Good evening everyone:

I’d like to explore the renewed interest in a book called The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We can Do It Again (2020) by Robert Putnam. But to do that, we have to go back almost thirty years to Putnam’s seminal work: Bowling Alone. So, I wanted to do this note in two parts: let me use tonight to roll back the tape and then return tomorrow to The Upswing.

It is hard to have a conversation about the continued fraying – and decline – of social cohesion in this country without referencing Robert Putnam, who cascaded into public consciousness with his seminal article, and then book, Bowling Alone.

The article, “Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital.” first appeared in the magazine Journal of Democracy in 1995. Extrapolating his hypothesis from the power of choral societies and soccer leagues in Italy’s hill-towns in the post World War II period, Putnam pointed to scores of indicators demonstrating the weakening in the United States of the informal networks of mutual support that build community cohesion – social capital. The brilliant shorthand was that more and more Americans were “bowling alone.”

Putnam immediately came under all manner of attack from fellow academics. Some felt he was selectively measuring the wrong things. Others felt he wasn’t measuring enough things. Some felt that deriving an hypothesis from Tuscany was overly simplistic. Others were just vexed that an academic’s work had set popular culture on fire.

So, Putnam decided to do what no self-respecting professor would do: he invited fourteen of his harshest critics to spend five hours tearing into his methodology and conclusions. I unexpectedly received a call from him (I had gotten to know him when we spent two days touring Minneapolis – which he termed the social capital capital of America) asking if I would attend that meeting and track the conversation.

The meeting was as revelatory as it was agonizing. Bob has a temper, and there were multiple times when I thought it would get the better of him. But it didn’t. He listened with enormous intensity. And I tried to capture the conversation with a drawing.

The conversation pointed in the direction of a follow-up research project, which he termed the Saguaro Project (for the cactus that grow to forty feet tall with need for very little water). He would identify eight or nine broad topics of critique (changes in religious habits, the proliferation of new forms of social associations, the emerging power of technology, and the like), ask two of the nation’s leading experts on that topic to co-chair a working group, and set in motion a two-year process of unpacking and re-assembling everything there was to be known about the dynamics within those topic areas that pointed toward – or away from – this thesis. I drew that for him – one of my great sources of pride is that that drawing hung framed in his office for 20 years (he sent it to me when he retired a few years ago – it’s in my office if you are curious).

The process played out brilliantly, as each working group completed their assignments. Putnam took it all in – the affirming and the contradictory. In a massively complex and comprehensive feat, he incorporated all of that into the book, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. It’s methodology and its conclusions were air-tight. No more criticisms. It became canon.

I mention all of this because Putnam went on to publish two more books treating similar themes: Our Kids (2015), which describes how unattainable upward mobility is for most young people deprived of ample opportunities to build social capital; and The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We can Do It Again (2020), which documents how America moved from an individualistic – “I” – society in the early 20^th century to a more communitarian – “We” – society and then back again.

I’ll break there and continue tomorrow.

Rip

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