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The Evolution of Getting a Living in Middletown

Ball State Work Study Student

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Introduction
The Evolution of Getting a Living in Middletown is the creation of students who completed History 414 (Seminar in Middletown Studies) during the fall term, 2022. Students explored various facets of the work experience from the late nineteenth century to the present and used archival materials focused on Muncie, Indiana, to document them. They developed this site, which traces changes in work during and after the period of rapid industrialization and the impact of deindustrialization on workers and companies, as well as the distinctive work experiences of women, Blacks, and other minorities.

Muncie as Middletown
Muncie is an especially suitable place for investigating these topics. In the 1920s, two sociologists, Robert and Helen Lynd, came to Muncie on an assignment from the Institute for Social And Religious Research with the goal of discovering religious solutions to problems of urban-industrial life. What they produced, however, was an analysis of the impact of industrialization on a medium-sized city, encompassing several aspects of the lives of the people of Muncie. They studied the economic situation, religious worship, how children were raised, and how people spent their leisure time, just to name a few topics. The project reached into the most minute aspects of the lives of Munsonians. Middletown, as it was called, was published in 1929 and became a portent force in the construction of the average American’s identity. It also made Muncie one of the most closely studied places in the country, especially as researchers returned to the city to conduct follow-up studies.

Americans identified Middletown as a story of the average American community. They saw themselves in the book, but it did more than provide them with a mirror. It offered certainty in the face of changing times. In the early twentieth century, the United States was experiencing dramatic changes in its economic and social dynamics because of rapid industrialization. As a result, the people of the United States sought normalcy amid transition. As Sarah Igo writes, “Middletown located patterns in and imparted shape to a new world, responding to worries over standardization and conformity, changes in work and leisure, and shifting gender roles and moral codes... [it] offered a reassuringly familiar picture of just who Americans were amidst unsettling social, demographic, and economic developments.”[1]

Although the Lynds chose a title that seems to suggest they sought to discover the typical American experience, that is not entirely why they chose Muncie, or how they hoped the project would be understood. They selected Muncie in part because of its atypical characteristics, specifically writing “no claim is made that it is a ‘typical’ city, and the findings of this study can, naturally, only with caution be applied to other cities or to American life in general.” For all of the benefits that an all-encompassing study such as Middletown can provide for social scientists, there were a number of faults that must be taken into account. To start off, Robert and Helen Lynd, who were not trained as sociologists and were not formally prepared to produce this kind of project. In Middletown Revisited, Dwight Hoover notes that the study was carried out “by a person unqualified to do so.”[2] For example, the Lynds display their findings in a manner much too simple for a city the size of Muncie. The Lynds delineate socioeconomic differences in two broad categories: a “business” class and a “working” class. This worked for the Middletown project, but it didn’t allow for nuance in distinctions between classes.

The Lynds' narrative was too simplistic in other ways. They chose to purposefully exclude certain groups from their investigation. While searching for the right city to study, they sought a homogeneous community to simplify the variables they were analyzing. This led them to choose a city that was mostly white, with a limited immigrant population and, supposedly, few Blacks. This did not mean that they “held a monolithic view of the community.” They knew that Muncie had an African American population, they simply choose to write it out of their equation. This is because “gender and status divisions seemed to fit the Lynds’ intellectual preconceptions, and their sense of who was truly American” better than classifications based on race, ethnicity, or even religion. The exclusion of the factor of ethnicity is especially interesting, considering that nearly all industrialized cities in the United States featured a large foreign-born population, while Muncie had a very small one. Igo summarizes the issues with Middletown when she writes that the Lynds "looked backward to find the modern United States.”[3]

Since the first Middletown study, there have been several investigation that have followed up and improved upon our understanding of Muncie. In 1937, the Lynds published Middletown in Transition, a sequel to their original study, this time examining the impact of the Great Depression on Munsonians. In the following decades more and more projects have been undertaken that improve our knowledge of Middletown. This work has generated a large archive of material documenting life in Muncie, including work experiences.

This project is organized into four main parts. The first dives into the industrialization of Muncie. The discovery of a large supply of natural gas triggered rapid industrialization during the 1880s and 1890s. The "Gas Boom" changed the city from a primarily agricultural market center into an industrial city. Dozens of companies established factories in or near Muncie. However, rapid modernization of those factories changed the character of work and the lives of workers. They responded by organizing. This section will also explore the cultural impact that unions – organizations through which many industrial laborers found their identity – had on the workers and the community.

The next section discusses the economic transition that began in the second half of the twentieth century in Muncie: deindustrialization. Companies left the town for various reasons, and a city with an economy once primarily supported by industry declined. This is where the service sector rises to prominence as Munsonians flocked to jobs in restaurants, medicine, and the local university, Ball State.

The workers that made up the industrial and non-industrial sectors of Muncie’s economy were diverse and had specific experiences of work. Race shaped the kind of work that Munsonians could undertake. Muncie’s African-American population were barred from some jobs and had restricted upward mobility in general. In addition, this section will also cover foreign and immigrant work experiences in Muncie. These groups worked both in factories and outside of them, with some opting to open their own businesses in response to discrimination they experienced in factories.

In addition to race, gender shaped the work and opportunities of Munsonians. Women have always been found in factories, ostracized by union members and encountering glass ceilings that prevented them from procuring managerial positions. These women entered the workforce for different reasons, many of which were shaped by class. This section will explore their role in industrial work and unpaid labor, especially labor in the home. This work was essential to maintaining households and providing for children.

In addition to these main lines of investigation, readers can use tags to explore other themes. These tags highlight and connect material focused on four topics: factory work, unions, education, and discrimination. They indicate where content overlaps, offering users a chance to explore the topics in different ways. Tags can be found at the bottom of select pages.

For further background, see the timeline below, which traces the rise and fall of industry in Muncie:

Introduction by Jamie Reeder.
Project Editor: Cory Balkenbusch.
Special thanks to Jordan Bratt, Donald Williams, Sarah Allison, Lyndsey Vesperry, and Becky Marangelli (Ball State University Libraries) for assistance with this project.
[1] Sarah Igo, “From Main Street to Mainstream: Middletown, Muncie, and ‘Typical America,’” Indiana Magazine of History 101, no. 3 (2005): 241, https://www.jstor.org/stable/27792641.
[2] Dwight Hoover, Middletown Revisited (Muncie: Ball State University, 1990).
[3] Sarah Igo, The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 58, 59.