Speaker 1:
From the library of the New York Stock Exchange at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in New York City, you're Inside The ICE House, our podcast from Intercontinental Exchange on markets, leadership, and vision and global business. The dream drivers that have made the NYSE and indispensable institution of global growth for over 225 years. Each week, we feature stories of those who hatch plans, create jobs, and harness the engine of capitalism right here, right now at the NYSE and at ICE's exchanges and clearing houses around the world. And now, welcome Inside The ICE House. Here's your host, Josh King, of Intercontinental Exchange.
Josh King:
The New York Stock Exchange has leaped into fall with September, the busiest month in the 228 year history of the exchange, a slew of 28 new listings even brought unity to the trading floor. And by that, I mean the virtual reality platform now trading under the NYSE ticker symbol U, Unity Software, which listed on September 18th, caused a spike in the prevalence of Unity, not just here at the NYSE, but globally. I was able to track the use of the word by news outlets going back a dozen years and found the listing date was the high highest use of the word over that time. Now, years from now, sociologists and historians studying the datasets from 2020 might be confused to see this spike in Unity, amidst arguably the most polarized presidential race of my lifetime. Our guest today, Robert Putnam, and Shaylyn Garrett, would likely tell me to strike the word I just used, arguably, and they'd have the data to prove it.
Josh King:
Their research confirms an increasing fracturing in American society that many of us just feel anecdotally these past few years, but they might just as quickly point out that we've been here before. It's all part of their exhaustive research which underpins their recent book, The Upswing, How America Came Together A Century Ago And How We Can Do It Again, out now from Simon and Schuster. The pages of The Upswing are tour de force of how economics, politics, society, and culture have evolved over the past 125 years as the nation has struggled with balancing the competing forces of individualism and communalism contained in the American promise. Using an endless stream of data, Putnam and Garrett point out the consistent inverted U graph that tracks hundreds of topics through what we've termed the I-we-I curve from the gilded age to this very day.
Josh King:
Oh, and that word unity, our guests found its usage peaked in the early 1960s, just as the entire nation began its slow descent from its communitarian high water point to where we sit here in 2020. Our conversation with Shaylyn Garrett and Robert Putnam on the state of the union, how we got here, and where it heads from here by looking at the last time America came together. That's right after this.
Speaker 2:
In our time of greatest need, we want to thank the true heroes around the world for stepping up, for taking care of us, and keeping us safe. With your expertise, your commitment, your sacrifice, and your selflessness, we'll work together to create a brighter future. And we thank you for reminding us what really matters. From all of us, thank you.
Josh King:
Our guests today are the authors behind The Upswing, How America Came Together A Century Ago And How We Can Do It Again. Back when I was working at the White House for President Clinton, he didn't use his retreat at Camp David very much, preferring the companionship he found from friends hanging out around Washington on weekends. And when he did go, it was usually a family affair, but he found a reason to invite Robert Putnam up there to talk about his then seminal article, which became his best seller, Bowling Alone.
Josh King:
Professor Putnam is the Malkin Research Professor of Public Policy at Harvard and a former Dean of the Kennedy School of Government. He's written 15 books, including the aforementioned Bowling Alone, along with Our Kids in 2015. He's consulted with the last four presidents, his research program, the Saguaro Seminar is dedicated to fostering civil engagement in America. Shaylyn Romney Garrett is a writer and award-winning social entrepreneur. She's a founding con to Weave, the social fabric project and Aspen Institute initiative. She also contributed to Bob Putnam and David Campbell's American Grace. Shaylyn holds a degree in government from Harvard University and served in the peace Corps. Welcome Inside The ICE House, Bob and Shaylyn.
Robert Putnam:
Thanks very much, Josh. It's really good to be with you.
Shaylyn Garrett:
Thank you, Josh. We're excited to be here.
Josh King:
Hey Bob, we all have our hobbies that have helped us get through the trials of 2020. Apparently yours was looking at data sets. Where does one find their own supply of unique data sets and how did that hobby lead to an idea for this book and the I-We-I graph?
Robert Putnam:
Well, it's true. I get teased a lot about the fact that I spend a ton of time, and I really enjoy, plowing through data, especially old data, especially really detailed data. Frankly, it's just fun for me, but it's also really enjoyable to be able to use data to see the data at what was really happening in various periods of American history. And lastly, I have to say, and I'm sure Shaylyn and I both feel the same way about this.
Robert Putnam:
This is not just data and it's not just even a narrative. We actually care. We want to change America. I know that sounds a little silly for an academic to say that. And I don't believe of course that we can actually change history, but I'd like to bend history a little bit. I don't want to just be writing about it. Carl Marks once said he came not to study the world, but to change it. Well, I'm not a Marxist, but that's my philosophy too. And I'm sure Shaylyn feels the same way. Don't you, Shaylyn?
Shaylyn Garrett:
Absolutely.
Josh King:
Shaylyn, you wrote that you had no idea how involved you become when Bob first came to you wide eyed with wonder about the topic, what's your process for co-writing and how did the process evolve over the course of this project?
Shaylyn Garrett:
Yeah, well, Bob and I have a long history of collaboration that goes all the way back to when he advised my senior thesis as a wide eyed undergraduate at Harvard and over the course of what has become, gosh, 20 years, we've collaborated in many different ways. Once, as you mentioned, on American Grace, which is a fascinating book about the role of religion in American civil society. And we've just kept in touch as friends.
Shaylyn Garrett:
And I remember one time my husband and I happened to be up in New Hampshire where Bob has a home where he spends a lot of his time doing this hobby of mining obscure data sets. And he was telling me about this amazing confluence of trends that he was just barely being beginning to discover and knowing Bob as I do, I knew that that would ultimately become a project, even though he had vowed he'd already written his last book. And I was invited into the project well after the data and the hard work and the heavy lifting had really been done. And my role was to really help shape a narrative that was not just about numbers, but was resonant really, with the state of America today. And that would help us understand the lessons of this I-We-I curve for what we're looking at going forward.
Josh King:
Springsteen says that his new album is not his last. You should never say you've written your last book. The cover of the book shows an inverted U graph with a only an X axis of the years from 1890 to 2020, no Y axis at all. And that's the theme of the book. What are some of the more memorable, even if they didn't make it into the book, graphs that tend to fit that pattern?
Robert Putnam:
Well, there are actually a lot of them and there are four basic curves that fit that pattern. One is the pattern of economic equality and inequality. It rises and falls. That is, begins around the gilded age in around 1900, with very high inequality and then rises toward greater and greater equality in the middle of the century. And then in around 1960-65, and then declines, and ends up actually even lower than we are now with greater inequality now than had been true at the beginning of the century. Then there's another curve about political polarization, which starts off with America being extremely polarized at the end of the gilded age, then becoming, beginning in the progressive era, becoming more and more depolarized, that is more and more cross party collaboration steadily rising up until again, steadily rising up until about the mid 1960s and then beginning to decline.
Robert Putnam:
And now we're more polarized, possibly more polarized than we have ever been since the civil war, so this is a really big deal. Similar trends for social fragmentation, social isolation. We begin at a very isolated period at the end of the gilded age, beginning of the progressive era. Americans, they're already isolated from one another, isolated from one another in terms of connections with organizations in the community like, well, the rotary or barn racing groups, but also isolated in terms of their own family. The family formation was low then, rises to a peak, almost the same peak in the middle of 1960s and then declines sharply, and is probably, everybody's aware now, kids, our current, youngest generation now is getting married very late. Maybe not getting married at all. Certainly not having kids, so we're back to that, I would say thinner or delayed family of the first part of the century.
Robert Putnam:
And finally, it's a little harder to measure this, but the self-centeredness the individualism, but really narcissism almost, of the late 19th century in terms of the literature, in terms of poetry, and in terms of music then was very narcissistic, individualistic. Then gradually even the culture becomes more connected, a sense that we're all of this together. That is, the ideas that people are working with. And again, that is a peak in the middle of the 1960s. Oddly enough, we would come back to this later. Springsteen turns out to play a role in that turning point up there, and Pete Seeger, up at the top. And then, again, with a very sharp turning edge beginning in the middle of the 1960s, the culture gradually becomes more and more self-centered, I guess I would put it. More and more narcissistic.
Robert Putnam:
So, that's the big curve. There are a lot of, even under that, even within each of those curves, there are many, many different particular things we've looked at exactly what the distribution of income was, exactly what the distribution of health was, exactly what the distribution of housing and so on was, but it turns out this is astonishing, actually, that you can put, and we've got probably, I don't know, 40 or 50 different curves in the book, and you can put them all on a chart and they all look exactly the same. It's astonishing how they're the same curve. And then I'm going back to the question of what that vertical access is in that summary graph, because we're adding together things that are measured in different units, measured in dollars, or measured in kids, or measured in books, or measured in families or whatever. You can't directly add those up.
Robert Putnam:
So, we've used a statistical technique, which is called factored analysis to put them all on a single graph so you can see at a glance, essentially, you're seeing essentially every one of those 40 or 50 separate measures.
Shaylyn Garrett:
One of the things that I think Bob is famous for and makes it so fun to work with him is that he comes up with these incredibly creative and quirky ways to measure things that are really hard to get at. So, when you're asking this question of a cultural difference between I versus we, one of the things that Bob came up with to measure was how frequently Americans were giving unique baby names to their children, right? Hmm. And of course, Bob always has an eye on data sets that that span long periods of time, right? So, it's hard to find data sets that really span a full century or more. And this happens to be one of them, the social security administrations tracks the use of different baby names. And this happened to be personally salient to me because in the very ending run up to the publication of the book, I was pregnant, and pondering what to name this child that was coming into the world.
Shaylyn Garrett:
But what Bob found was that in that we period, the period we dubbed the we period, people were more and more increasingly likely to give common or more conformist names to their children. And that trend flipped in the opposite direction at almost the exact same time as we flipped in the direction away from political comedy and toward political polarization. Now that is just a crazy correlation, right? And so it's not so much trying to say, "This is what we is or what it should be," because, in the 1950s, we really saw that people started to buck against that conformity. It isn't necessarily a good thing that 900 out of a thousand people named their kid John. That's not what we're trying to argue, but we're say this is a really fascinating phenomenon that shows us a change that has happened, a C change in our nation's history that has happened really from I, to we, and then from we to I, and the question then becomes what's the next C change? Will there be one?
Robert Putnam:
And exactly as Shaylyn says, our focus has basically been on not spending a ton of time trying to give our preferred definition of we. The particular thing that's really important is to think about, in this context, is to think about, "Well, did the we at its peak in the sixties and into the seventies, was it racially inclusive? Was it a we that included all races? Or was it basically a we defined in racial terms, we white people, or maybe we black people? And we have a whole chapter in the book exploring that question. That is to say, how did the meaning of we change over the course of this 125 years? I won't try to summarize the whole argument there, but the short answer is it did gradually become more inclusive in the first part of this curve.
Robert Putnam:
That is, even in a period when, of course, Blacks were treated. In fact, in reality treated really awfully. But we, as is embodied in their own connections with the rest of American society, gradually did expand. Of course, I didn't mean that we ever reached full equality in meaning and that's what the Black Lives Matter movement is about right now, it's highly relevant to this question of the fact that we never did actually have a we that encompassed everybody, but we were making progress in the right direction, I think, in the first half of the century. And then by contrast, actually, we stopped making progress around the time of the civil rights movement, strikingly in many measures, there was much more progress before the civil rights revolution, especially in material terms, much more progress toward racial equality before the civil rights revolution than after the civil rights revolution.
Josh King:
Have you considered how a more immersive digital experience could functionally replace the rotary club hall of the last century?
Robert Putnam:
Yeah, it's funny you say that because it is true that we've just published, also it's 20 anniversary edition of Bowling Alone, and then, really is, the only big change as was planned all along was that we would have a last chapter asking the question, "Can Facebook replace bowling leagues, or can Facebook replace the rotary?" And we were finishing the drafting of that chapter or in February of 2020, just at the moment that the whole world unexpectedly began an enormous national experiment on exactly that question; can Facebook replace face to face context? And it was a little bit of a challenge, frankly, trying to write about a topic when the topic itself was changing every day that you were writing about it. And I think and the readers can read the afterward of of the 20th anniversary edition to see the full answer to that question.
Robert Putnam:
But, I think in shorthand, we don't think that websites or internet based communication, social media, can really replace face to face connections, but what we do find, and actually, I think people are going to find this shocking. Mostly, the world is not divided into a virtual world and a real world. Mostly, we have what we call alloys. That is, mixtures of different and particular kinds of connection, but that in themselves, bring together both face to face and virtual type. They're not replacing, they're joining together. And that's actually extremely interesting. I'll give you one quick example. I happen to be one of the oldest users of Facebook in the world. If they had membership numbers, I'd be 0012 or something, because it was invented by a guy who was a roommate of somebody taking my seminar. One of Mark Zuckerberg's roommates was actually in my own small, little seminar.
Robert Putnam:
And we were kind of like a beta tester. And at the beginning of that, everybody in the group was also, if you were a friend in Facebook terms, you were also a real friend. I would see the people in that little group, I'd see them every day or at least once a week walking across the campus. Facebook changes business model about oh, six or seven years later, saw that you could friend anybody in the world. And that changed the nature of the alloy. That's what I'm trying to say, it changed the nature of the connection between real and face to faces. So that now, if you're at all visible, you get friend requests from all over the world, Hans from Berlin friended me, or wanted to ask me to be a friend, I think. Friended me.
Robert Putnam:
Well, I don't know what Hans has in mind. If I showed up and if Hans were a real friend and I'd showed up there, he'd bring flowers, or if I got sick, he'd bring me chicken soup, but I have no idea what Hans has in mind for this relationship. The fact that he turns out to have 5,000 friends makes me a little different, a little hard to believe that he wants to be a face to face friend. I'm really trying to say we should be really careful in understanding, that both for good and for ill, Most of our ties nowadays are simultaneously. Most of our networks are simultaneously real and virtual.
Josh King:
In upswing, I think you guys say that the only group still actively engaged in community life is the religious community, not just at their place of worship, but also the remaining communal organizations. Does this give religious values a larger platform as politicians seek the support of the community, but can only engage through these traditional organizations?
Shaylyn Garrett:
Well, does it give it a larger platform? I don't know. Right? Because I think that we see an increase in secularism, right? What we see when you look at data around religious participation is something called the rise of the nones, which not nuns like in the Catholic sense, but nones in the sense of, if you were to ask people what a religion they identify with, Catholic, Protestant, Mormon, whatever, they would say none. But those people tend usually to also say that they are spiritual, but not religious, so that they're experiencing spirituality, but by choice doing so outside of an organized group. Right? And so, bringing this down to an anecdotal level, rather than up on a macro data level, when I look in my life at the response to COVID or other things, I see the most promising activities around bridging and mutual aid and all these sorts of things happening in my religious community. Right?
Shaylyn Garrett:
That not having a whole lot to do with theology, but having more to do with the connected and interwoven nature of the communities that religious congregations represent. And so, the fact that people are increasingly choosing not to participate in those organizations has tremendous effects on our neighborhoods, on our abilities to care for each other, on all of those things that affect these other measures, like loneliness and isolation and despair and other things. And so, the one question is, how do you get people reinterested in things like church congregations, when they don't find those to be particularly resident when it comes to their own beliefs? And I do think that there are a lot of innovators out there asking this question. One of my favorites is a guy named Eric Lou who runs Citizen University and has come up with this amazing thing called Civic Saturdays, which he calls a secular analog to church.
Shaylyn Garrett:
So, what he's trying to do is to create a space where people can come together, not only to meet each other and have these sort of associations, but also to experience some, what in a church setting, we might call moral formation, but around citizenship, right? So, they hear citizen sermons or democratic sermons, that might not speak to God or Jesus or Buddha or what have you, but sermons that speak to the American ideals, that rally us around those civic causes and those civic identities that can motivate us. So, those are amazing. That's an amazing innovation to try and say, "Let's take seriously the secularism of America, but also take seriously what we've lost as we've moved away from religious congregations and religious practice."
Robert Putnam:
One way of seeing that is, in our data, is that it turns out that if you are an atheist who nevertheless always goes to church suppers, you're way more connected than if you're a deep and developed person who just prays alone in the pews. It's the connections at church, it's the community at church that actually turns out to have all these remarkable effects, not the content of your theology.
Josh King:
My wife will tell you that I'm a sucker for a church supper. I look at the signs outside the churches and say, there's going to be a franks and beans dinner on Saturday night, I always want to go to these things.
Shaylyn Garrett:
Yeah. They're an amazing place to feel that comradery that so many of us feel in our lives has gone missing. Right? You don't feel that very often. And that's an amazing place to find that.
Josh King:
Another group, I think, that politicians seek out for their endorsement, for their embrace, are the unions and their membership are now, I think, at pre-World War I levels leaving perhaps only teachers as a significantly organized profession. Did unions, which piqued at about, I think, a third of non agricultural workers have an outsized impact on The Upswing, and then what led to their relative demise?
Robert Putnam:
The story of unions is actually somewhat different from the story of religion. We can get into that in a minute, but the collapse of unions began actually around 1960, a little earlier than some of these other trends. And it began in part just because of harsh attacks by union businesses and corporations and Republicans. But then, in addition, there were a number of other things that all more or less accidentally combined to drive down union membership. In the sixties and seventies, there were union corruption scandals, and so on. But that actually, basically, the decline in unions driven by those factors that is corporate and conservative opposition and scandals and so on, that actually ended about 25 years ago. And in fact, the decline in what remains in what I might call real union membership, that is union membership intended to actually connect people with other people, that has not been going down so rapidly over the last 20 or 30 years.
Robert Putnam:
And in fact, public approval of unions, that is how does the public feel about unions, follows more or less that same path. It fell sharply when the unions were being attacked by corporations and when scandals were big, but unions are actually now with the American public. Actually, somewhat more popular than they were sometime ago. So, I think now we're way down here in the weeds about one part, one strand of this big U curve. But I think that's a case where you can see a beginning of maybe a turnaround and another pivot. In the larger picture. Shaylyn and I are not just about describing this I-We-I curve. We want to turn it around again. And so, we're also spending a lot of time thinking, "Well, are there green shoots? Are there any early signs that maybe we could be getting another upswing?"
Robert Putnam:
That's why the book is called The Upswing, because we're eager to see how we can do that. And in that context, there are some hopeful signs, I think, and one of the hopeful signs is, it's not the only one, but it's this beginning of a rebirth of interest, of grassroots interest, in union membership.
Josh King:
Think about how there would be an upswing in some of the unplanned challenges that would be put in its way. We talked about it earlier about how you were trying to finish off the book in February and then the world changed on us in March. I want to talk about how you think about how COVID is going to impact society. On the one hand, most people now spend most of their time in these small, tight-knit groups, even familial, and organizations are forced to find ways to meet now without the use of that rotary hall. On the other, there was this complete severing from everyone's normal community. So, what ends up on the other side of this vortex?
Robert Putnam:
Yeah, you may have some ideas. When we were writing the afterward to Bowling Alone, we spent a ton of time trying to guess that. We weren't just trying to describe what was happening at the time we were writing, we're trying to ask what of this is likely to stay? And actually, in my view, it is very, very hard to predict. Yogi Bear said, "Prediction is hard, especially about the future." And therefore, I'm generally reluctant to predict, but especially in this case, because there's still a lot we don't know. There's a lot of the story we don't yet know. We don't know yet how long the epidemic will last. We don't know whether there will be a second peak. There's just a lot we don't know.
Robert Putnam:
We don't know about how permanent lessons people live through it will take. There's some evidence that the experience of the epidemic has made younger people who otherwise have been happy, entirely happy in the virtual world, made them a little more skeptical, actually, now that they're forced to do without any, or almost no face to face ties, that it's a little unclear where that's going to last. I guess I would say, finally, that there are big differences in exactly what we're talking about here. That is, the degree to which people during the epidemic have relied on face to face ties or virtual ties. And in fact, the people and the places that have relied more on face to face ties, that is have been not hunkering down and following social distancing and so on, they are actually doing much worse. In fact, much worse in survival of this epidemic.
Robert Putnam:
And so, it's now becoming clear that a good predictor of who lives and who dies, I really mean that, who lives and who dies, is are they living or dying? Are they living in a place where other people are paying attention to social connections, paying attention to what we call social capital? And if you're living in an area where other people are paying attention to social capital, you're going to be safer than if you happen to be living in a place where other people are not practicing social distancing. And that actually, honestly, now this is maybe getting a little far afield. Fundamentally, the reason why America's spread rate and death rate is so much worse than every other industrial country is it's not having to do with any particular person or leader or whatever of America.
Robert Putnam:
It's the virus happened to catch us in the very lowest ebb of weness in our own history, just an accident that the along comes this virus, it doesn't know about my I-We-I curve, but it hits us at our peak of Iness. And that means we were at our most vulnerable because people who are living in an I world are very vulnerable to this virus. I'm sorry, that's a little long story, but it turns out there's a real connection between what we've been talking about here, which is the I-We-I curve, and what people are living through in the outside world, mainly living and dying as a result of their exposure to the virus.
Shaylyn Garrett:
And I would just add to that, that in terms of another lesson of the I-We-I curve, because one of the things that we try to do in The Upswing is really look to a period of history that was very similar to our own. Namely, the last gilded age that happened around 1900 and ask, well, they managed to get up and out of this I period and into a we period, what is there to learn from them? And so, when you take a question of this COVID, we're having a massive structural change to our lives and our economies in terms of shifting online. And what is that going to do in terms of the future of America? Well, a similar, somewhat analogous shift was back during our last I period in America too, namely the industrial revolution when people were, in vast numbers, moving out of tightly knit towns and communities and into anonymous cities.
Shaylyn Garrett:
What had to happen then was that we had to completely reinvent what togetherness looked like and that required of vast, innovative upsurge in new forms of gathering. And so, I think when bringing this together with Bob's comments about the alloys, the alloys that we're seeing, where people are using both online and in person connections in concert with one another, those are the types of innovations, I think, that could potentially fuel another upswing in America. If we keep thinking of this as some sort of zero sum game, it's either going to be in person or it's going to be online, that doesn't think far enough outside the box in terms of an innovative solution to these structural changes that are creating a whole new ground game in American's society.
Josh King:
And we will continue our exploration of togetherness after the break. Bob Putnam, Shaylyn Romney Garrett, authors of The Upswing, and I, will continue to discuss how America came together a century ago and how we can do it again. That's coming up right after this.
Speaker 6:
Historical data can offer insight into the direction of markets, yet data processing, collection, and storage could be challenging and costly. To simplify your data access needs and help find efficiencies, we launched ICE Data Vault, a cloud-based platform that enables you to access tech history for global exchanges, as well as our proprietary data sourced from our real time feeds.
Speaker 6:
Back test your trading strategies to assess performance and viability. Conduct transaction cost analysis, and support compliance requirements. Input data into surveillance systems to help detect and prevent abusive or illegal trading activities. Access over 10 years of deep tech history across asset classes. Get tick data for an entire market or on an underlying list of instruments. Access additional securities as needed with flexible delivery options to compliment your workflow. Simplify your historical data management with ICE data vault.
Josh King:
Welcome back. Before the break, Bob Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett, authors of The Upswing, and I, were discussing the story behind their most recent book and how economics politics, society, and culture have all followed the I-We-I inverted U curve. Shaylyn, as the 1900s progressed, more and more of those progressive era factory workers were African Americans moving from the south to the north. Where does the great migration fit to our understanding of the I-We-I shift?
Shaylyn Garrett:
That's a great question. I think that a commonly held view about our progress as a nation toward racial equality is that everything was oppression and stagnation for most of the 20th century until you get to the lightning bolt changes of civil rights movement when things dramatically changed. And to a certain extent, that's true, especially when it comes to does your exclusionary policies, right? That really kept people out, kept Black Americans out of certain spheres and segregation and all sorts of things like that. But interestingly, when you look, when you again, zoom out to a broader data set and ask the question, "How and when were Black Americans moving toward parity in material wellbeing with White Americans over the course of the 20th century?"
Shaylyn Garrett:
And when we're talking about material wellbeing, we're talking about things like income equality, we're talking about things like equality of access to education and educational outcomes, we're talking about things like health, life expectancy, infant mortality, we're talking about things like voting access and voter participation. What did the rate of change and the timing of change look like as Black Americans did or did not move toward equality with Whites? And it turns out that the surprising thing is that Black Americans were moving toward parody with White Americans on these measures more quickly, more rapidly before the civil rights movement than after the civil rights movement. Now, that's a shocking thing, I think, to most people who think of the century in this other way that I described before.
Shaylyn Garrett:
But it turns out that those we decades, even though progress for Black Americans was taking place in an entirely separate sphere, by and large, progress was definitely happening. Now, why? How is it that Black Americans were moving toward greater and greater parity with White Americans during a period that characterized by White supremacy, by Jim Crow, and by violently exclusionary policies and practices? Well, the answer turns out to be just as you said, the great migration. Mostly, it was a factor of Blacks themselves moving out of the highly violent and segregated south and into a slightly more hospitable situation in the north. And so, the way that we characterize this in the book is that this is a matter of Black Americans standing up and claiming their place in the American we, essentially against all odds.
Shaylyn Garrett:
So, we're not claiming in the book that during these we decades, the White establishment created all these great polices to help bring Blacks into the we, that isn't the case unfortunately, tragically it's not. But yet, Black Americans did make this stunning progress due mostly to their own efforts. But what's even more striking when you look at the data again, over the course of the full century, is that you see right when that dam of exclusion broke with the civil rights acts, you see then what follows is actually stagnation and in many cases, reversal of that progress toward material parity and material wellbeing with Whites. So, just in that moment, when America turned from we back down to I, we see that we took our collective foot off the gas and the drive toward racial equality and equality of outcomes for Americans, which is a stunning fact to me, I think to most people, as I was studying this.
Shaylyn Garrett:
And again, let me emphasize, this is not a stunning fact to Black Americans. What our charts and graphs to White Americans are the contours of their own genealogy for Black Americans. Black Americans lived this history. They know that there was this great jump in progress during great migration and then a vast stagnation since then. That proves to be, that backdrop of frustration and failed dreams is what is ultimately driving the Black Lives Matter protests. So, this is no surprise to Black Americans. Unfortunately, it is a surprise to a lot of White Americans. And I think it's a really important story to tell that America's we decades, though they were exclusionary, were more friendly to a march toward racial equality than Americans' I decades have been, which is a really interesting and really important story to tell.
Josh King:
The chapter on gender closes with an observation from anthropologist Margaret Mead that may be more salient today than when she said it. She asks, "Who will manage the home as women achieve equal workplace participation?" It's a question that in the COVID movement was revealed to still be the women. Do you see gender equality facing a foot on the gas moment as the pandemic increases the workload to run a home while disproportionately affecting female employment?
Shaylyn Garrett:
What I hope is that in this particular situation, what COVID has done is to bring to light realities that again, women have known and have been living forever, right? That yes, there's equality on all these great measures. Not equality, we are moving toward equality in the workplace and other things, but there's this backdrop story that rarely gets told, which is women shouldering a greater burden of caregiving, both of children and of elders in our society. And that has not been addressed. And that's an analogous story to what we're seeing with race, right? And what COVID really has done and what the killing of George Floyd and all these other highly publicized instances of police brutality have really done is to highlight and bring to the fore problems that were there that we weren't really addressing, which to me sets the stage for innovation.
Shaylyn Garrett:
It sets the stage for a really innovative conversation about how do we reimagine caregiving in our society? Such that this is not a gendered issue that falls disproportionately on one group versus another. This is an incredibly important question that we face if we want to take the question of equality, particularly in this space of gender seriously. But this overlaps with race as well, because who is disproportionately taking the jobs that are caregiving jobs when they are shifted off of a working woman and onto somebody else? It's women of color, right? And so, these are overlapping realities that are creating a perfect storm. As a upper middle class white woman, I can hire somebody to help me.
Shaylyn Garrett:
That's not something that other people can do and we are seeing that problem bear out incredibly harshly in the lives of millions of Americans now. And I hope that that creates a call for change.
Josh King:
So, the research can included that the turning point happened around the time that Bob Dylan went electric. How did a country enter in the 1960s as an acoustic idea of togetherness exit as this wired, self-centered individual?
Robert Putnam:
Yeah, it's a tough question. It's a fun question and as you indicated, I spend a lot of time, actually, even now, listening to music of the sixties and seventies, because if you know what you're listening to, you can actually hear that transformation in the songs of the Beatles or in the songs of Pete Seeger or Dylan or whoever. To take the question a little more seriously, well I was taking it seriously, but in a different direction, I think that part of the challenge is that America entered the sixties and into the early sixties going in one direction, we were reaching a peak of connectedness and communes and cuddly feelings and so on. That was the folk songs of that era.
Robert Putnam:
But then right in the middle sixties, there's this pivot. It's a little bit like, I don't know, an acrobat who's part way through this air, reverses direction and goes in exactly the opposite direction. You can't quite figure out how did he do that? Well, this is like that in the sense that you can't quite understand how we entered the sixties going in a we direction and then suddenly exited the sixties going in an I direction. And of course you want to know, well, why did that happen? And it turns out there's no easy answer to that. There was, I think, the simplest answer. Well, the first answer is one that Shaylyn already alluded to, that is the White backlash against the racial incipient progress of the 1960s. That was a big part of this. The White backlash triggered a lot of other changes in the society.
Robert Putnam:
But there were a whole lot of other more or less unrelated things that all were just like a catenation of many different things, the Vietnam war and drugs and oil crisis and they all happened at that one time. And I know this isn't really a scientific explanation, but America had a nervous breakdown at that point from trying to figure out all of these different things and came out of that period, this is really important, came out of that period much, much more to divided in understanding what American society was about. So, that's when people now call the culture war really begins in that period, really in the aftermath of that period. And it's the people who were of that generation are the people who then later on became involved in trying to overcome the culture class. Bill Clinton is exactly a person of that pivot point and his complicated public career embodies that grappling with the stress of that rapid change.
Robert Putnam:
So, we think there are lessons to be learned from that pivot point up in the 1960s. We also think that there are a lot of really interesting lessons to be learned and maybe even more relevant for us today in the earlier pivot point back around 1900, because that's the period in which the people there were facing the same problems we are. And so, rather than indulge in nostalgia and say, "Wouldn't it be nice if we could be back in the 1960s?" Or it wouldn't. That was my generation and I know that the sixties, there were a lot things wrong with the sixties. I don't think we should be trying to get back to the sixties. I think what we could learn really, from this book is, well, those people who were facing a situation very much like us, around 1900-1910, that sort of era.
Robert Putnam:
We know in retrospect that they did a remarkable job of succeeding and putting the country on a new trajectory and therefore, I think what we in the end want to emphasize to our readers is there are lessons and really concrete, practical lessons we can learn from that earlier episode.
Josh King:
Yeah. So, if we can look, Bob and Shaylyn, at a silver lining of being back at the bottom of the downswing, I guess hopefully there's only one way to go from there. The conclusion of the book begins with vignettes of people from all walks of life who took on the I of the gilded age and gradually guided society back to a we mindset. Is a self-appointed conglomerate of we the solution to kicking off a new upswing?
Shaylyn Garrett:
A self-appointed conglomerative we, that's an interesting way to put it. I think that the thing that characterized the last upswing more than anything was that there was a group of people, and they weren't necessarily a group when this happened. They were individuals when this happened, they experienced a compelling desire to repudiate the downward drift of our nation. And as well as a galvanizing belief in their own ability to do so. Right? And as this realization that there was a choice to be made really took hold, the choice, of course, being that we could continue to drift down this ever darkening path that we're on, or we could choose to master in the words of Walter Lipman, one of the most progressives, we could choose to master the future, grab the reigns of history and say, "You know what? This is a national state that most Americans find genuinely unappealing. We need to do something different."
Shaylyn Garrett:
And that's exactly what the progressives did. And they didn't necessarily start as some grand national movement with charismatic political leaders, they started as people who saw problems in their own communities, in their own neighborhoods, and began to try out innovative solutions to those problems right outside their door. And as they began to see what was working and what was resonating, those good working solutions bubbled up from neighborhoods and into municipalities and into the state level, and then to the national level, and ultimately culminated in the platforms and programs that we see happening at the end of what we call the progressive era. The presidency of Teddy Roosevelt and things like that. And so, we often have this way of looking at the progressive era and saying, "Oh, it was this great platform of grand, national change." When in reality, I think that it was driven by citizen innovation that was happening on a large scale.
Shaylyn Garrett:
And when I say innovation, I mean ideas that really went past the gridlocked left/right framework. That framework really precludes the inventiveness that animated our last upswing. And these reformers then engage in complimentary bottom up and top down strategies to bring the best ideas to the fore. And late in the process, you see political entrepreneurship of Teddy Roosevelt and Wilson and others coming along and translating that popular uprising and those innovative ideas into the policies and programs that ultimately reshaped our nation. And so, that would be what we might describe as a potential recipe for another upswing. Now, let me just add this. It is true that it's hard to look at these progressives and say, we should model ourselves exactly on what they did.
Shaylyn Garrett:
We absolutely shouldn't, both in the content specifically of what they were dealing with, but also in the fact that many of the progressives were racist just to put it bluntly. They did not do enough to widen the circle of moral concern to include all Americans. And so, a lot of the policies and programs that they built had knit into them, an underlying racism that today we call structural racism. Right? And so, any upswing that we would hope to build today that we would model in any way on this progressive era needs to be absolutely clear eyed about how difficult it is going to be to engineer an upswing that is inclusive of all, but that if we do it without including everyone, we will sew into this next upswing, the seeds of its own demise, much as we did last time.
Robert Putnam:
I wonder if I could just add a couple of brief things to that story, which I, of course, agree with entirely. I wanted to, first of all, just add an example that I think people may find instructive of this solving problems locally, but then sharing the ideas nationally, but with the original innovation, the recreating this coming from the local level. Really, a very good example of that is of all things, the public high school. Here's a real fact, Josh, the public high school was invented for the first time in world history in 1910 in a couple of small towns in Iowa and Kansas. And what I mean by that, there had been secondary schools, where rich kids could go, private schools, and boarding schools, and so on. But there had never been, almost never been a situation in any country where all the kids in town, just because they were residents of that town, were afforded a free, four year, secondary education.
Robert Putnam:
That first happened in small towns in the middle of America. The ideas did not from Harvard. They did not come from Stanford. They did not come from Washington. They came from Podunk, Iowa, and then the ideas, and why did they come? Is because in those little towns, even though there were rich folks and poor folks there too, they had a sense of social solidarity, in those communities they had, in our jargon high social capital, and that meant that when you went to the rich banker in town who was going to have to pay for the new high school, whose kids had already gotten a free private education, they were off now in Chicago making lots of money. When you went to him and said, "You ought to help other people's kids too," he felt in some sense, they were his kids too, because it was all a sense of community.
Robert Putnam:
And therefore, that's why it started there. But the idea was so great that it went viral. It was more than a hundred years pre electronic virals, but it went viral in the sense that, astonishingly, within about 20 years, the high school proliferated from a couple of small communities in the Midwest to about 80 or 90% of every place in America. In 20 years, every place in America had high schools. That's what I mean by going viral. And that illustrates what Shaylyn was talking about, which was that these ideas, eventually they spilled up to the national level, but the real creativity was happening down at the bottom level. And exactly as Shaylyn said, the role of people like Teddy Roosevelt was important, but Teddy Roosevelt was important as the person who articulated at a national level things that had been being learned in the previous 20 years in the language statistics, political leaders were the lagging variable, not the leading variable in that period of change. And I think that's likely to be true now.
Robert Putnam:
I just want to finish my thoughts about this with one final point, another striking feature of that period was how young, how incredibly young the people doing this in the progressive era were. People like Jane Adams or Francis Perkins or whatever, all these people who we think of as the presenters of the progressive movement, we think of them because they became famous when they were old. We think of them as people who were awesome in there fifties, sixties, seventies, but actually they were in their late teens and twenties and thirties when they made these. These were young people who were making these decisions. Jane Adams, Francis Perkins, amazingly still too little appreciated African American woman who was a journalist, Ida B. Wells, who has a good claim to have ended this scourge and just she's little known, but she was herself young. If it hadn't been for Ida B. Wells, we could still be having lynching. So, she was really important. But the point I'm trying to make is she was young.
Robert Putnam:
If we're going to fix these problems in America today, I hope that people like Shaylyn, who's no longer in her teens and twenties and people like me who are, I'm nearly 80. So, I would like to say I'm contributing, but actually it's statistically extremely unlikely that someone my age is going to get a new idea, but the people who are really going to now, who are going to do it are people like, I don't know, Greta Thunberg, this young Swedish girl who probably isn't even 20 and who's leading the global movement against global warming. I'm hoping that we're seeing the early start of a new progressive era. But if we are, that's what it'll look like.
Robert Putnam:
We will move in that direction when the youngest generation of Americans today begin taking up leadership to take responsibility, in a sense, for fixing the problem that they did nothing, they didn't do anything to call cause this problem, just as the people in the progressive era who were active, they hadn't caused the problem, but they took up the responsibility, as Shaylyn says and I completely agree with that, of choice, agency. That's the measure here. The history tells us we're not the victims of history, we can master history. We can make change as to where our country's headed, if we want to.
Josh King:
And I think if I go way back, Bob, Alexis de Tocqueville was no more than 26 years old when he started his journeys across America and maybe that's a decent way of ending. We've been discussing the last 125 years in quite great detail. But the book begins with de Tocqueville's analysis of the young American democracy two centuries ago and wondering how he would view the present success and failures at maintaining this delicate balance of individualism and communalism required for liberty and peace. He said that the greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults. Looking forward, do you think you'll be right?
Shaylyn Garrett:
I certainly hope so, but I think that, again, it's important to remember that there is no inevitability here. There is no inevitable downward drift, nor is there an inevitable upward turn. Everything depends upon the choices that we as citizens make. Right? And I think that we don't know what direction we're going to go in. We have a huge national choice to make in just about a month. And the outcome of that, I think, will have a massive effect on which direction this nation goes, and it remains to be seen. But I think we have a short period of time yet to do everything that we can to help people understand that the choices that they make have enormous consequences. And this could not be any bigger of a moment in American history in terms of our ability to hopefully turn things around.
Josh King:
Enormous consequences indeed. Bob, Shaylyn, thanks so much for joining us Inside The Ice House.
Shaylyn Garrett:
Thanks, Josh.
Robert Putnam:
Thank you very much.
Josh King:
And that is our conversation for this week. Our guests were Robert Putnam and Shaylyn Garrett, authors of The Upswing, How America Came Together A Century Ago And How We Can Do It Again, out now from Simon and Schuster and available wherever you get your books. If you like what you heard, please rate us on iTunes so other folks know where to find us and it you've got a comment or a question you'd like one of our experts to tackle on a future show, email us at [email protected] or tweet at us at ICE House Podcast. Our show is produced by Pete Asch with production assistance from Ken Abel and Ian Wolf. I'm Josh King, your host, signing off in the library of the New York stock exchange. Thanks for listening. We'll talk to you next week.
Speaker 1:
Information contained in this podcast was obtained in part from publicly available sources and not independently verified. Neither ICE, nor its affiliates make any representations or warranties expressed or implied as to the accuracy or completeness of the information and do not sponsor, approve, or endorse any content herein. All of which is presented solely for informational and educational purposes. Nothing herein constitutes an offer to sell, a solicitation of an offer to buy any security, or a recommendation of any security or trading practice. Some portions of the preceding conversation may have been edited for the purpose of length or clarity.
