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

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America thus knows the small town to be many things. Yet today, given the morbid problems of the cities —the incessant shriek of crisis, the hovering buzzards of bankruptcy, the noise, the crowds, the filth, the violence, the fear—it is easy to imagine that the small town offers, no matter what else, an escape from all that. But does it really?

The answer is a mixed one. The typical small town is free of the city's unruly ambience but not of its nagging problems. Small towns, just like the cities, struggle constantly with tight budgets and pressing needs that keep rising faster than revenues. "In little bitty towns," says Frederic Cooper, program manager of the Mississippi Institute for Small Towns, "the entire budget might go to pay the policeman and the light bill at the town hall." Downtown decay is common place in small town America, as are shortages of housing, medical service, diversions for the young and suitable settings for the lonely aged. It is a rare small town that is not afflicted by poverty; 38% of the black inhabitants of small towns live below the poverty line. Then, too, it is only an unusual small town that does not have a dilapidated neighborhood to which the citified word slum might be applied. Says Anthropologist Clayton Denman of Central Washington University, founder and head of the Small Towns Institute at Ellensburg, Wash.: "Small towns are facing problems that are much the same as the cities' problems, except for scale."

No wonder. The self-contained, self-sufficient small town has vanished with the ascendance, in the U.S., of an increasingly singular technological economy from which the entire nation is suspended. By the 1920s the small town was rightly called a "ganglion" of the city, and it is even more intricately tied today to the larger society in which culture flies everywhere by television. Small towns, in short, are racked by some of the same strains that beset the cities.

The migration of people and economic shifts, if they are the fundamental sources of such strains, are also the sources of equally difficult but opposite problems. While many small towns are frantically trying to get more industry or keep what they have, others are groaning under the problem of providing services for the additional people who come in with new industry. Just recently, Colorado's Governor Richard D. Lamm complained that the energy boom was bringing some of his small towns more prosperity than they could afford. Wrote Lamm: "Craig, Rifle, Meeker—towns that have existed on a stable agricultural base for 100 years—are doubling every two years, every three years. With that growth comes every social pathology; when Rifle doubles in size, juvenile delinquency increases three times; the alcoholism rate increases four times; displaced homemakers increase 4.5 times. The immediate costs are immense, the long-term benefit doubtful." It is no wonder that some little communities, as Mayor Byron Farwell of Hillsboro, Va. (pop. 135) points out in the journal Small Town, "struggle to stay small."