Samuel Stouffer and the GI Survey: Sociologists and Soldiers during the Second World War

1. Meet Sam Stouffer

Chapter 1 Meet Sam Stouffer The Liberty Limited arrived in Washington, DC, on August 4, 1941—a day when everyone knew what a Pullman train was, and when women were about to learn how to draw stocking lines with eyebrow pencils. Alighting from the train was a diminutive man on his way to the War Department. He had no official status, no military rank, and although at forty-one he had reached a certain level of prominence in his field, no one would have much noticed him in a national capital that knew it was likely to go to war. The man stepped into the welter of prewar activity , met a colleague for breakfast, and then headed for the Munitions Building. It was already hot, but it would get hotter still before the day was out—late summer in DC.1 Nineteen years and twenty-one days later, The New York Times ran an extended obituary for the man entitled “Samuel Stouffer, Sociologist, Dead.” Readers learned that Stouffer (1900–1960) was from Sac City, Iowa, and that he had held sociology professorships at Wisconsin, Chicago, and Harvard. He had been the founding director of the Laboratory of Social Relations at Harvard, and president of both the American Sociological Association and the American Association for Public Opinion Research. Readers also learned what had come of Stouffer’s train trip from Chicago to Washington, DC, nineteen years before: “Dr. Stouffer was the principal author of ‘The American Soldier,’ an exhaustive study of the citizen-soldier. . . . The book was a report developed from the research 2 Meet Sam Stouffer work he directed during World War II at the Education and Information Division of the War Department.” Lieutenant General James Gavin, commander of the famed 82nd Airborne Division in World War II, was interviewed for the obituary , and he commented that Stouffer had made “a monumental contribution to the science of making citizens of a free country win its wars.” The obituary also indicated that the knowledge gained from Stouffer’s studies applied to business, urban planning, population control, public-opinion polls, civil liberties, and economics . Those were the bare bones of an influential and innovative man and his career.2 Stouffer’s work is cited in journals as diverse as Child Development Abstract, The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, and Commentary. He served as a consultant to scores of private and public institutions, including the American Standards Association, the Cooperative Test Service of the American Council on Education, the University of California, the American Economic Association, the Population Association of America, the National Committee on Atomic Information , and the American Psychoanalytic Association. He was also a delegate to the International Conference on Population in Paris (1938), as well as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Association , Phi Beta Kappa, the American Statistical Association, the Sociological Research Association, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, the Population Association of America, the Psychometric Association, and—reflecting part of his social life—the Harvard and Cosmos Clubs.3 General George C. Marshall, Chief of Staff of the US Army in World War II, believed that Stouffer’s The American Soldier represented “the first quantitative studies of the impact of war on the mental and emotional life of the soldier.” Like others, Marshall emphasized “the value of these books goes beyond their obvious importance to military training. . . .”4 After reading The American Soldier at La Finca Vigia in Cuba, Ernest Hemingway wrote to Charles Scribner that it was “An excellent and impressive work. . . .”5 And the eminent sociologist C. Wright Mills included in his book The Sociological Imagination (1959) the direct statement that “apart from the official history of the War, the most elaborate body of research is probably the several-year inquiry made for the American Army under the direction of Samuel Stouffer.”6 By the time Princeton University Press published The American Soldier in 1949, many more influential figures in and beyond government had recognized the value and potential applications of Stouffer’s work. And even before The American Soldier was published, Frank Stanton of the Columbia Broadcasting Meet Sam Stouffer 3 System (CBS) had written in 1944 “the work Sam Stouffer has done for the army is by all odds the best to come out of the war. For that matter, his program represents the most complete thing of its kind to date. . . . In this mass...