Jill Norgren Reviews The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again ... An intriguing book about change and turning points
The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can DO It Again
By Robert D. Putnam with Shaylyn Romney Garrett
Published by Simon & Schuster, 2020, 463 pgs.
Reviewed By Jill Norgren
Writing from a peninsula in Maine history professor Heather Cox Richardson gathered a readership of “paralyzing” numbers, posting essays on Substack about the present day seen through the lens of American history and values. Richardson, fifty-eight, told The New York Times, “I’m an older woman and I’m speaking to other women about being empowered.” In this year of pandemic, using the Internet, she has created a sizeable community.
From San Francisco Steve Huffman, the head of Reddit, the social news discussion website, also builds community. In an interview Huffman said that his company believes in and supports hundreds of thousands of virtual communities — communities “that provide a sense of belonging and connection as real as the ones we make offline.”
Community. What is it, how is it formed and sustained? From the perspective of politics, how do the organized ways that people participate in a society’s civic life sustain or diminish democratic institutions? Is the notion of common cause just political rhetoric? How does a society build and reinforce “the character of its members through the community’s moral voice” if society speaks with several — not one — authentic moral voices? Hillary Clinton asserts that it takes a village to raise a child, but what happens when the parents support gun control and village members all belong to the NRA?
In 2000, Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam sobered readers of his book Bowling Alone with a deft analysis of 20th century social change. The United States, he wrote, had become a society of citizens disconnected from one another as well as important social structures such as the PTA, church, unions, and political parties. We were, as in the title of his now classic book, bowling alone. Putnam’s pronouncement set off a firestorm of argument. Many Americans believed he had identified a real and terrifying turn of events, an undeniable implosion of community and national well-being.
The book has readers of every political stripe. Its conclusions resonated: Only recently former President Barack Obama told The New York Times that “the normative glue that holds us together … has frayed … atomization and loneliness and the loss of community have made our democracy vulnerable.” Yet others have insisted that the bonds of civic culture are strong, consisting both of new ones including multi-faceted environmental and social justice movements and traditional connections of our everyday life [Key Club, Nextdoor, book groups, cycling clubs rather than bowling leagues, kids’ soccer, school boards, consciousness raising, local food and drink hangouts, gyms, Change.org, voter registration drives … a list without end].
Months before the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the United States Capitol, Putnam published a new, provocative study of the state of U.S. civic life. Written with Shaylyn Romney Garret, The Upswing: How American Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again, uses data from a long sweep of American history to demonstrate how we have gone from “an individualistic ‘I’ society to a more communitarian ‘we’ society and then back again.” We are presently in an “I” era but they argue that the lessons of history, specifically the Progressive era of the early twentieth century, suggest the United States could regain its “we” identity and become a more egalitarian, more cooperative, and more generous society.
Putnam and Garrett’s first “I” moment is the nineteenth century Gilded Age: ambition, excess, the building of American capitalist institutions created a culture and moral stance that glorified the individual. Over several decades in the late nineteenth and twentieth century, however, reform groups, union people, and third parties insisted that economic inequalities, lack of rights for women and children, and racial injustice need not define the United States. The Progressive era of the early twentieth century gave the United States a foundation of laws (tax and other), community activism (including racial and gender), church attendance, and union membership upon which was built, the authors argue, a more egalitarian, cooperative, and inclusive “we” society.
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