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Coming together in Fargo
Christian Century, July 30, 1997 by Stewart W. Herman
Most of the groupings Putnam surveyed do not appear to have organized their members to fight the flood. Nevertheless, the reservoir of cooperation generated through such voluntary associations becomes particularly helpful in times of crisis. As the river reached its crest, for example, city officials announced that a sheet of water some 50 miles square and a foot deep was flowing toward the southernmost suburbs. The city decided to build a dike of last resort. Triage engineering dictated that some 600 houses had to be left outside. Following the announcement, scuffles broke out over sandbags and the sand to fill them. Residents then spent the night making herculean efforts to dike their houses individually -- a wasteful and possibly futile endeavor. The next morning, under the harsh sun of an early Dakota spring, common sense returned. The city directed residents to build single dikes to encompass whole subdivisions. Volunteers began to pour in, presenting a thousand points of color against the violently churned clay of the city dikes. Vast numbers of white sandbags sprouted like stemless tulips on the winter-weary lawns, to be passed via long chains of human hands onto new dikes meandering through backyards. "It looks like Fargo is really coming together," remarked several sandbaggers with a keen satisfaction.
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While the term "social capital," with its implications of investment and return, enables us to account for civic engagement and voluntarism in normal times, it seems inadequate to elucidate the extraordinary flow of volunteer effort in Fargo and Moorhead. During those six intense weeks in March and April, many Fargo and Moorhead residents appear to have done more than invest in their community. They also set aside the normal economy of reciprocity and exchange for an economy based upon giving according to ability and receiving according to need.
This gift economy, as essayist Lewis Hyde terms it (The Gift, 1983), was most visible as the American Red Cross and the Salvation Army disbursed supplies of all kinds to flood victims, mainly in Grand Forks. It reached into the community as local Catholic schools admitted 150 refugees students from Grand Forks at no cost in tuition. Local and regional businesses made their own grand gestures. One local AM station tossed out all programming, and even advertising for 12-hour stretches, to become an impromptu nerve center and sounding board for flood relief efforts. A Fargo software company offered its suddenly homeless Grand Forks -- based competitor space, equipment and even labor, in a bid to keep it from folding.
Most important, spontaneous, unorganized gestures multiplied. It became normal to give without expectation of return. People freely offered the use of their trucks. The operators of a West Fargo motel fed, at their own expense, 200 stranded guests. A chiropractor and a masseur made their skills available gratis to sandbaggers. There were stories of desperate homeowners who looked out their back windows to see vanfuls of volunteers pulling up and piling out. "I don't even know who to return it to," wondered one homeowner who found a pile of flood-fighting supplies left on his porch. People routinely returned from their jobs to put in four or five hours of volunteering before collapsing exhausted into bed. University students bagged and delivered sand, built dikes and watched pumps night after night. A Moorehead middle-school girl organized a dozen neighborhood kids to put in hours after school for weeks on end. Senior citizens made sandwiches or baked cookies.
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