ABSTRACT
By the end of the war, certain members of Congress had made perfectly clear that they were displeased with governmental opinion research. The temporary wartime agencies were gone or dismembered, and Program Surveys was on the chopping block, too. Conservative congressmen and farm interests had shown their suspicion of the liberalism of the Department of Agriculture in general and some of its surveys in particular. Some Southern congressmen had come upon what they interpreted as racial meddling in a departmental survey conducted in Coahoma County, Mississippi. Program Surveys was not, in fact, involved-Carl Taylor's Division of Farm Population and Rural Life had studied the county as part of an ambitious plan in the social survey tradition and had reported on the wretched living conditions of poor blacks-but hostile congressmen reacted by determining to abolish all "social surveys."
