Soundbite: In Search of the Average American

Kerry Howley from the February 2007 issue

As this interview went to press, 63 percent of Americans disapproved of their president, 14 percent of adults believed in evolution, and 100 percent of politicians claimed to speak for something called "The American People." Americans have grown used to crisp statistics, but as Sarah Igo points out in her new book The Averaged American (Harvard University Press), it wasn't always so easy to create a snapshot of the country's collective psyche. Igo, an assistant professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, tells the story of how surveys and polls have contributed to a sometimes distorted, always controversial conception of the archetypical American.

 

Q: What does it mean to be part of a mass public?

 

A: The way people have talked about that in the past was very wrapped up with being a consumer-that people were listening to the same radio shows, watching the same television programs. What I discovered was that statistical information, bastardized and popularized, was a deeper way for people to understand that they belonged to something larger than a family or a particular community. People could find themselves in the numbers, or sometimes not find themselves. It was a very powerful technology for understanding this mass.

 

It's really not until the 20th century that you get surveys attempting to query "normal, ordinary" Americans: white, middle-class folks. There is a conflation in the '20s, '30s, '40s, and '50s of that character, the normal American, with white middle-class subjects.

 

Q: What do you make of claims that America is losing its common culture?

 

A: There is this nostalgia for some kind of homogenous-and I think idealized and impossible-commonality in a nation this diverse. That's always been a kind of national fantasy. And that fantasy was strongest in the period where surveys really took hold at the national level.

 

People now look back, sometimes using survey data, to the 1950s and say we were a country that was much more unified, much more harmonious. I suspect that's not true. But that's the image that these surveys projected. The earlier surveys, bound by their own time and place and presuppositions, elevated a certain kind of profile as typical, or average, or mainstream.

 

Q: Aren't these anxieties as old as the country itself?