7

Internalization and Enforcement of the Paradigm of Domination

U.S. mass communication studies have never been as simple a matter as “funding = preconception,” of course. True, sponsorship money usually flowed toward entrepreneurs promising innovations of greater utility to those who possess the wealth and influence necessary to set the research agenda. But social science has generated its preconceptions concerning communication in a way that is deeper and more complex than that. At any given moment, backers of the currently “dominant” preconceptions struggle both with colleagues who favor a variety of “alternative” constructions and with forces outside the field, in a fierce competition over the vision, methods, and formulations that will define the field. This rivalry, and the shifting alliances between leading social scientists and U.S. security agencies to which it gave rise, has remained much more tangled than the relatively straightforward economic relationships discussed in earlier chapters.

Leading mass communication researchers were not “bought off” in some simplistic sense during the 1950s; they instead internalized and reflected the values of the agencies they had been hired to assist for reasons that seemed to them to be proper, even noble. Interestingly, academic promotion of psychological warfare during the 1950s became one aspect of the field’s defense against the nativist reaction known as McCarthyism. That defense reinforced the authority of political and academic centrists in communication studies at the expense of their rivals on both left and right.

Academic historians of mass communication studies generally agree that most social scientists of the 1930s and 1940s regarded themselves as social reformers, progressives, and even political radicals. At the National Opinion Research Center, to name only one example, founder and director Harry H. Field contended that NORC’s main purpose was to permit “the voice of the common man to be heard by those in authority.” That institution’s founding documents stress that opinion polling should be seen as “a new means of making voters articulate, which in turn should increase public knowledge and public interest in political, social and economic questions.” NORC’s immediate predecessor organization, in fact, was Field’s short-lived People’s Research Corporation, whose name reflects the rhetoric and something of the spirit of much U.S. social science prior to 1940.1

The political-military crisis of World War II, however, forged a new harmony of purpose in most of U.S. society, and particularly between leading social scientists and the government, say Albert Biderman and Elisabeth Crawford in a little-known, but unusually frank study of academic–government relations prepared for the U.S. Air Force. Objectives such as restoring the economy, winning the war, defeating Nazism, and reestablishing world order after 1945 “rendered legitimate the tremendous increase of public and quasi-public intervention and planning called forth by [these] crises,” they write. “Frequently, the only recognized sources of experience and expertise [for the government] for collecting these intelligence, planning and evaluational data were [sic] social scientists.”² Soon a strong convergence of interests developed between existing elites seeking social engineering tools to manage crisis, on the one hand, and social scientists with reformist points of view concerning government policy, on the other. “The symbols of science often became as convenient for government clienteles of applied science as they were for social scientists who either sought government favor or justification for asserting their views concerning public policy,” Biderman and Crawford contend.³

The strength of this national consensus, particularly during World War II, permitted social scientists to transform research projects that might otherwise have posed “fundamental value questions” for them into “purely instrumental” studies, Biderman and Crawford write.⁴ In other words, study topics that might otherwise have seemed morally or politically suspect to reform-minded social scientists became acceptable, and even desirable, targets for academic inquiry.

The effects of bombing on the morale of [civilian] populations; the degree of democratization appropriate to the armed forces; the functions of true and false atrocity accounts in propaganda, domestic and foreign, all became not only important questions for research, but could be treated “objectively” as purely instrumental issues.5

Note that at least two, and arguably all three, of the examples Biderman and Crawford cite are studies widely accepted today as seminal documents in the emerging specialty of mass communication research. The study of the effects of bombing on civilians was the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, the survey work for which was organized by Rensis Likert. This was “the last important project in governmental [survey] research during the war. From the standpoint of design, it was also the most ambitious,” writes Converse in her history of U.S. survey research. The Bombing Survey’s published studies on German and Japanese morale were among the first genuinely systematic efforts to examine U.S. efforts at “persuasion”—albeit of a particularly violent sort—of foreign populations.⁶ The “democratization” and “atrocity” studies they mention are the work of Stouffer, Hovland, and their colleagues in the American Soldier series, which employed U.S. troops as research subjects in some of the first large-scale, systematic tests of communication effects. The same studies are widely recognized as influential in the development of research methodologies for communication studies.⁷

Biderman and Crawford point to five basic factors that they believe made national security projects “professionally appropriate” among social scientists during the cold war years. Biderman can speak with some authority on this point, for his own early career was funded in substantial part by military and intelligence agencies, as was the project from which the material quoted here has been drawn.⁸ Their typology includes:

“1. Selective attention [among social scientists] to value-consonant elements of the military-political context.” Scientists made common cause with the Pentagon in opposition to Stalinism, for example, while sidestepping the more problematic issues of U.S. imperial adventures abroad and the rise of the military-industrial complex at home.

“2. Insulation [of social scientists] from the military’s primary concern—violence.”

“3. Perceptions of asymmetrical relationships.” Biderman and Crawford mean the belief among social scientists that they could use military money and resources to advance their own careers, while avoiding making a contribution to causes they disdained.

“4. Organizational innovations which made participation [in military research] pose few threats to the autonomy of the profession.” Military consulting fees and project funding often permitted social scientists to remain in universities and think tanks, rather than directly joining the government.

“5. Fulfillment of scientific ambitions of sociologists.” The funded projects were sometimes professionally rewarding or scientifically interesting.9

The second element, the “insulation” of academics from the effects of their activities, is particularly important. Biderman and Crawford and, separately, Morris Janowitz contend that the military’s use of social science “has been limited chiefly to … political and psychological warfare, military government, and troop indoctrination,” as Janowitz put it.¹⁰ His comment illustrates two points simultaneously. First, that “militarized” communication studies enjoyed particular emphasis in government funding of social science; and second, that three of the more prominent recipients of such funding—Biderman, Crawford, and Janowitz—considered such work to be nonviolent. Biderman and Crawford further contend that many of their social science colleagues adopted the same rationale; namely, that U.S. psychological warfare (and troop morale studies, etc.) should be considered something fundamentally different from, say, development of improved warheads. One hint of the extent to which this conception permeated the U.S. social science establishment of the day can be found in their claim (in 1968) that of twenty postwar presidents of the American Sociological Association, “more than half are known to have had an involvement of some kind with defense research” during the cold war. Biderman and Crawford declined to name names, citing the “invidious connotation” that such work had gained in later years.”

Their use of the term “insulation” here is adroit. By simply acknowledging that social scientists believed they were acting in good faith, Biderman and Crawford sidestep the more basic question of whether the academics’ work actually increased social misery and violence. But the social scientists’ beliefs are only part of what is at issue here. Equally relevant is the question of whether their beliefs were accurate, and most of the evidence shows that they were not.

The literal process of the military’s social science research (including psychological warfare studies) only rarely involved front-line violence. But the various definitions of psychological warfare promulgated by the government, and most particularly the secret definitions designed for internal consumption, leave no doubt that violence was a consistent and often predominant characteristic of psychological warfare for those who were distributing the contracts. Many academics, too, must have understood on some level that their work was integral to overall U.S. national security tactics of the day. For one thing, scholars such as Wilbur Schramm, Ithiel de Sola Pool, and Leonard Cottrell had direct access to the internal government thinking on such matters through their service on elite advisory committees. Further, even a casual newspaper reader would have encountered information suggesting that there was some relationship between the widely reported U.S. role in violent coups or civil wars in Greece, Iran, Egypt, Guatemala, Laos, the Congo, and others, and the work of surveying public opinion and analyzing communication systems in those same countries. More generally, how else but through the shame associated with this knowledge can the pervasive secrecy and rationalization that continues to surround the social scientists’ contribution to psychological warfare to this day be explained?

The conclusion is inescapable: The U.S. social scientists active in psychological warfare were not ignorant of their role, or of the violence that usually accompanied psychological operations. They were, rather, “insulated,” just as Biderman and Crawford say, from consideration of the implications of their work.

Study of Public Opinion Quarterly and other prestigious academic journals of the period brings to light a number of indications why seemingly reform-minded academics participated in psychological warfare projects, and these reasons seem to roughly coincide with Biderman and Crawford’s typology. There usually appears to have been a convergence of interests, rather than any single factor, that contributed to the strong support that efforts to dominate and manipulate other peoples enjoyed inside the academic communication research community. The motivations of particular individuals surely varied from case to case, but overall trends are clear.

First of all, psychological warfare work became a means of demonstrating patriotism, loyalty, and support for one’s country. These sentiments were most often expressed in the texts of American Association for Public Opinion Research presidential addresses and similar ceremonial occasions. “Public opinion analysts are helping to combat the forces which currently threaten freedom and democracy,” POQ told its readers in its summary of Samuel Stouffer’s AAPOR presidential lecture of 1954. “To continue serving the needs of their society … social scientists must take a long-range view of history and work hard at improving their instruments of measurement.”12

At least two elements seem to have undergirded Stouffer’s inspirational message. He saw the United States as the protector of important attributes such as democracy, peace, humanitarianism, truthfulness, rationality, and Judeo-Christian values. U.S. social science was said by many advocates to be advancing these values worldwide through its research, thus turning back the tide of superstition and ignorance.¹³ Meanwhile, many academics had the West’s experience with Hitler and World War II fresh in their mind. As Stouffer’s comment suggests, they regarded Stalinism and Third World nationalism as an integrated attack on Western culture generally, and that was seen as an important reason to close ranks to support the U.S. government’s foreign policy initiatives.¹⁴

There is little reason to believe that money alone was an important motivating factor for these scholars, if only because there are considerably more lucrative fields than communication research open to talented, highly trained personnel. That having been said, however, it is clear that use of government funding facilitated certain types of research and the winning of professional prestige that might not otherwise have been available.

For example, some academics interested in quantitative methodology or in communication effects studies, who were also amenable to psychological warfare campaigns, sought government funding in an effort to pursue both goals simultaneously. Samuel Stouffer’s program at Harvard’s Laboratory of Social Relations illustrated this trend. On the one hand, Stouffer made clear his support for psychological warfare programs as a means of meeting the perceived challenge posed by “a handful of ruthless men in the Politboro who can press a fateful [atomic] button” unless convinced that the “might and determination of the free world will deter them.”¹⁵ On the other, Stouffer’s publications and those of his staff appearing in POQ and the American Journal of Sociology focus almost entirely on narrowly drawn methodological issues involving the derivation of cumulative scales from unstructured interviews.¹⁶ In this case, the U.S. Air Force, which was underwriting the research, was primarily interested in deriving strategic intelligence concerning the Soviet Union from interviews of Soviet refugees and defectors.17 Stouffer facilitated both that goal and his own methodological interests by finding a means to adapt Guttman and Lazarsfeld’s latent distance scales to the raw data from the interviews.¹⁸ A similar phenomenon involving some of the same methodological questions can be seen in the work of Eric Marder of International Public Opinion Research on behalf of the U.S. Army’s Human Resources Research Office¹⁹ or in Stuart Dodd and Melvin DeFleur’s Project Revere studies discussed earlier. This behavior fits well with the first and the fifth elements in Biderman and Crawford’s typology.

Another important motivator among social scientists seems to have been a perceived need to “make a choice” between the United States and the Soviet Union, with failure to actively support U.S. government campaigns interpreted by leaders in the field as proof of “neutralism” or even of Stalinist sympathies. Daniel Lerner’s work provides particularly vivid examples of these pressures. “The management of international consensus presents extremely complicated problems of symbolization,” he wrote in a special Public Opinion Quarterly issue on International Communications Research at the height of the Korean War. “Neutralists” in the struggle with communism can be recognized by their claim that “the choice between the U.S. and USSR does not coincide with the choice between freedom and bondage,” Lerner asserted, contending that those who favored the political symbols such as “peace, safety and relaxation [of tensions]” were promoting “Neutralist-Communist symbols” that had permitted the Free World to be “out-maneuvered in the world struggle for popular loyalties.” Reserving judgment on the East–West ideological conflict should be viewed as an “evasion of political reality … based on inaccurate expectations which, at some point, [will be] rendered untenable by the course of actual events.”²⁰

It is worth noting that the campaign against “neutralism” was at that time the central focus of CIA propaganda among intellectuals within the United States and worldwide. Beginning in 1950, the CIA sponsored and financed the Congress for Cultural Freedom and a series of politically liberal, strongly anticommunist publications including Encounter (England), Der Monat (Germany), Forum (Austria), Preuves (France), and Cuadernos (Latin America) as a means of combating the perceived neutrality of intellectuals in the face of purported communist expansion. Sidney Hook, Melvin Lasky, Edward Shils, Daniel Bell, and Daniel Lerner, among others, emerged as prominent public spokesmen for this campaign, though they have insisted in later years that they were unaware of the CIA’s sponsorship for their work. Either way, the point here is simply that fierce, social-democratic anticommunism became a genuinely powerful political movement in academe, in part because it enjoyed considerable covert government financing.21

Meanwhile, POQ and other prestigious journals presented academics who advocated rival communication paradigms, or who were not active supporters of U.S. foreign policy (the two were often intertwined), as persons possessed by mental diseases or personality disorders associated with totalitarian political systems.²² Gabriel Almond’s Appeals of Communism study (written with Herbert Krugman, Elsbeth Lewin, and Howard Wriggins of Princeton)²³ presented what is probably the most elaborate and ostensibly scientific version of this widely accepted analysis. Almond and his colleagues interviewed about 250 former communists who had resigned from parties in four Western countries, then concluded on the basis of this skewed sample that communism appealed mainly to “individuals who were confused and uncertain about then-own identities.” Leaders of communist organizations were said to be widely regarded by their own rank-and-file as “ruthless, cynical, remote, dogmatic, [and] opportunistic” individuals in whom “all values save power have been squeezed out.”²⁴

Whatever truth there may be in these characterizations, it is evident that the relentless publicity given to the conclusion that Marxists were (or might be) psychologically defective contributed to the sweeping delegitimization of critical perspectives during the 1950s. An alternative interpretation of Almond’s data, which is in fact more consistent with basic social science than the Princeton conclusions, is that “individuals who were confused …” were more likely to resign from communist parties. But that was given short shrift by Almond and his colleagues and never seriously discussed at the time the work was published. Instead, contemporary academic journals presented the study’s questionable methodology as a model of responsible research, and Almond himself went on to a prominent career in mainstream social psychology.

The social pressure on mass communication researchers to take a strong stand against any variety of critical thinking that sought to puncture widely held preconceptions about the role of the United States in the world was reinforced by another important factor: the growth of McCarthyism in U.S. society. During the early 1950s Senator McCarthy and his political allies launched a series of attacks on U.S. information programs and on the social sciences in general. These began with McCarthy’s well-known campaign against the Voice of America, which led to the public purging of U.S. Information Service libraries, dismissal of Voice officials, and repeated congressional inquiries into alleged communists at the Voice.25 Less well-known, but of equal importance in the present discussion, were congressional investigations into the major tax-exempt foundations led by Congressman Carroll Reece of Tennessee. Reece took as his theme that major U.S. foundations—including the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, and the Social Science Research Council—were engaged in a campaign to promote socialism and “One World” government through funding social science studies Reece regarded as critical of the United States and the “free enterprise” economic system. He singled out John Dewey, Samuel Stouffer, and Bernard Berelson, among others, as purported ringleaders.²⁶

The foundations’ principal defense against these charges was that U.S. social science was a uniquely effective weapon in the cold war. Social Science Research Council president Pendleton Herring offered a report to the Reece committee contending that “in the eyes of communist leaders social science is regarded as one of the worst and most dangerous enemies of communist ideology and communist expansion. Indeed, so strong is the feeling against sociology that it is not permitted to teach it” in the Soviet Union. Herring went on to submit excerpts from two hostile reports published by the Soviets—“American Bourgeois Philosophy and Sociology in the Service of Imperialism” and “Contemporary American Bourgeois Sociology in the Service of Expansion”—as proof of the effectiveness of sociology’s contribution to the cold war.²⁷

The price tag for scholars who refused to support the cold war consensus could be quite high: shunning by colleagues, firing, loss of tenure or prospects for promotion, forced appearances before collegiate and state investigating boards, FBI inquiries, hostile newspaper stories, or worse.²⁸ Even very prominent academics were not exempt. The House Committee on Un-American Activities called Daniel Boorstin of the University of Chicago to testify in 1953, for example, because more than a decade earlier he had briefly joined the Communist party. (Boorstin cooperated with the investigation.)29 FBI and U.S. military intelligence agents kept American Sociological Society conventions under surveillance in an effort to smoke out radicals;³⁰ Charles Beard, the longtime dean of American historians and former president of the American Historical Association, was drummed out of the profession when he refused to readjust his work to the new political realities;³¹ and Harvard, MIT, Columbia, UCLA, and a score of other leading universities purged alleged Marxists and leftists from their faculties, often at the instigation of their ideological rivals among the professors.³² Maryland became a trend-setter with regard to driving leftists from academe; in 1949 it passed the Ober Anti-Communist Act, which became a model statute for about a dozen other states.³³ (The law was eventually found to be unconstitutional.)

The FBI and other domestic security agencies hit institutions and scholars espousing Marxist interpretations of the social sciences particularly hard. The Jefferson School of Social Science—a thinly disguised, U.S. Communist party-sponsored institution that drew a remarkable five thousand students annually in the New York area during the early 1950s—was placed on the attorney general’s list of subversive organizations, was denied tax-exempt status, had its student list subpoenaed, and was eventually harassed out of existence in 1955.³⁴ The House Un-American Activities Committee subpoenaed the officers and all of the records of the Jefferson School’s successor, the Fund for Social Analysis, and soon drove that out of business as well. The Fund for Social Analysis had provided small grants to leftist scholars such as William Appleman Williams and Herbert Aptheker.³⁵ The Emergency Civil Liberties Committee attempted to organize a protest by U.S. social scientists against HUAC’s actions, but with little success and, so far as can be determined, no support whatever from mainstream sociologists and communication researchers.³⁶

This decade-long campaign of repression had a substantial chilling effect on the social sciences. Paul Lazarsfeld’s 1955 study for the Fund for the Republic on the impact of political censorship on the social sciences found that 27 percent of a sample of 1,445 college teachers had begun to go out of their way “to make it clear that they had no extreme leftist or rightist leanings.” About 20 percent of the sample had altered the subjects they were willing to discuss in university classrooms, the reference material they assigned, or the research projects they undertook. Almost half of the teachers indicated that they were concerned that students might deliberately quote them out of context or otherwise garble the teacher’s point of view in order to report them to school administrators or to the FBI. Some 394 respondents asserted that they believed their “point of view on a political subject [had been] reported unfavorably to higher authorities.”37

Within this context, academic contributions to psychological warfare campaigns became in part a means of reaffirming one’s political reliability. This is demonstrated by the foundations’ testimony, cited earlier, where sociology’s contribution to psychological warfare was presented as proof of its political legitimacy. The same trend can frequently be seen in POQ’s editorial introductions to its articles, where mildly controversial ideas are often prefaced with the claim that the author’s intent has been to “draw neutrals into the American-centered coalition”³⁸ or to “improve America’s effectiveness in the propaganda war.”³⁹

POQ provides an example of the paradoxical role that many academic institutions played during the McCarthy years. By continuing to publish scholars such as Stouffer and Berelson, the journal tacitly defended their legitimacy in the face of attacks from the radical right. At the same time, however, the act of defending their legitimacy necessarily carried with it some outline of what illegitimacy might be, if only by default, and the gradual construction of barriers separating “responsible” from “irresponsible” points of view.

In mass communication research and other fields, the academic community’s shelter against McCarthyism consisted in important part of defining and defending paradigmatic theories, research methodologies, and standards of behavior around which the “center” or mainstream of the profession could consolidate—a circling of the wagons, so to speak.⁴⁰ This was not usually a battle for civil liberties or academic freedom per se, although there was no shortage of rhetoric along those lines. Academics who strayed too far from the safety of the center were for the most part abandoned to their fate, as the shunning of historian Charles Beard and of the Jefferson School of Social Science faculty illustrate.

This retreat to the center had important implications for mass communication research. It tended to reinforce the authority of the center of the profession, and of those academics who could draw on networks in the government and foundations for political support. It provided considerable incentive for scholars not to explore new approaches to understanding communication, as the results of the Lazarsfeld survey discussed earlier suggest. And it struck deeply at the academic legitimacy of both the “left” and “right” critiques of mainstream social science. The radical right’s critique of U.S. social science in the 1950s, it may be recalled, was not so different in some ways from that of the radical left. Both protested the growing alliance between the state and elite scholars; both were suspicious of the obscurantism and exclusivity that often accompanied the evolution toward professionalism in the social sciences; and both believed (though for different reasons) that modern social engineering techniques posed serious threats to their constituencies.41

The delegitimizing of Marxist critiques of communication paradigms became one element of the field’s defense against McCarthyism. At Public Opinion Quarterly and in major academic associations such as AAPOR, scholarly participation in psychological warfare projects was not viewed as an ethical problem, even when scholars concealed the sources of their funding⁴² or employed questionable methodologies.⁴³ But pointed critiques of the inbreeding between social science and the state did pose problems for the center of the profession, and they were rarely published in academic journals or aired at professional meetings, regardless of whether the analysis came from the left or the right.

POQ, like other respectable journals, tended to ignore or even ridicule authors whose writings were outside of the mainstream of the field during the 1950s, while at the same time offering a steady flow of publicity and praise to academics who offered elegant elaborations of the commonly accepted assumptions about the character of communication. The journal published no articles by Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer or C. Wright Mills between 1950 and 1960, for example. It did offer three lukewarm book reviews: two for Mills (in fall 1954 and fall 1956) and one for Horkheimer (summer 1956)⁴⁴—a gesture that tended to distance the journal from those authors, yet which tacitly conceded that they did have something to say to students of mass communication during this period. Meanwhile, the journal offered repeated articles, book excerpts, and guest editorial slots to academics in POQ’s favor, including Daniel Lerner, Harold Lasswell, and W. Phillips Davison.

The journal openly ridiculed writers who failed to use “scientific” formats for their ideas when offering heretical points of view on mass communication issues. Two examples of this can be found in Avery Leiserson’s scathing review of George Seldes’ The People Don’t Know and Lloyd Barenblatt’s commentary on Vance Packard’s Hidden Persuaders.45 Both Seldes and Packard argued that the mass media in the United States presented a monolithic, ideologically charged version of “reality” that had succeeded in shaping popular consciousness to a much greater degree than was generally recognized; POQ presented both authors to its readers as irresponsible crackpots.

The point here is not that POQ “should” have published more articles by Adorno, Horkheimer, and Mills, or that Seldes and Packard are above criticism. It is rather that Public Opinion Quarterly articulated and defended particular preconceptions about mass communication, and that more critical authors such as Adorno were tacitly defined by the journal as being largely outside the boundaries within which “responsible” dialog could be carried out.

In sum, there were both positive and negative reinforcements for academics participating in U.S. psychological warfare projects. Positive reinforcements included the perceived patriotism demonstrated by participating, the opportunity for rewards of money and academic prestige, and psychological warfare’s usefulness as a means for legitimating oneself or one’s profession in a society that was often suspicious of intellectuals or, indeed, of any sort of nonconformity. Negative inducements included the desire to avoid the consequences that would come with defeat at the hands of perceived enemies abroad, and the threat of punishments that could come with a failure to achieve political or social legitimacy. Particularly important in both instances was the phenomenon of “insulation,” the ability of institutions and individuals to separate themselves from the effects of their work on others. Meanwhile, the profession’s resistance against what has come to be known as McCarthyism carried with it a reinforcement of the political and scientific center at the expense of challenges from both the left and the right.