This dissertation investigates the depiction of the "average American," a statistical and visual trope that carried significant ideological weight at the end of the nineteenth century and in the first half of the twentieth century. On a symmetrical bell curve, the most aberrant representative data ground the curve to its horizontal axis, while the average is located at its central peak The center of the bell curve was a late nineteenth- and twentieth-century obsession, especially in the United States, where immigration, economic instability, and swift modernization made it seem ever more urgent to understand the nation's diverse population in "objective" terms. This dissertation examines how the average American---as determined by both statistical and anthropological models---was represented in sculpture. I trace the scientific and artistic trajectories of three sets of sculptures, a male and female figure commissioned by Dudley Allen Sargent from Henry Hudson Kitson and Theo Alice Ruggles to represent the average American man and woman at the Chicago's Columbian Exposition in 1893, the Races of Mankind exhibit commissioned by Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History from Malvina Hoffman which opened in 1933, and Norma and Normman, commission by Robert Latou Dickinson from Abram Belskie and which were put on display at the Cleveland Health Museum in 1945. These sculptures were meant to be seen by large audiences in public spaces, and were primarily didactic objects intended to promote physical, racial, and sexual fitness.and contributed to statistical imaginary of the interwar years. I argue that such representations derived their authority from their scientific aura and were an effective way to construct an imagined community blissfully unchallenged by diversity and difference.

These sculptures were based explicitly on data compiled by large-scale statistical or anthropological projects. They were all meant to be seen by large audiences in public spaces (world's fairs, natural history museums, health museums) and were primarily didactic objects intended to promote physical, racial, and sexual fitness. Such representations derived their authority from their scientific and their artistic aura and were used as tools to develop a specific kind of public, while simultaneously discouraging the formation of others. They were effective ways by which to formulate and fix an imagined community in which the challenges of diversity and difference could be tamed if not fantasized away entirely.