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

by Robert D. Putnam

Apart from TR, as historian James Patterson pointed out, “Nixon was easily the most liberal Republican President in the twentieth century.”39 He kept Great Society programs more or less intact; raised social spending; sponsored the Environmental Protection Agency, the Clean Air Act, the Occupational Safety and Health Act, and the National Endowment for Arts and for the Humanities; signed Title IX, which ended sex discrimination in education; opined that “I am now a Keynesian in economics”;40 and even proposed a national health insurance system and a guaranteed annual income, though without following through on either proposal.

*

“Government is not the solution to our problem,” Ronald Reagan argued in his 1981 inaugural address; “government is the problem.”

party polarization and tribalization has reached an intensity unseen since the Civil War with no end in sight.

The correlation between a voter’s party identification (and vote) and his or her parents’ party identification steadily declined between 1958 and the late 1960s74 (meaning less tribalism), but then rose sharply between the late 1960s and 2015 (indicating more tribalism).

In the widely discussed book The Big Sort, published in 2008, political observers Bill Bishop and Robert Cushing argued that Americans are increasingly sorting themselves into politically homogenous and geographically segregated enclaves, with growing cultural and lifestyle differences between the two party-tribes as both cause and consequence of this sorting on the basis of partisan identity.

The Pew Research Center found that in 2016, 75 percent of Americans reported no political disagreements within their own circle of friends, up from about 65 percent as recently as 2000.

This partisan prejudice shows up both in online dating and in actual marriages, as people are increasingly choosing their partners on the basis of political affiliation, even more than on the basis of education or religious orientation.90 Over the last half century marriage across racial and religious lines has become much more common than either used to be,91 whereas marriage across party lines has become much less common.92 This increasing agreement between husband and wife about politics in turn strengthens the inheritance of party identity by the next generation, since we know that children are more likely to inherit party identity when both parents agree politically. In this very intimate way, over the last half century partisanship has gradually replaced religion as the main basis of “tribal” affiliation in America.

The balance of opinion among experts currently is that in this elite-mass interaction the primary impetus is top-down. Elites send polarizing messages to the electorate in an effort to win support with partisan appeals. And often voters change their views on issues as a result of these messages from their own party leaders.

Like Trump not conceding the election he lost

This top-down causality is consistent with the fact that mass polarization has tended to lag elite polarization by a decade or two.

Scholars and pundits have offered a wide variety of other possible causes of the polarization of the last half century, but much less attention has been given to the long trend toward depolarization in the first half of the twentieth century, and many of the proffered explanations fit poorly with the actual history of party politics in that period. In fact, even for the later period of increasing polarization after 1970, evidence in support of many putative causal factors is weak.

with such “insecure majorities,” exacerbating gridlock.108 It is no accident that most substantial legislative reform programs of the last 125 years—the Progressive Era reforms, the New Deal, the Great Society, and even the Reagan Revolution—had substantial support from both sides of the aisle.

Drawing on their best-seller How Democracies Die, political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt have expressed this concern most cogently: FIGURE 3.10: POLITICAL EFFICACY VS. POLITICAL CYNICISM, 1952–2016 Source: American National Election Studies; Harris Poll. Data LOESS smoothed: .15. When societies divide into partisan camps with profoundly different worldviews, and when those differences are viewed as existential and irreconcilable, political rivalry can devolve into partisan hatred. Parties come to view each other not as legitimate rivals, but as dangerous enemies. Losing ceases to be an accepted part of the political process and instead becomes a catastrophe.112

Alexis de Tocqueville has been the patron saint of American communitarians since his voyage to our land in the 1830s. But individualism, he also argued, was an inevitable consequence of equality in America. Thus recognizing the competing claims of community and the individual, Tocqueville described how Americans sought a synthesis of the two in a chapter he entitled “How the Americans combat individualism by the principle of self-interest rightly understood.”

“By joining a lodge, an initiate adopted, at least implicitly, a set of values. Societies dedicated themselves to the advancement of mutualism, self-reliance, business training, thrift, leadership skills, self-government, self-control, and good moral character.”

Interestingly, some women’s groups even bridged profound class gaps. For example, young immigrant women struggling to create a trade union in the garment industry of the Lower East Side of Manhattan received powerful political and financial support from the Women’s Trade Union League, actively sustained by Progressive socialites from the Upper East Side like Anne Morgan, daughter of J. P. Morgan, the most powerful capitalist in the world.

Progressive Era reformers made youth development a special focus of their organizational energies. In an extraordinary burst of creativity, in less than a decade (1901–1910) most of the nationwide youth organizations that were to dominate the twentieth century were founded—the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, Campfire Girls, the 4-H, Boys Clubs and Girls Clubs, Big Brothers and Big Sisters. In a stroke of marketing genius, the new organizations combined enduring social values—“A Scout is trustworthy, helpful, friendly, courteous…”—with the pure fun of camping, sports, and play.

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.

the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s inadvertently helped to trigger a reorganization of national civic life, in which professionally managed associations and institutions proliferated while cross-class membership associations lost ground.

To summarize: Organizational records suggest that for the first two thirds of the twentieth century Americans’ involvement in civic associations of all sorts rose steadily, stalled only temporarily by the Great Depression. In the last third of the century, by contrast, only mailing list membership continued to expand, with the creation of an entirely new species of association whose members never actually meet. We could surely find individual exceptions—specific organizations that successfully sailed against the prevailing winds and tides—but the broad picture is one of declining involvement in community organizations.

In short, for nearly half a century now Americans have been dropping out of organized community life in droves, exactly the opposite of what was happening a century ago.

congregations, Bible study groups, prayer circles, and so forth—and roughly half of all philanthropy and volunteering is carried out in a religious context. For many Americans religion is less a matter of theological commitment than a rich source of community.

Rigorous statistical analysis suggests (surprisingly, perhaps, to secular Americans) that the link between religious involvement and civic do-gooding is not spurious, but probably causal. In short, trends in religious engagement are key indicators of trends in social connection more generally.

only 43 percent of the total population claimed any church affiliation in 1910,

The phrase “What would Jesus do?” (paradoxically now common among conservative Christians) was popularized in a best-selling 1899 novel by Charles Sheldon, a Congregational minister in Topeka, Kansas, whose theology was shaped by a commitment to Christian Socialism.

With his 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, Pope Leo XIII “rejected laissez-faire theories of economic liberalism, and laid the central planks of modern Catholic social teaching, based on the rights to a just wage and to form unions, the call for a more equitable distribution of wealth and the duty of the state to ensure social justice in the economy.”

“People wanted a religious experience that made them feel at home. Inhabiting the sacred space of a church or synagogue gave them a sense of membership in a community.”68

In 1957, 69 percent of Americans told Gallup pollsters that “religion is increasing its influence on American life.” Within barely a decade, those expectations would be shattered.

Recall that as late as 1957 fully 69 percent of Americans had observed that “the influence of religion in America is growing.” Barely five years later that number had fallen to 45 percent, and it continued to fall to 33 percent in 1965, 23 percent in 1967, and 18 percent in 1968, finally bottoming out at 14 percent in 1970.

Economic historians Thomas C. Cochran and William Miller, writing in the 1940s, emphasized that unions were an important part of their members’ social lives, not merely a means to gain material improvements. Collective action by labor had roots far more complex than simple questions of wages and hours.… Labor unions were but a part of the mass movement into clubs, lodges and fraternal orders.

and a myriad of opportunities for informal social connections.97 At their peak in the 1960s roughly one third of all American adults belonged to a union family, a figure that would fall to 13 percent by 2018.

As the twentieth century opened, family formation in America was far from universal and surprisingly late. Relative to patterns earlier or later, many young adults in the Gilded Age lived with their parents well into their twenties and married only later in life—if at all, for many people remained lifelong “bachelors” and “spinsters,” unmarried and childless. When marriage did occur, it was unlikely to cross class lines. To be sure, most Americans in that age (as in all ages) eventually married and had children. But as in the case of Gilded Age religion, a surprising number of Americans were “nones,” when it came to having a nuclear family of their own.

102 In short, in the two “I” periods at the beginning of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, fewer people married and had kids, and those who did, married later and had kids later, whereas in the mid-century “we” period, for virtually all Americans that “we” began with their nuclear family.

Representing hundreds of millions of momentous personal decisions by ordinary Americans, it is remarkable that family formation over this 125-year period followed exactly the same rhythms as civic and religious and union engagement.

Conceptions of the family were about to take a sharp turn in an individualist direction, almost in synchrony with the comparable turn toward a more individualist perspective on religion.110 “Love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage,” sang Dinah Shore and Frank Sinatra in 1955. “All you need is love,” retorted the Beatles twelve years later.

in 1950 in the midst of the postwar Baby Boom, the median age of a mother at her first birth was less than 21, while by 2016, after six decades of steady rise, it was nearly 27, and for female college graduates more than 30.

philosopher Michael Taylor has pointed out, each individual act in a system of reciprocity is usually characterized by a combination of what one might call short-term altruism and long-term self-interest:

*

By the 2010s, social trust in America had collapsed to 33 percent. In round numbers, in the early 1960s nearly two thirds of Americans trusted other people, but two decades into the twenty-first century two thirds of Americans did not.

At the 1893 World’s Fair celebrating industrial change, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner reflected on whether American individualism, which had been fostered by the frontier then just closing, would be undermined by the emerging urban, industrial society.9 Recent research has confirmed that frontier life was indeed associated with a culture of bootstrap self-reliance and hostility to economic redistribution, an imprint still visible a century later.10 In this way, the frontier had encouraged American individualism generally, just as Turner had speculated, and its closing might portend a turn away from it. As we have said, the frontier was also symbolized by communitarian wagon trains and barn raisings, but both Turner and the recent research suggest that the more enduring legacy of the frontier was individualism.

*

To wealthy residents of Manhattan’s Upper East Side, disturbed by muckraker Jacob Riis’s appalling photographs of destitute slum-dwellers of the Lower East Side in How the Other Half Lives (1890), social Darwinism gave reassurance that they deserved their wealth.

Using the website http://books.google.com/ngrams, it is possible to display the relative frequency of any word or group of words over long periods of time and thus to estimate trends in the cultural salience of words or concepts. We will frequently draw on Ngram evidence based on all books published in America from roughly 1880 (when our period of interest begins) to 2008 (the last year for which the archive is available).18 Scholars who have pioneered the use of Ngrams for historical studies of culture term the field “culturomics.”19 They argue that Ngrams provide a new and more rigorous way of exploring and quantifying cultural change, so that claims about culture become more than merely subjective.20

In literature, social conscience and social realism prevailed, culminating in John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath (1939). In cinema these were the years of Frank Capra’s celebration of community spirit in films like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). As Capra said, “My films must let every man, woman, and child know that… peace and salvation will become a reality only when they all learn to love each other.”

The foremost anthem for mid-century America was the monumental “Fanfare for the Common Man” penned in 1942 by composer Aaron Copland, and inspired in part by a speech made earlier that year by Vice President Henry A. Wallace, in which Wallace proclaimed the dawning of the “Century of the Common Man.” As Figure 5.3 shows, the term “common man” had appeared first in American literature in the Progressive Era, rose steadily in the first half of the century (except for the familiar pause in the 1920s), peaked in 1945, and then faded in cultural salience throughout the rest of the century, its waning accelerating after the Sixties. By 1942 “common man” had become a powerful cultural symbol of national solidarity, social equality, and communitarianism that Wallace and Copland appropriated.

*

In the arts, too, Norman Rockwell’s middlebrow paintings in The Saturday Evening Post both reflected and reinforced the mid-century moral and cultural consensus.

The dark side of communitarianism became readily visible in Senator Joseph McCarthy’s attacks on “subversives” in the early 1950s. Though the more tolerant Ike despised McCarthy and McCarthyism, even he sought to exclude “deviants” from government service.45 The Red Scare (and the contemporaneous Lavender Scare aimed at homosexuals) gradually waned, but concern that the balance had shifted too far toward “conformity” and community standards began to spread, especially among intellectuals.

In the field of literature, the 1950s brought Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger, Lord of the Flies by William Golding, the beatniks inspired by Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, and other books that reflected rebellion against the mid-century insistence on conformity. In cinema, this trend was embodied in James Dean, the lead actor in the hit movie of 1955, Rebel Without a Cause,

Most interpretations of the 1960s are framed in terms of the political struggle between the Left and the Right, a struggle in which the initial victories of the Left (the Great Society and the Civil Rights revolution) triggered a conservative backlash, putting in power the Right, which has largely dominated American politics ever since. In Chapter 3 we acknowledged that narrative, but we also argued that the more durable and pervasive change was from communitarianism to individualism, a dimension that is conceptually and empirically distinct from the left-right spectrum.

“Identity” itself, unmodified by race, or gender, or politics, rapidly became an important theme in American culture after mid-century, as our trusty Ngram tool reveals with great clarity. The frequency of the word “identity” in American literature increased more than five-fold over the second half of the twentieth century, as Figure 5.8 shows. Identities, of course, can be collective—“we Democrats,” “we whites,” “we women”—but over much of this period “identity” referred as much to personal identity as to collective identity.

The most substantial quantitative evidence on this trend has been gathered by social psychologist Jean Twenge, under the rubric of The Narcissism Epidemic (coauthored with W. Keith Campbell, 2009) and Generation Me (2014). In one of her earliest studies, she cited the astonishing fact that in 1950, 12 percent of students agreed with the statement, “I am a very important person.” By 1990 that figure had risen to 80 percent!74 Twenge’s interest is not in the incidence of a clinically defined personality trait, but in broader social and cultural change: “the fight for the greater good of the 1960s” turning into “looking out for number one by the 1980s.”

**

one solid, century-long behavioral measure comes from a very simple choice that faces almost all of us at one time or another: What names do we give our newborns? Concentration of parental baby-naming choices on fewer names implies tighter social constraints on appropriate baby names, whereas a wider dispersion of parents’ choices reflects a desire to assert individuality.

CONVENTIONALITY (VS. INDIVIDUALISM) IN BABY NAMES, 1890–2017

Check out how the first gerneartion of American born were named from their parents country of origin butthey named their kids to fit into the U.S. and ignore their past