God Made the Country, Man made the City and the Devil Made the Small Town

Drawing of Philipsburg by Granville Stuart on September 6,1867
Courtesy of L. Tom Perry Special Collections Harold B. Lee Library,Brigham Young Library, Provo, Utah

I just finished viewing the DVD “Saving The Burg” and was reminded of an earlier sociological interpretation of this same place. The DVD will always be viewed in a positive manner because it was meant to be. The earlier presentation done by Albert Blumenthal originally as a thesis in the 1920’s for his degree in Sociology and then published in 1932 as “Small Town Stuff” was never “loved” by the population because it created a great deal of discomfort. So much so that prominent “folks” spoken of in the book spent considerable time and money to try and buy up all the known copies in the state of Montana, hoping to keep their family secrets quiet. It looks like they were fairly successful because when I went looking for a copy I found only four in the United States and one of then was already sold when I tried ordering it. The one I bought cost me $129.00 and had come from the personal library of W. Allen, the long time president of Boeing. The other two were school library books and in very poor shape. 

Blumenthal changed all the names of the county, towns and people but for anyone living in the area it was not hard to realize that “Mineville” was Philipsburg; Gold was Butte and Smelter was Anaconda. Crystal was the name given to the ghost town of Granite and the county and Junction was the name for Drummond. 

This compilation of data was made possible because Albert was the youngest child of Emil Blumenthal, an Assayer at the Bi-Metallic Mill. Emil was engaged to Emma Augenstein prior to moving to the ‘Burg and married Emma on March 20, 1900. Their children were all natives of the ‘Burg and when Albert left to attend college (six years of under-graduate and graduate training), he was able to view this population with detachment and somewhat of an outsider. The result of his sociological methodology produced a “document typical in varying degrees of every small American community.” “This fund of concrete knowledge which everyone has of everyone else in the small town naturally emphasizes and accentuates the role of the personal in all relationships and activities of community life. Approval and disapproval of conduct, likes and dislikes of persons, play correspondingly a tremendous part in social life, in business, in politics and in the administration of justice.” 

“The dominance of ‘intimate face to face association’ in the small town naturally entails as one consequence the almost absolute surveillance and control of the individual by the community. In the small town is to be seen in its elementary aspects the very process by which personal interaction forms public opinion, which almost always enslaves and not infrequently destroys its creators.” “He who would indulge in pretense in Mineville must be very cautious lest he be wasting his time or making himself a target for scorn, ridicule or amusement. to be sure, a certain amount of bluffing can be done, since after all, persons have some privacy, even in Mineville. But this bluffing must not be of a sort that easily can be uncovered, for the people have little patience with pretenders. persons long in the community know that there is scant use for them to “put on front” of the more obvious sort such as wearing fine clothes or them purchasing of a costly automobile. 

Men without automobiles and who rarely “dress up” occupy positions of highest community esteem alongside of others who make every external appearance of prosperity and sophistication. And by a ferreting out process the people soon discover whether or not a newcomer “has anything to be stuck up about.” 

“One must be ‘common’ in Mineville. That is, while there are countless ways in which people are rated as ‘not as good as’ or ‘better than’ one another in social hierarchy, everyone is expected to be democratic. Those who appear to ‘think they are better than anyone else’ are not well liked and need not expect favors from their townsfolk such as election to public office.” 

I have chose to omit the intimate details of personal lives written about in the book, for a number of reasons. First, only the natives of advanced age would recognize who was being discussed. Second, some of the disclosures are less than kind. Third, in the era discussed by Blumenthal most residents of the county were blood relatives, in-laws, or “had been married to…” so you learned as a very young child to not disparage anyone for fear they were a “shirt tail” relative. 

In conclusion, Small towns can be “mean” but provide a safe environment to grow and bloom.