In which I argue that a central aspect of American exceptionalism, American civic life, is nearing collapse in Fishtown.
IN THE MID-1950S, Edward Banfield, who would become one of America’s most distinguished political scientists, was an obscure young scholar who had spent nine months living in a southern Italian town that he would later call Montegrano. He came away from that experience with an insight into the nature of communities. The town where he had lived didn’t work because it was run on the basis of what he called amoral familism. Amoral familism was based on a single decision rule that he decoded as follows: “Maximize the material, short-run advantage of the nuclear family; assume that all others will do likewise.”1 That insight and his elaboration of it made the book he wrote about the town, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society, a classic.
Amoral familism didn’t leave much room for altruism or even cooperation. An order of nuns struggled to maintain an orphanage in an ancient monastery, but the people of Montegrano contributed nothing to its support, even though the children in the orphanage came from their region. The monastery needed work, and there were local stonemasons who had free time, but none of them donated even a day’s work to help with repairs. Montegrano had two churches, but neither played any part in the secular life of the community. In fact, there was just one “association” in the whole town—twenty-five upper-class men who maintained a clubroom where they could play cards.
As he searched for a way to introduce Montegrano to his American readers of the 1950s, Banfield recalled another town where he had done fieldwork. It was an American town similar to Montegrano in population, climate, terrain, and isolation: St. George, Utah. He decided to open The Moral Basis of a Backward Society with an account of the activities reported in a single issue of St. George’s weekly newspaper.
The Red Cross was conducting a membership drive that week. The Business and Professional Women’s Club was raising funds to build a new dormitory for the local community college. The Future Farmers of America was holding a father-son banquet. A local business had donated a set of encyclopedias to the school district. The Chamber of Commerce was discussing the feasibility of building a road between two nearby towns. “Skywatch” volunteers were being signed up (for what purpose, Banfield doesn’t say). A local church had collected $1,393.11 in pennies (worth more than $10,500 in 2010) for a children’s hospital. There was an announcement of the meeting of the PTA, concluding with the words, “As a responsible citizen of our community, you belong in the PTA.” All that, in a town of 4,562 people in the middle of the Utah desert, reported in a single issue of a weekly newspaper.
The founding virtues operating under the freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution produced an American civic culture that was unique in all the world. Not only Americans thought so. All observers agreed that community life in the United States was unlike community life anywhere else. Its closest cousin was England’s civic culture, but the pervasive effects of England’s class system meant that “closest” was still quite different.
The first unparalleled aspect of American community life was the extent of its neighborliness. Neighborliness is not the same as hospitality. Many cultures have traditions of generous hospitality to strangers and guests. But widespread voluntary mutual assistance among unrelated people who happen to live alongside one another has been rare. In the United States, it has been ubiquitous. One of the things that made the real Fishtown in years past so dear to the people who lived there was its neighborliness—the way that residents routinely helped out one another, continually, in matters great and small: keeping an eye on a house when its family was away, loaning a tool or the proverbial cup of sugar, taking care of a neighbor’s children while the mother was running errands, or driving a neighbor to the doctor’s office. Neighborliness has often been identified with small towns and rural areas, but that’s misleading. As the real Fishtown illustrated, urban neighborhoods in America often used to be as close as small towns, with identities so strong that their residents defined themselves by the neighborhood where they grew up.
The second unparalleled aspect of American community life has been vibrant civic engagement in solving local problems. Sometimes this meant involvement in local government, but even more often it has been conducted within the voluntary associations, which Americans historically formed at the drop of a hat. One of the most quoted passages in Democracy in America begins with Tocqueville’s observation that “Americans of all ages, all stations in life, and all types of dispositions are forever forming associations.” He goes on:
There are not only commercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but others of a thousand different types—religious, moral, serious, futile, very general and very limited, immensely large and very minute. Americans combine to give fêtes, found seminaries, build churches, distribute books, and send missionaries to the antipodes. Hospitals, prisons, and schools take place in that way. Finally, if they want to proclaim a truth or propagate some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they form an association. In every case, at the head of any new undertaking, where in France you would find the government or in England some territorial magnate, in the United States you are sure to find an association.2
The reach and scope of these voluntary associations by the end of the nineteenth century and reaching into the first decades of the twentieth has been largely forgotten. Cultural historian Marvin Olasky pulled together data that give a sense of the profusion of activities. Here, for example, is the roster of activities conducted by associations affiliated with 112 Protestant churches in Manhattan and the Bronx at the turn of the twentieth century: 48 industrial schools, 45 libraries or reading rooms, 44 sewing schools, 40 kindergartens, 29 small-sum savings banks and loan associations, 21 employment offices, 20 gymnasia and swimming pools, 8 medical dispensaries, 7 full-day nurseries, and 4 lodging houses.3 Those are just some of the Protestant churches in two boroughs of New York City, and it is not a complete list of the activities shown in the report. Try to imagine what the roster would look like if we added in the activities of the New York Catholic diocese, the Jewish charities, then the activities of a completely separate and extensive web of secular voluntary associations. Perhaps the numbers from a very different setting will indicate how long that list of activities sponsored by secular organizations might have been. When Iowa mounted a food conservation program in World War I, it engaged the participation of 9,630 chapters of thirty-one different secular fraternal associations. It is a number worth pausing to think about: 9,630, in one lightly populated state.4
The role of those secular fraternal associations has been even more completely forgotten than the role of the numberless small charities. Today, most people know of organizations such as the Elks, Moose, and Odd Fellows (if they know of them at all) as male lower-middle-class social clubs. They are actually the remnants of a mosaic of organizations that were a central feature of American civic life. We are indebted to Theda Skocpol for bringing their role back to life in her 2003 book, Diminished Democracy.5 You need to read her entire account to get a sense of all the functions the fraternal organizations filled. For our purposes, one is particularly salient: They drew their membership from across the social classes, and ensured regular, close interaction among people of different classes. “Evidence to this effect is entirely consistent,” Skocpol writes, “whether it comes from scholarly studies or from assorted old lodge or post rosters I have found that happen to list members’ occupations.”6 One of her passages is worth quoting at length:
Read biographical sketches of prominent men and women of the past … and you will see proudly proclaimed memberships and officerships in a wide array of the same fraternal, veterans’, women’s, and civic associations that also involved millions of non-elite citizens.… Those who were leaders had to care about inspiring large numbers of fellow members. Members counted; and leaders had to mobilize and interact with others from a wide range of backgrounds or they were not successful. To get ahead within associations, ambitious men and women had to express and act on values and activities shared with people of diverse occupational backgrounds.7
This does not mean that the people of Fishtown and Belmont participated equally in the good old days, but it does mean that they interacted. If you lived in Fishtown, you might or might not be a member of a fraternal organization, but you knew people who were, and they in turn knew people who lived in Belmont—not just by name but as lodge brothers or sisters.8
The case for the ongoing collapse of American community was first made by Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam in his best-selling book Bowling Alone.9 Adopting the social scientists’ name for neighborliness and civic engagement, social capital, and assembling data from a multitude of sources, Putnam devoted a chapter each to six types of activity: volunteering and philanthropy, political participation, civic participation, religious participation, connections in the workplace, and informal social connections. In this chapter, I will omit religious participation, which was covered in chapter 11. Here is a sampling of indicators on the other issues, and how much they changed through the mid-1990s:10
There’s much more, but these examples will serve to make the point. Measure it however he might, Putnam found the same thing: consistent and widespread evidence, direct and indirect, that America’s social capital had seriously eroded.
The good news, of a sort, is that civic life in the new upper class is as robust in many places as it was in Tocqueville’s time. Burlington,
Vermont, is an example of a certain kind of small city that David Brooks calls “Latte Towns,” enclaves of affluent and well-educated people, sometimes in scenic locales such as Santa Fe or Aspen and sometimes in university towns such as Ann Arbor, Berkeley, or Chapel Hill. Of Burlington, Brooks writes:
Burlington boasts a phenomenally busy public square. There are kite festivals and yoga festivals and eating festivals. There are arts councils, school-to-work collaboratives, environmental groups, preservation groups, community-supported agriculture, antidevelopment groups, and ad hoc activist groups.… And this public square is one of the features that draw people to Latte Towns. People in these places apparently would rather spend less time in the private sphere of their home and their one-acre yard and more time in the common areas.12
Attendance at city council meetings in Latte Towns is high and residents who willingly take part in local politics are plentiful. The classic neighborly interactions vary. In new-upper-class neighborhoods filled with restored Victorian houses, neighbors often interact in traditional ways. Where homes are secluded on their own multi-acre lots, they don’t. But the neighborliness can exist even then, with parents’ associations in the schools often serving as a way for wealthy parents to develop local friendships.
Social capital in the new upper class is not confined to suburbs and small cities. Within Washington, DC, neighborhoods such as Cleveland Park are locally famous for their civic activism. In The Big Sort, Bill Bishop describes the intense neighborhood pride and activism in the Austin neighborhood of Travis Heights. Even in the most urban of SuperZips in Manhattan, San Francisco, Chicago, and Boston, you will find active neighborhoods engaged in their own version of community life.
Added to that are the forms of community life that the new upper class enjoys because of their professions and their affluence. Their best friends probably do not live in the same geographic neighborhood, perhaps not even in the same city. The same is true of the clubs to which they belong and the charities with which they are engaged. For the new upper class, the geographic neighborhood has become less and less relevant to the set of activities that fall under the rubric of social capital.
Has the new upper class, or Belmont more broadly, avoided the erosion of social capital altogether? It is frustratingly difficult to find data for answering that question. We know from Bowling Alone that the decline in social capital began in the 1960s, with 1964 being the modal year, and that the decline was rapid. The first data on social capital that can be disaggregated by class comes with the General Social Survey in 1974. The GSS continued to collect such data until 1994, when (very frustratingly) it stopped asking those questions with the single exception of the 2004 survey. So we don’t know how much Belmont had already deteriorated before 1974, and we have just a single survey for estimating changes since 1994. With those limitations in mind, it looks as if Belmont has been doing pretty well. The details are given in appendix F. The short story goes like this:
Consider two indexes of decline in social capital: social disengagement, meaning that people no longer belong to sports clubs, hobby clubs, fraternal organizations, nationality groups (e.g., Sons of Italy), or veterans groups; and civic disengagement, meaning that people no longer belong to service groups, youth groups (e.g., being a scoutmaster), school service groups, or local political organizations. A person is defined as being socially or civically disengaged if he has no memberships whatsoever.
The index of social disengagement was effectively flat for Belmont from 1974 to 2004, with the percentage of the socially disengaged going from 35 percent in the surveys of the 1970s to 36 percent in the single survey in the 2000s. The index of civic disengagement in Belmont shows a U-turn. In the GSS surveys of the 1970s, 38 percent of Belmont had no memberships in civic groups. That percentage rose to 50 in the 1980s and 59 in the 1990s. Then, in that one lonely survey in 2004, the percentage dropped to 45, even lower than it had been in the 1970s. Are the 2004 results an anomaly or an indicator of revived civic engagement in Belmont? Your guess is as good as mine.
Combining the findings from the GSS with qualitative observations about life in upper-middle-class communities, there is reason to think that social capital in Belmont in general, and the new upper class in particular, has not taken the same downturn that it took elsewhere in America.
There’s more good news for people who are deeply involved in the Internet. Putnam wrote Bowling Alone during the last half of the 1990s, when the Internet was just beginning to flower. Since then, the Internet has produced a variety of new ways for human beings to interact. Many of them have all of the characteristics of social capital, and the academic world has accordingly been building a literature to examine whether the Internet undermines social capital by competing with traditional social interactions or augments traditional social capital through new resources.13 The answer, predictably, is “It depends.” Sometimes, a community is formed through the Internet (e.g., mothers with small children in a big city form their own website for mutual support and to share information about local resources).14 Sometimes, highly traditional forms of neighboring are facilitated by the Internet: The website lotsahelpinghands.com makes it easy for the friends of a family undergoing a crisis to cooperate during times of need (e.g., the friends of a mother undergoing chemotherapy create a schedule for preparing dinners every night for weeks). Sometimes, online friendships lead to the use of traditional resources (e.g., when a teenager realizes that an online friend a thousand miles away is sounding suicidal, he contacts the boy’s school and mobilizes an intervention). All of these examples are drawn from experiences just within my own immediate family. There are dozens of other types of interactions fostered by the Internet that meet any reasonable definition of social capital.
How much is Fishtown participating in these new forms of social capital? The Pew Foundation’s ongoing Internet & American Life Project has found that families with incomes of $75,000 or more were more likely (often close to twice as likely) to get their news online, bank online, seek out medical information online, shop online, pay bills online, and conduct research into products online than were families with incomes of less than $30,000.15 Another study in the Internet & American Life Project found positive relationships of education to use of social-networking sites, in terms of both the size of the networks and the extensiveness of the activities on those networks.16 Given those patterns, it is highly likely that Fishtown’s use of the Internet in ways that augment social capital is much lower than Belmont’s.
The bad news involves Fishtown in general and the white new lower class in particular. By the time the GSS data began in 1974, social and civic disengagement in Fishtown were already much higher than they were in Belmont. In the 1970s surveys, 63 percent of Fishtown was socially disengaged compared to 35 percent of Belmont. For civic disengagement, the comparison was 69 percent to 38 percent. What had those figures been in 1960? I have been unable to find an answer. All we know is that the nationwide data assembled by Putnam show a steep decline in social capital in the 1960s. The decline surely hit Fishtown at least as hard as it hit other communities, and plausibly a lot harder.
By the 2000s, Fishtown had deteriorated even more. In the 2004 survey, 75 percent of Fishtown was socially disengaged, up from 63 percent in the 1970s surveys, and 82 percent of Fishtown was civically disengaged, up from 69 percent in the 1970s. These trends taken from the GSS could have been predicted just by looking at the severe declines in marriage and religiosity in Fishtown.
The role of marriage—specifically, marriage with children—is obvious. Some large proportion of the webs of engagement in an ordinary community are spun because of the environment that parents are trying to foster for their children—through the schools, but also in everything from getting a new swing set for the park to prompting the city council to install four-way stop signs on an intersection where children play. Married fathers are a good source of labor for these tasks. Unmarried fathers are not. Of course social capital declined in Fishtown. Meanwhile, single mothers who want to foster the right environment for their children are usually doing double duty already, trying to be the breadwinner and an attentive parent at the same time. Few single mothers have much time or energy to spare for community activities. Of course social capital declined in Fishtown.
The effects of the decline in religiosity are also obvious, especially after learning in chapter 11 via Robert Putnam that about half of all the kinds of social capital originate in the context of churches and, at least as important, that people who are involved in their churches also disproportionately engage in the secular kinds of social capital. Of course social capital declined in Fishtown.
Voting in presidential elections is a classic case of an indicator that doesn’t mean much for any one person but has many implications in large samples. Voting is the most elementary act of participation in a democracy, and presidential elections are the most visible and, for most people, the most important election. In aggregates, people who do not bother with even this simplest form of civic engagement are unlikely to be civically engaged in other ways. Voting in presidential elections also offers one of the rare measures of social capital for which the GSS gives us an unbroken trendline, starting with the 1968 contest between Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey. Figure 14.1 shows voting turnout for prime-age whites in Belmont and Fishtown.17
The main story line is that turnout in Fishtown was already much lower than turnout in Belmont even in 1968—70 percent versus 96 percent—and remained so. But the contrast in the trends also has important implications. Belmont turnout never dropped below 86 percent and returned to more than 90 percent in the 2000s. Fishtown turnout dropped from 70 percent in 1968 to 51 percent in 1988. Except for a spike in the 1992 election, it remained in the low 50s or worse through the 2008 election of Barack Obama. We also know that the turnout in 1968 was lower than it had been in the 1950s, when the percentage of whites with less than a high school education (an approximation of the Fishtown of the 1950s) was at least 75 percent.18
FIGURE 14.1. VOTING TURNOUT IN PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS, 1968–2008
Source: GSS. Sample limited to whites ages 30–49. Data smoothed using locally estimated regression (LOESS).
I cannot be more precise, but it looks as if voting in presidential elections in Fishtown dropped by about a third from 1960 to 2008, while voting in Belmont remained extremely high.
The scariest message from the GSS does not consist of declines in specific activities that make up social capital, but this: The raw material that makes community even possible has diminished so much in Fishtown that the situation may be beyond retrieval.
That raw material is social trust—not trust in a particular neighbor who happens to be your friend, but a generalized expectation that the people around you will do the right thing. As Francis Fukuyama documented in Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity, the existence of social trust is a core explanation of why some cultures create wealth and other cultures are mired in poverty.19 At the community level, it is hard to think of any form of social capital that would exist without trust. Robert Putnam puts it in terms of reciprocity: “The touchstone of social capital is the principle of generalized reciprocity—I’ll do this for you now, without expecting anything immediately in return and perhaps without even knowing you, confident that down the road you or someone else will return the favor.”20
When social trust breaks down, social capital breaks down across the board. With that in mind, consider this set of three questions that the GSS has asked in almost every survey since 1972:
The trends in the answers to these questions are alarming. Figure 14.2 begins the story with the results for the question on trust.
FIGURE 14.2. WHITES’ ESTIMATION OF THE TRUSTWORTHINESS OF OTHERS
Source: Author’s analysis of the GSS. Sample limited to whites ages 30–49. Data smoothed using locally estimated regression (LOESS).
Putnam’s data indicate that social trust had declined prior to 1972, though we cannot know how or whether that decline affected Belmont and Fishtown differently.21 In the GSS’s surveys in the first half of the 1970s, around 75 percent of those in Belmont were still trusting. In the last half of the 2000s, that figure had dropped to about 60 percent. Fishtown in the 1970s was already much more distrustful than Belmont, with fewer than half of the respondents saying that most people can be trusted. Their pessimism only got worse. In the GSS surveys conducted from 2006 through 2010, only 20 percent of Fishtown respondents said that other people can generally be trusted.
Figure 14.3 shows the results for the fairness question.
FIGURE 14.3. WHITES’ ESTIMATION OF THE FAIRNESS OF OTHERS
Source: Author’s analysis of the GSS. Sample limited to whites ages 30–49. Data smoothed using locally estimated regression (LOESS).
In this case, we are back to the familiar picture of divergence between Belmont and Fishtown as well as overall decline. A gap between Belmont and Fishtown already existed when the first GSS surveys occurred in the early 1970s, but the gap grew substantially between the 1970s and the 2000s. Not much changed in Belmont, where almost 80 percent of people still believe in the fairness of others. As in the case of trust, the belief in the fairness of others in Fishtown has declined to a minority of people.
The results for both trust and fairness make sense in light of the other changes in life in Fishtown. If in recent decades you lived in a neighborhood that has become much more densely populated with people who will cheat, rob, assault, and perhaps even murder you, you would be a fool not to have become more untrusting and less likely to assume that other people will treat you fairly. Correspondingly, the people of Belmont live in a world where neighbors are pretty much as they always were, and it makes sense that their optimism about their fellow human beings has not fallen as much. But they also live in a society in which, once they leave the confines of Belmont, they have to watch their backs more carefully than they once did, so their trust in their fellow countrymen in general has dropped as well.
Figure 14.4 shows the situation for the assumption of helpfulness.
FIGURE 14.4. WHITES’ ESTIMATION OF THE HELPFULNESS OF OTHERS
Source: GSS. Sample limited to whites ages 30–49. Data smoothed using locally estimated regression (LOESS).
The assumption of helpfulness was fairly stable in both neighborhoods during the 1970s, and then began a steep decline during the 1980s that continued until around 2000 for Belmont. The neighborhoods were about as far apart in the last half of the 1980s as they had been in the first half of the 1970s. Two troubling signs: In Fishtown, a substantial majority already agreed with “people are mostly just looking out for themselves” by the 2000s. And the belief in helpfulness continued to decline more shallowly through the 2000s, while it had stabilized at a much higher level in Belmont.
The decline in social trust in Belmont is not trivial. On the other hand, the declines on all three indicators have leveled out in Belmont, and it is possible to imagine a revival of community given the right circumstances. The big question is whether the remaining levels of social trust in Fishtown are enough to sustain anything approaching the traditional expectations of American neighborliness and local problem solving. There is no metric for specifying the tipping point at which all is lost. Looking at the whole picture for Fishtown, capped by what can only be called disastrous declines in social capital, it is hard for me to envision a revival in Fishtown unless Fishtown operates under a radically changed set of social signals.
Another problem regarding social trust, and one that may help explain the decline, has surfaced more recently: The key ingredient of social capital, social trust, is eroded by ethnic diversity. In the years after Bowling Alone appeared, Robert Putnam’s research led him to a disturbing finding: Ethnic diversity works against social trust within a community—not only against trusting people of the other ethnicity, but against trusting even neighbors of one’s own ethnic group. In addition, Putnam’s research found that in areas of greater ethnic diversity, there was lower confidence in local government, a lower sense of political efficacy, less likelihood of working on a community project, less likelihood of giving to charity, fewer close friends, and lower perceived quality of life.22 How is the corrosive effect of ethnic diversity on social capital to be reconciled with the reality of an increasingly diverse twenty-first-century America? I personally am optimistic that the distrust that has accompanied ethnic diversity will diminish—that the generations born in the last few decades are comfortable with ethnic diversity in a way that their parents could not be—but that’s still a hope, not a fact.
I must anticipate a plausible reaction to this discussion:
We have just been treated to nostalgia for a world that was never as wonderful as the author tries to portray it. All those voluntary organizations and all that neighborliness existed side by side with widespread poverty and human suffering of all kinds, not to mention systemic discrimination against women and people of color. Most of the community activities that the author celebrates are actually boring, and the closeness of community can be suffocating. Hasn’t he ever read Main Street?
Without doubt, high levels of social capital have downsides. Small-town entertainments and conversations are not to everyone’s taste. In a small, close-knit community, everybody knows just about everything you do, anonymity is impossible, and the pressure to conform can be oppressive.
High social capital may have other disadvantages. One point of view (which I do not share) argues that the hallmark of high social capital—neighbors helping neighbors cope with their problems—is inferior to a system that meets human needs through government programs, because only the government can provide help without the moral judgmentalism associated with charity. For my own part, I have argued that too much of certain kinds of social capital impedes the exercise of individual creativity and diminishes the production of great art, literature, and music.23 Considerations like these explain why two of the basic texts on social capital have chapters identically titled “The Dark Side of Social Capital.”24
But if we are talking about daily life for most people, the decay in social capital makes an important difference in quality of life, and this is as true in large cities as in small towns. A neighborhood with weak social capital is more vulnerable to crime than one with high social capital. A neighborhood with weak social capital must take its problems to police or social welfare bureaucracies because local resources for dealing with them have atrophied. In a neighborhood with weak social capital, the small daily pleasures of friendly interchange with neighbors and storekeepers dry up. The sum of it all is that people living in places with weak social capital generally lead less satisfying lives than people who live in places with high social capital—they are less happy. Which brings us to the topic of the next chapter.