BOWLING ALONE
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Immigrant and ethnic associations illustrate other aspects of social capital building at the end of the last century. Generally speaking, emigration devalues one’s social capital, for most of one’s social connections must be left behind. Thus immigrants rationally strive to conserve social capital. So-called chain migration, whereby immigrants from a given locale in the “old country” settle near one another in their new homeland, was and remains one common coping strategy. In addition, the benevolent society for mutual aid was the bedrock of many immigrant communities, providing financial security, camaraderie, and even political representation. A member of a Chinese tong expressed the essential value of social capital for immigrants in a remark in the early twentieth century: “We are strangers in a strange country. We must have an organization (tong) to control our country fellows and develop our friendship.”60
According to historian Rowland Berthoff, “The immigrants, who had been accustomed to a more tightly knit communal life than almost any American could now recall, were quick to adopt the fraternal form of the American voluntary association in order to bind together their local ethnic communities against the unpredictable looseness of life in America.” Germans, who constituted the largest ethnic minority throughout this era, were especially associational. When Italians, Jews, Poles, and others from southern and Eastern Europe arrived around the turn of the century, they too quickly organized mutual aid societies, free loan societies, burial societies, social, sports, and recreational clubs, foreign-language newspapers, churches, and synagogues. By 1910 two-thirds of all Poles in America were said to belong to at least one of the approximately seven thousand Polish associations, and there were similar figures for Jews, Slovaks, Croats, and so on. In addition, national fraternal organizations, like B’nai B’rith, Hadassah, and the Knights of Columbus, attracted large numbers after the turn of the century.61
The building of associations among freed blacks followed much the same pattern, including mutual aid, burial, and social associations and black fraternal and women’s groups. Released from bondage, exercising newly acquired civic freedoms, and facing profound social dislocation, blacks founded and joined associations in great numbers in both North and South between 1870 and 1900. In his classic study of The Philadelphia Negro at the turn of the century, W. E. B. Du Bois emphasized the importance of black secret societies, such as the Odd Fellows and Freemasons, in furnishing “pastime from the monotony of work, a field for ambition and intrigue, a chance for parade, and insurance against misfortune”—virtually the same boons that attracted millions of whites into such organizations in these years. As we discussed in earlier chapters, the church played a role of unique importance in social-capital formation within the African American community. At the same time, associations arose that linked blacks and whites together in support of social reform—above all, the NAACP and the Urban League.62
Although the culture of industrial America was becoming in some respects more secular, religion played a substantial role in the civic revitalization of the period quite apart from the devotional activities of local parishes and congregations. The Salvation Army, an evangelical Protestant movement ministering to the unchurched urban poor with missionary zeal and unorthodox mass marketing—marches, brass bands, and “Hallelujah lassies”—spread from Britain to America in 1880. This was the epoch of the “Social Gospel” and “muscular Christianity.” The Social Gospel movement embodied a turn-of-the-century effort by liberal Protestant theologians and ministers to bring pressing social problems such as urban poverty to the attention of their middle-class parishioners. The Social Gospel represented a reaction against individualism, laissez-faire, and inequality, and an attempt to make religion relevant to new social and intellectual circumstances.
It was in this period that many churches took on the character of what religious historian E. Brooks Holifield terms “the social congregation.”
In the late nineteenth century, thousands of congregations transformed themselves into centers that not only were open for worship but also were available for Sunday school, concerts, church socials, women’s meetings, youth groups, girls’ guilds, boys’ brigades, sewing circles, benevolent societies, day schools, temperance societies, athletic clubs, scout troops, and nameless other activities…. Henry Ward Beecher advised the seminarians at Yale to “multiply picnics” in their parishes, and many congregations of every variety proceeded beyond picnics to gymnasiums, parish houses, camps, baseball teams, and military drill groups…. They also gave increasing amounts of money for purposes other than their own maintenance: both in the cities and in the country churches, Protestant congregations by 1923 gave 25 to 35 percent of their offerings to missions and benevolent causes, up from 14 to 18 percent at the turn of the century.63
Religious inspiration, self-improvement, and civic engagement were closely intertwined in this period. The Chautauqua movement, founded in upstate New York in 1874 as a summer institute for Methodist Sunday school teachers, spawned a nationwide series of extension schools, study groups, and tent lecture circuits, on which speakers ranging from Eugene Debs to Warren Harding regularly traveled. By 1919 one commentator estimated that “one out of every eleven persons in the country, man, woman, or child, attended a lyceum or Chautauqua program every year.” Radio (and later television) would provide more alluring entertainment, though less opportunity for grass-roots, cross-class civic deliberation.
Catholics tended to be even more sympathetic to the plight of the poor than did Protestants, not least because more Catholics belonged to the laboring classes. As always, the church played a special role in the black community. Evelyn Higginbotham, a leading historian of the black church, observes that “it housed a diversity of programs including schools, circulating libraries, concerts, restaurants, insurance companies, vocational training, athletic clubs— all catering to a population much broader than the membership of individual churches. The church … held political rallies, clubwomen’s conferences, and school graduations.” In short, a socially reformist Christianity was a central inspiration for much of the social activism of the period. On the verge of nominating Theodore Roosevelt as a full-throated reform candidate for president in 1912, delegates to the Progressive convention broke spontaneously into an emotional chorus of “Onward, Christian Soldiers!”64
This was also the era in which the organized labor movement became a serious force in American life. The Knights of Labor, based on the premise that workers of all types should be enrolled in “one big union,” had boomed from 28,100 members in 1880 to 729,000 six years later, but then fell back to 100,000 in 1890 and collapsed in 1894 in the face of internal conflicts between the skilled and unskilled, as well as between blacks and whites. Its leading role was soon taken over by the American Federation of Labor, along with a series of unions organized along craft and industrial lines—mine workers (founded in 1890), electrical workers (1891), longshoremen (1892), garment workers (1900), teamsters (1903), and so on. In barely seven years (1897–1904) nationwide union membership almost quadrupled from 3.5 percent of the nonagri-cultural workforce to 12.3 percent. This time union efforts proved more durable, and union membership would not fall below the new plateau for the rest of the century.65
Historians Thomas Cochran and William Miller make clear that unions were a part of their members’ social lives, not merely a means to gain material improvements:
Collective action by labor had roots far more complex than simple questions of wages and hours…. Labor unions were but a part of the mass movement into clubs, lodges and fraternal orders. Working for the union and empowering the delegates to do battle with the boss was a reassertion of the individual’s power over his environment. Mutual benefit policies gave a feeling of security in the face of industrial accidents and seasonal unemployment, while union socials, dances, picnics and lectures offered stimulating leisure-time activity.66
Because Progressive Era reformers were especially aware of the importance of youth development, that
was a special focus of their organizational energies. In an extraordinary burst of creativity, in less than a decade (1901–10) most of the nationwide youth organizations that were to dominate the twentieth century were founded—the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, Campfire Girls, the 4-H, Boys Clubs and Girls Clubs, Big Brothers and Big Sisters, and the American Camping Association, the organizational crystallization of the movement for summer camps that had rapidly developed in the previous two decades.
In these years, too, the kindergarten and the high school became recognizable elements in American public schooling and the playground a commonplace of American towns and cities. Beginning with the creation of sand gardens in Boston in 1885, organized playgrounds spread rapidly to New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and beyond, and by 1906 the Playground Association of America had been founded. Through the creation of such public recreation centers, reformers hoped to involve the entire family in wholesome leisure, rather than leaving kids unsupervised in dangerous streets. In the face of newly recognized child abuse, the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, founded in 1874 after the model of the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, was followed by similar organizations elsewhere, and by 1908 there were fifty-five local societies for the prevention of cruelty to children. In short, Americans of that era did not simply bemoan “the way kids are today,” or long nostalgically for the lost social control of the village. Rather, the Progressives devoted their intellectual, organizational, and financial energies to blazing constructive new paths for youth. In a stroke of marketing genius, the new organizations combined enduring social values—”A Scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous …”—with the pure fun of camping, sports, and play.67
One of the most notable social inventions of the Progressive Era were settlement houses, an idea imported from mid-Victorian England. Settlement houses hosted idealistic young middle-class men and women who lived for several years in urban slums seeking to bring education and “moral uplift” to the immigrant poor. Hull House, founded by Jane Addams in Chicago in 1889, was quickly followed by a proliferation of similar experiments in other cities— six by 1891, seventy-four by 1897, and approximately four hundred by 1910. Initially the primary purpose of the settlers was to teach English and the civic knowledge necessary for citizenship, but their activities broadened rapidly, as historian Mark Wahlgren Summers describes:
Settlement house workers set up debate societies and lecture series, taught slum mothers the importance of bathing and sanitation, trained them in manual skills to compete in the job market, and ran kindergartens and daycare centers for the children of working parents. Soon an art gallery joined Hull House’s main dormitory, then a coffeehouse, a gymnasium, and a nursery.68
Settlement houses made valuable contributions to the lives of the urban poor. Settlements like Pittsburgh’s Kingsley House ran summer “fresh air” programs for thousands of children and their parents. A Hull House club gave Benny Goodman his first clarinet. Ironically, however, the most significant long-term effect of the settlement house movement was not on the recipients of service, but on the service givers. Jane Addams had hoped that firsthand contact with the harsher realities of life would give meaning to the lives of young college graduates. The range of leaders who came out of the experience of the settlement houses was extraordinary—not merely scores of social reformers like Florence Kelley and Eleanor Roosevelt, but also future public-spirited business magnates like Gerard Swope (president of General Electric, 1922–1944) and Walter Sherman Gifford (president of AT&T, 1925–1948). Historian Richard McCormick summarizes the settlements’ longer-term impact:
For men and women alike, the settlements served as training grounds. From them, residents moved into every conceivable Progressive social reform: the improvement of tenement houses, the public playground movement, the crusade to abolish child labor, the demand for better hours and wages for working women, and many more…. Often their values and activities must have seemed alien to the immigrant working people whom they sought to assist. But no other Americans in the early 1900s tried so hard or so successfully to devise solutions for urban, industrial problems as did the women and men of the settlement movement.69
As a social movement, Progressivism was broad and variegated. As political philosopher Peter Levine has observed, “Any movement that attracted Upton Sinclair and J. Edgar Hoover, W. E. B. Du Bois and Robert Taft, Herbert Hoover and the young Franklin D. Roosevelt can hardly be called a movement at all.”70 Any simple interpretation thus risks being misleading and incomplete. From our point of view, however, the Progressive Era represented a civic communitarian reaction to the ideological individualism of the Gilded Age. Although it culminated in a specifically political movement, it began with social goals that were both broader and more immediate. In the successful efforts to establish playgrounds, civic museums, kindergartens, public parks, and the like, an important part of the rationale was to strengthen habits of cooperation, while not stifling individualism. Frederick Law Olmsted, designer of New York’s Central Park (opened in 1876) and first commissioner of Yosemite National Park (1890), crusaded for parks and recreation areas as a means to overcome isolation and suspicion. Similarly, one enthusiastic supporter of the playground movement exclaimed that playgrounds
are actually coming in considerable numbers and in all parts of the country, and everywhere they produce the same social results. That is, they bring about fine community spirit, awaken civic consciousness and co-operation, and make for a whole-souled companionship instead of individualism and isolation. If we could see the playground idea prevail … the gain to the nation through the ever increasing number of cheerful, contented, industrious, patriotic citizens will be far greater than if mines of fabulous wealth were uncovered or all the commerce of the world were brought under our flag.71
In short, though they did not generally use this terminology, an important goal of Progressives was to strengthen social capital.72 Recall that the term social capital was itself invented by a Progressive Era educator, L. J. Hanifan, expounding the value of community centers.
The impulse to educate and assimilate may have reached its greatest flowering in the kindergarten movement. Borrowed from an institution invented by German progressive educators, the first American kindergarten was launched by Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, a “lady bountiful” in Boston. By the late 1870s this kindergarten movement was spreading rapidly across the country, and by 1908 more than four hundred kindergartens were run by women’s clubs, temperance groups, churches, and other organizations. In their early years kindergartens were inspired by an innovative educational philosophy that encouraged childhood creativity. Their volunteer organizers sought both to provide a wholesome educational environment for immigrant children and to influence the child-rearing techniques of their parents. Around the kindergartens grew up an array of new forms of adult connectedness—mothers’ clubs, sewing clubs, and so on. Some of the most innovative features of the movement, including its legion of volunteers and its emphasis on childhood creativity, rather than just school readiness, fell away as kindergartens were increasingly incorporated into the public school system and kindergarten teachers strove for professional recognition; but an important residue remained. The National Congress of Mothers, formed in part from the kindergarten movement in 1897, went on to organize local school groups of parents and teachers. In 1924 the Congress of Mothers was formally renamed the National Congress of Parents and Teachers (later the PTA).73
As McCormick reveals, civic engagement was at the heart of the Progressives’ approach:
Progressivism owed much of its success to a distinctive method of reform, variations of which were adopted by the leaders of nearly every cause. They typically began by organizing a voluntary association, investigating a problem, gathering relevant facts, and analyzing them according to the precepts of one of the newer social sciences. From such an analysis a proposed solution would emerge, be popula
rized through campaigns of education and moral suasion, and—as often as not, if it seemed to work—be taken over by some level of government as a public function.74
Social entrepreneurs, both at the grass roots and nationally, built new organizations, often initially for nonpolitical purposes. An early example was the temperance movement, which aimed in part to create “a cohesive structure of reciprocal responsibility” in the face of industrialization and urbanization. Often too the new organizations were built on preexisting social networks, especially religious ones. In turn local and national reform movements were built on the foundations of the informal or nonpolitical groups.
A far from unique example: the transformation of women’s reading groups into first a civic movement and then a political force. During the depression of the 1890s, women’s reading groups expanded their agenda to include social service and advocacy. The General Federation of Women’s Clubs (GFWC), founded in 1890, campaigned for government food inspection, stricter housing codes, safer drinking water, workplace protection for women, and services for the poor, sick, disabled, and children. The National Congress of Mothers, established to educate mothers about child rearing, then sought public support for infant health clinics, juvenile courts, probation homes for children awaiting trial, kindergartens, and playgrounds. Barred by segregation from joining the GFWC, African Americans formed the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs of America in 1896, campaigned against alcoholic consumption, and supported nurseries, kindergartens, and homes for unwed mothers. “Woman’s place is in the Home,” wrote suffragist Rheta Childe Dorr in 1910, “but Home is not contained within the four walls of an individual home. Home is the community.”75 The suffrage movement, reaching across class lines (though generally not race lines), was merely the most visible culmination of feminist organizing at the turn of the century.