Surveying postwar America: The averaged American in the age of Gallup and Kinsey

Survey data telling Americans “what we think,” “how we vote,” and “who we are” became common currency only in the last century. This paper, drawn from the recent book, The Averaged American, examines the way opinion polls, sex surveys, and consumer research transformed the United States public in the postwar era. The paper argues that modern surveys projected new visions of the nation: authoritative accounts of majorities and minorities, the mainstream and the marginal. They also infiltrated the lives of those who opened their doors to pollsters, or measured their habits and beliefs against statistics culled from strangers. Survey data underwrote categories as abstract as “the average American” and as intimate as the sexual self—demonstrating the power of scientific surveys to shape Americans' sense of themselves as individuals, members of communities, and citizens of a nation. Tracing how ordinary people argued about and adapted to a public awash in aggregate data, the presentation will reveal how survey techniques and findings became the vocabulary of postwar mass society.