Robert Putnam

Robert D. Putnam is a large man whose booming voice and expansive gestures underscore big ideas. His new book, “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community,” meticulously traces the rise, in the early 20th century, of dozens of community groups and their steady decline in membership, post-1950s. Instead of getting out and getting involved, Putnam writes, Americans are isolating themselves by watching more television, bowling alone when they once bowled in leagues. This pattern, Putnam warns, has profoundly negative consequences for democratic participation, family relationships, even physical and mental well-being.

But don’t call him a pessimist. The 59-year-old Harvard professor of public policy has used “Bowling Alone” to cheerlead for a revival of civic life, beginning with more picnics and card games among family and friends, and moving to a better balance between work and family and the reinvention of clubs and community groups to be more inclusive than their early 20th-century predecessors.

Putnam’s provocative thesis has its origins in a study he did of local government in Italy. It gradually dawned on him that one of his conclusions--that a healthy democracy depended on civic engagement and social connections--might have implications for American society. Putnam began to gather data on things like membership in fraternal organizations and the PTA. A friend mused that trends in league bowling also fit his evolving thesis, and “Bowling Alone” acquired a broader focus--and a title.

Does Putnam, who divides his time between homes in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, practice what he preaches? “Don’t count me as one of the saved; I’m one of the sinners,” he laments. “I would like to be in the Lexington [Mass.] town choir again. I love singing. I dropped out because I was doing other things. Now, I actually have to start the organization again because everybody else dropped out, too.”

But his findings prompted this married grandfather of five to invite his New Hampshire neighbors over, as a step toward organizing to preserve forest land nearby. “I thought if we had dinners together, it would be easier, later on, if we needed to connect to fight a developer.” Putnam sat down to discuss the civic fabric during a recent visit to The Times.

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Question: Your critics say you paint the 1950s and 1960s as a rosy, golden age.

Answer: One of the common misperceptions of my argument is that I’m selling gloom and doom. . . . Over the last generation or so, a variety of technological and social changes have rendered obsolete the ways we used to connect with our community. That’s just jargon for saying two-career families, TV and sprawl mean people no longer go to clubs. I think bad things happen as a result.

But we have been in a similar situation [before]. At the end of the 19th century, technological and economic changes rendered obsolete the ways people connected. The Industrial Revolution and the wave of immigration and urbanization meant that people left their friends on the farm--whether the farm was in Alabama, Iowa or in Russia--and moved to cities. [There was] a very widespread sense [that] people’s community ties were missing. At the beginning of the 20th century, we fixed the problem by inventing a whole new set of organizations and ways of connecting. . . . The major civic institutions in American communities today were almost all founded in a period of about 10-15 years at the beginning of the 20th century, like the Red Cross, the Boy Scouts and the League of Women Voters. . . . What I’m saying is not that we have to somehow erase the last 40 years of technological change. . . . But rather, that we need a period of sustained civic inventiveness in which we remove or at least lower the barriers that are keeping people from connecting with their neighbors.

Q: Many of the organizations that flourished earlier in the century were, at their core, racist, sexist or in some other way exclusionary. Isn’t their decline a sign of progress?

A: Certainly, the animal clubs [the Moose, Lions, Elks, etc.] were about white men. But the NAACP [National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People] was not, and even the NAACP was a much more active structure in the 1950s and 1960s than it is today. Many women’s organizations were much more active [40 years ago] than they are today. The reason I called the book “Bowling Alone” is because nearly one of every 10 Americans used to belong to a bowling league. The leagues were about people connecting with one another. I’m not talking only about organizations. Families used to have dinner together, and they don’t. We don’t hang out with friends as much or with our families.

Q: But that all gets back to a time deficit. Years ago, many women were stay-at-home moms. Today, people are working long days, families live far apart. How will we find time?

A: Time is a significant part of the story. It’s not the whole story. . . . Between 1865 and 1900, roughly a third of the U.S. work force moved from fields to factories, which had enormous implications for American society. We then spent 10-20 years working out the implications for law and society. Between 1900 and 1920, we went through a period of what I call “cultural clicks,” in which people said, “Wait a minute, now that we’re mostly working in factories rather than on family farms, things that seemed sensible before no long seemed so.”

For example, when women were mostly working in fields, kids working meant Sally picking beans alongside her mother--and that’s fine. Once women working meant factories, kids working meant Sally working in a sweatshop--and that’s not fine. So we had a little cultural click, and we decided child labor isn’t such a great thing, and we transformed the way we worked.

Before, when you were mostly working in fields, you’d pick the wheat whenever it was ready. Afterward, eight-hour days seemed reasonable. . . . So, after the Industrial Revolution, we . . . saw the world differently and changed the law. . . .

Fast forward. We have now been through a larger transformation, because, since 1965, more than a third of the American work force has moved from kitchens to offices. . . . But we are all still pre-click in the following sense: Most of the implications . . . have been borne by the worker. We have a career structure, a workday structure or a workweek structure that is basically an industrial pattern. . . . But when you’re not in an industrial mode of production--as most of us aren’t--it’s an old-fashioned, particularly rigid structure.

So, we need to have a dramatic revolution over the next 10-15 years in the way we think about how our work life fits together with our community and our family life. This is absolutely a kitchen-table issue. . . . It is what people talk about: Who’s going to pick up the kids tonight?

Q: But isn’t it more accurate to say the burden is pretty much on the female worker, because in most families these things are not shared?

A: It’s not just about women. Rather, it’s the inevitable adjustment of workplace life to this change. . . . I talked to a Republican gubernatorial candidate in a mid-South state a few months ago. He said, “Funny thing, Professor Putnam, every time I go to a local audience, what they want to talk about is child care.” Click. That was exactly the way a click looks when people are making that leap from a private issue to a public issue.

Q: You write about how people spend their leisure time and conclude too many of us are watching TV.

A: It won’t make me very popular to say to turn off the TV, but the amount of time people spend watching entertainment television is really not good for their physical health, and it’s not good for their community. The Internet may actually replace TV, which is an interesting idea. . . . The Internet could be a nifty telephone, that is, a way of connecting with other people. In principle, it could also be a nifty TV, which would be horrible.

Q: The rich are connected to each other through informal and formal networks. But you can walk into any beauty salon in town and the customers are watching Jerry Springer: They’re connected to what’s on that TV. Haven’t we outgrown our need for organized connection?

A: Two contradistinctions must be made here. One is between bridging social capital and bonding social capital. Bonding social capital are connections that you make with people like you [such as those] folks . . . watching Jerry Springer. It’s likely to be bonding in ethnic terms and in class terms. Bridging social capital links people unlike you--the rich folks’ clubs, the country clubs--while bonding happens with people like you. If you’re a person of the ‘60s like me, one’s first instinct is to say, bridging good, bonding bad. That actually isn’t true. . . . The people who are like you are likely to bring you chicken soup. . . . We also need a lot more bridging social capital. . . . Groups in the Progressive Era were almost all about bonding; there was very little bridging. It was actually the period of the greatest racism in American history.

Q: What else helps bridging?

A: Participatory arts and sports are important, because they are unusually easy ways for people to bridge class and racial barriers. . . . It’s not that I want the government to do all these things, but I don’t see anything wrong with government subsidy of participatory arts or athletics. I also think there is a whole set of things we can do in schools to increase people’s civic skills. We know smaller schools are better for kids for learning civic social participatory skills and habits. We know that kids who are involved in debate or band or chorus or football or any extracurricular activity are more likely to take part in community activities as adults.

Q: George W. Bush and Al Gore have sought your advice. What can a president do to improve our civic connectedness?

A: The Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 will be seen to be a very small opening wedge in a much, much bigger dialogue of how to restructure work. And because it’s partly a matter of cultural clicks, the president could use the bully pulpit to speed those clicks. But I also [support] flex time, release time and [such] school reforms as smaller is better, community-service work, extracurricular work--as well as limits on sprawl. . . . It’s not just to be environmentally useful, it would help the community, too.

Q: You encourage people to do things like picnic more often and have more dinner parties? Why is that so important?

A: Well, if you asked for my list of the top 10 things we need to do, most of them are these kind of public, collective things, more flexible schedules and so on. But I also think people want to know “What can I do in my own life?” Part of it is just saying, “Look, it’s not such a big deal to go on a picnic.” It’s not like you have to revolutionize America to go on a picnic. And it actually does represent contacts, probably with your family, but suppose you went on a picnic with your neighbor? That’s not such a big deal. Picnics won’t solve the world’s problems, but they won’t do any harm, for goodness’ sake, and they probably could move us a little bit in the right direction.