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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.  
 
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