==================== HES POSTING ====================
H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by [log in to unmask] (May 1998)
Maurine W. Greenwald and Margo Anderson, eds.
_Pittsburgh Surveyed: Social Science and Social Reform in the Early
Twentieth Century_. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996.
xi+ 292 pp. Notes, illustrations, and index. $49.95 (cloth), ISBN
0-822-93956-8; $22.95 (paper), ISBN 0-822-95610-1.
Reviewed for H-SHGAPE by Robert C. Bannister
<[log in to unmask]>, Swarthmore College
"Six months here would justify suicide," Herbert Spencer remarked of
Pittsburgh during a visit in 1882. Three decades later, the six volume
"Pittsburgh Survey" (1909-14) documented the indictment in what became a
minor classic among early social surveys. The project involved several
dozen researchers who produced thirty-five articles initially serialized
in _The Survey_ plus monographs on industrial accidents, men and women
workers, and households in Homestead. Funded by the Russell Sage
Foundation, and coordinated by _Survey_ editor Paul Kellogg, these studies
built on a tradition that included Charles Booth's _Life and Labour of the
People in London_ (1889-1903), _The Hull House Papers_(1895), and W.E.B.
DuBois' _The Philadelphia Negro_ (1899). Its mixture of muckraking
journalism, social activism, and sociological analysis outraged
Pittsburgh's steelmakers while it inspired reformers to undertake similar
surveys elsewhere, studies that numbered more than 2,500 by 1930. Yet, as
revealed in the thirteen essays in _Pittsburgh Surveyed_, classics can be
as interesting for their failures as for their success. Reforms failed to
materialize or were subverted to different ends. In the social sciences,
as one contributor puts it, empirical research on the Pittsburgh model was
a "path not taken... because it...led nowhere" (p. 49).
Three opening articles provide historical perspective. Although rooted in
earlier surveys, the Pittsburgh project was the first to call itself a
"survey" and the first to study the "entire" life of a community, Martin
Bulmer notes. By the 1920s, however, a new generation of sociologists,
led by Robert Park and his Chicago colleagues, compared its combination of
social investigation and social activism unfavorably to more objective
"social research." Robert Lynd in _Middletown_ and William F. Ogburn and
his coworkers on _Recent Social Trends_ also distanced their work from
earlier surveys, while demographers administered the coup de grace so far
as future influence on sociology was concerned.
In a perceptive analysis of institutional setting and selfperception,
Stephen Turner traces the "mysterious" disappearance of the survey
tradition to the "engineering model" which Kellogg and others adopted in
a campaign to professionalize social work. Likening communities to
machines requiring expert care, this model viewed the social worker as the
primary coordinator of the activities of other community professionals.
But, as revealed in a 1930 bibliography of survey work, the trend instead
was toward specialization without coordination, one favored by the
Rockefeller and other foundations of the 1920s. Steven R. Cohen, in
contrast, pictures Kellogg as a champion of "industrial democracy" rooted
in an earlier "republican" tradition, another path not taken as U.S.
policymakers instead embraced a collective bargaining model of labor
relations.
A second group of articles considers conceptual and methodological
assumptions that shaped and often skewed findings. A failure to
appreciate the complexity of Pittsburgh's social and topological geography
left the Survey team unable to provide a logically defensible plan for
consolidated government, while opening specific findings to criticism
(Edward K. Muller). Margaret Byington's _Homestead_ (1910), the subject
of analysis in separate essays by S.J. Kleinberg and Margo Anderson, was
marred by assumptions concerning the "typical American family" with the
father as primary wage earner. As a result, Byington ignored working
class self help efforts and severely criticized ward-based schools and
alderman's courts that immigrants often preferred to more distant,
bureaucratized institutions. Regarding immigrant earnings, Byington was
both wrong and right: wrong in that income (as measured by consumption
expenditures) was not less in 1910 than in some earlier age; but right in
articulating the ideal of an adequate "family wage" that would become
policy only decades later. The condescension buried in her analysis led
at the time, not to a demand for better wages or sensitivity to the value
of immigrant traditions, but rather to child labor laws, "protections" for
women workers, and finally immigration restriction. Underlining the
importance of photos and illustrations for the survey, Maurine Greenwald
provides an intelligent analysis of the work of Lewis Hine and Joseph
Stella, concluding (as do most of the essays in one way or other) that
intrinsic merit did not translate into political effectiveness.
Four final articles evaluate the survey in light of today's concerns over
the environment, race, and ethnicity. The survey addressed environmental
issues both with respect to city planning (author) and pollution (Joel
Tarr), although the only immediate consequence was a scaled down postwar
planning project that ignored the survey's social concerns. Laurence A.
Glasco mounts an interesting defense of Helen A. Tucker and Richard Wright
(not the novelist), the sole African American contributors whose work (a
total of twenty-six pages) has been too easily dismissed as naive in its
praise of black "accomplishments" and sanguine in an age of increasing
racism. Richard Ostreicher makes a convincing case that the traditional
image of industry domination and worker inertia in Homestead from
1892-1937 is not only false but was constructed by elite reformers to
serve their own political agenda. A comparison of Pittsburgh as seen by
reformers and by immigrants is the only essay in the volume previously
published elsewhere, and the only one also unfortunately marred by jargon
and a preachy tone.
_Pittsburgh Surveyed_ builds on studies of the survey tradition that
include John F. McClymer _War and Welfare_ (1980), Jean M. Converse's
_Survey Research in the United States (1986), and the essays in _The
Social Survey in Historical Perspective, 1880-1940_, ed. Martin Bulmer et
al. (1991). Specialists will thus find some familiar material, especially
regarding historical context. Historians of progressivism will also
recognize familiar themes in the eclipse of "republicanism," the roots of
welfare materialism, the agency of the dispossessed, and the narrowing
effect of the cult of expertise on earlier reform. As is inevitably the
case in a collaborative volume, some conflicting views are left
unresolved: the image of Kellogg and "social engineer" and "industrial
democrat," for example, or the relation of traditional assumptions and
innovative proposals (as in Byington's ideal of a "family wage"). More
attention could be given to motivations of the researchers and to their
institutional settings largely absent save for Turner's analysis. Gender,
although introduced indirectly in Kleinberg's analysis of the family
ideal, and directly in John F. Bauman and Margaret Spratt's discussion of
Pittsburgh's "Civic Leaders," could figure more prominently in the overall
analysis, given the major role played by women in the survey.
By focusing narrowly on a single project, _Pittsburgh Surveyed_
nonetheless adds depth and nuance to our understanding, not only of the
survey tradition and its fate, but of the dynamics of reform in the late
progressive era. Nicely conceived, well organized, and clearly written,
these essays address and deserve a wide audience of those interested in
the history of social sciences, in progressivism, and in American reform.
Copyright (c) 1998 by H-Net, all rights reserved. This work
may be copied for non-profit educational use if proper credit
is given to the author and the list. For other permission,
please contact [log in to unmask]
============ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ============
For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]
|