The Survey, Volume 30, Number 5, May 3, 1913

In the spring of 1913, America was in the midst of a quiet revolution. Across the country, cities were turning the investigative gaze inward, surveying their own neighborhoods to diagnose what ailed them: tenement housing, public health crises, labor conditions, civic corruption. This issue of The Survey, the era's essential progressive periodical, captures that momentum. It opens with a definitive account of the "survey idea" that had taken hold from Topeka to Springfield to Scranton, documenting how ordinary citizens, armed with questionnaires and conviction, believed that knowing the truth about their communities was the first step toward healing them. The publication reads like a snapshot of Progressive Era optimism at its peak, when Americans still believed that systematic knowledge plus civic will could remake urban life. For historians of reform, urbanists, and anyone curious about the roots of community data and participatory governance, these pages offer something rare: direct access to the moment when Americans first decided to survey themselves.