That Stephan Thernstrom’s Poverty and Progress is widely regarded as a classic is clear from the very fact that a symposium of this type is being held. Nor is the book’s reputation unwarranted. Thernstrom (1964: 1) himself wrote that “one of the most glaring gaps in our knowledge of 19th century America is the absence of reliable information about the social mobility of its population, particularly at the lower and middle levels of society.” Thanks to his study of Newburyport and the many studies of other communities that his research has helped inspire, that gap in our knowledge has been narrowed and we are all the wiser. Before Thernstrom, American historians were prone to speak of large-scale upward mobility on the basis of a handful of success stories. He showed us a better way.

Some scholars, and they include admirers of Thernstrom’s work, have recently questioned both the importance of social mobility and the extent to which it influenced the minds of working people (Henretta, 1977; Katz, 1975; and Dawley, 1976). Their argument is interesting but highly conjectural. Most of us continue to believe, and rightly so, that research such as Thernstrom’s has significantly illuminated nineteenth-century American society.

My Copy of Poverty and Progress provides shocking evidence that we have moved far enough along in time to have the necessary perspective: the price on the jacket of this Harvard University Press original edition—hardcover—reads $5.95. There is similarly little doubt about the judgment of time, for I think there would be general agreement with the assessment offered by Michael Katz (1982) several years ago that “in the last two decades there have been two landmark books in the history of social structure, one each for Britain and the United States. Both reflect not only the talents of the author but the national/intellectual contexts as well. For Britain the book is E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class [1964]; for America it is Stephan Thernstrom’s Poverty and Progress [1964].”

It is thus appropriate that we honor Stephan Thernstrom on the twentieth anniversary of a slim volume on a small city, which made a disproportionately big bang. We know he understands that to the extent that our honorific twenty-one gun salute may occasionally seem to be aimed not over but at him, this is only to keep him from feeling uncomfortably like the guest at his own funeral eulogies. Whatever the mix of criticism and praise, however, I suspect that he will be amused: all of this solemn discussion devoted to what was initially only a doctoral thesis which Professor Thernstrom, if he was anything like most of us, may have had to struggle, from time to time, to take altogether seriously.

In an era of extreme specialization among American historians, it is rare for a monograph to have had the major impact of Poverty and Progress. While there have been previous studies of social mobility, American ethnic groups, and urban communities, Thernstrom’s study was pathbreaking in his use of research techniques and interpretation, and it established a major agenda for the “New Social History.” The questions he raised and his success in writing history “from the bottom up” captured the imagination of the new generation of historians who attended graduate school in the late 1960s and early 1970s. His ability to explore the experience of the inarticulate working class drew the attention of radical or New Left historians who were seeking to write a different type of labor history that focused less on unions and more on working-class culture, as well as of the traditionally oriented consensus historians who wanted to expand the horizons of social and cultural history to encompass the experiences of the greatest numbers of Americans. Thernstrom’s impact on the latest cohort of historians was felt in their methodology and their studies of ethnic subcommunities, working-class culture, and geographic and social mobility.

It is a rare author, I suspect, who is capable of assessing the impact and influence of his own work with any insight. I do not pretend to be one of them. I cannot venture an opinion as to how well these three interesting papers succeed in illuminating that question. While reading them I felt like Huck and Tom hiding away in the church gallery to hear the eulogy at their own funeral. The minister:

Although the role of strategically situated black Cincinnati as a gateway to freedom in the period before the Civil War has been well documented, the internal structure of this dynamic black urban community and its evolution within the larger urban setting has proved a more elusive subject (Woodson, 1916; Wade, 1954; Ellwein, 1964; Lammermeier, 1970; Riley, 1971; Berlin, 1976; Curry, 1981; Horton, 1984). In the antebellum period, as in our own age, residential location determined the type and quality of housing one might occupy, the employment opportunities and the public and private facilities accessible to the resident, and the overall physical, economic, political, and social setting in which urban residents lived and raised their families. Moreover, in the commercial era, before the advent of modern intraurban transport, the residential structure was the foundation upon which the entire social life and the organizational structure of urban life was built. An understanding of residential patterns, and of the location of the black community in geographic space and in the context of the evolving urban structure, is therefore a critical prerequisite to understanding what life in the antebellum black urban community was like.

In a recent article in Social Science History, Flanigan and Zingale reviewed the old problem of inferring individual relationships from aggregate data, cast doubt on Goodman’s ecological regression technique as a method of estimating such relationships, and contended that the specification analysis approach to the issue was misleading. Instead, they argued that an ad hoc procedure suggested by Shively in a 1974 article was superior to Goodman’s point estimates because it avoids dubious assumptions and forces investigators to make their premises clear. Comparing results from analyses of state-level data on major party voting in the 1968 and 1972 presidential elections with figures from the Michigan surveys, they concluded, to their satisfaction at least, that the assumptions required for ecological regression were badly violated and that it was preferable in this and other cases to use the system that Shively, without making any grandiose claims for it, had originated (Flanigan and Zingale, 1985; Goodman, 1959; Hanushek et al., 1974; Shively, 1974; Langbein and Lichtman, 1978).

Those skeptical of ecological regression in voting behavior studies continue to suggest that problems in applying the technique severely limit its utility. But the cautionary offered in the Winter 1985 number of this journal by William H. Flanigan and Nancy H. Zingale (“Alchemist’s Gold: Inferring Individual Relationships from Aggregate Data,” Social Science History 9: 71-91) goes so far as to suggest that these problems are insurmountable—or virtually insurmountable. As a user, I was prepared to be devastated, but in fact find myself cheered (if a little puzzled).

Interested readers will recall that the centerpiece of the authors’ argument is a test involving this question: How did the voters of 1968 behave four years later in the presidential election of 1972? The test consists of comparing voters’ actual behavior, as determined by survey data, with ecological regression estimates of that same behavior. The tabulated results are alleged to be decisive in proving the authors’ point, but instead appear to prove just the opposite of what is intended, as a fresh look at the material reveals.

In our article “Alchemist’s Gold”, we tried to make three main points. First, a large number of models of individual behavior can fit observed ecological patterns, and these models entail different assumptions about the nature of the individual relationship within and across the ecological units. This topic has been most impressively developed by Gudmund Iversen (1981). Second, there is nothing in the ecological data or the various types of ecological analysis that informs the researcher about how to choose among the many dissimilar models. All the models are compatible with the ecological data, and we have no way of knowing whether a particular inference about individual behavior is quite accurate or extremely misleading. Because of the inherent ambiguity over the unobserved individual behavior within ecological units, we made a third point of recommending techniques for reducing the amount of uncertainty surrounding estimates.