The Decline of Small Towns

John Hallwas

When we drive through the various struggling villages in western Illinois—towns like Bardolph, Colchester, LaHarpe, Plymouth, Roseville, and Tennessee—it’s hard to realize that each was once a thriving community. They are evidence of a huge American economic and cultural problem, the decline of small towns.    

That ongoing matter has been the subject of various books during the past fifty years or so. Among the titles that I own is “A Vanishing America: The Life and Times of the Small Town” edited by Thomas C. Wheeler, published way back in 1964. Another good one is “Main Street Blues: The Decline of Small-Town America” (1998) by Richard O. Davies. Despite his broad title, Davies focuses on the stages of decline in one Ohio community, Camden, that was typical of so many others. That book appeared just as my account of a struggling Illinois town, and its well-known lawbreaker of the 1920s, “The Bootlegger: A Story of Small-Town America,” was also appearing in print. 

But concern about the changes taking place in small towns also goes back to the late 1920s, when the coming of cars and hard roads made travel to larger nearby towns much easier, and village businesses began to struggle. Of course, the Depression only made things worse. And by then, ambitious young people were starting to leave the small communities where they had been raised. As Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Marquis Childs said in a 1934 article for “Harper’s” magazine, focused on Winslow, Iowa, and other declining river towns, “It is a confession of failure to remain in Winslow,” so “the young have gone away.” In that same year, an article in “American Mercury” magazine was titled, “Are Small Towns Doomed?” 

One of the best early discussions of the problem that I have run across is Max Lerner’s chapter on “The Decline of the Small Town,” which appeared in “America as a Civilization” (1957). As he points out, “in the quarter century between 1930 and 1955 the decisive turn was made, away from small-town life,” leaving many of those communities “isolated and demoralized.” And he explains that behind it all was the rise of non-local forces with a negative impact on community life: 

“What happened was that the small town lost its economic and cultural base. . . . Everywhere, even in the most prosperous areas, the small town was undercut by the big changes in American life—the auto and the superhighway, the supermarket and the market center, the mail-order house, the radio and TV, with the growth of national advertising, and the mechanization of farming—so that [the small town] turned its face directly to the centers of technology. It was the city and the suburb—the cluster-city complex—that became the focus of working and living, consuming and leisure.”  

Oddly enough, there was a brief change of pattern in the 1970s and early 1980s. “Newsweek” magazine, for example, ran a cover story titled “The Small Town Boom” (July 6, 1981), which pointed out that “rural and small-town America is growing faster than the cities.” And the main reason was “quality of life.” People wanted to get away from the traffic, the crime, the impersonal busyness of the cities. However, the regions that were getting the biggest small town boost were the West and the South, not the Midwest. 

And that turn-around didn’t last. As “USA Today” pointed out three years later in a cover story (April 30, 1984), “The exodus [from cities], or Rural Renaissance, has stopped.” One main reason was a national recession, which raised gas prices and made commuting to work from a small town to a larger nearby community too expensive. Also, small towns were directly impacted by the recession. Some struggling shops and restaurants closed, making their communities less inviting.

Another turn-around occurred in the 1990s. The “Time” magazine cover story for December 8, 1997, for example, was titled “Why More Americans Are Fleeing to Small Towns.” It pointed out that “75 percent of the nation’s rural counties are growing again after years of decline,” and that was apparently because “the Internet and the overnight shipping boom are enabling high tech industries that were once tied to urban areas to settle in the countryside, creating jobs. . . .” However, the small towns that benefitted most were not that far from cities and often had lovely natural areas (lakes, forests, or ocean beaches) that people could enjoy. 

And again, the population shift to smaller communities has subsided. As William H. Frey of the Brookings Institution points out in an Internet commentary titled “A Population Slowdown for Small-Town America” (May, 2014), “the new statistics show population decline in smaller areas, increasing the large metropolitan area dominance.” The majority of rural American counties have been losing population in recent years.

While the advantages of city and suburban life are apparent, including the availability of a large variety of jobs, nearby specialized medical facilities, and convenient access to restaurants, shops, and cultural attractions, there are important reasons for preferring small communities, too. Back in 1957, Max Lerner made some good points: “If the small town is wholly sacrificed [or vanishes], there will be sacrificed along with it . . . face-to-face relations, an awareness of identity, a striving to be part of a compassable [i.e., understandable] whole, and a sense of counting for something and being recognized as a person. . . .”

He is exactly right about those psychological benefits, and I would add that small towns don’t have the disorienting growth and change that typifies suburban areas, which often makes long-term residents regret moving to such an unstable social environment. Beyond that, in an American culture that has a booming senior citizen class, the ability of older people to get out, walk around in non-congested streets, and safely drive a car is fostered by the slow-paced, uncrowded, familiar atmosphere of a smaller community.

Much that makes life in a small town worthwhile is related to belonging—which is essential to a satisfying human life but is fading in so many larger places. Also, we need to recognize that regional centers like Galesburg, Macomb, and Quincy are a middle ground between fading villages and city-suburban environments, and they need to promote themselves accordingly. And village residents need to become more familiar with, and involved in, nearby regional centers, for recreation, entertainment, club memberships, etc. The forces that have fostered the decline of smaller places are here to stay, but response to that reality can vary enormously from one town, or one person, to another.