J Paul Johnson
Join or Die: A Film About Why You Should Join a Club is a film about, well, to be obvious, why you should join a club. But that’s only half of the tale. It’s also about why the fate of America depends on nothing less than its citizens’ willingness to join clubs, whether they are leagues, associations, charters, societies, or guilds. Lots of us, especially in recent decades, like to play the canard “I’m not really much of a joiner,” but doing so has its costs, especially when the nation becomes plagued with disgruntled, disassociated non-joiners. It’s a phenomenon Robert Putnam has spend his life and career exploring, and it’s one with even greater importance today than ever.
Before he became a legendary Harvard social scientist and bestselling author, Robert Putnam was a “joiner.” In high school, he was a member of the band, choir, orchestra, track and football teams; honor society, yearbook staff, student council; debate and declaration squads; Latin and glee clubs, and more. (He was also class president each year and capped off his career as valedictorian.) And that’s just in school: he was also an avid bowler and participant in dozens of other clubs and leagues off of school grounds. Let’s just say it was a topic that became second nature to him. But it was his attending a John F. Kennedy rally at the behest of his girlfriend that changed him. Kennedy became president, his girlfriend became his fiancée and then wife, and the two attended his inauguration, where Putnam became forever inspired by the President’s call to action.
As a political scientist decades later, Putnam’s research took him to Italy, where he was able to study its evolving democracy though comparison of each of its regional governments. It was there he first noticed a correlation between robust civic participation and a thriving, purposeful government. The phenomenon was elusive and complex, but palpable, and Putnam devoted his career to its study, first in Europe and then in his homeland, especially in the best-selling 2000 book Bowling Alone, where he argues that the U.S. has has undergone an unprecedented collapse in civic, social, associational, and political life—what he and other social scientists define as social capital—since the 1960s, with disastrous consequences for our nation.
That book’s title elegantly, eloquently predicts its thesis: that by the end of the 20th century, America had become a nation of loners, people who preferred “bowling alone” to joining leagues. Participation in all kinds of groups, clubs, societies, leagues, and associations had declined; meanwhile, civic and political strife escalated. The term became synecdochic for a phenomenon many had witnessed as America retreated from its streets and neighborhoods to its closed-curtain living rooms, awash in the glow of the television.
Join or Die delivers Putnam’s story and research with a sprightly tone, aided in no small part by Putnam’s own self-deprecating humor and lively animations and illustrations. His is a compelling story, an academic motivated by a call to civic action and a life lived with purpose: Putnam was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama in 2013 “for deepening our understanding of community in America.” It’s not afraid to critique his findings—some found his methods suspect, others his conclusions flawed—but it does so largely from Putnam’s perspective.
Some might wonder, for instance, if America weren’t for hundreds of years a deeply divided nation rife with political conflict, whether in the 1860s or the 1960s. It’s also possible, of course, that people are as engaged as ever, but in online communities that don’t register in the research, or perhaps in the kinds of social activities—gangs, say, or militias—that don’t get counted as “civic participation.” But at the core of Putnam’s research is an optimism that if we join, if we get to know our neighbors, if we become invested in their futures and not just our own, that America becomes a country that can prosper. The film’s title harks back to a moment 270 years ago in the nation’s history, when Benjamin Franklin suggested, with a crude drawing, that the individual states, depicted as severed sections of a single snake, must “join or die.” It was a masterstroke of political messaging, if not exactly a phrasing Butler himself offers.
Near its conclusion, Join or Die raises a troubling, if entirely plausible, prospect: that the very notion of rugged individualism was not a legacy of the country’s frontier era, but instead a cynical marketing ploy sold its citizens by the conservative right, a means of setting back the hard-won gains of the feminist and civil rights movements. If so, it’s been a successful tactic to date, allowing conservativism to hold, right up through today, an outsized hold on the fabric of the nation’s politics and policy despite an ever-increasingly diverse demographic. Is it mere coincidence that the tearing apart of this swath of what binds us has kept so many still disenfranchised?
It’s often enough that I review a documentary that really, simply, ought to have been a book. Sometimes, a film simply doesn’t have the sufficient visual content to illustrate its argument. In those cases it might be better off as a book, or maybe a podcast. Such might have been the case here, but Join or Die co-directors Pete Davis and Rebecca Davis keep the focus on Putnam himself, an avuncular yet learned scholar, throughout the film, detouring for short sketches of modern groups—a bike collective in Atlanta, for instance, alongside others—that serve the same purpose as the bowling league. These vignettes, combined with the film’s lively animations of researched graphics and its series of talking heads—Hilary Clinton, Pete Buttigieg, a half-dozen political scientists and community organizers—keep the film’s pace sprightly and its argument on target.
Bob Putnam devoted his life and career to showing how more people becoming “joiners” could hold the solution to our national strife and division. Join or Die might not be an adequate substitute for his body of work, but it’s certainly an engaging primer to it. To watch it is to be inspired—maybe to join a bowling league or other club, or maybe, just maybe, to realize that to engage in civic life is to effect change.
