The Meaning of the Mean

How probing for public opinion has dampened the public’s voice.

In the Federalist Papers, James Madison expressed his belief that “the larger the society ” the more duly capable it will be of self-government.” The principle would hold particularly firm, he believed, in the United States, where “the society itself will be broken into so many parts, interests and classes of citizens, that the rights of individuals, or of the minority, will be in little danger from interested combinations of the majority.” Who would have guessed that more than 200 years later, in a more diverse society than Madison ever could have imagined, so much energy would be devoted to flattening those differences? Fueled by incessant political polling, mountains of survey data, and increasingly refined efforts to take the pulse of the “average” citizen, American political life increasingly resembles a matrix dominated by a single axis–the normative value. Indeed, much of contemporary politics is premised on the belief that by locating and then claiming title to “the center,” politicians can trump the disparate “interests and classes” Madison saw as the very lifeblood of a vigorous democratic society.

The rise of social survey data in twentieth-century America has done much to speed our arrival at this state of affairs, according to Sarah E. Igo’s book, The Averaged American. Igo, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania, forcefully argues that the tail of polling, data collection, and social investigation has come to wag the dog of modern American society, and she makes her case by examining three critical twentieth-century American research endeavors: Robert and Helen Lynd’s social investigations of “Middletown” in the 1920s and 1930s, the rise in the late 1930s and 1940s of Gallup and Roper’s polling empires, and the Kinsey reports on male and female sexual behavior in the late 1940s and early 1950s. All three accelerated a trend in twentieth-century life that privileged the place of “typical” Americans in efforts to define the public.

Igo details how social surveyors managed to conflate their methods, goals, and audience with the nation’s prevailing political values. Studies that sought to take the temperature of a feverish body politic wound up invading the organism to such a degree that eventually the cure became indistinguishable from the disease. Rather than simply elucidating Americans’ opinions, survey data wound up defining a new reality: We believe what we are told we already believe. The political consequences of this turn of events are momentous, for they cut to the fundamental premises that underlie democratic values. If what is “democratic” in American society today is what survey data demonstrate most Americans believe, what agency do individuals have? If their views diverge from, or for that matter echo, the perceived mainstream, why bother voting?

The passivity encouraged by the hegemony of averaging stands at odds with the historical roots of early social surveys and social investigation. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American survey research pointed in the opposite direction. Unfortunately, Igo dispatches the prologue to her story by characterizing early social investigation as a Victorian endeavor, rooted in a “feminized social work tradition” geared to the “amelioration” of problems posed by society’s marginal members. It was much more than that. Progressive Era–social investigation proved an essential ingredient–indeed, it was often the engine–of much liberal activism.

Progressives viewed their prolific studies as an instrument of social change–one that might simultaneously expose social problems, uncover workable solutions, and mobilize public support for social welfare legislation. Jane Addams’s Hull House Maps and Papers (1895) surveyed Chicago’s immigrant, working-class 19th Ward, in part to make the case for the evils of child labor and the necessity of factory reform. Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives (1890) stunned middle-class readers because it revealed that one could exist comfortably in New York and never know the degrading conditions endured by the poorest and most desperate in the city. What was lost, then, in the drift of social surveys toward the average was not only the preoccupation with the most destitute and needy groups in American society, but also the political energy that animated it.

Igo’s focus is on the period after World War I, when reform-oriented inquiry gave way to social research reflecting the values and techniques promoted by increasingly professionalized academic social science disciplines. The new breed of social researchers, inside and outside the academy, emphasized their adherence to strict objectivity, rigorous empirical and increasingly quantitative methodology, and alleged political neutrality. Igo pays little attention to the fact that the transforming goals of social survey research occurred at the same time that the enthusiasm for progressive reform began to be eclipsed. For her, the change is driven not by the political climate but by the research itself and the growing hegemony of the putative average. Yet given its Progressive roots, it is striking to see how the proliferation of a new social knowledge devoted to “aggregating” Americans in the period from the 1920s to 1960s unfolded despite the vagaries of the Great Depression, New Deal reform, the two world wars, and their aftermath. The turmoil of American politics and society and the persistent poverty at the “margins” remained even as social survey research relentlessly searched for the great American average. In time, subject and object merged as Americans not only accepted mass survey research, but also came to rely on “the representations” of the public they produced as a way of understanding “their society and themselves.” “National polls and surveys,” Igo asserts, “were as much responsible for creating a mass public as they were reacting to its arrival.”

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