Small Town America Research Articles

“Italian Immigrants in Rural and Small Town America”: A Conference Report

“Italian Immigrants in Rural and Small Town America”: A Conference Report

The Urban South: A Regional Framework

A SHORT TEN-MINUTE DRIVE from downtown Atlanta and you are no longer in city; you are in South. There it is still possible, journalist Pat Watters wrote, a late spring evening ... to breathe air of a small-town America (not suburbia) of American past, suffused with coolness and blossom fragrance of trees and bushes, roses, honeysuckle, and wet smell of grass and weeds.' The aroma had barely subsided when historians began to draw a different portrait of urban South, demonstrating that, over past two centuries, urban Southerners were concerned about same issues and problems as residents in cities elsewhere and were as aggressively capitalistic in pursuing growth and prosperity. If urban South lagged behind urban North in population and production, lag was of time, not of quality. Southern cities, in short, were full-fledged members of urban nation, distinguished only by latitude and pace.2 Such historical studies-and complementary works of sociologists, geographers, and political scientists-had beneficial effect of lifting cotton curtain that had shrouded an important aspect of Southern regional development. The South could no longer be thought of simply as the plantation, planter, staple crop, and Negro, all set in a rural scene.3 The discovery of Southern city, moreover, had significance beyond academy. It provided a new perspective on an old region and portended well for its future. As

Corrections Policy in Rural and Small Town America: A Proposal for Change

Corrections Policy in Rural and Small Town America: A Proposal for Change

Making a Living in Rural and Smalltown America

Making a Living in Rural and Smalltown America

Toward an Accidental National Urbanization Policy

Abstract A national redistribution of population and economic activity known as the “shift to the sunbelt” is currently underway. Several federal programs, such as the Housing and Community Development Act of 1974 and the Federal Water Pollution Control Act of 1972, may be subsidizing this phenomenon. Through a case study of the implementation of Title I of the Community Development Act, the authors find that the nonmetropolitan grant allocation formula is favorably biased toward the applications of county governments. The crux of the issue is the use of several social indicators as surrogates for poverty and poor housing. The social indicators are used to establish a funding priority among each intrastate set of competing applicants. The work argues that the surrogates are imprecise and at times misleading indicators of potential users or groups in need of publicly provided aid within nonmetropolitan areas of the nation. It is concluded that the continuation of such a policy will encourage abuse in the use of the grant money and will simultaneously support the growth and development of rural areas through the construction of a public infrastructure. In view of the relative absence of growth controls and growth management capacity in the unincorporated parts of nonmetropolitan areas, the consequences of this policy could be extensive scattered development and perhaps the demise of small-town America.

Some Reflections on Urban Dualism in Mature Economies

Many economists will recall with a certain amount of nostalgia the “Robinson Crusoe Dilemma” as it was presented to them in courses in economic theory during their undergraduate days. No doubt these same economists will be surprised to learn that Robinson Crusoe is very much alive and still marooned in small town America. Unfortunately this time it will take much more than a raft to solve his dilemma, for the evidence appears to suggest that he was torpedoed rather than shipwrecked and that his attacker, a peculiar form of dualism, is still at large and ready to sink him should he attempt to rejoin the mainstream. His plight is further complicated by the fact that he has been forgotten by those in the mainstream and is either invisible or unrecognizable to passersby.

Wild Pitch by A. B. Guthrie, Jr

Reviews Wild Pitch. By A. B. Guthrie, Jr. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1973. 224 pages, $5.95.) I believe Guthrie had a good time writing this story. It has a relaxed, comfort­ able gait that makes it a very readable book. Just so long as the reader does not begin this novel anticipating another serious encounter with the development and history of the great Northwest, he should not be disappointed. To expect another The Big Sky, the Way West, These Thousand Hills, or Aifive, however, is to ask for disappointment. The book makes no pretense o f being a continuation of this series. It is frankly and openly a light, entertaining mystery yarn, told with characteristic Guthrie good sense, compassion for the human situation, and masculine humor. The story, set in a present-day western cattle town, population 1500, is narrated by seventeen-year-old Jason Beard (Huck-Holden-Nick), sheriffs helper and star pitcher for the town baseball team. The relationship between Jason and the sheriff, Chick Charleston, is a squire-to-knight one, with genuine regard and affection on both sides. It is this association, in fact, which is one o f the informing principles o f the novel, a rather refreshing variation on the youth-age, Huck Finn-Jim, son-father relationship. Chick, not unlike TV ’s McCloud in dress, manner, and western horse-sense, solves two murders by use of his shrewd insight into human nature. Jason describes him: “He looked like justice or law or clean order, and all of them tallied up. Habitually he wore polished boots and white, fitted shirts, often with a string tie, and a sandcolored stockman’s hat and frontier jacket and pants.” His methods, of course, are unsophisticated by modern detective standards, and because o f his apparent inefficiency in solving the crimes, a state criminal investigator is brought in to unravel the mystery with his superior training and technique. The result is predictable. Gewald, the trained state investigator, is shown up as a fool, the city slicker thus yielding to the local common-sense westerner. To further enhance the image o f the sheriff, he succeeds in winning the affections of the young and beautiful daughter of one of the suspects, much 76 Western American Literature to the chagrin o f the youthful Jason, who feels that age should not have the needed hormones to receive the attentions of such a beautiful filly. Charleston’s position in the town and relationship with its citizens is not unlike another TV sheriff, Andy Griffith o f Mayberry. (Guthrie’s town is named Midbury.) At times, in fact, the novel seems somewhere just this side o f parody and caricature, whether intentional or unintentional. For example, the various village characters fill roles that have become commonly associated with the small town; and the comic, often alliterative names serve to exaggerate this function. Besides the sheriff and his side-kick, the cast includes the town doctor, Old Doc Yak, old-fashioned but effective; the village idiot, Otto Dacey; the local telephone operator, Mabel Main, who knows everybody’s business; the resident drunk, well-treated and well-fed in the town jail; the local judge; and assorted characters: Oscar Oliphant, Loose Lancaster, Plenty Toogood, Dr. Ulysses Pierpont . And, curiously, it is this exaggerated identification with small-town America that finally defines the book. Forjudged by the standards for a first-rate detective story, the book would be no more than average — although it does have a number of plausible red herrings and an exciting episode in which the murderer is apprehended (which, incidentally, involves the title, a term associated with baseball). Beneath the surface o f the rather ordinary mystery plot, if one looks for it, lies something quite fundamental — so fundamental, in fact, that the book does, contradicting what I said earlier, have a basic thematic relationship with Guthrie’s previous novels. Guthrie’s continuing theme, disguised in various costumes, is nostalgia and regret for a vanishing America — the fur trapper, the pioneer, the cowboy, and now the village sheriff. For could not Chick Charleston, born in an earlier day, have been a Boone Caudill, a Dick Summers, a Lije Evans? He...