A A M N CCIDENT OF EMORY EDWARD SHILS, PAUL LAZARSFELD AND THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN MASS COMMUNICATION RESEARCH Jefferson D. Pooley Submitted in partial fulfillment of the Requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy under the Executive Committee of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2006 © 2006 Jefferson D. Pooley All Rights Reserved Abstract An Accident of Memory: Edward Shils, Paul Lazarsfeld and the History of American Mass Communication Research The main memory of American mass communication research holds that scholars around Paul F. Lazarsfeld, in the years during and after World War II, dispelled the conventional wisdom that media marinate the defenseless American mind. According to the story, a loose and undisciplined body of pre-war thought had concluded naively that media are powerful—a myth punctured by the rigorous studies of Lazarsfeld and others, which showed time and again that media impact is in fact limited. This storyline, first narrated in Elihu Katz and Lazarsfeld’s Personal Influence (1955), remains textbook boilerplate and literature review dogma fifty years later. The dissertation traces the emergence of this “powerful-to-limited effects” disciplinary legend, with special emphasis on the surprising contributions of sociologist Edward Shils, the mandarin theorist and intellectual maverick with little interest in the empirical study of media. In the crucial postwar years, Shils provided an account of the disappearance and reemergence of “small group” research, which he framed as a contrast between pictures of society—between the mistaken European view of impersonal isolation as against his view, that Gemeinschaft elements endure. Shils’s treatment of small-group research, and especially his embedding of that story in terms of societal imagery, was essential to the field’s mnemonic emplotment. Shils had his own intellectual reasons for narrating the history in the manner that he did—reasons rooted in his evolving and deeply engaged search for the underpinnings of modern social order. In a sense, however, his reasons did not matter once the narrative itself was released to the American sociological public; Lazarsfeld and Katz had their own reasons for adopting the historical picture that Shils put forward—reasons largely centered on scholarly competition and norms of originality. The powerful-to-limited-effects narrative in Personal Influence, in turn, was so widely embraced in the late 1950s for a still-different set of reasons—because of the scholarly support it lent to the public intellectual defense of American popular culture, in the context of an evolving Cold War liberalism. The staying power of this limited-effects narrative was ultimately guaranteed, however, by the newly institutionalized, would-be discipline of “communication”—which retained the storyline as a usable, and teachable, past. Table of Contents Introduction Fifteen Pages that Shook the Field ................................... 1 Chapter One The Young Shils and the Downcast Intellectual ............ 21 Chapter Two Shils and the Interwar Crisis of Liberalism ................... 59 Chapter Three Shils’s Discovery of the Small Group ......................... 117 Chapter Four Paul Lazarsfeld, Accidental Media Researcher ........... 179 Chapter Five Lazarsfeld’s Personal Influence ................................... 216 Postscript Shils and the “Mass Society” Label ............................. 300 Bibliography Dissertation Bibliography ............................................ 304 Appendix History of Communication Studies Bibliography ........ 332 i Acknowledgements The dissertation that I planned to write hardly resembles this, the completed manuscript. I set out to write a history of leftist media research, and ended up with an account of the field’s remembered history: from Herbert Schiller and Dallas Smythe, in my early conception, to Edward Shils and Paul Lazarsfeld here. My dissertation sponsor, James W. Carey, adapted cheerfully to the topical meandering. Few if any communication scholars share his broad-based intellectual literacy, and I benefited enormously from his erudition and guidance—inside and outside the classroom. I owe him the profoundest debt. Of my other graduate teachers, two sociologists—Craig Calhoun and Jeff Olick— stand out for their intelligence and commitment to truth-seeking. They both earned my deepest respect as scholars and human beings, and both inform the dissertation in numerous and particular ways. Another sociologist, Elihu Katz, helped shape my understanding of the history of mass communication research, even if we did not always share the same interpretation. I would never have finished without his generosity, wit, and gentle prodding. Todd Gitlin, since my first independent study with him at NYU, has been a reliable source of advice and feedback, and the dissertation bears his imprint. Andie Tucher, in addition to her tireless work on behalf of the Communications PhD program, modeled the historian’s craft for me. My colleagues in the Media and Communication Department at Muhlenberg College have generously supported me from the day I arrived in Allentown as an ABD. Sue Curry Jansen deserves special mention: Her quiet wisdom—familiar to all who know her—informed more of the dissertation than she realizes; our wide-ranging conversations remain rich and rewarding to me. ii I could not have made it through that first Muhlenberg year without the constant companionship of Jeremy Teissere, Janine Chi, and Charles Anderson—like me, brand- new faculty disoriented by Allentown and the College’s demands. Though I left my close friend Justin Nowell behind in New York to assume the Muhlenberg post, our frequent conversations and day trips back and forth eased my Pennsylvanian transition. I have boundless gratitude for my wife Karen, whose emotional support, patience, and forgiving love were fundamental to the dissertation’s completion. She made many sacrifices, and I hope to return the favors as she toils to complete her own dissertation. My brand-new daughter Keller arrived just as I was applying the finishing touches, and her presence made completion that much sweeter. iii 1 INTRODUCTION Fifteen Pages that Shook the Field The main memory of American mass communication research holds that scholars around Paul F. Lazarsfeld, in the years during and after World War II, dispelled the conventional wisdom that media marinate the defenseless American mind. According to the story, a loose and undisciplined body of pre-war thought had concluded naively that media are powerful—a myth punctured by the rigorous studies of Lazarsfeld and others, which showed time and again that media impact is in fact limited. If we were to trust the first chapter of Personal Influence—the landmark 1955 study by Elihu Katz and Lazarsfeld—the whole of pre-World War II research would seem to us naïve in its methods and crude in its conclusions.1 Katz and Lazarsfeld’s well- written, fifteen-page synopsis of the “ideas with which mass media research began” ascribes to past scholarship one of “two opposite inclinations”: The interwar body of work either decried the mass media as “instruments of evil design,” or else heralded those media as a “new dawn for democracy.” Both tendencies—the fearful and the ebullient— described the media message as a “direct and powerful stimulus.” Swept up by popular alarm or blinded by utopian rhetoric, both kinds of scholars based their judgments on intuition or folk wisdom or speculative European theory. None of this will do, write Katz and Lazarsfeld. Fortunately, a new body of work has emerged that rejects the folk wisdom and spurns the Europeans, and opts instead for a sober and quantitative approach. 1. Elihu Katz and Paul F. Lazarsfeld, "Images of the Mass Communications Process," in Personal Influence: The Part Played by People in the Flow of Mass Communications (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1955) 15-42. 2 Katz and Lazarsfeld conclude their fifteen pages with a review of the new research, whose “greater precision” has generated “increasing skepticism about the potency of the mass media.” In one short chapter, the field’s untidy past was neatly emplotted. A naïve, intuitive prehistory—given over to the mistaken belief that radio and film wield enormous power—got displaced by a calmer, scientific appraisal: These media, according to the new evidence, have only “limited” effects. This Personal Influence history is simple, direct, and meagerly sourced. Its clean narrative is resolved by the second act. And it was believed: Fifty years later, the “powerful-to-limited-effects” storyline remains textbook boilerplate and literature review dogma. Katz and Lazarsfeld’s fifteen pages have had more influence on the field’s historical self-understanding than anything published before or since. All of the historiographical cliches of the decades to come—the interwar “magic bullet theory,” for example, or the idea of a “hypodermic needle” model—trace their origins to those fifteen pages. They themselves do not employ these terms—the “hypodermic” image, as it turns out, was first invoked in passing by their colleague at the Bureau of Applied Social Research, Bernard Berelson in his 1954 Voting study.2 But Katz and Lazarsfeld lay out the whiggish two-stage history that would become the common reference point—the default citational authority—for the many later elaborations of the “powerful-to-limited-effects” storyline. 2. Berelson et al., Voting: A Study of Opinion Formation in a Presidential Campaign (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954) 102. Lazarsfeld, of course, is the study’s second author. Deb Lubken brought my attention to the Voting passage with the ‘hypodermic’ reference 3 ******** It is a fitting irony that the sociologist Edward Shils, a mandarin theorist and intellectual maverick with no interest in the empirical study of media, supplied the coalescing field of mass communication research with a usable past. It was Shils who furnished, without intending to, Personal Influence’s basic plot. While it is possible to discern inchoate gropings toward the “limited effects” storyline before Shils’s unwitting intervention, these were scattered and inconsistent, without narrative tightness. As early as 1943, Lazarsfeld and others started to note the difficulty of bringing about attitude change through media persuasion.3 But this observation—repeated often over the next ten years—wasn’t yet framed as a claim of minimal media impact, nor as a happy repudiation of precursor overreach. Indeed, the discovery of the obstinate audience was typically discussed as a technical problem, as an obstacle in the design of effective propaganda. Occasionally, especially in the years immediately after the war, the failure of straightforward persuasion was treated in broad, media-impact terms, but almost always in tension with the ongoing search for careful propaganda design.4 This two-track, schizophrenic framing—a concern, on the one hand, for finding out how to make persuasion work, and on the other, an effort to draw 3. The earliest research synthesis that places an emphasis on audience intransigence is Lazarsfeld and RobertK.Merton,"StudiesinRadioandFilmPropaganda,"TransactionsoftheNewYorkAcademyof Sciences6(2)(1943).Slightly,modified,thesynthesiswasincludedinRobertK.Merton’senormously influential Social Theory and Social Structure: Toward the Codification of Theory and Research (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1949/1968). 4. Two classics of media research from the immediate postwar years—Merton’s Mass Persuasion and Lazarsfeld and Merton’s “Mass Communication, Popular Taste, and Organized Social Action”— display this tension in acute form. (Mass Persuasion: The Social Psychology of a War Bond Drive (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1946); and "Mass Communication, Popular Taste and Organized Social Action," in The Communication of Ideas, ed. Lyman Bryson (New York: Harper, 1948) 95-118.)