Abstract
NOTWITHSTANDING “Main Street,” it is difficult for us in the old country to realise the state of public opinion throughout the greater part of the United States outside the larger cities: difficult to realise how the minister (be he Methodist or Baptist, Congrega tionalist or Lutheran) and the Sunday School dominate the community. In the small country town—and every village aspires to be a town—there is no society, and no public opinion, save that centring round one or other church. He is out of society who is not a church member, and it is a commonplace for “Aunt Susan,” a representative of one of the oldest families in the town, to conduct the Sunday School class, she being close upon seventy, and her class consisting of the elderly farmers of the locality and their wives and associated elderly spinsters, who have, as it were, grown up under her wing. Visit the farms and other houses of the town and you will find no solid literature that is not theo logical of an approved type, and of that but some three or four books. Read the local papers and you will see in them little beyond local news, of church teas and picnics, of auctions, of local weddings and funerals in most intimate detail, with a long column of notes upon the doings of local personages, how this one has left for New York or that one returned from Chicago, with, of course, full information regarding local and league doings in baseball. They contain absolutely no news about the outer world, no discussion of topics outside the range of the Sunday School. Save personal gossip and local happenings, all other topics are taboo.
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Prof. J. George Adami, M.D., F.R.S., Vice-Chancellor of the University of Liverpool. Nature 116, 103 (1925). https://doi.org/10.1038/116103a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/116103a0