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

by Robert D. Putnam

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.