4

Academic Advocates

Looked at with the benefit of hindsight and what came to light during the Watergate-related investigations, the pages of Public Opinion Quarterly during the first decade after World War II illustrate several important features of the alliance that emerged after 1945 between a select group of academic entrepreneurs and the government’s psychological warfare agencies. POQ had been founded in 1937 at Princeton University by DeWitt Poole, who was at that time on sabbatical from the U.S. State Department division responsible for eastern European affairs.

POQ’s work during the postwar years reflects Poole’s concerns, revealing at least three characteristics of U.S. propaganda and covert operations. First, many of the journal’s articles explicitly discussed American experience in psychological warfare, presented relevant research results, or advocated expanded U.S. programs of this type. POQ articles exhibiting this relatively unambiguous characteristic were often indexed under “psychological warfare” or “propaganda,” or both, in POQ’s annual index.1

Second and usually more subtly, a substantial number of articles targeted POQ’s own audience for persuasion concerning the appropriateness of U.S. intervention abroad, the emerging cold war, and the proper role of mass communication research professionals in those efforts. Such articles frequently took the form of extended reviews of books concerning foreign affairs.²

Finally, a number of the journal’s editors and contributors maintained unusually close relations with the clandestine or “denied” side of the U.S. government’s psychological warfare effort at the Department of State, CIA, and the armed services. In fact, at least one-third of POQ’s editorial board can be identified today as financially dependent upon psychological warfare contracting.3

POQ’s explicit articles concerning psychological warfare can be readily identified by their language and their themes. For example, during 1945 POQ published a report on the use of polling techniques to obtain military intelligence on the island of Saipan,⁴ a review of the work of the principal U.S. domestic propaganda agency, the OWI;⁵ a discussion of the use of opinion polls among Japanese nationals to determine effective propaganda themes;⁶ and an argument in favor of intensifying U.S. propaganda against communism in Latin America.⁷ A similar pattern continued for the remainder of the decade. A complete list of POQ’s explicit articles concerning psychological warfare would become tedious, but representative examples published between 1945 and 1949 include two further studies of the OWI,⁸ seven reports on the dynamics of German civilian and military morale during World War II and on Allied attempts to influence it,⁹ three case studies of the use of leaflets and postcards as propaganda vehicles,¹⁰ six essays concerning morale and training programs among U.S. troops,¹¹ at least twelve reviews of books on wartime propaganda and psychological warfare,¹² and more than fifteen studies on various aspects of U.S. and Soviet propaganda and psychological warfare campaigns.¹³

Despite the volume of this material, and the frequent use of the terms “propaganda” and “psychological warfare” in POQ’s headlines and texts, the journal’s authors were unable to arrive at any clear definition of exactly what was meant by those words. Terms like communication, propaganda, and psychological warfare meant quite different things to different people, even among experts in the field.

This was illustrated in Leo Crespi’s 1946 review of Propaganda, Communication and Public Opinion: A Comprehensive Reference Guide, by Bruce Lannes Smith, Harold Lasswell, and Ralph Casey. Crespi took Lasswell to task for arguing that “propaganda is language aimed at large masses … to influence mass attitudes on controversial issues,” whereas “education,” in the Lasswellian view, is “primarily concerned with transmitting skill or insight, not attitude.” As Crespi saw it, in contrast, any “socially enlightened educator” would agree that “a particular concern of education is to ‘influence mass attitudes on controversial topics.’… [Lasswell’s] attempt at a distinction fails.”¹⁴ Thus, while propaganda and psychological warfare were frequent topics of discussion, there remained considerable dispute among leaders in the field over exactly what those terms meant and how they might be distinguished from any other form of communication.

To carry the conundrum a step further, a few issues later a second leading expert, Hans Speier of the RAND Corporation, presented an extended discussion of “The Future of Psychological Warfare” in which he used the terms “propaganda” and “psychological warfare” interchangeably throughout.15 Similarly, in POQ’s published annual index, the titles listed under index entry terms “propaganda” and “psychological warfare” overlap in such idiosyncratic ways as to offer few meaningful guidelines for distinguishing one from the other.¹⁶

Despite the journal’s avoidance of a clear-cut definition, it is possible to identify the dominant arguments put forward concerning psychological warfare during the first five years after World War II. These can be most conveniently summarized through review of two theoretical articles on the topic by Donald McGranahan and Hans Speier, respectively. McGranahan’s “U.S. Psychological Warfare Policy,” published in the form of an extended letter to the editor in the fall 1946 issue,¹⁷ focused on how best to use what was known about the social-psychological and anthropological characteristics of a given population when choosing coercive tactics for use against that population. This was the “relation of our psychological intelligence to our psychological warfare policy,” as McGranahan put it. Briefly, he argued that U.S. psychological warfare tactics up to that time had suffered from an “advertising complex.” Too much stress had been put on the principles of commercial advertising and public relations, where an advocate was said to be “careful not to offend the public or any important segment of it. [His] interest is in the broadest mass audience and the lowest common denominator.” Even during World War II, the United States had been too reluctant to directly criticize Hitler in its broadcasts to Germany, he contended, because once having learned that many German soldiers remained loyal to Hitler, the United States was concerned that offending their faith might encourage them to fight all the harder.¹⁸

McGranahan contended that a “frontal attack” on rival ideologies would be more effective. “Evangelical propaganda” involving direct attacks on paganism had effectively spread Christianity, he argued, and the Soviet technique of “violent attacks [on rival] leadership, as well as on [its] political system,” had mobilized internal discontent in the populations the Soviets had targeted. The United States should exploit these insights through propaganda and other psychological warfare techniques “adapted to [its] own particular objectives and based upon our democratic philosophy of life.” In sum, U.S. psychological warfare should be campaigns of active subversion against targeted states. If U.S. programs were to be effective, they should be aimed primarily at indigenous, discontented groups who could be convinced to risk everything to attack a rival’s government; they should only secondarily appeal to the “lowest common denominator” of the target’s populations.19

McGranahan’s argument resonated well with some American traditions and would seem to be easily applicable to wartime situations in which the United States was unambiguously dedicated to the defeat of a rival regime. But it begged the more difficult questions raised by postwar psychological warfare operations: Are these “revolutionary” tactics appropriate for use against governments with which the United States is officially at peace? And, considering that the sponsorship of subversion campaigns must frequently be secret in order for them to be successful, how exactly is a democratic society to determine which campaigns are appropriate and how far they are to be carried?

Hans Speier’s article on “The Future of Psychological Warfare” appeared as the lead article in the spring 1948 issue. The historical context is important here. President Truman had “drawn the line” against popular revolutions in Greece and Turkey a year previously, and U.S.–U.S.S.R. relations were headed for—but had not yet reached—the watershed symbolized by the Berlin crisis of 1948. Inside the U.S. government, the National Security Council had in December 1947 secretly passed NSC 4 and NSC 4-A, the official authorization for campaigns of clandestine propaganda, sabotage, and subversion. Among the most important sponsors of NSC 4 and NSC 4-A within the government was Frank Wisner, who was in December 1947 chief of the Occupied Areas Division at the State Department, and who would a few months later be appointed chief of OPC, the clandestine warfare agency. Wisner’s second in command at State during his effort to secure passage of NSC 4-A was Hans Speier.²⁰

By the time Speier’s article appeared that spring, he had left the government and had taken a temporary roost at the New School for Social Research in New York. POQ presented his essay to its readers as that of a private scholar rather than that of a government official. Nevertheless, Speier’s commentary clearly was born at least in part out of his government work, where he had specialized in the sociology and social psychology of reeducating populations in the U.S. occupation zone of Germany and Austria. In his POQ article, Speier argued that the United States had permitted its psychological warfare weapons to “fall into desuetude” since 1945 and should now refurbish them. Specialists in the field had never received the support within the government that they deserved, he contended, in large part because their previous efforts had been put together on an ad hoc basis after World War II had already begun. This time around, however, “the United States cannot afford to persist in its indifference toward political and psychological warfare,” nor would it be possible to “rely on improvisation once more if it should be impossible to avoid war.”21 As Speier saw it, U.S. clandestine subversion campaigns against the Soviet Union and rebel nationalist groups in developing countries should be extended and escalated.

He contended that the U.S. government should prepare immediately to “impos[e] martial law [in the United States] to guard against defeatism, demoralization and disorder,” if that proved necessary. More urgent in Speier’s mind, however, was activation of a strong “offensive” program designed to overthrow rival regimes. “Subversion [is the] aim of strategic propaganda,” Speier wrote. “The United States … can wage sincere political subversion propaganda against the dictatorial Soviet regime, particularly in the political realm.… Planning and preparation for strategic propaganda in a future war must begin now.”²²

Thus by the end of the 1940s Speier, McGranahan, and other prominent communication research specialists used the pages of POQ to call on U.S. security agencies to employ state-of-the-art techniques to facilitate the overthrow of governments of selected foreign countries in a “future” war—the preparations for which should begin immediately. Speier’s program included coercive measures, even the imposition of martial law, to ensure that the U.S. population cooperated. Although Speier presented his argument in the form of a proposal, it is today known from the declassified records of the National Security Council that many of the measures he recommended were in fact actually under way at the time his article appeared.²³

Turning to the second and more subtle manifestation of psychological warfare themes in Public Opinion Quarterly, many POQ articles targeted the journal’s own audience for persuasion concerning U.S. policy on cold war operations in contested countries worldwide and on the proper role of mass communication research professionals in that effort. These texts did not usually advocate psychological warfare campaigns in the sense that McGranahan and Speier did, but instead framed their discussion in such a way as to reinforce the foreign policy initiatives and propaganda themes of the powerful “internationalist” faction within the U.S. government. As I noted earlier, this phenomenon can be seen in the extensive play POQ gave to reviews of books on various aspects of foreign affairs that strongly demonstrated the reviewer’s (and presumably the editors’) support for the foreign policy initiatives of the Truman administration—even when the books had little meaningful relationship to the study of public opinion. Between the winters of 1946 and 1947, for example, POQ published twenty-seven book reviews. Of these, six (22 percent) concerned books on the Soviet Union, each of which was a general-interest work. All of them were reviewed by a single author, Warren Walsh, who used each of his commentaries to conclude that cold war between East and West was necessary, and that the conflict had been instigated by the Soviets.24 None of Walsh’s reviews dealt with public opinion or communication research, other than in the banal sense that any political writing involves public opinion in some fashion.

The point here is not the merit of Walsh’s opinions. Rather, it is the journal’s willingness to propagate a monochromatic picture of issues that were among the most controversial of the day. The use of the single author and the single point of view suggests that the magazine did indeed have an editorial “line” on East–West relations, and that it did not welcome contrary points of view.

The journal’s reporting on other international issues shows a similar trend. POQ’s coverage of public opinion polling in Italy, for example, was initiated in spring 1947 with a study by P. Luzzatto Fegiz, “Italian Public Opinion,”²⁵ which focused on the possible electoral strength of Italy’s Communist party (CPI). Fegiz outlined a method he had developed that purportedly could determine the degree of communist sympathy among Italian voters and concluded that Italy might soon “become an integrant [sic] part of Russian-dominated Eastern Europe.” This concern was followed up in a second feature article in winter 1947, “The Prospects of Italian Democracy” by Felix Oppenheim, who expressed many of the same themes,²⁶ and in two later POQ articles on Italian public opinion published in 1949 and 1950 that reported on the propaganda techniques used during the 1948 election campaign.²⁷

Again, some historical background is appropriate. The CPI was during the late 1940s probably the most powerful communist organization in western Europe. The Truman administration’s National Security Council was deeply concerned that Italian voters might democratically elect a socialist–communist coalition government, a move that the NSC regarded as putting Italy behind the Iron Curtain. NSC 4 and NSC 4-A’s first clandestine psychological warfare project became a no-holds-barred campaign to ensure the CPI’s defeat in the 1948 election, including multimillion-dollar, “deniable” propaganda projects aimed at both Italian and American audiences.28

In reporting on Italy, POQ’s authors consistently articulated the main psychological warfare themes of the U.S. government in articles that were ostensibly about Italy, rather than about psychological warfare as such. The point once again is not the merit of POQ’s position, nor is it necessary to assume that POQ was a willing participant in the government’s effort to mold U.S. public opinion on the Italian elections. What is apparent on its face, however, is that the academic journal promoted a single point of view on these political issues, and that it did not air contrary views.

Opposition to this “propagandistic” aspect (as some might call it) of POQ’s, content was rare, but it did take place. One protest came from Alfred McClung Lee, who wrote to the editors of the journal in the spring of 1947 criticizing George Counts’ 1946 article, “Soviet Version of American History.”²⁹ Lee contended that Counts’ work had one-sidedly indicted Soviet writers for distorting U.S. history in their magazines, without recognizing that many U.S. authors also twisted Soviet history when they considered it useful. Lee’s note was to be the last published protest to the politicization of POQ for more than a decade. There appears to have been passive resistance among some POQ readers to the stress the journal placed on ideologically charged foreign political news, however. Intriguingly, a 1948 survey of POQ readers found that 20 percent of the respondents preferred that “less attention [in the journal] be given to descriptions of popular attitudes abroad,” and that POQ should instead place greater emphasis on scientific methodology, case histories of publicity campaigns, and research into the effects of publicity.³⁰

The third expression of psychological warfare themes in POQ and similar academic literature during the first years after World War II can be seen in the unusually close liaison that some of the journal’s authors and editors maintained with clandestine psychological warfare projects at the CIA, the armed services, and the Department of State. This can be found in both manifest and veiled form in many articles appearing in the journal, and in the composition of POQ’s editorial board. Hans Speier’s emergence as a prominent “private” advocate of expanded psychological warfare shortly after his work with Frank Wisner at the Occupied Areas Division at the State Department, discussed previously, is one example of an informal link between a prominent POQ author and the government’s clandestine warfare programs.

This phenomenon became considerably more widespread, however, though rarely easy to identify. A good example of latent linkages can be seen in Frederick W. Williams’ 1945 article “Regional Attitudes on International Cooperation.”31 On a manifest level, Williams’ study simply reports data gathered by the American Institute of Public Opinion and the Office of Public Opinion Research at Princeton during the winter of 1944–45 concerning popular attitudes on the U.S. role in international affairs, broken out by geographic region of the country. Williams uses the data to strongly advocate “making the United States more international-minded,” as POQ described it.³²

In the decades since the article first appeared, it has become clear that Williams’ data had been collected in an ongoing clandestine intelligence program underwritten by Listerine heir Gerard Lambert on behalf of the Roosevelt administration. The U.S. Congress had in those years barred the expenditure of government funds on most types of attitude surveys of U.S. voters, arguing that it was the Congress’ job under the Constitution to represent “public opinion.” Congress’ concern was in part political, because FDR used rival sources of information on public opinion to advance controversial policies, not least of which was the president’s drive toward an “internationalist” foreign policy. Despite the congressional strictures, the White House hired Hadley Cantril and Lloyd Free for “government intelligence work,” as Jean Converse puts it, including clandestine intelligence collection abroad and public opinion surveys in the United States. Cantril and Free in turn engaged Frederick Williams and the American Institute of Public Opinion as field staff for research on behalf of the administration.³³

Meanwhile, Public Opinion Quarterly’s board of editors included a substantial number of men who were deeply involved in U.S. government psychological warfare research or operations, several of whom were largely dependent on government funding for their livelihood. The journal’s editorial advisory board during the late 1940s, for example, was made up of twenty-five to thirty individuals noted for their contributions to public opinion studies and mass communication research. Among those on the board with readily identifiable dependencies on government psychological warfare contracting were Hadley Cantril, Harold Lasswell, Paul Lazarsfeld, and Rensis Likert, whose role as government contractors are documented in Chapters 5, 6, 7, and 8 of this study. They were joined on the POQ board by DeWitt Poole, who later became president of the CIA’s largest single propaganda effort of the era, the National Committee for a Free Europe.34 Another prominent board member was CBS executive Frank Stanton, also a longtime director of both Radio Free Europe and the Free Europe Fund, a CIA-financed organization established to conduct political advertising campaigns in the United States and to launder CIA funds destined for Poole’s National Committee for a Free Europe.³⁵ The journal’s editor during 1946 and 1947 was Lloyd Free, a wartime secret agent on behalf of the Roosevelt administration who some years later was destined to share a million-dollar CIA research grant with Hadley Cantril.³⁶

This pattern appears to have been repeated at several other important academic journals of sociology and social psychology of the era, although quantitative studies of their content remain to be done. The American Sociological Review (ASR), published by the American Sociological Society, overlapped so frequently in its officers and editorial panels with those of Public Opinion Quarterly and its publisher, the American Association for Public Opinion Research, that board members sometimes joked that they were unsure which meetings they were attending.³⁷ While ASR published articles about a considerably broader range of sociological subjects than did POQ, the ASR articles and book reviews concerning communication remained confined to a group of fewer than a dozen authors who were simultaneously the dominant voices in POQ. The range of views concerning communication and its role in society remained similarly circumscribed.

Further, an informal comparison of articles published during the 1950s concerning mass communication and public opinion in POQ and the prestigious American Journal of Sociology (AJS) shows that its articles in this field were just as rooted in psychological warfare contracts as were those appearing in POQ. The 1949–50 volume of AJS, for example, featured eight articles on various aspects of mass communication and public opinion. At least four of these stemmed directly or indirectly from ongoing psychological warfare projects, including work by Hans Speier and Herbert Goldhamer (both of RAND Corp.), Samuel Stouffer (from the American Soldier project), and Leo Lowenthal (then the director of research for the Voice of America, whose political odyssey is discussed in Chapter 6).38

In sum, the data show that Public Opinion Quarterly—and perhaps other contemporary academic journals as well—exhibited at least three important characteristics that linked the publication with the U.S. government’s psychological warfare effort during the first decade after World War II. First, POQ became an important advocate for U.S. propaganda and psychological warfare projects of the period, frequently publishing case studies, research reports, and polemics in favor of expanded psychological operations. Second and more subtly, many POQ articles articulated U.S. propaganda themes on topics other than psychological warfare itself. Examples include the magazine’s editorial line on U.S.–Soviet relations and on the Italian election of 1948.

Finally, data suggest that some members of the journal’s editorial board and certain of the authors maintained an unusually close liaison with the clandestine propaganda and intelligence operations of the day. The traces of these relationships can be found in several articles mentioned in this chapter and in the composition of POQ’s editorial board, at least one member of which—POQ’s founder DeWitt Poole—was a full-time executive of a major propaganda project organized and financed by the CIA.

This influence over the editorial board and editorial content of the field’s most prestigious academic journal was only a symptom of a deeper and more organic bond that is discussed in the next chapter. Money became one of the most important links between the emerging field of mass communication studies and U.S. military, intelligence, and propaganda agencies. Precise economic figures cannot be determined because of the lack of consistent reporting from the government, the continued classification of some projects, and the loss of data over the years. Even so, the overall trend is clear.

“The primary nexus between government and social science is an economic one,” write Albert Biderman and Elisabeth Crawford of the Bureau of Social Science Research. It is “so pervasive as to make any crisis of relations with the government a crisis for social science as a whole.”³⁹