The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [86]
Jefferson here holds himself as a capable teacher of happiness, having just given us a rundown of his day—clearly meant as a model for others.
Only by noting the historically strange amount of freedom that we have in our lives, and our failure, of late, to take part in voluntary associations, can we understand what it is that we do with our modern wealth, and why we want it so much. The founders’ vision of the good life includes permission to avoid the crowd, to skip church, and to put some distance between you and your extended family—if you want. People had been bossed around by authority; now they had won the right to boss their own selves around. That they were going to do a better job of it was still quite a self-conscious idea. In this move toward freedom, bonds to country and family were reconceived, but were still strong: people were supposed to die for their country, and value their nuclear family with a sentimental romanticism. Meanwhile, in both de jure and de facto ways, modern men and women were emancipated from mandatory midsize associations. You could ditch the town, ditch the parish, ditch the family, and ditch your father’s trade. Democracy and capitalism supported freedom from tradition. Yet the Enlightenment ideal was that you would fill some of the gap with socializing of some sort—usually productive or intellectual—as is evident in Franklin’s and Jefferson’s daily agendas.
One of the main observations in Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1835) was that the young United States was surprisingly vigorous in the creation of clubs and associations: “Americans of all ages, all stations of life, and all types of disposition are forever forming associations.”8 Tocqueville came to believe that new associations were essential to a democracy, especially the ad hoc variety that sees to the local chores that, in Europe, were done by traditional local authority. “In democratic countries knowledge of how to combine is the mother of all other forms of knowledge; on its progress depends that of all the others.”9 Tocqueville was impressed in 1835, but that was about the time that this sort of behavior began to decline: chores like arranging holiday events or doing quality control on local crafts were left to local government or private business, or they were allowed to disappear. Through the middle bulk of the nineteenth century, the “joining” mood further declined. It was revived, in a different form but with equal passion, around the turn of the century. The political scientist Theda Skocpol made a list of all the mass-membership organizations in U.S. history that had ever enrolled at least 1 percent of the adult male or female population. All of them—all—were founded between 1870 and 1920.10 These include the Red Cross, the NAACP, the Knights of Columbus, Hadassah, the Boy Scouts, the Rotary club, the PTA, the Sierra Club, the Audubon Society, the Teamsters Union, and the Campfire Girls.
In the twentieth century, each generation of American immigrants brought Old World associations, and when they got here they started new clubs that referred to where they had come from. There were Italian social clubs delineating each little town of origin, and Jews had “Ferein clubs” that brought together people from a given region of the old Ashkenazi, mostly Russian-Polish, world. My ninety-five-year-old grandmother, Mollie, remembers her Ferein club fondly: they went on Yiddish theater trips together, had parties for kids and for adults, and arranged a calendar of community events.11 Some such immigrant associations formed burial societies and loan societies, and ran foreign-language newspapers.12 Then there were the lodges: The Honeymooners’ Ralph Kramden was “a Raccoon,” a member of the International Order of Friendly Sons of the Raccoons. The handshake involved touching elbows (first right, then left), followed by a “wooo” noise they made as they clasped the raccoon tail on their lodge hats and wiggled them, and