Why Small Towns Matter

How community helps America muster the manpower to defend itself.

By Jim Manzi, August 24, 2008

I grew up in a New Jersey beach town named Spring Lake, where there are 3,475 people and no traffic lights. It’s pretty much Mayberry-by-the-Sea. I was raised there in the house that my grandfather built. Not “built” as in “hired people to build it”, but built as in got carpenter’s tools, nails and wood, and hammered it together with his own hands.

Earlier this year, New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine began pressuring small towns like Spring Lake to give up their autonomy. He argued that they should subsume themselves into larger communities in order to save money on municipal services. I may be biased, but I disagree.

It’s not just that the plan doesn’t make sense on its own terms—New Jersey’s most efficient towns are on the small side, 10,000 people or so on average. It’s that efficiency is beside the point, for we should reject the idea that a community’s worth depends on the cost of its local services.

My hometown helps illustrate why.

Let me try to explain something about this place by telling you about two things in it: my grandfather’s house and a recent speech.

When I was a child, a major hurricane hit the New Jersey coast. We were used to hurricanes in late summer (June, too soon; July, keep an eye; August the worst; September, remember; October, it’s over). The power would always go out, and we would ride it out together in the living room with candles and flashlights, almost like an indoor camp-out.

This storm started that way, but got much, much worse than normal. A hurricane can look kind of cartoonish on TV when you see an anchorman being blown around by the wind in its early stages, but if it’s a bad one, it can be pretty serious business near the water. This one got horrifying. Trees were uprooted by the wind. Cars flipped over. A brick wall that had stood for decades collapsed on the beachfront. The eeriest part was when the eye of the storm passed over us, and we looked out into the bizarre moonlit stillness, knowing what was going to start again in a few minutes. I glanced up, frightened, at my father. He smiled and told me not to worry, that the house was built solid. Which, it turns out, it was.

This house sits on a street that changes slowly. When I would come back home as an adult, the houses around us still had the same families in them as on the day I was born. Our cousins lived directly across the street, but eventually sold their house to one of my grammar school classmates. When I was in my thirties, we finally took up the wall-to-wall carpeting that my parents had put down because they had a houseful of kids. Underneath it, in the living room where we had ridden out that storm, was a simple, beautiful, geometrically-patterned hardwood floor.

On a particularly memorable visit home in 2002 my wife and I spent Memorial Day weekend in Spring Lake. I brought her to exactly the kind of small-town parade you might expect: volunteer fire department, Boy Scouts, Little League teams. The parade always ends at one end of the lake, and the mayor and whoever else give short speeches in front of the memorial stone that lists people from the town who have died in war. It is normally pretty far from intense, but emotions were a little raw, as this was the first Memorial Day after 9/11, and the Jersey Shore had an extremely high casualty rate in that attack.