The portrayal of individuals in the media usually affects the way the public perceives and treats them. The negative views of the elderly in this country are often blamed on the way in which the media have depicted the aged in our society. For example, in hearings on “Age Stereotyping and Television” before the House Select Committee on Aging, Representative William S. Cohen testified:

In the last two decades, the most interesting new perspectives on the history of American voting behavior have come from a small group of historians writing what Bogue (1968) termed the “New Political History.” While members of this group have been characterized by theoretical and methodological concerns that transcend their interest in quantitative analysis, they have emphasized the use of statistics in historical research. At first, this technical innovation awed traditional historians and limited critical commentary on the techniques employed by the “new” historians. Recently, however, both the substantive findings and the methods of these historians have received increasing scrutiny Wright, 1973; McCormick, 1974; Kousser, 1976).

In The Other Bostonians, Stephan Thernstrom argues that there has been “a fairly constant migration factor operating throughout American society since the opening of the nineteenth century.” Patterns of geographic mobility, according to Thernstrom (1973: 228, 220), “were products of forces that operated in much the same way throughout American society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.” Finding considerable mobility everywhere—both in his own examination of Boston and in studies of other communities—he stressed the similarities among urban areas and postulated an “American pattern.” But while the principal finding of his examination of geographic mobility— that there was a great deal of it—remains secure, work done in recent years has rendered less satisfactory the emphasis on inter-urban uniformity. Indianapolis, for example, constitutes a striking exception to Thernstrom’s postulations; and when considered in conjunction with the results of other recent studies of urban population movement, the findings for Indiana’s capital indicate a need to reevaluate the validity and utility of using the term “pattern” to describe geographic mobility in urban North America.

In the winter of 1978 Social Science History published a short note by me (Gallman, 1978) that questioned certain features of Professor Edward Pessen’s critique of the egalitarian hypothesis. In the winter of 1979 Professor Pessen (1979) responded to me, at great length. The editors have kindly offered me the opportunity to reply. The space limitations they have imposed upon the debate do not permit me to comment on each issue raised by Professor Pessen, nor do I think that that is necessary. I plan only to repeat the main points of my orginal note and to indicate how far I think Professor Pessen’s paper has affected them. As will appear, I believe my note has survived Professor Pessen’s critique well, and has gained strength from research done since it was written.