Time Essay: Small Town, U.S.A.: Growing and Groaning

The flight from the cities, though it continues, is pretty old news.

Only recently, however, has it become clear where that exodus has been heading. The nation long assumed that the cities' lost population was piling up mostly in the suburbs and urban fringes. Not so. In a marked reversal of U.S. migration patterns, nonmetropolitan areas have started growing faster than metropolitan ones.

This demographic turnabout may have many meanings, but one is already clear: the small town in America is once again on the rise.

New census figures that will confirm the shrinkage or stagnation of many cities will also undoubtedly show small town America growing at a faster rate than the country as a whole.

The trend first became apparent in the earlier half of the past decade.

While the national population in creased 4.8% from 1970 to 1975, towns of 2,500 to 25,000 rose 7.5%, and the smallest towns, those with populations under 2,500, jumped by 8.7%, nearly double the national rate.

The new migration has surprised demographers, but it can hardly astonish anyone familiar with U.S. attitudes toward urban existence. Americans have always preferred smaller communities, and did so even during the years when the nation seemed bent on emptying its entire population into metropolitan clots. Surveys have consistently shown that a majority of the people, including almost 4 out of 10 big city dwellers, were partial to a life outside the metropolis. Some leaned to the suburbs and others to more rural vistas. But the biggest single dream remained the small town. Now, when more and more are moving to fulfill that dream, is a suitable time to reflect on what they are getting.

The small town as an ideal is familiar. The very notion, as though invented by Norman Rockwell, has always carried with it images of low-key living, easy friendships, neighborly neighbors, front-porch sociability, back-fence congeniality, downtown camaraderie. Small town—the phrase evokes an intimate sense of community, leafy serenity, free of the sinister strangers who menace the cold, grimy canyons of the city. U.S. literature has abounded with ugly portraits of small towns like Sinclair Lewis' Main Street, but the wistful ideal has survived. Americans have always been readier to be pierced by the human loveliness of Our Town than convinced by the grotesqueries of Winesburg, Ohio.

The small towns of American reality have been stunningly varied, as Richard Lingeman makes definitively clear in his new history, Small Town America. Lingeman stalks the dream and the reality from colonial days to the present, from Town Builder William Penn's hope for "a green country town, which will never be burnt, and always be wholesome" to the prepackaged sterility of some of today's contrived "new towns." Factory towns, farm towns, railroad towns, cow towns, mining towns, all march through his book. "New England towns with white churches and elm-arched streets ... fugitive transient towns with their tacked-on names and mayfly lives." The aspirations and disappointments of little American towns have come and gone in rich diversity, too, but every town, as Lingeman says, has represented one more lof the many "permutations the dream z of community has undergone."