The Montana Study was a project conducted by the University of Montana in Missoula with funds provided by the Rockefeller Foundation. The project was conceived by Ernest O. Melby, Chancellor of the University of Montana System. He believed that by creating a common awareness of Montana's heritage, the people of the state would develop a deeper devotion to the welfare of the community, state, and country.
In the early 1940s, Montana State College in Bozeman conducted a Rockefeller Foundation-funded project entitled "Northern Plains in a World of Change." At a meeting in Bozeman, Chancellor Melby met David H. Stevens of the Rockefeller Foundation. They worked together to create the Montana Study. Melby and Stevens consulted Baker Brownell of Northwestern University, a noted authority on problems of rural life. They created a project that would focus the University on problems of rural life and find ways of stabilizing the family and the small community. Melby resigned as Chancellor in 1944, became the president of Montana State University in Missoula, and directed the Montana Study. He hired Baker Brownell as project director. Brownell was assisted by Paul Meadows, a sociologist from Northwestern University, and Joseph Kinsey Howard, an author from Great Falls.
The Montana Study was conducted in three phases: a community field work phase using local community study groups, a special projects phase, and a leadership training phase. Local study groups were set up only in towns which requested them. Eventually groups met in Lonepine, Darby, Stevensville, Conrad, Lewistown, Libby, Hamilton, Victor, and two on the Flathead Indian Reservation: the Dixon group consisting of white community members, part-blood Indians, and Bureau of Indian Affairs staff and the Full Blood Flathead Indian Group at Arlee. The local study groups met to discuss the problems of their local communities, to study their local history, and to propose solutions. Several of the groups produced historical pageants as a way of raising the self-awareness of the community.
The Montana Study officially ended July 19, 1947, due in part to political controversy over its mildly left wing orientation and its academic "egg-head" image. However, many of the people involved in the Study continued working on the project without official funding, and the Montana Study continued to function on an informal basis into the early 1950s.
From the guide to the, 1943-1954, (University of Montana--Missoula Maureen and Mike Mansfield Library Archives and Special Collections)
