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Social Science for What? Philanthropy and the Social Question in a World Turned Rightside Up

What starts out as a prim organizational history that was written, appropriately enough, to commemorate the centennial of the Russell Sage Foundation (RSF), turns into a passionate and political call-to-arms for contemporary social science to reclaim its sense of public purpose, and respond to the wellfunded network of politically conservative think tanks that have so powerfully reshaped U.S. public policy since the Reagan administration. There has indeed been a vast rightwing conspiracy, according to historian Alice O’Connor, and compared to the red meat of its ideological convictions and political certitudes, social science truth, with its associated caveats, qualifications, significance tests, and mealy mouthed even-handedness, has seemed like thin gruel. What is to be done in a political world where a single exaggerated story about a Chicago “welfare queen,” endlessly retold by Ronald Reagan, outweighed a thousand reports written by policy analysts with PhDs? Rather than despair, O’Connor suggests we look for answers in the RSF’s own history. Founded in 1907 for “the improvement of social and living conditions in the United States,” the RSF put to philanthropic use the vast wealth accumulated by Margaret Olivia Sage’s deceased husband. Russell Sage had been a successful but ruthless financier who probably would not have appreciated what his widow did with his robber-baron estate. As O’Connor explains in the early chapters of her book, the RSF joined other newly established foundations (e.g., Rockefeller, Carnegie) in pursuit of a “scientific philanthropy” that would better society by improving its social policies. Together, they boosted American social science in the early twentieth century by funding research and by helping to establish organizations like the Social Science Research Council, the National Bureau of Economic Research, and the Brookings Institution. In addition to launching this organizational infrastructure, the RSF directly supported social scientific research that was methodologically innovative, empirically grounded, and politically relevant. One early achievement was the Pittsburgh Survey, an encompassing look at work and life in a major industrial city. In another policy arena, credit for poor people, the RSF coupled its research with direct political intervention by trying, for several decades, to get states to adopt its Uniform Small Loan Law. Additionally, the RSF supported long-term projects on industrial relations, headed by Mary van Kleeck. For various reasons, the RSF recast itself after World War II. Rather than harness research to policy intervention, the Foundation focused on research, and embraced a vision of social science as neutral, non-ideological, and managerial (p. 48). In so doing, it followed the leads of the Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations, and deliberately eschewed the kind of social science exemplified by Robert Lynd’s Knowledge for What? and Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma. However, this recasting did not protect the RSF from eventual accusations that it, and its fellow foundations, were part of a liberal, secular-humanist, anti-market movement. Here, O’Connor’s historical narrative leaps from the immediate post-war period to the right-wing reaction, and says only a little about what happened in between. The second part of the book deals with the confrontation between mainstream social science and the network of well-funded conservative foundations, organizations, and think tanks that came to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s. The impact of publications like Charles Murray’s Losing Ground shows to O’Connor that conservative intellectuals are now able to produce arguments that sufficiently resemble social science as to pass REVIEWS