I just had to read this book despite it originally was written in 1995 and updated in 2000, and, is therefore, 18 years old. However, I keep coming across references to it in many books I read dealing with sociology; Bowling Alone is considered a seminal book in describing the fraying institutions of community in America as well as the entire industrialized Western world. In any event, the fraying of institutions described has certainly continued through the intervening eighteen years. We have now by the twenty-first century entrenched ourselves in silos, many living behind gates. The present is better described in Charles Murray’s, 2012, book “Coming Apart,” a book I previously reported.
The author of Bowling Alone, Robert D. Putnam, is a political scientist at Harvard University. Bowling Alone makes the case that Americans are no longer the energetic joiners they had been as recently as the 1950s. It wasn't just voter turnout and grass-roots political activism that had declined since 1960 or so. Membership was falling in organizations, from the P.T.A. and the League of Women Voters to the Elks and the Shriners. Americans were becoming ever more isolated, a cynical and anomic lot -- detached from civic life, deprived of the social networks that develop when communities are more closely knit. However, the only measure on which America lags behind other democracies is voter turnout. So maybe a history of political parties or even of the logistics of registration would be more relevant. It’s not like Yogi Berra hadn’t warned us, “If you don’t go to somebody’s funeral, they won’t come to yours.”
It is interesting that surveys suggest that while nominal membership in community organizations has not actually fallen much at all, active involvement -- measured by number of meetings attended and leadership positions held -- has fallen markedly. While it's true, Putnam acknowledges, that the sheer number of voluntary organizations has grown, many of these are essentially lobbying and direct-mail operations, with big Washington staffs, few if any local chapters and no membership requirement save the willingness to write a check.
Putnam assigns reasons for the community deterioration to two leading causes. One is generational replacement. The unusually civic-minded cohort born in the 1920s and formed in the crucible of wartime patriotism had begun to die off eighteen years ago, only to be replaced by more cynical and libertarian boomers and Gen Xers. The other is television, the heavy watching of which, Putnam says, is ''the single most consistent predictor'' of low civic engagement. TV not only ''steals time,'' it breeds ''lethargy and passivity.'' His other leading suspects -- suburban sprawl and the time crunch for working women and their families -- each account, Putnam concludes, for at most 10 percent of the problem. The author misses one element which I personally experienced. That is, the devastation of small communities of less than 1,000 people when they lost their high schools and then their elementary schools to consolidations in the late '50s and early '60s.
My Notes:
Pg. 33: The 1960s and the 1965 Voting Rights Act enfranchised millions of men and women in the South who were then able for the first time in the twentieth century to exercise the right to vote. This influx of new voters partially masked the decline in turnout among the rest of the American electorate, obscuring the fact that fewer and fewer of the rest of us who had had the right to vote all along are actually exercising it…. Voting in America as of 2000 is down about 25 percent over the last three decades. (P. 37).
Pg. 63: Organizational records suggest that for the first two-thirds of the twentieth century Americans’ involvement in civic associations of all sorts rose steadily, except during the Great Depression. In the last third of the century, by contrast, only mailing list membership has continued to expand, with the creation of an entirely new species of “tertiary” association whose members never actually meet. At the same time, active involvement in face-to-face organizations has plummeted. The broad picture is one of declining membership in community organizations.
Pg. 60: Between 1973 and 1994 the number of men and women who took any leadership role in any local organization was sliced by more the 50 percent. This dismaying trend began to accelerate after 1985: in the ten short years between 1985 and 1994 active involvement in community organizations in America fell by 45 percent. By this measure, at least, nearly half of America’s civic community infrastructure was obliterated in barely a decade.
Pg. 69: The classical sociological theory of secularization—that as society becomes modern, it becomes more secular—fits the experience of Western Europe reasonably well, but there is doubt whether it fits the facts in America. Virtually all Americans say they believe in God, and three out of four say they believe in immortality.
Pg. 72: Over the last three to four decades (‘60s through ‘90s) our actual attendance and involvement in religious activities have fallen by roughly 25 to 50 percent. Virtually all the postwar boom in religious participation has been erased. This broad historical pattern in religious participation—up from the first third of the century to the 1960s and then down from the 1960s to the 1990s—is very much the same pattern that we noted earlier for secular community-based organizations, as well as for political participation. The decline in religious participation like many of the changes in political and community involvement is attributable largely to generational differences. More recent generations are less observant than their parents. The slow but inexorable replacement of one generation by the next has gradually but inevitably lowered our national involvement in religious activities. In short, Americans are going to church less often than we did three or four decades ago, and the churches we go to are less engaged with the wider community.
Pg. 145: Astonishingly, America had fewer lawyers per capita in 1970 than in 1900. Two world wars, the booms of the 1920s and the 1950s; one Great Depression; one New Deal, our metamorphosis from a rustic nation (with 60 percent of its inhabitants living in hamlets of fewer than 2,500 souls) to a metropolitan nation (with nearly half its population in cities and order of magnitude larger); the transformation of our economy from gaslights, horse-drawn buggies, and the general store to GE, GM, and Kmart—none of these economic, social, and cultural revolutions raised the lawyering ratio in the American economy by a single iota. After 1970, however, the lawyering ratio more than doubled. And, by 1995 America had 40 percent more police and guards and 150 percent more lawyers and judges than would have been projected in 1970. Apparently, beginning around 1970, informal understandings no longer seemed adequate or prudent. All of us abruptly began to demand to ‘get it in writing.”
Pg. 185f: Civic disengagement appears to be an equal opportunity affliction. The sharp, steady declines in club meetings, visits with friends, committee service, church attendance, philanthropic generosity, card games, and electoral turnout have hit virtually all sectors of American society over the last several decades and in roughly equal measure. The trends are down among women and down among men, down on the two coasts and down in the heartland, down among renters and down among homeowners, down in black ghettos and down in white suburbs, down in small towns and down in metropolitan areas, down among Protestants and down among Catholics, down among the affluent and down among the impoverished, down among singles and down among married couples, down among unskilled laborers and down among small-business people and down among top managers, down among Republicans and down among Democrats and down among independents, down among parents and down among the childless, down among full-time workers and down among homemakers. Age is the one striking exception to this uniformity…. Age is second only to education as a predictor of virtually all forms of civic engagement. Middle-aged and older people are more active in more organizations than younger people, attend church more often, vote more regularly, both read and watch the news more frequently, and work on more community projects, and volunteer more (P. 247)
Pg. 186: Education is one of the most important predictors of many forms of social participation, from voting to associational membership, to giving blood. Having four additional years of education is associated with 30 percent more interest in politics, 40 percent more club attendance, and 45 percent more volunteering….It is not appreciated how massively and rapidly this education trend transformed the educational composition of the adult population. As recently as 1960, only 41 percent of American adults had graduated from high school; in 1998, 82 percent had. In 1960, only 8 percent of American adults had a college degree; in 1998, 24 percent had.
Pg. 194: The movement of women out of the home into the paid labor force is the most portentous social change of the last half-century. Women in the workforce went from one in three in the 1950s to nearly two in three in the 1990s.
Pg. 212: It is difficult to overstate the symbiosis between the auto and the suburb. We spend measurably more of every day shuttling alone in cars: American adults average seventy-two minutes every day behind the wheel. This is more than twice as much as the average parent spends with the kids. Private cars account for 86 percent of all trips in America, and two-thirds of all car trips are made alone.
Pg. 262: As the twentieth century ended, Americans born and raised in the 1920s and 1930s were about half as likely to commit suicide as people that age had been at midcentury, whereas Americans born and raised in the 1970s and 1980s were three or four times more likely to commit suicide as people that age had been at midcentury.
Pg. 277: In addition to the century-long increase in divorce rates (which accelerated from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s and then leveled off), and the more recent increase in single-parent families, the incidence of one-person households has more than doubled since 1950, in part because of the rising number of widows living alone. Also, all American adults who are currently married fell from 74 percent in 1974 to 56 percent in 1998, while the proportion of adults who have children at home fell from 55 percent to 38 percent. The fraction of adults who are both married and have kids at home was sliced by more than one-third from 40 percent in 1970 to 26 percent in 1997.
Pg. 283: Summary: First, pressures of time and money, including the special pressures on two-career families, contributed about 10 percent to the diminution of our social and community involvement. Second, suburbanization, commuting, contributed another 10 percent. Third, the effect of electronic entertainment—above all, television—in privatizing our leisure time has been substantial, probably contributing another 25 percent to the decline. Fourth, and most important, generational change—the slow, steady, and ineluctable replacement of the long civic generation by their less involved children and grandchildren—has been a very powerful factor. This factor alone may account for half of the overall decline.
Pg. 308: The relationship between social capital and safe streets is substantial; states with more social capital have proportionately fewer murders. Social capital is about as important as poverty, urbanism, and racial composition as a determinant of homicide prevalence. Surprisingly, social capital is more important than a state’s education level, rate of single-parent households, and income inequality in predicting the number of murders per capita during the 1980-95 period.
Pg. 327: Between 1975 and 1995 studies in the US, Scandinavia, and Japan have shown that people who are socially disconnected are between two and five times more likely to die from all causes, compared with matched individuals who have close ties with family, friends and the community. It is also people divorced from community, occupation, and association that are foremost among the supporters of extremism.
Pg. 335: America in the 1990s was a more tolerant place than America in the 1950s or even the 1970s. In 1956, 50 percent of white Americans said that whites and blacks should go to separate schools; in 1995, only 4 percent felt so. In 1963, 45 percent of white Americans said they would move out if blacks moved in next door; in 1997 only 1 percent felt this way. Similar statistics can be found for interracial marriage, homosexuality, etc…. So between the mid-1960s and the late 1990s Americans became substantially more tolerant, precisely the same period when they were becoming disconnected from civic life and from one another. Most of the changes in both tolerance and civic engagement over the last several decades are traceable to generational succession. That is, more tolerant, less engaged generations have gradually replaced older, less tolerant, more engaged cohorts.
Pg. 367: Over the last three decades (90s, 80s, 70s) a variety of social, economic, and technological changes have rendered obsolete a significant stock of America’s social capital. Television, two-career families, suburban sprawl, generational changes in values—these and other changes in American society have meant that fewer and fewer of us find that the League of Women Voters, or the United War, or the Shriners, or the monthly bridge club, or even a Sunday picnic with friends fits the way we have come to live. Our growing social-capital deficit threatens educational performance, safe neighborhoods, equitable tax collection, democratic responsiveness, everyday honesty, and even our health and happiness. (It is interesting to note that the states with the lowest social capital are those that belonged to the Confederacy during the Civil War).
Pg. 371: In 1870 one-third of all industrial workers in America were foreign-born. By 1900 more than half were. In 1890 immigrant adults actually outnumbered native adults in eighteen of the twenty cities with a population over 100,000.
Pg. 375: Lynching’s peaked between 1889 and 1898. During that decade there was an average of one lynching every other day somewhere in America. Meanwhile, between 1890 and 1908 virtually all southern states disenfranchised African Americans, using the poll tax, the literacy test, the grandfather clause, and other devices. The more vicious forms of segregation were concentrated in the South.
Pg. 398: The Progressives were responsible for the most thoroughgoing renovation of public policies and institutions in American history, rivaled only by the New Deal. The secret ballot (1888, Kentucky); popular initiative and referendum (1898, South Dakota); presidential primary elections (1900, Minnesota); the city manager system (1903, Galveston, Texas); the direct election of senators (1913); women’s suffrage (1893, Colorado; 1920 in the US Constitution). These all diffused nationally after introduction by the states.
Nationally, the Progressives laid the institutional cornerstones for fiscal and monetary policy with the Federal Reserve (1913), and the income tax (1913). The list goes on: the Food and Drug Administration and federal meat inspection in 1906; the Federal Trade Commission in 1914; the national park system in 1913; child labor laws (1916); the eight-hour day (beginning with the railways in 1916); workmen’s compensation (1916); the FBI (1908); and federal campaign finance regulation (1907).
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