The Invention of the Stereotype
BEGINNING IN THE seventeenth century, when John Locke pulled the mind apart from the Christian soul and made it into a natural object, this realm created great opportunities and complex problems. John Watson was hardly the first to insist that no science could enter that dark realm and not get lost. Yet common sense indicated that ideas were critical to human intention and action. Xenophobic bigotry, some suggested, was not external stimuli and reactions alone, but also due to ideas. That the most powerful cognitive theory of such bias would come from an American newspaperman, and be named not after Plato or Locke but a printing process, well, that was impossible to imagine.
Since antiquity, ideas were attached to grand philosophical questions about the mind’s capacities to represent reality. However, a particular set of such problems had been forced into the open with globalization. Ideas often simplified and coalesced groups into categories. For example, in the eighteenth century, Western philosophers, doctors, and scientists took up this task of codifying and distinguishing humans into what John Stuart Mill in 1843 called “natural kinds.” Unfortunately, these categories often proved anything but natural. A lifetime colonial administrator for the British East India Company, Mill himself sorted by race, temperament, gender, and age—a Herculean effort that, by the advent of the new century, was exposed as little more than prejudice. As critiques of the categories of race and ethnicity emerged, these self-serving typologies began to be seen as a reflection not of the world but rather of the way the prejudiced mind created ideas. Divisions of humanity into order, family, and genus were too often not based just on archaeological and biological verities, but rather fantasies. As racial theory was accused of being racist, nationalist typologies were challenged as xenophobic. Perhaps these efforts simply should be abandoned.
Or maybe not. What if these crude categories were not just errors, but revelations? What if they exposed the misguided manners by which the everyday mind came to erroneous notions of others? After the propaganda campaigns of the Great War, where such biased national types were put to murderous use, a journalist took up that question and, in the process, invented the concept of the “stereotype.”
Walter Lippmann was not just any journalist. From a startlingly young age, he was an American power broker. Born in 1889 to wealthy German-Jewish parents in New York, this serious man attended Harvard, wrote for the Crimson, and studied philosophy and history with George Santayana and William James. After graduating, Lippmann moved to Washington and, as one of the founders of The New Republic, quickly became an insider whose ideas seamlessly found their way into the world. Despite his inexperience, he earned a reputation as a political whiz kid who had the ear of up-and-coming politicos before and after they made it, including Herbert Hoover, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt.
Lippmann became self-conscious of the power his little magazine yielded, though initially, he was hardly squeamish about using all the tools at his disposal. “I just got back from Washington,” the twenty-seven-year-old wrote a Harvard friend, the future Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter, “with the feeling The New Republic must get in the Brandeis fight with the heaviest guns.” President Woodrow Wilson had nominated a controversial, outspoken liberal and a Jew, Louis Brandeis, for the Supreme Court. Lippmann put The New Republic to work so as to provide support for this nominee, and after a struggle, Brandeis took his place on America’s highest court. Confident of the righteousness of his moral vision, Lippmann was not shy about using his megaphone to mold mass opinion.
When war broke out in Europe in 1914, most of America wanted nothing to do with it. Lippmann, however, called for the United States to enter the fray. When his call was heeded, he left for London and joined the Inter-Allied Propaganda Board, where among other things he composed leaflets urging Germans and Austrians to give up. By the end of this experience, having taken in the scope of war propaganda on both sides, Lippmann became alarmed by the power that the modern media possessed. He especially was disturbed by how the German, French, and British outlets whipped up a frenzy of hate, using cartoons and caricatures of national types. The Kaiser’s helmet or the French beret were metonymies that defined and reduced complex human beings without a word. As more sophisticated methods of communication like radio and film spread, Lippmann recognized that opportunities for manipulation would multiply if “derivative experience,” like reading a book or seeing a cartoon, was all it took to create hatred and bias. The manipulative use of more immersive media like film could undermine democracy and peaceful coexistence. New technologies had the power to create imaginary worlds, what Lippmann called a “pseudo-environment,” which could support deluded ideas about others.
Walter Lippmann
Lippmann struggled to find a conceptual key that would help him articulate his concerns. In 1919, after five years of labor, he penned an article for The Atlantic but was not impressed with the results. He sheepishly wrote to another friend, the legal giant Oliver Wendell Holmes, worried that the great man would think poorly of his effort. Something better was forthcoming, he assured Holmes, a book on “how public opinion is made.” In 1922, Lippmann made good on his promise. In Public Opinion, Lippmann sought to make sense of how mass democracy was dependent on a fickle, at times hysterical, foundation, and in the process he snatched a term from printing and altered its meaning.
“Stereotypes” or “stereoplates” were a variety of metal plates that marked an early-nineteenth-century advance in the printing process; they didn’t require the setting of individual type and were used to swiftly make identical imprints. By the middle of the nineteenth century, “stereotype” migrated into general discourse to connote a mechanically repeated phrase or formula. It floated around as a useful metaphor; in medicine, a tic might be referred to as “stereotypical.” In Public Opinion, Lippmann retooled this term, for it beautifully captured commonly held distortions of ethnic and national kinds, which could be created and then easily reproduced.
Though he seemed unaware of it, Lippmann’s stereotype landed squarely in the center of debates roiling academic psychology, for it directly challenged behaviorism. Pavlov and Watson considered perception to be a matter of individual stimuli coming together in associations. There was no place for a stereotype in their then-dominant model. However, Lippmann’s theory dovetailed with Gestalt psychology. Between 1914 and 1917, the German Wolfgang Köhler had proposed that perception was not based on meticulously piecing together associations; it was grasped all at once. Humans did not build up impressions piece by piece; they took in whole configurations through inferences, guesses, and biases. Stereotypes fit neatly into the Gestalt framework.
Walter Lippmann didn’t dive into those deep waters. Quoting his teacher William James’s celebrated description, he agreed that the world was a “great, blooming, buzzing confusion.” Innumerable sights and sounds bombarded the perceiver as every moment passed. Overwhelmed by this onslaught, humans developed simplified and flattened signifiers of reality. Gesturing to Plato’s famous cave of illusion, Lippmann asserted that the mind was built to distill, generalize, and then exist in a theater of its own making.
However, these shadows of the real world were mostly not idiosyncratic, Lippmann proposed. We are primed to pick up inputs that make sense with the stereotypes laid down for us by our culture. In the flux and flow, we grasp that which already has been marked as meaningful. Faced with the incongruous and undefined, we grab for the common solution, our culture’s answer. In this way, stereotypes spread and one mind becomes much like another. When a stranger arrives in town, all that is confusing, threatening, and unreadable becomes tamed, contained, and defined when it is whispered that he is Russian. In a snap, the stranger becomes a known entity, a stereotype.
To drive home his point, Lippmann described an experiment conducted at a psychology congress. At a festive, masked ball, the experts on the psyche were hobnobbing, when suddenly a melee broke out:
A clown rushed in madly pursued by a negro, revolver in hand. They stopped in the middle of the room fighting; the clown fell, the negro leapt upon him, fired, and then both rushed out of the hall.
Afterward, the stunned experts were asked to describe what had transpired. Secretly, the whole scene had been photographed for veracity’s sake. Nearly two-thirds of the respondents got over forty percent of the basic facts wrong. Trained observers described “the stereotype of such a brawl.” The visual experience fit into a pre-existing cognitive model, which came to predictable and familiar conclusions. Lippmann did not reveal what those communal distortions had been, but perhaps he assumed his reader’s own stereotypes regarding “negroes” would fill in the blanks.
There was a great economy in having a warehouse stocked with such preconceived notions. No extra mental effort was required to get to the bottom of group or individual identities. But how closed was this system? Stereotypes, Lippmann believed, were rigid and not easily corrected; worse, they had the power to pervert the search for truth. The stereotype “stamps itself upon the evidence in the very act of securing the evidence,” he wrote. Incongruous or contradictory facts received no hearing. If behaviorists hoped that positive experiences would lessen prejudice, Lippmann’s model pointed to a source of resistance. Counterfactuals like a peaceful “negro” or a violent clown were brushed aside. Stereotypes ruled.
“By stereotypes,” Lippmann wrote to an excited Dartmouth sociologist, “I mean fixed habits of cognition.… It is a pathological term for the kind of cognition which classifies and abstracts falsely.…” Negative stereotypes did not require personal trauma or frightening Little Albert–type experiences. These ideas, once established, provided an everyday answer to the problem of sorting different beings with their weird cultures, inscrutable languages, and odd beliefs. Stereotypes provided answers by which other nations, ethnicities, and genders were typecast, so much so that many were ready to fight and even die in the service of the cartoons lodged in their heads.
PUBLIC OPINION WAS published during a time when progressive and reactionary forces struggled over America’s future. On the one hand, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People had been founded, and the so-called New Negro demanded equal rights. Suffragettes formed the National Woman’s Party and fought for women’s rights, and leftists pressed for workers’ rights. At the same time, these groups were challenged by religious conservatives, nativists, white supremacists, and supporters of anti-Semitism and European fascism. In 1920, with one constitutional amendment, Americans granted women the right to vote, and with another they sought to impose strict Christian values by the prohibition of alcohol. Affordable cars, paved roads, airplanes, and telephones brought citizens closer together, as Congress began to enact increasingly restrictive immigration laws, which culminated in the rabidly anti-Asian Immigration Act of 1924.
Lippmann was a witness to this push and pull, and his theory of stereotypes was a timely warning. A change in the way information was produced and consumed was approaching, and its impact would be enormous. If stereotypes were gestalts that could be created by simulated and reproduced experiences, then film, sound recording, and photography all carried great risk.
While Lippmann sought to alert his readers to such danger, others found different inspiration in his work. A graduate student in applied psychology named George Gallup began to measure public views. Sigmund Freud’s American nephew, Edward Bernays, read Public Opinion and then created the first public relations business: a suggestible public who were offered the right stereotypes might be led toward socially beneficial waters and made to drink. And in Germany, a philologist, having just received his doctorate from the University of Heidelberg, became deeply interested in Bernays and American ideas on public relations. His name was Josef Goebbels.
Propagandists could now reach far beyond a row of pews or a Saturday fairground. Visual and audio representations of strangers had already begun to affect the citizenry, and only more of these mediated experiences were to come. The danger that lay ahead was dramatized by D. W. Griffith’s blockbuster film, The Birth of a Nation. Technically brilliant and morally heinous, this 1915 film, based on the novel The Clansman, captivated audiences, who dizzily exited the theater filled with ugly visions of African Americans. The film itself was a justification of Jim Crow laws, and the taking back of the South by white supremacists after the Civil War. President Woodrow Wilson, who instituted Jim Crow rules in the nation’s capital, made it the first film ever screened at the White House. The box office receipts were immense, over sixteen million dollars. The Birth of a Nation’s success showcased a dangerous new power to manipulate human cognition through “derivative” experience. That the director, a grandiose racist, would dare to follow up his widely criticized film with another entitled Intolerance—an epic that made Griffith himself the voice of toleration—only heightened concern that the movies held the capacity to distort reality and establish delusions that might control the public as never before.
The Birth of a Nation poster, 1915
Lippmann’s theory of stereotypes emerged as cinema became a worldwide form of entertainment. Unlike opera or theater, movies were more affordable, reached a broader swatch of society, and could be shown anywhere, anytime. In Germany, France, the Soviet Union, and Japan, national cinemas stocked up on stereotypes of their rivals. In America, the film industry was particularly obsessed with racial stereotypes. Nearly every great technical advance in Hollywood was accompanied by derogatory images of African Americans. In 1907, the first animated film, Humorous Phases of a Funny Face, employed a joke about “coons.” The most expensive film yet made, the aforementioned The Birth of a Nation, banked on stereotypes of rapacious Black men. Sound came to the movies wrapped in racism: The Jazz Singer, a 1927 picture, featured Al Jolson in blackface calling for his “Mammy.” Steamboat Willie, the first sound-synchronized cartoon, was released a year later by Disney, and it too leaned on caricatures of Blackness.
Racial and ethnic minorities were rarely the main Hollywood characters, but more often were peripheral, intended for a cheap laugh, to evoke an exotic locale, or to spark effects like lust or contempt. Stereotypes, filmmakers understood, provided a whole backstory without any work. Viewers had these narratives preloaded in their heads: Aunt Jemima flipped pancakes, the happy barefoot Black child danced, the maternal maid tended to the white heiress, the watermelon-eating hick slobbered, while nearby the sleepy do-nothing somehow alternated with the sexually violent beast. Americans knew these … well, not people, but stereotypes. Little was required to make them come “alive” on the screen.
Animated cartoons made stereotypes even harder to miss. These were stocked with heroes, rascals, brutes, idiots, con men, and sexpots, each revealed with a few strokes of the pen. In “Uncle Tom’s Crabbin’,” the creators of the 1919 animated cartoon “Felix the Cat” took viewers down South to visit Blacks and their slothful lives. “Merrie Melodies” made a string of comic cartoons like “Jungle Jitters” and “Hittin’ the Trail for Hallelujah Land.” “Looney Tunes” created a character called “Bosco,” ambiguous as a species but clear in “Congo Jazz” and other shorts as a send-up of African Americans. Betty Boop’s “Bamboo Isle” used minstrel gags. Foreigners also provided easy laughs. In “Felix the Cat Goes to China,” “Japanicky,” or “Arabantics,” Felix gratified his viewers’ biases. The motto for these storytellers might have been “nothing strange not made familiar.”
Students of the stereotype began to comb through fiction and journalism, advertising and art, but film seemed to be the leading offender. This attraction was perhaps in part born of the medium. The constraints of silent movies could be daunting; the famed French filmmaker Abel Gance in 1927 argued that film representation was a bare form of hieroglyphics. The expense of moviemaking also meant that every second counted. Directors were forced to swiftly create recognizable characters. So why not steal powerful symbols from their culture and use what the German critic Walter Benjamin called an unconscious optics? In the early years of cinema, such cheap characterizations were combined with the power of the big screen—with its lighting tricks, close-ups, and slow-motion—to make a dazzling impact. Critics warned that no language had yet emerged to articulate what was happening to viewers as they took in the action.
Synchronized sound should have allowed movies to move beyond some technical limits; that it did not, however, showed that the problems were never merely technical. Filmmakers unwittingly relied on stereotypes because they themselves were equally preoccupied by them. For example, in the 1921 blockbuster The Sheik, starring Rudolph Valentino, the heart-throb at one point exclaimed, with a bug-eyed look, “When an Arab sees a woman that he wants he takes her!” And yet Ahmad was a kind kidnapper who abducted Lady Diana to win her heart. The dissonance created by casting the noble Valentino as an evil Arab was resolved in the end, when viewers learned near the finale—phew!—that the sheik was not an Arab at all, but rather a mix of British and Spanish. When his parents died, he had been adopted. The frisson of all this was so delightful that the studio quickly lined up their sequel, The Son of the Sheik.
As the lights dimmed in the theater palace, a world of unintelligible complexity, populated by immense differences, was transformed into an entertaining spectacle. Films, one critic declared, were “the most formidable engine of mass control the world had seen.” Uncritical movie watching, he wrote, was akin to a psychology experiment, in which derogatory and frightening stereotypes were created or reinforced.
Stereotypes performed a homogenizing function. If you got the joke—and the joke was so crude, it was hard not to get it—you were welcomed in as one of us. Lippmann himself proposed that tribal identities were nothing more than a set of shared stereotypes. He scoffed at the so-called French soul or Chinese psychology or Bolshevik character. There have been “oceans of loose talk about collective minds, national souls, and race psychology,” but these were nothing but minds infiltrated by exactly the same stereotypes. If John Watson’s phobics were ready to leap at the first stranger in an alley, Walter Lippmann’s were huddled together, certain of their own place in the world thanks to crude typologies of others.
This then was one answer to the sociologist Emory Bogardus’s conundrum, the one he faced when he realized that many Americans hated groups they never had a traumatizing experience with or had even encountered. One didn’t need to know a Mexican to hate one. One could simply exist in a community in which stereotypes of vicious Mexicans were held. Behaviorist relearning, exposure, and habituation, therefore, would not always work, because a shared stereotype offered its own rewards. Undoing all this would be difficult, even dangerous, for Lippmann warned that challenging someone’s stereotypes felt like an assault on their “universe.” These beliefs meant that “[w]e feel at home there. We fit in. We are members.” This was not just fast thinking in a tumbling, whirring world; it was a protected form of cognition that sorted out friend from foe. As Lippmann stated:
And since my moral system rests on my accepted version of the facts, he who denies either my moral judgment or my version of the facts, is to me perverse, alien, dangerous. How shall I account for him? The opponent has always to be explained, and the last explanation that we ever look for is that he sees a different set of facts.… It is only when we are in the habit of recognizing our opinion as a partial experience seen through our stereotypes that we become truly tolerant of an opponent. Without this habit, we believe in the absolutism of our own vision, and consequently in the treacherous character of all opposition.
IN THE Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, a reviewer proclaimed that the stereotype was the first great advance in Western political philosophy since John Locke. Research projects were launched, statistics began to be collected, and analyses of the effects of stereotypes were undertaken. Even the proud Nobel laureate Ivan Pavlov waved the white flag. After long rebuffing challenges from Gestalt psychologists, in 1930 the discoverer of the conditioned reflex added a cognitive element to his model, something that mediated between outer stimulus and behavioral response. He called them “dynamic stereotypes.”
In 1926, the first American research trials on stereotypes were conducted by Stuart Rice, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Rice recruited 258 Dartmouth students and 31 members of a Vermont grange to look at newspaper photos of nine white men—a financier, a prime minister, a Bolshevik, and a bootlegger, among others. Who were these men and what did they do? the researchers asked. The results confirmed the hypothesis that class and ethnic stereotypes led to gross errors. In 1926, the journal Social Forces explored the way stereotypes rationalized the subjugation of the Negro. Experimenters asked one hundred Princeton students to rank ten ethnic groups based on their preference and group characteristics, amply demonstrating racial prejudice based on stereotypes. Pedagogues asked how stereotypes infiltrated a child’s mind. Kimball Young, the freethinking grandson of Mormon founder Brigham Young, focused on how a child, oppressed by parental dos and don’ts, became angry and impulsive and then, when a negative stereotype appeared, latched on to it. In this way, he was stirred into “violent emotional attitudes and stereotypes toward the Negro or the Oriental or the immigrant.”
Some resisted this rush to apply stereotypes to America’s social problems. Their position had been previewed by the president of Princeton University, John Grier Hibben, in his 1911 essay “A Defence of Prejudice.” If all thinking relied on prejudice, then surely it alone could not be the cause of pogroms and lynchings. Stereotypes, then, would be merely thinking shortcuts, bound to include errors in generalization. Big deal. Humans did it all the time.
There was something to this rejoinder. For the theory of the stereotype did not address a critical element, the emotion, that is the “phobos” in xenophobia. To integrate that element, sociologists turned to Georg Simmel.
Simmel was a rebel, and he suffered for it. Born in 1858 to Jewish chocolatiers, who died and left him with a sizable inheritance, this Berliner embraced a life of scholarship. His advancement in the German academy, however, was stymied by anti-Semitism, which dogged him despite his parents’ conversion to Protestantism. Repeated rejection from superiors and colleagues, however, had a liberating effect. Simmel grew hard and fostered an aggressive, even theatrical nonconformity, as demonstrated onstrated in his untethered lecturing style and his free-wheeling prose. He chose to bite the hand that should have fed him, and refused to seek the favor of those who held the keys to his advancement. As German sociology turned away from philosophical models to quantitative methods, he remained defiantly out of step.
Around 1900, Simmel began to look more closely at his own marginalization and to take it as a subject of inquiry. What resulted was a sparkling kind of sociology as autobiography. Simmel assumed that raw experience was unself-conscious, akin to being afloat in infinite, unified space. Under stress, the pacific unity of self and world came undone. Forms emerged that divided consciousness from the external world. For example, in a sun-drenched Italian city, a walker strolled on the boulevard. Suddenly, amid the half-blinding glare, she was jolted out of her reveries by a passerby walking too close, cursing and muttering. Quickly she took hold over this frightening situation; it was a “madman.” That cognitive form immediately regulated her beliefs and actions. However, was that fellow actually mentally ill or just distracted, or drunk, or perhaps speaking Urdu? Simmel’s “fragmentary form,” like Lippmann’s stereotype, provided a swift answer. Forms came to our rescue, but they then could create problems as they locked in.
Simmel took pains to explore different “forms,” from the “leader” and the “miser” to the “prostitute” and the “stranger.” The last one remained closest to his heart. For Simmel, despite friendships with celebrities like Max Weber and Rainer Maria Rilke, remained on the periphery of his society. His unconventional writings had begun to slip into obscurity when an American student seized on this stranger’s work and revived it.
Robert Park was an unlikely conduit for fancy European philosophizing. Born in Harveyville, Pennsylvania, and raised in Minnesota, he was such a lousy student that his father, a grocer, initially refused to throw away money on college. The boy ran away and enrolled himself. After receiving his undergraduate degree, Park became a journalist and editor who wrote stories on the underclass, covering everything from their stoicism and courage to gambling rings and opium addiction. At the ripe age of thirty-five, he decided to go back to school. He studied philosophy at Harvard with Josiah Royce and William James before traveling to Berlin to pursue his doctorate. Park took several courses with Georg Simmel, before he completed a thesis in Heidelberg on problems of mass psychology.
As a former journalist, Park was well aware of the way in which the masses could be manipulated. While in Europe, he was shaken to learn of King Leopold’s genocide in the Congo. After returning home, he secured a position at Harvard, became the secretary of his local Congo Reform Association branch, and began to plot a trip to South Africa. Park reached out for advice to Booker T. Washington at the Tuskegee Institute and visited with him, only to realize that the situation with the “Negro” in the American South was not that different than in South Africa. When Washington offered him the opportunity to stay at Tuskegee, Park leapt at the chance. After seven years of field research, Park joined W. I. Thomas and others, to make the University of Chicago a powerhouse for the study of sociology.
One of the department’s founders, Albion Small, had translated Simmel and introduced him to readers of the American Journal of Sociology. Robert Park went further, merging Lippmann’s concept of the stereotype with Simmel’s notion of forms:
[E]very society had its own universe of discourse, and that is what Walter Lippmann means when he says that the public thinks only in stereotypes. There is, in fact, no other way in which the public can think. Where there is substantial agreement as to the categories, as there is bound to be in every stable society, there the status of every individual is defined by the class in which, by tradition or general consensus, he happens to find himself. The individual who is in no class at all is a pariah and an outlaw.
Stable stereotypes were ubiquitous, nearly invisible, and were the basis of social knowledge. However, as Simmel showed, turmoil fostered the need for new forms. With conflict, new winners and losers would emerge as would new stereotypes. The “Southern Negro,” after being freed from slavery, for example, was a “stranger.” Was he coming for our jobs, our women, our children, our identities? Was he coming for revenge? Fear incited the manufacturing of a new stereotype. This form would contain and manage those intense emotions. Social anxieties, according to Park, were codified and managed through emergent stereotypes, even as they divided up communities.
This especially applied to strangers. The stranger, according to Simmel, was the wanderer who came and then stayed. As such, he existed both within that collective’s prevailing beliefs and a bit beyond their reach. His point of view was privileged, for he could lucidly observe community assumptions and proclivities up close; however, thanks to his outsider status, he was free from demands to conform to those rules, rituals, and illusions. This was the stranger’s advantage: he could know what the insiders knew, but also what they had been compelled to ignore. He lived inside the law, but he was an outlaw.
In return for all that, Simmel argued, the stranger was treated with a double dose of suspicion and anger. For those whose individuality was constantly oppressed by the demands of the collective, the stranger’s freedom was enraging. His capacity for critical distance—the freedom to see when the emperor had no clothes—also made him a threat. For all this, he was stereotyped not just as odd, but also as irrational and a danger. This was the way that the “xénos” engendered a phobia. And the classic example of such an envied and dangerous stranger, Simmel suggested, was the European Jew.
Park expanded on this brilliant analysis. Worldwide immigration had deposited strangers in every port and polity. It had created a new kind of “marginal man.” This foreigner settled on society’s periphery, then, after the shock of arrival wore off, he would find himself in conflict. The marginal man would struggle to integrate two distinct sets of stereotypes from his old and new cultures. Global intermixing of this sort fostered the emergence of a “new type of personality,” the “cultural hybrid,” and it was precisely there, Park believed, that hope for the future resided. A new global civilization was quietly being born “in the mind of the marginal man.”
Of course, the old world resisted. In cultures where no integration was tolerated, the marginal man would need to hide. If hybridity brought with it a brew of bigotry, exclusion, and even violence, this creative mixing would be disrupted. In more open cultures, like in the welcoming lands of Latin America or Hawaii, Park argued, strangers married locals and their progeny openly forged new identities. In places where the old stereotypes strictly held, the stranger remained perpetually outside, a foreign body. Such a cultural refusal of passage was exemplified by the fate of European Jews and American Blacks.
With globalization, marginal men were omnipresent, as was the inner and outer conflict they might engender. W. E. B. Du Bois described this as “double consciousness,” where self-consciousness as an American and as a Black person were “two warring ideals in one dark body.” T. E. Lawrence also wrote of a battle waged between British stereotypes of the “Semitic mind” and Arab stereotypes of the British. “Sometimes,” he wrote, “these selves would converse in the void, and then madness was very near, as I believe it would be near the man who could see things through the veils at once of two systems, two educations, and two environments.”
DESPITE ITS easy integration with Köhler’s Gestalt psychology, the idea of the “stereotype” did not catch on in Europe, but over the next decades in the United States, journalists and critics used this notion to critique stock characters in plays and movies. Stereotypes were also said to be the cause of failures in international diplomacy and the unreliability of court witnesses. Most centrally, however, cartoonish depictions of African Americans, Jews, immigrants, and ethnic types were seen as socially toxic, in part responsible for race bias and class tensions, and rife in newspapers, magazines, cartoons, literature, cinema, theater, and marketing campaigns. Demeaning stereotypes were so common for Madison Avenue advertisers and mass journalism that they seemed essential to those domains. Aunt Jemima sold syrup and the Saturday Evening Post shamelessly trafficked in cartoons of dangerous immigrants. Meanwhile, Hollywood continued to sleepwalk. In 1930, the Hays Code forbade film depictions of interracial love, and nine years later, the largest-grossing film of all time, Gone With the Wind, was released. Based on a novel by Margaret Mitchell, an early devotee of Thomas Dixon’s novels of the South like The Clansman, Gone With the Wind originally included an explicit reference to the Ku Klux Klan riding to rescue Scarlet O’Hara. Through the intervention of the producer, that was deleted, and criticisms of the blatant stereotypes in the blockbuster movie were drowned out by wild applause.
However, a self-consciousness about stereotypes began to creep into American culture. The Harlem Renaissance commenced with a rejection of degraded and debased stereotypes. The dean of that cultural outpouring, Alain Locke, denounced Southern Reconstruction literature for its “stereotypes by which the Negro is still popularly known.” Locke helped foster notions of the cultured and refined “New Negro.” George Schuyler called out depictions of Aunt Jemima and Uncle Tom as a “composite stereotype.” Theater pieces now dismissed blackface and minstrel caricatures. Instead, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, and Countee Cullen shot to prominence by revealing a depth of character and complex subjectivity obscured by these crude forms.
At the same time, American immigrants began to find publishers for their own stories, ones that, by their depictions of complex individuality, often negated stereotypes. Fiction here took up its moral function, as readers encountered a stranger and, in a coming together on the page, became their intimates. Abraham Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky chronicled the travails of Jewish immigrants; Irish Americans found their struggles depicted in James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan trilogy. Stories of Norwegians in the Dakotas, Syrians in Brooklyn, Chinese on the West Coast, and Bohemians in Nebraska added to this mix. Often, these narratives featured bewildered foreigners who wrestled to make sense of the New World, alongside hosts who struggled with preconceptions about these aliens.
This same process of awakening and recognition was more difficult in film, for as the German playwright Bertolt Brecht noted, the inner life of characters in the movies took a back seat to actions and visual effects. In Europe, governments had already grasped the power of this new art form for not undercutting, but rather promoting, useful stereotypes. During World War I, the once sleepy German moviemaking industry grew tenfold; Vladimir Lenin pronounced film to be the most important art for the revolution; and Benito Mussolini handed the film industry to his brother, who was tasked with creating bombastic nationalistic epics. As World War II commenced, the American Office of War Information also looked to Hollywood. However, their task was different.
Facing a zealously anti-Semitic and racist enemy, the military recognized that these same fissures in American society posed a threat to the war effort. Their job was made trickier by Executive Order 9066, signed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt on February 19, 1942, which rounded up 112,000 Japanese, including 79,000 United States citizens, and placed them in internment camps. Though this order was upheld in the Supreme Court, Justice Frank Murphy noted “a melancholy resemblance to the treatment accorded the Jewish race in Germany.” Then there was the 1941 threat of a massive Negro March on Washington protesting Jim Crow discrimination, a spectacle quelled only after a horrified Roosevelt agreed to use an executive order to ban racial discrimination in defense industries. In 1942, former Republican presidential candidate Wendell Willkie delivered an address to the NAACP in which he called on moviemakers to take this opportunity to drop their African American stereotypes. A year later, before the Hollywood Writers’ Congress, the soon-to-be-blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo pointed out that the “most gigantic milestones of our appeal to public patronage have been the anti-Negro pictures, The Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind.” This homegrown legacy of race hatred muddied the moral waters and hurt the war effort against Hitler.
To remedy this, the Office of War Information enlisted the director Frank Capra, a hitmaker responsible for Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Capra’s first effort in a series called Why We Fight was a fifty-minute documentary called Prelude to War, which laid out the rise of race hatred in Germany, Italy, and Japan. Capra called on the authority of Moses, Mohammed, Confucius, and Christ, and claimed them all as foundations of American equality.
If, as Renan argued, it was in the very nature of nations to forget their own debacles, their enemies tended not to play by the same rules. Capra knew that America’s foes would seek to sow division by forcing American racism to the fore. To combat such German propaganda, Capra produced The Negro Soldier, in which he countered negative stereotypes and wove a heroic tale of African American patriots, from Crispus Attucks forward. African Americans were exhorted to enlist in the fight against Hitler, the monster who called them “half-monkeys.” Other films, like The House I Live In, starring Frank Sinatra, confronted American anti-Semites and reminded theater audiences that “the home of the free” was for all immigrants. While the United States positioned itself as the antithesis of German and Japanese racism, its propagandists sought to purify their nation of its past by pivoting against these dehumanizing stereotypes and promoting the “self-evident” truths enshrined in the Declaration of Independence.
These war efforts made a splash, but none matched the reception of a slim pamphlet called The Races of Mankind. The leaflet was written by two former students of Franz Boas, the anthropologists Ruth Benedict and Gene Weltfish. Professor Boas, after his takedown of racial science in London, had turned his studies toward the laws that governed cooperative societies. In the process, he helped move his field toward cultural anthropology. Much earlier, in 1871, Edward Tylor had argued that cultures came in three successive stages: primitive, barbaric, and civilized. Cultures therefore could evolve. Boas studied tribes who, by custom and myth, considered all strangers to be enemies, then changed:
We can trace the gradual broadening of the feeling of fellowship during the advance of civilization. The feeling of fellowship in the horde expands to the feeling of unity of the tribe, to the recognition of bonds established by a neighborhood of habitat, and further on to the feeling of fellowship among members of nations. This seems to be the limit of the ethical concept of fellowship of man which we have reached at the present time.
The Trobriand Islanders, who believed white men were ghosts, and the Germans who persecuted Jews for world domination were no different for Boas; both were culturally devolved. If human hordes first saw all strangers as enemies, once social units grew in size and diversity and began to act cooperatively, economic complexity and interdependence led to decreased hostility. Nonetheless, a primal abhorrence to strange hordes did not dissolve. It remained in what Boas called the “so-called race-instincts.” These hatreds—white against Black, Christian against Jew—were not really instincts but rather the mobilization of emotion so as to reinforce social cohesion. Whites hated Blacks so as to feel whiter. Cultural myths, repeated over and over—what Lippmann would call stereotypes—served the same function. If a tribe of islanders shared a myth that whites were from another planet, their bonds grew closer.
For over four decades, American anthropology was under the sway of Franz Boas and his wide network of anthropologists, luminaries who included African American Zora Neale Hurston and Native Americans Ella Deloria and William Jones, as well as Margaret Mead, Edward Sapir, and Ruth Benedict. For them, understanding the way that in-groups reviled outsiders, Boas concluded, was to be a central and critical task:
Most important of all, if we understand that the feeling of opposition to the stranger, which accompanies the feeling of solidarity of the nation, is the survival of the primitive feeling of specific differences, we are brought clearly face to face with those forces that will ultimately abolish warfare.…
And so it made sense that, during the war effort, two of Boas’s former students would be tapped to produce a seemingly rote bit of propaganda for schools, churches, and military personnel, targeting the destructive power of stereotyping strangers. “The World is Shrinking,” or so began The Races of Mankind. Thirty-five nations had formed one giant alliance against evil, thus proving that the planet was one great neighborhood. Eugenics and biological racism were lies. Yes, there were three different races—“white,” “yellow,” and “black”—but, no, they had no significant physical or mental differences. Inborn, national, or ethnic minds or characters were all just myths—that is, stereotypes.
This booklet was meant to unite Americans together in common cause, to be the anti-Nazis. Instead, it initially provoked outrage. For while ploddingly demonstrating the environmental influence on intelligence, the authors included a graph which showed that Northern Negroes scored substantially higher on IQ tests than Southern whites. Seeing this, Andrew May, a Kentucky congressman, blew his top. He denounced the whole effort and insisted that the United Service Organizations halt distribution. However, the ensuing brouhaha thrust the brochure into dinner-table conversations across the nation. Soon 750,000 people had spent a dime to take a look for themselves. The Races of Mankind was ultimately sent out to all soldiers through the Army Morale division. After that, it spawned a traveling exhibit, “Meet Your Relatives,” a musical, and even a film, “We Are All Brothers—What Do You Know About Race?”
The Races of Mankind, 1943
In 1946, an animated cartoon inspired by the booklet was funded by the United Auto Workers. Cowritten by Ring Lardner Jr., The Brotherhood of Man was a charming short. It told of a tubby, white suburbanite who woke from a dream in which exotic foreigners were camped in his yard. When he rubbed his eyes and looked outside, he found his dream had come true. Camped out on his front lawn were an African, a Chinese, a Mexican, an Arab, and others. Delighted by his new neighbors, this welcoming American strolls past an igloo, a windmill, a tepee, and a pagoda. He is thrilled for, as the voice-over informs us, our future depends on brotherhood. Suddenly a green silhouette appears: “We can’t get along with those people,” it says; they are “too different.” Swiftly, each foreigner succumbs to the same mistrust. They all begin to thump each other. Why? a calm voice asks from above. “Because we are all so different,” the quarrelers cry in unison. Really? the omniscient narrator replies, before pitching into a lecture on the wrongheaded racial stereotypes that led them down this dangerous road. Under different skin colors and rounder or pointier noses, human brains, blood, and physical capacities differed as much within racial groups as between them.
As World War II raged on, the War Department produced perhaps its most powerful attack yet on stereotypes and the way they stoked xenophobia. Don’t Be a Sucker opens with a series of con jobs—a fake wrestling match, a card-game hustle—before cutting to a commuter on his way home. Climbing down from the train, this dapper, young man pauses before a soapbox orator. This red-faced fellow has called for an America for “American Americans,” a country without “Negroes, alien foreigners, Catholics, and … Freemasons.” The sucker has been nodding eagerly in agreement, until this agitator denounces the Freemasons. “What?” he mumbles. “Why, I am a Freemason!” The commuter then falls into conversation with a German refugee, a former professor who had lectured on the myths of race until Nazi soldiers hauled him off. America, the refugee reminds Joe Normal, is made up of many ethnicities, many colors, many religions, all free. That dies, he warns, when demagogues use stereotypes to divide us.
In the war against Nazism, American film—without much sense of irony—both cautioned against stereotyping and banked on it. For Hollywood was cranking out melodramas that relied heavily on stereotypes of our enemies. In The North Star, Bataan, Winged Victory, The Purple Heart, The Fighting Seabees, Objective Burma, and Betrayal from the East, Germans and Japanese were often depicted as animals. However, in a testament to the growing force of those who morally opposed all stereotyping, some dared to make this point.
The most courageous voice to rise from this clamor was James Agee. Raised in the Episcopal Church, Agee lost his God but not his acute sense of the fallen ways of mankind. After attending Harvard, this poet turned to journalism, and in 1936 he was commissioned to travel with the photographer Walker Evans to document the lives of impoverished Southern tenant farmers. Tormented by his self-serving desire to use their stories, troubled by his failure to grasp another in full, acutely aware of his Harvard heritage and privilege, Agee shared his agonies in his 1941 masterpiece, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. He and Evans were “quite monstrously alien human beings, in the employment of still others still more alien.…” Of one of his mostly forgotten subjects, he wrote: “It is that he exists, in actual being, as you do and as I do, and as no character of the imagination can possibly exist. His great weight, mystery, and dignity are in this fact.”
Agee was not without his blind spots; this film buff somehow defended the artistry of D. W. Griffith. As a wartime film reviewer for The Nation, though, he also brought an exquisite sensitivity to the responsibilities and risks of representing others. An avowed patriot and anti-Fascist, he often approved of war movies since they brought the cost of war closer to home. However, he began to sicken before screenings of films like This Land Is Mine, The Moon Is Down, and Hangmen Also Die. In The Fighting Seabees, the Japanese were depicted as “subhuman.” The People’s Avenger was simply barbaric and could never be forgiven for jovial remarks about dragging a “frantically abject German soldier” to his doom. Another film elicited roars that Agee called “cheerfully bestial.” “When you can make such a picture or watch it with untroubled approval,” he concluded, “some crucially important moral nerve has, I believe, gone dead in you.”
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee. Photograph by Walker Evans
Stereotypes numbed, and this diminishment of human feeling could lead to the killing floor. War was driven by national and racial stereotypes that dehumanized strangers and made their destruction necessary. After 1945, many used Walter Lippmann’s concept to decry caricatures of African Americans as violent, Jews as stingy, Irish as drunks, and Mexicans as lazy. Stereotypes ranged from the relatively innocuous to the homicidal. What’s more, even after the great victory over the Axis powers, they remained a terrible problem. After the war, a leader of American academic psychology, Harvard’s Gordon Allport, threw himself into research on prejudice. Biases were sustained by “stereotypes,” he argued, those “exaggerated beliefs associated with a category,” whose function is “to justify (rationalize) our conduct in relation to that category.” Based on extensive field research, Allport estimated that nearly 80 percent of his countrymen led mental lives driven by stereotypes. If that was so, and if stereotypes killed off one’s moral nerves, America was a land filled with the walking dead.