The rise and fall of the Bureau of Applied Social Research, and the life of its founder and mentor, Paul Lazarsfeld should ideally be presented as a drama by Brecht, accompanied by the dissonant and jazzy music of pre-Nazi Central Europe, and its depression-time equivalent in the United States (from “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime” to “Happy Days are Here Again!”).

The concept of the university applied social research organization (all the adjectives are necessary) was born in the mind of a social activist student in the intellectual hothouse of Vienna between the World Wars. He wanted new methods of research to help bring radical social change; he had to start by studying soap-buying. He created a penniless research center in a near-bankrupt society, and found his friends jobs studying the unemployed.

Throughout his distinguished career, Herbert Gutman has displayed a rare genius for dredging up the most gloriously obscure historical evidence and deriving from it new perspectives on the largest themes. The Black Family is another triumph of this kind: my awe of Professor Gutman’s energy and insight is enhanced by this volume. At the same time, Gutman makes clear that the volume is not demographic in its intent. Since my commentary is to be from a demographic perspective, I will take particular pains to direct this perspective to the purposes Gutman sets forth in The Black Family. These are identified by the author as discerning “what sustained common slave beliefs and behavior,” rather than merely documenting “regularities in behavior,” the latter being Gutman’s characterization of the results of the application of quantitative methods (1976). My task, then, is to examine the links that Gutman establishes between demographic argument and explanation, in his sense, and to assess their adequacy. No demographer, I suspect, would have undertaken the kind of investigation Gutman assays; but demographic skills would have served Gutman’s intentions. I will here try to be severe with this imposing volume, recognizing the importance and aptness of its central thesis, and the audacity of its author’s empirical reach, but questioning the adequacy of his demography to his own ends.

With Professor Gutman’s superb work The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925 any anthropologist would feel most comfortable, for this is a study of the fine-grain and intimate relationships among a group of people, and such a topic comprises the normal terrain—I am tempted to say the “territorial imperative”— of the anthropologist. But the work is especially appealing to the anthropologist because Gutman has chosen to turn his immense energies on the family. To many people “begits and begats,” terminologies and genealogies are, at best, sterile ways to talk about a group and, at worst, unfortunate reminders of youthful years spent studying the Bible. But to the anthropologist these are technical ideas of the trade, concepts which reveal much about the relationships in a particular society at a particular time. Lastly, and here the anthropologist joins many others, we are all in the debt of Gutman for bringing to light an aspect of the American experience of which most of us were previously unaware. Perhaps the most moving, and paradoxical, aspect of the work is that because it is a testimony to the profound capacity of the black to preserve his essential humanity under the most frightening of conditions, conditions imposed by other humans, it is also an affirmation that all humans make their lives, and their history.

Gutman’s study of the black family is one of those books which serve as a constant inspiration to academics. In those dreary moments when we wrestle with a particularly subtle point or phrase, a fleeting question occurs to most of us. How many people will really appreciate the depth of our thinking or the way in which the prose really captures the essence of the phenomenon being explained? But when such pernicious thoughts disturb our concentration, the example of Gutman’s work can banish them, for this book has had more reviewers than some technical pieces have had serious readers. Indeed the November 1978 SSHA session indicates that it still continues. Not only has Gutman’s book been seriously read and pondered, but there are a substantial number of pages in print to indicate that all the subtleties have been duly appreciated.

Since the inception of slavery in North America the free population has been concerned with the mortality of the slave population. Slaveowners were concerned with mortality for purposes of estimating the profitability of slave investments. Opponents of slavery and the slave trade used actual and presumed slave mortality experience as arguments for abolishing the system. Death rates were viewed as a measure of demographic performance that reflected the quality of slave life. It was argued that death rates reflected, and were in part determined by, such factors as diet, physical treatment, and the quality of medical care and housing—all under the control of the slaveowners. Consequently, information on deaths was used as a standard for evaluating the severity of the slave system and for assessing regional and international differences in slavery. In the postbellum period, scholars researched and debated various issues in slave mortality. The modern discussion includes issues in the levels and determinants of slave mortality, but research has concentrated on levels, possibly due to inadequate data for extensive research on determinants of mortality.

The first known attempt to explain the duration and supersession of dynasties through calculations was made in the first century B.C. by Tsou Yen or his disciples in China (Eberhard, 1950: 60). The calculations were astrological. The rulers’ response was inimical. Maybe this is why no further attempts were made during the next two thousand years, in spite of astrology continuing to flourish. The objectives of the present study are somewhat related to those of Tsou Yen although the calculations avoid astrology; whether that helps to avoid the opprobrium heaped on Tsou Yen’s school remains to be seen. As we tackle the period during which this school of thought was born and subsequently crushed, it is only proper to recall the memory of these spiritual ancestors.

Tracing the development of the county commission system provides a unique opportunity for examining the nature of participatory government in colonial America. Yet, despite the prominence of the county commission system today, studies of the county commission system and, in fact, all county government have been few (Bromage, 1933: 15-35). Colonial historians have preferred to investigate the New England town and the provincial legislature. Most of these studies (Grant, 1961: 106, 120-127, 150-153; Bushman, 1967: 268-270; Syndor, 1965: 42, 6-73; Gross, 1976: 38-39, 179-181; Pole, 1962: 626-646; Greene, 1959: 485-506; Greene, 1963: 25-47; Cook, 1971:586-608; Zemsky, 1971:28-38; Lockeridge, 1970: 47-49, 119-138, 94; Cook, 1976: 9, 10, 19-22, 80-94, 115-118) have concluded that although the franchise was exercised by most adult male property owners, town councils and colonial legislatures tended to be dominated by a social and economic elite continually returned by the electorate to positions of power. In other words, exercising the vote did not seem to make much practical difference. ‘ An analysis of county officeholding in colonial Pennsylvania, however, challenges the belief in the universality of such voter behavior. For when male adult property owners gained the opportunity to elect county officials who levied, collected, and disbursed the only direct tax in colonial Pennsylvania, they chose people more like themselves than like the appointed officials who previously controlled county government.

In the early twentieth century, a drive for educational reform converged with the progressive movement in the street-car suburb of Somerville, Massachusetts to establish a local junior high school, an innovation that was sweeping through public school systems across the country (Krug, 1964: 327-335; Bunker, 1914; Annual Reports of Somerville, 1920: 183; Smith, 1920: 139). Proponents of the junior high school argued in national educational journals and scholarly monographs that this intermediate school would provide the special education appropriate for those students making the difficult transition from childhood to adolescence (Bonser, 1915; Judd, 1918; Briggs, 1920; Koos, 1921; Smith, 1926; Spaulding, 1927; Van Denberg, 1922; Thomas-Tindal and Myers, 1927). It would earlier supply, they said, “high-school type courses,” and equip students with the managerial and technical skills increasingly demanded by the gradual expansion of the white-collar occupational sector in the early twentieth century (Foote and Hatt, 1953; Thernstrom, 1973: 50-51). These two features, a more mature educational setting and useful technical courses, would make the junior high school an effective device for keeping students in school longer and for attracting them to high school. It appealed to progressive reformers because it promised an extension of schooling, a better-informed citizenry, and improved vocational preparation. In early twentieth-century Somerville, middle-class ethnic Democrats, who sought these objectives, used the political process to install this educational reform.

At this stage in the development of the Social Science History Association it is appropriate for us to consider some of the general problems concerning the development and use of machine-readable data and the Association’s role in such matters.

The long-debated issue whether social scientists should be concerned with improving the human condition, and if so how they should attempt this task, has been raised afresh in the exchange of views between Lee Benson (1978) and Warren Miller (1978) on “Changing Social Science to Change the World.” Before plunging into this debate, however, I should like to suggest that all of us who participate in it are viewing the world from a particular occupational perspective. Some years ago, when George Lundberg’s Can Science Save Us? (1947) was current, a friend suggested to me that a prior question was, “Should science save us?” He may have meant, as Miller suggests, that saving or changing the world is not the principal task of social scientists; or in another meaning, he may have been anticipating more recent critics in noting that a world “saved” by social science might not be one in which everyone would prefer to live. I hope that our efforts will not be counter-productive.

Despite differences in coloration Miller and Benson are birds of a feather. Although he is no Pollyanna, Miller believes that there has been a modest and decent series of advances in the social sciences and that the most conscientious, diligent, and intelligent researchers will continue to add to this stock of knowledge. Benson is much more pessimistic about the achievements of yesterday and today but, in turn, offers us the hope of a far brighter tomorrow. Miller explains Benson’s hyperbolic views about the past and future by distinguishing between pure and applied science and by pointing out Benson’s naivete about politics: the itch to understand the world is different from the one to make it better; and, Miller says, because Benson sees that we have not made things better, he should not assume we do not know more about them; Benson ought to realize, Miller adds, that the way politicians translate basic social knowledge into social policy need not bring about rational or desirable results. On the other side, Benson sees more clearly than Miller that the development of science has always been intimately intertwined with the control of the environment and the amelioration of the human estate.

In the years before professional image-building, few political groups managed to acquire a more enviable image than did the Republican insurgents of the Taft period. The Congressional insurgents, who first caught the country’s attention with the fight against the Payne-Aidrich tariff in the Senate and against the dictatorial rule of Speaker Joseph Cannon in the House, compensated for their failure to win control of their party by winning extravagant praise from contemporary journalists. They have had scarcely less appeal for historians. Thomas Dreier entitled his 1910 study of the rebellious Republicans, Heroes of Insurgency, and later writers have followed his spirit, and very nearly his terminology. In 1940, Kenneth W. Hechler provided a highly favorable portrait in Insurgency, and Russel Nye’s Midwestern Progressive Politics (1951) offered a sympathetic portrayal in the 1950s. Only in the most recent study, James L. Holt’s Congressional Insurgents and the Party System (1967), is there any critical discussion of the limitations of the insurgents’ ideas and political strategies.