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

by Robert D. Putnam

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.