World War and Early Modern Communication Research
Psychological warfare is not new, of course. It is a modern coalescence and development of very old methods. Some of the earliest human civilizations used symbols, masks, and totems as instruments of power,1 and the ancient Chinese military philosopher Sun Tzu documented the use of relatively sophisticated “psychological” tactics in both warfare and civil administration as early as the fifth century B.C.E.2 Closer to home, the native peoples of North America have a strong tradition of using symbols and ceremony to cement tribal morale and (more rarely) to terrify rivals that was established well before the European invasion.3 Similarly, European settlers in American made extensive use of propaganda tailored to various audiences, guerrilla warfare, and terror during the revolt against England,4 the Mexican War,5 the U.S. Civil War,6 and the long campaign to wrest control of the continent from indigenous peoples.
But it was not until World War I that the U.S. government institutionalized and employed psychological warfare in its modern sense. In 1917, President Woodrow Wilson appointed George Creel to lead an elite Committee of Public Information made up of the U.S. secretaries of war, navy, and state. As Harold Lasswell wrote, Creel’s new office was “the equivalent of appointing a separate cabinet minister for propaganda … responsible for every aspect of propaganda work, both at home and abroad.”7 President Wilson played a surprisingly strong personal role in devising U.S. psychological operations of his day, reviewing Creel’s proposals for operations and even revising the galley proofs of propaganda pamphlets prior to their distribution.8 The U.S. War Department meanwhile established a small psychological warfare subsection within the intelligence division of the War Department General Staff, and a parallel propaganda section under the general headquarters of the U.S. Expeditionary Forces in Europe.9
Much of the bureaucratic momentum for psychological warfare dissipated in the wake of the war, however. The War Department disbanded its psychological and propaganda sections in 1918, shortly after the Allied victory. The Creel committee dissolved in 1919, ending virtually all formal coordination of U. S. overseas propaganda efforts for the next twenty years. By the time the United States entered World War II in 1941, there was only one officer in the U.S. War Department General Staff who had had psychological warfare experience.10
In the United States, the psychological warfare projects of World War I left their strongest legacy in academic circles, particularly in the then embryonic field of communication research. Harold Lasswell’s 1926 dissertation entitled “Propaganda Technique in the World War” examined the belligerents’ propaganda programs as case studies in persuasive communication, exploring wide-ranging concepts such as political communication strategies, audience psychology, and manipulation of symbols. Similarly, Walter Lippmann based his two keystone texts, Public Opinion (1922)12 and The Phantom Public (1925),13 largely on his wartime experiences as chief leaflet writer and editor of a U.S. propaganda unit with the American Expeditionary Forces, and as secretary of The Inquiry, a prototypical U.S. intelligence agency organized by President Wilson to support the U.S. negotiating team in Paris.14
Both works investigated the impact of the new phenomenon of genuinely mass communication on Western industrial society. Both revealed the complex and often paradoxical relationship between mass communication and the professed values of democracies. Lasswell and Lippmann argued that new technologies for communication and transportation had awakened millions of disenfranchised people to a world outside their factories and villages, but that the traditional economic, political, and social structures that had shaped life during the nineteenth century remained in place. This led to potential explosions, as Lasswell and Lippmann saw things, including the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 and the wave of labor rebellions that swept through Europe and the United States in the wake of World War I.
Lippmann’s career during these years illustrates a phenomenon that was to become much more common in the aftermath of World War II: He was an intellectual who shaped psychological strategy during the war itself, and then helped integrate that experience into the social sciences once most of the shooting was over. Lippmann’s highly influential concept of the “stereotype,” for example, contended that new communication and transportation technologies had created a “world that we have to deal with politically [that is] out of reach, out of sight, out of mind.” The “pictures in our heads” of this world—the stereotypes—“are acted upon by groups of people, or by individuals acting in the name of groups.”15 The complexity and pace of the new world that Lippmann envisaged, together with the seeming ease with which stereotypes could be manipulated for political ends, led him to conclude that “representative government … cannot be worked successfully, no matter what the basis of election, unless there is an independent, expert organization for making the unseen facts [of the new world] intelligible to those who have to make the decisions.”16 The converse of that proposition was that decision makers had a responsibility to repair the “defective organization of public opinion,” as Lippmann put it, in the interests of social efficiency and the greater good. These concepts, first introduced in Public Opinion, are illustrated throughout that text with references to Lippmann’s wartime experiences as a propagandist and intelligence specialist.
Persuasive communication aimed at largely disenfranchised masses became central to Lippmann’s strategy for domestic government and international relations. He saw mass communication as a major source of the modern crisis and as a necessary instrument for any managing elite. The social sciences offered tools that could make administration of what would otherwise be highly unstable social structures relatively rational and effective, he contended. In an era when methods of social supervision in industrial societies still mainly consisted of guns and policemen’s clubs, many academics and intellectuals hailed Lippmann’s insights as enlightened and humane.17
Lasswell extended the idea, giving it a Machiavellian twist. He emphasized employing persuasive media and selectively using assassinations, violence, and other coercion as means of “communicating” with and managing disenfranchised people. He advocated what he regarded as “scientific” application of persuasion and precise violence, in contrast to bludgeon tactics. “Propaganda [has attained] eminence as the one means of mass mobilization which is cheaper than violence, bribery and other possible control techniques,” he wrote in 1933, adding that “successful social and political management often depends on proper coordination of propaganda with coercion, violent or non-violent; economic inducement (including bribery); diplomatic negotiation; and other techniques.”18 “Propaganda must be coordinated with information and espionage services which can supply material to the propagandists and report progress of propaganda work. That propaganda can be effectively correlated with diplomatic, military and economic pressures was abundantly demonstrated during the [First] World War.”19
Lasswell understood that communication is intimately bound up with social order. Looked at dialectically, human communication and various forms of social order seem to define one another, to establish one another’s boundaries; they probably cannot exist in isolation from one another. In this sense, communication might be understood as both the conduit for and the actual substance of human culture and consciousness.
Both the concept and the term “communication” had evolved from a far richer tradition than the cramped model offered by Lippmann and Lasswell. Etymologists say the word entered the English language around the fourteenth century, derived from the Latin com (literally “together”) and munia (“duties”), meaning “the sharing of burdens.”20 In this traditional vision, communication, to the extent it was articulated, was seen as a process of sharing with others (through cultural interchange, ceremony, commerce, etc.) within any particular social context, as distinct from existing primarily as a medium for giving directions. That understanding of communication’s root meaning can also be seen in related terms—community, commune, communion, and so on. Any society’s distribution of its “burdens” may vary greatly from another’s, of course, and there is little assurance that “sharing” is necessarily equitable. But the dialectical link between the collective, interactive attributes of communication and the attributes of any given social order seems to remain steady, even in very different societies.
Lippmann and Lasswell articulated a very narrow vision that substituted, for communication as such, one manifestation of communication that is particularly pronounced in hierarchical industrial states. Put most bluntly, they contended that communication’s essence was its utility as an instrument for imposing one’s will on others, and preferably on masses of others. This instrumentalist conception of communication was consistent with their experience of war and with emerging mass communication technologies of the day, which in turn reflected and to an extent embodied the existing social order.
For Lasswell, the study of all social communication could be reduced to “who says what to whom with what effect”—a dictum that is practically inscribed in stone over the portals of those U.S. colleges offering communication as a field of study. This was a seemingly simple, logical approach to analysis of communication, but it carried with it sweeping implications. Lippmann and Lasswell’s articulation of communication-as-domination permitted a significant step forward in applying a positivist scientific method to the study of social communication. Positivism has traditionally been based in part on taking complex, unmeasurable phenomena and breaking them up into discrete parts, measuring those parts, and bit by bit building up a purportedly objective understanding of the phenomenon as a whole. Its early applications in the social sciences in the United States had been pioneered at the University of Chicago, Columbia University, and other academic centers.
New measurement techniques of this sort often have substantial impact on society outside of academe, however. In this case, Lasswell’s formulation dovetailed so closely with emerging commercial and political forces in the United States that his slogan became the common wisdom among U.S. social scientists almost overnight. By reducing communication to the Lasswellian model of who says what, et cetera, it became possible for the first time to systematically isolate and measure those aspects of communication that were of greatest relevance to powerful groups in U.S. society.
The power of Lasswell’s model (and its many derivatives) began with its ability to help create commercially viable products and services. It went beyond that, however, to permit supplanting and often suppressing rival visions of what social communication is or could be. Here’s how: For mass consumer societies to establish and maintain themselves, it seems to be necessary for media to have the capacity to sell the attention of mass audiences to advertisers, who use that attention to promote their goods and services. To do that successfully, media organizations must have some means for measuring “popular attention” (and similar indices) in order to effectively market their services to potential advertisers. Lasswell’s model and the various methodological innovations associated with it—which were introduced by Frank Stanton, Paul Lazarsfeld, Hadley Cantril, and others21—provided the necessary conceptual foundation for measurement of the services media sell to their customers.
From the advertisers’ point of view, however, the simple sale of products and services is not enough. Their commercial success in a mass market depends to an important degree on their ability to substitute their values and worldview for those previously held by their audience, typically through seduction and deflection of rival worldviews. Automobile marketers, for example, do not simply tout their products for their usefulness as transportation; they seek to convince their customers to define their personal goals, self-esteem, and values in terms of owning or using the product. In mass consumer societies many customers do not simply purchase commodities; they instead eventually become them, literally and figuratively.
Put another way, early modern communication research often presented the de facto voicelessness of ordinary people—voicelessness in all fields other than selection of commodities, that is—as though it was communication itself. Terms like “Pepsi Generation,” “Heartbeat of America,” and “I Love What You Do for Me” (to cite modern examples) have always been more than simple advertising slogans. They have been successful from the advertisers’ point of view only to the extent they have defined a way of life.
Thus the (professed) ability to measure mass media messages and the responses they trigger became one necessary prerequisite to a much broader social shift, a shift in which modern consumer culture displaced existing social forms. That process, moreover, consistently has been marked by great violence, frequently including genocide, as the “modern” world overwhelms indigenous cultures and peoples.
The mainstream paradigm of communication studies in the United States—its techniques, body of knowledge, institutional structure, and so on—evolved symbiotically with modern consumer society generally, and particularly with media industries and those segments of the economy most dependent on mass markets.22 Communication research in America has historically proved itself by going beyond simply observing media behavior to finding ways to grease the skids for absorption and suppression of rival visions of communication and social order.
Clearly, social communication necessarily involves a balancing of conflicting forces. A “community,” after all, cannot exist without some form of social order; or, put another way, order defines the possible means of sharing burdens. Lass well and Lippmann, however, advocated not just order in an abstract sense, but rather a particular social order in the United States and the world in which forceful elites necessarily ruled in the interests of their vision of the greater good. U.S.-style consumer democracy was simply a relatively benign system for engineering mass consent for the elites’ authority; it could be dispensed with when ordinary people reached the “wrong” conclusions. Lasswell writes that the spread of literacy
did not release the masses from ignorance and superstition but altered the nature of both and compelled the development of a whole new technique of control, largely through propaganda.… [A propagandist’s] regard for men rests on no democratic dogmatisms about men being the best judges of their own interests. The modern propagandist, like the modern psychologist, recognizes that men are often poor judges of their own interests.… [Those with power must cultivate] sensitiveness to those concentrations of motive which are implicit and available for rapid mobilization when the appropriate symbol is offered.… [The propagandist is] no phrasemonger but a promoter of overt acts.23
Lasswell and Lippmann favored relatively tolerant, pluralistic societies in which elite rule protected democracies from their own weaknesses—a modern form of noblesse oblige, so to speak. But the potential applications of the communication-as-domination zeitgeist extended far beyond the purposes that they would have personally approved. Nazi intellectuals in Germany proved to be instrumental in many aspects of communication studies throughout the 1930s, both as innovators of successful techniques and as spurs to communication studies outside of Germany intended to counteract the Nazi party’s apparent success with propaganda. Josef Goebbels’ work in social manipulation via radio, film, and other media is well known.24 On a more academic plane, a bright young security service agent, Otto Ohlendorf, established a German research center known as the Deutsche Lebensgebiete in 1939 to apply new tools such as opinion surveys to the problem of determining who said what to whom with what effect inside Hitler’s Germany. He was successful, on the whole, and his performance at the Deutsche Lebensgebiete laid the foundation for his later career as commandant of SS Einsatzgruppe D in the Caucasus, where he organized the murder of ninety thousand people, most of them Jewish women and children.25 Ohlendorf’s principal sponsor and mentor was a leading SS intellectual, Dr. Reinhard Hoehn of the Institute for State Research at the University of Berlin, who emerged after the war as one of Germany’s most prominent experts on question of public opinion and the state.26 Several other leading German mass communication and public opinion specialists contributed their skills to Nazi publicity and opinion-monitoring projects. Notable among them was Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, who began her career at the Goebbels intellectual journal Das Reich and eventually emerged as one of Europe’s most celebrated communication theorists.27
“Worldview Warfare” and World War II
During the second half of the 1930s, the Rockefeller Foundation underwrote much of the most innovative communication research then under way in the United States. There was virtually no federal support for the social sciences at the time, and corporate backing for the field usually remained limited to proprietary marketing studies. The foundation’s administrators believed, however, that mass media constituted a uniquely powerful force in modern society, reports Brett Gary,28 and financed a new project on content analysis for Harold Lasswell at the Library of Congress, Hadley Cantril’s Public Opinion Research Project at Princeton University, the establishment of Public Opinion Quarterly at Princeton, Douglas Waples’ newspaper and reading studies at the University of Chicago, Paul Lazarsfeld’s Office of Radio Research at Columbia University, and other important programs.
As war approached, the Rockefeller Foundation clearly favored efforts designed to find a “democratic prophylaxis” that could immunize the United States’ large immigrant population from the effects of Soviet and Axis propaganda. In 1939, the foundation organized a series of secret seminars with men it regarded as leading communication scholars to enlist them in an effort to consolidate public opinion in the United States in favor of war against Nazi Germany—a controversial proposition opposed by many conservatives, religious leaders, and liberals at the time—and to articulate a reasonably clear-cut set of ideological and methodological preconceptions for the emerging field of communication research.29
Harold Lasswell, who had the ear of foundation administrator John Marshall at these gatherings, over the next two years won support for a theory that seemed to resolve the conflict between the democratic values that are said to guide U.S. society, on the one hand, and the manipulation and deceit that often lay at the heart of projects intended to engineer mass consent, on the other. Briefly, the elite of U.S. society (“those who have money to support research,” as Lasswell bluntly put it) should systematically manipulate mass sentiment in order to preserve democracy from threats posed by authoritarian societies such as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union.
One Rockefeller seminar participant, Donald Slesinger (former dean of the school of social science at the University of Chicago), blasted Lass well’s claims as using a democratic guise to tacitly accept the objectives and methods of a new form of authoritarianism. “We [the Rockefeller seminar] have been willing, without thought, to sacrifice both truth and human individuality in order to bring about given mass responses to war stimuli,” Slesinger contended. “We have thought in terms of fighting dictatorships-by-force through the establishment of dictatorship-by-manipulation.”30 Slesinger’s view enjoyed some support from other participants and from Rockefeller Foundation officers such as Joseph Willits, who criticized what he described as authoritarian or even fascist aspects of Lasswell’s arguments. Despite this resistance, the social polarization created by the approaching war strongly favored Lasswell, and in the end he enjoyed substantial new funding and an expanded staff courtesy of the foundation. Slesinger drifted away from the Rockefeller seminars and appears to have rapidly lost influence within the community of academic communication specialists.
World War II spurred the emergence of psychological warfare as a particularly promising new form of applied communication research. The personal, social, and scientific networks established in U.S. social sciences during World War II, particularly among communication researchers and social psychologists, later played a central role in the evolution (or “social construction”) of U.S. sociology after the war. A detailed discussion of U.S. psychological operations during World War II is of course outside the scope of this book. There is a large literature on the subject, which is discussed briefly in the Bibliographic Essay at the end of this text. A few points are worth mentioning, however, to introduce some of the personalities and concepts that would later play a prominent role in psychological operations and communication studies after 1945.
The phrase “psychological warfare” is reported to have first entered English in 1941 as a translated mutation of the Nazi term Weltanschauungskrieg (literally, worldview warfare), meaning the purportedly scientific application of propaganda, terror, and state pressure as a means of securing an ideological victory over one’s enemies.31 William “Wild Bill” Donovan, then director of the newly established U.S. intelligence agency Office of Strategic Services (OSS), viewed an understanding of Nazi psychological tactics as a vital source of ideas for “Americanized” versions of many of the same stratagems. Use of the new term quickly became widespread throughout the U.S. intelligence community. For Donovan psychological warfare was destined to become a full arm of the U.S. military, equal in status to the army, navy, and air force.32
Donovan was among the first in the United States to articulate a more or less unified theory of psychological warfare. As he saw it, the “engineering of consent” techniques used in peacetime propaganda campaigns could be quite effectively adapted to open warfare. Pro-Allied propaganda was essential to reorganizing the U.S. economy for war and for creating public support at home for intervention in Europe, Donovan believed. Fifth-column movements could be employed abroad as sources of intelligence and as morale-builders for populations under Axis control. He saw “special operations”—meaning sabotage, subversion, commando raids, and guerrilla movements—as useful for softening up targets prior to conventional military assaults. “Donovan’s concept of psychological warfare was all-encompassing,” writes Colonel Alfred Paddock, who has specialized in this subject for the U.S. Army War College. “Donovan’s visionary dream was to unify these functions in support of conventional (military) unit operations, thereby forging a ‘new instrument of war.’”33
Donovan, a prominent Wall Street lawyer and personal friend of Franklin Roosevelt, convinced FDR to establish a central, civilian intelligence agency that would gather foreign intelligence, coordinate analysis of information relevant to the war, and conduct propaganda and covert operations both at home and abroad. In July 1941 FDR created the aptly named Office of the Coordinator of Information, placing Donovan in charge.34
But that ambitious plan soon foundered on the rocks of Washington’s bureaucratic rivalries. By early 1942 the White House split the “white” (official) propaganda functions into a new agency, which eventually became the Office of War Information (OWI), while Donovan reorganized the intelligence, covert action, and “black” (unacknowledgeable) propaganda functions under deeper secrecy as the OSS. Officially, the new OSS was subordinate to the military leadership of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but the relationship between the military and the civilian OSS was never smooth. Donovan frequently used his personal relationship with FDR to sidestep the military’s efforts to restrict the OSS’s growing influence.35
Similar innovations soon spread through other military branches, usually initiated by creative outsiders from the worlds of journalism or commerce who saw “psychological” techniques as a means to sidestep entrenched military bureaucracies and enhance military performance. Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy, a longtime Wall Street colleague of Donovan, established a small, highly secret Psychologic Branch within the War Department General Staff G-2 (Intelligence) organization. (McCloy is probably better known today for his later work as U.S. high commissioner of Germany, chairman of the Chase Bank, member of the Warren Commission, and related posts).36 McCloy’s Psychologic Branch was reorganized several times, briefly folded in the OSS, shifted back to military control, and renamed at least twice. The Joint Chiefs meanwhile established a series of high-level interagency committees intended to coordinate U.S. psychological operations in the field, including those of the relatively small Psychological Warfare Branches attached to the headquarters staffs of U.S. military commanders in each theater of war. If this administrative structure was not confusing enough, the psychological warfare branch attached to Eisenhower’s command in Europe soon grew into a Psychological Warfare Division totaling about 460 men and women.37
These projects helped define U.S. social science and mass communication studies long after the war had drawn to a close. Virtually all of the scientific community that was to emerge during the 1950s as leaders in the field of mass communication research spent the war years performing applied studies on U.S. and foreign propaganda, Allied troop morale, public opinion (both domestic and international), clandestine OSS operations, or the then emerging technique of deriving useful intelligence from analysis of newspapers, magazines, radio broadcasts, and postal censorship intercepts.
The day-to-day war work of U.S. psychological warfare specialists varied considerably. DeWitt Poole—a State Department expert in anticommunist propaganda who had founded Public Opinion Quarterly while on sabbatical at Princeton before the war—became the chief of the Foreign Nationalities Branch of the OSS. There he led OSS efforts to recruit suitable agents from immigrant communities inside the United States, to monitor civilian morale, and to analyze foreign-language publications for nuggets of intelligence. Sociologists and anthropologists such as Alexander Leighton and Margaret Mead concentrated on identifying schisms in Japanese culture suitable for exploitation in U.S. radio broadcasts in Asia, while Samuel Stouffer’s Research Branch of the U.S. Army specialized in ideological indoctrination of U.S. troops. Hadley Cantril meanwhile adapted survey research techniques to the task of clandestine intelligence collection, including preparations for the U.S. landing in North Africa.38
There were six main U.S. centers of psychological warfare and related studies during the conflict. Several of these centers went through name changes and reorganizations in the course of the war, but they can be summarized as follows: (1) Samuel Stouffer’s Research Branch of the U.S. Army’s Division of Morale; (2) the Office of War Information (OWI) led by Elmer Davis and its surveys division under Elmo Wilson; (3) the Psychological Warfare Division (PWD) of the U.S. Army, commanded by Brigadier General Robert McClure; (4) the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) led by William Donovan; (5) Rensis Likert’s Division of Program Surveys at the Department of Agriculture, which provided field research personnel in the United States for the army, OWI, Treasury Department, and other government agencies; and (6) Harold Lasswell’s War Communication Division at the Library of Congress.
Dozens of prominent social scientists participated in the war through these organizations, in some cases serving in two or more groups in the course of the conflict. The OWI, for example, employed Elmo Roper (of the Roper survey organization), Leonard Doob (Yale), Wilbur Schramm (University of Illinois and Stanford), Alexander Leighton (Cornell), Leo Lowenthal (Institut für Sozialforschung and University of California), Hans Speier (RAND Corp.), Nathan Leites (RAND), Edward Barrett (Columbia), and Clyde Kluckhohn (Harvard), among others.39 (The institutions in parentheses simply indicate the affiliations for which these scholars may be best known.) OWI simultaneously extended contracts for communications research and consulting to Paul Lazarsfeld, Hadley Cantril, Frank Stanton, George Gallup, and to Rensis Likert’s team at the Agriculture Department.40 OWI contracting also provided much of the financial backbone for the then newly founded National Opinion Research Center.41
In addition to his OWI work, Nathan Leites also served as Lasswell’s senior research assistant at the Library of Congress project, as did Heinz Eulau (Stanford).42 Other prominent contributors to the Lasswell project included Irving Janis (Yale) and the young Ithiel de Sola Pool (MIT), who, with Leites, had already begun systematic content analysis of communist publications long before the war was over.43 Lasswell’s Library of Congress project is widely remembered today as the foundation of genuinely systematic content analysis in the United States.44
At the Army’s Psychological Warfare Division, some prominent staffers were William S. Paley (CBS), C. D. Jackson (Time/Life), W. Phillips Davison (RAND and Columbia), Saul Padover (New School for Social Research), John W. Riley (Rutgers), Morris Janowitz (Institut fur Sozialforschung and University of Michigan), Daniel Lerner (MIT and Stanford), Edward Shils (University of Chicago), and New York attorney Murray Gurfein (later co-author with Janowitz), among others.45 Of these, Davison, Padover, Janowitz, and Gurfein were OSS officers assigned to the Psychological Warfare Division to make use of their expertise in communication and German social psychology.46 Other prominent OSS officers who later contributed to the social sciences include Howard Becker (University of Wisconsin), Alex Inkeles (Harvard), Walter Langer (University of Wisconsin), Douglas Cater (Aspen Institute), and of course Herbert Marcuse (Institut fur Sozialforschung and New School).47 OSS wartime contracting outside the government included arrangements for paid social science research by Stanford, the University of California at Berkeley, Columbia, Princeton, Yale’s Institute of Human Relations, and the National Opinion Research Center, which was then at the University of Denver.48 Roughly similar lists of social scientists and scholarly contractors can be discovered at each of the government’s centers of wartime communications and public opinion research.49
The practical significance of these social linkages has been explored by social psychologist John A. Clausen, who is a veteran of Samuel Stouffer’s Research Branch. Clausen made a systematic study during the early 1980s of the postwar careers of his former colleagues who had gone into the fields of public opinion research, sociology, and psychology.50 Some twenty-five of twenty-seven veterans who could be located responded to his questionnaire; of these, twenty-four reported that their wartime work had had “lasting implications” and “a major influence on [their] subsequent career.” Clausen quotes the reply of psychologist Nathan Maccoby (Stanford): “The Research Branch not only established one of the best old-boy (or girl) networks ever, but an alumnus of the Branch had an open door to most relevant jobs and career lines. We were a lucky bunch.” Nearly three-fifths of the respondents indicated that the Research Branch experience “had a major influence on the direction or character of their work in the decade after the war,” Clausen continues, “and all but three of the remainder indicated a substantial influence.… [F]ully three-fourths reported the Branch experience to have been a very important influence on their careers as a whole.”51
Respondents stressed two reasons for this enduring impact. First, the wartime experience permitted young scholars to closely work with recognized leaders in the field—Samuel Stouffer, Leonard Cottrell, Carl Hovland, and others—as well as with civilian consultants such as Paul Lazarsfeld, Louis Guttman, and Robert Merton. In effect, the Army’s Research Branch created an extraordinary postgraduate school with obvious scholarly benefits for both “students” and the seasoned “professors.”
Second, the common experience created a network of professional contacts that almost all respondents to the survey found to be very valuable in their subsequent careers. They tapped these contacts later for professional opportunities and for project funding, according to Clausen. “Perhaps most intriguing” in this regard, Clausen writes,
was the number of our members who became foundation executives. Charles Dollard became president of Carnegie. Donald Young shifted from the presidency of SSRC [Social Science Research Council] to that of Russell Sage, where he ultimately recruited Leonard Cottrell. Leland DeVinney went from Harvard to the Rockefeller Foundation. William McPeak … helped set up the Ford Foundation and became its vice president. W. Parker Mauldin became vice president of the Population Council. The late Lyle Spencer [of Science Research Associates] … endowed a foundation that currently supports a substantial body of social science research.52
There was a somewhat similar sociometric effect among veterans of OWI propaganda projects. OWI’s overseas director Edward Barrett points out that old-boy networks rooted in common wartime experiences in psychological warfare extended well beyond the social sciences. “Among OWI alumni,” he wrote in 1953, are
the publishers of Time, Look, Fortune, and several dailies; editors of such magazines as Holiday, Coronet, Parade, and the Saturday Review, editors of the Denver Post. New Orleans Times-Picayune, and others; the heads of the Viking Press, Harper & Brothers, and Farrar, Straus and Young; two Hollywood Oscar winners; a two-time Pulitzer prizewinner; the board chairman of CBS and a dozen key network executives; President Eisenhower’s chief speech writer; the editor of Reader’s Digest international editions; at least six partners of large advertising agencies; and a dozen noted social scientists.53
Barrett himself went on to become chief of the U.S. government’s overt psychological warfare effort from 1950 to 1952 and later dean of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and founder of the Columbia Journalism Review.54
It is wise to be cautious in evaluating the political significance of these networks, of course. Obviously Herbert Marcuse drew quite different political conclusions from his experience than did, say, Harold Lasswell, and it is well known that even some of the once closely knit staff of the Institut fur Sozialforschung who emigrated to the United States eventually clashed bitterly over political issues during the cold war.55 Nevertheless, the common experience of wartime psychological warfare work became one step in a process through which various leaders in the social sciences engaged one another in tacit alliances to promote their particular interpretations of society. Their wartime experiences contributed substantially to the construction of a remarkably tight circle of men and women who shared several important conceptions about mass communication research. They regarded mass communication as a tool for social management and as a weapon in social conflict, and they expressed common assumptions concerning the usefulness of quantitative research—particularly experimental and quasi-experimental effects research, opinion surveys, and quantitative content analysis—as a means of illuminating what communication “is” and improving its application to social management. They also demonstrated common attitudes toward at least some of the ethical questions intrinsic to performing applied social research on behalf of a government. The Clausen study strongly suggests that at Stouffer’s Research Branch, at least, World War II psychological warfare work established social networks that opened doors to crucial postwar contacts inside the government, funding agencies, and professional circles. Barrett’s comments concerning the Psychological Warfare Division suggest a similar pattern there. As will be discussed in more depth in the next chapter, the various studies prepared by these scientists during the war—always at government expense and frequently involving unprecedented access to human research subjects—also created vast new data bases of social information that would become the raw material from which a number of influential postwar social science careers would be built.