BEN WATTENBERG: We've become accustomed to the images of bread lines, the apple sellers on the corners. But pictures cannot begin to capture the depth of the crisis. For that, we need to look at the desperate numbers of devastation, and we will. But first, consider one story that has come to epitomize the Depression experience -- the tragic saga of the Dust Bowl migration to California.

Most everyone who thinks about American history thinks they know this one cold. It was first immortalized by the memorable photographs of Dorothea Lang and others. John Steinbeck's classic novel, "The Grapes of Wrath," and the movie that followed have been etched on American chords of memory.

Steinbeck's heroes, the beaten-down Joad family, became stand-ins for the 375,000 Okies and Arkies who headed west in the 1930s. Many of them came across the desert on Route 66 through these mountain passes, seeking the lush San Joaquin Valley. Who were they? What really happened to them? As Americans were told over and over again, these were uneducated, dirt-poor refugee farmers blown away by the Dust Bowl, pushed to California to work as peasant pea-pickers facing harsh white-on-white racism. Right? Well, to begin, take that matter of the Dust Bowl itself.

JAMES GREGORY (University of Washington): So much of what we think that migration was all about is wrong, starting with the name. The whole concept of a Dust Bowl migration is a wonderful misnomer. Most of the people had nothing to do with the Dust Bowl region. Most really weren't victims of the drought either. A lot of them weren't even farmers.

BEN WATTENBERG: There was indeed a Dust Bowl, but almost all of these migrants came from areas well to the east of it, mainly from parts of Oklahoma, Texas, Missouri and Arkansas. And most did not match the demographics of the Joad family of Steinbeck's novel. Less than half the migrants, just 43 percent, were farmers or farm laborers. Almost one in six was a professional, a proprietor or a white-collar employee. About two in five were blue-collar workers. Accordingly, their prospects differed from those of the Joads.

JAMES GREGORY: About a third went into the valleys of California that are associated with "The Grapes of Wrath," two-thirds into the cities, especially Los Angeles, where they found industrial jobs. And some of them were white-collar workers. So the imagery is misleading. It's much too negative. It creates an impression of great misery, when there was certainly difficulties and there were people who suffered tremendously, but the majority's story is much more positive.

BEN WATTENBERG: For most people, even the journey itself, the great westward exodus, was not the hard road described in Steinbeck's novel.

JAMES GREGORY: This wasn't covered wagons. This was two days with camping along the way or stopping at motels in Arizona, and for many people, not unpleasant days at all, any more than it is today. For those who ran out of money, of course, there could be difficulties. But for most people, it's just a drive.

BEN WATTENBERG: It's not that families like the Joads didn't exist. They did. And those were real people that Dorothea Lang captured on film. But artists and the media often shape their data, just like social scientists.

Some of the rural Okies and Arkies faced deep-seated discrimination and scorn when they arrived in California. But perhaps they had the last laugh. They brought their country culture with them, which has survived and flourished, in California, across America, and around the world. The Okies and Arkies were not the only people who picked up and moved, fleeing the hurricane of the depression.

DAVID KENNEDY: The 1930s is the only decade for which we have numbers from the 18th century forward when net migration to the United States was negative. People actually left the country.

BEN WATTENBERG: Several hundred thousand Mexicans and Mexican-Americans also left the United States. Some, unable to find jobs in Depression America or facing widespread discrimination, saw greater opportunity back in Mexico. Others were repatriated, often against their will.

ALAN BRINKLEY (Columbia University): The Great Depression was the worst economic crisis in American history by a very large margin. And it's almost impossible to convey the dimensions of such a terrible economic crisis.

BEN WATTENBERG: The best way is with data. They tell a story beyond anything we've experienced in recent times. Take unemployment. From 1950 to 2000, the annual unemployment rate never even hit double digits. And when it got close, it was only briefly. But from 1930 to 1940, for more than a decade, unemployment in America averaged 18 percent, and it never dropped below 14 percent. At its worst, in 1933, the unemployment rate was 25 percent.

DAVID KENNEDY: In that era, the typical household had only one wage earner in it. So when we talk about one in four people being unemployed, we're really talking about one in four households in the country with no visible means of support, no reliable income. Today the typical household has two wage earners. So even a 25 percent unemployment rate -- God forbid that we should ever see it today -- would not mean the same thing in human terms as it did in 1933.

BEN WATTENBERG: The Depression hit almost every sector of the economy. One-third of American farmers lost their land from 1929 to 1932. Housing starts plunged by almost 90 percent between 1929 and 1933, and they wouldn't rebound for almost 15 years. The Dow Jones Industrial Average also plunged by almost 90 percent. Total wages dropped 60 percent. As we now measure it, more than half of all Americans were living in poverty.

ALAN BRINKLEY: This was a desperate time for families, because unemployment was so massive and so long-term and because there was no effective source of relief for unemployed people during much of the 1930s.

BEN WATTENBERG: The most intimate areas of American life were affected. From 1929 to 1933, the marriage rate fell by 22 percent. Many young people could not afford to leave their parents and start their own households. At the same time, the divorce rate dropped by 25 percent. If you were already in a household, you couldn't afford to set up a second one. The birth rate declined by 15 percent. Another mouth to feed? Those numbers measure the hardship of the time, but they had a lasting impact. This crisis was so extreme that it brought forth powerful remedies.

PRESIDENT FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT: I pledge myself to a New Deal for the American people.

BEN WATTENBERG: President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal introduced major federal programs for relief and recovery, many of which are still with us today: Social Security, unemployment insurance, aid to dependent children, the minimum wage, stock market regulation, federal deposit insurance for banks. The New Deal marked a radical change in the role of the federal government.

DAVID KENNEDY: Calvin Coolidge once said that if the federal government went out of business tomorrow, the average American wouldn't notice the fact for at least six months, which was a pretty true statement, actually, because in the 1920s and before, the federal government's role was essentially to deliver the mail and service the national debt, such as it was, and make a few payments to veterans, and that was about it.

MILTON FRIEDMAN (Hoover Institution): Prior to the Great Depression, the public at large generally accepted the view that government was a problem, not a solution. The Great Depression changed that, because it was so widely interpreted as reflecting a failure of the private enterprise system. And as a result, the attitude of the public toward government changed. It changed from believing it was a problem to believing that government was the solution to every problem.

BEN WATTENBERG: What did Americans of the 1930s think about the government's increased role in their lives? Previously, we would not have been able to answer that question with any certainty. But the mid-1930s saw the advent of another institution that boosted liberty and has stayed with us to the present day, the public opinion poll.

In 1935, a new weekly column appeared in newspapers across the country. "America Speaks" promised to report what the public thought about the issues of the day through nationwide public opinion polls. The surveys were conducted by a Princeton, New Jersey company called the American Institute of Public Opinion recently founded by George Gallup.

The issues were wide-ranging, from manners and morals to the most profound debates about public policy. For example, was it indecent for women to wear shorts on the street in 1939? Sixty-three percent of respondents said yes. What about topless bathing suits for men? Apparently they were okay, although 33 percent still found them indecent as late as 1939. Did Americans approve of a married woman working if she had a husband capable of supporting her? No, and by a wide margin; 78 percent disapproved in the Depression year of 1938.

As for what Americans thought about the Depression and the New Deal, the poll offered some real surprises. For example, in retrospect, it's commonly thought that Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal programs were wildly popular. But the very first Gallup poll question in 1935 was this: "Do you think expenditures by the government for relief and recovery are too little, too great, or just about right?" How do you think Depression-era America answered? Too little, 9 percent; about right, 31 percent; too great, 60 percent.

But just three months later, in December of 1935, Gallup was in the field again with this question: Are you in favor of government old-age pensions for the needy? Yes, 89 percent; no, 11 percent. Americans wanted to have their cake and eat it, too. And why not? It's a pattern that continues to the present day.

Now, George Gallup did not invent the modern public opinion poll, but he is the man who legitimized it, thanks in part to a dramatic bet. In 1935, in order to get newspapers to subscribe to his weekly polls, Gallup promised he would predict the winner of the 1936 presidential election.

DAVID MOORE (Author, The Super Pollsters): He actually guaranteed the newspapers that were subscribing to his poll that if he was wrong, he would refund all their money. Now, that was a lot of polling that he had been doing that whole year, so for him to agree to refund the money if he was wrong was a real big gamble.

BEN WATTENBERG: And that was just part of the bet. Gallup also guaranteed that he would predict the percentages more accurately than the leading poll of the day, conducted by the Literary Digest magazine. It seemed a foolhardy promise. The Literary Digest poll had picked the winner in every presidential election since 1916. The Digest poll was conducted on a vast scale. A staff of several thousand workers stuffed ballots into envelopes, in some years as many as 20 million of them. The ballots were mailed to names polled from automobile registration lists and telephone directories.

GEORGE GALLUP, JR. (The Gallup Organization): As a matter of fact, they went to about a third of all households in the United States. And the assumption was that the more people you interview, of course you're going to get closer to the truth.

BEN WATTENBERG: But George Gallup knew that huge samples did not guarantee

accuracy. The method he relied on was called quota sampling, a technique also used at the time by polling pioneers Archibald Crossley and Elmo Roper. The idea was to canvass groups of people who were representative of the electorate. Gallup sent out hundreds of interviewers across the country, each of whom was given quotas for different types of respondents; so many middle-class urban women, so many lower-class rural men, and so on. Gallup's team conducted some 3,000 interviews, but nowhere near the 10 million polled that year by the Digest.

DAVID MOORE: So a lot of politicians at the time said, "How can you believe George Gallup? I know the Literary Digest is polling, because I know of people who've gotten a ballot. But I never see a George Gallup interviewer."

BEN WATTENBERG: Both predicted big wins, but for different candidates. The Digest predicted Republican Alf Landon would win handsomely, with 57 percent of the vote to Roosevelt's 43 percent. Wrong, said Gallup. He forecast a win for Roosevelt with 54 percent of the vote.

When Election Day arrived, voters filed into the voting booths and re-elected Roosevelt with an overwhelming 61 percent of the vote. George Gallup won his bet. How could Gallup be right and the Digest so wrong? The Digest automobile registration list and telephone directories were not representative samples. In the 1930s, while cars and telephones were becoming more widespread, they were still disproportionately owned by the middle and upper classes. That hadn't mattered much in previous elections. The voting patterns of rich and poor were similar.

But in 1936, in the Depression, more prosperous Americans tended to vote Republican, for Landon, and less prosperous voters tended to vote Democratic, favoring Roosevelt. Since Gallup's samples more closely matched the electorate as a whole, his numbers were less affected when the vote split along class lines. It was a turning point for Gallup and for polling.

GEORGE GALLUP, JR.: I would say that the 1936 election really put the so-called scientific pollsters on the map -- my father, George Gallup, Archibald Crossley and Elmo Roper -- because it was a very dramatic demonstration of the power of -- rather, the accuracy of scientific polling versus other kinds of surveys that relied on sheer numbers or, you know, samples that weren't representative.

BEN WATTENBERG: The Literary Digest went out of business. Gallup became the leading evangelist for the new science of polling. In his 1940 book, "The Pulse of Democracy," Gallup outlined a utopian view of its potential. Polling, he said, would become the national equivalent of the New England town meeting. It would give a voice to the views of the common man.

GEORGE GALLUP, JR.: My dad thought that polls were absolutely vital to a democracy. He felt that polls were extremely important because it removed the power from lobbying groups and from smoke-filled rooms and let the public into the act. It was a way to let the public speak.

ALEC GALLUP (The Gallup Organization): I think he'd still say, if he were around, he'd say although it's being overdone now, you still have to know where the public is. And this is what a democracy is about. Without it, what do you have?

BEN WATTENBERG: Has Gallup's vision been realized? We are told politicians aren't leaders anymore; they just echo polls. But for all its flaws, public opinion polling is a great American contribution to democracy. Would you rather live in an America where politicians don't know what's on the mind of the public? Barely half of Americans vote for the president, while public opinion polls theoretically represent the views of all citizens. Polling helps give democracy a voice, which was what Gallup had in mind.

When we come back in a moment, we will see democracy itself under the gun during the greatest calamity of the century.

BEN WATTENBERG: Welcome back. In Act I, we saw the close of the American frontier, an immigrant wave, the new uses of social science in politics, a free-market economic boom, and America's worst economic crisis. It would get worse before it got better. Like so much that transpired in America in the 20th century, World War II was, at its root, about liberty -- preserving it, defending it, reinstating it, expanding it around the world, where it was directly threatened, and in America, where it was not.

Let's pick up the story. As the 1940s began, America was still struggling to emerge from a depression that had already stretched to a full decade. The New Deal programs may well have cushioned the blow but did not end the crisis, not by a long shot. Nonetheless, the American people continued to display a characteristic optimism. A Roper poll for Fortune Magazine showed that 71 percent of respondents thought the country would return to an era of expansion and opportunity. But many intellectuals were much more pessimistic.

DAVID KENNEDY: Just as an earlier generation of Americans at the end of the 19th century had thought that the closing of the frontier, the end of the frontier, had closed a major chapter in American history, so too did many people in the 1930s think that the Depression marked the end of an economic era, the end of an era of growth. The economy had matured was the way that they described it, and they thought it was not very likely that it would ever again grow at the rate that it had for the preceding century or so.

BEN WATTENBERG: But then something happened. Sixteen million Americans went off to fight, one out of every nine Americans. Four hundred thousand of them would lose their lives. Worldwide, 80 million people were killed. But for America, the Second World War was also an engine of huge social and economic change for the better.

WILLIAM O'NEILL (Rutgers University): It's kind of a terrible irony, in a way, that the solution to America's problems was World War II.

BEN WATTENBERG: The war did what all the New Deal programs of the 1930s had failed to do -- end the Depression. Factories long idle, plants running at a fraction of capacity, now geared up for flat-out war-time production. At its peak, the United States rolled out a ship every day and an airplane every five minutes. All that production put money in people's pockets. Suddenly everyone was working. In 1938, the unemployment rate was 19 percent. In 1944, it was 1 percent.

WILLIAM O'NEILL: Except for those who served in battle, the war was probably the best thing that had happened to the American people in the 20th century. For those at home, it meant unprecedented prosperity. Income levels had never been as high at any point in history before that time.

DAVID KENNEDY: We were the only belligerent country, the only country that fought World War II, that managed to increase its civilian standard of living even while it was fighting the war. In this country, we had more guns and more butter, too.

BEN WATTENBERG: The war set people in motion. Defense plants in the industrial North and Far West became magnets for huge migrations of job-seekers from the South and East. From 1940 to 1950, 8 million people moved to the West Coast, the largest western migration in American history.

DAVID KENNEDY: One historian has described it as it's as if some great hand reached down and tipped the whole continent westward, and people just slid, especially from the Midwest and the South, to the West Coast, which nearly doubled its population in the war. You might say the war was a kind of demographic cauldron in which the American people were churned as they hadn't been probably for 100 years, since they first burst across the Appalachian crest in the early 19th century.

BEN WATTENBERG: The war-time demand for labor bowled over some long-standing barriers. In a war-time address, President Roosevelt said this:

"In some communities, employers dislike to employ women. In others, they are reluctant to hire Negroes. We can no longer afford to indulge such prejudices or practices."

On the eve of World War II, three out of four African-Americans still lived in the South -- the poorest people in the nation's poorest region. Nationally, they were more likely than whites to work in unskilled jobs for lower pay; 39 percent of what whites earned. By today's standards, almost nine out of 10 were below the federal poverty threshold. And due to Jim Crow segregation laws, less than 5 percent of eligible blacks in states of the old Confederacy could vote.

At first, it looked like the war wouldn't change much of that. At the beginning, blacks were excluded from the Army Air Corps and the Marines. In the Navy, they could only serve as kitchen staff. The Army accepted blacks, but they could only serve in segregated units commanded by white officers. Many defense plants did not want to hire blacks. But in 1941, A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, threatened to have 100,000 blacks march on Washington to protest job discrimination.

WILLIAM JULIUS WILSON (Harvard University): The very idea of having to march on Washington during the war was really a very important symbolic change in the way that blacks were addressing the problems of race in America.

BEN WATTENBERG: President Roosevelt yielded to Randolph's demand. He issued Executive Order 8802 prohibiting discrimination in defense jobs or government. The lure of well-paid jobs pulled blacks out of the South and into the war plants in the North and West; 700,000 blacks during the course of the war. In the peak year of 1943, 10,000 blacks per month arrived in Los Angeles alone.

Black women, who had earned $3.50 a week as domestic servants back in the South, found themselves making $48 a week in the aircraft plants of Los Angeles. By the war's end, African-Americans held almost 8 percent of all defense industry jobs, not far from their proportion of the total population. The number of blacks working for the federal government more than tripled.

WILLIAM JULIUS WILSON: What it meant was that blacks gradually developed a working-class population. Prior to this time, they were overwhelmingly impoverished. But after World War II, you saw the gradual development of a black working class. And so the entry into these goods-producing industries was a stepping-stone into higher status.

BEN WATTENBERG: The gains were not just economic. When blacks migrated seeking better jobs, they left the Jim Crow South far behind.

DAVID KENNEDY: Blacks now moved to places in the country where they could vote, which they could not do in any appreciable numbers in the segregated pre-World War II South.

BEN WATTENBERG: The war's impact on blacks is reflected in the numbers. Between 1940 and 1950, the black population of Mississippi went down by 8 percent. The black population of Michigan went up by 112 percent; California up 272 percent. In 1939, black males earned 41 percent of what white males earned. In 1947, they earned 54 percent of what white males earned.

The war also created new opportunities for women, now desperately needed to keep defense plants running. Today, most of us are familiar with the story of Rosie the Riveter. Anecdotal histories and government propaganda have made Rosie the symbol of war-time working women. ("Rosie the Riveter" song.) But just how typical was Rosie?

ALICE KESSLER-HARRIS (Columbia University): The Rosie the Riveter image was an exaggerated image. It was typical of a few women, and it was perhaps how most women imagined themselves, even as they were doing dreary work. But, in fact, it was an exaggerated image.

("Rosie the Riveter" song.)

BEN WATTENBERG: The numbers give a sense of proportion. Nearly 2 million women worked in defense plants during the war, half a million in the aircraft industry alone. Two hundred twenty-five thousand women worked in ship-building. That's a lot. But these women never made up more than 10 percent of the total female work force of 19 million.

DAVID KENNEDY: If you look at the whole distribution of what women were doing in wartime, you might say the typical woman war worker should be called Sally the Secretary, or, in fact, maybe even Molly the Mom, because most women persisted in their traditional functions during the war.

BEN WATTENBERG: The biggest difference was in who those workingwomen were. Before the war, women who worked were typically young and single. That began to change. Thanks to the wartime labor shortage, working women were more likely to be middle-aged and married. In 1940, 36 percent of workingwomen were married. In 1944, 46 percent were married. In 1940, 43 percent of working women were 35 or older. By 1944, that number had jumped to 62 percent. World War II had one other very significant benefit for the United States.

WILLIAM O'NEILL: When the war ends, the United States is the only first-class economy left in the world. It's the only one. And it retains that position for, oh, 10, 15 years after the war. So you couldn't ask for a better start to peacetime for Americans.

FILM CLIP ANNOUNCER: Goodbye to the Army for these GI Joes at Fort Dix, New Jersey.

BEN WATTENBERG: Nineteen forty-five, World War II ended. Johnny came marching home again. The GIs invaded America. But beneath the homecomings and the hoopla, there was deep concern. What would happen to those 10 million veterans now returning to civilian life? Even as the war raged, government planners had gloomy visions of millions of vets standing in Depression-scale unemployment lines. Then, in March of 1944, Congress passed and the president signed a critical piece of legislation.

FILM CLIP ANNOUNCER: In the presence of senators, congressmen, and the heads of veterans' organizations, President Roosevelt signs GI Joe's bill of rights.

DAVID KENNEDY: The GI bill ironically was originally conceived as a way to ease the transition of demobilized veterans back into the economy, because many people feared that the Depression of the '30s would return after the war. So some device had to be found to slow down the return to the work force of these veterans. But ironically, the way the GI bill actually played out was a tremendous bonus to their skill level, their educational level, which, in turn, fueled the productivity of the economy in the post-war era.

BEN WATTENBERG: Almost 8 million veterans received educational benefits via the GI bill. Many went to trade schools or job training, and more than 2 million went to college. From 1930 to 1950, the number of college degrees granted in America went up three and a half times, from 122,000 to 432,000. WILLIAM O'NEILL: Most of them at the time regarded this as three lost years, just taken away. And so instead of doing things in sequence, they did them all at once. They went to college, became engaged, got married and started having children all at the same time.

BEN WATTENBERG: With their new wives and newer families, veterans arrived on college campuses in overwhelming numbers. At the University of Minnesota in 1947, of 30,000 students, 60 percent were veterans, and a third of those were married. At colleges across the country, married vets lived in on-campus housing with names like Vetsburg or Fertile Acres. Much of the veterans' housing was makeshift military, but the company they kept in their new barracks was clearly an improvement.

In college or out, veterans were marrying and starting families. In 1946, there were almost half again as many marriages as in 1940, which led very quickly to the baby boom. Just nine months after demobilization, the number of births began to soar to 2.9 million per year, and kept on soaring. Demographers had expected a baby boom when the wartime separations ended, but this one just didn't stop. The Energizer Bunny just kept going and going and going.

Over the course of 18 years, from 1946 to 1964, 76 million American babies were born. At its peak in 1957, a dozen years after the war, the total fertility rate topped out at 3.8 children per woman. That's higher than the current rate in the less-developed Third World countries. The baby boom was monumental, but it was more than just an event. It is a process that will take 100 years to play out, from cradle to grave.

BEN WATTENBERG: In the years immediately following the war, the baby boom posed a problem: Where would all those growing families live? For 15 years, thanks to the Depression and World War II, there had been virtually no new housing built in the United States.

KENNETH T. JACKSON (Columbia University): By 1947, you have millions of husbands and wives and children living together, bunched up, crunched in with their in-laws. That was my situation; four kids. I remember sleeping in a dining room. People would take any kind of a place that had a roof over it and a wall around it as a place to live.

FILM CLIP ANNOUNCER: Today, the ingenious veteran who has managed to find even a barge or a houseboat for his family may count himself lucky, despite the special problems involved in commuting.

KENNETH T. JACKSON: I think that we have never experienced in American history the kind of pent-up demand for housing that existed about 1947, 1948.

BEN WATTENBERG: Again, the GI bill was a key part of the solution. It allowed veterans to buy a home with no money down. What's more, it guaranteed the loans, removing the risk for lenders. In a housing boom to end all housing booms, builders responded. Lakewood, California, 15 miles south of Los Angeles, in 1950 this was called the fastest-growing housing development in the world. On one day, 100 homes were sold in one hour. Builders here started 50 houses a day. Cement trucks waited in a mile-long line to pour foundations for low-cost housing. Within just three years, the empty farm land around Lakewood had grown to a city of 90,000 people. Nationwide, housing starts soared from a low of only one per 1,000 people in the war year of 1944 to a high of 12 per 1,000 in 1950, a number not equaled since.

By 1950, the same assembly-line methods that had turned out an airplane every five minutes during the war were used to build almost four new houses per minute.

KENNETH T. JACKSON: We are making on the order of 2 million houses, new starts per year, and about 95 percent of them are fully detached, single-family houses. The second thing to remember about it is they're affordable. Quite literally, you could buy a house in the 1950s cheaper than you could rent it. In some ways, if we look at the whole history of the world, what's been unusual about America, the United States, has been that the single-family house has been available and affordable for the average person more so than any other land, save possibly Australia and Canada.

BEN WATTENBERG: In 1940, only two Americans in five owned their own homes. By 1950, it was more than half. And by the end of the 1950s boom, home ownership had climbed to 61 percent. Today, two out of every three Americans own their own homes. Increasingly, those homes are in the suburbs; 12 percent in 1910, about a third in 1960, and today a majority of Americans live in the suburbs.

KENNETH T. JACKSON: You have sort of a national ethos that celebrates the single-family house. We believe in it. We're not like, let's say, the Spanish or the Italians or the Germans or the Japanese, who love urban life. It's not surprising that we've become essentially the world's greatest suburban nation.

BEN WATTENBERG: This, too, was liberty and individualism at work, a free-standing private home of your own on land that you own. Now, these days suburbia has its critics. It's sprawl, they say. But, hey, have you ever heard anyone say, "A man's apartment is his castle"? In the years following the war, there were also criticisms of the suburbs and of the people who lived in them. The book "The Crack in the Picture Window" by John Keats was somewhat typical, complaining that the suburbs were boring places with no culture, where a homogeneous group of conformists lived in ticky-tacky homes, one looking exactly like the other. The American people were not buying the criticisms. They were voting with their feet, moving to the suburbs.

WILLIAM O'NEILL: This is probably the stupidest vein of social criticism ever developed in the history of social criticism, so far as I can tell, because who are they talking about? They're talking about the greatest generation. The guys who won World War II were the ones who were buying these houses and living in the subdivisions. They're the same people. So how can they be cowering conformists and people lacking any convictions of their own in one decade, and in the earlier decade they're the greatest generation? They're the same people, and they have the same aspirations that Americans have always had.

BEN WATTENBERG: And what, pray tell, were the American people doing in those homes?

BEN WATTENBERG: Today, if you want to know about sex in America, and even if you don't, the information is hard to avoid. Just look at the magazines at any newsstand or supermarket checkout line, and you will find intimate sexual behavior examined in great detail; and so, too, of course, on television. Yet not long ago, such public discussion and display of sex was limited. The naked truth about how Americans behave was unknown. It was the last dark frontier of social science until a controversial Midwest biology professor named Alfred Kinsey walked into America's bedroom and snapped on the light.

(Excerpt of song.)

BEN WATTENBERG: Few books have had greater impact on American society than the two volumes written by Alfred Kinsey. "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male" hit the bookstores in 1948, selling a quarter of a million copies in the first year alone. "Sexual Behavior in the Human Female" was published in 1953. Together, they comprised the first major scientific study of American sexuality, containing data from interviews with 5,300 men and 5,900 women covering most every aspect of their sexual histories.

JAMES H. JONES (Author, Kinsey: A Public/Private Life): What happens when Kinsey publishes the male volume and the female volume is that American society gets permission to talk about sex. You can go in board rooms, you can go in barber shops, you can go in cafes, you can go on sidewalk street corners and people are talking about issues that they never would have talked about before. Alfred Kinsey says 'x' number of people masturbate. Alfred Kinsey says 'x' number of men have premarital intercourse. And people have permission, really by science, the great secular force in our society, to open these questions to discussion.

BEN WATTENBERG: Some readers were shocked, others comforted. Some attacked the accuracy of the data. For according to Kinsey, there was a wide gap between what people thought was normal and what people were actually doing.

(Excerpt of song.)

BEN WATTENBERG: For example, premarital sex was reported by two out of every three college-educated males, and almost all males with only a grade-school education. More surprisingly, about half of all females said they had sex before marriage. What about extramarital sex? Kinsey maintained that about half of all married males and one-quarter of married females had strayed from the marital bed at some point in their lives.

The data on male homosexuality was most shocking and immediately challenged. Kinsey reported that 37 percent of males had at least one homosexual experience to the point of orgasm. What's more, 10 percent of males in the sample were predominantly homosexual for at least three years. About 4 percent were said to be exclusively homosexual for life.

The two books made Kinsey an international celebrity, both praised and vilified. Some regarded the works as a clarion call for personal liberation. Others saw them as precursors of promiscuity. Publicly, Kinsey always maintained that he had no social agenda and that what drove him was science for science's sake.

DR. ALFRED KINSEY: Pure research depends upon the sort of objectivity, which gathers data and allows other people to use that data.

BEN WATTENBERG: But as more has come to be known about the private Kinsey and his passions, both social and sexual, it has become clear that there was more to Kinsey than his scientific stance.

JAMES H. JONES: Kinsey is at odds with the way society regulates human sexual behavior. And what he wants to see is a much more encompassing ethic of tolerance that will make a room at the table for lots of different kinds of people who don't fit under the cookie cutters of prescribed morality.

PAUL GEBHARD (Kinsey Colleague, 1946-1956): No, he was trying to make the world a more tolerant and happier place. But you'd never get him to admit that.

BEN WATTENBERG: Kinsey was born in 1894 in New Jersey, where he grew up under the stern guidance of a very religious father.

PAUL GEBHARD: Well, you got the impression that everything connected with sex was dangerous and sinful. So he suffered a great deal as a child. You know, he thought his masturbation would drive him insane or stunt his growth or that he'd go to hell because of it, and that kind of business. But he often said, "I'd like to see that no child ever went through this nonsense that I had to go through."

BEN WATTENBERG: Kinsey was probably motivated by his adult sex life as well. He remained happily married to his wife Clara to the end of his life, but over the years he also had sexual relations with men and engaged in sadomasochism.

JAMES H. JONES: Kinsey's private life was at odds with his public persona. Publicly, Kinsey presented the image of a very staid Midwest university professor, a family man. Privately, he's also a person who pushes the envelope with regard to experimentation with behavior.

BEN WATTENBERG: Kinsey's research methods went beyond interviewing. He and a photographer filmed various animals copulating. Less openly, in the privacy of the attic of his own home, Kinsey filmed human sexual behavior, including masturbation, hetero and homosexual intercourse, and sadomasochism.

PAUL GEBHARD: He tried to anticipate Masters & Johnson a little bit. For example, if we could have someone masturbating or in sexual intercourse, you know, maybe one of us would be trying to hold a finger on their pulse to count the pulse and somebody else might be trying to count their respiration. That was very primitive. It's all we could do. And so these weren't exactly orgies. Some of these were pretty medically inclined.

BEN WATTENBERG: The sessions involved members of Kinsey's team and their wives, trusted volunteers, and occasionally Kinsey himself. Kinsey's wife Clara made the participants feel right at home.

JAMES H. JONES: Images I have of Clara that's really, you know, quite sweet is that people will be involved in the attic with all kinds of sexual acts, and she'll come in with milk and cookies and towels for them to, you know, dry off and freshen up, and then milk and cookies and the next round of, you know, behavior will begin.

BEN WATTENBERG: But even if the private Kinsey was a sexual experimenter and a covert crusader for what he considered sexual tolerance, the key questions remain: Does it matter? Did it lead him to slant his data?

JAMES H. JONES: Kinsey would never -- it's just not part of his makeup -- would never have knowingly doctored the books. With Kinsey, though, his desire to change attitudes, to have people be tolerant, is something that shapes his writing. It's something that really molds his presentation of data.

BEN WATTENBERG: Case in point: The data on homosexuality. Kinsey reported what he found, but his sample included adolescent boys who engaged in group masturbation.

PAUL GEBHARD: Well, a lot of it came about in the early post-puberty. So, yeah, for three years in there they were much more homosexual than heterosexual. And Kinsey had just put that out kind of to emphasize what he felt, to show the degree to which homosexuality was prevalent.

BEN WATTENBERG: There were also problems with Kinsey's statistical procedures. His methodology was derived from his previous biological fieldwork on the gall wasp. Kinsey had roamed far and wide across the United States and Central America collecting tens of thousands of samples of the wasps.

JAMES H. JONES: He takes that same approach of huge samples, vast geographical expanses, a dogged pursuit of every specimen that he can locate, and he just transfers it bodily to the study of human sexual behavior, never doubting that if he collects enough and does it in enough different places, he'll put together a portrait of human sexuality that starts to look like the truth.

BEN WATTENBERG: And so Kinsey and his team crisscrossed America, from California to the Carolinas, from campus coeds to gay hustlers and prostitutes in Times Square. He interviewed many prisoners, including sex offenders at San Quentin, whose incidence of homosexuality was substantially higher than average. As a means of portraying the vast range of human sexual behavior, Kinsey's approach was fine. But it was less useful in generalizing about the population as a whole.

PAUL GEBHARD: In the first book, Kinsey made an attempt to generalize, to extrapolate to the general population. And he realized later that was a mistake. He changed his mind and he decided, "We'll not do that."

BEN WATTENBERG: How have Kinsey's results held up? After the male volume was released, the American Statistical Association sent a blue-ribbon panel to Bloomington to examine the data. They had criticisms, but their report was largely favorable.

In later years, a re-analysis of Kinsey's data by researchers John Ganion and William Simon reported that some of the percentages on homosexuality were overstated and not representative of the American public as a whole. Kinsey had over-sampled prison populations and included teenage incidents. His exclusively homosexual calculation, however, was not far off the mark, according to Ganion and Simon, whose estimate is 3 percent as opposed to Kinsey's 4 percent.

Kinsey's data may forever remain controversial. But whatever the debate over his statistics, there is no denying the tremendous impact that Alfred Kinsey had on America at mid-century.

JAMES H. JONES: When we talk about Kinsey's validity, you know, the numbers to me are less important than the impact of the work as a piece of social reform. I think Kinsey's work precipitates the most sustained and the highest-level discussion of human sexuality up to that point in American history. And out of that discussion will come a review of social policy, will come a review of sex-offender codes, will come the review of gender roles, will come a review of the place of gays in American society. And to the extent that Kinsey forces the public to re-evaluate and to accept science as an arbiter of these issues, to that extent, he changes American society.

BEN WATTENBERG: Has sexual behavior changed since Kinsey? Premarital sex? Up --- It's estimated that three out of four women have had sex before marriage. Extramarital sex? Down - Kinsey reported 50 percent of men and 26 percent of women, but that included couples separated by the war. The numbers in the 1990s were 25 percent of men and 15 percent of women. Homosexuality? No real change. Kinsey estimated the range at 3 to 6 percent of men and 3 to 8 percent of women. The 1990 data: 3 to 5 percent of men and roughly 4 percent of women.