BOWLING ALONE

by Robert D. Putnam

  Junk ain’t junk no more, ’cause junk can win the war.

  What’s junk to you has a job to do, ’cause junk ain’t junk no more.

  Pots and pans, old garbage cans, the kettle that doesn’t pour.

  Collect today for the USA, ’cause junk can win the war.45

  Hard as it is to believe in our more jaundiced age, such appeals hit the target. Facing a severe shortage of rubber, in June 1942 the president asked the public to turn in “old tires, old rubber raincoats, old garden hose, rubber shoes, bathing caps, gloves—whatever you have that is made of rubber.” Boy Scouts were posted at filling stations to remind drivers to donate their car floor mats. Literally millions of Americans responded to the president’s appeal, and in less than four weeks roughly four hundred thousand tons of scrap rubber—six pounds for every man, woman, and child in the country (or at the front)—were collected.46

  Volunteers came in throngs, especially early in the war. In the first six months of 1942 the civilian defense corps expanded from 1.2 million to 7 million, and by mid-1943 more than 12 million Americans were registered. With armbands, whistles, and flashlights, the volunteers set out to supervise blackouts, plan gas decontamination, practice first aid. In Chicago in April 1942 sixteen thousand block captains took the oath of allegiance in a mass ceremony in the Coliseum. Local communities raised funds through “socials” to build observer posts for aircraft spotters. “A recruitment meeting in Hannibal, Missouri, consisting of a parade followed by a town meeting, packed 4,000 people in the armory, and another 15,000 were outside because there was no room for them,” recalls Lingeman. Meanwhile, Red Cross volunteers nationwide skyrocketed from 1.1 million in 1940 to 7.5 million in 1945 and set to work rolling bandages, ferrying blood donors to collection sites, training for emergency work.47

  Young people enlisted in the war effort in myriad ways—the Junior Service Corps, the High School Victory Corps, the Scouts, the Junior Red Cross, and, not least, the 4-H, which took a lead in the Victory Garden program. At its peak this most popular of civilian war efforts generated nearly twenty million Victory Gardens in backyards and vacant lots, yielding 40 percent of all vegetables grown in the country. As an indication of the scope of young people’s participation in the war effort, Lingeman lists the activities of Gary, Indiana, eighth-graders over a two-year period:

  taught young girls infant care; collected phonograph records; distributed WAR WORKERS SLEEPING signs; sold war stamps at an exhibition of a captured Japanese submarine; discussed curfew law with City Council; distributed anti-black market pledge cards; took auxiliary fireman and police training courses; collected 500,000 pounds of wastepaper; sold an average of $40,000 worth of war stamps a month; delivered Community Chest material to every home in the city; sponsored a Clean Plate campaign [to discourage food wastage]; participated in War Bond and tin can drives; and collected library books for servicemen.48

  Wartime civilian volunteerism both drew on prewar associational networks and contributed in turn to the postwar civic frenzy. Social historian Julie Siebel has recounted one unexpectedly instructive example.49 In prewar America Junior Leagues had brought together privileged young ladies in communities across the country to socialize and to volunteer for various local “good works.” As early as 1929 the Junior Leagues introduced the concept of a “volunteer bureau” to act as a kind of clearinghouse for local volunteerism. Even before Pearl Harbor the American Junior League Association (AJLA) was working with Eleanor Roosevelt (herself a former Junior Leaguer) to convert their existing volunteer bureaus into official Civilian Defense Volunteer Offices (CDVOs).

  With the outbreak of war the AJLA became de facto the government’s Office of Civilian War Services. By the end of 1943, 4,300 CDVOs had been established nationwide, and their volunteers were fixing school lunches, coordinating day care centers, running scrap drives, and organizing social welfare activities. After the war many of these volunteer bureaus successfully made the transition to peacetime service. In 1947, 390 such bureaus were still in operation, more than five times the number that had existed before the war. Multiply this example manyfold and one can begin to see the organizational mechanisms that undergirded the massive postwar civic renaissance that we observed repeatedly in section II.

  My point is not to romanticize the ubiquity or the effectiveness of such efforts, or even the esprit de corps they generated. As the war progressed, it gradually became clear that energies (particularly of the adult volunteers) could be better invested elsewhere in the war effort, and many of these programs had sputtered to a stop by 1944. In the meantime, however, they had demonstrated the mobilizing power of shared adversity. Sociologist Lloyd Warner, studying the impact of the war on one town, reported finding a sense of “unconscious well-being” because “everyone is doing something to help in the common desperate enterprise in a co-operative rather than a private spirit.” Adds historian Richard Polenberg, “To a large extent, participation in a common cause tended to enhance feelings of comradeship and well-being.”50 More important to our concerns here, it is almost surely no accident that those Indiana eighth-graders (and their older brothers and sisters) became in later years dependable members of the long civic generation.

  The war fostered social solidarity in yet another way—by accentuating civic and economic equality. Symbolically it was important that celebrities like Joe DiMaggio, Clark Gable, William McChesney Martin (head of the New York Stock Exchange), and all four sons of FDR entered the armed services. To be sure, relatively few celebrities saw combat service, but an instructive comparison is with the Vietnam War, in which notorious social inequality in military service contributed directly to widespread cynicism. Materially, the combination of plentiful work in war industries, unionization, high taxes, rationing, and perhaps other factors meant that World War II (coupled to some extent with the prior Great Depression) was probably the most leveling event in American economic history. The fraction of all personal wealth held by the top 1 percent of adults fell from 31 percent in 1939 to 23 percent in 1945, and the share of income received by the top 5 percent fell from 28 percent to 19 percent.51

  War is a powerful force for social change, and certainly not all the social changes fostered by World War II were good for American social capital. The powerful explosion of solidarity and self-sacrifice triggered by the attack on Pearl Harbor did not continue throughout the war. For example, shortages and rationing led to hoarding and black marketeering. Polenberg notes, “The longer the war lasted, the more the balance shifted from public and collective to private and personal concerns…. One in five Americans told interviewers that buying scarce goods at black market prices was sometimes justified.”52 Moreover, vast population shifts disrupted families and communities and exacerbated regional, racial, and class tensions. When massive new war plants sprouted in places like Ypsilanti (Michigan), Pascagoula (Mississippi), and Seneca (Illinois), conflict erupted between old-time residents and newcomers: “Folks in houses think trailer people are vermin,” was a typical sentiment.53 Racial tensions were in some instances heightened by the war—most obviously in the case of the Japanese Americans interned in California, but also in increased anti-Semitism and in violent episodes like the 1943 race riot in Detroit, in which twenty-five blacks and nine whites were killed. On the other hand, in historical perspective the social changes spawned by the war contributed directly to the black civil rights advances of the 1950s and 1960s.

  As the twentieth century ends, Americans have learned that no story is all heroes. (Indeed, we sometimes feel that heroes don’t really exist.) But most Americans in 1945 felt that the war had been a just one and that their terrible collective sacrifice—all those sons and daughters who would not come home—had been in some measure vindicated by victory. This was not a feeling that would be repeated in the 1950s in Korea or in the 1960s in Vietnam. Long-term research on veterans of these wars suggests that while Vietnam vets have been relatively isolated socially, even decades after the war, vets of t
he Second World War were more socially integrated.54

  When twenty-nine-year-old John F. Kennedy, running for Congress in 1946, said, “Most of the courage shown in the war came from men’s understanding of their interdependence on each other. Men were saving other men’s lives at risk of their own simply because they realized that perhaps the next day their lives would be saved in turn. …We must work together…. We must have the same unity that we had during the war,” most of his listeners must have nodded.55 He and they had already formed the long civic generation. Fifteen years later, when he admonished the nation, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country,” to the former Gary eighth-graders, now just turned thirty and settling down, it must have rung true in a way that, sadly, it no longer does to most Americans.

  So one plausible explanation for the strong generational effects in civic engagement that pervade our evidence is the replacement of a cohort of men and women whose values and civic habits were formed during a period of heightened civic obligation with others whose formative years were different. In a complementary fashion, the generational patterns outlined in this chapter also reinforce my argument in the previous chapter. The long civic generation was the last cohort of Americans to grow up without television. The more fully that any given generation was exposed to television in its formative years, the lower its civic engagement during adulthood. As we saw in chapter 13, men and women raised in the sixties, seventies, and eighties not only watch television more than those born in the thirties, forties, and fifties: they also watch television differently—more habitually, even mindlessly—and those different ways in which television is used are linked in turn to different degrees of civic engagement. Although more research is needed to put the issue beyond all reasonable doubt, it seems likely the effect of TV discussed in chapter 13 and the effect of generation discussed in this chapter are in some respects opposite sides of the same coin.

  As political scientist Wendy Rahn has shown, those generational differences continue to show up in the values expressed by successive cohorts more than half a century later.56 (See figure 75.) The changes are probably part of a larger societal shift toward individual and material values and away from communal values. We saw in figure 72 unmistakable evidence of this transformation in the values expressed by college freshmen over the years, and there is comparable evidence of a similar shift across American society. When asked by Roper pollsters in 1975 to identify the elements of “the good life,” 38 percent of all adults chose “a lot of money,” and an identical 38 percent mentioned “a job that contributes to the welfare of society.” The same question was then posed every three years, and by 1996 those who aspired to contribute to society had slipped to 32 percent, while those who aspired to a lot of money had leaped to 63 percent. Other increasingly important elements of the good life included a vacation home (rising from 19 percent in 1975 to 43 percent in 1996), a second color TV (10 percent to 34 percent), a swimming pool (14 percent to 36 percent), a second car (30 percent to 45 percent), travel abroad (30 percent to 44 percent), a job that pays more than average (45 percent to 63 percent), and “really nice” clothes (36 percent to 48 percent). By contrast, a happy marriage (84 percent to 80 percent), children (74 percent to 72 percent), and “an interesting job” (69 percent to 61 percent) all declined. Figure 76 summarizes the changes in the American definition of “the good life” during the last quarter of the twentieth century. Much of this growth in materialism, further analysis shows, is attributable to generational replacement, as a cohort less concerned about material goods passes from the scene and is replaced by a cohort who gives more priority to a second color TV and really nice clothes.57

  “Community” means different things to different people. We speak of the community of nations, the community of Jamaica Plain, the gay community, the IBM community, the Catholic community, the Yale community, the

  Figure 75: From Generation to Generation, Patriotism Wanes, Materialism Waxes

  Figure 76: Materialism Grows in the Final Decades of the Twentieth Century

  African American community, the “virtual” community of cyberspace, and so on. Each of us derives some sense of belonging from among the various communities to which we might, in principle, belong. For most of us, our deepest sense of belonging is to our most intimate social networks, especially family and friends. Beyond that perimeter lie work, church, neighborhood, civic life, and the assortment of other “weak ties” that constitute our personal stock of social capital. (Keep in mind that “weak ties,” though less intimate, can be quite important collectively.) How, if at all, does the sense of community differ across generations?

  As the twentieth century ended, Yankelovich Partners surveyed large numbers of Americans about what “community” meant to them: “What are the ways in which you get a real sense of belonging or a sense of community?”58 For all generations, as figure 77 shows, family and friends are most commonly cited, followed (for people who work outside the home) by coworkers. (In light of our discussion in chapter 5, it is interesting that co-workers are no more important for the younger generation than for their elders.) At this radius, the sense of belonging does not vary across the generations.

  Slightly further out, however, the community embeddedness of the generations differs markedly. Compared with Gen X’ers, men and women born before 1946 are nearly twice as likely to feel a sense of belonging to their neighborhood, to their church, to their local community, and to the various groups

  Figure 77: The Meaning of Community for Successive Generations

  and organizations to which they belong. (Baby boomers fall midway between the two in every case.) Among the younger generations, these residential, religious, and organizational ties are more frayed. Not surprisingly, electronic ties are more important to Gen X’ers than to the older generation, but even among the younger cohort, kith and kin are twenty times more important than cyber-friends as a source of community. As the new century opened, the younger generation felt less connection to civic communities—residential, religious, organizational—without any apparent offsetting focus of belongingness, beyond the ties to family, friends, and co-workers that they shared with the older generation. For the younger cohort, strong ties still count, but they are no longer complemented and reinforced by ties to the wider community.

  To sum up: Much of the decline of civic engagement in America during the last third of the twentieth century is attributable to the replacement of an unusually civic generation by several generations (their children and grandchildren) that are less embedded in community life. In speculating about explanations for this sharp generational discontinuity, I am led to the conclusion that the dynamics of civic engagement in the last several decades have been shaped in part by social habits and values influenced in turn by the great mid-century global cataclysm. It is not, however, my argument that world war is a necessary or a praiseworthy means toward the goal of civic reengagement. We must acknowledge the enduring consequences—some of them, I have argued, powerfully positive—of what we used to call “the war,” without at the same time glorifying martial virtues or mortal sacrifice. (This is precisely the dilemma addressed so effectively by director Steven Spielberg in Saving Private Ryan.) When a generation of Americans early in the twentieth century reflected on both the horrors of war and the civic virtues that it inculcated, they framed their task as the search for “the moral equivalent of war.”59 Insofar as the story of this chapter contains any practical implication for civic renewal, it is that.

  CHAPTER 15

  What Killed Civic Engagement? Summing Up

  We are about ready to sum up our conclusions about the complex of factors that lies behind the erosion of America’s social connectedness and community involvement over the last several decades. First, however, we must review the evidence for and against several additional suspects.

  First, the American family structure has changed in several important and potentially relevant ways over
the last several decades. The downturn in civic engagement coincided with the breakdown of the traditional family unit— mom, dad, and the kids. Since the family itself is, by some accounts, a key form of social capital, perhaps its eclipse is part of the explanation for the reduction in joining and trusting in the wider community. What does the evidence show?

  Evidence of the loosening of family bonds is unequivocal. 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. According to the General Social Survey, the proportion of 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 Census Bureau reports that the fraction of adults who are both married and have kids at home—the archetypal Ozzie and Harriet family—was sliced by more than one-third from 40 percent in 1970 to 26 percent in 1997.1

  It is a commonplace of cocktail conversation that we meet people through our spouses and our children. To what extent has the transformation of American family structure and home life over the last thirty years (fewer marriages, more divorces, fewer children, more people living alone) contributed to the decline of civic engagement? The surprising answer is “Probably not much.”

  Marriage and children do change the kinds of social networks to which one belongs. Both marriage and children increase time spent in community organizations and at home and decrease time spent in informal socializing with friends. Only two types of organizational affiliations, however, are sufficiently strongly related to marital and parental status to make a real difference in the aggregate: church- and youth-related activities.