Diversity and Its Discontents: Scientific Surveys and the Creation of the Twentieth-Century Numeric American

From the time of our colonial beginnings to the present day, debates over what it means to be "an American" have been embedded within the cultural politics of each generational cohort, resulting in some of the nation's most distinctive works of literature, art, and political thought in the process. That these debates have also had a reciprocal impress on what it means to be a "scientific American" holds true as well, even if innovations in scientific practice have received less attention on this score than other forms of cultural production. Within the American context, the history of scientific strategies for measuring, tabulating, quantifying, and statiscizing bears as fully on the study of cultural preoccupations about American identity as does the history of social thought in its more familiar forms. Empirical efforts to capture the metrics of the nature of American life have deep cultural roots, with shifts in scientific practice often serving to advance efforts to reconfigure self and society.

These quantitative dynamics encompass an array of disciplinary enterprises that are usually written about as subfields within the history of science—the "history of" economics, management, political science, psychology, sociology, statistics, and the like. While the disciplinary perspective has proven to be a useful and productive methodological shift for historians of science—resulting in studies of scientific practice that provide ever-finer understandings of how particular scientists produced scientific knowledge, constructed their identities as members of various professional networks, and inhabited worlds of specialized thought and action—a focus on disciplinary imperatives has often allowed only glancing attention to questions of wider meaning that concern many American historians, even though the subject matter may clearly bear on historiographic issues such as debates over national identity or the politics of individuality and collectivity. In turn, American historians have often shied away from digging into the seemingly dry and tedious inner workings of scientific research, assuming, perhaps, that what lies in the details will remain impenetrable to the uninitiated, and that other areas of expressive culture are likely to yield more evocative results. The intersection of intellectual histories of the social sciences with state-of-the-art work in modern American history happens all too rarely, despite the enormous potential that exists in bringing the two together to analyze the patterns of American culture. In The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public, Sarah E. Igo provides just such an example of what can be accomplished when both sets of traditions are brought to bear upon each other, with thought-provoking results.

Igo analyzes three major social scientific projects—the Middletown studies of Robert and Helen Lynd, the establishment of public opinion polling units by George Gallup and Elmo Roper, and Alfred Kinsey's reports on human sexual behavior—that figured prominently in bringing social scientific realities to bear on the soul-searching of Americans about the status of their private and public lives. Starting from the mid-1920s with the Lynds and then moving forward with Gallup and Roper and then up through the 1950s with Kinsey, Igo's choices allow her to advance chronologically with a wide-angle panning shot while simultaneously permitting an in-depth focus on the survey phenomenon from three different angles. Although Igo provides a great many historical details about the case studies and their contexts, having multiple foci necessitates treating each one selectively rather than expansively, but grouping them together as a trio nonetheless allows for an analysis that benefits by the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. Igo allows us to compare and contrast the developments and aftermaths of these projects, each of which shared a great deal in terms of assumptions and objectives and yet nevertheless displayed divergent emphases. This investigation into the circumstances that informed each project demonstrates the robustness of the survey phenomenon, which helps to underscore Igo's argument that these mid...