2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

HSS Abstracts
Bruce␣ J. Hunt University of Texas at Austin
Teaching the History of the Atomic Bomb
For the past 15 years, I have taught a course at the University of Texas on
“The History of the Atomic Bomb.” It focuses tightly on events from the
discovery of fission in 1938 to the Oppenheimer security hearings in 1954,
and combines a detailed examination of the scientific and technical issues
involved with extensive treatment of the social and political context. The
students are required to write papers analyzing and evaluating the American
decision to drop atomic bombs on Japanese cities, and for the purposes of this
session, I will focus on how I handle this always controversial subject. I will
also discuss how I use the mid-1990s controversy over the Smithsonian’s
planned “Enola Gay” exhibit to bring out the continued resonance of the story
of the atomic bomb, and to raise broader questions about how history gets
written, rewritten, used, and understood.
100
Sarah␣ E. Igo Princeton University
Arguing with Gallup: Popular Challenges to ‘Scientific’ Polling, 1936-1948
In a 1949 article in the Public Opinion Quarterly, two social scientists referred
to the “traumatic November episode” casting a pall over their field. To anyone
in the business of measuring attitudes, the reference was immediately clear: the
spectacular failure of opinion polls to predict the outcome of the 1948 presidential
election. The article went on to discuss the crucial importance of polling‚s public
image. The “widespread, relatively prolonged, and intense” adverse public
reaction to the inaccurate forecasts, the authors feared, would not only undermine
popular acceptance of opinion research but might also “radiate” out to “the more
remote field of social science” as a whole. This was especially true if the lesson
the public had learned was “the intrinsic unpredictability of human behavior.”
The authors of this article, like many of their colleagues, worried about the
status of their relatively new field of inquiry. Certain that the only way to acquire
legitimacy was through approximating the rhetoric of the hard sciences, but
frustrated by their own dependence on variable human subjects, pollsters worked
constantly to shore up public confidence in their methods and findings. George
Gallup’s claims for “scientific” polling provide a case in point. In his promotional
rhetoric, polls were a scientifically-perfectible means for uncovering aggregate
national opinion. Even in the years before 1948, however, this characterization
did not go uncontested. Popular audiences were fascinated by but also suspicious
of “scientific” techniques of opinion-gathering: the intrusiveness of the doorstep
interview, the privileging of quantitative over qualitative data, the possibility of
public manipulation, and the vision of a systematic science of human attitudes.
Drawing upon Gallup’s published works and private papers as well as