On Thursday, April 23, renowned political scientist Robert Putnam ’63 visited Swarthmore to deliver a lecture on social, political, and economic transformation in the twentieth-century United States. Putnam’s seminal work, the nonfiction best-seller “Bowling Alone,” describes a widespread downturn in civic participation and local solidarity (which he dubs collectively, “social capital”) in the decades between the 1960s and the 1990s; his later works, “Better Together” and “Our Kids,” track this shift into the 21st century and propose approaches to restoring social capital across the United States. Putnam is the Peter and Isabel Malkin Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government, and was the fourth most frequently cited author on collegiate political science syllabi as of 2024.
On the Friday following his lecture, he sat down with The Phoenix to discuss his memories of Swarthmore in the 1960s and his hopes and fears for the future of American society.
Zephyr Weinreich: Last night, you described your time at Swarthmore as the “best thing that ever happened to you.” Given that this period (the early 1960s) coincides with the era that “Bowling Alone” highlights as the golden age of American social capital, I’d love to hear more about your experience of the college in those years, both from a historical and a biographical perspective. Who were you when you arrived at Swarthmore? Who were you when you left? How did the setting of 1960s Swarthmore inform this change?
Robert Putnam: I grew up in a small town in northern Ohio, called Port Clinton — this town of about 5,000 people. There were 150 people in my graduating class, of whom I think roughly twenty went to college. I was the only one who went to college outside of Ohio. So it was not a college-going part of the country or a college-going era.
ZW: And did you grow up with the expectation that you would go to college?
RP: I did, but that was pretty unusual. My parents were definitely not wealthy, and indeed, while I was at Swarthmore, my father went bankrupt. I was only able to stay in college because the college reached out to me when he did and said, “Well, whatever happens, we will enable you to finish college.”
So, my parents were surely not rich, but they were very well educated — extremely well educated for the time. My mom had what would have been equivalent to a junior college degree, which, for women in those years, was a lot. And my dad had a master’s degree, which was extremely rare; he had a master’s degree in a time when not more than 5% or 10% of American men had college degrees, much less masters. He was the first in his family to go to college.
And how did I decide to come to Swarthmore? How did I even know about the existence of Swarthmore? Well, my parents took me to tour colleges, and they took me to the Toledo public library, where I found a book called “The Younger American Scholar: His Collegiate Origins.” Based on my interest in the title, you can tell that I was implicitly thinking I was going to become a professor. I thought I wanted to be an engineer at the time. I was good in math and might have become an engineer, but part of me knew I wanted to become a professor. This book statistically measured, for the people who later on ended up becoming good professors, where they had gone to college compared to the number of people in those colleges. Of course, a lot of them would go to Harvard, but Harvard’s big, so its score was not that high. But Swarthmore was tiny, and it was producing all these scholars. Swarthmore was first.
ZW: When you imagined becoming a professor, did you envision yourself as a political scientist? A professor of engineering?
RP: I was very much in the hard sciences initially. I liked math and physics and chemistry, so I thought I’d teach one of those. I don’t know if you still have distribution requirements, but we had them. And that’s how I ended up in an Introduction to Political Science class. That’s also how I met [my wife] Rosemary: I was sitting behind her, and then we had lunch, and one thing led to another. So, Rosemary and I were in the class during the fall of 1960. Obviously, that fall was the presidential campaign — Kennedy versus Nixon — and therefore, it was an exciting time to be taking that kind of class. As one of our first dates, Rosemary took me to a Jack Kennedy rally at a shopping center near the college. I’d taken her to a Nixon rally because I was a Nixon person at that point. So we took the Media Local into 30th Street Station, and stood in the crowd, and heard Kennedy say—I’m now 85, and the hair on the back of my neck is still rises —“ask what you can do for your country.” I thought, I should do something really important. Now, of course, I could’ve decided to be a rocket scientist. But I didn’t. I thought, politics is what I’ll do. That’s when I changed to being a political scientist.
ZW: And what was the political environment like at Swarthmore broadly? Many features of small liberal arts colleges seem to align with your model for pro-social capital communities. Did you find this to be the case at Swarthmore? What, if anything, did you find lacking?
RP: I could show you my [first-year] dorm in Palmer, the window, out of which I looked. And why do I remember that window? Because I looked out that window for the whole first semester, and thought, “I have made an enormous mistake.” In Port Clinton, I was pretty good. I was the leader of this and that, and I could even play football on the team. It was a tiny high school, but in that way, I was a big fish in that little pond. Here, there were a lot of big fish. My roommate was a guy named Leo Brody, who turned out to be one of the brightest stars of my class. First of all, he had a beard. I didn’t. Secondly, he listened to crazy music all the time.
ZW: What kind of music?
RP: Well, it wasn’t so crazy, but at the time, I thought, wow. It was [Stravinsky’s] Rites of Spring. He played that for 24 hours straight. I had never heard of it. And Leo and I now are close friends but he was way left of me. And way more sophisticated than I was. And so even though now we become good friends, he was with a different crowd of people. I was just sort of a straight arrow.
So, was Swarthmore a hippie paradise? Well, look, compared to every place else in America, yes. But, there were a lot of conventional people here. There probably are now, and there probably always have been. If everyone was Allen Ginsberg, it wouldn’t work. But if you said, “Where in America would you go looking for something good for hippies?” Swarthmore would be the place.
That first fall, when I went home on Thanksgiving, I said, “I’m not going back. I’m just completely not in the right place. I should go to some state school.” I was not exactly intimidated, but it didn’t feel like my crowd, is what I was trying to say. These were all really intellectual kids. And I had thought I was intellectual, but it didn’t feel like it here. I mean, who was playing Stravinsky? It seems silly for me to say now.
My family said, “at least stay one [full] semester.” So I did. I stayed. And, first of all, my first semester grades were really good, so I couldn’t have been that dumb. I was gradually becoming accustomed to the place, and I was developing friends who are still, 70 years later, among my very closest friends. Gradually, I felt I was becoming connected. I joined the marching band, and then the orchestra, on trombone. That turns out to have been sort of important, because there was a cute woman in the band who played French horn. She was also in my political science class. And now she’s waiting for me in the other room. And then, also, I was not a deeply religious person, but I certainly was observant, and I sang in the choir of the Methodist Church near campus. So I was more comfortable.
As for social capital — the term was not in use in that way for many years, so I didn’t call it that at the time. I was aware, though, that this was a tight-knit community, and I had come from a tight-knit community, and I liked it. So there’s some sense in which, really, all of my career surrounding social capital hearkens back to the fact that I loved Port Clinton, and I loved Swarthmore, and I wish the rest of America had the same sense of community.
I think the fact that it’s a Quaker school is relevant, too, because Quakerism is really big on community. You sit there and listen, and you want to know what other people think. In some ways, Quakerism is intolerant, but basically, it’s a very communitarian approach. I never became a Quaker myself, but the spirit of Quakerism is really powerful.
I don’t know that I was aware of the influence that the Swarthmore environment had on me at the time. But somebody who wrote a biography of me would say, it all began at Swarthmore.
ZW: Nowadays, many Swarthmore students remain politically committed, but I think that a lot of Swatties might tell you that the current level of social cohesion and social engagement on campus leaves something to be desired. For example, our most recent Student Government Organization election had a voter participation rate of 12%. Where do you think the Swarthmore community may have gone wrong, as far as cultivating social capital goes? How can Swarthmore students, faculty, and staff contribute to positive change in this regard?
RP: Half of the people in my class here went on to become academics. Think how different that is for you. But that’s not on you, and it’s not on us. It’s just a different world. The same thing is true in politics, actually. I think compared to other people, other college students in this area, you guys are probably much more progressive.
All I know about the college is what I read in the campus paper, but the way [President Val Smith] handled the disagreement about student activism for Palestine — I read it and I said, “that’s Swarthmore.” Everybody’s engaged, but people are decent about it. They can live together. You may disagree, but that told me it’s the same Swarthmore.
Most of the problems that I think are relevant today are not caused by you students, and not by the college either. We’re all stuck today. That was my story [in “Bowling Alone”]. We’re all stuck in an era. When I’d just taken my first job in the University of Michigan, I would have been a little older than you, but not that much older. At that time, I thought, America is fine. Things are going in the right direction, which they were. And I thought, and we’ve got lots of prosperity, which we did. And the Vietnam War was not a big deal yet at that point. And I thought that America was going to go on just like that forever. I didn’t know that it was not sunrise in America, but sunset in America. And so, if you look at the world, in my point of view, I’ve gone through my entire adult life being disappointed, because I was raised in a period in which everything seemed to be going right with America, everything. You have been raised in an utterly different America. From your experience, in comparison to mine, everything’s been going wrong in America. And that’s not your fault.
This was what I was saying last night, in my talk, when I was trying to get you all to get up and march right out of there to Washington. Yeah, I’m trying to save America. If America is going to be saved, it will be by people at Swarthmore. People like the people who were in the room last night. That’s what it’s gonna look like. I’m really quite confident.
ZW: You ended your talk last night by encouraging us to “go moral.” The question that naturally arises, though, is how to go moral. What can our readers do, not in the long term and not in D.C., but today, right here?
RP: Well, vote and organize. Organization is essential. I don’t know about this exact congressional district, but Pennsylvania is a big swing state. There are things that your readers can do now, and over the summer, and in the fall, that are being civically engaged, and I don’t mean you just go praying for more. That’s not at all what I’m saying. You should look for ways in which, in your social activity, you can help other people. It’s not just about belief. Believing has to lead to doing. You’re working hard. I know you’re working hard, but you are unbelievably privileged here. So you’ve got to think, “I’m a privileged person. How can I, right now, begin helping people who are under or less privileged than I am?”
ZW: I want to address some of the more complicated, possibly uncomfortable implications of the conclusions you draw across your work. For one thing, the period you identify as marking a decline in American social capital is also the period in which the civil rights movement and sexual revolution unfolded. In 2015, same-sex marriage became nationally protected under America’s first Black president; that year, at the time, was also a record low for social capital. I would imagine that many people would be hesitant to return to the sociopolitical framework of the 1960s, even if the alternative were to remain in an era of relative division and isolation. Your later work found a correlation between diversity in local communities and mistrust amongst neighbors. Is it possible that progressive social change inherently comes at the cost of widespread unity? Could it be that we remember the 1960s as a golden age simply because we were listening to a more limited set of privileged voices at the time?
RP: You’re probably thinking that these bowling teams were all-white. Turns out, that’s not true. If you can find a hard copy of “Bowling Alone,” on the dust jacket, there’s a picture of me and my bowling team. When I was in Port Clinton, it was mostly white, but some Black people lived there. And I was in eighth grade when this picture was taken. This is about 1956. There are three white guys there, and skinny Bobby Putnam in the middle. The two people on the outside are both black. That is, our team was integrated. This is a real picture of real kids, in Port Clinton, not a very liberal place.
At the time that I was at Swarthmore, many people went down south to lobby for freedom and equality. I regret this, but I was not one of the leaders who went down South, but there were lots of white people who would go down and disrupt segregation in the South. They were from here, good friends of mine.
ZW: Journalist Derek Thompson refers to your work in his writing on what he dubs the “antisocial century” — these past couple decades of unprecedentedly widespread loneliness and isolation. In addition to citing trends like those you point out (a downturn in civic participation, involvement in religious organizations, etc.), he highlights the role that technological advances have played in building interpersonal distance into everyday life. In the age of social media, remote work, and AI chatbots, it’s hard not to feel that the only way we can restore our social capital is by throwing all of our smartphones into the ocean. What do you make of this aspect of the issue? Is technology inherently opposed to social capital?
RP: It’s a complicated question. It’s funny, because, both last night and this morning, when I gave a talk in Central City, I was beaten up by people saying, “We fixed the problem. We have these smartphones, and social media, so we don’t need to go bowling.” This is a problem. It’s especially terrible for kids. And therefore, I actually am a strong supporter of a lot of these things that would keep kids under a certain age from having these. Or at least keeping them in a lockbox during the school day. There’s now a movement globally in the direction that I’m talking about.
ZW: And what about adults?
RP: Kids are the most dangerous part of it. Because they’re being isolated in the most important stage of their brain development. This is serious stuff that is really irreversible. What happens to these kids — even a little bit kids your age, but especially really young kids — we’re never gonna be able to reverse that, because it’s being built biologically into their brains.
The symbol of everything bad in America today are the “tech bros” who are running the country. It’s much worse than ever before, much worse than the Gilded Age. Because they’re just unbelievably wealthy, and they have no connections with ordinary people at all. Some of them — it is astonishing, I mean — they’re never physically in the presence of ordinary people. That wasn’t even true of Rockefeller. He did actually encounter real human beings, and he had been a real, ordinary human being himself. The same goes for all those other robber barons back then. These Silicon Valley types are worse. They’re disconnected from the rest of this country, and they actually are running the country.
I don’t know if I said this publicly, but I’m happy to have you quote me saying it. It’s hard for me to see how we can solve any of the problems, including what we’re talking about now, until their power, their monopoly power over everything — politics, technology, money — is dramatically reduced.
ZW: And would that happen through governmental regulation?
RP: Yes. Absolutely. It is not a technical problem. There’s nothing intrinsic about smartphones that makes them anti-communitarian. They could be used just as easily for us to call a flash mob or say, “Let’s get together here and organize a protest march to Washington or something.” The problem is not the physical thing. It’s the way it’s being used to monitor us and to divide us.
It would be easy to regulate it — it should be. People, back in the day, thought we should regulate railroads. Well, we did, and it worked. We thought we should regulate the stock market. Well, we did, and that worked too. I mean, come on. It’s only because some people have this view that there’s something sacred about private property, but the founders did not think there was anything sacred about private property. And you don’t have to be socialists. You just have to be just conscious of the fact that there are consequences to the rest of the world, for the decisions that a few people make.
ZW: You’re one of the most frequently cited political scientists in today’s college classrooms, and “Bowling Alone” has become a household title. Often, being widely read entails being widely misunderstood. In closing, then, I’d like to ask you what you think most people get wrong about your research and your conclusions.
RP: It’s easy to cast “Bowling Alone” as a celebration of white male hegemony. That was never true. But I was less sensitive to race early on. It wasn’t that I was completely blind to it. There’s some talk about race in the book, but I didn’t take it as seriously as I should have. Part of the change has just been paying more attention, and part of it has been diversity coming into my little family. My grandson’s father is Costa Rican, and is much darker than I am or his mother is. He’s somewhere in the middle. I’m pink and he’s not pink, and now I see the world partly through his eyes, because I care a lot about him. I care a whole lot about him. And so, I’m still the same white guy, but on the other hand, I’m not quite the same white guy. And this is just my little corner of the much bigger thing that’s happening in America, which is that America has become more diverse. And it’s a wonderful thing.
As for my article about diversity and mistrust, the short-run effect of diversity is this hunkering down, but in the long run, the result is an expansion of the “we” that is America. This country has always been moving toward a more encompassing sense of “we.” The idea is that our “we” when we’re at our best, has always been expansive, expanding.
ZW: Let me make sure that I understand you correctly. I’m hearing that originally, when you wrote “Bowling Alone,” race was just not something that was on your mind in the same way as it is now. And so if you have a fundamental takeaway about American social capital that synthesizes “Bowling Alone” and your later work, it would be that, yes, the 1960s were an era in which there was white male hegemony, and we’re no longer there. We shouldn’t go back there. We should go forward, into a world only possible today, combining the cohesion of the old days with the tolerance we’ve achieved since then. Does that sound about right?
RP: Exactly, yes. And I’m saying that that’s not contrary to American history. That exemplifies American history. Not that we’re always perfect — of course, I’ve never said that we’re always perfect — but that we have, over time, repeatedly, learned to live with more diversity. What does it say, right on our currency? E pluribus unum. Out of many, one. That’s us.
