Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft often have been and still are equated with the rural-urban continuum and are employed to describe the “way of life” or the “moral basis” for rural/urban living. By employing common American values that seem to represent Gemeinschaftliche or Gesellschaftliche attributes, this article (1) explicates the value basis for the two concepts and (2) tests for the spatial (rural-urban) hypothesis and the communal (collectivistic-individualistic) hypothesis.