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

by Robert D. Putnam

The Boy and Girl Scouts, the Audubon Society, the Red Cross, the National Urban League, and Jack-and-Jill (for black middle-class kids) all illustrated the ubiquity and usefulness of the franchise form for rapid growth and diffusion. 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.