55. Martha E. Kropf and Stephen Knack, “Viewers Like You: Community Norms and Contributions to Public Broadcasting,” unpub. ms. (Kansas City: University of Missouri, Kansas City Department of Political Science, 1999).
56. Jennifer M. Coston, Terry Cooper, and Richard A. Sundeen, “Response of Community Organizations to the Civil Unrest in Los Angeles,” Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 22 (1993): 357, and Krzysztof Kaniasty and Fran H. Norris, “In Search of Altruistic Community: Patterns of Social Support Mobilization Following Hurricane Hugo,” American Journal of Community Psychology, 23 (1995): 447–477. The literature on small-group solidarity and military effectiveness is enormous, and much of it is directly relevant to social-capital theory. See Edward A. Shils and Morris Janowitz, “Cohesion and Disintegration in the Wehrmacht in World War II,” Public Opinion Quarterly 12 (1948): 280–315; Samuel A. Stouffer et al., The American Soldier (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1949); and Anthony Kellett, Combat Motivation: The Behavior of Soldiers in Battle (Boston: Kluwer-Nijhoff, 1982).
CHAPTER 22: THE DARK SIDE OF SOCIAL CAPITAL
1. Henry David Thoreau, “Life without Principle,” Atlantic Monthly XII (1863): 484–495, as quoted in McWilliams, Idea of Fraternity in America, 296.
2. Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1950 [1922]): 203. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 3rd ed. (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1992), defines “babbitt” as “a member of the middle class whose attachment to its business and social ideals is such as to make that person a model of narrow-mindedness and self-satisfaction.”
3. The Collected Works of Walter Bagehot, ed. Norman St John-Stevas (London: The Economist, 1965–1986), vol. iii, 243.
4. Gallup Poll Social Audit (various years); John L. Sullivan, James E. Piereson, and George E. Marcus, Political Tolerance and American Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), esp. 26–53; Glenn, “Social Trends in the United States”; John Mueller, “Trends in Political Tolerance,” Public Opinion Quarterly 52 (1988): 1–25; Davis, “Changeable Weather in a Cooling Climate atop the Liberal Plateau”; Benjamin I. Page and Robert Y. Shapiro, The Rational Public: Fifty Years of Trends in Americans’ Policy Preferences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Thomas C. Wilson, “Trends in Tolerance Toward Rightist and Leftist Groups, 1976–1988,” Public Opinion Quarterly 58 (1994): 539–556; George E. Marcus, John L. Sullivan, Elizabeth Theiss-Morse, and Sandra L. Wood, With Malice Toward Some: How People Make Civil Liberties Judgments (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Howard Schumann, Charlotte Steeh, Lawrence Bobo, and Maria Krysan, Racial Attitudes in America: Trends and Interpretations, rev. ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997). Scholars have hotly debated whether tolerance in general has grown, or only tolerance toward some specific (leftist) groups; the current consensus seems to be that tolerance has shifted but has also grown in general.
5. Schudson, The Good Citizen; Alan Wolfe, One Nation After All (New York: Viking Press, 1998).
6. Sources for data in the previous two paragraphs: Schumann et al.,Racial Attitudes in America, 104–105; 117; archives of Pew Research Center for the People & the Press (www.people-press.org/); Gallup Poll Social Audit (various years); and author’s analysis of General Social Survey and DDB Needham Life Style archives. Researchers disagree about whether the favorable trends in white responses to questions about race might simply reflect political correctness rather than real changes in behavior, but most believe that the changes are too big and too consistent to be written off.
7. I draw this image from Amy Gutmann’s articulate critique of communitarian political philosophy: “Communitarian Critics of Liberalism,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 14 (1985): 308–322, at 319.
8. Schudson, The Good Citizen, 307 (emphasis added).
9. Sources for evidence in previous two paragraphs: author’s analysis of General Social Survey archive and the 1996 Adult Civic Involvement survey of the National Household Education Survey of the U.S. Department of Education; Berry, Portney, and Thomson, Rebirth of Urban Democracy, 220–221; Samuel C. Stouffer, Communism, Conformity and Civil Liberties (New York: Doubleday, 1956); Clyde Z. Nunn, Harry J. Crockett, and J. Allen Williams Jr., Tolerance for Nonconformity (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1978); Herbert McClosky and Alida Brill, Dimensions of Tolerance: What Americans Believe about Civil Liberties (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1983); James L. Gibson and Richard D. Bingham, Civil Liberties and Nazis: The Skokie Free Speech Controversy (New York: Praeger, 1985); Page and Shapiro, Rational Public; John L. Sullivan, Patrick Walsh, Michal Shamir, David G. Barnum, and James L. Gibson, “Why Are Politicians More Tolerant? Selective Recruitment and Socialization Among Political Elites in New Zealand, Israel, Britain, and the United States,” British Journal of Political Science 23 (1993): 51–76. Not all studies have found a positive correlation between tolerance and civic engagement, but none have found a negative correlation. Lori Weber, The Effects of Democratic Deliberation on Political Tolerance (Ph.D. diss., University of Colorado, 1999), 24–42, drawing on the surveys from Verba, Schlozman, and Brady, Voice and Equality, found that “social” forms of political participation (such as attending meetings) are associated with increased political tolerance, whereas “individual” forms of political participation (such as contacting officials) are not. On the other hand, dozens of studies have linked religious participation to political intolerance, controlling for potential confounding variables; see, for example, Stouffer, Communism, Conformity and Civil Liberties; Nunn, Crockett, and Williams, Tolerance for Nonconformity; and Kathleen Beatty and Oliver Walter, “Religious Preference and Practice: Reevaluating Their Impact on Political Tolerance,” Public Opinion Quarterly 48 (1984): 318–329.
10. I have aggregated at the state level all three measures of tolerance outlined in table 7. Reasonably reliable estimates of average tolerance are available for forty-five states. In the interests of economy, figure 91 combines all three measures of tolerance—for gender and racial diversity and for civil liberties—into a single index, because across the states all those measures are quite closely correlated. However, precisely the same pattern applies to each measure taken separately. Figure 91 presents the bivariate relationship between social capital and tolerance, but the link is highly robust in multivariate analysis and is equally strong for any of the individual measures of tolerance taken separately. Controlling for education, income, race, urbanism, income inequality, and even region (north/south), the Social Capital Index is significantly correlated with tolerance for gender equality (r = .48), with support for civil liberties (r = .44), with racial tolerance among whites (r = .45), and the composite index of tolerance shown in figure 91 (r = .50). Social capital is a far stronger predictor of state-level tolerance than any or all of these standard socioeconomic factors.
11. Other researchers have also noted that the growth in tolerance is driven mostly by differences between the prewar and postwar generations, rather than by differences among more recent generations. See Davis, “Changeable Weather in a Cooling Climate atop the Liberal Plateau”; Thomas C. Wilson, “Trends in Tolerance toward Rightist and Leftist Groups, 1976–1988: Effects of Attitude Change and Cohort Succession,” Public Opinion Quarterly 58 (1994): 539–556; Schumann et al., Racial Attitudes in America; Kevin A. Hill, “Generations and Tolerance: Is Youth Really a Liberalizing Factor?” in Craig and Bennett, After the Boom; and Kenneth H. Stehlik-Barry, “The Growth of Political Tolerance 1976–96,” paper prepared for presentation at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association (Boston, September 3–6, 1998).
12. Gallup Social Audit survey, 1997, available at www.gallup.com/Special_Reports/black-white.htm.
13. Amy Gutmann, “An Introductory Essay,” 19, 25.
14. Robert D. Plotnick, Eugene Smolensky, Eirik Evenhouse, and Siobhan Reilly, “The Twentieth Century Record of Inequality and Poverty in the United States” (Madison, Wisc.: University of Wisc
onsin Institute for Research on Poverty Discussion Paper no. 1166-98, 1998); Williamson and Lindert, American Inequality.
15. On the growth of economic inequality in the last three decades of the twentieth century, see Edward N. Wolff, Top Heavy: A Study of the Increasing Inequality of Wealth in America (New York: Twentieth Century Fund Press, 1995); Mishel, Bernstein, and Schmitt, State of Working America, 37–90.
16. The measure of economic equality used in figure 92 is based on the distribution of income; specifically, it is 1- the Gini index of income inequality. Many different measures of economic equality are available, but any reasonable alternative sustains the same basic conclusion: Social capital and economic equality are positively correlated. The index of civic equality used in figure 93 is based on class differences in rates of political participation, as measured in the Roper Social and Political Trends surveys. For each of the twelve forms of political participation measured in those surveys—signing petitions, attending public meetings, and so on—we constructed the ratio of the logged incidence in the top quintile of the income distribution to the bottom quintile of the income distribution. These various measures of civic inequality were themselves highly intercorrelated, and from them (excluding the one based on running for office, which was abnormally distributed) we constructed a factor score. The scoring was reversed so that a positive number signifies relatively high civic equality or, in other words, relatively little difference in the frequency of civic participation between the wealthiest and the poorest fifth of the population. I am very grateful to Bruce P. Kennedy for constructing this measure, although I alone am responsible for its use here.
17. Private communication.
18. I am grateful to Lara Putnam for clarifying these dilemmas.
CHAPTER 23: LESSONS OF HISTORY: THE GILDED AGE AND THE PROGRESSIVE ERA
1. What follows, while consistent with conventional historical accounts, makes no pretense to be a comprehensive survey of the history of America between 1865 and 1920. For overviews of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, see Nell Irvin Painter, Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877–1919 (New York: Norton, 1987); Richard L. McCormick, “Public Life in Industrial America, 1877–1917,” in The New American History, ed. Eric Foner (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 93–117; John Whiteclay Chambers II, The Tyranny of Change: America in the Progressive Era, 1890–1920 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992); Sean Dennis Cashman, America in the Gilded Age: From the Death of Lincoln to the Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, 3rd ed. (New York: New York University Press, 1993); The Gilded Age: Essays on the Origins of Modern America, ed. Charles W. Calhoun (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1996); Mark Wahlgren Summers, The Gilded Age: or, The Hazard of New Functions (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1997); Steven J. Diner, A Very Different Age: Americans of the Progressive Era (New York: Hill & Wang, 1998); Sidney M. Milkis and Jerome M. Mileur, eds., Progressivism and the New Democracy (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999). Classic interpretations include Benjamin Parke De Witt, The Progressive Movement: A Non-partisan, Comprehensive Discussion of Current Tendencies in American Politics (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968 [1915]); Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985 [1955]); Samuel P. Hays, The Response to Industrialism, 1885–1914 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957); Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order: 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967); Thomas Bender, Toward an Urban Vision: Ideas and Institutions in Nineteenth Century America (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982); and Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America: 1820–1920 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978). As a nonhistorian, I repeat the plea of the English sociologist T. H. Marshall: “It is the business of historians to sift [a] miscellaneous collection of dubious authorities and give to others the results of their careful professional assessment. And surely they will not rebuke the sociologist for putting his faith in what historians write.” T. H. Marshall, Class, Citizenship, and Social Development (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1964), 35.
2. Historical Statistics of the United States, vol. 2, 958–959; Cashman, America in the Gilded Age, 100; Calhoun, Gilded Age, xii; and Howard Husock, “Elks Clubs, Settlement Houses, Labor Unions and the Anti-Saloon League: Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century America Copes with Change,” John F. Kennedy School of Government case no. C105–97–1381.0 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, 1997), 1–2. In this chapter I draw often on this summary; I am grateful to Howard Husock for his skilled presentation of our evidence, as well as his extensive knowledge of the Progressive Era.
3. Quoted in Cashman, America in the Gilded Age, 19.
4. Cashman, America in the Gilded Age, 8–9, 23. On “island communities,” see Wiebe, Search for Order.
5. Diner, Very Different Age, 49; Summers, Gilded Age, 283; Ralph Nelson, Merger Movements in American Industry: 1895–1956 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1959); Devra L. Golbe and Lawrence J. White, “Mergers and Acquisitions in the U.S. Economy: An Aggregate and Historical Overview,” in Mergers and Acquisitions, ed. Alan J. Auerbach (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 25–47, esp. figures 9.7 and 9.8 at 273 and 275; Mergers and Acquisitions, ed. Gregory Marchildon (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Patrick Gaughan, Mergers, Acquisitions, and Corporate Restructurings (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1996). For recent data, see Mergerstat at www.mergerstat.com/free_reports/free_reports_m_and_a_activity.html.
6. Glenn Porter, “Industrialization and the Rise of Big Business,” in Calhoun, Gilded Age, 9, 14–15.
7. Thomas C. Cochran and William Miller, The Age of Enterprise: A Social History of Industrial America (New York: Harper, 1961), 230, as cited in Husock, “Elks Clubs, Settlement Houses,” 2; Historical Statistics of the United States, vol. 1, 224–225.
8. Wahlgren Summers, Gilded Age, 138, 122; Cashman, America in the Gilded Age, 354; Painter, Standing at Armageddon, xix–xx; Eric Arnesen, “American Workers and the Labor Movement in the Late Nineteenth Century,” in Calhoun, Gilded Age, 42–43; Williamson and Lindert, American Inequality; and Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz, “The Returns to Skill across the Twentieth Century United States,” unpublished ms. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Department of Economics, 1999). Economic historians seem to agree that inequality rose from the 1830s or 1840s to roughly 1910 (with the fastest increase coming early in that period), that it leveled off and perhaps declined from roughly 1910 to roughly 1940, that it certainly declined from roughly 1940 to roughly 1970, and that it certainly rose from roughly 1970 on. Reductions in inequality were concentrated around World Wars I and II.
9. Arnesen, “American Workers,” 42; McCormick, “Public Life,” 103. Real GNP per capita grew every year between 1896 and 1912 except for modest recessions in 1902, 1904, and 1907–1908, according to Historical Statistics, vol. 1, 224.
10. Historical Statistics, vol. 1, 8, 11–12; Robert G. Barrows, “Urbanizing America,” in Calhoun, Gilded Age, 91–110. “Urban” was defined by the Census Bureau in this period as any place with a population of 2,500 or more. Roughly half of the new city dwellers were from the rural U.S. and half were foreign immigrants.
11. Historical Statistics, vol. 1, 105–06; Calhoun, Gilded Age, xiii; Cashman, America in the Gilded Age, 146. Despite these waves of immigrants, the foreign-born fraction of the population rose only from 13.2 percent in 1860 to 14.5 percent in 1910. In 1997 that figure was 9.7 percent: Dianne Schmidley and Herman A. Alvarado, “The Foreign-Born Population in the United States: March 1997 (Update),” Current Population Reports, no. P20–507 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Census Bureau, March 1998).
12. Diner, Very Different Age, 5.
13. Cashman, America in the Gilded Age, 92; see also Diner, A Very Different Age, 101.
14. Husock, “Elks Clubs, Settlement Houses… ,” 4, citing Cochran and Miller, Age of Enterprise; Painter, Standing at Armageddon, xx.
1
5. Painter, Standing at Armageddon, 172; McCormick, “Public Life in Industrial America,” 103; Cashman, America in the Gilded Age, 20; Wahlgren Summers, Gilded Age, 4.
16. Quoted in Cashman, America in the Gilded Age, 354.
17. Quoted in James T. Patterson, America in the Twentieth Century: A History, 2nd ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), 33.
18. Stacy A. Cordery, “Women in Industrializing America,” in Calhoun, Gilded Age, 111–135.
19. Henry Adams,The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961 [1918]), 53.
20. Husock, “Elks Clubs, Settlement Houses…,” 4; Painter, Standing at Armageddon, xxii; Cashman, America in the Gilded Age, 148. Reliable crime statistics for the nineteenth century are scant, but homicide—generally considered a bellwether of violent crime—sharply increased during the first decades of the twentieth century. See Ted Robert Gurr, “Historical Trends in Violent Crime: A Critical Review of the Evidence,” in Crime and Justice: An Annual Review of Research, vol. 3, ed. Michael Tonry and Norval Morris (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 295–353, esp. figure 2 at 325; and Bureau of Justice Statistics, “Homicide Trends in the U.S.,” at www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs.
21. Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives (New York: Penguin Books, 1997 [1890]), 6.
22. As cited in Painter, Standing at Armageddon, xxii–xxiii.
23. Josiah Strong, The Twentieth Century City (New York: Baker and Taylor, 1898), 181, as quoted in Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York: Knopf, 1955), 175.
BOWLING ALONE Page 74