570
PARTISAN REVIEW
You get a sense of the resistance of the present-day rural myth in
Small Town In Mass Society
by Arthur J. Vidich and Joseph Bensman.
1
Small Town
is a grimmer tale and a truer one than Whyte's
Organiza–
tion Man
or Riesman's
The Lonely CroWd.
Each of the last two com–
posed an image which swallowed up its facts;
Small Town
takes its
subject's image of itself and places alongside it the reality that image
is designed to hide. The themes of Whyte and Riesman were carried
along by their rhetoric; Vidich and Bensman deny any thesis and
stumble along in the non-language that passes for a normal vocabulary
among the pros of social investigation; when they hit their most telling
points their prose seems to tum in on itself and becomes even thicker
than usual as if it were trying to camouflage its content.
Small Town
will never reach the best seller lists; caricature, however, is one thing,
social criticism something else.
Vidich and Bensman begin with the lie of the small town in the
small town and end by showing how this lie drives everyone there crazy
("externalization of the self"). Their chief distinction as sociologists
is their sense of mirage. "Springdale," the town in upper New York
State they have chosen to rake over (I am reminded of Jules Romains'
Les Copains,
in which a band of French intellectuals comically wrecked
their version-how different from ours!--of such a town), is a spot
on the side of the traffic lanes. Once you notice it, you see "the image
of the typical New England town: a well-kept, clean, neat place; a
small shopping center; white colonial style, freshly painted houses, inter–
spersed with houses of each of the architectural eras up to the ranch
house. One cannot escape the impression of the small town with one
main street that has largely escaped the general hustle and turmoil of
American life. . . . The beauty of the village rests on a picturesque
stream...."
The correspondence of Springdale physically to the dream setting
of the movies and the ads is perfect. So is that of the Springdale men–
tality to the accepted "copy" concerning country fresh air, the com–
radeship of neighbors, the corruption of the cities and the probity of
"just plain folks."
It
is only when you have been brought inside the
picture that the town breaks down into a nasty little hive of smugness,
greed, conniving, gossip, self-enslavement, sloth, pettiness, frustration
and hopelessness.
Classless, indigenous, independent, unified Springdale is dominated
by its class of "rational" farmers (those applying the latest production
1.
Princeton University Press. $6.00.
