BY PAUL TUNS
The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do it Again by Robert D. Putnam (Simon & Schuster, $44, 465 pages)
Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community by Robert D. Putnam (Simon & Schuster, $27, 580 pages)
Twenty years ago, Harvard professor Robert Putnam made a splash with an essay and book, Bowling Alone, about the collapse of American community, evidenced by (among other things) the decline in bowling leagues: the American population was more interested in various individual pursuits than community ones, and he famously pointed out that more people went bowling in small groups recreationally than joined bowling leagues. Putnam has an eye for the telling data point, noting surveys that found in the 1970s, the average American hosted company 15 times a year, but by the 1990s, they were entertaining only eight times a year. Putnam was at the beginning of a cottage industry books about community fragmentation and societal decline.
It would have been useful to have an updating of Bowling Alone, and the new release has a new preface and afterward, but the bulk of what might have been an updated version comprises a new book, The Upswing. Putnam has compiled copious statistics to show that America experienced an “I-We-I” paradigm shift, beginning with a highly individualistic era in the Gilded Age in the latter part of the 19th century, before the Progressive Era of the late 1890s to mid-1910s restored a de Tocquevillean solidarity of strong community ties, that increases until the 1950s. Paradoxically (or perhaps not) after the civil rights movement of the 1960s, American community experienced fraying that elevated the individual at the cost of familial and associational life.
Like in Bowling Alone, Putnam presents a relentless array of statistics and the sheer volume of evidence for his narrative makes it is difficult to accuse the author of cherry-picking facts. To take just one example: in a brief section called pronouns – not what you would think it is about – Putnam notes studies of the uses of “I” and “we” in books that found, like all the trajectories illustrated in the many graphs throughout The Upswing, that “we” usage was higher in the first half of the 20th century, than in the second half and through to today. Putnam examines the rise and decline of everything from association membership to church attendance to marriage and family formation, all of which follow the same pattern.
Related to our cover story this month, Putnam shows that the number of never-married and late-marriages was high during the Gilded Age before falling around the turn of the century; the nuclear family became the norm in the first half of the 1900s before declining in practice over the past 50 years. Putnam observes that in the Gilded Age and ours, “fewer people married and had kids, and those who did, married later and had kids later.” But for the first 60 years of the 20th century, “for virtually all Americans that ‘we’ began with their nuclear family.”
While highly recommending Putnam’s books and as praiseworthy as his attempts to understand alternative explanations may be, there are some problems, most notably warning us to be wary of singular explanations while himself offering an overarching “I-we-I” paradigm. But for the most part, Putnam should be congratulated for documenting the fraying of society and the need to give greater consideration to the commonweal than our highly individualistic culture presently does.
