on pecuniary success, and supplying the active motive to more energetic struggle for such success, and the adoption by the churches of the latest devices of the movies and the advertiser, approach too close to the obscene." In Dewey's reading, the city of Middletown was a "house divided against itself," preaching idealism and practicing materialism—not, as Mencken saw it from his lofty position of satirical disengagement, a "city in Moronia."

Dewey's point about religion implied respect for the ideals Middletown claimed to live by. The disparity between preaching and practice was "obscene" only because those ideals deserved to be taken seriously. Mencken, on the other hand, made a point of taking nothing seriously, least of all religion, and therefore had no standard that would have justified the use of such strong language—all the more telling in this case because Dewey used this kind of language, the language of the American jeremiad, so sparingly.

The Lynds exposed themselves to conflicting readings of their work because they themselves wavered between connected and disembodied criticism of American society. Robert Lynd was a product, after all, of the small-town Middle Western culture he was trying to understand. His descent on Muncie had something of the character of a homecoming. He chose Muncie as the site of his research because he wanted to study the effects of industrialism uncomplicated by ethnicity, but also because he still believed that the old Protestant communities of the Middle West remained a source of "spiritual energy." Middletown thus took on some of the characteristics of a "secular jeremiad," as Richard Fox calls it, one that "lashed its readers with a relentless chronicle of their faults while calling them to repentance and conversion." ^* But it was also a satire of small-town life in the spirit of Mencken and Sinclair Lewis. The satirical note came out even more prominently in the sequel, Middletown in Transi-

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"My demand in Washington is 'repent, America.' " said Martin Luther King of his poor people's march. Robert Lynd, like King, came out of the social gospel tradition. He studied for the ministry at Union Theological Seminary and abandoned the church only when he decided that social scientists were more likely than preachers to succeed in "helping people to face the facts and think through their problems." He assigned to social science, in other words, the role the social gossip assigned to religion.

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