Socially Mapping the 1920s Midwest

In both Sinclair Lewis’s novel Babbitt (1922) and the sociological study by Robert and Helen Lynd, Middletown: A Study in Contemporary American Culture (1929), an attempt is made to systematically document and map the practice of everyday life in a representative American town. For the Lynds, this meant choosing the midwest as “the common denominator” of the US, a city with a population between 25,000 and 50,000, one in which there were more than one industry, and a city in which “social problems” would not overshadow the study’s findings (race is carefully elided throughout the book). For Lewis, this meant constructing a fictional city Zenith in the fictional state of Winnemac, a state which would be “more typical than any state in the Union” (Lewis’s own maps of which are included throughout this post–more info on them below).

“Middletown” was revealed later to be Muncie, Indiana–most famously by photographer Margaret Bourke-White who was sent by Life Magazine to document the town in May 1937. Muncie underwent a “gas boom” when a massive natural gas reserve was found in the area in 1886, ballooning the town to a population of tens of thousands and attracting outside capital to this thriving “gasopolis.” Due to severe misuse and waste–it was thought cheaper to keep gas valves in the house open and burning than to waste a match relighting the flame–the field was all but depleted by 1890. The Middletown study takes place in the wake of this unevenly distributed and underdeveloped industrialization of the formerly agricultural town.

Characterizing Muncie’s current state of labor and production in 1925, they write:

“If the working class in Middletown does not make the material necessities of its everyday life, the activities of the business class appear at many points even more remote. As the population has forsaken the less vicarious life of the farm or village and as industrial tools have become increasingly elaborated, there has been a noticeable swelling in the number and complexity of the institutional rituals by which the specialized products of the individual worker are converted into the biological and social essentials of living. It is by carrying on these institutional rituals that the business group gets its living.” (44)

Paradoxically, this “increasing elaboration” of the technics of everyday life is coupled with an “increasing standardization of leisure-time pursuits.” Perhaps the most significant change found in the Lynds’ study can be attributed to the triad of automobiles, movies, and radio, which together spawned a “cluster of habits that have grown up overnight.” They write: “Indeed, at no point is one brought up more sharply against the impossibility of studying Middletown as a self-contained, self-starting community than when one watches these space-binding leisure-time inventions imported from without—automobile, motion picture, and radio—reshaping the city.” Here, the case study of social anthropology seems to come up against its limits when the “underlying groundwork of folk-play and folk-talk” is integrated into a web of cultural production and technological innovation that necessarily extends the boundaries of this town beyond its traditional patterns.

Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt on the other hand provides us with a very different type of perspective on the networks and systems organizing a representative midwestern town. George F. Babbitt–perhaps a reference to the frequently worn out automobile babbitt metal, a soft alloy “used for bearings connecting the piston rods to the crankshaft”–is the quintessential middle man. Breaking with the precedence of American businessmen novels that gave us portraits of tycoons, leaders of the masses–Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), Norris’s The Pit(1903), Dreiser’s The Financier (1912)–Babbitt is little more than middle management in a small real estate development company owned by his father-in-law, spending his non-working hours at booster club meetings and indulging in flights of heroic fancy while parking his car in tight spots: “It was a virile adventure masterfully executed” (28). Read the rest of this entry »

“that spooky post-geographical feeling”

A curious add-on is now available for Google Earth, the proprietary software that synthesizes satellite images, aerial photography, and GIS data into a searchable, virtual globe. If one turns off all Earth-related layers—roads, traffic, borders, labels, and terrain—it is then possible to overlay what is called OnMars, a series of .kml files that “wrap the Earth’s sphere in Mars basemaps.” The result is a virtual model of the red planet, updated weekly with the latest images from the fleet of satellites currently in Mars orbit. This three-dimensional globe, accessible from any PC with broadband access, can be tilted, zoomed, set rotating, and when angled just correctly, takes on the syntax of a flight simulator’s camera eye. Yet when one enters a Martian location into the “fly to:” field such as “Victoria,” the crater on whose rim the SUV-sized Opportunity rover is currently perched, Earth’s skeleton of geographic coordinates surfaces from under the image of the Martian sands, and we are given a list of ports, streets, cities, and islands within the former British Empire as it stands grafted onto the virtual space of this synthesized alien landscape. OnMars unearths our originary experience of Martian space as the image itself. Find out how you can help!