Trustees of Indiana University

Our Towns: Remembering Community in Indiana by John BodnarReview by: John E. MillerIndiana Magazine of History, Vol. 98, No. 1 (March 2002), pp. 53-54Published by: Trustees of Indiana UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27792361 .

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Book Reviews 53

magisterial, Bain took control of the school in 1947 and raised it to

unprecedented and unequaled prominence during his long tenure. The often brutal manner in which Bain achieved his objectives includ ed maintaining a penurious payroll and dismissing faculty members when a musician Bain felt was more eminent could be persuaded to take a position in Bloomington. Burgeoning enrollments during the

postwar years (which not incidentally included veterans with mature

voices) enabled Dean Bain to attract a sufficient number of student musicians to support large vocal and instrumental ensembles and

credibly establish Indiana University's Opera Theater as the chief

jewel in the school's crown. With Bain at the helm of the School of Music and Herman Wells as the university's chief executive, the sky was the limit, as Wells's backing of Bain was virtually unqualified.

Webb took over when Bain reached mandatory retirement age in 1973. Bain expected his protege to continue to do his bidding, while

faculty and students looked to Webb for a welcome change from Bain's

dictatorship. The difficulties of deanship in an era of shared gover nance, rising costs, shrinking budgets, and increased university administrative complexities are clear. A brief postlude discusses the administration of David Woods, who was appointed dean after Webb retired in 1997. Confronted with a mandate for fundraising, a grow ing deficit, and increasing problems with administration and facul

ty, he resigned after only two years. Logan assesses many situations frankly, though the project was

tackled mainly from the vantage points of administrators, faculty, and staff, and the book is clearly laudatory. Insight and documen tation add authority to the work's many anecdotes. Students of Indi ana history and of Indiana University will find that Logan has

admirably shown how "the foremost American school of music"

(p. 5) attained its status.

ANN L. SlLVERBERG (M.M. Musicology, Indiana University School of Music, 1981,

Ph.D., Musicology, University of Illinois, 1992) is associate professor of music at Austin

Peay State University, Clarksville, Tennessee. She is the author of A Sympathy with

Sounds: A Brief History of the University of Illinois School of Music to Celebrate Its

Centennial (1995).

Our Towns: Remembering Community in Indiana. By John Bodnar.

(Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 2001. Pp. xviii, 218.

Map, notes, illustrations, appendix, index. $29.95.)

Since the invention of the tape recorder enhanced our ability to capture people's memories, oral history has played a major role in

documenting state and local history. Our Towns: Remembering Com

munity in Indiana is a welcome addition to our understanding of Indiana history and of the history of community in local settings.

This volume contains the transcripts of thirty-one interviews, recording the recollections of thirty-nine individuals, obtained between 1976 and 1996 by thirteen different interviewers, including John

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54 Indiana Magazine of History

Bodn?r, the compiler of this volume and the author of its introduc

tory essay. Without intruding themselves too much in the process, the interviewers skillfully elicited from their respondents a sense of what it was like to live and how conditions changed in Indiana during the decades after World War I.

Identifying community as the book's central theme makes sense, since it is people's relationships with neighbors, fellow workers, and the groups they come into contact with that stand out in the inter views. A variety of conditions surrounding community life can be observed in the interviews, which deal with six different towns and cities: Evansville and Paoli in the southern part of the state, Indi

anapolis and Anderson toward the center, and Whiting and South Bend in the north. From the interviews the reader derives a picture of life in both rural and urban settings. In Indianapolis, the focus is on the black community. In Anderson, the center of attention is auto

mobile workers and the sit-down strike of 1936-1937. The automo bile industry also is a subject in the South Bend interviews, but here

perspectives of both workers and management are presented. Eth nic communities, especially among Slovak immigrants, stand out in the case of Whiting. Residents in Paoli and Evansville discuss life in town and in the country more generally.

The topics discussed in the 210 double-columned pages of text cannot easily be summarized or pigeonholed. They remind us of how

various, complex, and often conflicted history is. People's lives differ

tremendously from family to family, place to place, and time to time. For some, community revolved around family and neighborhood. For

others, it was school, church, work, or recreation. For many, it was

all of these. There is evidence here to confirm the central thesis of Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American

Community (2000) that the spirit of community was once more vital and vibrant than it has become in recent decades. Whether one

emphasizes the decay of community or its continuing vitality, how

ever, collections like these provide wonderful sources of evidence for

evaluating those tendencies. It is to be hoped that other states will emulate Indiana in similar ventures and that the Indiana Historical

Society will follow up with further volumes.

JOHN E. MILLER, professor of history at South Dakota State University, Brookings, is the author of Looking for History on Highway 14 (1993, rev. ed. 2001) and other

publications on midwestern culture and politics. He is working on a book about small

town boys who grew up in the Midwest.

Doc: Memories from a Life in Public Service. By Otis R. Bowen, with William Du Bois, Jr. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. Pp. , 232. Illustrations, index. $24.95.)

The story of a small-town physician who started out in local

government as coroner and eventually went on to serve as Secretary

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