Bowling Alone: Revised and Updated: The Collapse and Revival of American Community by Robert D. Putnam

Bowling Alone: Revised and Updated: The Collapse and Revival of American Community by Robert D. Putnam

Author:Robert D. Putnam [Putnam, Robert D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Sociology, Politics, History, Psychology, Fall 2021 Textbook
ISBN: 9781982130848
Google: C7cCEAAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 52152508
Publisher: Simon Schuster
Published: 2000-01-01T08:00:00+00:00


SECTION FIVE What Is to Be Done?

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

OVER THE LAST THREE DECADES 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 Way, 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.

Is erosion of social capital an ineluctable consequence of modernity, or can we do something about it? Sometimes, in the face of fundamental questions like this one, history instructs. In this case, some unexpectedly relevant—and in many respects optimistic—lessons can be found in a period uncannily like our own: the decades at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century that American historians have dubbed the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era.I In a number of deep respects the challenges facing American society at the end of the nineteenth century foreshadowed those that we face in our own time.

Almost exactly a century ago America had also just experienced a period of dramatic technological, economic, and social change that rendered obsolete a significant stock of social capital. In the three or four decades after the Civil War, the Industrial Revolution, urbanization, and massive waves of immigration transformed American communities. Millions of Americans left family and friends behind on the farm when they moved to Chicago or Milwaukee or Pittsburgh, and millions more left community institutions behind in a Polish shtetl or an Italian village when they moved to the Lower East Side or the North End. America in the last quarter of the nineteenth century suffered from classic symptoms of a social-capital deficit—crime waves, degradation in the cities, inadequate education, a widening gap between rich and poor, what one contemporary called a “Saturnalia” of political corruption.

But even as these problems were erupting, Americans were beginning to fix them. Within a few decades around the turn of the century, a quickening sense of crisis, coupled with inspired grassroots and national leadership, produced an extraordinary burst of social inventiveness and political reform. In fact, most of the major community institutions in American life today were invented or refurbished in that most fecund period of civic innovation in American history. The Progressive Era was not the only example of practical civic enthusiasm in American history, and it was surely not flawless, but (partly for that reason) it contains many instructive parallels to our own era. This chapter tells the story of that exceptional epoch, offering inspiration, enlightenment, and a few cautionary tales that may illumine our own.1



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