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

by Robert D. Putnam

All four phenomena described above are apparent: The steady century-long trend toward liberalization of attitudes about gender, the ever-so-slightly increased pace of that liberalization among Americans who came of age during the 1960s, the gradual slowing of the pace of that liberalization after 1970, as post-Boomer cohorts entered adulthood, and the slight but surprising reversal of this trend in recent years.73 Figure 7.13 suggests that the bulk of progress in Americans’ support for gender equality over the last 100 years occurred among Americans socialized before 1970. In effect, the women’s movement seems to have lit a match to what was already well-cured kindling.

Hirschman pointed out that for such a pendular pattern to exist, something outside the private interest/public action framework—some “exogenous variable”—must cause these shifts in involvement. The answer he found was disappointment—namely, that people become disenchanted by one mode of thinking and shift to the other. At some point, the growing imbalance between the vices of one mind-set and the virtues of the other reaches a tipping point, as when adding grains of sand to a balance. The pendular reversal can be seen as backlash to excesses of the previous period.

Neither Millennials nor Twitter and Facebook can possibly be blamed for the I-we-I curve. The longer time frame of our study gives those alleged culprits an ironclad alibi. The declines of the last half century predate the Millennial generation and the internet by decades. But if youth and social networking are not the problem, they may well be part of the solution.

institutions of civil society, “crowded out” private generosity, and sapped individual initiative. This is a common explanation among conservative commentators, who attribute the reversal from we to I in the 1960s to the welfare state.16 Empirical evidence for “crowding out” is modest, for across states in the US and across countries in the world, the correlation between big government and social solidarity appears to be, if anything, faintly positive, not negative.17 However,

the size of government lagged behind the I-we-I curve by several decades. Federal government spending and the number of employees rose steadily in tandem with the I-we-I curve from 1900 to 1970 and kept rising until they leveled off after the 1980s. That

fact, the empirical evidence strongly suggests that government size is a consequence of the I-we-I curve, not a cause. The best evidence is that the size of government responded to changes in Americans’ sense that we are all in this together, and that growth of government did not cause increased individualism.

shocking rejection of the status quo struck deep at cultural consensus, and left an entire generation of adults feeling that “nothing less than the soul of America was at stake,”58 as the groundwork was laid for the “culture wars” of the next half century.

thoughtful retrospective on mid-century America makes clear its deficiencies: the shortcomings of a society that undervalued individuality and diversity and gave woefully insufficient attention to racial and gender justice. Nonetheless, the empirical evidence we have gathered in this book also makes clear that we have paid a high price for the Sixties’ pivot—the indefensible economic inequality of the second Gilded Age, the political polarization that is enfeebling and endangering our democracy, the social fragmentation and isolation that ignore the basic human need for fellowship, and most fundamentally, the self-centeredness that itself makes it so difficult to achieve the unity of purpose required to change our national course.

Though their initial goals were not always clear or coherent, Progressives had two things in common—a compelling desire to repudiate the downward drift of our nation, and a galvanizing belief in the power of ordinary citizens to do so.

Johnson worked personally to provide relief to the victims but became disillusioned by the inadequacy of charitable responses to problems caused by wider systemic failures. “If we were wise enough to seek and find the causes that call for charity there would be some hope for us,” he wrote, reflecting on the devastation at Johnstown.

To a remarkable degree, the federal policies and programs for which Progressive standard-bearers such as Teddy Roosevelt were famous were the result of local innovations bubbling up from below.

As all of these stories illustrate, the Progressive movement was, first and foremost, a moral awakening. Facilitated by the muckrakers’ revelations about a society, economy, and government run amok—and urged on by the Social Gospelers’ denunciation of social Darwinism and laissez-faire economics—Americans from all walks of life began to repudiate the self-centered, hyper-individualist creed of the Gilded Age.

The legacy of the Progressives points to the power of moral messaging, but also challenges us to push beyond the idea that silencing or expelling certain elements of our society, punishing offenders, or replacing one faction’s dominance with another’s, will restore the moral and cultural health of our nation. We must undertake a reevaluation of our shared values—asking ourselves what personal privileges and rights we might be willing to lay aside in service of the common good, and what role we will play in the shared project of shaping our nation’s future.

Another distinct feature of the Progressives’ story was the translation of outrage and moral awakening into active citizenship.

By the mid-1870s, “Americans had entered a period of radical economic and political instability they were ill-prepared to understand,” wrote historian Richard White.18 To a great degree, Progressive Era innovations were a response to this reality—seeking to reclaim individuals’ agency and reinvigorate democratic citizenship as the only reliable antidotes to overwhelming anxiety.

But to a surprising degree they did not have a national blueprint in mind at the start. In stark contrast to the prescriptive ideology of socialism, which was also gaining adherents at the turn of the last century, Progressive reformers were instead intensely pragmatic, using the new methods of social science to test the merits of different solutions. Such methods, Walter Lippmann had argued, would be the key to mastery. Indeed, true innovation requires openness to experimentation that is not premised upon ideological beliefs.

Thus, a critical reading of the moment when we last turned the corner from “I” to “we” offers lessons about how we can put our nation on an upward course again. But it also cautions us that doing so without fidelity to individual liberty, and an unwavering commitment to equality and inclusion, will ultimately compromise the very best of our efforts.

A simplistic embrace of an I/we dualism implies a zero-sum trade-off between communitarian equality and individualistic freedom. While we acknowledge this timeless tension, we do not believe that we must choose one side or the other, or that all virtue lies at one pole.

Alexis de Tocqueville that individualism “rightly understood” is perfectly compatible with community and equality.32

Therefore, the question we face today is not whether we can or should turn back the tide of history, but whether we can resurrect the earlier communitarian virtues in a way that does not reverse the progress we’ve made in terms of individual liberties. Both values are American, and we require a balance and integration of both. This