Word: lynd
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...American, penchant for Government intervention, tolerance of Communist totalitarianism and its fatuous call for revolution. Intellectually at any rate, they soon had their adversaries on the run; many of the most voluble leftists of the period have faded from the polemical scene: Noam Chomsky, Daniel and Philip Berrigan, Staughton Lynd, Jerry Rubin, Andrew Kopkind ("Morality, like politics, starts at the barrel of a gun"). The Commentary crowd, meanwhile, carries on the battle with undiminished gusto...
Though it sometimes galls the town fathers, Muncie, Ind. (pop. 83,000), is famous for being ordinary. In 1924, Sociologists Robert S. and Helen Merrell Lynd decided that Muncie was "the typical American city" that could reveal how small-town America had developed and where it was going. The Lynds trained themselves in anthropological methods and descended on Muncie as if it were a settlement of New Guinea headhunters. The result was two classic books, Middletown (1929) and Middletown in Transition (1937), that shrewdly foreshadowed the next two generations of American life...
...century ago, Muncie was an isolated agricultural town, the former headquarters of the Northern Ku Klux Klan. By the time the Lynds arrived in 1924, it was industrialized and dominated by the Ball family, who built a thriving fruit-jar industry as well as the local hospital, Ball State University and most of the rest of town. Its population of 36,000-50,000 by the time of the second Lynd report-was 90% white and 95% Protestant, and struggling to cope with layoffs, a new trend toward secularization, women's voting and flapper ideas about...
...Lynds predicted that secularization and a generation gap would come to Muncie slowly, while citizens clung to the old values. That is just about what happened, according to the new researchers. Says Warren Vander Hill, a historian at Ball State who has worked on many post-Lynd Muncie studies: "First you learn to roll with the punches and accept things that were unacceptable, then you hold onto those very basic ideas about life with an even tighter grip...
...workers, as women, and as individuals. Much of the newsreel material is unusual and exciting--footage of hunger marches and strikes in Chicago and Detroit, for example--but it is the interviews which are the truly remarkable aspect of the film. These women, who were first interviewed by Staughton Lynd in Rank and File, are exceptionally articulate about their experiences, as well as able to bring contemporary political concerns, particularly feminism, to bear on the struggles of the '30s. But what makes the film most effective and moving is the way these women are able to communicate their deep commitment...