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

by Robert D. Putnam

Keenly aware of the dangers of individualism (a term he coined), Tocqueville was inspired by what he saw in America: Its citizens were profoundly protective of their independence, but through associating widely and deeply, they were able to overcome selfish desires, engage in collective problem solving, and work together to build a vibrant and—by comparison to Europe at that time—surprisingly egalitarian society by pursuing what he called “self-interest, rightly understood.”1

Rather than citing some recent event or offering a narrative of long-run decline, we will argue that the state of America today must be understood by first acknowledging that within living memory, each of the adverse trends we now see was going in the opposite direction. And we will show that, to a surprising degree, century-long trends in economics, politics, society, and culture are remarkably similar, such that it is possible to summarize all of them in a single phenomenon: The story of the American experiment in the twentieth century is one of a long upswing toward increasing solidarity, followed by a steep downturn into increasing individualism. From “I” to “we,” and back again to “I.”

Since 1900, Americans have become, on average, healthier, wealthier, and if not wiser, then at least more educated, although as we shall see, the education story is somewhat more complicated.

Economists have shown that (as is clear from Figure 2.1), the slope of this upward curve in economic prosperity has been remarkably constant at 2 percent per year since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Indeed, over the century after 1871 the only visible deviation from the steady pulse of the American economy was the Great Depression (when GDP per capita fell nearly 20 percent in four years), followed by the World War II catch-up boom. However, as economist C. I. Jones reports, “To me this decline stands out most for how anomalous it is. Many of the other recessions barely make an impression on the eye: over long periods of time, economic growth swamps economic fluctuations.”3 Economists have devoted much thought and energy to explaining this continuous growth—which was once considered “a stylized fact,”4 that is, a fact so widely accepted that almost no one disputes it. More recently, the growth rate seems to have slowed significantly after 1970, falling below the long-term rate of 2 percent a year, perhaps because technological innovation is no longer leading to steady growth in productivity.5 That discovery should dampen any cheery optimism about the 2 percent “stylized” growth rate continuing into the future. But for most of the period we cover in this book material progress seemed steady and assured.

Roughly speaking, the top 1 percent’s share of national income nearly doubled from less than 10 percent in 1870 to approaching 20 percent in 1913.25 Inequalities in income, wealth, and status were vast and seemed destined to grow in perpetuity. What followed instead was a surprisingly durable turn toward a halcyon period of roughly six decades during which economic inequalities were substantially reduced—what economic historians call the “Great Leveling” or “Great Convergence.”26 Dating this period is not an exact science, but the most recent and widely accepted account of US economic history, by Peter H. Lindert and Jeffrey G. Williamson, dates it from roughly 1913 to roughly 1970.27

Then suddenly and unexpectedly in the mid-1970s, Figure 2.8 shows, the Great Convergence was reversed in a dramatic U-turn, to be followed by a half century of Great Divergence, that is, plunging income equality. By the early twenty-first century income inequality in America (especially pre-tax and transfers) was reaching an intensity unseen for one hundred years. So abrupt was this reversal that one of the earliest scholarly accounts of it was subtitled “A Tale of Two Half-Centuries.”31 In the most recent half century, in vivid contrast to the previous half century, what growth there was came at the expense of equality, and the rich captured the lion’s share of the growth dividend.

No facet of the first Gilded Age had been more glaring than the extremes of wealth. Even in 1913 the wealthiest 1 percent owned 45 percent of the country’s total wealth, and during the Roaring Twenties their share rose for a couple of years to 48 percent, as Figure 2.9 shows. In the following six decades, however, their share was more than halved to 22 percent, in large part by financial regulation and progressive taxation on income and estates, though in part because of redistributive spending. In other words, mirroring the great convergence in income was a great convergence in wealth. However, in recent decades the top 1 percent’s share of our national wealth surged back to nearly 40 percent by 2014 and has continued to increase.35 The top 1 percent in recent years have garnered roughly 20 percent of household income, but nearly 40 percent of household wealth. The share of wealth held by that top 1 percent nearly doubled from less than 25 percent of total national wealth in the early 1980s to more than 40 percent in 2016. In fact, the top 0.1 percent of American families now hold about 20 percent of household wealth, almost as much as at the peak of the first Gilded Age.

What caused the Great Convergence, and then what caused the Great Divergence? In recent years we have heard much debate about the latter, but relatively little about the former. It turns out that these are not two separate issues, because to a considerable extent the same factors are responsible for both the upswing in equality until the 1970s and the downturn after that. International factors are no doubt a significant part of the backstory, because the same basic U-shape across the twentieth century is found in most advanced countries.62 Globalization is a plausible suspect, because international flows of people and goods and money tended to diminish in the first half of the twentieth century and then to intensify in the second half.63 Other Western countries have experienced the same international pressures, however, while seeing a much less dramatic increase in inequality, suggesting that U.S. domestic institutions and policies have played a major role.

both dreamers and doers, created innovations such as the public high school, labor unions, the federal tax structure, antitrust legislation, financial regulation, and more.66 Those creations did not immediately close the income gap, given the turbulence of the Twenties, but they were the necessary foundations for further developments (especially during the New Deal, but not only then) that underpinned the Great Convergence. Conversely, by the 1970s those earlier social innovations and institutional reforms had all begun to fade and even to be reversed. The growth of education “paused” around 1965, as we saw earlier in this chapter; unions had begun their long decline by 1958; in the mid-1960s tax cuts began to make the tax structure more regressive; after 1970, deregulation, especially of financial institutions, overturned the reforms begun in the Progressive Era; and most subtle, but also perhaps most important, the collective norm that “we are all in this together” was replaced by a libertarian (sometimes misleadingly called “neoliberal”) norm that we’re not. These changes underlay the pivot toward inequality in the mid-1970s

Since one popular interpretation of these shifts in policy and of the consequent shifts in income and wealth distribution fingers the Reagan Revolution after 1981 as the chief culprit, it is significant that in virtually every case the key turning points occurred a decade or more before the presidency of Ronald Reagan. In short, the presidential election of 1980 and the subsequent unfolding of Reaganism was a lagging indicator of this sea change in the American political economy.

Most experts agree that a primary cause of the Great Convergence was the interplay between technological advance and the educational innovations (especially the public high school) that emerged from the Progressive Era around 1910. Other things being equal, more widespread education means more equality, as the increased supply of high-skilled workers puts downward pressure on higher incomes, while the decreased supply of low-skilled workers puts upward pressure on lower incomes. That dynamic is offset by technological progress, which increases the demand for (and hence the incomes of) high-skilled workers and lowers the incomes of low-skilled workers.

The twin pauses in high school and college growth in the 1970s, clearly visible in Figures 2.6 and 2.7, halted the long, steady increase in the supply of skilled workers. At the same time, what economists call “skill-biased technological change” (or SBTC) began to increase the relative demand for ever more highly skilled workers. High school education was fine for the assembly lines that dominated economic growth from the 1920s to the 1970s, but it was inadequate for the high-tech labs that replaced those assembly lines in the last decades of the twentieth century. Most economists agree that technological change has been an important contributor to the recent growth of inequality. Nevertheless, if the educational push that had begun in the Progressive Era had been renewed and accelerated after the 1970s, the magic combination of growth and equality might well have continued. But instead we Americans collectively took our feet off the educational accelerator in the 1970s and began to coast. Almost immediately, the long, gradual upward trend in equality was reversed, as we saw in Figure 2.8. In broad outline, this is probably now the single most widely accepted explanation for the Great Convergence and Great Divergence.70 However, it works much less well in explaining the waning and waxing gap between the top 1 percent and the rest of the American labor force, especially the explosive widening of that gap in recent years.

The Knights of Labor, based on the premise that workers of all types should be enrolled in “one big union,” had boomed from 28,100 members in 1880 to 729,000 six years later, but then fell back to 100,000 in 1890 and collapsed in 1894 in the face of internal conflicts between the skilled and unskilled, as well as between blacks and whites. Its leading role was soon taken over by the American Federation of Labor, along with a series of unions organized along craft and industrial lines—mine workers (founded in 1890), electrical workers (1891), longshoremen

(1892), garment workers (1900), teamsters (1903), and so on. In barely seven years (1897–1904) nationwide union membership almost quadrupled from 3.5 percent of the nonagricultural workforce to 12.3 percent. This time union efforts proved more durable, and union membership would not fall below the new high-water mark for the rest of the century.

Strikes became the workers’ weapon of choice in the struggle with management, and in the decades after 1870 America acquired “the bloodiest and most violent labor history of any industrial nation in the world.”75 On neither side was this tussle a polite effort to seek compromise through collective bargaining. Both sides used violence—from the notorious street battles of the Homestead steel strike in 1892, to the equally violent Pullman strike in Chicago in 1894, to the anthracite coal strike in Pennsylvania in 1902. In 1894 Democratic president Grover Cleveland and his attorney general, Richard Olney, crafted a strategy to use court injunctions to break the Pullman strike, but by 1902 the Progressive Republican president Teddy Roosevelt appointed the Anthracite Coal Commission that ended the miners’ strike, giving de facto recognition to the union. Against the backdrop of fears among the “haves” of anarchy and revolution by the “have-nots,” mutualism and compromise had begun to win out over individualism and conflict, though it would be several decades before a new model of labor relations would emerge.

In 1929 only about 10 percent of workers were members of unions, but by 1945 that figure had risen to about 35 percent. Probably an even larger fraction of Americans were members of a union family, and during this period unions enjoyed wide public approval. Gallup polls showed union supporters steadily outnumbered critics by more than three to one throughout the three decades from 1936 to 1966.79 It was a period in which most Americans had come to appreciate the virtues of solidarity. FIGURE 2.12: UNION MEMBERSHIP, 1890–2015 Source: Freeman, “Spurts in Union Growth”; Hirsch and Macpherson, “Unionstats.” Data LOESS smoothed: .2. See endnote 2.80. By the 1960s, however, membership rates in unions (and their social and cultural salience, to which we shall return in Chapter 4) had begun a long, seemingly inexorable slump, so that by the 2010s unions were left with substantial membership only in the public sector (especially among teachers),

Only a fraction of these effects comes from the direct impact of collective bargaining on the incomes of union members.89 Studies have found that unionization had an equalizing impact even on the nonunionized labor force,90 on broader norms of equity,91 and on CEO pay during the Great Convergence.92 During the Great Convergence unions also provided powerful support for political forces that were working for greater income equality. For all these reasons, several independent studies suggest that roughly one quarter of the post-1970s decline in income equality could be explained by the fall in unionization.93 Unions are another important example, like the high school movement, of a “we” social innovation from the early 1900s whose development over the ensuing six decades contributed to the Great Convergence and whose decline after mid-century contributed to the ensuing Great Divergence.

In sum, during the Great Convergence, both taxation and spending moved in a progressive direction, so government redistribution was a major contributor to growing equality. With the advent of the Great Divergence, by contrast, taxes became more regressive, though spending continued to be more progressive, softening the post-1980 trend toward inequality, at least for the aging middle class.

Many economists who have closely examined growing income inequality over the last half century have emphasized the same factors that we have just outlined. “In the United States,” argue Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman, “the stagnation of bottom 50% incomes and the upsurge in the top 1% coincided with reduced progressive taxation, widespread deregulation (particularly in the financial sector), weakened unions, and an erosion of the federal minimum wage.”

Instead, in the late nineteenth century, party alignments were largely tribal—vast patronage networks competing for spoils. Reinforcing regional economic divisions were ethnic divisions and a cultural and urban-rural cleavage not entirely unlike the cultural and urban-rural cleavage today. Prohibition (and undergirding that, religious conservatism) was a major dividing line in American politics from the 1890s until the 1930s, when it was effectively removed from the national agenda by repeal.

The Progressive movement (and eventually Teddy Roosevelt’s Progressive or “Bull Moose” Party) embodied this discontent. By 1912 such third parties would receive 35 percent of the national popular vote for president, the high-water mark for third parties in American history and a symptom of public discontent with the polarized party system.11 The new issues jostling for a place on the national agenda included insurance for the elderly, the jobless, and the disabled; progressive income and estate taxation; environmental regulation; labor reform; the overweening power of big business monopolies; women’s suffrage; campaign finance reform; and universal health insurance. (The parallels to our contemporary political agenda are striking.) Initially, support for such reforms had been concentrated among progressive Democrats, but as the new century opened, Progressivism also found strong champions among liberal Republicans, like Teddy Roosevelt, and the Republican Party began to split into the “stand-patters” and the emerging “Progressive” wing. This cross-party Progressive movement had first surfaced at the state and local level in the 1880s and 1890s, but gained power at the national level with TR’s unexpected ascent to the presidency after McKinley’s assassination in 1901.

One mark of the incipient blurring of party lines in the Progressive Era (visible in Figure 3.1) is that the major reforms of that period were enacted during both Republican and Democratic administrations with support (and opposition) from both sides of the aisle. On ten major reforms passed between 1906 and 1919, including the Interstate Commerce Commission, the Pure Food and Drug Act, the federal income tax, the direct election of senators, the tariff cuts of 1913, the Federal Reserve, the Clayton Antitrust Act, child labor regulation, Prohibition, and women’s suffrage, the administration in power received, on average, the support of 78 percent of the House and Senate members of its own party, as well as 40 percent of the votes of the opposing party.14 Party-line votes were beginning to be replaced by bipartisan coalitions.

The Progressive movement did not eliminate polarization, to be sure, but in reflecting reformist, egalitarian, and even communitarian sentiments among leaders of both major parties, it laid the groundwork for decades of declining polarization. This Progressive trend not only influenced congressional voting, as shown in Figure 3.1, but also brought into politics a new generation of reformers in both parties who would dominate presidential politics for decades to come. Though not all remained lifelong Progressives, eight of the ten Republican presidential nominees and six of the eight Democratic nominees in the first half of the twentieth century had launched their careers as members of the broad Progressive movement at the turn of the century.

Partisan tribalism began to reemerge—slowly at first, but then with gathering speed and force. The polarization that began in the late 1960s was initially driven primarily by race, as the two parties became more distinct and more internally homogeneous. Johnson and Nixon (ironically, each a moderate within his own party) were the twin progenitors of that turn toward polarization, Johnson by signing the Civil Rights bills in 1964-65 that (as he himself reportedly had foretold45) cost the Democrats their conservative, Southern wing, and Nixon by following an essentially racist “Southern strategy” in 1968 to bring those same conservative Southerners into the Republican fold.

So the renewed party polarization of the last half century began with race—the one constant and central conflict in American history—but polarization soon came to be about much more than race.55 By the years of Obama and Trump, bipartisanship in Congress had become virtually nonexistent; on six major votes of this period, the administration received support from 95 percent of their own party, but only 3 percent of the opposition.56 Statistically speaking, party polarization was rapidly approaching mathematical perfection.

Between 1870 and 1920 civic inventiveness reached a crescendo unmatched in American history, not merely in terms of numbers of clubs, but in the range and durability of the newly founded organizations. Social historian Theda Skocpol and her colleagues have shown that half of all the largest mass membership organizations in American history—the fifty-eight national voluntary organizations that ever enrolled at least 1 percent of the adult male or female population—were founded in the decades between 1870 and 1920.11

Franchise-form commercial organizations had begun with Singer Sewing Machines in 1880 and auto dealerships in the 1890s, and this pattern was quickly adopted by the contemporaneous new civic organizations. Invented once, the organizations then replicated themselves endlessly to meet a seemingly inexhaustible demand from Americans for ways to connect.

The first Rotary club, for example, was invented in Chicago in 1905 by Paul Harris, a young lawyer, just arrived in Chicago from a small town, who lacked useful social connections and felt “desperately lonely” in the urban maelstrom. Within four years his Chicago club had two hundred members, and within six years Rotary clubs existed in every major city in America. Imitative competitors like Kiwanis and Lions (and dozens more) spread rapidly across the country. Nationwide membership in service clubs grew exponentially to 300,000 by 1920 and several million by 1930, a quarter century’s rate of diffusion that would not be rivaled until Ray Kroc’s invention of the McDonald’s franchise system nearly half a century later.

Many of these new forms of “instant” sociability were castigated by critics as middle-class, low-brow, conformist “Babbitry,” but that critique overlooks their innovative importance as a new form of community to replace the rural barn raisings, quilting bees, and small-town neighborliness that had been rendered obsolete by the economic advances and demographic turmoil of the late nineteenth century. It is also remarkable how uniform were the commitments of these new organizations—male and female and of all ethnic backgrounds—to the ideals of community service and social solidarity.

By mid-century, civic engagement as measured by membership and involvement in a wide variety of groups—religious organizations, sports groups, charitable groups, unions and professional groups, neighborhood associations, hobby groups, parent groups, book clubs, youth groups, fraternal organizations, veterans organizations—was very high by any standard. Across lines of race and gender, most Americans belonged to one or more of these groups, and our national rate of civic involvement was at or near the top of the world rankings. Community groups across America seemed to stand on the threshold of a new era of expanded involvement. Except for the civic drought induced by the Great Depression, the seedlings planted by the Progressives had shot up year after year, cultivated by assiduous civic gardeners and watered by increasing affluence and education. Each annual report registered rising membership. Churches and synagogues, as we shall shortly see, were packed, as more Americans worshipped together than only a few decades earlier, perhaps more than ever in American history. Already by the late 1950s, however, this burst of community involvement began to tail off. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, membership growth began to fall further behind population growth. On average, across all these organizations, membership rates began to plateau in 1957, peaked in the early 1960s, and began a period of sustained decline by 1969.

Not all the social engagement of religion in the Progressive Era was focused on what we would today term “progressive” causes. The most important conservative example was the temperance movement, which reached its highwater mark with passage of the Prohibition amendment to the Constitution in 1919. This movement divided Americans along religious lines, especially “dry” Protestants from “wet” Catholics, and also illustrated how even conservative religion in this era pointed outward to community reform, not merely inward to individual salvation.

The anxieties of World War II heightened American religiosity—no atheists in foxholes, it was said. Exactly like the economic and political trends we examined in the previous two chapters, however, the invigorated religious observance did not fade after the war, but accelerated.61 Postwar affluence and the onset of the Cold War against “godless communism” encouraged a paradoxical mixture of material optimism and respect for traditional values, including both patriotism and religion. The boom in churchgoing was fueled by men and women who had survived the Great Depression as teenagers and World War II as grunts and girlfriends, and were now ready at last to settle into a normal life, with a steady job, a new house and car, and a growing family. Then, as now, getting married, settling down, and raising children were associated with more regular churchgoing.

The growth of union membership in the first Gilded Age required the development of a shared sense of identity and shared interests to create working-class solidarity. Unionism in the nineteenth century had encountered widespread worker resistance embedded in the traditional ideal of the individual craftsman reluctant to sacrifice his independence and his status as a skilled worker on behalf of workers on the far side of historic occupational and ethnic or racial cleavages. Why should a Polish locomotive engineer put his livelihood at risk to benefit a black or Chinese gandy dancer merely because they both happened to work for the same large corporation?

In the 1970s and 1980s popular magazines began publishing articles about the importance of privacy, self-development, individual growth, and identity apart from marriage. Cherlin explains: A new style of marriage was emerging in which both the wife and the husband were expected to develop a separate sense of self.… They asked themselves questions such as: Am I getting the personal satisfaction I want from my marriage? and Am I growing as a person? The result was a transition from the companionate marriage to what we might call the individualized marriage.111 This cultural shift was obviously related to the simultaneous women’s movement (which we discuss in more detail in Chapter 7), but it was not limited to the gender balance within marriage; marriage itself was becoming more optional and more fragile. The cultural shift toward individualized marriage contributed to a sharp rise in divorce and cohabitation.

Politically, as well as culturally, seen from the perspective of the twentieth century as a whole, the New Deal was a continuation of the Progressive Era, interrupted only temporarily by the pause in the 1920s. The Great Depression and revival of concern for the community, not merely the isolated individual, had the effect once again of shifting the Overton window, making massive government intervention more plausible and laissez-faire policies less credible.

Meanwhile, in the very same years an equal and opposite evolution was more slowly getting under way at the far-left end of the spectrum, as the Old Left was replaced by the New Left, similarly eager to replace institutionalized solidarity with individual liberation. While the New Right wanted to remove the fetters from capitalist entrepreneurs, the New Left wanted to free people from oppressive community bonds. Francis Fukuyama in The Great Disruption (1999) emphasized that both Left and Right have taken freeing people from constraints as their central goal. For the Left, constraints are on lifestyles; for the Right, constraints are on money.

The benefits of this wide-angle, time-lapse approach are familiar in natural science. Early astronomy began studying the universe in a single band of radiation—visible light—at one point in time, viewing the night sky through a telescope. Later astronomers began to study the sky over longer periods of time, and to measure the entire electromagnetic spectrum, creating infrared astronomy, X-ray astronomy, and so on. Recently, multispectral astronomy has emerged, allowing images from separate spectra to be integrated and observed over longer periods of time. For example, our contemporary understanding of supernovae is based on multispectral images collected over time.

Almost all historians agree that a major historical turning point took place between roughly 1968 and 1974—a “revolution,” a “renaissance,” a “fracture,” a “shock wave,” a point after which “everything changed,” creating a “new America.”36 Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin, for example, argue that the Sixties ushered in a moment of historical rupture on the scale of the American Civil War, dividing the twentieth century into a pre- and post-Sixties world, a change from which “there is no going back, any more than the lost world of the antebellum South could have been restored after 1865.”

Most historians also agree on an important distinction between the first half of the 1960s and the second half—“years of hope” and “days of rage,” as Todd Gitlin famously put it.38 Widely shared prosperity, the Civil Rights movement (culminating in the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act), and progress toward equality, democracy, and tolerance (symbolized by the Great Society of 1964–1965 and the immigration reform of 1965) represented the “years of hope.” By contrast, the Vietnam war protests (1966–1970), urban unrest (1965–1969), the rise of the Black Panthers (1966–1968), the “law and order” counterattack (1968–1972), the convulsions of 1968, and the stagflation and rancorous gas lines of the 1970s represented “days of rage.”

“Progressives” ultimately put in place a stunningly diverse and sweeping set of reforms and innovations—many of which form the basis of American society as we know it today. The secret ballot; the direct primary system; the popular election of senators; the initiative, referendum, and recall; women’s suffrage; new forms of municipal administration; the federal income tax; the Federal Reserve System; protective labor laws; the minimum wage; antitrust statutes; protected public lands and resources; food and drug regulation; sanitation infrastructure; public utilities; a vast proliferation of civic and voluntary societies; new advocacy organizations such as labor unions, the ACLU, and the NAACP; the widespread provision of free public high schools; and even the spread of public parks, libraries, and

Harris soon began talking with friends and business associates about the idea of forming an organization for local professionals. In 1905, he and three other men gathered at an office in downtown Chicago for the first meeting of a new club called Rotary—the name came from the group’s early practice of rotating meetings between members’ offices. The initial vision for the club was simply to provide “fellowship and friendship” for urban businessmen, and they eventually developed a tradition of noon “luncheon meetings” to accommodate professionals’ routines.

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.

Perhaps the clearest example of this is the high school movement, which we have pointed to in previous chapters. Universal, free public high schools were an almost entirely local innovation, created in small towns in the early decades of the twentieth century, although academics in places like Harvard had bruited about the idea in the late nineteenth century. At that time, students who wanted to extend their education past “common school” usually had to pay for private instruction, though some cities had selective secondary schools such as Boston Latin, open only to unusually talented youngsters. But recognizing the growing demand for more educated workers in a rapidly changing economy, a handful of communities in the Midwest began rallying citizens to band together and provide free secondary school for all. In towns that successfully raised taxes to pay for them, public high schools were built and, given the growing economic return on education, the idea spread across the country like wildfire—or in a more contemporary metaphor, went viral. Hence, one of the most powerful forces behind America’s Great Convergence, as well as our ability to out-compete other nations in a globalizing economy during the upswing, was the vastly expanded education of our workforce—something that, amazingly, came almost entirely from the bottom up.

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. And this movement has so far been led not by far-left political operatives, as many have supposed, but by everyday people working on problems central to their own lives23 and—in a particularly striking echo of our nation’s last upswing—primarily middle-class, middle-aged, college-educated women.

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.

Of course, any slate of reforms consequential enough to create a contemporary upswing in America would require a significant change of course that may seem radical to some—just as it did a century ago. As we pointed out in Chapter 3, the issues that rose to the national agenda during the Progressive Era bear a striking resemblance to those being debated today: universal health insurance; safety nets for the elderly, the jobless, and the disabled; progressive income and estate taxation; environmental regulation; labor reform; curtailing the overreach of big business monopolies; gender equality; and campaign finance reform. Progressives were pragmatic but nonetheless uncompromising in pursuit of programs and policies that deeply and fundamentally reshaped America and set the stage for the upswing.

Many American political thinkers have argued that these two values are inherently in competition with one another—pitting social solidarity, equality, shared interests, shared destiny, mutual obligations, and shared values against individual rights, diversity, freedom, “rugged” individualism, and live-and-let-live tolerance. A simplistic embrace of an I/we dualism implies a zero-sum trade-off between communitarian equality and individualistic freedom. While we acknowledge this timeless tension, we do not believe that we must choose one side or the other, or that all virtue lies at one pole. 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.