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Book Review
Canada and the United States
| Theda Skocpol. Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life. (The Julian J. Rothbaum Distinguished Lecture Series, number 8.) Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. 2003. Pp. xviii, 366. $29.95.
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| In 1874, women from around the country and from different economic and social positions met in Cleveland, Ohio, to launch the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) and fight drunkenness among men. By the early 1900s, membership in the WCTU ballooned to over one percent of all women in America, and their activities had become organized into a well-articulated federated structure of national, state, and local units that were geared toward influencing government policy. That a small meeting of volunteers might lead within a few decades to a large, hierarchically structured organization might seem to be an extraordinary anomaly. But it is not. Since the eighteenth century, fifty-eight voluntary associations with active memberships of over one percent of men, women, or adults in the United States have formed and drawn into their ranks a wide spectrum of Americans: farmers, craft and industrial workers, white-collar workers like doctors and lawyers, and business owners. |
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Theda Skocpol uncovers the history of large membership voluntary associations in an important and readable book that is equally aimed at historians, social scientists, policy makers, and the broad public. Skocpol—today's preeminent macrohistorian actively working within the social sciences—deftly combines extensive and original primary historical research, original synthesis of existing research in history and the social sciences, and thoughtful engagement with the larger public. Her book, which grew out of a distinguished lecture series at the University of Oklahoma, makes three powerful contributions. First, Skocpol offers a cogent institutional and political model of "social capital." Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Renewal of American Community (2001) contributed to the renewed interest in the decline of citizen engagement and connectedness within communities. For Putnam, Americans had become couch potatoes glued to their televisions; they were no longer joining bowling leagues, parent-teacher asociations, and a host of other associations as had their parents and grandparents. Instead, as Putnam's title would have it, they bowled alone. |
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Putnam focuses on citizens and asks, what's wrong with them? Skocpol largely accepts Putnam's prognosis (with some notable differences) that Americans today join voluntary associations less often than in the past but pinpoints as the cause the strategies of political and civic leaders to advance the power and positions of themselves and their members. The engine of vibrant civic life, according to Skocpol, is "raucous conflict," attempts to grab power and leverage, and the interchange of government (at multiple levels) and federated voluntary associations. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, large voluntary organizations like the Grand Army of the Republic, the Grange, the American Farm Bureau Federation, and others formed to promote government programs and were in turn encouraged and sustained by these programs. Today, Americans are less engaged in their communities and in the country's political life because the "Rights Revolution" of the 1960s punctured old social barriers. In addition, political and organizational elites shifted their strategies: instead of directly mobilizing and indirectly encouraging large-scale citizen involvement, professionally managed advocacy groups focus on communicating through the mass media and fund raising among the middle and upper classes. |
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