The growth of these groups reflects the application of social capital remedies to a set of previously neglected problems. Gay support groups, the Association for Retarded Citizens, and overweight people’s support groups bring problems hitherto dealt with in isolation into a communal forum. Just as AA helped recast alcoholism as a social problem needing social and spiritual remedies, these newer support groups bring what were thought to be private problems into the public realm. Thus support groups serve an important range of needs for many people who might otherwise lack access to social capital.
In some cases, such groups also come to pursue broader civic goals. Mothers Against Drunk Driving and the Association for Retarded Citizens illustrate the range of public purposes and activities that have emerged from this sector of American life.12 On the other hand, self-help and support groups do not typically play the same role as traditional civic associations. Alone among twenty-two different sorts of groups to which Americans belong, membership in self-help groups is completely unrelated to any other form of group affiliation. Self-help groups are not nearly so closely associated with regular community involvement such as voting, volunteering, giving to charity, working on community problems, or talking with neighbors, as are more traditional civic associations, such as religious, youth, neighborhood, school service, fraternal, and service groups.13 As Robert Wuthnow emphasizes,
[T]he kind of community [these small groups] create is quite different from the communities in which people have lived in the past. These communities are more fluid and more concerned with the emotional states of the individual…. The communities they create are seldom frail. People feel cared for. They help one another. They share their intimate problems…. But in another sense small groups may not be fostering community as effectively as many of their proponents would like. Some small groups merely provide occasions for individuals to focus on themselves in the presence of others. The social contract binding members together asserts only the weakest of obligations. Come if you have time. Talk if you feel like it. Respect everyone’s opinion. Never criticize. Leave quietly if you become dissatisfied…. We can imagine that [these small groups] really substitute for families, neighborhoods, and broader community attachments that may demand lifelong commitments, when, in fact, they do not.14
IF THE LINKAGE OF SMALL GROUPS to public life is sometimes tenuous and hard to detect, the comparable connection for social movements is omnipresent. Although all social movements have historical roots, and nearly all epochs witness grassroots organization for social change, the sixties was without doubt the most portentous decade in the twentieth century from the perspective of grass-roots social change. Beginning with the successes of the black civil rights movement, wave after wave of popular mobilization swelled and crested in the ensuing years—from the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley in 1964 to the Vietnam protests in Chicago in 1968 and then in Washington, D.C., and hundreds of other towns and cities in the 1970s, from the Stonewall Inn uprising for gay rights in 1969 to the mass demonstrations for environmental quality on Earth Day 1970, from anguished debates about women’s liberation in board-rooms and bedrooms across the country throughout the 1970s to the massive and widespread demonstrations for and against abortion during the 1980s.15
The social activism of the sixties greatly expanded the repertoire of readily available and legitimate forms of civic engagement. Boycotts that began with blacks and buses in Alabama were then applied by farmworkers to grapes in California, abortion advocates to pizza in Michigan, and upholders of traditional family values to amusement parks in Florida. Protest marches that once outraged authorities in scores of local communities became so routine that police and demonstrators became joint choreographers. Segments of the American population, on both the Left and the Right, who had been quiescent or silently suppressed, suddenly felt empowered and plunged into public life. Standing at the close of the century, it is virtually impossible to overstate the impact of these social movements on the lives of most American communities and most American citizens. In our most private moments, as in our most public ones, our behavior and our values bear the imprint of those movements.16
Social movements and social capital are so closely connected that it is sometimes hard to see which is chicken and which egg. Social networks are the quintessential resource of movement organizers. Reading groups became sinews of the suffrage movement. Friendship networks, not environmental sympathies, accounted for which Pennsylvanians became involved in grass-roots protest after the Three Mile Island nuclear accident. Social ties more than ideals or self-interest explain who was recruited to Freedom Summer, a climactic moment in the civil rights movement. Local church connections account for the solidarity that underlies the Christian Coalition.17 Precisely because social capital is essential for social movements, its erosion could shroud their prospects for the future.
Social movements also create social capital, by fostering new identities and extending social networks.18 Not only did preexisting interpersonal ties bring volunteers to Mississippi to participate in Freedom Summer, but the annealing heat of that tumultuous summer forged lifelong identities and solidarities. “Mississippi exposed them to a way of life and a vision of community that most of the volunteers found enormously appealing,” reports Doug McAdam, collective biographer of the volunteers, and they carried that vision with them into the student movement, the peace movement, the women’s movement, the environmental movement, and many more. Moreover, “the volunteers left Mississippi not only more disposed toward more activism, but in a better structural position, by virtue of their links to one another, to act on these inclinations.” As sociologist Kenneth Andrews has shown, the community infrastructure generated by the Mississippi civil rights movement in the early 1960s had an impact on local African American political power for decades to come.19
Whether among gays marching in San Francisco or evangelicals praying together on the Mall or, in an earlier era, autoworkers downing tools in Flint, the act of collective protest itself creates enduring bonds of solidarity. Ironically, many now domesticated sing-along favorites have their origins in highly contentious social movements: “Oh! Susanna!,” “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” “We shall overcome,” “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Collective protest strengthens shared identity, certainly for the participants and sometimes for their heirs, “anchoring individuals in participatory cultures.”20 In short, social movements with grassroots involvement both embody and produce social capital.
Whether national “social movement organizations”—from Greenpeace to the Moral Majority—do so as well is another matter. Even sympathetic commentators on the maturing movements of the sixties, like sociologist Margit Mayer, have observed that their organizational legacy was often Washington-based, full-time, professional, staff-run organizations, with “social entrepreneurs” cultivating comfortable conscience constituencies and “concentrat[ing] on manipulating the mass media so as to influence public opinion and to generate elite responses and policy changes.”21 Indeed, sociologist John McCarthy has argued that professional social movement organizations arise precisely as a response to a “social infrastructural deficit”—that is, cases in which “widespread sentiment exists favoring or opposing a social change, but the lack of available infrastructures inhibits the mobilization of the sentiment.”22
McCarthy points out that although pro-choice and pro-life positions both garner substantial support in opinion polls, the two movements are structured quite differently. The pro-life movement rests on thousands of church-based grassroots organizations and can efficiently mobilize its supporters for direct action on the basis of those preexisting social networks. To take a single example, in 1993 the National Right to Life Committee claimed 13 million members and 7,000 local chapters. By contrast, the pro-choice movement (particularly with the demise in the 1980s of the organized grassroots women’s liberation movement) lacks a preexisting social infrastructure and therefore must rely more heavily on national advocacy organiz
ations, using the technology of direct mail, telemarketing, media campaigns, and the like.23 Membership in the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League, for example, more than tripled from 132,000 in 1989 to nearly 500,000 in 1996, but within two years membership had plunged to 190,000, of whom state leaders estimated that only about 3–5 percent had done more than write a check.24 Such volatility in membership is emblematic of affiliation based on symbolic identification rather than on personal networks. As sociologist Debra Minkoff correctly observes, “In the absence of the opportunity or resources to establish face-to-face interactions, such symbolic affiliation may be the only available mobilizing structure that can link isolated individuals.”25 However, we should not mistake symbolic ties for personal ones.
Neither of these approaches—what political consultants sometimes label the “ground war” strategy and the “air war” strategy—is politically or morally superior. Rather, they are adapted to different resource endowments. The pro-life ground war (like the civil rights ground war before it) is adapted for a “social capital rich” environment with dense preexisting social networks of reciprocity, while the pro-choice air war is adapted to a “social capital poor” environment. In the latter case, the existence of a well-developed national social movement organization using “air war” techniques is a sign not of the presence of grassroots engagement, but of its absence.
BY COMMON CONSENT, the sixties (and early seventies) was a period of uncommon social and political mobilization. What was the historical significance of this period and what was to be its sequel? Did the movements of those years represent the cresting of a long wave of rising civic involvement—indeed, the very same upwelling whose conventional contours we traced in earlier chapters? And did this cycle of protest then recede, leaving behind it only professionalized and bureaucratized interest groups, still bearing the banners of social movements but deployed now as a defensive light air force, not a massed infantry for change? Is all that remains of that proud period of deepened citizenship now captured by the camp bumper sticker—“Nuke the gay whales for Jesus”? Or instead did the sixties produce a durable and more advanced repertoire of civic engagement, leaving as its legacy many rich new forms of connectedness, a “movement society” in which “elite challenging” behavior becomes perpetual, conventional, routinely deployed by advocates of many different causes?26 In short, did the sixties mark the birth of an era or merely the climax of one?
This question is surprisingly difficult to answer rigorously. Perhaps because most of the best academic research of the last two decades has been produced by children of the sixties, much of it takes for granted that a new era of expanded participation dawned in 1968. To be sure, case studies of specific movements sometimes describe backlash, weakening, retreat, even quietism. Most social historians, for example, agree that as an organized, grassroots effort, the civil rights movement was receding by 1970, and the women’s movement began to decline with the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1982.27 By contrast, most studies of the environmental movement tout its continuing ability to rouse millions of Americans to civic activity.
The development of the American environmental movement over the last four decades of the twentieth century provides instructive insights into the fate of the social movements of the 1960s. Although a number of important grassroots conservation organizations, such as the Sierra Club and the National Audubon Society (NAS), were founded at the turn of the twentieth century, the modern era of environmentalism began during the 1960s and was punctuated by the exclamation point of Earth Day 1970, celebrated by a reported twenty million participants across the country. With the ensuing acceptance of environmentalism in Washington and then the onset of the energy crisis, membership growth of the movement itself lagged during the 1970s, but under the threat to environmental gains posed by the Reagan administration, the movement rebounded during the 1980s. By 1990, according to one estimate, the environmental movement counted more than ten thousand organizations nationwide.28
Over these four decades, as figure 43 shows, membership in national environmental organizations exploded.29 Membership in the major organizations rose from about 125,000 in 1960 to 1 million in 1970, then doubled to 2 million in 1980 and more than tripled again to 6.5 million in 1990. Although growth slowed substantially in the 1990s, in quantitative terms this remains a remarkable organizational success story rivaling, for example, the PTA from the 1930s to the 1960s. This remarkable boom led some enthusiastic observers to speak of “participatory environmentalism.”
Greenpeace illustrates the development in a nutshell. Founded in 1972, it tripled its membership in barely five years from 800,000 in 1985 to 2,350,000 in 1990, bounding past rival groups that had dwarfed it a decade before and becoming by far the largest U.S. environmental organization, more than twice as big as its nearest competitor, the National Wildlife Federation. This phenomenal growth in environmental organizations occurred precisely in the period in which many other civic organizations were withering, and even the women’s movement had wilted. At first blush, figure 43 seems strong evidence that the last several decades have witnessed, not a general decline in civic engagement, but merely a reorientation from “old-fashioned” to “contemporary” affiliations, away from Rotary and the League of Women Voters to Greenpeace and the Sierra Club.
Unfortunately, in the main this ebullient growth swelled the mailing lists of what we earlier termed “tertiary” organizations—that is, organizations in which “membership” is essentially an honorific rhetorical device for fund-raising. Affiliation with Greenpeace (and its peers elsewhere on the ideological spectrum) does not represent the sort of interpersonal solidarity and intense civic commitment that brought millions of students, African Americans, gays and lesbians, peace activists, and right-to-lifers to thousands of marches and rallies and sit-ins as part of the social movements of the sixties and seventies. The crucial innovation that explains the trend in figure 43 is not a deeper civic consciousness, but direct mail.
Figure 43: Explosive Growth of National Environmental Organizations, 1960–1998
In 1965 the National Audubon Society mailed one million invitations to membership, an extraordinary number for an organization that then counted fewer than fifty thousand members. Within six years its postage bill had doubled, as Audubon headquarters sent out two million letters in 1971. By then, with the stimulus of direct mail boosting growth to almost 25 percent a year, Audubon membership had ballooned to more than two hundred thousand. The technique spread across the spectrum of environmental associations, and by 1990 Greenpeace was mailing out forty-eight million letters annually.30
Virtually all the major American environmental groups (as well as dozens of smaller organizations dedicated to “charismatic” animals, like the Mountain Lion Foundation, Save the Manatee, and Pheasants Forever) are addicted to direct mail as a tool of mobilization and membership retention.31 Indeed, the few national environmental organizations, such as the Izaak Walton League, that have forsworn direct mail have experienced no growth whatsoever over the last thirty years. In 1960 the Izaak Walton League, for example, had 51,000 members, as compared with 15,000 for the Sierra Club. By 1990, after three decades of direct-mail growth hormones, Sierra Club membership stood at 560,000, as compared with 50,000 for the Izaak Walton League.32
Direct mail serves multiple purposes. The leading academic expert on environmental fund-raising, Christopher Bosso, says that “direct mail has been a lucrative, relatively low cost way to educate the public about both an issue and a group; it lowers the cost of individual participation to just writing a check.” Whether the technique is “low cost” for the organization depends on how we do the accounting. Typically these organizations allocate 20–30 percent of their budget to fund-raising and associated advertising.33 Typically, too, the rate of return is 1 percent to 3 percent, depending on how well the mailing list has been chosen. Adding a “front-end” or “back-end” premium can double the rate of return. Once
signed up, new “members” have a loyal organizational pen pal, for the average environmental organization requests money from its “members” nine times a year. (Fair is fair: eight of every nine direct mail appeals from nonprofit organizations are thrown away unopened.)34 Typically the dropout rate after the first year is 30 percent, although in some cases (like Common Cause in the 1980s) dropout can exceed 50 percent.35 On the other hand, members who stay past the first year are more reliable sources of revenue. As one environmental strategist said, “We know what it costs us to bring in a member; we know we lose money to bring people in, [but] it is an investment program.”
Recruiting “members” (actually, “donors” or “supporters” would be a more accurate term) has become an exact science. “We know how many new people we have to bring in each year,” explained one membership director. “A large percentage are from direct mail. We are trying to get away from mailing so many pieces, but right now it is the most effective way to bring in new members.” Added another, “We have a certain amount of attrition … and we have a certain amount of desired growth, and based on our response rate we have to mail that number of pieces to maintain our membership level and growth rate.” A third wrote me with disarming candor, “Although our membership is not declining, it is becoming increasingly more challenging to bring in new members at an affordable cost per donor…. Whoever finds a new niche market is the winner!!!”36
As one might expect from this process of recruiting “members,” organizational commitment is low. Compared with members recruited through face-to-face social networks (including recipients of gift memberships from friends and relatives), direct-mail recruits drop out more readily, participate in fewer activities, and feel less attachment to the group. Direct-mail recruits also hold more extreme and intolerant political views than members recruited through social networks.37 It is thus perhaps less surprising that Greenpeace, which had tripled in membership to 2,350,000 between 1985 and 1990, then lost 85 percent of its members in the next eight years.
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