BOWLING ALONE

  BOWLING ALONE

  ALSO BY ROBERT D. PUTNAM

  Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy

  Double-Edged Diplomacy: International Bargaining and Domestic Politics (edited with Peter B. Evans and Harold K. Jacobson)

  Hanging Together: The Seven-Power Summits

  Bureaucrats and Politicians in Western Democracies

  The Comparative Study of Political Elites

  The Beliefs of Politicians: Ideology, Conflict, and Democracy in Britain and Italy

  BOWLING ALONE

  THE COLLAPSE AND REVIVAL OF AMERICAN COMMUNITY

  Robert D. Putnam

  SIMON & SCHUSTER

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  SIMON & SCHUSTER

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  Copyright © 2000 by Robert D. Putnam

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Designed by Edith Fowler

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Putnam, Robert D.

  Bowling alone: the collapse and revival of American community / Robert D. Putnam.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  1. United States—Social conditions—1945–2. Social change—United States—History— 20th century. I. Title.

  HN65.P878 2000

  306’0973—dc21 00-027278

  ISBN 0-684-83283-6

  ISBN 978-0-6848-3283-8

  eISBN 978-0-7432-1903-7

  The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge permission to reprint figure 95 from

  Civic Engagement in American Democracy,

  edited by Theda Skocpol and Morris P. Fiorina, The Brookings Institution Press, 1999.

  Reprinted with permission of The Brookings Institution.

  To Ruth Swank Putnam

  and to the memory of Frank L. Putnam,

  Louis Werner, and Zelda Wolock Werner,

  exemplars of the long civic generation

  Contents

  SECTION I: INTRODUCTION

  CHAPTER 1: Thinking about Social Change in America

  SECTION II: TRENDS IN CIVIC ENGAGEMENT AND SOCIAL CAPITAL

  CHAPTER 2: Political Participation

  CHAPTER 3: Civic Participation

  CHAPTER 4: Religious Participation

  CHAPTER 5: Connections in the Workplace

  CHAPTER 6: Informal Social Connections

  CHAPTER 7: Altruism, Volunteering, and Philanthropy

  CHAPTER 8: Reciprocity, Honesty, and Trust

  CHAPTER 9: Against the Tide? Small Groups, Social Movements, and the Net

  SECTION III: WHY?

  CHAPTER 10: Introduction

  CHAPTER 11: Pressures of Time and Money

  CHAPTER 12: Mobility and Sprawl

  CHAPTER 13: Technology and Mass Media

  CHAPTER 14: From Generation to Generation

  CHAPTER 15: What Killed Civic Engagement? Summing Up

  SECTION IV: SO WHAT?(with the assistance of Kristin A. Goss)

  CHAPTER 16: Introduction

  CHAPTER 17: Education and Children’s Welfare

  CHAPTER 18: Safe and Productive Neighborhoods

  CHAPTER 19: Economic Prosperity

  CHAPTER 20: Health and Happiness

  CHAPTER 21: Democracy

  CHAPTER 22: The Dark Side of Social Capital

  SECTION V: WHAT IS TO BE DONE?

  CHAPTER 23: Lessons of History: The Gilded Age and the Progressive Era

  CHAPTER 24: Toward an Agenda for Social Capitalists

  APPENDIX I: Measuring Social Change

  APPENDIX II: Sources for Figures and Tables

  APPENDIX III: The Rise and Fall of Civic and Professional Associations

  NOTES

  THE STORY BEHIND THIS BOOK

  INDEX

  * * *

  SECTION ONE

  Introduction

  * * *

  CHAPTER 1

  Thinking about Social Change in America

  NO ONE IS LEFT from the Glenn Valley, Pennsylvania, Bridge Club who can tell us precisely when or why the group broke up, even though its forty-odd members were still playing regularly as recently as 1990, just as they had done for more than half a century. The shock in the Little Rock, Arkansas, Sertoma club, however, is still painful: in the mid-1980s, nearly fifty people had attended the weekly luncheon to plan activities to help the hearing- and speech-impaired, but a decade later only seven regulars continued to show up.

  The Roanoke, Virginia, chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) had been an active force for civil rights since 1918, but during the 1990s membership withered from about 2,500 to a few hundred. By November 1998 even a heated contest for president drew only fifty-seven voting members. Black city councillor Carroll Swain observed ruefully, “Some people today are a wee bit complacent until something jumps up and bites them.” VFW Post 2378 in Berwyn, Illinois, a blue-collar suburb of Chicago, was long a bustling “home away from home” for local veterans and a kind of working-class country club for the neighborhood, hosting wedding receptions and class reunions. By 1999, however, membership had so dwindled that it was a struggle just to pay taxes on the yellow brick post hall. Although numerous veterans of Vietnam and the post-Vietnam military lived in the area, Tom Kissell, national membership director for the VFW, observed, “Kids today just aren’t joiners.”1

  The Charity League of Dallas had met every Friday morning for fifty-seven years to sew, knit, and visit, but on April 30, 1999, they held their last meeting; the average age of the group had risen to eighty, the last new member had joined two years earlier, and president Pat Dilbeck said ruefully, “I feel like this is a sinking ship.” Precisely three days later and 1,200 miles to the northeast, the Vassar alumnae of Washington, D.C., closed down their fifty-first— and last—annual book sale. Even though they aimed to sell more than one hundred thousand books to benefit college scholarships in the 1999 event, co-chair Alix Myerson explained, the volunteers who ran the program “are in their sixties, seventies, and eighties. They’re dying, and they’re not replaceable.” Meanwhile, as Tewksbury Memorial High School (TMHS), just north of Boston, opened in the fall of 1999, forty brand-new royal blue uniforms newly purchased for the marching band remained in storage, since only four students signed up to play. Roger Whittlesey, TMHS band director, recalled that twenty years earlier the band numbered more than eighty, but participation had waned ever since.2 Somehow in the last several decades of the twentieth century all these community groups and tens of thousands like them across America began to fade.

  It wasn’t so much that old members dropped out—at least not any more rapidly than age and the accidents of life had always meant. But community organizations were no longer continuously revitalized, as they had been in the past, by freshets of new members. Organizational leaders were flummoxed. For years they assumed that their problem must have local roots or at least that it was peculiar to their organization, so they commissioned dozens of studies to recommend reforms.3 The slowdown was puzzling because for as long as anyone could remember, membership rolls and activity lists had lengthened steadily.

  In the 1960s, in fact, community groups across America had seemed to stand on the threshold of a new era of expanded involvement. Except for the civic drought induced by the Great Depression, their activity had shot up year after
year, cultivated by assiduous civic gardeners and watered by increasing affluence and education. Each annual report registered rising membership. Churches and synagogues were packed, as more Americans worshiped together than only a few decades earlier, perhaps more than ever in American history.

  Moreover, Americans seemed to have time on their hands. A 1958 study under the auspices of the newly inaugurated Center for the Study of Leisure at the University of Chicago fretted that “the most dangerous threat hanging over American society is the threat of leisure,” a startling claim in the decade in which the Soviets got the bomb.4Life magazine echoed the warning about the new challenge of free time: “Americans now face a glut of leisure,” ran a headline in February 1964. “The task ahead: how to take life easy.”

  As a matter of fact, mankind now possesses for the first time the tools and knowledge to create whatever kind of world he wants…. Despite our Protestant ethic, there are many signs that the message is beginning to get through to some people…. Not only are Americans flocking into bowling leagues and garden clubs, they are satisfying their gregarious urges in countless neighborhood committees to improve the local roads and garbage collections and to hound their public servants into doing what the name implies.5

  The civic-minded World War II generation was, as its own John F. Kennedy proclaimed at his inauguration, picking up the torch of leadership, not only in the nation’s highest office, but in cities and towns across the land. Summarizing dozens of studies, political scientist Robert E. Lane wrote in 1959 that “the ratio of political activists to the general population, and even the ratio of male activists to the male population, has generally increased over the past fifty years.” As the 1960s ended, sociologists Daniel Bell and Virginia Held reported that “there is more participation than ever before in America …and more opportunity for the active interested person to express his personal and political concerns.”6 Even the simplest political act, voting, was becoming ever more common. From 1920, when women got the vote, through 1960, turnout in presidential elections had risen at the rate of 1.6 percent every four years, so on a simple straight-line projection it seemed reasonable, as a leading political scientist later observed, to expect turnout to be nearly 70 percent and rising on the nation’s two hundredth birthday in 1976.7

  By 1965 disrespect for public life, so endemic in our history, seemed to be waning. Gallup pollsters discovered that the number of Americans who would like to see their children “go into politics as a life’s work” had nearly doubled over little more than a decade. Although this gauge of esteem for politics stood at only 36 percent, it had never before been recorded so high, nor has it since. More strikingly, Americans felt increased confidence in their neighbors. The proportion that agreed that “most people can be trusted,” for example, rose from an already high 66 percent during and after World War II to a peak of 77 percent in 1964.8

  The fifties and sixties were hardly a “golden age,” especially for those Americans who were marginalized because of their race or gender or social class or sexual orientation. Segregation, by race legally and by gender socially, was the norm, and intolerance, though declining, was still disturbingly high. Environmental degradation had only just been exposed by Rachel Carson, and Betty Friedan had not yet deconstructed the feminine mystique. Grinding rural poverty had still to be discovered by the national media. Infant mortality, a standard measure of public health, stood at twenty-six per one thousand births—forty-four per one thousand for black infants—in 1960, nearly four times worse than those indexes would be at the end of the century. America in Life was white, straight, Christian, comfortable, and (in the public square, at least) male.9 Social reformers had their work cut out for them. However, engagement in community affairs and the sense of shared identity and reciprocity had never been greater in modern America, so the prospects for broad-based civic mobilization to address our national failings seemed bright.

  The signs of burgeoning civic vitality were also favorable among the younger generation, as the first of the baby boomers approached college. Dozens of studies confirmed that education was by far the best predictor of engagement in civic life, and universities were in the midst of the most far-reaching expansion in American history. Education seemed the key to both greater tolerance and greater social involvement. Simultaneously shamed and inspired by the quickening struggle for civil rights launched by young African Americans in the South, white colleges in the North began to awaken from the silence of the fifties. Describing the induction of this new generation into the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, sociologist Doug McAdam emphasizes their self-assurance:

  We were a “can do” people, who accomplished whatever we set out to do. We had licked the Depression, turned the tide in World War II, and rebuilt Europe after the war…. Freedom Summer was an audacious undertaking consistent with the exaggerated sense of importance and potency shared by the privileged members of America’s postwar generation.10

  The baby boom meant that America’s population was unusually young, whereas civic involvement generally doesn’t bloom until middle age. In the short run, therefore, our youthful demography actually tended to dampen the ebullience of civil society. But that very bulge at the bottom of the nation’s demographic pyramid boded well for the future of community organizations, for they could look forward to swelling membership rolls in the 1980s, when the boomers would reach the peak “joining” years of the life cycle. And in the meantime, the bull session buzz about “participatory democracy” and “all power to the people” seemed to augur ever more widespread engagement in community affairs. One of America’s most acute social observers prophesied in 1968, “Participatory democracy has all along been the political style (if not the slogan) of the American middle and upper class. It will become a more widespread style as more persons enter into those classes.”11 Never in our history had the future of civic life looked brighter.

  WHAT HAPPENED NEXT to civic and social life in American communities is the subject of this book. In recent years social scientists have framed concerns about the changing character of American society in terms of the concept of “social capital.” By analogy with notions of physical capital and human capital—tools and training that enhance individual productivity—the core idea of social capital theory is that social networks have value. Just as a screwdriver (physical capital) or a college education (human capital) can increase productivity (both individual and collective), so too social contacts affect the productivity of individuals and groups.

  Whereas physical capital refers to physical objects and human capital refers to properties of individuals, social capital refers to connections among individuals—social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them. In that sense social capital is closely related to what some have called “civic virtue.” The difference is that “social capital” calls attention to the fact that civic virtue is most powerful when embedded in a dense network of reciprocal social relations. A society of many virtuous but isolated individuals is not necessarily rich in social capital.

  The term social capital itself turns out to have been independently invented at least six times over the twentieth century, each time to call attention to the ways in which our lives are made more productive by social ties. The first known use of the concept was not by some cloistered theoretician, but by a practical reformer of the Progressive Era—L. J. Hanifan, state supervisor of rural schools in West Virginia. Writing in 1916 to urge the importance of community involvement for successful schools, Hanifan invoked the idea of “social capital” to explain why. For Hanifan, social capital referred to

  those tangible substances [that] count for most in the daily lives of people: namely good will, fellowship, sympathy, and social intercourse among the individuals and families who make up a social unit. …The individual is helpless socially, if left to himself…. If he comes into contact with his neighbor, and they with other neighbors, there will be an accumulation of social capital, which
may immediately satisfy his social needs and which may bear a social potentiality sufficient to the substantial improvement of living conditions in the whole community. The community as a whole will benefit by the coöperation of all its parts, while the individual will find in his associations the advantages of the help, the sympathy, and the fellowship of his neighbors.12

  Hanifan’s account of social capital anticipated virtually all the crucial elements in later interpretations, but his conceptual invention apparently attracted no notice from other social commentators and disappeared without a trace. But like sunken treasure recurrently revealed by shifting sands and tides, the same idea was independently rediscovered in the 1950s by Canadian sociologists to characterize the club memberships of arriviste suburbanites, in the 1960s by urbanist Jane Jacobs to laud neighborliness in the modern metropolis, in the 1970s by economist Glenn Loury to analyze the social legacy of slavery, and in the 1980s by French social theorist Pierre Bourdieu and by German economist Ekkehart Schlicht to underline the social and economic resources embodied in social networks. Sociologist James S. Coleman put the term firmly and finally on the intellectual agenda in the late 1980s, using it (as Hanifan had originally done) to highlight the social context of education.13

  As this array of independent coinages indicates, social capital has both an individual and a collective aspect—a private face and a public face. First, individuals form connections that benefit our own interests. One pervasive strategem of ambitious job seekers is “networking,” for most of us get our jobs because of whom we know, not what we know—that is, our social capital, not our human capital. Economic sociologist Ronald Burt has shown that executives with bounteous Rolodex files enjoy faster career advancement. Nor is the private return to social capital limited to economic rewards. As Claude S. Fischer, a sociologist of friendship, has noted, “Social networks are important in all our lives, often for finding jobs, more often for finding a helping hand, companionship, or a shoulder to cry on.”14