Modernity Lost and Small Town America
or how my obscure (unpublished) dissertation remains relevant three decades later
Overlooking Ironton, Ohio. Photograph by author.
Thirty years ago I completed my Ph.D. dissertation, “Modernity Lost: Ironton, Ohio, in Industrial and Post-Industrial America” under the direction of Dr. Warren Van Tine. I graduated with a Ph.D. in June 1994 from The Ohio State University. This is one of those milestones that almost missed but last winter I moved offices on campus forcing a much needed reorganization of both my campus and home offices. In the process I came across a crate of “stuff I’ve written.” There was the dissertation.
As is so often the case, in retrospect some of the dissertation seems cringy in a “what the heck was I thinking” sort of way. There was definitely dissertation prose, that is overly dense academic writing that I will leave to your judgment as to whether or not I left behind.
I never published it as a book (see above) and in retrospect that might (or might not) have been for the best. I distinctly remember Warren telling me that a dissertation is not a book. However, I’m sure you can still get a copy of it through the Ohio State University library or a library database (if you want to after my description of it). If you visit the Ironton, Ohio entry on Wikipedia it is cited. While I have a couple of hard copies, I do not have a digital copy. As a marker of the passage of time, that was many computers ago and I wrote it in Microsoft Word for DOS (my memory is that Windows was a shell over DOS at the time). I collected and stored my research on note cards organized in cardboard filing boxes.
Why did I call it “Modernity Lost?” The basic point was that Ironton (and similar towns) were losing out on what it meant to be modern, which was a more academic way to discuss the slipping away of the American dream. I grew up in Ironton, so the dissertation had a personal element to it. Warren specialized in labor history. So we had a shared interest in what was happening in the small towns dotting the Ohio landscape as factories closed. The closing of factories and the shrinking of rural and small town America with the accompanying sense of loss was in the zeitgeist for a while. In 1982 Billy Joel had the song “Allentown” about closing all the factories down. Similarly, John Mellencamp’s 1985 album “Scarecrow” dealt with closing steel mills in a changing nation. Farm Aid was in the news as celebrities raised money for and awareness of rural America. For folks in these small towns, the 80s were not about the boom of Reaganomics but rather the bust of deindustrialization.
Academically, I engaged with modernization theory partly in reaction to the “organizational synthesis” that was popular at the time. I read a lot of community histories as case studies. I read a bunch of books on deindustrialization. Thomas Bender’s Community and Social Change in America played a role in my thinking. I looked at Robert Weibe’s The Search for Order where he applied modernization theory to the decades that followed the Civil War. The short version is that industrialization and it accompanying changes meant that communities that were once self-sufficient (“island communities”) became integrated into a modern, bureaucratic, market-oriented economy.
My argument was that Ironton was born modern, that is of the industrial revolution. Exhibit A being the same, Ironton (iron by the ton) a town at the center of the “iron plantations” where they mined and processed the pig iron that was so important to industrialization. However, Ironton’s modernity slipped away with changes to the economy and society.
Mural on the floodway in Ironton. Photograph by author.
In the 19th century boosters hailed Ironton as the next Pittsburgh. Located on the Ohio River, Irontonians took advantage of that economic artery and proximity to iron ore, coal, and timber. The pig iron industry boomed, the mansions of the “iron masters” still stand. The iron plantations gave way to other heavy industries such as automobile manufacturing. Growth meant the hallmarks of success that local leaders like to boost. In the 1920s, the Ironton Tanks had some real success in the early days of professional football. The D.T.& I Railroad stood for Detroit, Toledo, and Ironton. Ironton, and the Ohio River Valley, were clearly located in the industrial heartland before it became the rust belt.
The local economy peaked during the middle decades of the twentieth century. In 1950 the population topped 16,000 people. By 1960 the population was shrinking, but starting in 1990 population losses hit double digits, a trend that continued through 2000. Since then the rate of population loss has slowed.
Why? The Ohio River lost some of its economic importance. Stress to the domestic automobile industry during the 1970s and 1980s hurt. Global competition and outsourcing took a bite. National trends favored “financialization” over heavy industry. Local factors came into play. It’s a complicated, and common, story. I wrote “Modernity Lost” at peak deindustrialization as town’s like Ironton fell into the economic abyss.
Today, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, the population of Ironton is just over 10,000 people with a median household income of $43,702. The employment rate is 45.5% and 20% of the population has a bachelor's degree or higher. The poverty rate is 24.6%. The ancestry of the residents reflects older immigration patterns, with the top three Irish (15.5%), German (12.5%), and English (10.7%) with a substantial drop off after that (the next group is Italian at 1.8%).
If I were writing this in 2024 instead of the mid-90s, I might frame it differently. The question that seems to loom large now is whether or not these economic changes are permanent. Have they contributed to the large rift that divides our country? Growth seems to be centered in certain urban areas. What happens to those areas outside of the growing urban centers? Ironton might be a case-study for a place that subsequent phases of the industrial revolution did not treat kindly, a place where change did not mean progress. As I was writing this, the Washington Post published “`Too many old people’: a rural Pa. town reckons with population loss” (Tim Craig, June 23, 2024) about Sheffield, Pennsylvania. The subtitle about the “decline of small-town life” being a “looming topic” in the presidential election could have been written in the nineties.