The averaged American : surveys, citizens, and the making of a mass public /

The 20th century, marked by the ascendance of the social sciences in academia, brought to the US the movement to socially engineer society by surveying, measuring, statistically analyzing, polling, and categorizing Americans. Standardized IQ and behavior tests produced quantified measurements of what was average and what was normal. Polls replaced literary traditions in defining the "American mind." Igo's book is an example of a dissertation that blossomed into a seminal volume identifying and explaining one of the dominating constructs of the modern US. "Normality" increasingly lined up with quantified averages. "Mass public" and "average American" became synonymous with the search for a coherent US culture. The character of the "aggregated Americans" emerges in Igo's chapters on Robert and Helen Lynd's Middletown (1929), George Gallup and Elmo Roper's public polling, and Alfred Kinsey's revelations of the behavior of statistically normal Americans. The movement magnified the issues involved in weighing the significance of statistical minorities. Igo's well-written study is an excellent introduction to the problems involved in aggregating and disaggregating the US. Without bibliography but with index and detailed scholarly notes, her book provocatively proposes the seeming inevitability that Americans need to understand that they will live in a world shaped and perceived through survey data. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. J. H. Smith Wake Forest University

Measure for Measure Sarah E. Igo explores how the social sciences have changed the way America thinks of itself. HERE'S a tip. When deciding whether to buy an academic book marketed to a general audience, flip to the acknowledgments to look for tell-tale phrases like this one: So-and-so "deserves special mention for his indispensable advice and counsel as I turned my dissertation into a book." Beware! Vestigial Dissertation Syndrome alert! Common symptoms include turgid prose and microscopic narrowness of topic. So after finding that tip-off in the acknowledgments of "The Averaged American," by Sarah Igo, I braced myself for a slog. Happily, I wasn't in for one. Briskly written, forcefully argued and broad in scope, "The Averaged American" falls into a category occupied by works like Paul Starr's "Social Transformation of American Medicine" (1982) and Laura Thatcher Ulrich's "Midwife's Tale" (1990), Pulitzer Prize-winning books by academics whose reach extended beyond the ivory tower. On the face of it, the subject matter of "The Averaged American" could hardly sound duller: it's about social science data - specifically, about the increasing use of surveys, polls and other forms of statistical measurements beginning in the years after World War I. But Igo, a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania, has an ambitious argument to make: that the advent of new techniques of measurement not only helped give birth to the modern social sciences but also changed the way America thinks of itself. Focusing principally on three milestones in the annals of empirical research - the famous study of Muncie, Ind., published as "Middletown" in 1929; the emergence of George Gallup's and Elmo Roper's political polling in the 1930s; and the publication of the infamous Kinsey reports in 1948 and 1953 - Igo chronicles the emergence of a "mass society" and the transformation of the American consciousness along statistical lines. In telling this story, Igo does for social statistics what Louis Menand's "Metaphysical Club" did for American pragmatism, providing a narrative intellectual history of the field. Igo's narrative begins with Robert and Helen Lynd, who met while hiking in New Hampshire in 1919 and bonded over their admiration for Thorstein Veblen's "Theory of the Leisure Class." Social statistics were just beginning to escape their confines in the decennial census, as government bureaucrats used them in an effort to better manage the burgeoning technocratic state, and the era of market research had dawned with the creation of the Harvard Bureau of Business Research in 1911. Amid this growing emphasis on "objective" data, the Lynds arrived in Muncie. Their survey undertook to examine every aspect of life - to illuminate, as Robert Lynd put it, "the whole range of 'growing pains' of our contemporary ... urban industrial civilization." The Lynds collected information about everything from hours spent on household cleaning to the size of backyards, and harvested a wealth of data about this supposedly representative American town, eventually reporting, in Igo's summary, "that workers rose earlier in the morning than their employers; that schoolgirls desired silk rather than cotton stockings; ... that the newest homes in town lacked spare rooms and parlors; that public speeches were getting shorter; that business associations were growing but trade unions declining; that belief in hell was weakening." The Lynds were appalled by what they perceived to be the money-grubbiness of Muncie society. "More and more of the activities of living are coming to be strained through the bars of the dollar sign," they wrote. True to their Veblenesque spirit, one of the Lynds' intentions in publishing their ostensibly objective findings was to highlight - and thereby to mitigate - the "pecuniary" nature of modern industrial life. It is no small irony, then, that their work became the touchstone of modern market research. "The only two books that are absolutely necessary for an advertising man are the Bible and MIDDLETOWN!" declared a trade magazine in 1937. But that was down the road. When it was published, "Middletown" became an object of collective American fascination. Everyone, or so it seemed, wanted to know about the "typical" Americans of Middletown. "Nothing is so interesting as ourselves," as an article in Good Housekeeping put it. According to Igo, in capturing modern life for the first time in an "empirical, detached and, most of all, objective" way, "Middletown" changed how America understood itself, and created a new object for scientific study: "average America." If the publication of "Middletown" marked the arrival of a self-conscious national culture, the work of Gallup and Roper would feed that self-consciousness on a weekly basis. Pioneering the use of statistical sampling, they presented the American "average" in a whole new way: instead of looking in a particular geographic place, the pollsters located the average in a disembodied statistical mean. Their ambition was to capture what the national public, or "the mass mind," was thinking, doing and buying at any given time. Politicians and marketers increasingly turned to Gallup and Roper to find out what "America" was thinking. The pollsters' ascendance solidifed the notion of a cohesive American public - a useful function, as the cold war began - but at the expense of homogenizing the vast diversity that goes into any statistical mean. Surprisingly, given that she's writing about research whose basic unit of measurement is the orgasm, Igo's chapters on the Kinsey reports are the least interesting in the book. Perhaps that's because after two recent Kinsey biographies, a feature film and T. Coraghessan Boyle's novel "The Inner Circle" (based on Kinsey), the material is already familiar. Or maybe it's because learning about spending and household maintenance habits is more titillating than learning how many farm boys are having sex with their goats. (When H. L. Mencken wrote of a study "as exhilarating as even the dirtiest of the new novels," he was referring not to the Kinsey reports but to "Middletown.") FOR Igo's purposes, what's most notable about the Kinsey reports is not their sexual content but the way they used data. (Talk about a one-track mind.) Kinsey wanted to remove the stigma attached to sexual practices (adultery, masturbation, homosexual sex) that were considered deviant by demonstrating how common they were. Where the Lynds found the "normal" in a representative city and the pollsters found it in statistical averages, Kinsey demonstrated there was no such thing. Whatever outlandish sexual act you could imagine, someone somewhere was doing it. This led to the charge that Kinsey was perpetrating what we might call the statisticization of morality. Even as we have moved toward ever-finer calibrations of statistical measurement, the knowledge that social science can produce is, in the end, limited. Is the statistical average rendered by pollsters the distillation of America? Or its grinding down into porridge? For all of the hunger Americans have always expressed for cold, hard data about who we are, literary ways of knowing may be profounder than statistical ones. (You can learn as much about life on Main Street from Sinclair Lewis as from the Lynds.) Poll-saturated though we may be, our national self-understanding still comes as much from art (think of Norman Rockwell or Edward Hopper), literature (think of "The Great Gatsby" or even "The Bonfire of the Vanities") and impressionistic journalism (think of James Agee and Walker Evans, or Joan Didion) as it does from any survey. I'm sure at least 23 percent of Americans would agree with me. The 'Middletown study, Mencken wrote, was 'as exhilarating as even the dirtiest of the new novels.' Scott Stossel, the managing editor of The Atlantic Monthly, is the author of "Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver."

In a nation that values privacy and individualism, why do Americans so eagerly answer surveys and treasure the resulting data? Igo explores how changes in commerce, governance, culture, and the social sciences have converged to induce Americans to answer survey questions on everything from sexual practices to voting patterns. Igo draws on researchers' private papers to reveal how the Gallup poll, the Kinsey reports, and other studies and surveys have been formulated; the kind of undisclosed assumptions behind the surveys; and how conclusions are drawn from the responses. She begins by exploring how the detailed survey of Muncie, Indiana, in the 1920s and its transformation to Middletown, a representation of American averageness, changed broader American society. Igo also explores how Americans allow their behavior to be judged and influenced by the results of surveys, measuring themselves against studies showing that half of all marriages end in divorce and that most Americans support the death penalty. Igo brings historical perspective and a critical eye to surveys and the creation of the notion of a mass public. --Vanessa Bush Copyright 2006 Booklist

In this book, Igo (history, Univ. of Pennsylvania) examines the social transformation that has occurred over the past century since the emergence of a new "science of society" that revolves around sampling, surveying, and quantifying ourselves. She investigates how, in our poll-saturated culture, with its insatiable appetite for social facts, our ideas about who we are, what we want, and what we believe are all shaped by and perceived through survey data. Her work focuses primarily on the early history of the accrual of facts about mass society, starting at the turn of the last century, when academic and bureaucratic trends merged in recognition of the utility of social scientific data. She uses as case studies some of the first and most familiar indexes of understandings of self and nation provided by researchers like Alfred C. Kinsey, Elmo Roper, and George Gallup. Her reflections on the origins, trajectory, and subsequent social impacts of demographic research and its characterization of what constitutes the "median, average, typical, and normal" are insightful. An important contribution to the early history of the information society and politics of knowledge; highly recommended for all (especially academic) libraries.-Theresa Kintz, Wilkes Univ., Wilkes-Barre, PA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.