I keep thinking about the opening of E.L. Doctorow’s 1975 novel, “Ragtime,” in which he describes the convivial America of the early 20th century. “The population customarily gathered in great numbers,” he wrote. They flocked to parades, concerts, fish fries, regattas, fireworks displays, operas and balls. “There seemed to be no entertainment that did not involve great swarms of people.”
Today, Americans are more likely than ever to spend time alone, as Derek Thompson regretfully documented in The Atlantic. They order takeout instead of eating in restaurants. They watch TV at home instead of going to the movies. In 2023, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declared an “epidemic of loneliness and isolation.”
When I was young, the people who populated Doctorow’s happy crowds were still walking the earth. One of them was my grandfather Robert C. Brewster, born in 1901, who was a pillar of Manchester, Vt. He was a big fish in a small river — that being the Batten Kill, the trout-fishing stream that runs through town. He was at different times the president of the Chamber of Commerce, the president of the local independent high school, a co-founder of Equinox Country Club and a winner of the Boy Scouts’ Silver Beaver Award for leadership. He ran an ambulance service, a funeral service and a furniture store. He was also the board chairman of Factory Point National Bank (which gave me my first credit card) and the executive secretary of the Manchester Sports Club, which was instrumental in getting the area’s ski industry going. Among other things.
My grandfather was a joiner, and he thought his grandchildren should be, too. He wanted me to join the marching band in college so I could go to football games free. I did not. When I was out of college, he said I should join the Rotary Club. I did not. He didn’t just belong to the Rotary Club; he was the founding president (in 1937) of the Manchester chapter, which built and operated a swimming pool in town.
A couple of years ago, I wrote about my great-grandfather Charles Orson Brewster, a builder, and his experiences when the Great Depression struck Vermont. That man was my grandfather’s father. He also seemed to know everybody in town, judging from the calendars he kept.
I know I’m not breaking ground when I write that people used to do things together more than they do now. That reality has been made plain by Thompson, Doctorow and many others, including Robert Putnam (“Bowling Alone”), my colleague David Brooks and, of course, Alexis de Tocqueville, who wrote, “In no country in the world has the principle of association been more successfully used, or more unsparingly applied to a multitude of different objects, than in America.”
Still, I got a powerful feeling for the communal life that has been lost in recent decades when I read about the Manchester of yesteryear in “Manchester, Vermont: A Pleasant Land Among the Mountains, 1761-1961.” The Manchester Fair was a huge deal a hundred years ago, as was the Manchester Union Band, a group of local amateurs who gave open-air concerts, performed the dirge at Memorial Day, serenaded at socials and appeared at firemen’s musters.
“Manchester, Vermont,” which was published in 1961, gives the names and key members of 63 organizations that came and went in a town that had only about 2,000 people in the first half of the 20th century. The list includes a camera club, a flying club, a horseback-riding club, granges, veterans’ groups, baseball clubs and all the traditional civic organizations. The Monday Club, organized in 1895, was especially charming. According to the book, it:
has never had dues or regular officers; meets fortnightly, limiting itself to 16 members; now in its 66th year; its afternoon programs begin at 3:00 p.m. with dessert followed by readings, reviews and discussions on many topics such as “the democratic measures of the Gladstone administration,” various schools of art, “the peasant revolt of 1377” and lives of White House families.
You could say that things are better today. If I want to know about the Peasants’ Revolt (which actually got going in 1381), I don’t need friends in the Monday Club; I can find out everything I need on the web. If I want to hear music, I can listen to the world’s best through wireless earbuds; I don’t need to go down to the firemen’s muster and listen to my neighbors toot their horns.
But so, so much has been lost.
To economists, what I’m bemoaning here is the loss of social capital. According to the Institute for Social Capital, the term “does not have a clear, undisputed meaning.” It’s sometimes described as bonds between similar people and bridges between different ones.
I think the second part — bridges — is especially important. It’s easy enough to bond with people who are just like you. It’s more challenging and potentially more beneficial to turn strangers into acquaintances into potential friends. As I wrote in my newsletter last month on sending holiday cards, those more tenuous connections expose you to new ideas and facts.
Small towns can be too insular. At their best, though, they nurture their own while welcoming and learning from the wide world. It’s a shame that so many of us, no matter where we live, struggle to feel that spirit today.
The Readers Write
The Biden administration was stuck with a difficult case to make to the large number of individual voters it needed to convince on the economy. James Carville recently wrote in a guest essay that it’s still all about the economy. But I think what it’s really about is the economy as individual voters experience it — not the economy as economists like to measure it.
Gary Ragatz
East Lansing, Mich.
On inflation under Biden: Eggs at my local store exceeded $4 this week, and bird flu just killed its first human victim in the United States this year. No president has control over such problems.
Barbara Sloan
Conway, S.C.
After some years, there may be a more positive evaluation of Biden’s presidency. His situation reminded me a lot of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s term in office. For L.B.J., war crushed his remarkable achievements in civil rights legislation. For Biden, his foreign policy overshadows his economic successes. Our recovery from the pandemic is truly impressive.
Gloria Renner
Butler, Pa.
You wrote about making artificial intelligence serve humanity. Henry Ford knew he shouldn’t devise his assembly lines to replace people because then no one would earn the money to buy his cars. A.I. developers don’t directly depend on consumers to make their software profitable, so they are divorced from the implications of A.I. replacing workers.
Rob Hellman
New York
Kurt Vonnegut’s “Player Piano” (1952) is simply prescient in anticipation of a time when machines replace humans, leaving only service jobs for what few folks can get jobs. He imagines trickle-down subsistence in a bleak and hopeless environment.
Andrew M. Novaković
Milwaukee
Quote of the Day
“Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think that you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.”
— Ayn Rand, “Atlas Shrugged” (1957)
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