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

by Robert D. Putnam

With the Crash of 1929 the bacchanal among the 1 percent abruptly ended, even before Franklin Roosevelt took power in 1933 with his New Deal programs. Those programs, based in large part on innovations from the Progressive Era, unleashed the full force of the Great Convergence, as we shall shortly see. World War II required massive tax increases and further encouraged the sense that “we are all in this together,” and measures of economic equality jumped even higher, just as during World War I. That both world wars were associated with a rapid increase in equality seems to confirm the view of the nineteenth-century sociologist Émile Durkheim that shared wartime adversity fosters strong norms of solidarity and thus equality, as well as the more recent theory that war is “The Great Leveler.”

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