An American Hometown: Terre Haute, Indiana, 1927

Introduction

1 Introduction Terre Haute, Indiana, was once one of America’s shining jewels. Set along the banks of a legendary river, it was a thriving Midwestern city, surrounded by fertile farmlands, rich coalfields, and mature hardwood forests. In the early decades of the twentieth century, Terre Haute became known as “The Crossroads of America,” due to the fact that two national highways, U.S. Route 40 and U.S. Route 41, intersected right in the heart of its downtown. Gradually, as the city assumed an even greater prominence in the American consciousness, this title came to symbolize much more. By the mid-1920s, Terre Haute was at the intersection of another type of crossroads—that of a profound shift in American life. The United States was completing the transition from being a rural nation to an urbanized one, wholeheartedly embracing science and technology as the primary means of improving daily life. Most households had begun to acquire advanced appliances like electric iceboxes and vacuum cleaners while laying aside their straw brooms and pie safes. This included working-class families, even as they incurred significant debt to do so. Increasingly, muscle and mind were being displaced by machine, while synthetic materials, like plastics and complex metal alloys, were gradually being substituted in place of wood, stone, and iron ore. Still another crossroads would be reached with the exponential rise in worker productivity. The increased mechanization of farms and factories would result in record crop harvests and huge inventories of manufactured goods. With much of Europe still recovering from the devastation of World War I, attention focused on expanding the domestic consumer market to absorb the surplus. Throughout the 1920s, a vigorous debate was being engaged by pundits and politicians. On one side were those who called for these gains in productivity to be translated into more leisure time and greater support of public services. Others extolled the benefits of expanded personal wealth and discretionary spending. Now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, we can see how this debate was resolved. Today, two-thirds of America’s Gross Domestic Product is directly tied to consumer spending. Currently, the United States, which constitutes 5 percent of the world’s population, consumes over one quarter of the world’s energy resources. Meanwhile, the emergence of an American society dedicated to increased personal mobility, material acquisition, and resource use has, not surprisingly, accompanied the steady decline of Terre Haute, Indiana. m 2 An American Hometown In 1927, Terre Haute was a prominent part of the American cultural landscape , visited by national figures from politics and the arts, mentioned in the prose of writers such as O. Henry and Ring Lardner. In the city’s residential neighborhoods were a wide variety of locally owned stores, businesses, and factories that nearby households worked in and patronized daily. This city of ten square miles and 65,000 people contained more than 400 grocery stores, two Jewish synagogues, and a host of active union locals for occupations ranging from commercial bakers to theater stage hands. Elementary schools were constructed without cafeterias since children and teachers could easily walk home for lunch. Three daily newspapers were published in Terre Haute in 1927. The two largest, the Tribune and the Star, supported the Democratic and the Republican parties respectively. The previous December, the Terre Haute Symphony had been founded. This 48-piece orchestra, which performed works by Grieg and Hayden at its premiere, drew the majority of its members from the skilled amateur musicians in the general public. Terre Haute’s subsequent decline occurred in no small part because much of what the city had represented during its peak in the 1920s became more difficult to sustain in a modernized society. The exponential growth of automobiles meant that people habitually began driving to shop, work, and worship. Core neighborhoods became less self-contained. The proliferation of broadcast and recorded media meant that residents relied less often on their neighbors and themselves for entertainment. Vaudeville in Terre Haute and minor league baseball disappeared as people attended double features or stayed home to listen to radio. In the midst of this cultural shift, fewer children learned to play musical instruments or visit the library. Over time, the very concept of the hometown became almost quaint to Americans. Elements that had traditionally created a community’s identity— long-standing family businesses, locally produced manufactured goods— were considered inefficient for a global economy. Neighborhood schools were consolidated. Civic groups struggled to maintain a...