Sarah E. Igo

Every day, we make decisions about what to share and when, how much to expose and to whom. Securing the boundary between one's private affairs and public identity has become an urgent task of modern life. How did privacy come to loom so large in public consciousness? Sarah Igo tracks the quest for privacy from the invention of the telegraph onward, revealing enduring debates over how Americans would--and should--be known. The Known Citizen is a penetrating historical investigation with powerful lessons for our own times, when corporations, government agencies, and data miners are tracking our every move.… (más)

In The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public, Sarah E. Igo argues, “Bound up with citizenship in ways obvious and subtle, surveys demarcated lines of inclusion, exclusion, and affinity in a national public. As such, they sat in complicated relationship to both social reality and mass culture” (pg. 2). The survey process and data it generated represented “a peculiar sort of social investigation in which the public is simultaneously object, participant, and audience” (pg. 4). Additionally, the process delineated the boundaries of citizenship. Igo writes, “Proclamations about ‘Americans’ could not be made without suppressing the voices and experiences of some, and here surveyors more often perpetuated than challenged the assumptions of their day” (pg. 18). Igo specifically examines the Middletown studies, the Gallup and Roper polls, and the Kinsey Reports, with two chapters devoted to each.
Igo describes the Middletown studies as crucial to changing the role of survey. In the Progressive era, surveyors worked to uncover the seedier elements of society with the goal of reform. The Lynds sought to capture the average American, but still worked with a reforming goal. Igo writes, “The researchers were able to launch a powerful indictment of American class relations, consumerism, and social conformity – all the while masking their criticisms with scientific detachment” (pg. 42). Though they sought to reform these issues, the Lynds carefully circumscribed the boundaries of citizenship. They excluded African-Americans, Jews, and Catholics from their final data. In this way, Igo argues, “Despite their professional interest in contemporary trends, the Lynds looked backward to find the modern United States” (pg. 58). The public response to the survey “expressed a fascination with the very social scientific mode that permitted such discoveries” while the survey itself “was a crucial step in the social scientific production of typical America” (pg. 70).
Unlike the Lynds, Gallup and Roper “claimed to uncover what the American public wanted” (pg. 104). While the Lynds looked at a whole community, “pollsters worked in the opposite direction, gathering atomized bits of opinion and then grafting them together so that they might speak for ‘America’” (pg. 105). Polls began in the field of marketing, though Gallup claimed complete impartiality, even going so far as to refuse to vote. Like the Lynds, however, Gallup excluded African-Americans from his final data (pg. 137). Though the pollsters failure to correctly predict the outcome of the 1948 election cast short-term doubt on their work, the polls continued to “displace other, earlier ways of gathering political and social information, become the most legitimate – even if never fully persuasive – technology for telling ‘the public’ what it collectively believed” (pg. 190).
Finally, Kinsey made the final leap in making the most intimate thoughts and details of the masses the realm of social scientists. Igo writes of the struggle it sparked, “This time it would be fought on more deeply cherished ground and intrude upon those areas of life seemingly most resistant to surveyors’ probing” (pg. 193). According to Igo, “Like other midcentury surveyors, Kinsey promoted his project as empirical, objective, and shorn of moralizing and prescription” (pg. 202). He used the presentation of scientific data in charts and graphs to curtail criticism that his study was itself salacious. Despite this, “many reviewers registered that Kinsey referred to, and generalized about, data only from white men and women in his Reports” (pg. 225). That said, “many citizens were not only willing to trust and use Kinsey’s statistics. They were also willing to become statistics themselves” (pg. 236). This reflected the role of surveys in society. Igo writes of observers worries about eroding social boundaries, “By 1950 many observers concurred that there was not much of a boundary left” (pg. 243).… (más)

This book proposes and documents an important idea -- that the surveying of characteristics, heavily, and opinions in the US over the past eighty years has helped to shape as well as to measure beliefs and behavior. Moreover, the author argues convincingly, the process of surveying has not been at all politically neutral. For example, the "Middletown " (Muncie, Indiana) of the first and still famous survey of American behavior and opinion was selected precisely because it had unusually small African-American and foreign-born populations. In an America where opinion polls are constantly reported, it is important to understand the political nature of
polling, and the interaction between polling and opinion. This book definitely added to my understanding of these issues. But it also took a great deal of time in doing so (the points could I think have been conveyed in a rather lengthy article). It also lapses into "academese" on frequent occasions, something that could have been edited out in a book aimed at a non-academic audience. Overall, a useful if dull contribution… (más)

In the 1920's and 1930's, American's were introduced to numerical descriptions of what it means to be average. A study of Muncie, IN characterized it as average America. The book, Middletown, became a best-seller, unheard of for a social science publication. The public was enthralled with understanding what the average American was like. Even though the author of the study, the Lynd's, would acknowledge its limitations, the study marked a watershed moment in American mass culture.

It spawned many new polls on all subjects. These polls portrayed themselves as neutral observers and therefore objective. As these also became popular, the Gallop poll introduced scientific polling, which took a small sample and extrapolated to the larger population. These polls were incredibly popular but also met fierce attack. Igo suggests that the need to refute them is acknowledge meant of their importance in public perception. Although the polling methods were crude by today's standard, they helped shape the concept of a mass-culture. One by-product was the homogenization of the average and the exclusion of minorities.

This reductionist function of surveys was overturned by the Kinsey Report in 1948, which focused on male sexual activity. Kinsey found that almost a quarter of men had homosexual experiences and half had pre-marital sex. This set off a firestorm of criticism, both for its accuracy (or lack of) and its subject. Many Americans found the subject inappropriate. Others challenged his methods, which included creating a personal relationship with those polled in order to get them to open up. Igo suggests that the Kinsey report was far from objective. It was a combined product of surveyor and surveyed.

Igo argues that the Kinsey report marked a shift to inclusion of minorities. Surveyors were not as concerned with accuracy for its own sake, but were meeting the demands of politicians and companies who were interested in finding niche markets. By the 1960's, polling tended to highlight divisions in society rather than homogeneity.

This is an excellent work on how polling shaped America and how Americans embraced polling. In her epilogue, Igo discussed the underlying question of polling: "Who gets to represent America?" Although she does not delve deeply into this, she opens up an important issue that is as relevant today as it was in the 1930's. The American "imagined community" is in constant flux The battle for the face of that community and the direction of it is one of the most important in American society today.… (más)