COMMUNITY DREAMING IN THE RURAL NORTHWEST THE MONTANA STUDY, 1944-47

On 28 April 1944, three intellectuals, each representing the views of different regions of the country, met in Chicago and laid the basis for an experimental program in adult education and community outreach. Ernest Melby, the newly appointed chancellor of the University of Montana system of higher education, Baker Brownell, a respected Northwestern University philosophy professor and leading advocate of the small community, and David Stevens, head of the Humanities Division of the Rockefeller Foundation agreed on the shape of a community action project that would later be called the Montana Study. They brought together the concerns and needs of the rural West, Midwest, and East, respectively, and reached consensus on the leading threats to and weaknesses of modern mass society. Melby voiced the West's ambivalence over rapid wartime growth. He noted that cities expanded haphazardly, while rural areas seemed to wither. Brownell brought a midwesterner's desire for stability and continuity of small communities and their presumed inherent cultural worth. Stevens contributed the initial funding, plus a sense of urgency about Americans' ignorance of their own cultural identity-its people and regions-and their attendant lack of understanding about the geopolitical realities of the larger world. But beyond regionalism, and above all, they believed that small communities and local social awareness were the wellsprings of the American character and its democratic culture. The Montana Study represented a propitious joining of the ideas of communitarian reformers with the entreaties of western ruralists who argued that their region had rapidly come of age, but was threatened by the very elements of progress that hastened its maturation.