BEN WATTENBERG: The 20th century is a closed chapter in American history. When we look back, what do we see? What are we shown? A thousand stories of many heroes, and some villains, tales of momentous events that reshaped our world.

BEN WATTENBERG: But there is another way to view history. Over the past hundred years, Americans became the most ambitious measurers of human activity ever. Only now can we see long-term trends about everyday people providing us with an imperfect method for solving problems, and ongoing series of great arguments, and a startling way of seeing America. This is the First Measured Century.

Hello, I'm Ben Wattenberg, moderator, or immoderator, of the weekly PBS series Think Tank. Welcome to our special, The First Measured Century: A Look at American History by the Numbers, and the story of social science pioneers, who by measuring America helped changed it.

Of course statistics are used and abused on all sides of every argument. We will show you the straightest numbers we can muster. But I urge you to look at the data here, and to look further to Web sites and reference books. If you do, broad themes will likely emerge, and you can call yourself an expert.

Here's my take: America is an exceptional nation that has done remarkably well. Central to that success is the extension of liberty, the measurable expansion of personal, political, economic and cultural freedom. That's a blessing, but sometimes perhaps a mixed blessing.

As Americans reflect on the official end of the twentieth century, we ask, "What happened?" The answers are called "history," and these days, there is more than one way of telling history. Americans have learned about yesteryear in terms of events, politics, personalities, science, inventions, and arts. We saw: Titanic, Lindbergh, Challenger, Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt, world wars, the Roaring Twenties, hula-hoops, Elvis, Hiroshima, Vietnam, Watergate, the civil rights and feminist movements, the Beatles, Reagan, O.J. and Monica. Some of the best have come from PBS.

In a sense, these are "anecdotes," defined as "short narratives of interesting, amusing, or biographical incidents." But there is another way of answering "What Happened?"-- through the lens of data and measurement, which shows us how the lives of everyday Americans changed. (The plural of anecdote is data.)

The three-hour PBS program "The First Measured Century," tells the story of America by the numbers through the eyes of those who did the measuring and the interpreting, often in highly controversial and unusual circumstances. These include George Gallup, Alfred Kinsey, Robert and Helen Lynd (authors of "Middletown,") Daniel P. Moynihan, W.E.B. Dubois, Jane Addams and Julia Lathrop, Frederick Jackson Turner, Franz Boas (who turned back the tide of "scientific racism,") James Q. Wilson (co-author of the "broken windows" theory of crime prevention), Frank Fukuyama, William Julius Wilson, and many others who, for the most part, are unheralded.

We begin our look at social indicators before the time of Gross National Product, public opinion polls, rates of unemployment, out-of-wedlock births, infant deaths and maternal mortality (which was the second leading cause of death among women, beaten out only by tuberculosis.)

We see the United States going from half the size of the four biggest European nations to twice the size of all of them combined. We see a nation of 50 million, taking in 25 million immigrants.

We see the population of cities soar, and then fade, as America becomes the first majority suburban nation. We see a nation with less mobility today than in 1900, the sharp rise and slow fall of violent crime rates, and increasing wealth, with a big argument about how it is shared.

"The First Measured Century" is a fast paced narrative with unique graphics. It's history as you've never seen it, measured. And dramatic.

BEN WATTENBERG: Let's start -- 1893, Chicago, our story of the first measured century begins at a world's fair, celebrating the 400th anniversary of Columbus's arrival to what Europeans called "The New World." For the 27 million visitors to the fair, it was a window to the near unimaginable changes to come in the next century. Like a giant department store where everything is bigger and better, the fair showcased the products of progress. There was the 22,000-pound block of cheese from Canada, and the world's largest cannon, measuring more than 43 feet in length, and weighing 132 tons from Germany. Measurement was in style. Numbers even defined standards of beauty. Scientists compiled the measurements of 40,000 college students. Artists used these statistics to create these statues of the "ideal man and woman." It was already clear that America would see the new century through data-colored glasses.

Just outside the fairground, one of the great promoters of the day, William Cody, was staging a production of his own. Three times a day, Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show celebrated the derring-do of gun-slinging cowboys and Indian warriors. For a new generation of Americans, this is as close as they would ever come to the legendary experience of the American frontier.

While Buffalo Bill put tales of the heroic West on parade, a young professor came down to the world's fair with a new way to tell the same sort of story, but with data. Frederick Jackson Turner, from the fledgling University of Wisconsin, presented his thoughts to the American Historical Association. His thesis would come to be called the single most influential piece of writing in the history of American history.

WILLIAM CRONON (Frederick Jackson Turner Professor of History, University of Wisconsin): Turner starts this famous essay by quoting the Census Bureau, which interestingly in 1890 declares for the first time that there is no longer a visible frontier line on the demographic maps that the Census is producing. Up until that time, if you drew a map of where people were and were not living in the United States, and drew a line in areas that have more than two people per square mile or less than two people per square mile, there was a very clear demarcation between those two.

BEN WATTENBERG: From 1790 on, that line had been moving steadily Westward. Thomas Jefferson had speculated that to fill the vast open spaces of America it would take a hundred generations. It took about 80 years. By 1890, people had settled throughout the Western territories and a clear frontier line could no longer be drawn.

WILLIAM CRONON: Turner sees those maps and says, Wait a second, something important is happening here -- something radical is changing in the nature of the American experience. The frontier line is ending, and therefore the first chapter of American history has come to a close.

BEN WATTENBERG: Turner believed that creating a nation out of the wilderness yielded character traits that were unique to Americans.

FREDERICK JACKSON TURNER (1893): "Coarseness and strength, acuteness and inquisitiveness, that restless, nervous energy, that dominant individualism that comes with freedom -- these are the traits of the frontier. This expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnishes the forces dominating American character." Frederick Jackson Turner, 1893.

WILLIAM CRONON: Turner grows up in this little town in central Wisconsin called Portage, and he tells the story of that town as a kind of microcosm of this American melting pot that he thinks of as the frontier. You can't actually read the Turner frontier essay in 1893 without seeing that what he is really doing is taking the story of Portage, Wisconsin, and mapping it onto the American map, so it becomes the story of all of America.

JOHN MILTON COOPER (Author, Pivotal Decades): Turner is picking up on an idea that is very much around -- a lot of people are commenting on it -- the frontier is closed. The country is industrializing. The place of the greatest growth, quite obviously, is in the cities. We are now becoming a country of cities and of bigger cities. Immigrants are pouring in from Europe, and there is all this concern. What's happening to us? What are we becoming?

BEN WATTENBERG: Where now could the seed of liberty be planted? For Turner the frontier meant social and economic freedom, and he worried that with its closing America would become more like Europe. Turner believed in what is now called "American exceptionalism."

SEYMOUR MARTIN LIPSET (Author, American Exceptionalism): But his emphasis on the frontier was an emphasis on something which he thought was unique to the United States, and therefore helping to explain why the United States was a more egalitarian society, why it was a more open society, and why there was more social mobility in it. And this in turn affected the class structure. And that makes Turner a social scientist, if you will, or closer to the ways in which social scientists operate.

BEN WATTENBERG: Turner is important for not just what he said about America, but for the way he told the story.

WILLIAM CRONON: Turner really is one of very first American historians who conceives of his intellectual activity as a social science. He really does think of history as a problem-solving activity, not a story-telling activity. And so he draws from all sorts of sciences, natural and social, that are going on around him. And maybe one of the biggest influences on Turner is geography. He is in love with maps, and the application of maps as a statistical tool, as a way not just of depicting information but of analyzing information, is the heart of what Turner is about.

BEN WATTENBERG: There was more information to analyze than ever before. The 1890 Census that so influenced Turner asked more questions than any other before that time -- or since. Measurement magnified the impact that the infant social sciences would have on American life. Data would be at the core of the first measured century.

WILLIAM CRONON: Turner is one of the new group of historians that emerges at the end of the 19th century, early 20th century, who are vocal advocates for something that they called "the new history." And that new history has a couple of characteristics. One is it is far more committed than any prior body of historical scholarship to social science analysis. It tries to use statistics -- it uses the kind of data that historians had not used much up until that time in order to gain new insights and make new arguments. And then the other strand of the new history are those new insights, those new arguments, are pointed towards political interventions -- very explicit political interventions, to say history can make a difference to policy. It can change the way we govern this country by using data in new ways.

BEN WATTENBERG: Bella Bocce. So a new history based on data and social science was linked to politics from the very start. A social science controversy surfaced in a policy are n amost Americans today would find anti-social and unscientific. For just as Turner was warning of the closing frontier, a new wave of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe was coming into neighborhoods like this one, Little Italy herein Baltimore. The immigrants brought their languages, their cultures and their talents. But at the turn of the century, a school of thought now called "scientific racism" used the tools of social science to label the newcomers as unfit for self-government, unable to become real Americans, and in fact biologically inferior.

Here's how the field of play was set up at the time. In January of 1892, the government opened a special building on Ellis Island to handle the massive numbers of new arrivals to the United States. Throughout the early 1800s,immigration rose and fell with the famines and wars of Europe. But starting at about 1880, there began an extraordinary migration on a scale unheard of before or since. By 1930, more than 28 million immigrated to the United States. That's on a base population of only 15 million people in 1880. Each year between 1905 and 1907, more than one million people entered the country. At the peak of immigration, almost 15 percent of the national population was foreign born. In many cities, immigrants made up more than 50 percent of the population. The American economy was usually booming, and workers came from all across Europe, drawn by the promise of jobs -- and by something else.

ALAN KRAUT (American University): The overwhelming number of immigrants who came to the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were really in search of economic opportunity. But they were also concerned -- and this was especially true of minority groups in parts of Southern and Eastern Europe -- in political liberty -- the ability to participate in the political system, to function in the world without the oppressiveness of a totalitarian regime. The pull of the United States and its attitude of religious liberty was very, very great.

BEN WATTENBERG: Through the early 1800s, immigration to America had looked like this: primarily English, Scottish, German and Scandinavian. But between 1880 and the 1920s the flow changed. Eastern and Southern Europeans made the move to America in record numbers. Unlike the Scandinavian and German immigrant farmers of the 19th century, the new immigrants clustered in the cities. That's where the jobs were.

Between 1880 and 1920, the cities expanded at a previously unimaginable pace. New York grew by more than 300 percent, Chicago 400 percent, Detroit700 percent. And the real blockbusters were out West: Los Angeles grew by over 1,000 percent from a mere 50,000 people in 1890 to over half a million in just 30 years. These newcomers were often described by what they were not: not Protestant, not English-speaking, not skilled, not educated, and not liked.

The newly arrived immigrants found themselves in a hostile and alien environment, in its way similar to the frontier described earlier by Frederick Jackson Turner.

JOHN MILTON COOPER (University of Wisconsin): For so many of these immigrants from Europe, they are coming from small cities or small towns, peasant villages, the shtetls of the pale. They are hop scotching two or three centuries of history. They are coming immediately into a strange new world.

BEN WATTENBERG: Could the new immigrants adapt to a life in America? Many learned men thought not, including Turner.

FREDERICK JACKSON TURNER (1901): "It is obvious that the replacement of the German and English immigration by southern Italians, Poles, Russian Jews and Slovaks is a loss to the social organism of the United States. The congestion of foreigners in localities in our great cities, the increase in crime and pauperism are attributable to the poorer elements. All these are presented by this transformation of our immigration" -- Frederick Jackson Turner, 1901.

BEN WATTENBERG: And Turner, it turned out, was a softie. Another prominent social scientist, Francis Walker, a superintendent of the Census and later president of MIT, had this to say:

FRANCIS WALKER (1896): "The entrance of such vast masses of peasantry degraded below our utmost conceptions, is a matter which no intelligent patriot can look upon without the gravest apprehension and alarm. They are beaten men from beaten races. They have none of the ideas and aptitudes such as belong to those who were descended from the tribes that met under the oak trees of old Germany to make laws and choose chiefs." Francis Walker,1896.

BEN WATTENBERG: Good old democratic Germany.

MATTHEW FRYE JACOBSON (Yale University): We have come to think of race in this country almost entirely in binary terms of black and white. But at the turn of the century there were upwards of 36 in some schemes, 75 in other schemes, races, and the largest difference being the divisions within what we now think of being one white race.

BEN WATTENBERG: One scientist named William Ripley, believe it or not, identified a hierarchy of three fundamental white racial types in Europe by measuring head shape: the long-headed blond Teutonic type, the short-headed brunette Alpine, and the long-headed dark Mediterranean -- the Jews, Italians, Slavs and Greeks. Surprise, the new immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe were ranked at the bottom of the scale.

LEE D. BAKER (Duke University): This was the age of science, and science in this time, and social science as well as physical science, measuring everything from heads to leg length to nose size was used to bolster discrimination.

ALAN KRAUT: Now, in the United States there was an increasing attention to eugenics, the idea that you could improve the human condition and improve human stock by careful breeding.

BEN WATTENBERG: Improving the American breeding stock was the goal of a Chicago biologist named Charles Davenport. In 1910, with a grant from of all places the Carnegie Foundation, he established the Eugenics Records Office.

CHARLES DAVENPORT (1911): "The population of the United States will, on account of the great influx of blood from Southeastern Europe, rapidly become darker in pigmentation, smaller in stature, more given to crimes of larceny, kidnapping, assault, murder, rape and sex immorality. And the ratio of insanity in the population will rapidly increase." Charles Davenport, 1911.

BEN WATTENBERG: For eugenicists like Davenport, race and character were fixed and immutable. Biology was destiny.

LEE D. BAKER: No matter how much philanthropy, no matter how much education, no matter how much learning and pulling oneself up by the bootstraps, they were confound to some sort of state of inferiority.

BEN WATTENBERG: Leading the opposition to this nativist view was a German Jewish immigrant who got his start in one of the coldest places on earth. In1883, a young scientist named Franz Boas traveled to Baffin Island in the Arctic Circle. While studying Eskimo customs, Boas began to develop one of the most important concepts in modern anthropology. At the time, tribal groups like the Eskimo were considered primitive and uncivilized. Northern European society was seen as the pinnacle of evolution -- culturally, racially and biologically. Boas wrote in his diary:

FRANZ BOAS: "I often ask myself what advantages our good society possesses over the savages. The more I see their customs, the more I realize we have no right to look down on them. The idea of a cultured individual is merely relative."

BEN WATTENBERG: In 1896, Franz Boas became one of the first professors of anthropology at Columbia University.

LEE D. BAKER: Franz Boas is affectionately known as the father of American anthropology. He has made a number of contributions. The first is de-linking race from language and culture and making persuasive arguments that people and cultures do not go from savage barbarians to civilized. Cultures are not better nor worse than any others. They are just equally complex and equally important on their own merit.

BEN WATTENBERG: In 1907, Boas began an intensive study of close to 18,000children of European immigrants. The results were published as "Changes in Bodily Form," part of a 42-volume Congressional study on immigration. Boas measured height, weight, head shape and other physical traits, all cross-tabulated by whether his subjects were born in Europe or America, and how long they have lived in America.

The results showed that in just one generation the head shapes of children of long-skulled Nordic immigrants and those of the round-headed Slavic and Jewish immigrants were quickly becoming more like each other. In effect, once in an American environment eating an American diet, the children were physically becoming more like American children.

LEE D. BAKER: Boas was actually at a loss of words to really explain this. But he was demonstrating that the actual shape of people's bodies changed in the environment of the United States, which was actually quite profound.

MATTHEW FRYE JACOBSON: And what that implies is that the hereditarians have it completely wrong. I mean, they're talking about immutable types. They are talking about unshakable characterology. They are talking about a kind of being, a racial being that is etched in stone that will never change. And he is saying, Well, look right before your eyes, right here among these throngs that you are so worried about here in the New World -- we can see changes, and quite rapid ones at that.

BEN WATTENBERG: Throughout his life Boas continued to argue that environment played a key role in shaping individuals. But eugenicists turned to another way of sorting out the races.

In the early 1900s the American scientist H.H. Goddard was in the vanguard of those promoting the newly invented "intelligence quotient," the IQ test. Goddard outlined a scale of feeble-minded intelligence. At the very bottom were the idiots -- barely able to function. Next came imbeciles -- mentally 4 to10 years old, and capable of only simple tasks. And Goddard added another stage just on the edge of normal intelligence, the moron.

MATTHEW FRYE JACOBSON: The thing that made morons in Goddard's estimation so important is that morons were thought to be functioning enough that they could actually enter society and take part in society -- as workers, as voters and, most importantly for Goddard, as procreators, as family members. They would be the mothers and fathers of the future generations of Americans.

BEN WATTENBERG: In 1917, America entered the First World War. Millions of young men were mobilized to join the fight. Eugenicists saw an opportunity to gather a huge test sample.

Lewis Terman of Stanford University convinced the Army that IQ tests could help sort the draftees according to their mental ability. Almost two million soldiers took the new tests. The written, or alpha test, included questions about American popular culture, the brand names of products, and even the location of a university. If the draftee failed the alpha test or was unable to read, he was given the verbal beta test. He had only a few minutes to look at pictures and draw in what was missing.

ALAN KRAUT: In looking at the intelligence tests, especially the verbal intelligence tests, there was a tremendous cultural bias that was involved. Often an immigrant would be shown a picture of a tennis court and asked, What's missing from this picture? Well, if you are an Eastern European Jew from the shtetl, you would hardly be aware of the fact that there was a tennis net missing from the picture of the tennis court.

MATTHEW FRYE JACOBSON: So scientific racism itself isn't new. But what is new in this period is the level of influence that science is having on policy debates and on policy itself.

BEN WATTENBERG: Eugenicists seized on the army IQ tests to prove to Congress that the races of Southern and Eastern Europe were a threat to the biological make-up of the nation. Henry Laughlin from the Eugenics Record Office testified before Congress that more than 75 percent of the new immigrants were feeble-minded. Based on such testimony, in 1924 Congress passed sweeping restrictions on immigration. The new law set quotas for incoming immigrants equal to 3 percent of the number of a given nationality living in America in 1890 35 years earlier.

MATTHEW FRYE JACOBSON: By going all the way back to 1890, it cut out from the calculations all of those millions who had arrived after 1890. What it does in fact is cut out exactly the people who eugenicists were the most afraid of. So while it's called a national origins act, it really is very much a racial origins act.

BEN WATTENBERG: Following the 1924 act, immigration slowed way down until well after the Second World War. If many Americans didn't like immigrants, many immigrants did like America. Some in fact were ecstatic.

In 1908, at the height of immigration, the most popular play on Broadway was called "The Melting Pot," written by Israel Zangwill, an immigrant playwright and political activist. It became a box office smash.

ISRAEL ZANGWILL: "America is God's crucible, the great melting pot, where all the races of Europe are melting and reforming. Here you stand, good folks, and your 50 groups with your 50 languages and histories, and your 50 blood hatreds and rivalries, a thing for your feuds and vendettas. Germans and Frenchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and Russians, in the crucible with you all. God is making the American."

BEN WATTENBERG: Zang will knew what Franz Boas knew: in time most immigrants become Americans. It has nothing to do with biology and everything to do with liberty.

BEN WATTENBERG: Okay, cue the babies -- smile, girls. Today we take it for granted that kids like these will live to see their first birthday. But back in 1900, more than one of every six American infants -- one in six -- died before the age of one, and mothers were 100 times more likely to die in childbirth than they are today. Tuberculosis was the number one cause of death for women; number two was childbirth. In response to these frightening conditions, women activists rallied the nation to a campaign of reform. To make their case, they reached for the new tools of social science.

We continue in Chicago, where in the shadow of the world's fair, new immigrants were redrawing the face of the city. Between 1880 and 1900, the population of Chicago doubled and doubled again. The proportion of the city's residents who were foreign born or first generation American was 78 percent. Cheaply-built tenements defined the landscape. Several families often crammed into a single apartment with little sanitation, ventilation or sunlight. Disease often spread rapidly in the densely populated neighborhoods. The death of an infant from cholera, tuberculosis and even simple diarrhea was a common fact of life.

Horrified by the conditions in the city, small groups of university-educated women began volunteer organizations called settlement houses. These dormitory-like homes provided a place where middle- and upper-class women could live and work in the heart of the poorest city neighborhoods.

DAPHNE SPAIN (University of Virginia): The voluntary efforts were a way that women were encouraged to identify the city as their larger home. And it was a path into civic improvement and civic activity for women, because if they treated the city as a place that they were responsible for, they had to keep clean, they had to keep healthy for the benefit of their family members, and the community as a family, that gave them opportunities for public actions that they didn't ordinarily have.

BEN WATTENBERG: One of the first and most important of these settlement groups was Hull House in Chicago. It was founded in 1889 by the 29-year-olddaughter of abolitionist Jane Addams.

JANE ADDAMS (1891): "The streets are inexpressibly dirty. The number of schools inadequate. Sanitary legislation unenforced. Hundreds of houses are unconnected with the street sewer. The older and richer inhabitants seem anxious to move away as rapidly as they can afford it. They make room for newly-arrived immigrants who are densely ignorant of civic duty." Jane Addams, 1891.

BEN WATTENBERG: For the next 45 years, Addams led Hull House in aiding and educating their immigrant neighbors.

One young boy who took his first music lessons at the settlement house was the son of a poor Jewish tailor, Benny Goodman.

In 1893, Hull House was hired by the Illinois Bureau of Labor to gather statistics on wages. The women canvassed the entire neighborhood door to door with a detailed survey. The collected data formed the basis of a landmark book, "Hull House Maps and Papers," published in 1895. Using detailed color-coded maps, the volume breathed life into dry statistics.

ROBYN MUNCY (University of Maryland): And the map showed you for any building the wages of the residents in that building. And then another map showed you the nationalities of the people in that building, so you could look and see block by block, even building by building, where wages were falling out and which nationalities were stacked next to each other in this ward.

BEN WATTENBERG: The nationalities map showed 18 different ethnic groups in the one-third mile neighborhood around Hull House. Italian families, marked in blue, clustered to the north; and Poles and Russian Jews, noted in red, lived to the south.

The neighborhood even had its own red-light district. The lots in white indicated brothels, most of which were occupied by native-born women, both white and block, not by immigrants.

The wage map showed the average income in the area was only about $7 a week. That's like a family at the end of the 20th century living on about$7,000 a year. The lots in black show that most Italians made less than $5 a week, and were unemployed much of the year.

ROBYN MUNCY: And one of the things that the women at Hull House were very anxious to demonstrate was that the people in their neighborhoods were not vicious, that they were not drunken, lazy bums, but were impoverished because of low wages and the conditions in which they worked.

DAPHNE SPAIN: They thought that poverty was not a result of sin, but rather a result of social conditions, and that it was society's responsibility to address poverty, both the living conditions and health and welfare.

BEN WATTENBERG: Hull House maps and papers used data to make a case for political action. Social measurements helped turn an emotional plea into a focused argument for reform.

ROBYN MUNCY: They don't care that people should use that information to spin theories, sociological theories. They're not interested in theories. They are interested in solving social problems. And so women social scientists were continuing a tradition of sociology and economics and political science, social science in general, outside of universities. And that stream of social science thought, that stream of social science practice, continued to marry moral imperatives to the collection of data.

BEN WATTENBERG: But according to some social scientists, this was not a marriage made in heaven. They said that if the new disciplines were to grow and remain credible, morality and emotion had to take a back seat to science. It was the president of the American Sociological Society who made the most passionate case against passion:

WILLIAM FIELDING OGBURN: "Thinking must be free from the bias of emotion. There must be eliminated all the associations that disturb the connection between the thinking and the data." William Fielding Ogburn.

BEN WATTENBERG: Ogburn had refined his views while teaching at the two institutions that led the way in the new field of American sociology, Columbia University, and then the University of Chicago, just a stone throw's away from Hull House, at which he occasionally threw stones.

WILLIAM FIELDING OGBURN: "Desire has a strong selective influence in causing particular data to be noted and other data not to be noted. Theories suggested by such facts have a strong probability of being untrue in varying degrees, offering false solutions."

BEN WATTENBERG: But for Jane Addams and the women activists, collecting data was more than just an academic exercise. Women did not have the national right to vote. Numbers were a source of power. Armed with statistics, women's groups mobilized across the country.

ROBYN MUNCY: There were millions -- literally millions of women involved in progressive reform activities in the early 20th century, women not only in the settlement movement, but women in organizations like the general federation of women's clubs, in the women's Christian Temperance Union, the Daughters of the American Revolution, some groups that we much later would associate with conservatism, not progressivism, were in the early 20th century very much a part, in fact central to progressive reform.

BEN WATTENBERG: And in 1912, Congress created the Children's Bureau under the Department of Labor. Jane Addams and her network of women's groups persuaded President William Howard Taft to appoint a woman as chief of the bureau. Julia Lathrop became the first woman to head a federal agency. One of the original residents of Hull House and a co-author of Maps and Papers, Lathrop firmly believed in the power of data.

JULIA LATHROP(1912): "We do not know how many children are born each year or how many die or why they die. We need statistics of nativity and mortality. Homeless and neglected children are going to be better cared for, because we are going to do more for all children as we begin to know more about the problems of childhood in general." Julia Lathrop, 1912.

BEN WATTENBERG: The Children's Bureau studies reveal that infant death was often caused by unsanitary conditions, contaminated water and by the lack of adequate health care. In homes without running water, infant deaths were 40 percent higher. And as the father's income fell by half, infant mortality doubled. Lathrop searched for an approach that would be both helpful and politically feasible.

ROBYN MUNCY: She decides that the education of pregnant women and new mothers would be one of the ways that she might help to decrease infant and maternal mortality. She mounted educational campaigns to help women learn about the value of prenatal care for instance, about the kinds of nutrition that pregnant women need to have, the kinds of exercise that they need to have in orderto have a healthy delivery. And she mounted an educational campaign about the healthiest ways to raise babies.

BEN WATTENBERG: Lathrop rallied her grass-roots network to lobby for an expansion of the Children's Bureau. And in 1920, Congress passed the Shepherdtowner Maternity and Infancy Act. It would become a model for much of the social welfare legislation of the 20th century. Itinerant nurses sought ought pregnant women and new mothers, setting up wellness tents, a mining babies and educating their mothers. Women's groups spread the gospel of cleanliness, proper feeding habits, and the need to seek out a octor or clinic for advice. Women's club members went door to door to measure infant births and deaths, and then compared the results to local records. They showed that infant mortality had previously been greatly underestimated.

ROBYN MUNCY: One of the remarkable things about Julia Lathrop's procedure was the degree to which she involved women in local organizations. She was creating a demand for the collection of statistics. She was involving grass-roots people who had no training themselves in academic social science in the collection of social data, and so was giving that method a kind of authority in American life that it simply had not previously had.

BEN WATTENBERG: Social science measurement passed the test of political power. It worked. We can now look back and see what happened over the century.

In 1900, for every 1,000 births, 165 babies died. By 1930, that rate had dropped by more than half, and it kept going down. By the end of the century, only 7 babies died for every 1,000 born.

Over the course of the century, life expectancy at birth increased from 47years to 76 years. A baby born at the end of the century will typically live 56percent longer than an infant born in 1900. A similar trend was apparent among new mothers. In 1900, for every 100,000 births, about 850 mothers died from problems related to pregnancy and child birth. Today for every100,000 births there are eight deaths.

BEN WATTENBERG: Thank you, Morris. Why don't they let me drive once in a while? Well, life was getting better for babies, and for moms, and for most everyone else. Henry Ford advertised his new Model T as "stronger than a horse and easier to maintain." In the early part of the century, the mass-produced automobile and a blizzard of other new machines were dramatically changing the way Americans lived.

The industries and inventions that arose in the 19th century had mostly provided the building blocks of America's infrastructure -- steel, canals, railroads, oil, coal, and of course big daddy, electric power. That tree of infrastructure bore fruit. The 20th century was to be the consumer century, hailed by most, scorned by some.

In 1900, there were only 8,000 cars in the entire country, owned naturally enough by the very rich. But by 1925, a new Model T was rolling off the assembly line every 15 seconds. By 1930, there were more than 26 million cars, used by about half the population. Thanks largely to Henry Ford's use of standardized parts and the assembly line, costs fell, even as wages rose throughout the country. Before World War I a car cost the average American worker the equivalent of 24 months wages. By the late 1920s a car could be purchased for about 3 months' wages. By 1928, more than three quarters of all the cars in the world were in America.

Notwithstanding this outpouring of consumer goods, the American economy remained volatile. Since the earliest days of the Industrial Revolution, swings in national production marked repeated cycles of booms and busts, of panics, small depressions and periodic high unemployment.

In 1919, unemployment and inflation prompted more than 2,000 strikes across the country, involving more than four million workers. What to do about this growing rift?

John D. Rockefeller, Jr., billionaire son of the founder of Standard Oil, believed that the key was religion. In the spirit of the time, he sought data and funded a survey of religious attitudes. The young man chosen to head the study was not a social scientist -- not yet. He was a social activist, Robert Lynd.

While training to be a minister, Lynd lived and worked in the difficult conditions of an oil camp in Elk Basin, Wyoming, owned by Rockefeller's Standard Oil.

STAUGHTON LYND (Son of Robert and Helen Lynd): My dad, after his summer in Elk Basin, published two articles for which he criticized the long hours, the low pay, the social isolation. And in fact the story at our family table was that he wrote a letter to John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and asked him for a contribution for the project of building a community center for the women in Elk Basin. The story is that John D. Rockefeller replied and said that Standard Oil had a hard year and he wasn't in a position to contribute.

BEN WATTENBERG: Despite young Bob Lynd's public attacks on one of the most powerful men in America, or perhaps because of it, he got the job. Lynd's new wife, Helen, a graduate of Wellesley College, joined him in the investigation. Together the Lynds searched the Midwest for a sample community that they hoped could represent Mainstream America.

In 1923 they found what they were looking for in Muncie, a small city of 38,000 people in Lynd's home state of Indiana, 40 miles to the northeast of Indianapolis. Their subsequent book, a smashing best seller still in print, would be called "Middletown," and it would make Muncie the most studied community in the world.

THEODORE CAPLOW (University of Virginia): They wanted a place that was as unexceptional as possible, with nothing outstanding about it. And that is true of Middletown to this day. That is what they liked about it. They were looking for in a sense the essence of plain Americanism.

BEN WATTENBERG: The Lynds arrived in Muncie in January of 1924. As they put it, they set out to observe Munconians as an anthropologist would study a primitive tribe.

STAUGHTON LYND: He refused to study religion as a thing in itself. He took the position that it could only be understood as part of the entire life of the community. The folks who were paying for the study were very dissatisfied with it. They thought it was a waste of time. They thought it wasn't going anywhere. And my dad had a tough time sticking to it.

BRUCE GEELHOED (Ball State University): They took up residence in Muncie and tried to become part of the fabric of the community. It was a conservative culture, it was a community that reflected the influence of late 19th century southern attitudes.

The Lynds had a series of questionnaires, where they would survey the attitudes of high school students, they would survey the attitudes of house wives, they would survey the attitudes of the people on the street. No one had done a small city survey of the type that the Lynds proposed to do.

BEN WATTENBERG: Several survey questions measured patriotism in Muncie. The Lynds showed high school students the statement that "The United States is unquestionably the best country in the world." More than 90 percent of the students agreed. Clearly they believed that America was a most exceptional place.

Robert and Helen Lynd tried to capture how life in a small heartland city had changed between 1890 and 1925. To establish their time line, the Lynds used data from Census Bureau records along with the personal recollections of Munconians drawn from hundreds of interviews.

They made long lists of goods that could be found in the home of 1924 that were unheard of in the Muncie home of 1890: a furnace, running hot and cold water, indoor plumbing, toasters, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, telephones, refrigeration, fresh fruit all year round, a greater variety of clothes, and by the way cigarettes. What the Lynds saw in Muncie was happening across the nation. The portion of American households owning flush toilets more than doubled in 10 years. Less than one percent of homes had central heating before 1920; but by 1930, the figure was above 40 percent. By 1930, one in four homes had a washing machine. The number of households with radios climbed from one percent to 40 percent in a single decade. Telephones quickly spread from only 5 percent of households in 1900 to 41 percent in 1930.

NANCY KOEHN (Harvard Business School): The 1920s were a very important decade in the rise of consumer society in America, unmistakably an inflection point -- not in terms of the production of the goods or the existence of the goods, but in terms of the actual acquisition of those goods by millions of households.

BEN WATTENBERG: The Lynds observed how new technology and new political goods were transforming everyday life in Muncie. Consider the movies. Within three decades of the invention of moving pictures, 70 percent of Munconians went to the movies at least once a week, and almost half went two or more times. Eighty percent of high school boys and 70 percent of high school girls went to the movies more often without their parents than with. The Lynds concluded that movies were transforming leisure time from a family activity into an individual one. Some high school teachers thought moving pictures were bringing about the early sophistication of their students.

In the Lynd survey of housewives, mothers worried about how these changes affected their children.

QUOTE: "Girls aren't so modest nowadays. They dress differently. It's the girls' clothing. And we can't get our boys decent when girls dress that way."

BEN WATTENBERG: Telephones gave Americans greater liberty of communication. For young people, a phone could be a more private way of approaching the opposite sex.

QUOTE: "Girls are far more aggressive today. They call boys up to try to make dates with them, as they never could have when I was a girl."

BEN WATTENBERG: The Lynds also saw how cars affected behavior. Sometimes mobility also means privacy. One Middletown judge told the Lynds that cars were "houses of prostitution on wheels." The Lynds noted that movies and the automobile were changing the nature of the predominantly Christian town. The Sabbath was becoming the Sunday holiday. Church attendance fell to almost half of what it had been in the 1890s.

BRUCE GEELHOED: What the Lynds saw in Muncie that they later became very critical of, was this all-too-vigorous embrace of the consumer society. The Lynds were very critical of advertising and of the manipulation of people's attitudes and beliefs. And of course much of the 1920s prosperity was conditioned by advertising. The Lynds were very much critical of this mentality that was taking place in America where personal possessions were valued more than personal relationships.

BEN WATTENBERG: The Lynds saw the new consumer economy as contributing to a growing division in society. It would become the most controversial aspect of their work.

THEODORE CAPLOW: They discovered the scandal of class. Most Americans at the time had been brought up to believe that we live in a democracy where everybody is essentially equal, though admittedly some people are richer than others. The Lynds discovered in Middletown that there was a business class as they called it, and a working class, and that they were as different as two different tribes. Their conditions of life were different, their values were different, their expectations were different, and there wasn't they thought much passage between the two.

BEN WATTENBERG: The Lynds identified 70 percent of Munconians with jobs as "working class"; that is, typically factory or construction workers, those that made a living working with things. The other 30 percent belonged to what the Lynds called the "business class." These were the people who worked with ideas or with other people, developing, promoting and selling services. This difference, according to the Lynds, affected every aspect of life in Muncie.

DAVID KENNEDY (Stanford University): What distinguished the working class from the business class was not level of income necessarily; rather, it was security of employment. The business class were people who had long-term secure employment prospects. The working class, the much larger category, were people who could not count on stable employment and had no protection against unemployment -- no substantial savings, no unemployment insurance plans and so on. So their lives, the working class lives, were characterized by volatility and insecurity to a degree that simply wasn't true of this other category of people.

BEN WATTENBERG: When the Lynds published "Middletown" in 1929, it was an instant hit. They had tapped into Americans' growing love affair with data. Critics took a variety of messages from the Lynds' work.

NANCY KOEHN: There's a great written debate I think that quietly but consistently rages about whether the rise of a consumer society has been on net a good thing for Americans or not. Americans have voted with their feet. I think it's hard to see a lot of commerce as anything but at some core level a set of elections. No one forced Americans to buy movie tickets or mass-produced lipstick from Max Factor or baked beans. They chose to do that.

BEN WATTENBERG: The Lynds focused on class differences just when class itself was changing.

HOWARD BAHR (Brigham Young University): They're looking at two processes. One is they show class to us -- working class, business class. But the other is the progress of modernization. And the progress of modernization actually muddies up the class distinction that they want to make.

People are getting washers and refrigerators, indoor plumbing. We have cars, not for all the lower class, but everybody is thinking about getting a car if they don't have one.

BEN WATTENBERG: Case in point: the rich man's car was likely to be luxurious and perhaps chauffeur-driven. But a working class car performed exactly the same function: it took a passenger from point A to point B, faster, easier and cheaper than a horse and buggy. All car owners enjoyed an increase in their liberty of mobility.

Like the car, many of the new consumer goods were liberty multipliers. Call them "liberty machines." The radio and the movies let middle-class folks hear and see the same entertainment as rich people. The telephone, once a rich man's toy, provided the liberating force of communication for millions. Middle-class women may not have had servants, but washing machines and vacuum cleaners could offer the liberty of time off from housework.

Now, I think the Lynds were great sociologists. They reported on modernization and on the availability of consumer goods. But they had big problems with that. By my lights, what the Lynds didn't quite get is that consumer goods were eroding class differences, and actually leveling the playing field.

BEN WATTENBERG: As the 1920s moved to a close, the American economy was booming. Things looked good for most Americans. The new president, Herbert Hoover, commissioned a vast study called "Recent Social Trends." He hoped that it would do for the entire nation what the Lynds had done in Muncie.

DAVID KENNEDY: The fact that Herbert Hoover, of all people, commissioned this group of social scientists to write "Recent Social Trends" is a reminder that Hoover comes out of this older progressive tradition of looking to social scientists and looking to reliable data as a way of making political policy.

BEN WATTENBERG: When it was finally published in 1933, "Recent Social Trends" ran to 1700 pages, 29 chapters and two volumes. To this day, it remains revealing reading. It used statistics to describe how America had changed between 1890 and 1930.

The president of the American Sociological Society, William Ogburn, was in charge of research. Ogburn, recall, had criticized activist sociologists like Jane Adams. In "Recent Social Trends," he tried to completely separate social science from politics and ideology, with mixed results.

Among the top social scientists chosen for the study were Robert Lynd, only months after the publication of "Middletown." One of the few women to work on the project was Julia Lathrop's protege at the University of Chicago, Sopanisba Breckinridge. In a chapter on women's activities outside the home, Breckinridge noted a shift we often think started only recently. Between 1900 and 1930, the percent of married women who work doubled, rising from 6 percent to 12 percent. Looking at the American family, William Ogburn noted a familiar-sounding trend: The divorce rate was on its way up. It doubled in 30 years.

WILLIAM FIELDING OGBURN: "Our culture may be conducive to further increases in divorce unless programs are instituted to counteract this tendency. If present trends continue, one in six marriages of the present year will end in divorce." William Fielding Ogburn, 1933.

BEN WATTENBERG: The report also looked at the impact of the new immigrants on society. The ideas of scientific racism still influenced the dialogue.

WARREN THOMPSON: "As soon as any agreement can be reached about the method by which undesirables can be selected from the population, they should be prevented from propagating." Warren Thompson.

BEN WATTENBERG: "Recent Social Trends" was published in 1933, but it was no longer of use to Hoover, who had been voted out of office, held accountable for the onset of what would become America's greatest depression. The worst was yet to come.