This book examined the interaction between U.S. psychological warfare and the development of mass communication theories and research methodologies between 1945 and 1960. The literature cited therefore centers on the following areas:
1. international events and the general sociopolitical context from 1945 through 1960, which are often referred to as the early cold war years;
2. U.S. psychological warfare operations during that period;
3. U.S. mass communication theory and research during that period;
4. writings of, and biographical data about, several major thinkers involved in both psychological warfare and mass communication research;
5. institutional histories of the major private organizations and government departments active in mass communication research and psychological warfare; and
6. Comparative data concerning Soviet and Western European work in psychological warfare and mass communication research.
In the following notes, discussion of the literature utilized in this study is divided into these six categories.
Sociopolitical Context, 1945–1960
There is an extensive literature concerning the events and politics of the early cold war years, and a complete review of that material is obviously beyond the scope of this project. A look at a handful of works concerning the general sociopolitical context of this period is useful, however, both for background on events of the day and for insight into how leading scholars and political figures interpreted those events.
Works that deal primarily with foreign affairs usually fall into one of four basic schools of thought concerning the cold war: orthodox, Soviet, revisionist, or postrevisionist. The rival orthodox and Soviet trends arose more or less contemporaneously during the 1940s and 1950s. These schools articulate what might be termed the “official” version of the cold war as viewed by the U.S. and Soviet political establishments, respectively.1 Their basic features are their contention that the opposite side is responsible for the creation and escalation of the cold war,2 a Manichaean dualism that views the rival camp as a powerful and evil enemy,3 and a conviction that one’s own side must wage a bitter or even desperate battle if it is to survive the aggression of the other.4 A comparison of orthodox U.S. and Soviet writings strongly suggests that neither group accepted any substantial element of its rival’s thinking as legitimate. These two trends were by far the dominant schools of thought during 1945–60.
The revisionist challenge to the orthodox school arose in the West during the late 1950s and early 1960s. There have been several revisionist variations, but the unifying tenet of this school has been the argument that the United States (rather than the Soviet Union) was the principal aggressor during the cold war.5 The postrevisionist school emerged in the West during the 1970s as a means of reintegrating the revisionist rupture, so to speak; it concedes a number of factual arguments to the revisionists and plays down the Manichaean notions of the orthodox school while reasserting Soviet culpability for much of the cold war, particularly during 1945–60.6
General works that deal with domestic U.S. affairs during 1945–60 cannot be quite so easily divided into schools, in part because there has been a much richer and more complex range of published opinion. But a useful distinction can be made for the purposes of this study between those writers who regarded communism as a threat so imminent that it impelled a major domestic response (typically involving use of psychological warfare techniques against the U.S. population in order to secure national security and ideological unity)7 and those who regarded that response as itself presenting greater practical danger to the United States than did communism.8
Taken as a whole, then, these general-context works both discuss and implicitly illustrate the continuing division within American society over the U. S. role in the cold war and in U. S.–Soviet relations generally. As has been seen, these divisions played an important role in the dynamics of psychological warfare’s impact on mass communication theory during the study period.
Literature on Psychological Warfare
Literature concerning psychological warfare presents special problems not typically encountered in mass communication research. First, the substantial majority of U.S. psychological warfare policy writings and operational records since World War II were classified at the time they were created.9 Many remain classified today or are accessible only in sanitized form through Freedom of Information Act requests.10 In some cases, U.S. intelligence agencies deliberately destroyed all record of certain particularly sensitive operations—notably those involving biological warfare, chemical experimentation on humans, and murders—as a means of heading off congressional inquiries into psychological operations.11
Fortunately, however, the United States’ comparatively open policies concerning government records have facilitated declassification of a substantial number of policy records concerning psychological warfare, as well as a more limited body of surviving operational records. Much of this material has not been published but is available to researchers at the National Archives, the Truman Presidential Library, and the Eisenhower Presidential Library. Highlights of these collections include the National Security Council’s policy papers on psychological warfare,12 the records of the Psychological Strategy Board,13 and miscellaneous declassified U.S. Army, U.S. Air Force and U.S. State Department records.14 Discussion and documentation concerning Central Intelligence Agency psychological operations can be found scattered throughout the collections just mentioned,15 and fragmentary records concerning a number of CIA operations have been collected by the National Security Archive (a private archive),16 the Center for National Security Studies,17 and other organizations.
There is an extensive secondary literature concerning CIA psychological warfare operations. This includes histories written from several different points of view, memoirs of participants, and journalistic accounts. The reliability of this material runs from poor to excellent. Some sources include what appears to be intentional disinformation concerning U.S. psychological operations, but this problem can often be offset by cross-checking various authors’ accounts against one another or against independently verifiable facts.18 Recommended secondary sources on psychological warfare include definitions of the term “psychological warfare”;19 psychological warfare budgets and personnel;20 clandestine CIA ownership and/or subsidies of newspapers, magazines, publishing houses, and radio stations;21 suborning of reporters or media executives;22 selective financing and/or manipulation of scholars in the United States and abroad;23 clandestine radio broadcasting, including Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty;24 other clandestine communication techniques, such as use of propaganda balloons;25 U.S. psychological operations during coups d’état in Guatemala, Iran, and elsewhere;26 U.S. psychological operations during elections in Italy, France, and other countries in western Europe;27 attempts to destabilize or encourage rebellion inside the Soviet bloc;28 use of psychological warfare within the United States;29 development and use of mind-altering drugs, including LSD;30 replies to Soviet and/or Chinese propaganda;31 impact of psychological warfare on intelligence estimates;32 sociological and social-psychological studies of the Soviet Union;33 and overviews of the role of social science research in the general intelligence mission.34
There is also an interesting literature published between 1945 and 1960 on the theory of psychological warfare that is often different in content and tone from the later histories and memoirs just mentioned. The work published during the early cold war years typically recounted World War II experiences with these techniques35 or argued from an “orthodox” standpoint that psychological warfare was an essential weapon to use in the conflict with the Soviets.36 As noted elsewhere, there was a considerable amount of writing concerning psychological warfare in Public Opinion Quarterly and other academic communication journals of the day.37 Such writings were collected in several valuable casebooks and handbooks that offer accessible overviews of the public writings on psychological warfare by many of the authors, consultants, and political figures active in the field.38
There are a number of published and unpublished bibliographies concerning psychological warfare. The earliest of these date to the 1930s, before the term “psychological warfare” had entered English.39 Perhaps the most focused bibliographic compilation for the purposes of this book was prepared in 1951–52 by Chitra Smith for the Bureau of Social Science Research under contract with the RAND Corporation;40 this was later published in slightly modified form by RAND and Princeton University Press.41
Myron Smith, Jr., prepared two relatively recent selected bibliographies on psychological warfare.42 Smith’s work includes 190 citations concerning such activities during World War II and a second collection of 668 citations covering 1945–80. The later collection is also broken out by subject area and by country. The Sociofile computerized data base includes a handful of citations to foreign-language works and to more current material.43 Former State Department historian Neal Peterson recently prepared an annotated bibliography of writings concerning intelligence issues and the cold war that reviews much of the literature concerning the clandestine aspects of the cold war that has been published during the last decade.44
Also noteworthy is a recent annotated bibliography of commercial and scholarly communications studies regarded as useful for design of future psychological operations. The bibliography was prepared by Ronald McLaurin, L. John Martin, and Sriramesh Krishnamurthy for Abbott Associates, under contract to the undersecretary of defense for policy.45
These notes by no means means exhaust the list of literature on psychological warfare as it was conducted between 1945 and 1960, but they are indicative of its scope and general trends.
U.S. Mass Communication Theory and Research, 1945–1960
The history of mass communication theory and research has become a lively topic among academics during the past decade. Much of the present literature on the subject stresses the evolution of ideas that influenced the field, rather than the ways in which the social context of the day helped shape ideas. As a result, there has been relatively little inquiry into the sources of institutional and financial support for mass communication research during the years that it crystallized into a distinct field of inquiry. With the notable exception of Converse’s46 and Biderman and Crawford’s47 work, the role of U.S. psychological warfare programs in the evolution of post–World War II communication studies has largely escaped academic attention up to now. Indeed, a number of now standard texts that discuss the history of mass communication theory mention psychological warfare only in passing or not at all.48
This project has built on earlier studies on the history of communication research by Albig,49 Barton,50 Bennett,51 Berelson,52 Blumler,53 Chaffee,54 Chaffee and Hochheimer,55 Converse,56 Czitrom,57 Delia,58 Dennis,59 Eulau,60 Gitlin,61 Hall,62 Hardt,63 Katz,64 Lazarsfeld,65 Lowery and DeFleur,66 McLeod and Blumler,67 Rogers,68 Schramm,69 Sproule,70 Stouffer,71 and Tankard,72 among others, as well as earlier work in the relationship between the federal government and the social sciences by Beals,73 Biderman and Crawford,74 Crawford and Lyons,75 Gendzier,76 Horowitz,77 Horowitz and Katz,78 the Library of Congress,79 Lyons,80 McCartney,81 Pool,82 and others.
Although differing in emphasis, degree of detail, and political perspective, each of these accounts reflects a historical paradigm of more or less clearly defined “stages” of U.S. mass communication theory and research. While there is important evidence that the stages conception may itself be in part misleading,83 it can nonetheless serve as a useful framework for discussion of how leading writers view the evolution of work in the field.
The stages are generally said to have begun with a period of early studies into the broad macrosocietal and ideological role of mass communications, which is usually dated from the late nineteenth century to around 1940. Thinkers widely regarded as exemplifying this trend include Durkheim, Tönnies, and Maine.84 “Mass society” models with both “dark” and “light” overtones are widely associated with this work; the speakers in the discussion generally agreed that the mass media were playing a new, integrative role in modern society but often disagreed on the character of that society and quality of life that it could offer.85
In the United States, a strongly positivistic, quantitative approach to communications studies focusing on “middle range” communications effects supplanted most discussion of macrosocietal and ideological communications issues by about 1945. This approach continued to serve as the largely undisputed “dominant paradigm” for the field until well into the 1970s.86 Most recent authors on the history of communication research agree that this post-1945 trend exhibited at least three characteristics. First, the funded research in the field centered on efforts to discover and quantify the “effects” of communication behavior. The social science tools applied to the task were for the most part surveys, content analysis, and experimental and quasi-experimental techniques borrowed from psychology and social psychology. Second, there was a rise of “two-step,” “reference group,” and eventually “limited effects” models of communications behavior. Each of these theories was based in large measure on the relatively limited and transitory impact of mass media messages on individual behavior that could be documented with the research methodologies then in favor. To the extent that these theories considered media’s macrosocietal or ideological roles at all, they tended to extrapolate the minor quantifiable “micro” effects to a “macro” level. Third, communications research crystallized into a distinct field of scholarship after 1945, complete with professional cadre, institutional identity, a more-or-less defined research agenda, and a substantial body of agreed-upon knowledge. The date for this precipitation into a distinct field is necessarily arbitrary but is generally placed between 1949 and about 1955.87
Less common in the literature, but argued in this text and (in part) in work by Dewey,88 Carey,89 Hall,90 Biderman and Crawford,91 and others, are several corollary propositions. Commercial, political, and military groups seeking new techniques to preserve and advance their existing role in society provided the substantial majority of funds for the quantitative studies that elaborated narrowly positivistic models of communication behavior.92 The U.S. government’s psychological warfare programs were an important funder, particularly during the years in which mass communication research crystallized into a distinct field.93 While the funders did not determine the results of mass communication studies, they did often determine which questions would receive attention, and they exerted considerable indirect influence on the selection of “leaders” and “authorities” in the field through the extension or withholding of the resources necessary for large-scale research. One result of this process was the virtual eclipse of conceptions of communication as a ritual or sharing behavior—which had been a prominent part of Dewey’s thought,94 for example—and its replacement by baroque elaborations of theories of communication as a highly instrumental process of persuasion and coercion.95
Biographical Data on Key Personalities
Four prominent mass communication researchers active in psychological warfare projects during 1945–60 provided the starting point for this book’s examination of key personalities in this field. They are Hadley Cantril, Harold Lasswell, Daniel Lerner, and Wilbur Schramm, and each has left a substantial body of work concerning mass communication, psychological warfare, and political affairs.
Albert Hadley Cantril (generally known as Hadley Cantril) wrote or edited, alone or with colleagues, at least 24 book-length studies96 and a reported 120 scholarly articles for professional journals.97 Cantril published an intellectual memoir,98 and biographical notes concerning his career are available in several standard sources.99 Cantril is remembered primarily for the application of psychology to the study of political and social affairs and for his contributions to opinion research.100 Particular note should be made of Cantril’s longtime partner, Lloyd A. Free, who collaborated with Cantril in the Institute for International Social Research101 and wrote several books with him.102
Harold Lasswell was probably the most prolific of the authors considered here, having written or edited some forty-seven identifiable book-length works between 1924 and 1980, several of which appeared in three and even four separate editions.103 Lasswell is perhaps best remembered for his sloganlike formulations of political affairs and media dynamics, which became the foundation for many functionalist theories of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s.104 Lasswell’s Propaganda Technique in the World War (first issued in 1927 and subsequently reissued in three further editions) is widely regarded as one of the seminal works of modern mass communication theory.105
Daniel Lerner, a frequent collaborator of Lasswell’s, wrote or coedited at least four texts with him,106 each of which dealt in some manner with propaganda and psychological warfare. Lerner published at least eighteen book-length works during his career,107 as well as numerous journal articles.108 Lerner’s work was somewhat more tightly focused than that of Cantril or Lasswell, with greater attention to psychological warfare, propaganda, and methodological issues in social science research.109 Lerner either wrote, edited, or contributed to virtually every major collection of essays on psychological warfare published from 1945 to 1980.110
Wilbur Schramm is widely regarded as a pivotal figure in the crystallization of U.S. mass communications research into a distinct field of scientific inquiry.111 Schramm’s role as a psychological warfare contractor, operator, and promoter is less widely understood, however. During the 1950s, Schramm’s personal income and professional prestige were to a significant degree dependent upon his work for the U.S. Air Force, U.S. Information Agency, Department of Defense, and the CIA-sponsored propaganda organization Radio Free Europe.112
The four authors discussed here—Cantril, Lasswell, Lerner, and Schramm—do not, of course, exhaust the list of noted social scientists and mass communication theorists active in psychological warfare projects during the early cold war years. Other prominent figures in mass communication research who participated in substantial, but varying, degrees include Kurt Back,113 Edward Barrett,114 Raymond Bauer,115 Robert Bower,116 Albert Biderman,117 Stanley Bigman,118 Leonard Cottrell,119 Leo Crespi,120 William Daugherty,121 W. Phillips Davison,122 Leonard Doob,123 Murray Dyer,124 Harry Eckstein,125 Lloyd Free,126 George Gallup,127 Alexander George,128 Robert Holt,129 Carl Hovland,130 Alex Inkeles,131 Irving Janis,132 Morris Janowitz,133 Joseph Klapper,134 Clyde Kluckhohn,135 Klaus Knorr,136 Hideya Kumata,137 Paul Lazarsfeld,138 Alexander Leighton,139 Nathan Leites,140 Paul M. Linebarger,141 Leo Lowenthal,142 L. John Martin,143 Margaret Mead,144 Jesse Orlansky,145 Saul Padover,146 Ithiel de Sola Pool,147 DeWitt Poole,148 Lucian Pye,149 John W. Riley,150 Carroll Shartle,151 Chitra Smith,152 Hans Speier,153 Samuel Stouffer,154 Ralph K. White,155 and William R. Young.156
Institutional Histories
The institutional frameworks of U.S. mass communication research, on the one hand, and of U.S. psychological warfare operations, on the other, went through an intricate, interlocked evolution during 1945–60. Some familiarity with these shifts is necessary to understand the relationship between the two trends. Jean Converse157 offers what is probably the best and most accessible institutional histories of the Bureau of Applied Social Research, National Opinion Research Center, and the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research, each of which was a center of mass communication scholarship and a contractor for psychological warfare–related research at various points between 1945 and 1960. Additional institutional studies are available for the RAND Corporation,158 BASR,159 NORC,160 ISR,161 Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for International Studies,162 and Harvard University’s Russian Research Center.163 The archives of the Bureau of Social Science Research, an important center of both mass communication research and psychological warfare contracting during the 1950s, are now held by the University of Maryland Libraries’ Special Collections unit and by American University. There is no history text, as such, concerning BSSR, but archivists have prepared a detailed finding aid to the Maryland record collection, which permits reconstruction of many BSSR activities.164
Institutional histories concerning psychological warfare operations are generally less accessible and less likely to be familiar to mass communication scholars. The sources cited in the “Psychological Warfare” section of this essay (above) cover much of this ground. Particularly noteworthy, however, are two histories of Radio Free Europe165 and several recent studies of the U.S. Army’s Special Forces.166
Soviet and European Psychological Warfare
This text focuses on the U.S. experience in psychological warfare without attempting to fully document the activities of U.S. rivals and allies in this field. Some comparative data are valuable nonetheless in order to place the U.S. efforts in context.
Internal documents concerning the development of psychological warfare strategy by the Soviet Union and its allies are not available at this writing, although there is testimony from East bloc defectors on the subject,167 and some suggestion that relevant Soviet archives may open during the next decade.168 There is also a substantial secondary literature from Western specialists concerning U.S.S.R. practices in this field.169 For the most part, these writings reflect an “orthodox” conception of the cold war and a concern that Soviet propaganda has been effective in shaping the opinions of its target audiences.170
Original documentation concerning psychological warfare activities by U.S. allies in Europe is relatively sparse, but some secondary literature is available.171 These works tend to be descriptive rather than theoretical in nature, but they suggest that Western European governmental thinking concerning propaganda and psychological warfare has followed roughly the same evolution seen in the United States.172