From Jaffrey, Putnam chronicles America's decline, offers hope for better future

Aug. 13—On a cold winter day in early 1995, Bob Putnam and his wife, Rosemary, along with the architect and builder they'd hired to construct a new home on Frost Pond, trudged through about 3 feet of snow, carrying a tall ladder across the yard of their newly purchased property.

"And we took this huge ladder and wrestled it around, up to about here," Putnam says, gesturing to the window in his study at the house he's considered home for more than 25 years, "because we knew that we wanted this as the view for my writing. ... And therefore, every book that I've written since then ... I've written right here, looking at that view."

The view is an idyllic one, overlooking a quiet lawn and, down a small hill, the serene pond that straddles the Dublin town line.

And the books Bob Putnam has produced here are among the most important and influential scholarly works of 21st-century America. His research has led the now-81-year-old emeritus Harvard professor to advise presidents, inspire generations of civic leaders and undertake a crusade not only to meticulously detail the decline of community connections in the U.S. but also to propose a roadmap for the next generation to put the country on a better path.

"Whether or not I've done well, someone else can say that," he says with a smile, and an earnest insistence that he's never taken himself too seriously. "But quite consciously, ... I've tried throughout my life to use my talents — this sounds so highfalutin, and I'm not a highfalutin guy — I've tried to use my talents in a way that would benefit the country."

The first, and most famous, of those books Putnam penned in Jaffrey, "Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community," was based on a similarly titled 1995 academic article. That piece, he says, transformed him nearly overnight from a self-described "really good workaday political scientist" into a minor celebrity.

President Bill Clinton invited Putnam to Camp David to chat. He and Rosemary appeared in People Magazine. Suddenly, his barber in Peterborough and baker in Jaffrey recognized him solely based on his work.

The article, and the book published five years later, struck a nerve in America, Putnam hypothesizes, because they presented data-driven research to articulate a feeling that was growing increasingly pervasive: Our communities were not as close as they used to be. The book's titular metaphor exemplifies this notion — Putnam's research found that bowling was the most popular sport in the country, but participation in leagues had plummeted in the late 20th century.

Putnam measures levels of social connectedness — like knowing your neighbors, participating in local government and volunteering in the community — with a term he calls social capital. In "Bowling Alone," and essentially all the books he's written since, Putnam argues that the decline of social capital since the mid-20th century has wrought a range of negative consequences, such as widening inequality, heightened polarization and increasing levels of social isolation.

"But that's not America, that's not all of America," Putnam says. "I had the good fortune to grow up in a period in which America was ... growing more equal, not less equal; less polarized, not more polarized; more connected and more concerned about other people."

Putnam was raised in Port Clinton, Ohio, a small town of about 6,500 people on the shore of Lake Erie.

"My hometown was, in the 1950s, a passable embodiment of the American Dream, a place that offered decent opportunity for all the kids in town, whatever their background," Putnam writes in the opening of his 2015 book, "Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis."

He did well in school, and went off to Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, where he planned to study math or engineering during the height of the Sputnik era. But then in the fall of 1960, his sophomore year, he took an introductory political science course, and began to feel that he would be better suited for a career in academic and civic life.

In that class, he also met "a cute co-ed, as we would say in those days," named Rosemary Werner, he said. They often got lunch together after class, and grew close. On their first date, Rosemary, a Democrat, took Bob, a Republican, to a John F. Kennedy campaign rally. For their next date, Putnam said, he reciprocated by taking her to a Richard Nixon rally.

By the time the election rolled around in November, Rosemary had convinced Bob to switch parties and vote for Kennedy. A few months later, the night before JFK's inauguration, they took a train to Washington, D.C., and made their way to the back of the crowd on the National Mall to hear the new president say, "Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country."

"I thought he was speaking directly to me," Putnam says. "And that moment had a huge effect on my whole life. ... Almost in that instance I thought, 'Oh, God. He's saying to me that I should use whatever talents I have for the country. And maybe that means I should be doing not engineering, but something about politics.' "

In addition to changing the course of his academic and professional life, that first political science class altered the trajectory of Putnam's personal life. He and Rosemary have been married since shortly after graduating in 1963.

"The best thing I've ever done is to marry Rosemary," Putnam says. "She is a full partner in writing the books. I have not written a word that she hasn't read, and I've written a lot of words over the last 50 years. ... I talk a lot about social capital and connections. She is a social capitalist. She is just good at making [connections]. Wherever we are, she's a volunteer."

After college, Putnam earned a Fulbright Scholarship that took him and Rosemary to England for a year, where he studied at the University of Oxford. He then continued his political science studies at Yale, earning a masters and Ph.D. before accepting a faculty position at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

About a decade later, Putnam — whose scholarship at the time focused on international relations — was invited to join the staff of the National Security Council, working out of the White House. He fully intended to return to Michigan after his stint in Washington, but while he was there, he received an offer to join the faculty at the Harvard.

So, Putnam and his family — which at that time also included two children, Jonathan and Lara — moved to Cambridge, Mass., where he and Rosemary still have a house, though they have long considered Jaffrey their primary residence.

In his nearly 40 years at Harvard, before retiring from teaching in 2018, Putnam held a variety of roles, including a stint as dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government. He has written 15 books, translated into 20 languages, and become one of the most widely cited social scientists in the world. In 2012, President Barack Obama presented Putnam the National Humanities Medal, the nation's highest honor for contributions to the humanities, "for deepening our understanding of community in America."

Putnam's work is also the subject of an upcoming feature-length documentary from sibling filmmaking duo Pete and Rebecca Davis.

"We just kept coming back to this idea of civic life and community and social isolation, and social connectedness on the other side," Pete Davis said of the project's impetus. "And five or six years into making the film now, we still believe that's an important message to get out there."

And spreading that message, Davis said, is where Putnam truly excels.

"What I love about Bob is that Bob, even though he has given his message to presidents, to religious leaders, to tech leaders, he still believes the hope for America is ordinary Americans in neighborhoods and towns across the country deciding to live in a more communal way," Davis, of Falls Church, Va., said. "... He sees them as a great hope."

Many others see Putnam himself as a source of hope and inspiration, including Richard Ober, president and CEO of the N.H. Charitable Foundation. Ober, who lives a few miles from Putnam in Dublin, first heard him speak in the mid-'90s at the foundation's annual meeting. He really got to know him around 2014, when Putnam was writing "Our Kids" about the widening opportunity gap for America's children.

"And it mirrored what we were seeing in New Hampshire at the time," Ober said. "And that conversation with Bob, and follow-up advice and guidance from him, was one of the inspirations for a very major initiative we launched here in 2016 called New Hampshire Tomorrow."

Through that project, the N.H. Charitable Foundation has committed to investing a minimum of $100 million over 10 years in early childhood development, family and youth supports, substance use prevention, treatment and recovery, and education and career pathways.

So, Ober said, Putnam's work not only has global reach, but also directly impacts the community they both call home.

"To have someone of that stature be able to apply that so directly to the communities he loves — and Jaffrey and the Monadnock Region in New Hampshire is at the top — is really an experience," Ober said. "And I found that Bob's ability to downshift and make this work really relevant in my home community and my home state, is really compelling."

Bob and Rosemary Putnam chose to live in Jaffrey, Bob said, not only to give him a writing retreat, but also because of the vibrant community in the Monadnock Region. And Putnam has the data to show that southwestern New Hampshire (and Vermont) boast the highest levels of social capital in the country.

"This is a very special [place]," Putnam says. "And a lot of people know that, but I think a lot of people who've always lived here don't realize what an exceptional place [it is], at least for someone who's a political scientist interested in studying community."

Putnam hasn't done the research to figure out why, exactly, the Granite State is home to such close communities and high levels of civic engagement, but he has some theories.

"I think it's mostly history," he says, specifically noting that neither New Hampshire nor Vermont have a history of slavery.

"I'm not saying that there isn't racism up here, now and before, but it's not structurally in our culture," Putnam says. "And the places where once upon a time people owned other people are the same places that are low in social capital today. And that's an empirical fact, and it's an important part of the story."

In the present, New Hampshire's first-in-the-nation presidential primary also plays a role in the Granite State's high levels of community engagement, Putnam argues. To illustrate that point, he cites a recent anecdote when he chatted with a handyman doing some work on the Putnams' "bunkhouse," a second structure on their Jaffrey property primarily meant for their now-adult kids and seven grandchildren.

"I was talking with him, and we were talking about various different peace plans for the Middle East and about not just COVID, but about national affairs," Putnam says. "What you may not realize is it's very rare to have a college professor and a guy digging ditches having a conversation about public affairs. And that's just a mark. I mean, I could tell you the data, but the data are the same, that people up here are way more likely, not just during the primary, to be talking politics."

Putnam's affinity for the Monadnock Region goes beyond his family, too. In February, his former student and longtime collaborator, Shaylyn Romney Garrett, moved with her husband and two young children from southern Utah to Keene.

"It's not an accident that Bob and I chose to live in the Monadnock Region," she said. ... "The social capital numbers in this region are very high. And you can feel that, not just see it on the charts."

Romney Garret co-wrote Putnam's latest, and he says last, book, "The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again," which published in 2020. The book draws on decades of Putnam's research in social capital trends to argue that America is in a similar place now as it was at the turn of the 20th century, when young people in communities nationwide took action and ushered in an age of progress and growing prosperity.

"I sort of think of him as the prophet crying in the wilderness, that sort of metaphor," Romney Garrett says of Putnam. "He's someone who well before anyone else, saw this storm coming of the unraveling of our society. And not only did he spend his entire career describing this, but also trying to improve it."

Looking ahead — in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, renewed racial-justice activism, continued declining social capital and increasing inequality — Putnam says he could argue either that America will continue to deteriorate, or that we will once again change course toward a better future. Looking back to the early 1900s, he says he's hopeful.

"The last time we fixed this problem, around 1900-1910, it was young people, and they began at the local level," he says. "... It was places like Keene. It wasn't actually then Keene, but it was places just like Keene that came up with the ideas, and they did it in a nonpartisan or bipartisan way. And Keene could be that kind of a place."

Jack Rooney can be reached at 352-1234, extension 1404, or jrooney@keenesentinel.com. Follow him on Twitter @RooneyReports.