Newsletter #382 — September 8, 2025

by David Eisner

“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” The line, usually attributed to Mark Twain, carries special weight in our civic moment. Looking around America in 2025, many citizens hear only discordant notes: polarization that cuts families and communities in two, institutions we no longer trust, corruption we assume is baked into politics, and a gnawing sense that our democracy may be too fragile to survive another shock.

Listen to how some observers have described our civic condition:

• “Our politics are rotten, our officials are the tools of the corrupt, and the people know it. They have lost faith that their ballots matter; they believe the game is rigged, and they withdraw in disgust.”
• “We are unsettled to the very roots of our being. We move without direction, lost in a whirl of change. The past is no guide; the future, a thing to dread.”
• “Men and women, bewildered by institutions they do not understand, come to believe that civic life is not meant for them, that it is a hostile thing from which they must protect themselves.”

It would be easy to mistake these as bitter commentaries on the present. They sound as if they were pulled from the latest survey of declining trust in government, or an op-ed about polarization in the age of social media.

But they are not.

The first comes from muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens in 1904. The second from Walter Lippmann in 1914. The third from Jane Addams in 1910. Together, they describe not 2025, but America at the turn of the 20th century — halfway between the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and its 250th anniversary, which we will mark next year.

The rhyme is unmistakable. Then, as now, Americans felt battered, threatened and polarized by rapid changes in technology and demographics — in their time they named the challenges industrialization and immigration. In ours, we call it globalism and tech-driven productivity and media fragmentation. Then, as now, citizens feared their democracy was corrupt, captured by self-serving elites and intractably gridlocked.

A century ago, the mood was not hopeful. Then, as now, leaders and citizens wondered whether the American experiment could endure – and blamed and demonized those who voted and thought differently from them for its likely destruction. The concerns we voice today — that mistrust is too deep, that rancor is too bitter, and that our civic innovations are too small to make a difference — echo their worries.

America’s Last Civic Low Tide

The turn of the 20th century was a time of breathtaking change. The industrial revolution uprooted millions from farms and forced them into factory towns and crowded cities. Immigrants poured into America’s ports, reshaping the nation’s demography almost overnight. Economic inequality widened as tycoons amassed staggering fortunes while workers endured dangerous conditions and pitiful wages.

Politics, meanwhile, was openly corrupt. Urban machines like Tammany Hall dominated city governments through patronage and graft. Senators were still chosen by legislatures, heavily influenced by wealthy interests. Trust in institutions collapsed.

Cultural fracture deepened the sense of hopelessness. Immigrants were derided as threats to American identity, just as rural and urban cultures clashed. Racial terror intensified, with Jim Crow laws codifying segregation in the South and waves of lynchings spreading fear in Black communities.

To many, it seemed the nation was adrift. As Lippmann wrote in 1914, society was “caught in the tumult of change,” while Jane Addams warned that newcomers “grew suspicious that their welfare was no common concern.” The sense of alienation, rancor, and helplessness was profound.

And critics at the time worried that the responses being attempted — settlement houses, reform clubs, charity associations — were too few and too fragile to stem the tide.

The Great Civic Turnaround

And yet — at that very moment of despair, the country experienced an extraordinary flowering of civic entrepreneurship. Grounded in neighborhood experiments destined to become national movements, citizens built the scaffolding of civic life that still undergirds us today. The scale of innovation in the early 1900s is astonishing in retrospect.

• Settlement Houses: Jane Addams’ Hull House in Chicago (1889) became the model for hundreds of settlement houses nationwide. They offered English classes, job training, arts programs, and political education to immigrants, while creating new ways for women and young people to participate in civic life.
   
• Service Clubs & Associations Rotary International (1905), Kiwanis International (1915), and Lions Clubs (1917) sprang up in towns and cities, bringing neighbors together for mutual aid and community service. The Elks, Moose, and Knights of Columbus expanded their reach. These weren’t elite circles — they were shopkeepers, teachers, farmers, and clerks inventing civic glue.
   
• Youth Movements & Infrastructure: The Boy Scouts of America (1910), Girl Scouts (1912), and 4-H Clubs (1914) introduced millions of children to civic responsibility and community leadership. The YMCA and YWCA expanded dramatically, as did Boys & Girls Clubs, offering safe spaces, recreation, and belonging for the young.
   
• Collective Philanthropy: The first Community Chest (1913) pioneered the model of neighbors pooling money to support local needs. Within a generation, this became the United Way, one of the largest philanthropic networks in the world.
   
• Civil Rights & Equity Organizations: The NAACP (1909) fought racial injustice and segregation. The National Urban League (1910) supported Black migration from the rural South to northern cities. The League of Women Voters (1920) helped millions of women find their civic footing after suffrage.
   
• Political Reform: Citizens demanded — and won — the direct election of senators (17th Amendment, 1913), the referendum and initiative powers in many states, and anti-trust laws to curb monopolies.

At the same time, a countercurrent emerged. Philanthropic foundations — Carnegie, Rockefeller, Russell Sage, and later Ford — were created in close alliance with elite universities and consistent with fashionable civic theories promoting the importance of technocratic professionals directing citizens. Civic trend-setter in the early 1900’s Walter Lippman wrote that he believed effective civic advancement “...looks to the infusion of scientific method, the careful application of administrative technique.”

The foundations poured unprecedented resources into libraries, health campaigns, and scientific research. These investments were transformative in their own way. But they also highlighted and reinforced the belief that expertise and professionals, not ordinary citizens, were the drivers of progress. This tendency to cast citizen initiatives as amateur or marginal compared to professionally managed institutions did not stop the progress of grassroots renewal, but it often sidelined and impeded it.

Yet, history suggests, it was not the professionally-driven civic effort that was the most successful. Over time, it was the citizen-led institutions — settlement houses, clubs, youth organizations, pooled community funds — that generated cultural momentum, belonging, and legitimacy. These fragile beginnings became the civic infrastructure that carried America through the 20th century. They helped carry the republic forward for a century — because they were owned and led by citizens themselves.

Today’s Civic Renaissance — Fragile but Real

Fast forward to 2025. America is again anxious, again polarized, again fragmented – and again fearful for the survival of our democracy. Yet beneath the headlines, another burst of civic innovation is underway — and, once again, it is being built not by elites, but by ordinary people.

• Bridge-building initiatives like Braver Angels, Living Room Conversations, BridgeUSA, and the One America Movement are powered by neighbors, students, and community volunteers who host dialogues in living rooms, churches, libraries, and civic halls. These programs work because they are citizen-led — relying on trained volunteers, not experts, to hold the space.
   
• Deliberative experiments like citizens’ assemblies and participatory budgeting put residents directly in charge of setting priorities and allocating resources, not just commenting on decisions already made.         
                             
• Dialogue-to-action programs like Braver Angels’ Citizen-Led Solutions, Mormon Women for Ethical Government, and National Issues Forums create structures where everyday citizens co-design solutions, often alongside local leaders.
   
• Service corps and volunteer networks such as hundreds of AmeriCorps programs, the Red Cross, Habitat for Humanity, YouthBuild and local youth corps thrive where they give participants agency to design projects with communities rather than for them.
   
• Hybrid models like the Better Together America-nurtured civic hubs, community storytelling circles, and the training and engagement platforms of Civic Genius are sustained by citizen volunteers, not professional staff alone. Civic tech platforms like Democracy Works amplify citizen participation in elections, rather than replacing it with technocracy.

Yet it is crucial to remember that not all citizen-led problem solving is equal. Some groups advocate one-sided solutions that advantage their own perspective without engaging those who disagree. History offers a stark warning: in the Weimar Republic of the 1930s, a flourishing of civic institutions was turned to advance Hitler’s racist ideology and authoritarian agenda. The lesson is clear — citizen-led approaches strengthen civic muscle only when they include diverse perspectives and robust community voices. Without that pluralism, they risk deepening division and eroding democracy instead of renewing it.

The echo from the early 1900s is unmistakable. Back then, the strength of initiatives like Hull House, Rotary, and the NAACP lay in their citizen leadership. Today, the initiatives with the most promise share the same DNA.

Of course, the fragility is real. Many of today’s most promising civic efforts remain boutique, scattered, and largely invisible. They are easily overshadowed by conflict entrepreneurs who profit from division, and by professionalized organizations with far more funding. Modern philanthropic institutions and high-net-worth donors, often unintentionally, reinforce this imbalance. They frequently channel resources into elite-driven institutions and professionalized nonprofits — initiatives that appear scalable and efficient on paper, but rarely generate the grassroots ownership or cultural momentum that sustains renewal over time.

This is not a counsel of despair. If anything, history teaches that the skepticism we hear today — that efforts like Braver Angels or citizen assemblies are too fragile to matter — is itself a sign of civic renewal in its infancy.

Lessons We Can Carry Forward

Key lessons from the last civic renewal carry urgent insights for today’s bridge-builders, dialogue conveners, and service networks:

• Fragility is not failure. Almost every civic institution we now take for granted — Rotary, Scouts, NAACP, United Way — began as a fragile, local experiment.
   
• Citizen leadership is decisive. A century ago, it was neighbors, volunteers, and parents who drove reforms that reached scale, not experts or technocrats. Citizen ownership gave these institutions legitimacy, reach, and staying power. Today, the most promising innovations are those that are citizen-led.
   
• Common ground must guide solutions. Citizen-led efforts strengthen democracy only when they bring together representative voices across divides. The aim is not just action, but collaborative action that builds both solutions and trust.
   
• Renewal begins locally, multiplies nationally. Hull House began with one Chicago settlement, Rotary with four friends, the NAACP with a handful of organizers. Scale came from local citizen initiatives that built networks of peer learning and replication.
   
• Civic renewal is plural. Then and now, it takes a mosaic of experiments — settlement houses and scouting then; bridge-building, service corps, deliberative democracy, and civic tech now.
   
• Skepticism is part of the cycle. Just as critics dismissed Community Chests and Girl Scouts as trivial, many now dismiss civic dialogue and assemblies. But doubt is often a precursor to durability.
   
• Culture matters as much as policy. Rituals, service days, pledges, and badges created belonging and agency that turned the corner then. Today’s innovators must invent modern equivalents that help citizens feel national purpose and confidence in their ability to make a difference.
   
• Philanthropy must play a supporting role. Foundations can accelerate renewal when they strengthen citizen leadership, but they often slow it when they substitute professionals for citizens. To be catalytic,  philanthropy can support the creation, replication and maximum learning from multiple engagement models that offer citizens varying kinds of onramps to initiatives where they can lead civic change.

American Democracy is Citizen-Led

The thread of citizen ownership as the driver of civic renewal runs deeper than any single era. America’s founding promise is that sovereignty resides with the people. From the Declaration of Independence to the Progressive Era to today’s renewal, the through-line is the same: civic health is not handed down from above. It is generated by citizens themselves.

As Theodore Roosevelt put it in 1899:

“The main source of national power and national greatness is found in the average citizenship of the nation.”

Or as Lincoln reminded us: government must be “of the people, by the people, for the people.”

The lesson of both 1900 and 2025 is this: experts, technocrats, and civic professionals have an important role, but it is not to lead. They must be, in the old phrase, “on tap, not on top.”

Conclusion: Sobriety Buoyed by Hope

The Progressive Era did not fix all of America’s problems. Inequality endured. Racism deepened. Many reforms remained incomplete until the upheavals of the Great Depression and World War II.

But the civic scaffolding that citizens built — NAACP, United Way, Rotary, Scouts, YMCA, League of Women Voters and so much more — endured and still shapes our common life today.

That is the rhyme we need to hear. A century ago, in the face of disruption, corruption, rancor, and despair, ordinary Americans built a civic renaissance that helped carry the republic forward.

Now it is our turn. And like the most successful initiatives of a century ago, the best civic experiments of our day — from Braver Angels, BridgeUSA and the One America Movement to citizens’ assemblies and participatory budgeting — are also citizen-led.

Today’s initiatives may feel too small, too scattered, too fragile. But that is exactly how the last renaissance began.

The rhyme of history reminds us that despair is not destiny. Renewal is possible — because it has been done before, and because the power to do it still rests where it always has: in the hands of the American people.

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Two or three times a week, Guy and Heidi Burgess, the BI Directors, share some of our thoughts on political hyper-polarization and related topics. We also share essays from our colleagues and other contributors, and every week or so, we devote one newsletter to annotated links to outside readings that we found particularly useful relating to U.S. hyper-polarization, threats to peace (and actual violence) in other countries, and related topics of interest. Each Newsletter is posted on BI, and sent out by email through Substack to subscribers. You can sign up to receive your copy here and find the latest newsletter here or on our BI Newsletter page, which also provides access to all the past newsletters, going back to 2017.

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