Bowling Alone: Revised and Updated (eBook)

CHAPTER 1Thinking about Social Change in America NO ONE IS LEFT from the Glenn Valley, Pennsylvania, Bridge Club who can tell us precisely when or why the group broke up, even though its forty-odd members were still playing regularly as recently as 1990, just as they had done for more than half a century. The shock in the Little Rock, Arkansas, Sertoma club, however, is still painful: in the mid-1980s, nearly fifty people had attended the weekly luncheon to plan activities to help the hearing- and speech-impaired, but a decade later only seven regulars continued to show up. The Roanoke, Virginia, chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) had been an active force for civil rights since 1918, but during the 1990s membership withered from about 2,500 to a few hundred. By November 1998 even a heated contest for president drew only fifty-seven voting members. Black city councillor Carroll Swain observed ruefully, 'Some people today are a wee bit complacent until something jumps up and bites them.' VFW Post 2378 in Berwyn, Illinois, a blue-collar suburb of Chicago, was long a bustling 'home away from home' for local veterans and a kind of working-class country club for the neighborhood, hosting wedding receptions and class reunions. By 1999, however, membership had so dwindled that it was a struggle just to pay taxes on the yellow brick post hall. Although numerous veterans of Vietnam and the post-Vietnam military lived in the area, Tom Kissell, national membership director for the VFW, observed, 'Kids today just aren't joiners.'1 The Charity League of Dallas had met every Friday morning for fifty-seven years to sew, knit, and visit, but on April 30, 1999, they held their last meeting, the average age of the group had risen to eighty, the last new member had joined two years earlier, and president Pat Dilbeck said ruefully, 'I feel like this is a sinking ship.' Precisely three days later and 1,200 miles to the northeast, the Vassar alumnae of Washington, D.C., closed down their fifty-first-- and last--annual book sale. Even though they aimed to sell more than one hundred thousand books to benefit college scholarships in the 1999 event, co-chair Alix Myerson explained, the volunteers who ran the program 'are in their sixties, seventies, and eighties. They're dying, and they're not replaceable.' Meanwhile, as Tewksbury Memorial High School (TMHS), just north of Boston, opened in the fall of 1999, forty brand-new royal blue uniforms newly purchased for the marching band remained in storage, since only four students signed up to play. Roger Whittlesey, TMHS band director, recalled that twenty years earlier the band numbered more than eighty, but participation had waned ever since.2 Somehow in the last several decades of the twentieth century all these community groups and tens of thousands like them across America began to fade. It wasn't so much that old members dropped out--at least not any more rapidly than age and the accidents of life had always meant. But community organizations were no longer continuously revitalized, as they had been in the past, by freshets of new members. Organizational leaders were flummoxed. For years they assumed that their problem must have local roots or at least that it was peculiar to their organization, so they commissioned dozens of studies to recommend reforms.3 The slowdown was puzzling because for as long as anyone could remember, membership rolls and activity lists had lengthened steadily. In the 1960s, in fact, community groups across America had seemed to stand on the threshold of a new era of expanded involvement....