The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again

by Robert D. Putnam

The tactic of reclaiming white dominance by violence was augmented in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s by more creative measures, such as restrictive Black Codes and the disenfranchisement of African Americans through poll taxes, literacy tests, and election fraud.5 Even so, Northern Republicans could not rally enough white support to continue Reconstruction in earnest.6 Southern manipulation of the legal system and a series of backroom political dealings doomed Reconstruction to failure. As America moved through the Gilded Age, Northerners increasingly looked the other way as over eight million African Americans slid into a state-sanctioned and violently enforced form of second-class citizenship.

Americans favored the Civil Rights Act by a nearly two-to-one margin (58 percent to 31 percent), and in April 1965, fully 76 percent expressed support for the forthcoming Voting Rights Act.126 This

Government enforcement of the new legislation was also increasingly met with organized resistance and violent backlash on the part of disaffected whites. Sociologists Doug McAdam and Karina Kloos call this the “white resistance movement,” and argue that it developed first in the South in the early 1960s, then spread to the rest of the country in the mid- to late 1960s, “in opposition to the African American freedom struggle in both its traditional civil rights and increasingly threatening ‘black power’ incarnations.”129

Indeed, in 1968, just months after Dr. King was killed, Alabama governor George Wallace (who just three years earlier had presided over Bloody Sunday) ran for president and captured 13.5 percent of the popular vote.

Even though Wallace had siphoned off a significant percentage of Republican voters, Richard Nixon’s shrewd exploitation of what McAdam and Kloos call “the politics of racial reaction” made possible his 1968 presidential victory. His “much-ballyhooed ‘southern strategy,’ ” they write, “is more accurately seen as a reflection of the emerging dynamic than a bold new direction on his part.” They go on to argue that Wallace’s surprising success was “nothing short of a revelation to political strategists in both parties,” who thenceforth understood that grasping the critical balance of power meant appealing to a growing white backlash.

President Nixon began to shift his rhetoric to a racially conservative stance and appointed conservative judges who began to roll back civil rights victories. He thereby successfully won over Wallace’s supporters, capturing every Southern state and winning a landslide reelection in 1972. As we noted in Chapter 3, this was the key turning point in the U-curve of party polarization.135

As the 1970s wore on, politicians increasingly understood that while Americans could abide the slow, steady, and separate progress of black Americans, when progress demanded a reorganization of power structures, reallocation of resources, reformatio...

When asked about the causes of racial inequality, very few white respondents at the end of the century were still citing the “low ability” of black Americans. Yet their most common alternative explanation was neither racial discrimination nor low opportunity—responses that had been in decline during the last decades of the century—but “low motivation,” a perspective that seems to simply transmute racist attitudes from innate to non-innate grounds.139

During the closing decades of the twentieth century: Gains in relative life expectancy for black Americans stagnated, beginning to improve again only at the start of the twenty-first century.140 The closing of the black-white gap in infant mortality rates plateaued, and in recent years the infant mortality rate for black Americans has increased.141 Black/white ratios in high school and college degree attainment showed little or no improvement. Progress toward income equality between the races reversed, and in the aggregate the black-white income gap widened significantly.142 Relative rates of black homeownership plateaued and even declined. Schools began to resegregate.143 The trend toward generational liberalization of white attitudes slowed.

One important explanation for why America took its “foot off the gas” instead of continuing to press for equality, integration, and a more inclusive “we” is simply that white Americans vocally—and often violently—opposed the measures required to do so. Meanwhile, many black Americans, too, began to lose faith in the promises of the liberal establishment, and in the project of integration, which seemed excruciatingly slow in coming.

Thus, the cultural shift from “we” to “I” in the mid-1960s was intimately bound up with the white backlash to the Civil Rights revolution, and the shift from Jim Crow racism to a new kind of white racism, sometimes called “laissez-faire racism.”

And Donald Kinder and Howard Schuman observed in 2004, citing Mary Jackman, “whites come to champion the idea of individualism… because it provides them with a principled and apparently neutral justification for opposing policies that favor black Americans.”147

Some might argue that it was, quite simply, a white male “we” under construction in this period—one that had no room for anyone else, and whose strength was ultimately derived from its exclusivity. However, this view fails to take into account the ways in which blacks were moving toward equality with whites during that same period, as well as the slow but significant victories of the long Civil Rights movement, which prevailed upon the white establishment to widen the “we” in important (though ultimately insufficient) ways across many decades.

Karina Kloos make a similar claim with regard to the effect of racial resentment on the larger turn away from political liberalism and big government.151 Furthermore, historian Bruce Schulman argues that the embrace of identity politics and culture in the 1970s, which we discussed in the preceding chapter, fueled the rise of a competitive ethos and the abandonment of a broader cooperative ethic in the public square. The result, he believes, was a fractured notion of citizenship—based less on broad commonality and more on claiming rights and privileges associated with a narrowed sense of group identity.152

Furthermore, any attempt to create an American “we” that is not fully inclusive, fully egalitarian, or genuinely accommodating of difference will contain the seeds of its own undoing. Finding new and ever-more inclusive ways to achieve Martin Luther King, Jr.’s unrealized vision of the “beloved community”—a true multiracial and multicultural “we”—is as urgent as ever, and will play a critical role in determining whether America is ultimately able to reverse its downward drift and move forward into another upswing.

Furthermore, in defining such a broad group upon which to train our interest, we also must acknowledge the fact that this group contains within it every other marginalized group, introducing the issue of intersectionality, and the possibility that layered forms of discrimination may produce experiences and outcomes not fully captured by data that utilize a single form of categorization.

the founding of the American women’s movement is widely considered to have taken place at Seneca Falls in 1848. At what became the first national gathering addressing women’s rights, almost three hundred people convened at a church in upstate New York to discuss “the condition and rights of women,” and passed resolutions calling for equal rights in twelve areas, including ownership of property, education, access to employment, the ability to participate in the public sphere, and—most controversial of all—the right to vote.4 Thus, Seneca Falls launched what has been called in retrospect the “first wave” of the American women’s movement.5

New York City Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in 1911, which took the lives of 146 people, most of them immigrant women and girls. The fight for better pay and conditions for working-class women was thus an important early component of women’s activism.

The racism that came to characterize the early-century women’s movement was especially striking, given that many early feminists had initially found common cause with enslaved African Americans, and had found their voice as passionate participants in the abolitionist movement that preceded the Civil War. But in 1870 the Fifteenth Amendment, which legally gave the vote to black males, had been ratified, and despite the fact that granting the vote to women had been demanded and vigorously debated alongside the issue of black male suffrage, “sex” was conspicuously absent from the protected categories of the amendment. This fact incensed some white suffragists and had the effect of driving a wedge between the movements for racial justice and gender equality, and even caused a rift among suffragists themselves.

even the federal government to follow. To a remarkable degree, the federal policies and programs for which Progressive standard-bearers such as Teddy Roosevelt were famous were the result of local innovations bubbling up from below.

As all of these stories illustrate, the Progressive movement was, first and foremost, a moral awakening. Facilitated by the muckrakers’ revelations about a society, economy, and government run amok—and urged on by the Social Gospelers’ denunciation of social Darwinism and laissez-faire economics—Americans from all walks of life began to repudiate the self-centered, hyper-individualist creed of the Gilded Age.

As historian Richard Hofstadter has written, “the moral indignation of the age was by no means directed entirely against others; it was in great and critical measure directed inward. Contemporaries who spoke of the movement as an affair of the conscience were not mistaken.”

The 2018 March for Our Lives, in which 1.2 million people gathered at over 880 events in the US and across the globe to protest gun violence and school shootings, is but one example. As is the Families Belong Together initiative, calling for an end to the Trump administration’s inhumane treatment of immigrants in border detention facilities. The social media driven #MeToo movement—which is a clarion call for both personal and institutional accountability—is also part of a broader moral awakening in today’s America. And the Poor People’s Campaign, led by Reverend William Barber, describes its efforts to combat systemic racism and intergenerational poverty as “a national call for moral revival.”17

The legacy of the Progressives points to the power of moral messaging, but also challenges us to push beyond the idea that silencing or expelling certain elements of our society, punishing offenders, or replacing one faction’s dominance with another’s, will restore the moral and cultural health of our nation.

In stark contrast to the prescriptive ideology of socialism, which was also gaining adherents at the turn of the last century, Progressive reformers were instead intensely pragmatic, using the new methods of social science to test the merits of different solutions. Such methods, Walter Lippmann had argued, would be the key to mastery. Indeed, true innovation requires openness to experimentation that is not premised upon ideological beliefs.

And another key feature of the Progressives was the wide diversity of issues they took on simultaneously. Because so much of the movement was anchored by citizen activism, Progressivism didn’t privilege one type of reform over another, but was instead a holistic reorganizing of society that began at the bottom and was based on a reinvigoration of shared values.

Our current problems are mutually reinforcing, and their solutions must be so as well.

As their experience as changemakers grew, Progressives such as Addams realized that pressure of a different sort would need to be applied, and that government involvement was necessary to ensure fairness, safety, and the common good.

And it would require a new narrative bringing siloed efforts together in a broader vision for the future of America, as well as a retraining and retooling of average Americans for active citizenship.20

When it comes to political mobilization, the accepted wisdom is that online organizing is vital to any modern cause, but some research indicates that an overreliance on virtual networks creates fragile movements that rarely achieve their broader aims.22

According to research by sociologist Dana Fisher there are signs that today’s “resistance” movements are beginning to take on these characteristics. She has shown that since the Women’s March on January 21, 2017, the first mass protest in the Trump era, there has been significant overlap in the various marches, movements, strikes, and coalitions in which protesters are taking part. Participation in demonstrations, which is often prompted by online organizing, also seems to be a catalyst for more localized action when citizens-turned-activists return to their communities.

Without astute political entrepreneurs such as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, who effectively translated the popular uprising into policies and programs that garnered bipartisan support, the movement’s legacy would have been much shorter-lived.

One final feature of the Progressive movement that is relevant to today’s challenges is its youthfulness. All of the reformers and writers whose stories and ideas we have featured in this chapter were in their thirties or younger when they became powerful voices and forces for change. At age forty-two, Teddy Roosevelt was the youngest person ever to assume the office of president.

develop a shared vision of the common good is vitally necessary, but mere “kumbaya we-ness” will not ameliorate vast economic inequalities, curb deaths of despair, or end racism and sexism.

First is a caution to avoid the temptation to overcorrect. Progressivism emerged on the heels of populism and in direct competition with socialism, both of which movements advocated many of the same causes, but fell short of their aims because, among other reasons, they failed to appeal to the full range of American values. By contrast, Progressives managed to fashion slow and steady reforms as an alternative to calls for revolution. Progressive reformers quickly learned that in order to succeed they would have to compromise—to find a way to put private property, personal liberty, and economic growth on more equal footing with communitarian ideals and the protection of the weak and vulnerable, and to work within existing systems to bring about change.27

Prohibition was an overreach into social control by well-meaning reformers who sought to protect women, children, and the poor. It was aimed at a very real problem, but was ultimately an overcorrection—and one that Americans could and would not bear. This was perhaps a foreshadowing of a similar phenomenon that occurred in the 1950s, when a creeping collectivism and the pressure to conform became a source of resentment and a seedbed of cultural and political backlash. The solution to hyper-individualism is never hyper-communitarianism, nor a repudiation of equally important American values such as liberty and self-determination.

Second, and even more significant, is the caution never to compromise on equality and inclusion. To a significant degree, segregationism and white nationalism—undergirded by scientific racism—pervaded the thinking of many Progressives, and limited their understanding of which of the downtrodden deserved to be championed, and just who belonged in a widening circle of “we.” The Progressive Era coincided with the rise of Jim Crow; Woodrow Wilson was one of the most openly racist presidents ever to occupy the White House; and much of FDR’s New Deal ultimately discriminated against people of color and women—to name just a few examples.

In assessing such a widely diverse movement, it is nearly impossible to make statements that apply across the board, but most scholars agree that racism was the norm, not the exception among Progressive reformers. And although it was an incredibly pluralistic movement, Progressivism was nonetheless largely led and implemented by the white middle class, who decided not only who would benefit from its reforms, but also what shape a refashioned America would take.

Though historians have debated their motives and their methods, the Progressives’ legacy is nonetheless clear—in hard measures of economic equality, political comity, social cohesion, and cultural altruism they set in motion genuine upward progress that compounded during the first sixty-five years of the twentieth century. “We

Furthermore, it is important to make clear that the I-we continuum is conceptually and empirically distinct from the more familiar left-right spectrum.30 Both individualists and communitarians can be found on both sides of the political spectrum, because both individualism and community are foundational

American ideals.

Political philosophers have generated the view that equality and freedom are necessarily in tension with each other.… As a public, we have swallowed this argument whole. We think we are required to choose between freedom and equality. Our choice in recent years has tipped toward freedom. Under the general influence of libertarianism, both parties have abandoned our Declaration; they have scorned our patrimony. Such a choice is dangerous. If we abandon equality, we lose the single bond that makes us a community, that makes us a people with the capacity to be free collectively and individually in the first place.