5

Outposts of the Government

For the first decade after 1945—which is to say, the decade in which communication studies crystallized into a distinct academic field, complete with colleges, graduate degrees, and so on—U.S. military, propaganda, and intelligence agencies provided the large majority of all project funding for the field. The earliest cumulative data concerning government funding of social science is provided by the National Science Foundation (NSF) in 1952; that report shows that over 96 percent of all reported federal funding for social science at that time was drawn from the U.S. military. The remaining 4 percent of government funding was divided about equally between conventional civilian agencies (Department of Labor, Department of the Interior) and civilian agencies with clear national security missions (such as the Federal Civil Defense Administration and the Office of Intelligence and Research at the State Department). Social science funding rooted in national security missions totaled $12.27 million that year, the NSF reported, while comparable “civilian” funding totaled only $280,000.1

This extreme skew in favor of national security–oriented social science studies appears to have attenuated during the course of the 1950s, even as overall academic dependency on the federal government increased. Directly comparable funding data for the late 1950s are not available due to changes in the National Science Foundation’s data collection and reporting, but the available data indicate that annual research obligations by national security agencies (i.e., Department of Defense, civil defense, U.S. Information Agency [USIA]) for the social sciences increased slightly over the decade, to $13.9 million in 1959. Meanwhile, civilian funding (principally from the departments of Agriculture and Health, Education and Welfare) grew quite sharply over the same time to $41.4 million. The apparent military–civilian balance in the 1959 figures cannot be taken at face value, however, because a significant amount of security-oriented social science contracting took place under the aegis of the National Advisory Commission on Aeronautics in the wake of the Soviet Sputnik launch. This very large research budget—totaling more than twice as much as all other social science funding combined—is not broken out into categories that permit direct comparison to the 1952 data.2

Be that as it may, to the extent that social science was supported by the U.S. government during the 1950s, that support was usually tied to national security missions, especially during the first years of the decade. This was particularly true of mass communication studies. A close review of Public Opinion Quarterly, the American Journal of Sociology, American Psychologist, and other academic literature published between 1945 and 1955 reveals several dozen medium- to large-scale projects funded by the Office of Naval Research, Air Force, Army, CIA, and USIA. The only comparable “civilian” study appears to have been a 1950 Department of Agriculture survey of the effects of television on dressmakers—one of the earliest such studies of television effects—that was apparently never written up for academic journals. The Agriculture Department, Tennessee Valley Authority, and other civilian agencies also supported a limited number of consumer preference opinion surveys, Harry Alpert reported in 1952.³ But the National Science Foundation data show that the scale of such projects was quite small compared to the ongoing military, intelligence, and propaganda research.

At least a half-dozen of the most important centers of U.S. communication research depended for their survival on funding from a handful of national security agencies. Their reliance on psychological warfare money was so extensive as to suggest that the crystallization of mass communications studies into a distinct scholarly field might not have come about during the 1950s without substantial military, CIA, and USIA intervention.

Major beneficiaries included the Bureau of Applied Social Research, the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, the National Opinion Research Center, the Bureau of Social Science Research, the RAND Corporation, and the Center for International Studies at MIT. Moreover, this list must be regarded as preliminary at this time. Several of the more important academics engaged in mass communication studies became activist supporters of U.S. psychological warfare projects and derived part of their income from participation in such efforts over a period of at least two decades. This was particularly true of Wilbur Schramm, who is widely credited as the single most important definer of U.S. mass communication studies of his day. These scholars and the organizations they were affiliated with became central to the elaboration and to the practical social power of what has come to be known as the dominant paradigm of U.S. mass communication research during the 1950s.

The Survey Research Center (SRC) at the University of Michigan (today known as the Institute for Social Research [ISR]), for example, was established by Rensis Likert in the summer of 1946 using a number of the personnel who had served under Likert in the Program Surveys operation during the war. The “SRC functioned during its first year as something of an outpost of the federal government,” writes Jean Converse in Survey Research in the United States.4 Major early contracts included a ten-year grant from the Office of Naval Research for studies of the psychological aspects of morale, leadership, and control of large organizations, and a series of contracts for surveys of Americans’ attitudes on economics for the Federal Reserve Board, which was in those early postwar days deeply concerned about the potential for a renewed 1930s-style depression and social upheaval as veterans returned to the civilian work force.⁵ Early SRC/ISR research with strategic intelligence applications included U.S. Air Force–funded interview studies of Soviet defectors and refugees. The object of that study was twofold: first, identification of social-psychological attributes of the Soviet population that could be exploited in U.S. propaganda, and second, collection of intelligence on military and economic centers inside the Soviet Union to target for atomic attack in the event of war.⁶

SRC archival records show that federal contracts contributed 99 percent of SRC revenues during the organization’s first full year (1947) and well over 50 percent of SRC/ISR revenues during its first five years of operation. Angus Campbell, who later became director of the institution, has reflected that had the federal funding been canceled during this period, the SRC/ISR “probably would not have survived.”⁷

At the National Opinion Research Center, perhaps the most liberal and reform-minded of the early centers of survey research, about 90 percent of the organization’s work during the war years was made up of contracts from the Office of War Information, the government’s principal monitor of civilian morale. This backing was “probably critical in making [NORC’s] national capacity [for conducting surveys] viable,” Converse writes.8 Congress canceled the OWI project in 1944, but the NORC field studies of civilian morale and attitudes were continued under a series of secret, “emergency” contracts with the Department of State. That arrangement became institutionalized, and it provided a survey vehicle onto which NORC later marketed “piggyback” questions for commercial customers.

It was probably illegal for the State Department (though not for NORC) to enter these contracts, and that led to an unpleasant scandal when Congress uncovered the continuing “emergency” surveys fourteen years later in 1958.⁹ The State Department is prohibited by statute from spending funds to influence Congress, and the NORC surveys had indeed been put to that use by the department. NORC’s archives indicate that without the State Department contract during the institution’s first decade, the organization would probably have found it impossible to maintain a national field survey staff, which was essential to NORC’s academic and commercial work and for the group’s economic survival.¹⁰

A second noteworthy NORC contract during the center’s first decade was a study for the U.S. Army Chemical Corps of individual and group responses to “community disasters,” in which natural disasters such as earthquakes and tornadoes were used as analogues to model responses to attacks with chemical weapons.¹¹ In time, NORC undertook a related series of disaster studies that became the U.S. government’s main data base for evaluating the psychological effects of nuclear war.¹²

Funding for the Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia University appears to have been more diversified. BASR records from its first years are sketchy, but Converse concludes that approximately 50 percent of BASR’s budget from 1941 to 1946 stemmed from commercial work such as readership studies for Time and Life magazines and a variety of public opinion surveys for nonprofit organizations. Other funds stemmed from a major Rockefeller Foundation grant and, to a much lesser degree, from Columbia University.¹³

By 1949, the BASR was deeply in debt to Columbia University and lacked a cushion of operating funds with which to cover project expenses while waiting for clients to make payments. The cash flow problem was sufficiently severe that Lazarsfeld speculated in fundraising appeals that BASR would be forced to close its doors if help was not forthcoming.

By the end of that year, however, BASR’s Kingsley Davis won new military and intelligence contracts that substantially improved BASR’s finances. By fiscal year 1950–51, BASR’s annual budget had reached a new high, some 75 percent of which consisted of contracts with U.S. military and propaganda agencies.14 Major federally funded BASR projects of the period included two U.S. Air Force studies for intelligence gathering about urban social dynamics abroad, a large project for the Office of Naval Research, and a multiyear contract with the Voice of America for public opinion surveys in the Middle East.¹⁵ BASR’s dependence on federal money may in fact have been even higher, because some ostensibly “private” studies were actually subcontracts from private institutions of projects that had originated in the federal government. One example of this is technical consultation on interviewing and survey techniques by BASR’s Lee Wiggins and Dean Manheimer for surveys of Soviet émigrés in Europe. Harvard’s Russian Research Center was the prime contractor; funding for that project was drawn primarily from the U.S. Air Force and the CIA.¹⁶

The Voice of America project began in September 1950 with BASR as the prime contractor; Charles Glock organized the day-to-day work. Extensive, methodologically ambitious surveys were conducted in Iran, Turkey, Egypt, and four other Middle Eastern countries, each of which was a major target of U.S. psychological warfare efforts of the period.¹⁷ At least two of the countries, Iran and Egypt, experienced CIA-supported coups d’état while the study was under way.¹⁸

Lazarsfeld helped compose the survey questions, which were eventually asked by native-language researchers in the field. These included inquiries such as:

97a. How do you feel about the behavior of Russia in world affairs? How about its behavior towards [your] country? (Probe also for changes.) How long have you felt that way?

42. If you were put in charge of a radio station, what kinds of programs would you like to put on? (Probe here.)¹⁹

BASR arranged for translation, tabulation, and analysis of about two thousand interviews and eventually delivered a confidential report to the Voice of America designed to guide U.S. propaganda broadcasts in the region. Nonclassified studies of some of the same data were publicized through Sociometry, Public Opinion Quarterly, and other academic journals. These included reports on purported “Political Extremists in Iran” by Benjamin Ringer and David Sills and a comparative report on communications and public opinion in four Arab countries by Elihu Katz and Patricia Kendall.20

Military and Foundation Networks

This dependency of three of the United States’ most important centers of communication and public opinion research on contracts with military and propaganda agencies became but one skein in a broader, more complex, and more enveloping web of relationships. The flow of money to favored federal contractors moved through networks of personal contacts, friends, and colleagues such as those documented in the Clausen study of academic networks discussed earlier. These informal associations provided an important new dimension to the social and scientific impact of government funding patterns.

Their impact can be demonstrated in the interservice Committee on Human Resources, which the Department of Defense established in 1947 to coordinate all U.S. military spending on social psychology, sociology, and the social sciences, including communication studies.²¹

The Defense Department and a narrow group of influential academic entrepreneurs employed the committee as a confidential contact point for government–academic networking. In 1949, its chairman was Donald Marquis (University of Michigan and president of the American Psychological Association). He was aided by committee members William C. Menninger (Menninger Foundation, a major military contractor for studies of “combat fatigue” and related forms of psychological collapse), Carroll Shartle (then at Ohio State University and later chief of the Psychology and Social Science Division of the Office of the Secretary of Defense), and Samuel Stouffer (Harvard). Civilian deputies included Henry Brosin (University of Chicago), Walter Hunter (Brown University), and Frederick Stephan (Princeton), while professional Staff included committee executive director Raymond Bowers (later chief of the Bureau of Social Science Research [BSSR]), and his aides Dwight Chapman and Henry Odbert. Psychologist Lyle Lanier (New York University) succeeded Bowers as executive director later that year.22

The committee did not allocate funds, but it was responsible for oversight of the social science portion of the military budget, recommended projects, and signed off on major research initiatives. The budget, papers, and meeting notes of the group were classified. In 1949, the committee was responsible for oversight of about $7.5 million in social science research funds—by far the largest single source of funding of the day for this field of inquiry.²³

The Committee on Human Resources was divided into four panels, each of which specialized in a particular aspect of social science. The panel on Human Relations and Morale is of most interest here; it oversaw most U.S. military psychological warfare research and had the most direct impact on funding for communication studies. Other panels were Psychophysiology (studying primarily human engineering of high-technology weapons, motor skill development, etc.), Personnel and Training (developing psychological testing of recruits, examining the sociology of leadership and groups, etc.), and Manpower (research into the personnel requirements and mobilization of the armed forces).²⁴

The composition of the panel on Human Relations and Morale illustrates the continuing pattern of tight, inbred relationships in psychological warfare matters among a handful of academic specialists in communication and the military establishment. It also raises a distinct possibility of conflict of interest among the scholars responsible for oversight of government programs, because the U.S. government was dependent on expert advice on communication research from scholars who were themselves among the primary beneficiaries of the programs they were overseeing. The Human Relations panel chair was psychologist Charles Dollard, who was president of the Carnegie Corporation, trustee of the RAND Corporation, and a veteran of Stouffer’s World War II Research Branch team. Panel members included Hans Speier (who by then was based at the RAND Corporation, where he eventually became director of social science research.²⁵ Alexander Leighton (of Cornell and later Harvard, whose work during the late 1940s depended largely on the records of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey in Japan,²⁶ and Carl Hovland (of Yale, whose most influential work, Experiments in Mass Communications [1949], required exclusive access to the wartime records of Stouffer’s Research Branch of the army).²⁷

A list of the panel’s paid consultants reads like a who’s who of mainstream U.S. communication studies of the period. According to a December 1948 report in the American Psychologist, “special consultants for expert advice”28 included Harry Alpert (of Yale and BASR), Kingsley Davis (newly appointed director of BASR, whose role in obtaining government contracts to rescue BASR was discussed earlier), John Gardner (Carnegie Corporation and later secretary of health, education and welfare during the Johnson administration), Harold Lasswell (Yale), Rensis Likert (director of the Institute for Social Research), and Elmo Wilson (of International Research Associates, a major contractor of U.S. government overseas public opinion research).²⁹

The roles of panel chair Charles Dollard and consultant John Gardner reveal the complexity of the web of financial and personal relationships among selected communication scholars and the federal government. Dollard was the president of the Carnegie Corporation; Gardner was a senior Carnegie executive. Both were personally involved in the funding and oversight of the ostensibly private American Soldier studies by Samuel Stouffer, Carl Hovland, Leonard Cottrell, and others, and in the sponsorship of the Russian Research Project at Harvard, which was a joint Carnegie–U.S. Air Force–CIA enterprise that employed Raymond Bauer, Alex Inkeles, and others in communication studies focusing on the Soviet Union.³⁰ (The Harvard project was the contractor for the ISR and BASR consultancies on studies of Soviet refugees discussed a moment ago.)

Thus Carnegie’s Dollard was chairing and Carnegie’s Gardner was advising the Department of Defense’s primary committee on the scientific aspects of psychological warfare at a time when two of Carnegie’s most important projects were dependent upon Department of Defense cooperation for funding, for exclusive access to data, and for research subjects. At least two of the senior academics on the same committee (Stouffer and Hovland) meanwhile depended in some degree on Dollard and Gardner’s goodwill and money for their privileged position in the world of scholarship, for it was the Carnegie executives who controlled the purse strings of the funds on which Stouffer and Hovland relied.

At a minimum, this establishes that the social science programs at Carnegie and the Department of Defense were not conducted in isolation from one another. The substantial overlap of key personnel, funding priorities, and data sources strongly suggests that the two programs were in reality coordinated and complementary to one another, at least insofar as the two organizations shared similar conceptions concerning the role of the social sciences in national security research. Between them, the Carnegie Corporation and the overlapping government oversight committee exercised control (or substantial influence) over the large majority of both public and private funds for academic mass communication studies in the United States during the late 1940s and early 1950s, particularly over funding for the large, higher-profile projects that often make or break academic careers in the United States.

This informal network of scholars and managers was quite conscious of its role as an economic and political power broker within the academic community. Carnegie’s John Gardner discussed this in a 1987 interview with Charles O’Connell, who was studying the origins of Harvard’s Russian Research Center. Asked about the sociometry of post–World War II social science, Gardner replied that he was involved in at least four important “networks” that interacted in making decisions concerning major social science initiatives.

First of all, there was what I would call the behavior science network. It was [Charles] Dollard and [Clyde] Kluckhohn and [Pendleton] Herring and myself and Sam Stouffer and John Dollard [brother of Charles] at Yale and Alex Leighton … who were deeply interested in the behavior sciences and what they might do to illuminate some of the issues that we were all interested in.… The second network would be kind of a Harvard network which would certainly be [James B.] Conant and [Devereux] Josephs [treasurer of the Council on Foreign Relations].… A third network is kind of an international affairs network that grew out of the war.… [A]ll of us folks came back [from the war] deeply committed to think about international affairs and we met in various forums, worked together, Ford, Rockefeller, ourselves, State Department.…31

The fourth network, Gardner continued, was built around Stouffer’s Research Branch in the army and included Charles Dollard, Frank Keppel, Frederick Osborn (Stouffer’s military superior during the war and an active Carnegie trustee), and, of course, Stouffer himself.

Building on that point for a moment, it is useful to look briefly at two other important sources of social science funding during the cold war years, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Russell Sage Foundation. At the Rockefeller Foundation, social science funding was headed for most of the 1950s by Leland DeVinney, Stouffer’s coauthor in the American Soldier series.³² During his service, the Rockefeller organization appears to have been used as a public front to conceal the source of at least $1 million in CIA funds for Hadley Cantril’s Institute for International Social Research, for reasons discussed in more detail in a later chapter.33 Nelson Rockefeller was himself among the most prominent promoters of psychological operations, serving as Eisenhower’s principal adviser and strategist on the subject during 1954–55.³⁴

At Russell Sage, Leonard Cottrell served as the chief social psychologist from 1951 to 1967; he was frequently a public spokesman for the group and enjoyed substantial influence in the Sage Foundation’s decision making.³⁵ Cottrell simultaneously became chairman of the Defense Department’s advisory group on psychological and unconventional warfare (1952–53), member of the scientific advisory panel of the U.S. Air Force (1954–58) and of the U.S. Army scientific advisory panel (1956–58), and a longtime director of the Social Science Research Council.³⁶ Cottrell was among the most enthusiastic boosters within the social science community for psychological warfare operations, repeatedly calling for “a new club [among social scientists] dedicated to the task of bringing the full capability of our disciplines to bear on this field.”³⁷

Taken as a whole, the evidence thus far shows that a very substantial fraction of the funding for academic U.S. research into social psychology and into many aspects of mass communication behavior during the first fifteen years of the cold war was directly controlled or strongly influenced by a small group of men who had enthusiastically supported elite psychological operations as an instrument of foreign and domestic policy since World War II. They exercised power through a series of interlocking committees and commissions that linked the world of mainstream academia with that of the U.S. military and intelligence communities. Their networks were for the most part closed to outsiders; their records and decision-making processes were often classified; and in some instances the very existence of the coordinating bodies was a state secret.³⁸

This was not a “conspiracy,” in the hackneyed sense of that word. It was rather precisely the type of “reference group” or informal network that is so well known to sociologists. The informal authority exercised by these networks reveals a distinctly centrist ideological bent: Projects that advanced their conception of scientific progress and national security enjoyed a chance to gain the financial support that is often a prerequisite to academic success. As is discussed more fully in later chapters, projects that did not meet these criteria were often relegated to obscurity, and in some cases actively suppressed. One result of this selective financing has been a detailed elaboration of those aspects of scientific truth that tend to support the preconceptions of the agencies that were paying the bill.

That the funding agencies and interlocking committees described here helped underwrite the articulation of a particular paradigm of mass communication studies of the period is self-evident; the elaboration of paradigms is after all what research is. The more important question is how great a contribution the government’s psychological warfare projects made to the construction of the Zeitgeist of U.S. communication studies. Clearly, other forces also made contributions, particularly the commercially oriented projects stressed by Merton and Lazarsfeld and the academic developments discussed by Delia and others.39

The precise weight to be given to each of these factors in the evolution of communication research will no doubt continue to be debated, because the surviving data are simply too sketchy to permit final answers. Nevertheless, it is clear that the government’s national security agencies underwrote the economic survival of key communication research centers, funded large-scale research projects, and sustained networks of sympathetic scholars who enjoyed decision-making power over the substantial majority of research funds for the field. The impact of these elements on the “received knowledge” of the field of communication research is explored in the next chapter.

As will become apparent, the “dominant paradigm” of the period proved to be in substantial part a paradigm of dominance, in which the appropriateness and inevitability of elite control of communication was taken as a given. As a practical matter, the key academic journals of the day demonstrated only a secondary interest in what communication “is.” Instead, they concentrated on how modern technology could be used by elites to manage social change, extract political concessions, or win purchasing decisions from targeted audiences. Their studies emphasized those aspects of communication that were of greatest practical interest to the public and private agencies that were underwriting most of the research. This orientation reduced the extraordinarily complex, inherently communal social process of communication to simple models based on the dynamics of transmission of persuasive—and, in the final analysis, coercive—messages.