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.
