Foundations, Statistics, and State-Building: Leonard P. Ayres, the Russell Sage Foundation, and U.S. Government Statistics in the First World War

William J. Breen

Business History Review, 1994, vol. 68, issue 4, 451-482

Abstract: This article examines the statistical work done by Leonard Porter Ayres for the Council of National Defense during the First World War. Director of statistics for the Russell Sage Foundation when war was declared, Ayres immediately volunteered his own and the foundation's statistical expertise. The article focuses on the first year of American intervention in the war and argues that Ayres's important statistical work evolved in three overlapping but distinct stages. The structure of the American state, however, confounded the wider ambitions of Ayres (just as it had those of his rival Edwin Gay) to centralize all government statistical data.

Date: 1994
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