No one would call Middletown a work of great literature, but as sociology it had the merit of being admirably clearheaded and sensible. The Lynds found that life in this typical town fell into six simple categories: getting a living; making a home; training the young; using leisure in various forms of play, art, and so forth; engaging in religious practices; and engaging in community activities. But it was the Lynds’ analysis of their results, and the changes they observed, that made Middletown so fascinating. For example, where many observers – certainly in Europe – had traditionally divided society into three classes, upper, middle, and working, the Lynds detected only two in Middletown: the business class and the working class. They found that men and women were conservative – distrustful of change – in different ways. For instance, there was far more change, and more acceptance of change, in the workplace than in the home. Middletown, the Lynds concluded, employed ‘in the main the psychology of the last century in training its children in the home and the psychology of the current century in persuading its citizens to buy articles from its stores.’25 There were 400 types of job in Middletown, and class differences were apparent everywhere, even at six-thirty on the average morning.26 ‘As one prowls Middletown streets about six o’clock of a winter morning one notes two kinds of homes: the dark ones where people still sleep, and the ones with a light in the kitchen where the adults of the household may be seen moving about, starting the business of the day.’ The working class, they found, began work between six-fifteen and seven-thirty, ‘chiefly seven.’ For the business class the range was seven-forty-five to nine, ‘but chiefly eight-thirty.’ Paradoxes abounded, as modernisation affected different aspects of life at different rates. For example, modern (mainly psychological) ideas ‘may be observed in [Middletown’s] courts of law to be commencing to regard individuals as not entirely responsible for their acts,’ but not in the business world, where ‘a man may get his living by operating a twentieth-century machine and at the same time hunt for a job under a laisser-faire individualism which dates back more than a century.’ ‘A mother may accept community responsibility for the education of her children but not for the care of their health.’27
In general, they found that Middletown learned new ways of behaving toward material things more rapidly than new habits addressed to persons and nonmaterial institutions. ‘Bathrooms and electricity have pervaded the homes of the city more rapidly than innovations in the personal adjustments between husband and wife or between parents and children. The automobile has changed leisure-time life more drastically than have the literature courses taught the young, and tool-using vocational courses have appeared more rapidly in the school curriculum than changes in the arts courses. The development of the linotype and radio are changing the technique of winning political elections [more] than developments in the art of speechmaking or in Middletown’s method of voting. The Y.M.C.A., built about a gymnasium, exhibits more change in Middletown’s religious institutions than do the weekly sermons of its ministers.’28 A classic area of personal life that had hardly changed at all, certainly since the 1890s, which the Lynds used as the basis for their comparison, was the ‘demand for romantic love as the only valid basis for marriage…. Middletown adults appear to regard romance in marriage as something which, like their religion, must be believed in to hold society together. Children are assured by their elders that “love” is an unanalysable mystery that “just happens.” … And yet, although theoretically this “thrill” is all-sufficient to insure permanent happiness, actually talks with mothers revealed constantly that, particularly among the business group, they were concerned with certain other factors.’ Chief among these was the ability to earn a living. And in fact the Lynds found that Middletown was far more concerned with money in the 1920s than it had been in 1890. In 1890 vicinage (the old word for neighbourhood) had mattered most to people; by the 1920s financial and social status were much more closely allied, aided by the automobile.29
Cars, movies, and the radio had completely changed leisure time. The passion with which the car was received was extraordinary. Families in Middletown told the Lynds that they would forgo clothes to buy a car. Many preferred to own a car rather than a bathtub (and the Lynds did find homes where bathtubs were absent but cars were not). Many said the car held the family together. On the other hand, the ‘Sunday drive’ was hurting church attendance. But perhaps the most succinct way of summing up life in Middletown, and the changes it had undergone, came in the table the Lynds presented at the end of their book. This was an analysis of the percentage news space that the local newspapers devoted to various issues in 1890 and 1923:30
Certain issues we regard as modern were already developing. Sex education was one; the increased role (and purchasing power) of youth was another (these two matters not being entirely unrelated, of course). The Lynds also spent quite a bit of time considering differences between the two classes in IQ. Middletown had twelve schools; five drew their pupils from both working-class and business-class parents, but the other seven were sufficiently segregated by class to allow the Lynds to make a comparison. Tests on 387 first-grade (i.e., six-year-old) children revealed the following picture:31
The Lynds showed some awareness of the controversies surrounding intelligence testing (for example, by using the phrase ‘intelligent test’ in quotes) but nonetheless concluded that there were ‘differences in the equipment with which, at any given time, children must grapple with their world.’
The Lynds had produced sociology, anthropology – and a new form of history. Their pictured lacked the passion and the wit of Babbitt, but Middletown was recognisably the same beast as Zenith. The book’s defining discovery was that there were two classes, not three, in a typical American town. It was this which fuelled the social mobility that was to set America apart from Europe in the most fruitful way.
Babbitt’s Middletown may have been typical America, intellectually, sociologically and statistically. But it wasn’t the only America. Not everyone was in the ‘digest’ business, and not everyone was in a hurry or too busy to read, or needed others to make up his mind for him. These ‘other’ Americas could be identified by place: in particular Paris, Greenwich Village, and Harlem, black Harlem. Americans flocked to Paris in the 1920s: the dollar was strong, and modernism far from dead. Ernest Hemingway was there for a short time, as was E Scott Fitzgerald. It was an American, Sylvia Beach, who published Ulysses. Despite such literary stars, the American influx into the French capital (and the French Riviera) was more a matter of social than intellectual history. Harlem and Greenwich Village were different.
When the British writer Sir Osbert Sitwell arrived in New York in 1926, he found that ‘America was strenuously observing Prohibition by staying sempiternally [everlastingly] and gloriously drunk.’ Love of liberty, he noted, ‘made it almost a duty to drink more than was wise,’ and it was not unusual, after a party, ‘to see young men stacked in the hall ready for delivery at home by taxicab.’32 But he had an even bigger surprise when, after an evening spent at Mrs Cornelius Vanderbilt’s ‘Fifth Avenue Chateau,’ he was taken uptown, to A’Lelia Walker’s establishment on 136th Street, in Harlem. The soirées of A’Lelia, the beneficiary of a fortune that stemmed from a formula to ‘de-kink’ Negro hair, were famous by this time. Her apartment was lavishly decorated, one room tented in the ‘Parisian style of the Second Empire,’ others being filled, inter alia, with a golden grand piano and a gold-plated organ, yet another dedicated as her personal chapel.33 Here visiting grandees, as often as not from Europe, could mix with some of the most intellectually prominent blacks: W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Charles Johnson, Paul Robeson, Alain Locke. A’Lelia’s was the home of what came to be called ‘the new Negro,’ and hers was by no means the only establishment of its kind.34 In the wake of the Great War, when American blacks in segregated units had fought with distinction, there was a period of optimism in race relations (on the East Coast, if not in the South), partly caused by and partly reflected in what became known as the Harlem Renaissance, a period of about a decade and a half when black American writers, actors, and musicians made their collective mark on the country’s intellectual landscape and stamped one place, Harlem, with a vitality, a period of chic, never seen before or since.