In a sardonic poem of 1940, composed just after his migration to the United States from Great Britain, W. H. Auden memorialized an “Unknown Citizen.” Written in the form of an epitaph for an “unknown” and yet all-too-knowable citizen, the poem offers a capsule biography of an unnamed individual from the point of view of the social agencies charged with tracking and ordering his affairs. The citizen it commemorates is identified by a string of code similar to a U.S. Social Security number—“JS/07/M/378”—and his life amounts to a compendium of details gathered by employers, hospitals, schools, psychologists, market researchers, insurers, journalists, and state bureaus. The poem’s final lines point simultaneously to the hubris and the limits of society’s knowledge of this man. “Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd: Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.”1
If seldom as eloquently as Auden, contemporary Americans raised similar questions about those who sought to know them, whether for the purpose of governance or profit, security or convenience, or social welfare or scholarly research. Indeed, the proper threshold for “knowing” a citizen in a democratic, capitalist nation would become in the twentieth century one of Americans’ most enduring debates. How much should a society be able to glean about the lives of its own members, and how much of oneself should one willingly reveal? What aspects of a person were worth knowing—and to whom—and which parts were truly one’s own? Where and when could an individual’s privacy be guaranteed? As the century advanced, the questions became more insistent. Were private spaces and thoughts, undiscovered by others, even possible under the conditions of modern life? What would an ever more knowing society mean for the people caught in its net—and for the individual liberties that Americans supposedly prized? To wit: Could known citizens be happy? Were they, in fact, free?
This book borrows the poet’s questions to pry open the contentious career of privacy in the modern United States. Individual privacy first surfaced as a sustained political issue only in the late nineteenth century, but it would swiftly become a fixture—even fixation—of U.S. public culture. As corporate industry, social institutions, and the federal government swelled, so too did disputes over what sort of prying and how much probing into citizens’ lives were acceptable. These debates emerged alongside an increasingly impersonal, urban society: its techniques for maintaining social order but also its mass media, its scientific technologies as well as its styles of selling. Privacy talk waxed and waned, following no predictable path. But it closely tracked public attention to the perils—and the promise—of being a known citizen.
Modern privacy sensibilities were honed at the crux of a contradiction. Even as Americans grasped at wider freedoms in the twentieth century, they, like Auden’s protagonist, were becoming ever more intelligible to an expanding array of parties: state bureaucracies and law enforcement; the popular press and marketers; financial institutions and private corporations; scientific researchers and psychological experts; and, eventually, data aggregators and proprietary algorithms. A knowing society impinged on individual liberties in unsettling ways. Being known could bring punishment from the state or destroy a reputation crafted for peers; it could raise one’s insurance rates or cost someone a job. It could even compromise one’s free will and sense of authentic personhood. Because they possessed this capacity to know, modern social institutions raised Auden’s questions quite directly. Emerging technologies and media, novel modes of expert and corporate surveillance, and new practices of official documentation all propelled the problem of individual privacy to the foreground of U.S. public culture. There it would remain, becoming more and more central to citizens’ assessments of their state and social order.
Americans turned to privacy talk because it helped them navigate the pull and push of a knowing society, one that sought to apprehend, govern, and minister to its members by capturing them in fuller and finer detail. Such a society carried rewards as well as risks. The proliferation of techniques for rendering citizens knowable, from credit reports and CCTV cameras to psychological testing, promised opportunity and security, even self-understanding. But being known too well—through the monitoring of one’s sexual or consumption habits, for instance—could threaten personal autonomy, undermining the notion of a free-standing individual so foundational to U.S. politics and culture. In like fashion, to remain unrecognizable was in certain contexts a sign of privilege, but in others a form of disempowerment. Being traceable in a national criminal or DNA database was a different matter than being identifiable to a benefits-granting program like Social Security. It was possible, that is, to suffer not only from too little but also from too much privacy. Invisibility to service providers or census takers could sharply limit one’s social opportunities and legal rights.2 Whereas one’s individual dignity might require being shielded from public view in some contexts, in others it could demand just the opposite: the validation of being named and seen. A longing for public recognition could oscillate with a desire for obscurity, even within the same person. And so, whether one could be known accurately and authentically—and on one’s own terms, rather than the larger society’s—was yet another question animating privacy’s presence in American public life.
Arguments about privacy were really arguments over what it meant to be a modern citizen. To invoke its shelter was to make a claim about the latitude for action and anonymity a decent, democratic society ought to afford its members. Responses to that claim exposed the fault lines of civic membership. Which citizens, after all, could be entrusted with privacy, and therefore be liberated from official scrutiny? Because privacy could both foster intimacy and nurture vice, it came packed with assumptions about the kind of person entitled to it. And so, although privacy was obviously not the only way to talk about citizenship in the twentieth century, any conversation about privacy was already entangled with ideas about one’s status in the broader society. How much privacy, for example, ought to be allotted to prisoners, soldiers, patients, or teenagers? When could different sorts of sexual subjects—male, female, straight, gay, married, unmarried—claim its mantle? Under what social and economic conditions could a person be said genuinely to have privacy, and how on a daily basis did one’s class and race shape access to it? More generally, who had the ability to keep parts of their lives secret? Conversely, who could be recognized and appraised for who they truly were? The degree and nature of privacy that individual Americans enjoyed—including who could demand it and under what circumstances—were ways of defining, and divvying up, civic membership. No wonder, then, that privacy would become a dominant theme of twentieth-century politics.
To conceive of privacy as a social benefit and a mark of belonging enlarges the standard meaning of citizenship as a status conferred and regulated by the state.3 Auden’s anonymous subject, after all, was defined not simply by his nationality but also by his many other quasi-civic roles: employee, union member, father, neighbor, and consumer. “The Unknown Citizen” points us to the ways that full inclusion in an industrial democracy was a matter of one’s capacity to move relatively freely through a force field of social institutions, private as well as public. For citizens themselves, it is clear, “citizenship” was never merely a juridical status, but instead a looser, more expansive marker, gesturing to one’s ability to exercise choice and autonomy in the many realms of social life.4 Like them, this book employs the term “citizen” in its most capacious sense. Privacy, understood as freedom from intrusion or scrutiny, could by these lights sometimes act as a substitute for explicitly enunciated rights. Its absence—via formal law or informal circumstance—could work to deny even full citizens equal social standing. Asserting how one could be known in the workplace or the marketplace, on a city street or in a suburban bedroom, was a claim to self-determination as well as social power. Americans in the twentieth century thus made of privacy much more than a legal right. They made it foundational to their sense of personhood and national identity.
Privacy has played a vital political and cultural role in the modern United States. But it has largely eluded scholars. This book pursues its history from a new vantage point: the question of how Americans would, and should, be known by their own society. Across the last century and a half, tabloid journalism and new technologies, welfare bureaucracies and police tactics, market research and personality testing, scientific inquiry and computer data banks, tell-all memoirs and social media all posed this question. In response, jurists and philosophers but also ordinary citizens weighed the advantages and hazards of being known. They would, in the process, remake conventions about access and intimacy, redrawing the borders separating the private from the public self. Trained on how citizens approached unfamiliar practices of identification and intrusion, record keeping and revelation, this book illuminates the deeply personal—but also profoundly social and political—meanings they attached to private matters. Spanning the long twentieth century, from the era of “instantaneous photography” to our own age of big data, it offers a wide-angle view of privacy as Americans have argued and imagined it.
Privacy, it scarcely needs saying, looms large today. If the drumbeat of headlines and bestsellers is to be believed, Americans are in the midst of an unprecedented privacy crisis—under “relentless surveillance,” on the road to a fully transparent society, and with “no place to hide.”5 The ingredients of this crisis are well known to us. Data mining and NSA spying, recommendation algorithms and electronic footprints, biometric identification and extensive information sharing on social media platforms have raised fears about government and corporate surveillance to a high pitch. That a certain standard of protection from the gaze of others is routinely violated, and perhaps unrecoverable, is widely decried.
In this climate of worry about any number of parties and techniques that expose us against our wishes, privacy seems self-evidently a political matter. Despite privacy’s starring role in contemporary diagnoses of U.S. culture, however, we have a surprisingly poor grasp of how it arrived there. Certainly, privacy has figured for centuries as an essential ingredient in theorists’ formulations of liberal selfhood. Almost endlessly elastic, the term has, since its first appearance in English in 1534, accrued religious, philosophical, social, political, legal, and psychological dimensions.
Yet privacy was not always a matter of public import for Americans. As a topic for widespread popular debate or as a common public language, it is a creature almost entirely of the late nineteenth century. Born of disquiet about the status of the private person in the post–Civil War United States and an age when the contents of citizenship were under reconstruction, modern privacy arrived on the scene simultaneously prized and endangered. A new form of privacy talk took hold in this era, with mounting numbers of citizens both claiming a right to privacy and believing their privacy to be under siege. Only in the twentieth century did privacy emerge as a central concern of American life, with some commentators going further, tagging it an obsession or a “cult.”6 And only then was it vigorously pursued as a public, and sometimes collective, claim. “Privacy” gained an unusual capacity to frame Americans’ discussions about the state, their social institutions, and even themselves. This is a story that is still unfolding, of course.
Privacy may have made a late entrance into U.S. politics and public life, but its staying power has been impressive. Nearly every major development in the United States since the Civil War—public health campaigns, media and communications technologies, military mobilization, social welfare legislation, workplace innovations, therapeutic methods, urban planning and suburbanization, social movements, criminal and terrorist threats—has been assessed in terms of its implications for citizens’ privacy. Privacy talk has coursed through realms as different as bioethics and celebrity, national security and architecture, social etiquette and professional codes. At least since the turn of the twentieth century, it has also been democratic: just about anyone can demand privacy, if not achieve it. Immigrants, laborers, schoolchildren, and prisoners have all laid claim to the concept. It has featured as regularly in science fiction as in scholarship, in poetry as in political commentary. Invoked as an essential freedom and even a human right, yet worried over as a fragile and perhaps dying value, privacy became in the twentieth century a dominant concern of modern publics around the globe.7 In the post–World War II United States, concerns over its status gathered enough momentum to launch a new constitutional right. Since then, it is safe to say, privacy’s role in the American public sphere has only intensified.
Privacy in the modern United States thus has not been “private” at all. Rather, it has functioned as a crucial category of public life and a durable feature of partisan politics, even as its availability—or absence—has shaped countless personal choices and relationships. Highly visible contretemps over what should be kept out of the public eye across the last century fundamentally shaped U.S. political culture. The same is true today, even as a large body of writing declares that privacy is dead and gone.8 In fact, privacy has never been more present in American life. It informs pundits’ and citizens’ discussions of topics ranging from the social behavior of youth to airport screening procedures, and from online search tracking to state intelligence operations. It regularly punctuates public life as a policy concern, a legal claim, and an individual hope.
The modern concept of privacy, as even this brief sketch makes clear, is sprawling. It has for good reason prompted voluminous scholarship in law, philosophy, literature, communications, design, technology, and the newer field of surveillance studies. Yet inquiries into its past have been curiously confined. As I worked on this book I kept arriving at a paradox: privacy is everywhere in modern America and yet hardly anywhere in modern American history. Arguably one of the most charismatic words in the national lexicon, privacy is missing from the indexes and headings by which we organize our understanding of the past. Key episodes in the legal history of privacy are well charted, as are specific controversies. But the scholarship remains heavily state- and rights-centered, neglecting privacy’s significance as a cultural sensibility and public value. Historical works that examine the idea of privacy in all of its unruliness, or even some of it, are scarce, especially for the twentieth century—the period in which it entered national life with force.9
Existing histories of privacy are typically narrower affairs: explanations of the emergence of privacy rights, trained on doctrine, precedent, and policy. Legal scholars have devoted much attention to the first widely recognized demand for a “right to privacy” in 1890, the codification of state privacy laws over the ensuing decades, and the enunciation of privacy as a constitutional right in 1965.10 These works treat the evolution of jurisprudence as a proxy for less neatly contained shifts in Americans’ thinking about intimacy and intrusion. But such studies do not dwell on changes in citizens’ sensibilities or on the reasons behind them. Scholarship on privacy’s technical, juridical career has thus made little impact on our understanding of the politics and culture of modern America. Privacy as such makes only a brief—if dramatic—appearance in standard textbook surveys, usually beginning in 1965 with Griswold v. Connecticut and cresting in 1973 with Roe v. Wade. It bursts on the scene as a political problem, is transformed into a constitutional if controversial right, and, thus dealt with, promptly vanishes again.
There are excellent accounts that take up aspects of the history of privacy, especially concerning sexual regulation, the popular press, and state spying.11 Each of these is a massive and complex topic in its own right. But fixing on a single strain of privacy’s history can be misleading. For example, the two leading narratives about privacy in the United States—its eradication through state, workplace, and electronic surveillance, on the one hand, and its gradual, if tenuous, triumph through hard-won criminal or reproductive rights, on the other—point toward radically opposed conclusions.12 Important as such scholarship is, it cannot do justice to privacy’s wide-ranging, generative role in U.S. public culture. It cannot explain why Americans have so regularly turned to privacy to talk about such unlike things: their intimate relationships, their living spaces, their personal data, their political rights, and even their psyches. And it cannot account for why citizens’ understandings of and feelings about privacy have evolved over time. Yet precisely what we require is a history of privacy’s persistent, pliable appeal. Only by attending to its arrival in disparate spheres—law and technology, medicine and media, literature and architecture—will we be able to fathom how privacy came to sit at the very core of American politics and social life.
My panoramic approach attempts to overcome what is thus far a patchwork history. This book deliberately peers into otherwise unrelated domains in U.S. society in order to piece together a new picture of how and why privacy came to matter so much to modern Americans. Rather than lament privacy’s disappearance, as do so many recent commentators, I track privacy’s appearances in the U.S. public sphere, asking: When and why did privacy make its claims on citizens’ attention? In what terms, and with what consequences? How, in the process, were Americans’ expectations of privacy not simply diminished but transformed?
What, indeed, made privacy such a compelling idiom, brought to bear on topics as varied as intelligence gathering and confessional memoirs? Privacy talk, I argue, has been a response to, and sometimes a resolution of, an inescapable impasse of modern life: the fact that, even as U.S. public culture purported to honor the will and choices of individual citizens, its agencies pressed in new and forceful ways on the private person. “Privacy” rarely referenced a thing with definite contents; rather it served as an index to changing ideas about society itself.13 Legal scholar Lawrence Tribe captures this sense of privacy when he describes it as “nothing less than society’s limiting principle.”14 And indeed, citizens enlisted it, time and time again, to fix the line between the modern person and the collectivities to which she or he belonged.
To call something private, an option more and more Americans exercised in the twentieth century, was almost never to make recourse to an agreed-on definition. It was to make an argument about the proper relationship among citizen, state, and society. Sociologist Christena Nippert-Eng puts it this way: “privacy is about nothing less than trying to live both as a member of a variety of social units—as part of a number of larger wholes—and as an individual—a unique, individuated self.”15 The topic of privacy invited, even incited, grassroots social theorizing about power and intimacy, surveillance and subjectivity. It was the public vocabulary citizens reached for to debate the scope of the state, the conduct of social relations, and the very borders of the self.
More specifically, privacy was the language of choice for addressing the ways that U.S. citizens were—progressively and, some would say, relentlessly—rendered knowable by virtue of living in a modern industrial society. Given the number and range of parties that aspired to know them, Americans rightfully wondered what aspects of one’s body, personality, identity, biography, and data an individual had ultimate claim to. In different ways, a candid photograph, a financial record, and a psychiatric diagnosis each raised this question: How distinct from the mesh of institutions, practices, and norms that constituted social existence could a person actually be? Privacy talk attempted to bridge the tension between expanding claims to personal inviolability and more sophisticated methods of infringing on it. It mediated, too, between the desire to be “let alone” and the urge to be known. These tensions created special problems in a national culture staked on personal autonomy. Invoking privacy was one of the chief ways that Americans of all stripes weighed in on an enduring political and philosophical quandary as to what separated self from society.16
And yet, as we would expect, privacy was not a shared or unitary concern, but was experienced and summoned in markedly uneven ways in the American twentieth century. Citizens viewed and wielded privacy differently depending on their status and circumstances, and some could barely access it at all. As a general rule, those excluded from full political citizenship because of their class, race, gender, age, nationality, able-bodiedness, or sexuality—or combinations thereof—also suffered most from a lack of privacy.17 Prisoners and other institutionalized populations, but also the young, the poor, and the infirm, had few defenses against the intrusive monitoring of their lives. Racial minorities, immigrants, and noncitizens were subject to far higher rates of police and bureaucratic surveillance than were white native-born Americans; intensely scrutinized, they were perhaps always less deeply known by agents of the dominant society.18 Women and sexual minorities were presumed to have a lesser claim on privacy than heterosexual men, and as a result they came first to the recognition that altering privacy’s terms through disclosure and confession might be the path to a more inclusive public sphere.
In contrast, owning a home, making a comfortable living, and conforming to dominant norms of respectability all decidedly increased one’s chances of evading society’s gaze. And yet it was often white middle-class citizens who denounced privacy invasions most vociferously. This has led some to consider privacy talk a bourgeois pastime, the preoccupation of a select part of the population.19 Elite Americans have sometimes embraced that characterization; privacy, noted the prominent nineteenth-century editor E. L. Godkin, was “one thing to a man who has always lived in his own house, and another to a man who has always lived in a boardinghouse.”20 It is undoubtedly the case that privacy debates in the United States came with a class profile. As privileged citizens felt the press of social institutions on their own lives and liberties, their particular worries became the fodder for media coverage, congressional hearings, and public policy. But it is also evident that privacy’s promise beckoned, if in a variety of registers, to a wider swath of Americans, including juveniles, patients, soldiers, union members, research subjects, and welfare recipients. As W. H. Auden—an immigrant to the United States and a gay man—well understood, the extent to which an individual could be rendered knowable was full of consequence in a modern nation.21 The efflorescence and democratization of privacy talk over the course of the twentieth century were testament to that fact.
Precisely because privacy in the United States has been billed as a personal possession, outside the realm of the state or politics, its history opens an illuminating window onto the social strains of modern citizenship. Across the last century privacy was increasingly linked to that most public of identities, the rights-bearing citizen. Privacy talk thus became a potent avenue for claiming and circumscribing the social benefits of a modern industrial democracy. At the same time, insisting on recognition—as a citizen, a holder of a specific identity, a person out of the shadows—was basic to enacting one’s membership in society. How well known a citizen would be was a sensitive marker of status and power, a fissure like any other cutting across professions of equality and opportunity in American life.
Charting the travels of something as abstract, but also as intimate, as “privacy” has its challenges. To begin with, the question of what privacy is has long bedeviled legal and philosophical discussions. In the course of researching this book it was amusing, if also sobering, to come across other observers’ frustrations with how ungovernable a subject it is. “Few values so fundamental to society as privacy have been left so undefined in social theory or have been the subject of such vague and confused writing by social scientists,” charged legal scholar Alan Westin in 1967.22 Forty years later, Daniel Solove, a leading theorist of privacy, branded it “a concept in disarray.”23 Like the weather, concluded a sociologist in 2016, privacy is “much discussed, little understood, and not easy to control.”24 A large body of work nevertheless offers ever-finer taxonomies of privacy’s “spatial,” “decisional,” “aesthetic,” “proprietary,” and “informational” dimensions.25 But these efforts have considerable limitations for the historian. If we want to understand how Americans in varied contexts and times understood privacy, we need to abandon the notion of it having a stable definition. We cannot treat the bundle of ideas that inform modern privacy as transhistorical or ahistorical, a timeless principle waiting to be discovered, as in the abstract “right” to privacy—itself a puzzle since no such right was enunciated in formal legal terms in the United States until 1890.
The history offered here undercuts assumptions that there is something essential, even constitutional, about the concept. I argue that “privacy” has served in the United States as a catch-all for concerns about modern life and social organization, from new forms of media and technology to new state projects, new kinds of expert intervention, and even new living arrangements. As Americans reckoned with these developments, and particularly what they entailed for personal boundaries and individual rights, privacy itself—as an idea and a practice—evolved. In entertaining novel understandings of what could be asked and what could be said, what could be exposed and what should be disclosed, citizens shifted the very contents of “public” and “private,” even as they regularly treated those categories as a fixed feature of social life.
In contrast to virtually every recent book on the subject, then, mine is not an account of what happened to the privacy Americans once, and seemingly straightforwardly, enjoyed. Instead it recounts what has happened to citizens’ thinking about privacy—and, just as significant, what privacy has allowed them to think about. Threats to Americans’ solitude and security changed dramatically over the last century. Their expectations about privacy shape-shifted in response. In certain eras, privacy debates focused most intently on incursions into personal space; in other periods, on violations of individual bodies, psyches, data, or peace of mind. Although citizens at times seemed to crave privacy, at others they were insensible to its importance or deliberately repudiated it. In the name of personal dignity—or autonomy or liberation—some wrapped a cloak of privacy around themselves, whereas some tore it off or tried to strip it from others. Americans never all conceived of privacy in the same way, of course. Nor did they all attend to, or participate equally in, such debates. What remained remarkably consistent, however, was their recourse to privacy as a way of arguing about their society and its pressures on the person.
Here, the same imprecision that vexes theorists proved to be privacy’s true political value. Privacy, it turns out, has been a highly flexible container for social thought. The various domains in which Americans invoked privacy had little in common. But the questions that provoked the claim—who had the right to know, what ought to be publicly known, and who and what should remain unknown—were surprisingly stable, linking debates over print journalism in the 1890s to debates about confessional memoirs a century later, and contests over state filing systems in the 1930s to those over commercial algorithms in the present. Privacy may have been an inadequate vocabulary for that range of concerns, as a number of observers pointed out along the way. But the fact that so many items huddled together under its umbrella suggests privacy’s indispensability as a mediator of modern social life.
Privacy is, finally, a tricky historical quarry because it refers to those matters one hopes to keep out of the public eye, to those corners of life that are off-limits or beyond scrutiny. And yet, at many points across the last century, privacy went public as it were, suddenly becoming visible in editorial pages, congressional hearings, and popular protests. To get at its changing contours, I take my cues from major controversies that had privacy at their core, whether in the form of “instantaneous photographs,” Social Security numbers, or reproductive rights. A focus on public debates naturally leaves much hidden. This book cannot speak to the irreducible diversity of the ways Americans experienced privacy in their daily lives. Yet national debates can hint at more intimate ones, and what these disputes disclose is how regularly private matters have reshaped the public domain. Moments of uncertainty over the borders of public and private threw the concepts themselves into sharp relief, rendering cultural norms, and their transformation, visible. Attending to those moments moves us beyond elite commentary and legal arguments, getting us closer to the complex texture and meanings of modern privacy.
When did Americans call for privacy or give it up, and how did this depend on the setting: a bedroom, a laboratory, or a government office? Which citizens felt privacy’s lack—or publicity’s glare—most keenly? With what words did they defend their claims to privacy or argue about its violation? How were such beliefs, even deeply cherished ones, revised? Examining what a diverse array of Americans made of privacy, I document how conventions about access, intimacy, and disclosure were built but also dismantled. And I replace a now-familiar narrative about the “end of privacy” with one that recognizes both the curtailing of old privacies and the invention of new ones over time. That history cannot be told in linear fashion. And so I pick up the threads of particular privacy debates when they first appeared and let them go when others gained ground, without carrying each story to its conclusion. Rather than retell the history of photography, policing, research ethics, or “outing”—although portions of each of those histories appear here—I have sought to follow in the tracks of the known citizen.
No one book could capture the whole of this story or every angle of U.S. privacy debates. But by alighting on a series of critical episodes, this one aims to illuminate both the prominence and the significance of privacy talk in the modern American public sphere. That story begins in new understandings of the “inviolate personality” in the late nineteenth century and culminates—though does not end—with the emergence of a national “confessional culture” in our present. In between, I showcase pivotal moments when privacy talk became concentrated and consequential.
The first such moment came in the 1890s, when Victorian norms of propriety and respectability collided with mass-media technologies and prompted the first modern call for a “right to privacy.” The second was occasioned by the rise of the administrative state in the early decades of the twentieth century, which heightened anxieties about the government’s capacity to catalog and monitor its citizens. By mid-century, the intersection of a full-blown national security apparatus with more intimate forms of prying—in suburban communities, therapists’ offices, the white-collar workplace, the public school, and the consumer market—riveted public attention on the invasiveness of American culture itself.
In the 1960s, in response to this series of technical and cultural developments, privacy gained new status as a constitutional right, becoming a cornerstone of Americans’ popular lexicon of entitlements. Yet the fragility of that right in an era of advancing social and scientific research, government surveillance, and computer data banks meant that privacy concerns did not fade away. Instead, they were aroused anew, ushering in altered norms around confidentiality, consent, and access. In the 1970s and beyond, political demands for transparency, exposure, and disclosure—by one light privacy’s opposites—redrew the borders between society and citizen. By the end of the century, the commercialization of surveillance along with the outflow of confessional talk would prompt many to conclude that there was no longer any privacy in the United States, nor even any desire for it. Yet privacy talk erupted with force once again in the twenty-first century, triggered by the arrival of social media, big data, and startling exposés of just how well corporations and the state could know individual citizens.
The ways Americans debated the fate of personal privacy in the late nineteenth century can sound strangely familiar in the twenty-first, especially citizens’ conviction that threats to privacy were new and uniquely compromising of individual liberties. Important continuities do in fact mark this history. Yet there have also been striking transformations, which we can only understand by reference to the problem of the known citizen.
One was Americans’ turn from an emphasis on tangible claims to privacy—in the form of property rights and physical space—to intangible ones centered on psychological freedom, decisional autonomy, and personal identity as a more knowing society took root. Another transformation was in the shifting sense of who was entitled to privacy’s refuge. The person imagined to be deserving of privacy, from the man of reputation in the 1890s to the “data subject” in the 1980s, did not stand still; the expansion of formal privacy rights and regulations across those decades testified powerfully if insufficiently to the felt need for protection from those claiming a right to know. But perhaps the most unexpected development was the way in which the closely guarded secrets of the Victorian era moved out into the open after the 1960s, whether in political, psychological, or pop-cultural form. Although never completely or finally, an older fear of exposure gave way to an embrace of disclosure, an age of discretion supplanted by an age of self-broadcasting. The yearning for recognition and authenticity that would take hold in many corners of American society in the 1970s confounds conventional narratives of privacy’s twentieth-century career. It too is tightly bound to the career of the known citizen.
Although this book takes a broad view of privacy’s history, its omissions may surprise. Today’s commentators on privacy tend to gravitate to the most brazen instances of overreach and invasion, whether illegal federal wiretaps or covert social media profiling. My own search for bearings in more than a century of privacy talk has led me down a different path, alert to the manifold ways that Americans have managed their relationship to those who would know them. This has led me to spend far more time thinking about Social Security numbers, subliminal advertising, and public restrooms than I could have anticipated when I set out to write about privacy. The Known Citizen is, as a consequence, neither a history of the surveillance society nor of the national security state, two of the most common frameworks for thinking about privacy in the early twenty-first century (for perhaps obvious reasons).26 Without a doubt, surveillance technologies and the demands of national security ratcheted up privacy talk in the twentieth century, as did innovations in commercial data mining at the turn of the twenty-first. But it is also the case that these developments—if and when Americans became aware of them—intersected with and amplified public debates that were already well underway. For this reason, Facebook surveillance and malware, as well as the headline-grabbing episodes of the Cold War and the War on Terror, show up here as bit players rather than the main event.
By trailing the known citizen, this book foregrounds less expected places where privacy talk percolated in modern America: scientific laboratories and family living rooms, marketing agencies and welfare bureaus, social movements and therapeutic encounters. Those conversations, I contend, were as critical to public debates over privacy as were revelations of state break-ins and massive data breaches. Scandals may have provided a clear focus for American privacy talk, but daily negotiations supplied the sensibility. Well-publicized privacy violations in this way obscure what might best be described as an ongoing skirmish over the demands of the modern social order and its many claims on the person. The encroachments of a knowing society—in the form of telephone lines or psychological exams, public records or credit cards—were often most keenly felt in the intimate rounds of personal life.
The potential rewards of such a society were evident too, with many people willing to live more openly by embracing new modes of exposure and disclosure. The domains of the household, the bureaucratic agency, and the talk show yield plentiful stories of those who simultaneously resisted and craved being known, who both pursued and dispensed with privacy. Writers focused on surveillance often neglect this crucial fact: that concerns about intrusion have often been accompanied by a desire for visibility. Citizens, indeed, have often sought to be better known by their state and society—whether in the name of security, convenience, or social recognition. If Americans were in the twentieth century increasingly sensitive to infringements on their privacy, they were also aware that the way they lived often depended on such invasions. That, in a nutshell, was the dilemma of a knowing society.
The history offered here also makes abundantly clear that the impetus for privacy claims in American society—stretching all the way back to the nineteenth century—has as often been the actions of private entities as those of the central government.27 The notion that privacy talk in the United States has been animated primarily by governmental power is a byproduct of focusing on the legal right to privacy, generally framed as a defense against state action. Although aggressive journalists and photographers were a catalyst for modern American privacy arguments, it has been all too easy to neglect the central role of nonstate actors, whether corporations or private citizens themselves, in ushering in a modern sense of privacy’s precariousness. The government could be both guarantor and violator of individual privacy. So too could the many other institutions of social life: workplaces, laboratories, schools, and homes.
Recent commentators often envision a giant ledger where privacy is slipping ever more swiftly into the deficit column. Yet we miss something important if we insist, as many do, that it has been on a steady and precipitous decline. Privacy in the modern United States has been less a thing with definite contents than a seedbed for social thought, a tool for navigating an increasingly knowing society. Recurring debates about intimacy and intrusion across the last century are a product of this society’s dynamic, unavoidable tensions. This history explains why securing the boundary between one’s private affairs and one’s public identity has become such a routine, and yet urgent, task of modern life. A focus on the predicament of the known citizen—perhaps even more pressing today than it was when Auden wrote—will, I hope, help us better grasp privacy’s significance for contemporary U.S. culture, politics, and law.
As such, this book allows us to listen in on a vital strand of social thought in the twentieth-century United States. Its goal is not to decry but to explore the multifarious forms of publicity, exposure, and disclosure that modern Americans have lived with either by choice or necessity. It acknowledges that individuals’ search for privacy has always been complicated by their quest for recognition. It takes up the themes of secrecy and surveillance, recording and revelation, identity and identification that together constitute the danger but also the appeal of being known. It does its best to reckon with the knowledge problems at the heart of modern privacy—and of modern citizenship too.