The Lives of Erich Fromm: Love’s Prophet

Amid a long recuperation period in Locarno after his severe heart attack, Fromm defied his doctors and attended the May 1967 Pacem in Terris conference in Geneva. He talked with some of the other delegates but gave no presentation and did not stay long. He told his friend Michael Maccoby that one could believe all illness was psychosomatic until one reached one’s sixties; then illness seemed to strike with a vengeance. Maccoby discerned that after his brush with death, Fromm “became gentler, more sympathetic. He became more interested in individual spiritual development, more in tune with the Buddhist vision of transcendence, of becoming one with nature.” Although spirituality had been a stabilizer in his life ever since he studied with Salman Rabinkow, he now pursued it avidly, resuming his reading of Meister Eckhart and other mystics and meditating at a set time and place each day. As Fromm’s spirituality deepened while he rebounded from the heart attack, Maccoby remembered watching him lie on the floor to practice dying.¹

Nevertheless, contemplation of his own mortality and his emotional embrace of inner spirituality never extinguished his activity on behalf of nuclear disarmament and world peace. Fromm was deeply disturbed by the accelerating body count in Vietnam—all done purportedly in the effort to turn back “global communism.”

By the end of 1967, Eugene McCarthy, the junior senator from Minnesota, was speaking out vociferously against the war. Indeed, that became the essential plank in his uphill challenge to incumbent President Lyndon Johnson for the 1968 Democratic Party nomination. Fromm found that McCarthy’s life’s paralleled his own in interesting ways. McCarthy had grown up in the intellectual Catholic world of the 1930s among the Benedictine monks at St. John’s Abbey (Minnesota), where he had sought to pursue the priesthood. Fromm had studied with Talmudic scholars and considered becoming a rabbi, and his mentor Rabinkow had done much to dispose him toward a radical vision of social justice and an appreciation of socialism. Similarly, McCarthy’s mentor at St. John’s had urged his student to distance himself from the sinful world of the bourgeoisie, which had been corrupted by the internal contradictions of capitalism. McCarthy ultimately decided against the priesthood, just as Fromm decided against the rabbinate. After McCarthy tried unsuccessfully to establish a Catholic anticapitalist commune in rural Minnesota, he ended up teaching sociology at a small Catholic college in St. Paul. In several of his publications, Fromm had sketched out (more as a heuristic device than a historical reality) a Catholic Middle Ages with a strong sense of community, where spirituality and humane, caring relationships predominated over marketplace considerations.2

In 1948, Minnesota’s left-leaning Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party recruited McCarthy to run for Congress. A decade later, he won a seat in the U.S. Senate, where, with John F. Kennedy, he represented Cold War liberalism, coupling domestic reform with resistance to Soviet expansionism. That was not Fromm’s path. McCarthy first came to his attention at the 1960 Democratic Party convention, where McCarthy nominated Adlai Stevenson: “Do not leave this prophet without honor in his own party.” Fromm was impressed by the spiritual thrust of McCarthy’s speech. By the mid-1960s, McCarthy had repudiated the Johnson administration’s intervention in Vietnam. Pope John XXIII’s antiwar encyclical Pacem in Terris proclaiming that “We must obey God rather than men” became McCarthy’s springboard for attacking American involvement in Vietnam on ethical grounds. Fromm, who regarded John XXIII as a spiritual ally in the struggle against nuclear weapons and warfare, was encouraged by McCarthy’s spirited new opposition to the war.³

By 1967, McCarthy’s critique of the war blended with that of Fulbright and other Senate doves. He demanded the cessation of American bombing in North Vietnam, negotiations, a coalition government in Saigon, and U.S. troop withdrawals. A few Senate doves and peace activists encouraged McCarthy to challenge Johnson for the Democratic nomination. Although they had no hope of McCarthy winning the nomination, they sought to frighten Johnson into altering his Vietnam policy.

After McCarthy declared himself a candidate, significant money flowed into the campaign. Fromm was among the largest initial donors to this “man of peace” who loved poetry and philosophy. The first primary election took place in New Hampshire on March 12, after which newspapers reported that McCarthy had “defeated” Johnson. In fact, he finished a strong second. Exit polls suggested that many New Hampshire voters did not know precisely what McCarthy stood for but had marked their ballots as a protest against the incumbent administration. Robert Kennedy, a formidable challenger, declared his candidacy in mid-March. In response, Johnson halted the bombing of North Vietnam, announced that he now favored a negotiated settlement, and—to the shock of many Americans—dropped out of the race for the nomination two weeks later. Fromm trusted neither Johnson’s claim of withdrawal from reelection nor the sincerity of his plan to end the war. He feared that Johnson’s announcement would ultimately sway a “critical mass” of voters: “he snatched victory out of defeat” and put himself out as a “selfless, humble father of the people, doing precisely what his opponents proposed to do.”4

Despite Fromm’s poor health and perhaps because he deeply admired McCarthy, he decided that the McCarthy campaign needed his ideas, plus more of his financial assistance. The day Kennedy entered the race, Fromm completed a long “Memo on Political Alternatives” that he hoped to expand into a book that would become the basis of the McCarthy campaign. The memorandum emphasized a dangerous “new society” of “totally bureaucratized industrialism” that was taking hold in the West (especially in the United States). This society programmed man “by the principles of maximum production, maximum consumption and minimal friction” so that he became an unfeeling and smoothly functioning part of a “mega-machine”—passive and emotionless, living in a state of low-grade depression. It was time for man to pursue “humanistic industrialism” through organizational decentralization, local worker management, and other structural changes dedicated to “the optimum value for man’s development.” Fromm did not go so far as to mandate the socialization of private property, but the democratic institutional structure of his proposed society would promote basic “human needs.” Fromm had essentially propounded this program since The Sane Society (1955). In brief, Fromm advocated a democratic grassroots movement globally but especially in the United States, to assure a humanistic alternative to “worship of the mechanical and death.” ⁵

From this point on, Fromm was in demand on college campuses. His campaign memorandum was usually the text he presented, advocating socialist humanism, participatory democracy, and an end to the war in Vietnam. His position was compatible with much of the New Left political program. This accounted for some of his popularity, even though he was only minimally interested in student protest culture (of course, he promoted the idea of small groups of citizens gathering to establish a humanist approach for society at large). These groups were expected eventually to coalesce and become agencies for fundamental humanist transformation. Fromm’s memorandum and most of his speeches at rallies concluded with this vague outline of a movement for change. He hoped McCarthy and his staff would find utility in a book that would expand on the themes of the memorandum and give conceptual coherence to the campaign.6

On April 13, before Vice President Hubert Humphrey entered the race as a stand-in for Johnson, Fromm wrote a long letter to McCarthy offering his services. It resembled his first letter to Stevenson sixteen years earlier; this one was likewise peppered by a substantial amount of narcissism. “If I could be of any use for your campaign by writing memoranda which could be used for campaign speeches, or personal discussion” Fromm noted, “I would be most happy to arrange my time accordingly.” He also pointed out that McCarthy’s effort was “creating hope among millions of people choked by the sense of political and human impotence” and that this was why he had decided to transform his “Memo” into a short book.⁷

Fromm’s long letter, a philosophic disquisition on the need for new alternatives, was, like his letter to Stevenson, inappropriate for a busy presidential candidate. Fromm the prophet was on center stage here, representing one of his “lives,” and outdistancing Fromm the pragmatic tactician of the Brandt rescue. His epistle described a society “in which all men become a vast machine.” Life was increasingly bureaucratic and production oriented and required man to live “without being alive.” Deprived of “all that is human—love, interest, joy, freedom—his energies turn into destructiveness.” Necrophilia was in ascendance.⁸

Fromm concluded by acknowledging that his letter was far too long, though there is some evidence that McCarthy appreciated the letter. He encouraged Fromm to join his campaign effort, to help shape his campaign message, and to complete the proposed book promptly. Fromm consented on all counts, with marked enthusiasm. He put aside other writing projects so that Harper and Row could publish the volume (wisely renamed The Revolution of Hope) in early August 1968. Whereas Fromm would gloomily confide to close friends that nuclear war was a real possibility, in The Revolution of Hope he seemed to rally his own spirits as well as those of his readers. By 1997, roughly 2.5 million copies had reached readers in twenty different languages.9

As the campaign proceeded, the country was rocked by the train of events of 1968: the Tet offensive, Martin Luther King’s assassination, Robert Kennedy’s assassination, global student unrest, and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia to put down protests. Fromm had by then become exceedingly active in the McCarthy campaign, donating $20,000 (roughly $135,000 in 2012 dollars) at this point and paying his own expenses when he traveled to speak at McCarthy rallies. After an intense week-long campaign swing in California, he found himself exhausted but wrote excitedly to his cousin Gertrud Hunziker-Fromm that he could not let up and had promised to finish The Revolution of Hope with dispatch. Fromm also conveyed a sense of urgency in a public interview with Frederick Roevekamp, insisting that McCarthy was “neither a hero, a Savior or a demagogue” but a new type of political leader championing democracy through a grassroots volunteer campaign. Fromm and McCarthy met a few times in the months before the Democratic nominating convention, and on each occasion, Fromm felt energized. He developed a deep trust in the personal character of the senator. At the same time, Fromm confided to Schaff about his “ups and downs” on the campaign trail, “sometimes working too much and then having to pay for it by some exhaustion which forces me to rest for several days or to go very slowly for a while.” He told Schaff that the campaign was not only a protest against the U.S. fiasco in Vietnam—among its other foreign policy blunders—but a campaign for participatory democracy. Fromm also mentioned that he was enjoying the opportunity to work with McCarthy supporters who were neither scholars nor professionals and therefore represented a significant share of the audience for his books of the 1960s.¹⁰

As the Democratic convention in Chicago approached in late August, the McCarthy campaign made use of Fromm’s name and talents, and several campaign staffers studied Fromm’s books for usable ideas and language. “California Citizens for McCarthy” bought space in the Los Angeles Times for Fromm’s “Why I Am for McCarthy” essay, which presented Fromm’s portrait of the senator’s productive, life-affirming character and his vision of a humane society. Fromm also asserted that McCarthy appealed to a substantial number of Americans who feared that their lives were slipping away in a materialist society dominated by the prospect of nuclear war. With Michael Maccoby, a social psychologist Fromm had hired to help him complete a concurrent project in Mexico, Fromm also conducted a poll for publication in the Los Angeles Times. In the poll, 160 from widely different economic and social backgrounds living near Santa Cruz agreed to answer a series of questions on their candidate preferences. The questions were designed to measure the potential voter’s “love of life” (biophilia) as opposed to his or her attraction to death and the inanimate and mechanical (necrophilia). In this methodologically flawed survey, the results seemed to be clear. Far outdistancing the other candidates, 77 percent of those who favored McCarthy were “life loving.” A month before the convention, McCarthy invited Fromm to Chicago for several scheduled appearances intended to influence Democratic delegates. Four days before convention proceedings began, Fromm, Lewis Mumford, Dwight MacDonald, and other left-leaning social critics published a letter in the New York Review of Books. Penned by Fromm, the letter claimed that of those who had survived the primary elections, McCarthy was “the people’s choice.” To hand the nomination to Humphrey would undermine the democratic process. In contrast to Fromm’s public letter, McCarthy recognized, as the convention neared, that Humphrey was the choice of rank-and-file Democrats, not simply of the party bosses. The vice president would go on to win the nomination with ease.11

Although Fromm’s The Revolution of Hope (a campaign document for a now defunct campaign) was completed in early August, it did not appear in print until September, after Humphrey’s nomination. Still, publication at this late date comported with McCarthy’s proclamation that new ideas were more important than whether he personally won or lost. If the junior senator from Minnesota sometimes let political maneuvering dilute this proposition, his “high-riding” if exhausted supporter did not. Fromm was feeling increasingly drained as the months wore on, but only after he finished The Revolution of Hope did he yield to his doctor’s insistence that he rest. The book addressed grave planetary crises amid its upbeat exhortations. Unlike the wholly upbeat The Art of Loving, Fromm’s all-time bestseller, The Revolution of Hope balanced the negative against the positive in assessing the fate of humankind.¹²

The Revolution of Hope, characterized as “a response to America’s situation in the year 1968,” included only a few direct references to McCarthy and his campaign in its plea for “new directions, for a renewal of values … for a new psycho-spiritual orientation.” Fromm’s overwhelming focus was on the “crossroad” that presented itself to humankind at this precise moment: “one road leads to a completely mechanized society with man as a helpless cog in the machine—if not to destruction by thermonuclear war; the other to a renaissance of humanism and hope—to a society that puts technique in the service of man’s well being.” This humanist crusade predated McCarthy’s candidacy, and despite a discouraging Humphrey-Nixon race for the White House, Fromm insisted that the crusade continue past the 1968 election. In the back of the book, one found a tear-out questionnaire, to be mailed to Fromm, that “enrolled” readers of the book in the movement. The questionnaire allowed readers to select forty or fifty eminent citizens to serve on a National Council. Citizens-at-large could also join a twenty-five-member face-to-face group who would dispatch ideas and concerns to the National Council.13

The questionnaire was ineffective. Only three thousand readers completed it and mailed it to Fromm, and of those only a very small minority offered to help support Fromm’s proposed movement. Several nominated Fromm and McCarthy for the National Council, but few other nominees were suggested. This was hardly grassroots democracy. Acknowledging that the questionnaire venture had not worked, Fromm sought to meet with McCarthy to launch a postconvention campaign outside the auspices of the Democratic Party. “For reasons of health,” Fromm forewarned McCarthy, his part in this effort had to be limited. McCarthy agreed to meet with Fromm to discuss the possibility, but the meeting was low on the senator’s priorities and never occurred. Fromm’s proposal in The Revolution of Hope for a postelection continuation of the McCarthy campaign had few takers after the senator took a pass. Dejected and despondent after the election, McCarthy began to distance himself from the peace movement. As on other occasions in his life, Fromm could be impressed by the seeming authenticity and strength of character of a new friend or colleague to the extent of overlooking their negative qualities, ending up disappointed.¹⁴

The Revolution of Hope was more than a campaign document. It was a significant polemic in its own right and another illustration of Fromm’s remarkable capacity to connect to the concerns of whole societies and cultures. The book especially appealed to those who considered their lives to be at a turning point and yearned to be more hopeful about the future. The hopeful person sought “to transcend the narrow prison of his ego, his greed, his selfishness, his separation from his fellow man, and hence his basic loneliness.” He hoped to be open and vulnerable to the world while retaining a firm sense of his own identity and purpose. In a word, Fromm’s lesson was that man had to be an energetic participant in the life process. 15

Fromm acknowledged that it was difficult to characterize “hope” and easier to discuss what it was not. For the first time in any of his books, he instructed the reader to “mobilize his own experiences” as he read the text. Perusing Fromm’s observations about the nature of hope, the reader was assigned to fashion his own specific thoughts and feelings on what it meant to be hopeful. He needed to kindle within himself “an inner readiness.” Consistent with his own clinical approach, Fromm prompted the reader to summon an active “being” mode—to discover and to invigorate the hopefulness within himself. A personally active and introspective engagement with Fromm’s text could prompt a “revolution of hope,” or so Fromm hoped.¹⁶

To enhance hopefulness and the love of life, Fromm explicated what his friend Lewis Mumford called the “mega-machine,” which purportedly eradicated the small, convivial, and productive (and doubtless somewhat mythical) community of old. Community had been replaced by a “totally organized and homogenized social system in which society as such functions like a machine and men like its parts.” Maximized efficiency came through uniform bureaucratic rules. Individual idiosyncrasies became obstacles. As production increased, people needed to consume the products. Toward that end, people learned to view themselves as consumers rather than workers or creators, even as this realization resulted in a sense of spiritual emptiness and unimportance.¹⁷

Fromm concluded The Revolution of Hope by pleading directly to the reader to mobilize against the “mega-machine” and for its antithesis. Society must elaborate the vision of The Sane Society and struggle to establish it. Man had to elevate himself and his unique human needs and perspectives so that they would be primary—“the basis for humane planning reform.” The definition of man and the qualities essential to his happiness had to “become the ultimate source of values.”¹⁸

For Fromm, the first task in the process of replacing the “mega-machine” with a thoroughly sane and “humanistic” society was to involve man in the planning process. He had to shed his customary passivity—his sense of “impotence” and inconsequentiality. To restore man’s confidence in his own capacities, power could no longer flow from the top down. A two-way dialogue needed to be established between decision makers and those affected by their decisions. An equitable dialogue would shift the focus from issues of power and authority to creating a good and durable product or service that enhanced man’s existence. Whatever facilitated participation in the production and distribution of goods and services was what mattered.19

Reverting to his prophetic persona, Fromm echoed a familiar line: the best way to facilitate such dialogue on all levels was through face-to-face groups that exchanged information, debated, and made decisions for each unit of a particular enterprise. Arguing much as he had thirteen years earlier in The Sane Society, Fromm maintained that in America, organizing such groups was the equivalent of restoring and enlarging the old town meeting tradition of grassroots democracy, which technocracy had purportedly subverted. He elevated the ideal of the early American town meeting, which in reality was nothing like Fromm had envisioned.²⁰

Predictably, the book ended on a positive note. Although humankind stood at a dangerous crossroads, Fromm proclaimed that fresh new ideas were afloat, ideas shorn of clichés and bureaucratic jargon. A growing number of scientists, artists, businesspeople, and a new breed of politicians were proposing reforms to humanize technology while enhancing man’s creative potential. The appeal of The Revolution of Hope did not lie in its concepts or arguments, however, most of which Fromm had already presented in earlier writings. Rather, the appeal was in his mode of presentation—a brisk, compelling narrative that advanced intellectual content at a deeply emotional level. In effect, to read the book was like attending a therapeutic session. Fromm’s traditionally powerful prophetic exhortations about current dangers and solutions merged seamlessly with a soft spirituality, a sense of inner calm, and a profound hopefulness. Recognizing that his readers were standing at the edge of the abyss created by the mega-machine and the prospect of nuclear war, Fromm’s narrative promoted confidence that a whole new and deeply attractive existence was a realistic possibility. On these terms, rather than for its potent intellectual content, The Revolution of Hope was a very successful book.

After the campaign, Fromm and Annis spent more time outside the United States, alternating between winters in Cuernavaca and summers in Locarno. He also had a project with his colleague and former analysand Michael Maccoby to complete: a close study of a small and impoverished Mexican village. Fromm also wanted to complete a three-volume work on the nature of psychoanalysis. He felt strongly that these two substantial projects, which had been interrupted by his work on the McCarthy campaign, could restore his flagging reputation as a serious thinker. And he was in a rush to complete both projects before his health declined further.21-

For decades, Fromm valued a consistent publication schedule and always sought to bring a new project to a rapid conclusion before starting a new one. He wrote almost every morning—the routine made him feel productive and acted as a stabilizer, particularly in the face of occasional, sometimes serious, personal distress. He then meditated for an hour after writing, which had also helped to calm and structure his life.

In 1957, Fromm had begun to study Chiconcuac, a small village with rich soil, a temperate climate, and a long growing season, fifty miles south of Mexico City. For generations, many Chiconcuac villagers had lived in haciendas and served under semifeudal proprietors. Ignorant, docile, and depressed peon field laborers, these families cultivated sugar cane and rice and were perpetually indebted to the hacienda proprietors. After the Mexican Revolution and the abolition of the hacienda system, each laborer was provided with a small plot of land that he could farm but could neither rent nor sell. Nevertheless, he remained downcast, dependent, and without ambition, living much as he had under the hacienda. In addition to laborers, earlier in its history Chiconcuac had attracted a modest number of free peasants who owned small plots of land that the erstwhile hacienda proprietors had continually threatened to appropriate. The free peasants, more assertive and productive than the laborers, were intent on preserving and maintaining their ownership of the land. Though they were far better off than the laborers, Fromm insisted, they nevertheless had no knowledge of advanced agricultural methods and lacked the skills for successful employment in urban areas. Despite their economic and social differences, both the laborers and free peasants, together with an increasing number of poor landless migrants who had moved to the village, lived in “a cultural and spiritual desert.” Precapitalist customs of the fiesta, neighborly conversation and assistance, and song and collective recreation had lost their sway over most villagers. But the values of a modern industrial society had not filled that void, and the villagers felt marginalized. Television and liquor replaced any sense of community and productivity.22

As a Jew who often resided in a dominant Gentile culture, an academic on the outskirts of academe, and a psychoanalyst free of Freudian orthodoxies, Fromm always empathized with marginalized segments of society. Indeed, he often considered himself to be on the outside looking in. Coupled with a sense of estrangement, Fromm shared with the villagers a reliance on tradition. Indeed, he had long embraced the cohesion of a mythical Catholic past in his quest to bypass capitalism and its bureaucratization and to move toward a humanist future. The village seemed to resonate with the vision of a medieval world that likely never existed but whose conceptualization sometimes anchored Fromm intellectually.

Situated not far from his Cuernavaca home, Fromm visited Chiconcuac on several occasions. With a population of only eight hundred, he calculated that it would be possible to observe each villager closely in the context of the community. It presented an ideal setting for Fromm to conduct empirical research that might shore up his concept of social character. The Mexican Ministry of Health had established a Center of Rural Welfare in the village, and Fromm’s friend Jose Zozaya relied on the center to procure additional government funds. Zozaya gave Fromm the money for the startup costs on his social character project. Several of Fromm’s trainees in the Mexican Psychoanalytic Society offered to help Fromm with the project. Yale’s Foundations Fund for Research in Psychiatry provided grant money for Fromm to hire a full-time associate to administer the details of the project. Finally, the National Autonomous University of Mexico promised to send student and faculty volunteers to provide the villagers medical and social services. This combination of resources made the Chiconcuac project very promising.23

In part, Fromm regarded the village project as a means of demonstrating the utility of the questionnaire protocol he had designed and compiled at the Frankfurt Institute three decades earlier. At the time, it had been regarded as a very innovative research instrument, one capable of accessing and assessing a person’s deep or underlying character structure. The assumption was that the same protocol could be used across cultures and time periods.

The Frankfurt Institute never published the analysis and conclusions of the German worker project based on the tabulations of responses to the questionnaires. But despite the passage of time, Fromm continued to feel that the protocol had been an excellent attitudinal assessment vehicle and felt that the study that came of it had been his major accomplishment as a researcher. He was determined to use the protocol as part of his study of Chiconcuac. The specific and idiosyncratic wording of the respondents’ answers to the questionnaire would reveal their character structures. At Chiconcuac, the questions would be designed to elicit a full range of information on each respondent’s social character, including parental and family relations, the capacity to love and to create, tendencies to hoard and to share, attitudes of personal independence or docile submissiveness, and much more.²⁴

Revised extensively and administered to villagers of all backgrounds, the purpose of the questionnaire became more precise: to explore connections between villagers’ work lives, family relations, economic conditions, and underlying character structures. Unlike the Weimar project, moreover, the interpretation of each villager’s answers would be supplemented by standard projective psychological tests (the Rorschach or Thematic Perception Test), dream interpretation and storytelling, a great deal of data on the place of the respondent in the economic and social structures of Chiconcuac, and even general staff observations of village life. By redesigning the questionnaire to profile a villager on a deep and comprehensive level and by supplementing interpretation of the responses with additional information, Fromm hoped that his Mexican village project would demonstrate that, beyond his popular writings, he was still a serious social researcher.

By early 1959, Fromm had articulated his principal aim for the Chiconcuac project. Primarily through the heavily revised questionnaire (administered to all adults over age sixteen and half of the children) but supplemented by interviews, staff observations, and all sorts of data on the community, he would discern which factors inhibited and which increased creativity and productivity among the villagers. Economic surveys, statistical analyses, anthropological field observations, and other methodologies would also be used. He intended to learn how to remedy the dire legacy of the hacienda system—lethargy, alcoholism, and indifference to life. He sought to introduce happiness, a zest for life, and creative work into this peasant village, which had long suffered from cultural drabness, poverty, and fatalism. “I have been convinced for a long time,” Fromm wrote to the psychologist Charles Wrigley, “that the Mexican village can emerge from its lethargy, and especially from the evil of alcoholism only if the creative impulses of the peasant are awakened.” There were studies of Mexican towns and villages before Fromm’s, but the Chiconcuac project was emerging as a more ambitious undertaking than many of them. The agenda that was falling into place was essentially to understand an impoverished Third World village through quantitative survey data combined with a psychodynamic perspective and a picture of village life that merged social, economic, and historical perspectives into a synthetic narrative. Added to all of this was a reform agenda: the goal was ultimately to enhance the quality of life of the villagers. 25

For the first three years of the project, Fromm worked closely with two American anthropologists, Theodore and Lola Schwartz, a married couple recommended by Margaret Mead. They were fluent in Spanish and had studied segments of the rural Mexican population. Theodore had assisted Mead herself during some of her anthropological field work. Lola, his wife, was completing her dissertation in anthropology and sought to use the village as a research site for her manuscript. Like Mead, both deployed an ethnographic approach, seeking out the broad patterns of a culture. The couple moved to Chiconcuac when Fromm hired them for the project. Through the Schwartzes’ friendships with the villagers and their abundant observations and interviews, Fromm secured intimate details that supplemented the findings from his questionnaire. ²⁶

But after the first fifty villagers were assisted in completing the questionnaire, trouble erupted. Fromm candidly acknowledged to the Schwartzes and to others that he had little capacity to apply quantitative methods to tabulate the results of the overwhelmingly qualitative questionnaire material. Therefore he could not himself create a statistical profile of the social character types among the villagers. He would have to depend on staff for this work. Theodore had the statistical background to take charge in this area, but, according to Fromm, he lacked a refined understanding of the concept of social character, perhaps because he was unacquainted with the psychoanalytic perspective and lacking in social science training. Fromm reported to Mead that Theodore “showed his antagonism to my methods in no uncertain terms.” He seemed not to respect the general direction of the project based on the questionnaires. Theodore also seemed dismissive of the promise of confidentiality that Fromm had given the villagers, and this was a very important issue, perhaps endangering what support Fromm had from the Mexican government. Because of controversies over other local research projects in small Mexican communities, particularly the classic ethnographic study by Oscar Lewis, The Children of Sanchez, Fromm feared that carelessness about confidentiality could hurt his reputation as a serious research scholar. Lewis’s project had developed a “culture of poverty” thesis as the broad social pattern he was examining, using a specific community as a case study. He argued that in adapting to extreme and persistent poverty, the lives of the poor were, of necessity, entirely oriented to the present. They had no concept of long-term planning or the imperatives of civil society. Very little beyond the family was germane. After the study was published, Lewis’s subjects were easy to identify, and to their distress, they were hounded by the media.27

Although Lola Schwartz was not formally a staff member of the village project, she was completing a dissertation on Chiconcuac villagers and, like Theodore, did not conceal the identities of her subjects in her manuscript. In addition to conflicting sets of ethics, Fromm accused the couple of helping some of the villagers migrate illegally to the United States, an indictment that could influence the government to close down the project. Although Fromm praised the Schwartzes very modestly in Social Character in a Mexican Village for gathering data on the lives of the villagers, he felt they were insufficiently deferential to his intentions. Just as he had some difficulty in relinquishing control over the protocols of the Mexican Psychoanalytic Society, Fromm expected to exercise considerable control over his Chiconcuac project and insisted that Theodore recognize “that he was employed to help in a study the aims of which were set” by him. However, when it became clear that neither Theodore nor Lola would subordinate their ethnographic research agendas to Fromm’s exploration of his concept of social character, among other items, Fromm was intent on firing them. Coupled with their violation of confidentiality, he noted gross disparities between the field observations of the Schwartzes and the preliminary responses to his questionnaires. When he took measures to replace them, Theodore fought back, writing to Mead, Riesman, and others that Fromm himself was the source of problems in the study. According to Schwartz, Fromm “felt uncomfortable surrounded by the village people … overwhelmed by their needs” and hardly ever drove down from his home in Cuernavaca to be with them. Writing to Riesman in early January 1967, Theodore accused Fromm (perhaps excessively) of being dictatorial: “In spite of the fact that he set his life against authoritarianism, I found him often authoritarian though he strove against this tendency in himself when he recognized it. His self-knowledge seemed to me far less complete than he believed.”²⁹

Before the conflict with the Schwartzes became unmanageable, Riesman put Fromm in contact with Michael Maccoby, who was finishing a doctorate in social psychology while assisting McGeorge Bundy, the dean of Harvard College. Riesman wielded great influence with the Harvard faculty, had mentored Maccoby, and was favorably disposed toward Fromm’s Chiconcuac project as a means of grounding the concept of social character. Indeed, Riesman reiterated to Bundy, Maccoby, and others that Fromm’s acquainting him with that concept in the 1940s provided the basis for the distinction between “inner” and “other” direction in his 1950 classic The Lonely Crowd. Coincidentally, like Fromm, Maccoby had been attracted to rabbinical and Talmudic studies. He was not only conversant with most of Fromm’s books but admired Fromm’s political activism for nuclear disarmament and his socialist humanism. Fromm in turn was impressed by Maccoby’s general understanding of social and political theory, his mastery of statistical techniques, and his skill with projective psychological testing. Maccoby had studied briefly with Robert Redfield, who had written about the nearby village of Tepotzlan and had emphasized the value of the comparative study of peasant culture. Fromm asked whether Maccoby might want to join his staff (which still included the Schwartzes) as a researcher. Maccoby was interested but hardly sold on the idea of working with Fromm on the Chiconcuac project.30

By 1960, Fromm’s problems with the Schwartzes had become so acute that he asked Riesman to help him persuade Maccoby to work for him so he could replace the couple. Riesman recommended that Fromm invite Maccoby to Cuernavaca for a visit. Maccoby arrived, and an instant and lifelong bond of trust and camaraderie sealed their friendship. Maccoby understood that in addition to Fromm’s strong desire to improve conditions in the village, he was determined to demonstrate his concept of social character not only empirically but statistically, through his revised and more psychoanalytically organized questionnaire. Maccoby’s extensive training in quantitative techniques and institutional research exceeded Theodore Schwartz’s. Moreover, he had far more sympathy with Fromm’s rather idiosyncratic fusion of Freud and Marx and how it was basic to the concept of social character. Fromm intended the Schwartzes to introduce Maccoby to the villagers and wanted Maccoby immediately to become his major understudy. Sensing Fromm’s eagerness to include him on the project and aware that Fromm had analyzed Riesman, Maccoby requested that when the institutional arrangements for his work were in place, Fromm give him a personal analysis followed by a training analysis in clinical technique. Fromm agreed, and Maccoby joined the project.31

Maccoby moved to Cuernavaca with his family in 1960, and he and Fromm quickly became solid colleagues on the Chiconcuac study. As Fromm promised, Maccoby became his analysand. Since his departure from the Frankfurt Institute, Fromm knew that save for Riesman, he lacked a steady long-term critic of his research and writing who accepted him on his own terms. To be sure, Fromm always considered Maccoby his “junior” as a scholar and student of social character and never saw him as the sort of hardnosed critic of his work that Horkheimer or Lowenthal had been. But Fromm appreciated that he and Maccoby usually thought alike and that, unlike the Schwartzes, Maccoby had Fromm’s interests at heart. They exchanged jokes, read one another’s drafts, and greatly enjoyed the work involved in research and writing. Before he moved to Cuernavaca, Maccoby considered himself a humanist socialist. During his work with Fromm, he began to consider himself more a social commentator who might address broad social issues. Recognizing Fromm’s minimal grasp of statistics and his intention to be regarded as a social scientist, Maccoby treaded lightly. His discussions with Fromm focused on descriptive and theoretical narrative relating to the villagers. Despite his deficiencies in statistical research, Fromm insisted that it was essential to tabulate the interpretive responses to the questionnaires numerically and to report the psychological testing results statistically. He also wanted to use factor analysis, which involves processing a large number of variables, to demonstrate that similar peasant behaviors could sometimes be the result of different character types.³²

Like Theodore, Maccoby noted Fromm’s disinclination to visit the village. He also told Fromm that his presence in Chiconcuac was unnecessary. Fromm found this comforting, for he was troubled and often sleepless over the level of defeatism, cynicism, alcoholism, and even violence that permeated village life. Indeed, when Fromm discovered that a number of mothers had placed their children in a special village orphanage so the children could receive free social services, he was angry and indignant and assigned Maccoby to stop the practice and address the underlying problem. In sum, Maccoby made almost the perfect project partner for Fromm, and the Schwartzes left in 1961. Maccoby assumed much of the research and methodological concerns, dutifully discussing his findings with Fromm and following the older man’s lead in arriving at preliminary conclusions. By 1963, Fromm was comfortable with Maccoby’s hard-working, take-charge attitude and found that it complimented his own theoretical background and general supervisory role. A monumental case study of the Chiconcuac peasantry could finally be accomplished. Indeed, Fromm was so confident that Maccoby was moving the project along the right track and was properly attending to the daily work with questionnaires, projective tests, factor analyses, and write-ups of preliminary results that he permitted other projects to consume much of his time, returned to his regular writing schedule, and was happier and more in his element as a result.33

Fromm’s first heart attack kept him away from Mexico and the Chiconcuac project through much of 1967. That year, Theodore wrote to Fromm from Hawaii that he and Lola wanted to publish their firsthand observations of the villagers even though their accounts of specific individuals violated Fromm’s requirement of the strictest confidentiality. The letter arrived during the most critical months of Fromm’s recuperation. He fired back a long letter to Theodore informing him that he needed rest rather than attend to this new distraction. Fromm reminded Theodore that the project required that the staff adhere precisely to “psychoanalytic social psychology by the very nature of which there is no description of any one single individual.” Fromm would allow the Schwartzes to publish their village material only if it adhered to this requirement. Lola’s dissertation clearly did not, Fromm noted, for it was possible to identify the villagers in her narrative. The Schwartzes countered that at the time Lola showed her finished dissertation to Fromm to look over, he had not provided any feedback about it. She therefore assumed Fromm had no objections. She then submitted the completed dissertation to her doctoral committee, and the committee formally approved it. Learning of this, Fromm reprimanded the committee for doing so and asked that it reconsider. The committee refused, posing an important ethical wrinkle. What gave Fromm authority to interfere, as an outsider, with the work of a legitimate faculty committee performing its designated function? Was Fromm in breach of university autonomy in matters such as this? Conversely, what right did Lola have to compromise the guidelines that she had cause to know governed the village project? Should an ethical breach in the workplace preclude use of the accumulated data within a project in academe?³⁴

Beyond the dissertation conundrum, Theodore argued that Fromm was impeding the general process of anthropological study and hindering their efforts to publish findings based on two years of fieldwork. To conclude matters, Fromm pleaded with Theodore to move beyond “the atmosphere of annoyance and recriminations” and that “my physical condition makes it inadvisable” to go on fighting. Riesman, also aware of Fromm’s fragile health, once more played the role of intermediary and tried to mollify the Schwartzes. The problem resolved itself when Theodore received a professorial appointment at UCLA and became preoccupied with other matters, freeing Fromm and Maccoby to wrap up Social Character in a Mexican Village, without his interference. In her evaluation of the entire dispute, Mead got it right. What Fromm considered an ethical breach from the perspective of a psychoanalyst, she maintained, was no breach at that time in the professional training of anthropologists. Ethics here did not cross disciplines, and there was no universal standard for ethical inquiry. 35

By the time his book was almost completed, Fromm seemed somewhat more robust. He wrote a portion of the first chapter on theory and methodology and the eleventh, concluding chapter. Maccoby assumed responsibility for the rest. He sent each chapter draft to Fromm for critique. Often the two met to discuss potential revisions, and then Maccoby would finalize a chapter. A chapter might be rewritten and revised several times before it met with Fromm’s approval. In late April 1968, Fromm wrote to Mead that there was a rapidly evolving “manuscript between Maccoby and myself which we are constantly revising.” The manuscript would soon be ready for publication.³⁶

Unlike Fromm’s other books, Social Character in a Mexican Village did not make for quick, arresting reading, weighed down as it was by the methodological discussions, tables, and statistics that Fromm wanted Maccoby to include. Maccoby, who did most of the writing, lacked Fromm’s gift for eloquent prose, rich metaphors, and choice phrasings. He elaborated the concept of social character very well, however, and he explained the distinction between productive and nonproductive character quite clearly (with perhaps a greater rigidity than Fromm). All of these elements may help in part to explain why it was Fromm’s weakest-selling book, but other factors contributed to poor sales as well. The study was a product of the interdisciplinary Culture and Personality movement. This had flourished in the 1930s but was out of fashion by 1970. In addition, influential scholars of the 1960s and 1970s, such as the anthropologist Robert Levine, felt that market economies were the keys to change in locations such as Chiconcuac; Fromm and Maccoby assumed otherwise. Psychoanalysts and social psychologists generally ignored the book because it did not seem pertinent to their own work. Fromm was also distressed when Prentice-Hall “failed completely in giving any publicity to the book.” Indeed, Prentice-Hall relinquished publication rights after only seven years. By 1997, no more than 150,000 copies had sold worldwide (which was rather minimal for a Fromm publication), and there were only three translations from the English text—Spanish, Swedish, and German. As might be expected, the most impressive sales for Social Character in a Mexican Village, came from Mexico. The Spanish edition was reprinted seven times and was used in several university courses. The underlying problem was that the general targeting of the readership for Social Character in a Mexican Village was off. It appealed neither to a scholarly nor a popular audience.37

Yet even though the narrative line was weighed down by statistics and other details, the book told an arresting story that began with the founding of Chiconcuac. By the 1950s, the town had grown into a poor peasant society consisting of a small group of landowners and a large group of landless peasants and migrants who barely subsisted on their meager wages. The peasants and migrants felt that their lives were constricted by poverty, boredom, and sparse opportunities. Most of the peasant majority lacked productive entrepreneurial skills or the capacity to save what they acquired. According to Fromm and Maccoby, there was a constant “conflict between cynicism and hopelessness on the one hand and faith, often a childlike faith, on the other.” Interestingly, this was the same conflict that the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga had portrayed among late medieval European peasants in his classic study The Waning of the Middle Ages (1919). Chiconcuac seemed like a throwback in time.

A good deal of Fromm’s and Maccoby’s narrative concerned Chiconcuac’s culture of poverty and despair, where neither literacy nor education was prized. Many chose the less risky (and less profitable) practice of producing sugar cane rather than the more profitable choice of growing rice and vegetables. Cane production required less work and enabled workers to join a government-run cooperative providing medical care and life insurance. Very few planted a combination of more lucrative crops along with a minimal cane crop, which would be a way to garner profits yet remain eligible for the government cooperative. The choice to mix the crops grown was therefore a strong predictor of a villager’s social character.³⁸

Amid the unstable marriages and high rates of alcoholism that characterized the peasant culture in Chiconcuac, the quality of village life deteriorated. Nevertheless, a privileged elite emerged who worked hard and cultivated profitable rice and vegetable crops. They also prized the modern work skills that were more evident in Mexico City. Unlike most peasants, they trusted their powers of reasoning and understanding and felt confident that they could shape their own lives. Fromm and Maccoby described them as the “new entrepreneurs” who were dominating village government, and they also noted a deepening gap between a minority who felt hopeful and prosperous and the overwhelming majority who were poor and dejected. This was the present and the future of Chiconcuac unless reforms were instituted.39

Fromm and Maccoby underscored three institutional resources for reform that stood to enhance life not only in Chiconcuac but in other impoverished peasant villages, their ultimate goal being to find vehicles for mitigating poverty in Third World countries generally. First, the national government’s CONASUPO program (Compania Nacional de Subsidios Populares) merited support. It offered to buy (at decent prices and beyond what private buyers would pay) the crops the peasants harvested in their villages. Peasants selected by Chiconcuac and other villages would attend CONASUPO schools for training in weighing and evaluating the quality of their neighbors’ crops and providing a legally binding receipt before the crop was deposited in a community silo for wider government distribution. Fromm and Maccoby thought the CONASUPO project would work in Chiconcuac. It protected peasants from the potential price exploitation of private crop speculators and, by showing that the program could be trusted, it helped address the distrustful aspect of peasant life. It was a promising beginning.⁴⁰

The second reformist institution was a large orphanage, Nuestros Pequenos Hermanos (Our Little Siblings), started by Father William Wasson in Cuernavaca. He also accepted a good many orphans and abandoned children from Chiconcuac and surrounding villages. Some of the adolescents had prison records; most of the younger children had lived in violent neighborhoods. Within this devoutly Catholic institution, Wasson promised a secure and “nourishing” space where the children could mature, even though experts predicted he would end up with simply another failed juvenile correctional facility. Almost all of the youngsters proved to be cooperative and responsible, which Fromm and Maccoby attributed to Wasson’s refusal to allow his orphanage to become a rule-bound correctional facility. In fact, Wasson regarded the orphanage as a loving family. He minimized bureaucracy and encouraged client self-management. Fromm concluded that Wasson cultivated an atmosphere of trust, productivity, and life affirmation within the community, an atmosphere based on “unconditional love,” respect for the rights of others, emphasis on community obligations, and the treatment of each child as a distinct and important individual.41

The third example was the Chiconcuac’s Boys’ Club, which had originated through a cooperative venture between Fromm’s small Chiconcuac project research staff and volunteers from the American Friends Service Committee who lived in the village. These two groups organized a group of twenty adolescent boys. Initially, Theodore Schwartz supervised the venture. Maccoby took over in 1961 and used the AFSC volunteers to supervise the boys’ activities, which included new methods of farming and animal husbandry. Half of the club’s profit from crop sales was reinvested; the other half was distributed to each boy who participated. A small business soon emerged, with regular crops, valuable milk-bearing cows and goats, and hundreds of egg-laying chickens. For a downcast peasant village, this was a major achievement. As the older boys began to guide the younger ones, Maccoby and other project staff consciously assumed more peripheral roles. Several of the boys went on to successful careers, bypassing the general pessimism of the village.⁴²

Fromm and Maccoby agreed that the CONASUPO program, Wasson’s orphanage, and the Boys’ Club had made discernable inroads against traditional defeatist village behavior. Did this suggest a general approach to Third World poverty, they asked, as they compared the successes in Chiconcuac to community work in Sicily conducted by Fromm’s friend Danilo Dolci and work in Brazil by another friend, Paolo Freire. In the end, they postulated that reform was possible in all peasant communities, but they rejected the premise of most social researchers of the late 1960s and early 1970s that the answer was in expanding market forces. Programs held the greatest promise when they emphasized productive work through cooperation, education, mutual respect, and love. For Fromm, a “life affirming community” trumped one based on the marketplace. From a lifelong socialist humanist, this was a predictable perspective.⁴³

Fromm and Maccoby concluded their study with an unsettling qualifier. The changes they had observed in the village were promising starts, but they were only starts in a long and difficult process. Socioeconomic conditions existing over centuries formed the social character structures within a society, and once these were in place, they resisted change mightily. Human beings took a good long while—often generations—to adapt to fundamental changes in their very character and being. The gloom and despair of most of the Chiconcuac villagers had not lifted, even as life became more hopeful for others who benefited directly from the initial reforms. Despite the enormity of the task ahead, Fromm and Maccoby hoped the exciting changes they had studied would be a spur to other reformist changes and for those to connect to a chain of still others, so that over the generations the pervasive lethargy and despair of most Chiconcauc villagers would recede.44

Though Maccoby conducted a disproportionate share of the research and the writing of the book, he emphasized that Fromm had shaped not only the research methods and the conclusions but every other important aspect of the volume, especially the animating narrative line. It was probably Fromm’s most evidence-driven publication since the German worker project at the Frankfurt Institute. In brief, it was a solid and important work of scholarship. Fromm’s prophetic hope for the village was there, but it tended to be subsumed by layers of data and observations on the despondent and sometimes nearly hopeless quality of much of peasant life. The characteristically buoyant Fromm seemed chastened by the alcoholism, violence, and poverty in the village and by the pervading sense of despair. Published two years after The Revolution of Hope, Fromm found Social Character in a Mexican Village a much more difficult book to complete, and its storyline was more sober. ⁴⁵

Fromm’s serious coronary condition may have contributed to his cautionary assessment of Chiconcuac. Maccoby spotted his skepticism and dejection in their regular work sessions on the manuscript. Aniceto Aramoni felt that Fromm’s downcast mood was unmistakable whenever they discussed the village project, especially after the heart attack. Indeed, while Fromm made the trip from Cuernavaca to Chiconcuac fairly regularly before his heart attack, there is no record of his traveling there afterward.⁴⁶