Samuel Stouffer, a little-known sociologist from Sac City, Iowa, is
likely not a name World War II historians associate with other stalwart
men of the war, such as Eisenhower, Patton, or MacArthur. Yet Stouffer,
in his role as head of the Army Information and Education Division's
Research Branch, spearheaded an effort to understand the
citizen-soldier, his reasons for fighting, and his overall Army
experience. Using empirical methods of inquiry to transform general
assumptions about leadership and soldiering into a sociological
understanding of a draftee Army, Stouffer perhaps did more for the
everyday soldier than any general officer could have hoped to
accomplish.
Stouffer and his colleagues surveyed more than a half-million American
GIs during World War II, asking questions about everything from
promotions and rations to combat motivation and beliefs about the enemy.
Soldiers' answers often demonstrated that their opinions differed
greatly from what their senior leaders thought soldier opinions were, or
should be. Stouffer and his team of sociologists published monthly
reports entitled "What the Soldier Thinks," and after the war compiled
the Research Branch's exhaustive data into an indispensible study
popularly referred to as The American Soldier. General George C.
Marshall was one of the first to recognize the value of Stouffer's work,
referring to The American Soldier as "the first quantitative studies
of the . . . mental and emotional life of the soldier." Marshall also
recognized the considerable value of The American Soldier beyond the
military. Stouffer's wartime work influenced multiple facets of policy,
including demobilization and the GI Bill. Post-war, Stouffer's
techniques in survey research set the state of the art in the civilian
world as well.
Both a biography of Samuel Stouffer and a study of the Research Branch,
Samuel Stouffer and the GI Survey illuminates the role that sociology
played in understanding the American draftee Army of the Second World
War. Joseph W. Ryan tracks Stouffer's career as he guided the Army
leadership toward a more accurate knowledge of their citizen soldiers,
while simultaneously establishing the parameters of modern survey
research. David R. Segal's introduction places Stouffer among the elite
sociologists of his day and discusses his lasting impact on the field.
Stouffer and his team changed how Americans think about war and how
citizen-soldiers were treated during wartime. Samuel Stouffer and the
GI Survey brings a contemporary perspective to these significant
contributions.
