The Big “We”

Mid-century America was indeed a time and place of stronger macro- and micro-social cohesion. Robert Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett, authors of The Upswing: How We Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again, discuss the “I-we-I curve,” in which the individualism and mistrust of the Gilded Age gave way in the early decades of the twentieth century to a growing civic-mindedness, a wave that crested from the mid-1950s to the mid-’60s. The upswing in social consciousness yielded the New Deal and the Great Society reforms and set in motion the century’s profound social revolutions, before the big “we” dissolved into many competing “I”s once more.

Putnam is the author of Bowling Alone, a landmark work of political science that traces the rise and fall of civic society — churches, clubs, unions, lodges, sports leagues, volunteer associations, neighborhood organizations, youth groups — to demonstrate and explain the unraveling of mid-century American mutualism. Regardless of ideological or political affiliation, Putnam’s argument goes, the mass participation in groups and vastly more social nature of American life evidenced a far stronger sense of social solidarity than exists today. Even the most ardent anti-communists espousing unabashed individualism lived in a society where people routinely moved in unison toward common goals — so unlike today’s lonely satellites criss-crossing through empty space. This was the pro-social flip side of what liberals remember only as stifling conformity.

In The Upswing, Putnam and Garrett chart this trend alongside several others, deepening our understanding of how texturally different mid-century American life was from today. Crucially, the arc of economic inequality follows the same bell-curve pattern.

“For decades after World War II,” the authors write, “the gap between rich and poor continued to narrow. Poor and middle-income Americans’ share of the bounty of postwar prosperity grew, further reducing income inequality.” America’s collective wealth was growing, but unlike the Gilded Age or today, the share of that wealth was also more evenly distributed.

“A rising economic tide lifted all boats,” Putnam and Garrett write. “In fact, during this period the dinghies actually rose faster than the yachts.”

The policies responsible for this dramatic narrowing of income inequality and rise in working-class living standards emerged from the convergence of several historical forces: the massive labor organizing of the 1930s, the New Deal’s transformation of the relationship between government and the economy, and the extraordinary economic expansion that followed World War II. Consequently, the 1950s represented what historian Robert Brenner calls “the true golden age for the American worker,” with production workers in manufacturing enjoying unprecedented economic gains.

Per Brenner, the period from 1948 to 1959 saw unprecedented economic gains for workers, with manufacturing wages growing at an average annual rate of 3.4 percent — the highest sustained wage growth of the entire twentieth or twenty-first century outside of wartime. This prosperity extended beyond factory workers, with similar gains throughout the economy.

This remarkable transformation stemmed from two key factors. First, labor’s organizational strength reached historic levels, with unions winning a high percentage of recognition elections and union membership peaking at approximately 35 percent of the private sector workforce by the mid-1950s. Second, as Brenner argues, the post-war economic boom created conditions where employers prioritized maintaining steady production over wage containment. In this environment of high demand and tight labor markets, the threat of work stoppages gave workers substantial leverage in negotiations, allowing them to secure significant improvements in compensation and working conditions.

The mid-century combination of low inequality and high wages fostered less competition, stress, and crime, creating greater stability, trust, and social solidarity. Liberals often dismiss this abundance as a whites-only phenomenon, but the reality is more nuanced. Jim Crow segregation and discrimination severely limited black Americans’ opportunities, but they were not entirely excluded from the period’s prosperity. In fact, black Americans experienced significant economic gains during the post-war decades, driven by broader income equalization that particularly benefited them as they migrated from the South to access better jobs.

This period saw the lowest racial economic inequality in American history, with the black-white wage gap narrowing throughout the ’50s and beyond until 1968, when overall inequality began expanding. This accelerated economic inclusion into the big “we” exposed America’s racial contradictions at the same time as it brought resources to black Americans, both of which intensified the push for full civil rights.

But just as black Americans secured formal legal equality, the postwar economic consensus began to unravel. As wages stagnated and inequality accelerated from the 1970s onward, black Americans bore the heavier burden of these trends — just as they had disproportionately benefited from the earlier era of shared prosperity. The civil rights movement’s legal victories preceded an economic transformation that would undermine their full promise in subsequent decades.

For women, the picture was similarly complex. Though many women earned nothing from working outside the home during this period, family-sustaining wages meant they often enjoyed relatively high living standards through their husbands’ incomes. But this domestic arrangement was profoundly unstable.

As historian Stephanie Coontz observed, the 1950s were “built to self-destruct. The very things that made them the epitome of the male breadwinner family and made it look like they were the golden age of family life also worked to undermine that family.” The combination of women’s financial dependency alongside rigidly sexist gender norms that asserted male authority and denied female autonomy created conditions that would eventually prove intolerable as women’s expectations and aspirations evolved.

Central to Betty Friedan’s argument in her groundbreaking The Feminine Mystique, researched throughout the 1950s and published in 1963, was the contention that women, like men, should be able to devote their lives to “a human purpose” outside the walls of their own homes. The social movements of subsequent decades were extensions of the general communal ethos of the 1950s, even as they vociferously objected to specific social features of that era.

Women’s rejection of gender role orthodoxy need not have coincided with the dismantling of high wages, strong union power, and robust community bonds. A more equitable society might have emerged if economic security remained intact while gender relations were transformed — where incomes remained high enough that both women and men could work reduced hours outside the home while sharing domestic and childcare responsibilities more equitably. This progressive evolution never materialized because, at precisely the moment second-wave feminism was challenging traditional gender roles, the American political economy was undergoing its fateful regime change to neoliberalism.

Who Frayed the Social Fabric?

Beginning in the 1970s, this new economic paradigm systematically dismantled the material foundations of mid-century American life, eroding the economic security and social trust that characterized the era. This transformation coincided with the full expression of social changes that had been brewing in the postwar decades, like the downfall of Jim Crow and women’s entry into the formal workforce.

The timing led to a misdiagnosis. Conservative narratives exploit this coincidence to argue that social change itself caused economic precarity. To the Right, the supposed flaws of the 1950s were actually the essential features responsible for the period’s social cohesion, and we’ve gone astray because we’ve sought to “socially engineer” equality; letting natural hierarchies play out would work far better.

What liberals consider “backward,” like traditional gender roles, actually provided the necessary framework of order and purpose that prevented social chaos, the Right argues. The conservative solution follows naturally: to make America great again, roll back the social changes that supposedly threw off the natural balance and led to social decline.

In reality, the connection is far more contingent. The Democratic Party — always a party whose coalition included conservative elements like segments of capital, but also the party that was the architect of the New Deal and Great Society reforms and champion of unions and blue-collar workers in the twentieth century — abandoned its economic program, leaving the US political scene without an organized opposition to neoliberalism. At the same time, to provide progressive cover for the pivot, the Democrats embraced social justice politics. Without a foundation in shared economic prospects (the big “we”), those politics because increasingly tribalistic, mirroring the polarization and fragmentation of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century social life.

The story liberals told about this pivot was that the 1960s and 1970s were a wholesale repudiation of the backward 1950s. This narrative is a gift to conservatives, creating the appearance of a trade-off between economic prosperity and social egalitarianism. Because liberals have lost any inclination to frame politics in class terms, they have no compelling counterargument to the Right’s seductive account of lost American greatness. All they can really do is act scandalized by mid-century nostalgia and outright deny social decline. This feels like gaslighting to people who intuitively understand that something of value has disappeared from American life.

Tens of millions of Americans feel that life once boasted features strongly associated with human happiness and flourishing but has since lost them. It’s incumbent on any political group to take that sense of loss seriously and offer a convincing explanation — one that distinguishes between causes and effects, so that we can envision a future that integrates the best of the past without backpedaling on crucial social progress. Liberals’ refusal to openly acknowledge and explain why key aspects of life felt better seventy years ago delivers people into the embrace of social reactionaries who have an explanation at the ready.

The story we need to tell cuts against both liberal and conservative myths: America’s social fabric has indeed frayed, and neoliberalism is to blame, as it demolished the material foundation of social solidarity. This economic assault robbed average Americans of trust, community, security, and a sense of common endeavor. If we don’t popularize this narrative, people will continue to think that the solution to recovering what we’ve lost is resurrecting what ought to stay buried.