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

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Though the new migration represents a significant, probably healthy, readjustment of the nation's population pattern, it hardly presages an eclipse of the cities. The hyperkinetic metropolis, by sheer energy and the density of its cultural and economic shadow, will continue to dominate American consciousness and style. Yet the small town will always haunt and invite the American mind as both memory and metaphor. Small towns, after all, have abundantly provided much of the cast for the vibrant drama of city life. There will always be many a putative urbanite who inhabits the city in fact but a small town in his heart.

Thorstein Veblen considered the country town perhaps the greatest of all American institutions simply because it had, he wrote in 1923, "a greater part than any other in shaping public sentiment and giving character to American culture." Has the small town's historic hegemony in the American psyche appreciably dwindled in the subsequent 57 years? Who would care to answer yes at a moment when the national pre-eminence of a native son of Plains, Ga. (pop. 683), is seriously challenged only by the vaulting ambition of a native son of Tampico, Ill. (pop. 838)? —By Frank Trippett