The successive waves of labor mobilization provide another illustration of the interweaving of movements for social solidarity and movements for political reform. The efforts to organize labor in the closing decades of the nineteenth century were hardly tea parties, for this was the most vivid period of class conflict in American history. “The eighties dripped with blood,” recalled Ida Tarbell in her memoirs. Despite recurrent efforts to broaden labor’s agenda to encompass social reform and class struggle, the most durable nineteenth-century unions had aimed primarily at improved conditions of employment. The burst of unionization at the turn of the century, however, culminated in the election of fifteen unionists to Congress in 1910, and with the threat of “socialism” hanging in the air, the political establishment moved to encompass labor reform among their objectives. Here too alliances across class lines were important. The National Consumers League, founded in 1899 by Florence Kelley, a Hull House settler, aimed to enable middle-class women shoppers to boycott firms that failed to provide decent working conditions for women employees.76
As a social movement, Progressivism evades any simple classification as “top down” or “bottom up.” Many of the new fraternal, civic, and reform organizations represented the recruiting efforts of national headquarters and national leaders, while others sprang up in response to local initiatives. Some, like the 4-H and the Grange, were actually the creation of the federal government. More important still was the lateral diffusion of initiatives from one community to another. As political scientist Theda Skocpol notes, “This method of organizational expansion was very reminiscent of the techniques used by Methodist and Baptist circuit-riding clergy to disseminate new congregations, like wildfire, across the pre–Civil War United States.”77
Lateral learning was common in the diffusion of the Progressives’ ideas for increasing civic engagement. Initiatives born in one part of the country were picked up and developed in other communities from whence they spread further. We can see this process in action by tracing the evolution of a single civic innovation. In the 1890s, modeled in part on the lectures of scholars like John Dewey at Hull House, the Universities of Wisconsin and Chicago developed university extension schools to deepen ties between the university and adult citizens. In the first decade of the new century Tom Johnson, the renowned Progressive mayor of Cleveland, conceived the idea of periodic tent meetings to draw citizens and political leaders into informal give-and-take on public issues. By 1907, building on these initiatives, civic organizations in Rochester, New York, had established “social centers” in the public schools for regular, publicly funded popular debate about local issues.
Within three years hundreds of such meetings were being held annually in Rochester, as recorded in the Democrat and Chronicle of March 20, 1910: “This week’s programs in the social centers and civic clubs is a varied one, with evenings devoted to discussions of business conditions, health, art, social organization, high prices, the liquor question and neighborhood problems.” Participation in these civic deliberations cut widely across class and educational lines: an observer in 1911 reported laconically “the topic being the commission form of government, a Polish washwoman and the president of the WCTU were opposed by a day cleaner and a college professor.” By 1916 the “social center” (or “community center”) movement had spread across the country, reaching West Virginia, where, as we have seen, it evoked from L. J. Hanifan the first recorded reference to “social capital.”78
As this story illustrates, although the major metropolitan and intellectual centers of New York, Boston, and their ilk were part of the process of civic renovation, much of the creative action took place in communities all across the heartland, as local activists intent on rebuilding community ties in the new century learned from one another what worked. In fact, the wave of association building of the late nineteenth century actually had begun in the small towns of the heartland, not in the cosmopolitan metropolis. The high school movement spread most rapidly in small towns in the Midwest and West. Historians Arthur Link and Richard McCormick may exaggerate slightly, but they capture the distinctiveness of the movement when they conclude, “Progressivism was the only reform movement ever experienced by the whole American nation.”79
As a political movement, the Progressives were responsible for the most thoroughgoing renovation of public policies and institutions in American history, rivaled only by the New Deal. The secret ballot (1888, Kentucky); popular initiative and referendum (1898, South Dakota); presidential primary elections (1900, Minnesota); the city manager system (1903, Galveston, Texas); the direct election of senators (1913); women’s suffrage (1893, Colorado; 1920 in the U.S. Constitution)—in a few short decades all these fundamental features of our political process were introduced into state and local politics and then gradually diffused nationwide. Quite apart from these basic political reforms, this was also the most intense period of local administrative reform in our history.80
Nationally, the Progressives laid the institutional cornerstones for fiscal and monetary policy with the Federal Reserve (1913), the income tax (1913), and the Bureau of the Budget (1921). The first consumer protection legislation in American history (the Food and Drug Administration and federal meat inspection in 1906, the Federal Trade Commission in 1914); the first environmental legislation (the national forest system in 1905 and the national park system in 1913); the creation of the Departments of Commerce and Labor (1913) and the General Accounting Office (1921); strengthened antitrust regulations (1903); child labor laws (1916); the eight-hour day (beginning with the railways in 1916); workmen’s compensation (1916); first federal regulation of the communications industry (1910); the U.S. Bureau of Investigation (1908; renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1935); federal campaign finance regulation (1907); the biggest trade liberalization in more than half a century (1913); the foundations for federal water policy in the western states (1902); and Mother’s Day (1914)—hardly an area of public policy was left untouched by the Progressive avalanche of policy initiatives.81 Typically, innovation began with experimental reforms in states and local communities, then gathered strength as it thundered toward Washington.
lessons of history: the gilded age and the progressive era 399
Not all these reforms proved as successful as their advocates had expected, and a few in retrospect look positively pernicious. Nevertheless, taken as a whole, this package of reforms constituted an impressive achievement within a constitutional system that is built to thwart radical change. This achievement rested on a broad-based, grassroots, nationwide political movement that swept through both major political parties in the first decade of the century. In turn, that political mobilization drew on the energies and organizations created during the social capital building of the previous several decades.
Generally speaking, the wave began in the last third of the nineteenth century with organizations (like fraternal and cultural groups) focused primarily on the private concerns of their members, including leisure and self-help. In the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth century these associations (and newer ones spawned in that period) gradually turned their attention to community issues and eventually to political reform. The earlier, inward-oriented phase of creating social networks paved the way for the later, outward-oriented phase of political action.82 Like any stylized historical generalization, this interpretation could be exaggerated, since there were public facets of the Shriners and private facets of the League of Women Voters, but the central fact is that investment in social capital was not an alternative to, but a prerequisite for, political mobilization and reform. That too is a crucial lesson for our own times.
WE NEED NOT WHITEWASH the Progressive Era, for debates about the legacy of this movement have preoccupied historians for nearly a century now. Its critics, in the ascendancy among professional historians for much of the last half century, note the propensity of Progressives to favor a technocratic elitism. In proposing
“professional,” “expert” solutions to social problems, many Progressives adopted an antipolitical stance that had the effect, if not the intention, of demobilizing public participation. After 1896 electoral turnout began a descent from which it has yet to recover. Partisan politics, and especially the party machine, was the great enemy for Progressives, who generally preferred “boards” and “commissions” dominated de facto by middle-class professionals. Progressives were conscious of the corruption and dependency inherent in the machine, but they were blind to the role of the machine in allowing access to the public sphere for the otherwise powerless, especially the immigrant. Historian Philip Ethington has observed that “among the many ironies of the so-called Progressive Era (circa 1890s–1920s), the saddest perhaps is the deep and enduring damage done to democracy by her closest friends,” for instead of the deliberative democracy advocated by some Progressives, we ended up instead with the direct, plebiscitary democracy pushed successfully by others.83
An even greater debate has raged among historians about whether the Progressive Era was about social reform or social control or social revolution. Some scholars have argued that middle-class reformers organized voluntary associations to exert social control over rambunctious, uncouth working-class immigrants. Other researchers, while acknowledging that Progressive leadership came from the middle class, emphasize the benevolent aspect of the new institutions, aimed to strengthen immigrant and working-class communities and reduce social inequality. Still others have noted that middle-class reformers were often prodded to action by the demands of their working-class “clients,” so that to reduce this dynamic to top-down social control is to ignore the intentions and agency of those whose lives were being changed. “Fear of working-class violence explains much of what has been called progressive reform,” concludes historian Painter.84
Even those who celebrated the new associationism and its political consequences often recognized the potential for excessive social control and subordination of the individual.85 The communitarian impulses of the Progressive Era could easily go much too far: during World War I William Dudley Foulke, president of the National Municipal League, suggested that the draft should be used for public service purposes after the war:
The public welfare may require of some that they shall marry and rear children for the sake of the community. They must be ready to do it whether they so desire or not. It may require of some, that they shall give up the use of intoxicating liquor or discontinue some other habit that involves extravagance or demoralization … whether there is a prohibitory law or not. It may require periods of training either for military service or in organizing the industries of state or city for purposes of defense or social betterment, and those on whom the call is made must be willing to sacrifice their private interests and respond to the appeal.86
This “big brother-ism,” American style, illustrates the risk of an overdone communitarianism.
Even more troubling is the fact that racial segregation and social exclusion were, as we have seen, so central to the public agenda of the Progressive Era. Jim Crow was legalized in 1896, the NAACP was founded in 1909 to attack legal race discrimination, and in 1915 the second Ku Klux Klan was founded (in part) to enforce it, by illegal means if necessary.87 Not all the “civic innovations” of the Progressive Era were beneficent and progressive. Those of us who seek inspiration for contemporary America in that earlier epoch of reform must attend to the risk that emphasizing community exacerbates division and exclusion. Since social capital is inevitably easier to foster within homogeneous communities, emphasis on its creation may inadvertently shift the balance in society away from bridging social capital and toward bonding social capital. That is one of the most instructive lessons from that earlier era.
But there are other, more positive lessons as well. The institutions of civil society formed between roughly 1880 and 1910 have lasted for nearly a century. In those few decades the voluntary structures of American society assumed modern form. Essentially, the trends toward civic disengagement reviewed in section II of this book register the decay of that very structure over the last third of the twentieth century. Still, in human affairs it is no small feat to create a set of institutions that can endure and serve society through a century of kaleidoscopic social and economic transformation.
For all the difficulties, errors, and misdeeds of the Progressive Era, its leaders and their immediate forebears in the late nineteenth century correctly diagnosed the problem of a social-capital or civic engagement deficit. It must have been tempting in 1890 to say, “Life was much nicer back in the village. Everybody back to the farm.” They resisted that temptation to reverse the tide, choosing instead the harder but surer path of social innovation. Similarly, among those concerned about the social-capital deficit today, it would be tempting to say, “Life was much nicer back in the fifties. Would all women please report to the kitchen, and turn off the TV on the way?” Social dislocation can easily breed a reactionary form of nostalgia.
On the contrary, my message is that we desperately need an era of civic inventiveness to create a renewed set of institutions and channels for a reinvigo-rated civic life that will fit the way we have come to live. Our challenge now is to reinvent the twenty-first-century equivalent of the Boy Scouts or the settlement house or the playground or Hadassah or the United Mine Workers or the NAACP. What we create may well look nothing like the institutions Progressives invented a century ago, just as their inventions were not carbon copies of the earlier small-town folkways whose passing they mourned. We need to be as ready to experiment as the Progressives were. Willingness to err—and then correct our aim—is the price of success in social reform.
Looking back from the doorstep of the twenty-first century, it is hard to imagine a time without Boy Scouts, but a century ago it must have seemed fanciful that the twentieth-century equivalent of Tom Sawyer’s antebellum gang on the Mississippi sandbar would involve beanies, merit badges, and the Scout’s oath. Nevertheless, institutions like the Boy Scouts provided a new and successful forum for youthful community building. So too some solutions to today’s civic deficit may seem initially preposterous, but we should be wary of straining our civic inventiveness through conventional filters. The specific reforms of the Progressive Era are no longer appropriate for our time, but the practical, enthusiastic idealism of that era—and its achievements—should inspire us.
CHAPTER 24
Toward an Agenda for Social Capitalists
“TO EVERYTHING THERE IS A SEASON, and a time for every purpose under the heaven,” sang the Hebrew poet in Ecclesiastes. When Pete Seeger put that ancient maxim to folk music in the 1960s, it was, perhaps, a season for Americans to unravel fetters of intrusive togetherness. As we enter a new century, however, it is now past time to begin to reweave the fabric of our communities.
At the outset of our inquiry I noted that most Americans today feel vaguely and uncomfortably disconnected. It seemed to many as the twentieth century closed, just as it did to the young Walter Lippmann at the century’s opening, that “we have changed our environment more quickly than we know how to change ourselves.” We tell pollsters that we wish we lived in a more civil, more trustworthy, more collectively caring community. The evidence from our inquiry shows that this longing is not simply nostalgia or “false consciousness.” Americans are right that the bonds of our communities have withered, and we are right to fear that this transformation has very real costs. The challenge for us, however, as it was for our predecessors moving from the Gilded Age into the Progressive Era, is not to grieve over social change, but to guide it.
I want to thank Tom Sander for help in preparing this chapter.
Creating (or re-creating) social capital is no simple task. It would be eased by a palpable national crisis, like war or depression or natural disaster, but for better and for worse, America at the dawn of the new century faces no such galvanizing crisis. The ebbing of community over the last several decades has been silent an
d deceptive. We notice its effects in the strained interstices of our private lives and in the degradation of our public life, but the most serious consequences are reminiscent of the old parlor puzzle: “What’s missing from this picture?” Weakened social capital is manifest in the things that have vanished almost unnoticed—neighborhood parties and get-togethers with friends, the unreflective kindness of strangers, the shared pursuit of the public good rather than a solitary quest for private goods. Naming this problem is an essential first step toward confronting it, just as labeling “the environment” allowed Americans to hear the silent spring and naming what Betty Friedan called “the problem that has no name” enabled women to articulate what was wrong with their lives.
Naming our problem, however—and even gauging its dimensions, diagnosing its origins, and assessing its implications, as I have sought to do in this book—is but a preliminary to the tougher challenge. In a world irrevocably changed, a world in which most women are employed, markets global, individuals and firms mobile, entertainment electronic, technology accelerating, and major war (thankfully) absent, how can we nevertheless replenish our stocks of social capital? Like most social issues, this one has two faces—one institutional and one individual. To use the convenient market metaphor, we need to address both the supply of opportunities for civic engagement and the demand for those opportunities.
Just as did our predecessors in the Progressive Era, we need to create new structures and policies (public and private) to facilitate renewed civic engagement. As I shall explain in more detail in a moment, leaders and activists in every sphere of American life must seek innovative ways to respond to the eroding effectiveness of the civic institutions and practices that we inherited. At the same time we need to fortify our resolve as individuals to reconnect, for we must overcome a familiar paradox of collective action. Even if I privately would prefer a more vibrant community, I cannot accomplish that goal on my own—it’s not a meeting, after all, if only I show up, and it’s not a club if I’m the only member. It is tempting to retreat to private pleasures that I can achieve on my own. But in so doing, I make it even harder for you to solve your version of the same problem. Actions by individuals are not sufficient to restore community, but they are necessary.
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