How Americans Can Come Together Again

A review of The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again, by Robert D. Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett.

IN THIS TIME of pandemic and sheltering in place, we all feel the need for community. We self-isolate to guard the health of ourselves and our friends—shunning our neighbors is, paradoxically, loving them. This cultural conundrum suits our individualistic age, and the story of how we came to this rampant individualism is told in The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again, by Robert D. Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett.

Putnam made his name 20 years ago with Bowling Alone, diagnosing America’s shrinking sense of community since the ’60s. He propagated the concept of “social capital” to name the value of our connections, to quantify our losses. Now, in The Upswing, he takes the story back further and speaks in simpler terms of “I” and “we.”

The post-’60s pendulum swing from community to individual is a well-trodden history, but Putnam and Garrett find a less-known counterpart in the preceding decades. The late 1800s, the Gilded Age, was every bit as self-centered as today. Then, from the Progressive Era, at the turn of the century, to the mid-’60s, there is a steady growth in community. The four core chapters of The Upswing trace this movement through a key lens—economic equality, political comity, societal solidarity, and cultural communitarianism—and then recount the steady decline over the last 50 years. Graphing these stories yields the overlapping bell curve on the book’s cover, with troughs of individualism on each end and a height of collectivism in the middle. The authors call this the “I-we-I” curve.

They set out to reveal how Americans can come together again, the way we did 120 years ago. The authors base their recommendations on the Progressive Era that started that upswing. We tend to associate that time with politics alone, with Teddy Roosevelt and certain legislative accomplishments. But, as Putnam and Garrett point out, progressivism went far deeper than that. It was a loose network of local leaders serving their communities, a spontaneous bottom-up movement to help those in need. These leaders worked at the personal level, sacrificing to bless their neighbors’ lives. Any national figureheads calling themselves progressives were following and borrowing, not leading or creating. That grassroots progressivism is the untold example that we need to match today.

That “we” includes America’s churches. The authors refer often to the social gospel movement, which served as the conscience of those working against the gilded grain. They knew that, ever since Abraham, when God blessed people he meant them to bless others rather than hoard all they could take. Now, when “we’re all in this together” is again the national sentiment, can churches again make spiritual space for collectivism? Our current circumstance—our isolation—could be the deepest point in this phase of the I-we-I curve, launching another upswing.