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

by Robert D. Putnam

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. Membership rates had more than doubled between the early 1940s and the early 1960s, but by 2000 the results of that massive postwar boom in joining had been entirely erased. The decline would continue uninterrupted through the first two decades of the twenty-first century, and by 2016 more than a century’s worth of civic creativity had vanished. These averages conceal some