Middletown Revisited

Unemployment in the midst of prosperity has become the most paradoxical and most talked-about aspect of the U.S. economy. Unemployment lingered even after the economy pulled out of the 1957-58 recession, and in the current mild recession, with employment and total personal income at cheeringly high levels, the unemployment total has reached 5,700,000, highest since mid-1941. From Muncie, Ind. (pop. 68,600), the "typical" U.S. community that was the subject of 1929''s pioneering sociological study Middletown, TIME Correspondent Dudley Doust last week went beyond statistics to report the new unemployment in human terms:

Two contrasting establishments in Muncie are doing a brisk business. One is Muncie's top department store, Ball Stores, Inc. "We had the best December in our 50-year history," glows General Merchandise Manager Ralph Chase. "We don't seem to be following the trend." The other is the Delaware County surplus food distribution center, where needy families collect their monthly rations of federal handouts -- dried eggs, dried milk, flour, corn meal, lard, butter. This month the distribution center will stay open twice as many days as it usually does in order to handle the demands of some 3,000 Delaware County families -- largest number "on commodities" in the center's three-year history.

The cheerfulness at the Ball cash registers is symbolic of one face of Muncie. Other department stores are also doing a pretty good business. J. C. Penney, the Industrial Trust & Savings Bank, and the Muncie Federal Savings & Loan have put up new buildings within the past two years. A full work force comes and goes from the Chevrolet transmission plant and the Delco-Remy battery plant. But Warner Gear, maker of auto transmissions and normally Muncie's No. 1 employer, has laid off one-third of its boom-time payroll of 4,500. Many of the city's foundries and tool and die shops that supply the automakers are at least partly shut down. Merchants dependent on blue-collar trade are faring badly; a credit jeweler complains that he marked $30 watches down to $14.95 and still nobody buys. A low-price furniture dealer groans that he is averaging one customer a day.

About 12.5% of Muncie's labor force is out of work, as against a national average of 6.8%. For every seven people who are working in Muncie. one is looking -- and looking.

Checks from Montana. In the atmosphere of sharp contrast there is a despondency among the unemployed that arises from insecurity, boredom, a sense of failure and futility, rather than from physical hardship. Compared to the unemployed in other days or other countries, Muncie's jobless are pretty well off, cushioned from dire want by unemployment checks and other forms of social generosity.

Take John Campbell, 50, machine operator laid off by Warner Gear in mid-January. In addition to his $36-a-week state unemployment check, Campbell gets a $3O-a-week unemployment benefit from the United Auto Workers. Mrs. Campbell earns $40 a week as a restaurant cook. A grown son just back from working out West gets his own $32 unemployment check, mailed to him weekly from Montana. Or take Arnold Mace. 43, laborer, out of work since September. The public housing authority drops the family's apartment rent from $43 a month to $25 when Mace is unemployed. Pinched as the Maces are, trying to take care of four children on an unemployment check, they can afford to hold to some affluent-society standards: they take some of the surplus commodities that the Government hands out, but not corn meal or dried eggs, which, says Mrs. Mace, "just don't taste good."

Of Mules & Men. John Campbell and Arnold Mace, like many other unemployed men in Muncie, share a common feeling of hopelessness about the future. Neither man believes that the world offers any possible place for him except his old job in his old company, and neither sees any possible course except to go on waiting until he is called back to his old slot. Campbell's basic trouble, as he diagnoses it, is that, at 50, he is too old. "I doubt if I could get a job anywhere if I did leave Warner Gear," he says. "The places aren't hiring, and them that are aren't hiring men my age. They'd laugh me out of the place. I was lucky to get a new job when I was 40. Lots of places you got to be under 30."

Mace's trouble, he says, is that he is unskilled (he went only as far as the eighth grade in school, never learned a trade). "I'm willing and I'm able-bodied," he says, "but they ask if you're skilled, and if you're not they don't take your name." Since he is unskilled, his only claim to a job lies in the skimpy seniority he has built up during his eight years as a shipping clerk at the Ball Bros, glass-jar factory. Even if he could find a job at another firm, paying better than his $72 a week at Ball, he would be wary of taking it. "Say they were hiring everywhere. Just say they were. I go out and get a job. But I start without seniority. Say then Ball offers me my job back. If I don't go back in six days, I forfeit my seniority. Then I work a few days where I am and get laid off. I got nothing. I'm froze out." So Arnold Mace sits in his cheerless living room beside the telephone, waiting hopelessly. "I can't go anywhere," he broods. "The world's filled up. The tractor eliminated the mule, and the machine is eliminating the man."

A Dark View. Many of Muncie's unemployed are middleaged, like John Campbell, or unskilled, like Arnold Mace, or both. But unemployment strikes even men who are young and trained and eager. James Smith, 28, married and the father of three young children, is a skilled patternmaker, and he has practiced all the virtues that are supposed to assure prosperity. He is thrifty, hardworking, enterprising. After he was laid off in mid-1960, he tried to make a living as a freelance patternmaker, leased a small machine shop, for which he agreed to pay 40% of his profits. So far, that has proved to be a poor bargain for the landlord. "I bang on the doors of tool shops all around these parts," says Smith. "All around--Kokomo, New Castle, Elwood, over in Anderson. I've quoted on 15 jobs. I got two little ones--two weeks' work." Smith also puts in 30 hours a week as a commission salesman for a local food wholesaler, but so far he has sold only one order, for $70.

In a community sense, Muncie still believes firmly that everything is going to be all right. Two and a half years ago, the city fathers scurried around and sold Westinghouse on their town as the site for a new transformer plant--the first new plant to come Muncie's way in a quarter-century. The plant is now almost completed and should provide 500 new jobs in the fall. "Muncie is on the move," says William F. Craig, vice president of the WLBC TV-radio station and a wheel in the Chamber of Commerce. "We're on the threshold of the greatest employment in our history." Jim Smith, the patternmaker, is studying drafting at night school and reading public-library books on transformers in hopes of getting a job at Westinghouse. But the Smith family has a dark view of the path ahead--Westinghouse or no. "From here on in, I'm looking for a job with security first," says Jim Smith.

"You know what my ambition in life was? I wanted to sell this house and build one out in the country some day. And for the bad months, when there was no demand for patternmakers, I was going to build a little store out back, and sell tools, hardware, hobby equipment and toys. But since I've been out of work we've eaten up most of the $1,800 that it took us four years to save. Now it looks like I'm never going to be able to do it. Never."

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