In his recent essay in this journal on my writings on the “egalitarian myth,” Robert E. Gallman is kind enough to express admiration for “the scope of Pessen’s empirical undertaking, the skill and ingenuity with which he carried it out, his learning, and his grasp of his materials.” If praise from any source is sweet, praise from so admired a scholar as Professor Gallman is doubly sweet. Yet, “one may doubt,” he continues, that I have “in fact dealt a death blow to the egalitarian hypothesis.” Criticism, while not nearly so pleasing, alas, is to be expected, particularly for work such as mine that challenges a most influential, durable, and still popular thesis and challenges it on the basis of admittedly partial data. Scholarly disagreement on important issues is of course inevitable. For, as Peter M. Blau and Otis D. Duncan have observed, even collaborators in a joint study will interpret their data differently. I have taken pen in hand and availed myself of the opportunity graciously afforded me by a managing editor of Social Science History to publish my “observations on Gallman’s essay,” not because that essay criticizes my work but because a number of its references to my work are misleading and inaccurate.

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

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

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

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

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

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