Cambridge, Mass. -- For a guy who doesn’t bowl much, Robert D. Putnam is amassing quite a collection of trophies.
Pins, balls, shirts, towels, even salt-and-pepper shakers -- he has cleared a shelf in the study of his New Hampshire vacation home to display the bowling souvenirs that now routinely come his way.
Barely a year ago, Mr. Putnam, a professor of government and international affairs at Harvard University, wrote an essay on how Americans are less and less likely to join groups of any kind, a trend that he argued may be connected to our widespread distrust of political and other institutions.
The inspired title -- “Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital” -- and Mr. Putnam’s lucid writing helped to vault him to the forefront of experts worried about the loss of community in American life. In the essay, published in the Journal of Democracy, he used the example of bowling to underscore how Americans who once routinely participated in group activities have turned inward and suspicious. More Americans than ever bowl -- in fact, more bowl than vote, he discovered. Yet membership in bowling leagues is down 40 per cent.
Scores of journalists have picked up on the implications. Mr. Putnam’s influence can be seen in recent series in the Chicago Tribune (“Nation of Strangers”) and The Washington Post (“The Politics of Mistrust”). The “Bowling Alone” essay, David Broder wrote in the Post in January, “was perhaps the most influential published during the past 12 months.”
President Clinton has taken notice, twice inviting the professor to brainstorming sessions -- most recently before the State of the Union address -- on how to deal with the breakdown of American communities.
“Bob Putnam has been able to put some hard numbers on intuitions that people have had for a long time,” says William A. Galston, a former White House adviser who brought Mr. Putnam to the President’s attention. Mr. Galston now teaches public affairs at the University of Maryland.
As Mr. Putnam takes his message to Rotary Clubs and other civic groups, inevitably he is trundled to the local bowling alley or is handed bowling mementos. At the Holiday Lanes in New London, Conn., in February, he found a new wrinkle on the bowling-alone phenomenon: A 25-inch television set sat above each lane. “When you’re done bowling, you don’t have to talk to the other bowlers,” he says incredulously. “You can watch ‘Friends’ or ‘Seinfeld’ or ‘E.R.’”
Since publishing the piece, Mr. Putnam has expanded the study of what he calls “civic disengagement.” In the winter issue of The American Prospect, he began to sort through possible causes. Television, he speculated, is the likeliest suspect, a “mysterious, anticivic X-ray” that leaves citizens less likely to connect with the community.
As he traverses territory guarded by more-cautious empirical social scientists, Mr. Putnam is running into challenges to his methodology. Media researchers at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy were skeptical after his recent talk there.
“You throw up your hands at this sort of analysis,” says Pippa Norris, the center’s associate director. “It’s a broad normative plea, argued with great passion -- more of a polemic than a piece of systematic social-science research.”
The next issue of The American Prospect will feature responses to Mr. Putnam’s recent article, including a critique by a Harvard colleague, Theda Skocpol. She says Mr. Putnam plays into conservatives’ hands by romanticizing local volunteer organizations as if they were an alternative to government. The history of such groups shows that they were dependent on government for their growth, she argues. “If you dismantle higher levels of government, it actually will weaken social connectedness.”
Mr. Putnam was hardly invisible before hitting what Ms. Skocpol calls a “tidal wave of fame.” Besides heading Harvard’s government department, he served for two years as dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government, and he now directs the the university’s Center for International Affairs. In 1993 he published Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton University Press), which won several awards from political-science associations as well as a front-page rave in The New York Times Book Review. The book argues that political life in northern Italy is healthier than in the south because of the proliferation of civic groups, like choral societies.
A lone copy of the book sits lopsided on a shelf outside his Harvard office here. His new work is where the action is. Copies of his articles and those about him -- including a three-page spread in People magazine -- sit in individually marked trays, ready to be handed out or mailed.
A genial man, Mr. Putnam has called a moratorium on interviews. He agreed to this one because he will deliver a major speech to the American Association for Higher Education this month on what academe can do about the problems he has identified.
In the interview and at the Harvard talk, Mr. Putnam has a pitchman’s delivery -- fast, witty, peppered with statistics. Yet his beard and ruddy complexion give him the air of an Amish elder, a likeness that comes through when he is especially earnest.
“My take on the hubbub is it’s not academically the best thing I’ve ever written,” he says of the “Bowling Alone” article. “But there’s been a thousand times more attention to it.
“Invariably, people react to this story in an extremely personal way. People know that in their own lives, their parents played bridge regularly, and they don’t. Or they know that once a month their mom went to a P.T.A. meeting and they don’t. Or they know that their dad went to the Veterans of Foreign Wars and they don’t.
“Everybody of a younger generation knows they’re less engaged than their parents were. They react strongly to discovering that it’s not them -- you didn’t do something wrong -- but it’s a general phenomenon.”
He has the statistics to make his case. P.T.A. membership has fallen to 7 million from 12 million since 1964. Red Cross membership is down 61 per cent since 1970. Churchgoing is down as well. What’s growing are organizations like the American Association of Retired Persons -- groups to which members pay dues but in which they rarely congregate.
Numbers give Mr. Putnam’s message its weight, says Jean Bethke Elshtain, a professor of social and political ethics at the University of Chicago. “Here we have this respected, sober, social scientist who has all these graphs and this trend data. No one has challenged his data, as far as I know. This is the fact of the matter now.”
Mr. Putnam, she adds, hadn’t been wrapped up in earlier debates about family and community values. “He had the advantage of being the new kid on the block. Plus, he had quite a powerful metaphor.”
Bowling: By no means is it Mr. Putnam’s passion. He bowled as a youngster in Ohio and once belonged to a bowling league. He also used to sing in a community choir, and he used to coach his son’s Little League team. “I fear I embody the problem,” he says.
A casual conversation with a Harvard donor led to the bowling brainchild. When Mr. Putnam described his research, the donor -- who owned a nationwide chain of bowling alleys -- mentioned that the go-it-alone pattern was true in his business, too. When citizens bowl alone, Mr. Putnam notes, they don’t get the chance to talk politics, complain about their jobs, or worry about their garbage collection.
“Bowling rubbed people’s face in the fact that in many apparently unpolitical, uncivic contexts, we are also not connecting to one another,” he says.
Americans born in the first third of this century were much more likely to belong to civic groups and to exhibit “social trust,” Mr. Putnam says. The “long civic generation” that came of age before World War II is being supplanted by generations that are less likely to join, to vote, or to trust. “The roots go back to the end of World War II, but the symptoms don’t show up till the ‘70s and ‘80s.”
Written in the form of a mystery story, The American Prospect article goes over the likely causes of civic disengagement, finding little statistical evidence to support such culprits as the two-career family and increased mobility.
Instead, Mr. Putnam finds a clear correlation between the rise of television and a deteriorating sense of community. He acknowledges that the research is sketchy on whether television leads to passivity and pessimism, or whether citizens who would remain uninvolved anyway are the ones who turn to television for comfort. But the links are too strong to ignore, he argues.
What’s more, along with the effects on the political system, he points to medical evidence showing that social isolation is a health threat. “Your chances of dying are cut by half in the next year by joining a group,” he says.
Besides writing a book for Simon & Schuster, Mr. Putnam has also begun projects that are geared to providing solutions, not more diagnoses. With the support of a German foundation, he will coordinate a study of equivalent trends in other countries. And beginning in the fall, Harvard will play host to workshops on civic engagement, in which academics and community leaders will share success stories.
For his part, he takes heart in the American experience of 100 years ago, after the Industrial Revolution, when the nation invented forms of “social capital” that remained strong well into the 20th century.
The Red Cross, the Urban League, the Boy Scouts, the Sierra Club, the League of Women Voters -- all were founded within a 20-year period, he says. “The challenge the country faces today is to do the equivalent of reinventing the Boy Scouts or the Rotary Club.”
The Internet won’t do the trick, he predicts. Nor will nostalgia for a vanishing America. “You could have said in 1896 -- indeed, a few people did say -- ‘Whoops, we made a terrible mistake, everybody back to the farms, please. It was just much nicer out there.’ We could say today, ‘Whoops, we made a terrible mistake, everybody back to the 50s, please. Women go home. Let’s abolish TV. Let’s have Ozzie-and-Harriet kind of families.’ Some people have interpreted what I have said as a nostalgic call to return to the ‘50s. That’s not what I say.”
“It’s not just social capital, period,” he adds. “It’s social capital that cuts across the existing cleavages in American society. That is, it’s not enough that we all start bowling again. There have to be bowling leagues in which people of different races are connecting with one another.”
He ends his Harvard talk by exhorting his audience, coming across like a politician or a preacher -- or, perhaps, like the captain of a bowling team.
“This is the single most important problem facing America,” he says. “If we can solve this one, if we can get more people engaged in community life in contexts that respect American pluralism, many of our other problems -- to begin with, our politics -- will be different.”