"A Nation of Organizers: The Institutional Origins of Civic Voluntarism in the United States" by Theda Skocpol, Marshall Ganz, and Ziad Munson, in American Political Science Review (Sept. 2000), 1527 New Hampshire Ave., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036.

To hear some conservatives and communitarians tell it, big government and its "topdown" efforts to do good have sapped America’s civic health, turning a once proud land of bustling volunteers, active with friends and neighbors in multitudes of tiny local groups, into a nation of isolated, self-absorbed slackers, mindlessly clicking their remotes. Instead of "a thousand points of light," millions of TV screens glowing in the social dark. The solution: Turn off the set, stop looking to government, and join...a bowling league. But wait! cry Harvard University sociologist Skocpol and her colleagues. Government can help! After all, they argue, it served in the past as a model for voluntary membership organizations.

They cite a classic 1944 article, "Biography of a Nation of Joiners," by historian Arthur Schlesinger, Sr. Voluntary groups were few in colonial America, he wrote, but the struggle for independence and then the adoption of the Constitution taught lessons in cooperation. In the early 1800s, Americans began to organize associations along the lines of the federal political system, "with local units loosely linked together in state branches and these in turn sending representatives to a national body." Subsequently, the Civil War heightened national feelings, giving "magnified force" to association building in the late 19th century.

Buttressing Schlesinger’s analysis, Skocpol and her colleagues dredged up historical data on large-membership organizations from an ongoing study of the origins and development of volunteer groups, as well as from historical directories, then looked at the local groups listed in 1910 city directories for 26 cities. "In every city," they write, "most of the groups listed in the directories were part of regional or national federations, ranging from a minimum of 63 percent in Boston to a maximum of 94.5 percent in Rome, Georgia."

Looking further at groups listed in city directories between 1890 and 1910 in eight small cities, the authors found that religious congregations and local chapters of large federations (other than labor organizations) were "quite stable," while strictly local groups tended to come and go. "Once founded, churches and chapters linked to the largest federations took firm root and became the enduring core of civil society in modernizing America." The chapters flourished, they say, thanks in part to the efforts of national and state federation leaders, such as Thomas Wildey of the Odd Fellows and Frances Willard of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, who "were constantly on the move," spreading ideas and recruiting members.

If large federations growing "parallel to the institutions of national republican government" first made the United States "a civic nation," conclude Skocpol and her coauthors, soccer moms. They must seek to revitalize then Americans worried about civic decay "representative democracy as an arena and today must look beyond bowling leagues and positive model for associational life."