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Reviews
| Century of Difference: How America Changed in the Last One Hundred Years. By Claude S. Fischer and Michael Hout. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2006. x + 411 pp. Graphs, tables, notes, appendices, bibliography, and index. $45.00 (cloth).
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Claude Fischer and Michael Hout have produced a volume that will prove an indispensable reference for historians, sociologists, and other social scientists who are interested in the twentieth-century trajectories of such major social indicators as educational attainment, ethnic and religious diversity, and household living arrangements. Their data analyses are as comprehensive as possible, given that social surveys were in their infancy during the first half of the century, and they are always intelligently and insightfully constructed. The authors complement them with incisive syntheses of frequently large literatures, contributing to the indispensability of the volume as a resource. This is not to say that the book merely echoes conventional wisdom on the important subjects it addresses. In fact it dispels some commonly encountered generalizations on some topics such as the decline of the nuclear family household in the later part of the century. The authors use their survey of patterns across a large number of domains to draw some new conclusions about how Americans simultaneously diverged and converged during the last century. |
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The heart of the book lies in the data series the authors construct from a variety of sources, such as the Integrated Public Use Microdata Samples (of decennial censuses), Current Population Surveys (collected monthly by the Census Bureau), the National Opinion Research Center's General Social Survey (a biannual survey begun in 1972), and Gallup polls going back to the 1930s. It is an impressive array of data matched by the comprehensible way that the information is presented, even when the authors utilize sophisticated statistical procedures for corrections of one sort or another. Also impressive are the number and variety of domains they cover—from education, labor market, and economic variables to family and residential patterns, race, ethnicity and religion, and, finally, cultural divisions. In surveying the statistical indicators in these domains, the authors do not just attend to the trends of averages but also track variances—the spread of the departures from the averages—that lead them to some of their more interesting conclusions about convergences. |
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The intellectual interest that drives the book and gives it coherence concerns the widespread fin de siècle pessimism that the United States is fragmenting. Though their ultimate view is quite nuanced, the authors do not find convincing evidence of fragmentation. Instead, they are quite impressed by the many things that Americans seemed to share at the end of the twentieth century, especially in the realms of values and aspirations. Thus, the culture wars—while they are real in the sense that they engage the politically active—did not produce much polarization in the public at large. |
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Major changes did occur, but they were sometimes in the direction of greater convergence. Fischer and Hout look for these changes especially in the ways that key axes of differentiation lined up with other things. At the beginning of the twentieth century, ethnicity looked to be a major source of enduring division. By the end of the century, however, Americans had become visibly more tolerant of ethnic diversity, which had increased rapidly because of a new era of mass immigration. The once-prominent ethnic inequalities and distinctions of the preceding immigration era had faded to near invisibility. Racial differences, especially between Americans of African descent and others, was another matter and continued to loom large. Other divergences among Americans were reduced, however, with the strengthening of the correspondence between education and many other important matters, such as opinions and living standards. Hout and Fischer conclude broadly that the most critical change over a century was the replacement of family origins by education as the major determinant of adult statuses and outlooks. It is one among a number of findings that make this volume a valuable addition to the bookshelf.
Richard Alba
The University at Albany, SUNY
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