Then, as now, new forms of commerce, a restructured workplace, and a new spatial organization of human settlement threatened older forms of solidarity. Then, as now, waves of immigration changed the complexion of America and seemed to imperil the unum in our pluribus. Then, as now, materialism, political cynicism, and a penchant for spectatorship rather than action seemed to thwart idealistic reformism.
Above all, then, as now, older strands of social connection were being abraded—even destroyed—by technological and economic and social change. Serious observers understood that the path from the past could not be retraced, but few saw clearly the path to a better future.
By the turn of the century, complacency bred of technological prowess was succeeded by dissatisfaction, civic inventiveness, and organized reform efforts fueled by a blend of discontent and hopefulness. Over the succeeding decade this flourishing, multifaceted movement—sprouting from seeds sown in the Gilded Age and dependent on new tendrils of social connectedness— would produce the most powerful era of reform in American history.
While reactionary romantics mused about a return to a smaller, simpler, pastoral age, Progressives were too practical to be attracted by that appeal. They admired the virtues of the past but understood that we could not go back. The Industrial Age, despite its defects, had made possible a material prosperity that was an essential precondition for civic progress. The issue was not “modernity, yes or no?” but rather how to reform our institutions and adapt our habits in this new world to secure the enduring values of our tradition.
Their outlook was activist and optimistic, not fatalist and despondent. The distinctive characteristic of the Progressives was their conviction that social evils would not remedy themselves and that it was foolhardy to wait passively for time’s cure. As Herbert Croly put it, they did not believe that the future would take care of itself.49 Neither should we.
Historian Richard McCormick, writing about the final years of the nineteenth century, might have been charting a course for Americans entering the twenty-first century:
Amid hard times, many Americans questioned the adequacy of their institutions and wondered whether democracy and economic equality were possible in an industrial society. Answering these questions with hope and hard work, some men and women began to experiment with new methods for solving the problems at hand. Hundreds poured their energies into settlement houses where they lived and worked among the urban poor. From their pulpits a new generation of ministers sought to make Christianity relevant to this world, not only the next, by aligning their churches actively on the side of the disadvantaged. Across the country the movement for municipal reform entered a new phase as businessmen and professionals tried to reach beyond their own ranks and enlist broad support for varied programs of urban improvement. Women’s clubs increasingly turned their attention from discussing litera- ture to addressing social problems. Although these middle- and upper-class endeavors would not reach a peak of strength for another decade, the seeds of Progressivism were planted during the depression of the 1890s.50
One striking feature of the revitalization of civic life in America in the last decades of the nineteenth century was a veritable “boom” in association building. The American penchant for clubs dated to the earliest years of the Republic.51 Some Progressive Era associations (like the Independent Order of Odd Fellows) dated from the first third of the nineteenth century, and many others dated from the Civil War and its aftermath. As we noted in chapter 14, the Knights of Pythias, the Grange, the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, the Ancient Order of United Workmen, and the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) all had been founded between 1864 and 1868. The nineteenth-century equivalent of the American Legion, the GAR, had well over three hundred thousand members by 1885.52
Historians agree, however, that on these earlier foundations was built a massive new structure of civic associations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.53 Social clubs were not new to American life, but community histories regularly note their proliferation in this period. A so-called club movement swept across the land in the late nineteenth century, emphasizing self-help and amateurism. In 1876 Henry Martyn Robert published Robert’s Rules of Order to bring order to the mushrooming anarchy of club and committee meetings. Handbooks appeared on how to establish a boys’ club or a women’s club. College fraternities and sororities expanded rapidly in the 1880s and 1890s.
In the last decades of the nineteenth century Americans created and joined an unprecedented number of voluntary associations. Beginning in the 1870s and extending into the 1910s, new types of association multiplied, chapters of preexisting associations proliferated, and associations increasingly federated into state and national organizations. In Peoria and St. Louis, Boston and Boise and Bath and Bowling Green, Americans organized clubs and churches and lodges and veterans groups. Everywhere, from the great entrepôt metropolises to small towns in the heartland, the number of voluntary associations grew even faster than the rapidly growing population. Thus the per capita density of associations—fraternal, religious, ethnic, labor, professional, civic, and so on—rose sharply through the second half of the nineteenth century. Then, shortly after the turn of the century, the density of associations began to stagnate. (Figure 94 shows the growth in the number of local organizations per capita in a sample of twenty-six diverse communities across the country.)54
Standing at the verge of another century, we can see that the foundation stone of twentieth-century civil society was set in place by the generation of
Figure 94: Associational Density in Twenty-six American Communities, 1840–1940
1870–1900. This period of institutional ferment ended in the early twentieth century, but then (as we have seen earlier in this book) a long period of infilling followed, as the organizations founded in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era added to their membership ranks. That figure 94 traces not merely an arc of association building, but an arc of civic creativity and entrepreneurship is suggested by the fact that it mirrors perfectly an explosive growth in U.S. local newspapers from 1880 to 1910, followed by a period of some stagnation between 1920 and 1940.55
During the years from 1870 to 1920 civic inventiveness reached a crescendo unmatched in American history, not merely in terms of numbers of clubs, but in the range and durability of the newly founded organizations. Political scientist Theda Skocpol and her colleagues have shown that half of all the largest mass membership organizations in two centuries of American history—associations that ever enrolled at least 1 percent of the adult male or female population—were founded in the decades between 1870 and 1920.56 As
figure 95 shows, the number of such large membership associations grew dramatically in the late nineteenth century, reaching a plateau in the 1920s from which it hardly budged during the rest of the twentieth century.
Indeed, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that most major, broad-gauged civic institutions of American life today were founded in several decades of exceptional
Figure 95: Founding and Cumulative Incidence of Large Membership Associations
social creativity around the turn of the twentieth century. Table 9 displays evidence for this generalization. From the Red Cross to the NAACP, from the Knights of Columbus to Hadassah, from Boy Scouts to the Rotary club, from the PTA to the Sierra Club, from the Gideon Society to the Audubon Society, from the American Bar Association to the Farm Bureau Federation, from Big Brothers to the League of Women Voters, from the Teamsters Union to the Campfire Girls, it is hard to name a major mainline civic institution in American life today that was not invented in these few decades.
Furthermore, organizations founded in that fecund period at the turn of the twentieth century have been unusually long-lived. For example, of all 506 contemporary national “societies and associations” listed in the Encarta 2000 World Almanac—large and small; with chapters and without; religious, professional, social, political, and so on—almost twice as many were founded in the th
irty years between 1890 and 1920 as in the thirty years between 1960 and 1990. Figure 96, which shows the distribution of founding dates for all 506 associations, reveals that to a remarkable extent American civil society at the close of the twentieth century still rested on organizational foundations laid at the beginning of the century.57 An age distribution of this sort—where the elderly outnumber the youthful—implies that the birth rate has declined, or that the infant mortality rate has risen, or both. In other words, compared with or-
Table 9: Social Capital Innovations, 1870–1920
Organization
Founding date
National Rifle Association
1871
Shriners
1872
Chautauqua Institute
1874
American Bar Association
1878
Salvation Army (U.S.)
1880
American Red Cross
1881
American Association of University Women
1881
Knights of Columbus
1882
American Federation of Labor
1886
International Association of Machinists [and later Aerospace Workers]
1888
Loyal Order of Moose
1888
Women’s Missionary Union (Southern Baptist)
1888
Hull House (other settlement houses founded within a few years)
1889
General Federation of Women’s Clubs
1890
United Mine Workers
1890
International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers
1891
International Longshoremen’s Association
1892
Sierra Club
1892
National Council of Jewish Women
1893
National Civic League
1894
American Bowling Congress
1895
Sons of Norway
1895
American Nurses Association
1896
Volunteers of America
1896
Irish-American Historical Society
1897
Parent-Teacher Association (originally National Congress of Mothers)
1897
Fraternal Order of Eagles
1898
Gideon Society
1899
Veterans of Foreign Wars
1899
National Consumers League
1899
International Ladies Garment Workers Union
1900
4-H
1901
Aid Association of Lutherans
1902
Goodwill Industries
1902
National Farmers Union
1902
Big Brothers
1903
International Brotherhood of Teamsters
1903
Sons of Poland
1903
National Audubon Society
1905
Rotary
1905
Sons of Italy
1905
Boys Clubs of America
1906
YWCA
1906
Big Sisters
1908
NAACP
1909
American Camping Association
1910
Boy Scouts
1910
Campfire Girls
1910
Urban League
1910
Girl Scouts
1912
Hadassah
1912
Community Chest (later United Way)
1913
Community foundations (Cleveland, Boston, Los Angeles, etc.)
1914-15
American Association of University Professors
1915
Junior Chamber of Commerce (Jaycees)
1915
Kiwanis
1915
Ku Klux Klan (second)
1915
Women’s International Bowling Congress
1916
Civitan
1917
Lions Club
1917
American Legion
1919
Optimists
1919
Business and Professional Women (BPW)
1919
American Civil Liberties Union
1920
American Farm Bureau Federation
1920
League of Women Voters
1920
Figure 96: Founding Dates of Contemporary U.S. Associations
ganizational entrepreneurs in our own time, organization builders at the turn of the century were more prolific or more successful or both.
Moreover, the newer groups listed in recent almanacs, however worthy, are either mailing list groups, like People for the American Way, or narrowly defined and evanescent, like the Association for Investment Management and Research, the International Society of Sand Castle Builders, New Age Walkers, or the Group Against Smokers’ Pollution (GASP). The groups founded between 1890 and 1920—which, after all, have endured for roughly a century by now—are more likely to be broad-based professional, civic, or service organizations, like the Boy Scouts, the National Association of Grocers, the Red Cross, or the Lions Club. (Is it really plausible to think that New Age Walkers or even GASP will still be around in 2099?)
To spot lessons in the burst of social-capital investment at the turn of the twentieth century, note first the wide variety of guises in which it appeared. America a century ago was a more gendered place than our own, and most of the organizations founded in that period were segregated by sex. It is thus not surprising that the most prominent example of organizational proliferation in that era were fraternal groups. Although Freemasonry had much earlier origins, the Gilded Age ushered in a period of massive expansion of fraternal groups. “Every fifth, or possibly every eighth, man you meet is identified with some fraternal organization,” W. S. Harwood wrote in 1897. By 1910, historian David Beito calculates, “a conservative estimate would be that one third of all adult males over age nineteen were members.”
In part, fraternalism represented a reaction against the individualism and anomie of this era of rapid social change, asylum from a disordered and uncertain world. Fraternal groups provided both material benefits (for example, life and health insurance) and social solidarity and ritual. Mutual aid, resting on the principle of reciprocity—today’s recipient, tomorrow’s donor—was a core feature of the groups. Historian Beito observes, “They successfully created vast social and mutual aid networks among the poor.” The nation’s largest fraternal organizations—the Masons, Odd Fellows, Knights of Pythias, Ancient Order of United Workmen, Modern Woodmen of America—each reported hundreds of thousands of members in local chapters across the land. Notes Beito, this “geographically extended structure … facilitated a kind of coinsurance to mitigate local crises such as natural disasters or epidemics.” Finally, Beito adds,
By joining a lodge, an initiate adopted, at least implicitly, a set of values. Societies dedicated themselves to the advancement of mutualism, self-reliance, business training, thrift, leadership skills, self-government, self-control, and good moral character. These values reflected a fraternal consensus that cut across such seemingly intractable divisions as race, gender, and income.
Men of all social ranks joined these societies. Fraternal organizations encompassed both middle-class and working-class members. They were typically segregated by race and gender. On the other hand, as Beito has shown, there were many comparable organizations for African Americans and women that served the same functions of mutual aid and moral uplift. The segregation may be repugnant to our values, but as an ascendant form of social capital, fraternal organization was definitely not limited to middle-class white males. As illustrated by the Knig
hts of Columbus, B’nai B’rith, and Prince Hall Freemasonry (an organization for black Masons), various ethnic groups tended to spawn their own fraternal organizations. By the early twentieth century fraternal organizations were challenged by new service clubs (Rotary, Kiwanis, Lions, the Jaycees, and the like) and by professional associations. These newer groups offered business contacts, a more modern face, and more outward civic zeal, though this came at the expense of the “brotherhood” of fraternalism.58
Among women, a more or less spontaneous grassroots crusade of 1873–74 across the Midwest reinvigorated the temperance movement and resulted in the formation of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), which quickly expanded as a vehicle for broader moral and social reform. Frances Willard, its activist leader, adopted a national policy of “Do Everything,” and WCTU women did—advocating prison reform, forming youth groups, estab- lishing kindergartens, even endorsing labor reform. In the 1890s the WCTU began to decline, and with Willard’s death in 1898, it narrowed its focus to temperance and prohibition. Meanwhile, however, new women’s groups began to appear, emerging in part from the many independent reading and study groups described in chapter 9. In 1890 this translocal network of women’s organizations was linked together to form the General Federation of Women’s Clubs. During this period women’s associations turned toward explicit involvement in public affairs, campaigning on issues like child labor, women’s employment, kindergartens, and myriad other social reforms including women’s suffrage.59
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