What are the implications of all this persuasion in terms of our existing morality? What does it mean for the national morality to have so many powerfully influential people taking a manipulative attitude toward our society? Some of these persuaders, in their energetic endeavors to sway our actions, seem to fall unwittingly into the attitude that man exists to be manipulated. While some of the persuaders brood occasionally about the implications of their endeavors, others feel that what is progress for them is progress for the nation. Some of the depth marketers, for example, seem to assume that anything that results in raising the gross national product is automatically good for America. An ad executive from Milwaukee related in Printer's Ink that America was growing great by the systematic creation of dissatisfaction. He talked specifically of the triumph of the cosmetics industry in reaching the billion-dollar class by the sale of hope and by making women more anxious and critical about their appearance. Triumphantly he concluded: "And everybody is happy." Others contend that the public has become so skeptical of advertising appeals that its psyche is not being damaged by all the assaults on it from the various media. (On the other hand, it can be pointed out that this growing skepticism was a major reason ad men turned to subconscious appeals. They wanted to bypass our conscious guard.) Business Week, in dismissing the charge that the science of behavior was spawning some monster of human engineering who was "manipulating a population of puppets from behind the scenes," contended: "It is hard to find anything very sinister about a science whose principal conclusion is that you get along with people by giving them what they want." But is "everybody happy"? And should we all be "given" whatever our ids "want"? Certainly a good deal can be said on the positive side for the socially constructive results that have come from the explorations into human behavior arising from the persuaders' endeavors. The merchandisers in their sales appeals to us have gotten away from some of their crude excesses of old and are more considerate of our wants and needs, even if those needs are often subconscious. Edward Weiss, the ad executive, made this point when he said that social knowledge was helping ad men to "forget about the gimmicks and to concentrate on the real reasons why people buy goods." We've seen how the merchandisers of beer and other predominantly middle-class products have become more realistic in their messages. Likewise a food packer became more sensible in his selling as a result of a depth study. He had been offering a free trip to Hollywood as a prize to persons who sent in the best fifty-word statement "Why I like___" This brought in lots of statements but very little stimulation of sales. A depth study of housewives showed why. Married women with two children and a husband working weren't interested in going to Hollywood, free or otherwise. Who'd take care of the children and cook for the husband? An analysis of people sending in the statements showed they were mostly teen-agers who had never done any food shopping in their life! The use of the insights of the social sciences in dealing with company personnel has likewise—where not accompanied by "social engineering"—brought some enlightened policies and constructive changes. Advanced Management reported that one large company now carefully interviews researchers and other responsible newcomers to find the conditions under which they feel they work best. Do they like to work alone, or with a group? Do they like their desk in a corner or in the middle of their cubicle? Do they like to work on one project at a time or have several going simultaneously? This management, in short, tries to manipulate the environment to suit the individual, not vice versa. On the other hand, a good many of the people-manipulating activities of persuaders raise profoundly disturbing questions about the kind of society they are seeking to build for us. Their ability to contact millions of us simultaneously through newspapers, TV, etc., gives them the power, as one persuader put it, to do good or evil "on a scale never before possible in a very short time." Are they warranted in justifying manipulation on the ground that anything that increases the gross national product is "good" for America; or on the ground that the old doctrine "Let the Buyer Beware" absolves them of responsibility for results that may seem to some antisocial? Perhaps the supporters of optimism-generation in both business and government can make an impressive case for the need to preserve public confidence if we are to have peace and prosperity. But where is it leading us? What happens, actually, to public confidence when the public becomes aware (as it gradually must) that the leaders of industry and government are resolutely committed to a confidence-inspiring viewpoint, come hell or high water? How can you know what to believe? It is my feeling that a number of the practices and techniques I've cited here very definitely raise questions of a moral nature that should be faced by the persuaders and the public. For example: What is the morality of the practice of encouraging housewives to be nonrational and impulsive in buying the family food? What is the morality of playing upon hidden weaknesses and frailties—such as our anxieties, aggressive feelings, dread of nonconformity, and infantile hang-overs—to sell products? Specifically, what are the ethics of businesses that shape campaigns designed to thrive on these weaknesses they have diagnosed? What is the morality of manipulating small children even before they reach the age where they are legally responsible for their actions? What is the morality of treating voters like customers, and child customers seeking father images at that? What is the morality of exploiting our deepest sexual sensitivities and yearnings for commercial purposes? What is the morality of appealing for our charity by playing upon our secret desires for self-enhancement? What is the morality of developing in the public an attitude of wastefulness toward national resources by encouraging the "psychological obsolescence" of products already in use? What is the morality of subordinating truth to cheerfulness in keeping the citizen posted on the state of his nation? The persuaders themselves, in their soul-searching, are at times exceptionally articulate in expressing their apprehensions and in admitting some of their practices are a "little coldblooded." One of them, Nicholas Samstag, confessed in The Engineering of Consent: "It may be said that to take advantage of a man's credulity, to exploit his misapprehensions, to capitalize on his ignorance is morally reprehensible—and this may well be the case. . . . I do not quite know." The June, 1954, issue of The Public Relations Journal contained a remarkable venture into soul-searching by a Hawaiian publicrelations man, Kleber R. Miller. He said, "What I wish to pose here is . . . whether the public-relations practitioner realizes the depths of the moral considerations involved," in some of his activities. He said the principal assumption is that the public-relations practitioner will be able to create on any desired scale "a climate of opinion and emotion that is most favorable to the cause of the client he represents. . . . The public-relations man is continually faced with the question whether the end justifies the means." Mr. Miller went on, "What degree of intensity is proper in seeking to arouse desire, hatred, envy, cupidity, hope, or any of the great gamut of human emotions on which he must play." He made this penetrating point: "One of the fundamental considerations involved here is the right to manipulate human personality." Such a manipulation, he went on to say, inherently involves a disrespect for the individual personality. It seems to me that both the Advertising Research Foundation and the Public Relations Society of America might well concern themselves with drawing up realistic up-to-date codes defining the behavior of ethically responsible persuaders. Such codes might set up ground rules that would safeguard the public against being manipulated in ways that might be irresponsible and socially dangerous. The social scientists and psychiatrists co-operating with the persuaders in their manipulative endeavors face some uncomfortable moral questions, too. Their questions perhaps are more perplexing. They have a workable rationale for explaining their co-operation with, say, the merchandisers. After all, they are, in their depth probing, broadening the world's available knowledge concerning human behavior, and they can explain that knowledge which is not put to use is lost. In this they could quote Alfred North Whitehead, who pointed out that knowledge doesn't keep any better than fish. Still, there was the disturbing fact that some of them were being used by the manipulators. Printer's Ink devoted a special feature to the way social scientists "can be used" in merchandising problems. One point it made: "Use mostly those social scientists who demonstrate a knowledge and appreciation of business problems. Beware of those who don't. Many can be exceedingly naive and unscientific in their approach to advertising." Perhaps the most uncomfortable aspect of the situation for the scientists was stated by an ad executive writing under a pseudonym for The Nation. He said: "Social scientists in the past have paid attention to the irrational patterns of human behavior because they wish to locate their social origins and thus be able to suggest changes that would result in more rational conduct. They now study irrationality—and other aspects of human behavior—to gather data that may be used by salesmen to manipulate consumers." In their efforts to be co-operative with the persuaders the scientists also showed some tendency to accept assumptions that definitely were dubious. In 1953 a leading advertising researcher concluded that Americans would have to learn to live a third better if they were to keep pace with growing production and permit the United States economy to hit a "$400,000,000,000 gross national product in 1958." (Actually it shot past the $400,000,000,000 mark in 1956.) To find how Americans could be persuaded to live a third better Tide put the question to "quite a few of the leading U.S. sociologists." The response of Professor Philip J. Allen, of the University of Virginia, was particularly interesting. He mapped out a "systematic program" by which it could be achieved, and stressed that his scheme would require: Sufficient financial backing for regular utilization of mass media, constantly to communicate the desired objectives to the "common man." New values can be deliberately created, disseminated, and adopted as personal and collective goals highly desirable of achievement. But the concerted effort of the major social institutions—particularly the educational, recreational, and religious—must be enlisted with the ready co-operation of those in control of the mass media on the one hand and the large creators of goods and services who buy up time and space for advertising their "wares" on the other. . . . By utilizing the various tested devices, our modern genius in advertising may alight upon simple phrases well organized in sequence and timing, and co-ordinated with other efforts geared to realize the "grand design." But there are required a host of laborers with plenty of financial backing. In mapping out his "grand design" for making us all more dutiful consumers he accepted, without any question that I could note, the basic assumption that achieving the one-third-better goal was worth any manipulating that might be necessary to achieve it. One of the experts consulted, Bernice Allen, of Ohio University, did question the assumption. She said: "We have no proof that more material goods such as more cars or more gadgets has made anyone happier—in fact the evidence seems to point in the opposite direction." It strikes me that it would be appropriate for the Social Science Research Council and such affiliates as the American Psychological Association to develop codes of ethics that would cover the kind of co-operation that can be condoned and not condoned in working with the people-manipulators. The American Psychological Association has a guidebook running 171 pages {Ethical Standards of Psychologists) that covers more than a hundred problems and cites hundreds of examples of dubious behavior, but there is barely a mention in the entire manual of the kind of co-operation with depth manipulators I have detailed. The A.P.A. does state: "The most widely shared pattern of values among psychologists appears to be a respect for evidence combined with a respect for the dignity and integrity of the human individual." That is an admirable statement and might well be spelled out in terms of permissible and nonpermissible behavior in the field of commerce. Beyond the question of specific practices of the persuaders and their associated scientists is the larger question of where our economy is taking us under the pressures of consumerism. That, too, is a moral question. In fact I suspect it is destined to become one of the great moral issues of our times. Industrialists such as General David Sarnoff contend that trying to hold back, or argue about, the direction our automated factories are taking us is like trying to hold back the tides and seasons. He feels it is pointless even to talk about the desirability of the trend. Some demur. The advertising director of a major soup company commented: "If we create a society just to satisfy automation's production, we will destroy the finest value in our society." There were also signs that some segments of the public itself might be less than grateful for the outpouring of goods our economy was bestowing upon us. In the mid-fifties Harper's published two articles taking a dim view of our worldly riches. One by economist Robert Lekachman, entitled "If We're So Rich, What's Eating Us?" recounted the outpouring of goods and said: "All these good things, worthy of universal exultation, have caused instead a chronic case of economic hypochondria." And Russell Lynes, in his bitter-funny article "Take Back Your Sable!" put in a good word for depressions, not the evils they produce but the climate: "A climate in many respects more productive than prosperity—more interesting, more lively, more thoughtful, and even, in a wry sort of way, more fun." Dr. Dichter has been quick to realize the essentially moral question posed by the across-the-board drive to persuade us to step up our consumption. His publication Motivations stated in April, 1956: We now are confronted with the problem of permitting the average American to feel moral even when he is flirting, even when he is spending, even when he is not saving, even when he is taking two vacations a year and buying a second or third car. One of the basic problems of this prosperity, then, is to give people the sanction and justification to enjoy it and to demonstrate the hedonistic approach to his life is a moral, not an immoral, one. This permission given to the consumer to enjoy his life freely, the demonstration that he is right in surrounding himself with products that enrich his life and give him pleasure must be one of the central themes of every advertising display and sales promotion plan. On another occasion Dr. Dichter pointed out that the public's shift away from its "puritan complex" was enhancing the power of three major sales appeals: desire for comfort, for luxury, and for prestige. The moral nature of the issue posed by the pressures on us to consume is pointed up by the fact religious spokesmen have been among the first to speak out in criticism of the trend. The minister of my own church, Loring Chase (Congregational in New Canaan, Conn.), devoted his Lenten sermon in 1956 to the problem of prosperity. The self-denial pattern of Lent, he said, "stands in vivid contrast to the prevailing pattern of our society, which keeps itself going economically by saying to us, 'You really owe it to yourself to buy this or that.' " He described the national picture provided by our economy of abundance and stated: "Over against this . . . one feels a certain embarrassment over Jesus' reminder that 'a man's life does not consist of the abundance of his possessions. . . .'" He concluded that "the issue is not one of few or many possessions. The issue is whether we recognize that possessions were meant to serve life, and that life comes first." The Protestant publication Christianity and Crisis contended that the next great moral dilemma confronting America would be the threat to the "quality of life" created by abundance of worldly goods. It conceded that if we are to have an expanding economy based on mass production we cannot deny the necessity of mass consumption of new goods, and "for this advertising is obviously essential. Yet there is a dilemma," it explained. "We are being carried along by a process that is becoming an end in itself and which threatens to overwhelm us. . . . There is a loss of a sense of proportion in living when we become so quickly dissatisfied with last year's models." The profound nature of the dilemma was clearly drawn, however, when it added: "This is not to criticize those who make the products in question or those who promote and sell them. They and all of us who consume them are caught up in the same whirl. This whirl is so much the substance of our life that it is difficult to get outside it long enough to look at it and ask where it all leads us." Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr likewise took note of the dilemma by pointing out that the problem of achieving "a measure of grace" in an economy of abundance was very perplexing. And he added that "we are in danger . . . of developing a culture that is enslaved to its productive process, thus reversing the normal relation of production and consumption." This larger moral problem of working out a spiritually tolerable relationship between a free people and an economy capable of greater and greater productivity may take decades to resolve. Meanwhile, we can address ourselves to the more specific problem of dealing with those more devious and aggressive manipulators who would play upon our irrationalities and weaknesses in order to channel our behavior. I concede that some pushing and hauling of the citizenry is probably necessary to make our $400,000,000,000- a-year economy work, with lures such as premiums and thirty-sixmonths-to-pay. But certainly our expanding economy can manage to thrive without the necessity of psychoanalyzing children or mindmolding men or playing upon the anxieties we strive to keep to ourselves. America is too great a nation—and Americans too fine a people—to have to tolerate such corrosive practices. We still have a strong defense available against such persuaders: we can choose not to be persuaded. In virtually all situations we still have the choice, and we cannot be too seriously manipulated if we know what is going on. It is my hope that this book may contribute to the general awareness. As Clyde Miller pointed out in The Process of Persuasion, when we learn to recognize the devices of the persuaders, we build up a "recognition reflex." Such a recognition reflex, he said, "can protect us against the petty trickery of small-time persuaders operating in the commonplace affairs of everyday life, but also against the mistaken or false persuasion of powerful leaders. . . ." Some persons we've encountered who are thoroughly acquainted with the operations of the merchandising manipulators, I should add, still persist in acts that may be highly tinged with illogicality. They admit to buying long, colorful cars they really don't need and sailboats that they concede probably appeal to them because of childhood memories (if the Dichter thesis applies). Furthermore, they confess they continue brushing their teeth once a day at the most illogical time conceivable from a dental-health standpoint—just before breakfast. But they do all these things with full knowledge that they are being self-indulgent or irrational. When irrational acts are committed knowingly they become a sort of delicious luxury. It is no solution to suggest we should all defend ourselves against the depth manipulators by becoming carefully rational in all our acts. Such a course not only is visionary but unattractive. It would be a dreary world if we all had to be rational, right-thinking, nonneurotic people all the time, even though we may hope we are making general gains in that direction. At times it is pleasanter or easier to be nonlogical. But I prefer being nonlogical by my own free will and impulse rather than to find myself manipulated into such acts. The most serious offense many of the depth manipulators commit, it seems to me, is that they try to invade the privacy of our minds. It is this right to privacy in our minds—privacy to be either rational or irrational—that I believe we must strive to protect. 

Much of the material in this book, especially that relating to the probing and manipulating of consumers, is based on the findings and insights of motivational analysts, with their masspsychoanalytical techniques. Some of the conclusions they reach about our behavior are so startling that readers are often justified in wondering just how valid their probing methods are anyhow. In merchandising circles there has been both overacceptance and overrejection of these methods. Some of the blasts at M.R.— particularly from those with rival persuasion techniques—have been withering. Certain marketers still felt that offering a premium was far more effective in promoting sales than all this hocus-pocus about depth. The director of marketing for the Pabst Brewing Company told the Premium Industry Club sadly that "the psychologists have become the oracles of the business. Double-domed professors and crystal gazers are probing the minds of buyers. They are attempting to prove that sales are controlled by the libido or that people buy merchandise because subconsciously they hate their fathers." Actually, he said, "Customers like premiums and like to get something for nothing. There's a little larceny in all of us. . . ." During the mid-fifties many ad men filled the air above their Madison Avenue rookeries with arguments over the question of the validity and potency of M.R. Researchers, too, joined in by cannonading each other all through the fall of 1955 and early 1956. The fireworks were touched off by Alfred Politz, who had two years earlier announced himself available for motivational studies but who had built up a very large organization based on more traditional methods. He began by expressing great faith in the value of psychological probing in depth, but added that because of the need for interpreting findings and the fact that M.R. was still in its infancy, "a great deal of pure unadulterated balderdash has been passed off on gullible marketers as scientific gospel." He charged that the motivation analysts were taking the Madison Avenue folks for a ride with their "pseudo science" and were being well received because they offered simple answers and "Madison Avenue doesn't like anything heavy or complicated." Later he charged that some of the M.R. outfits were using as interviewers unemployed actors, not trained scientific workers. And one of his bristling aides contended that "you can't judge from a psychiatrist's couch how a consumer will behave in a dime store." The better, more sensible way to judge, he explained, is to recreate as closely as you can the buying situation. His firm does this by maintaining a "Politz store." The main target of the Politz cannonading was widely assumed to be the mountaintop castle of Ernest Dichter and his fast-growing Institute for Motivational Research. The institute retorted by calling Politz's criticism an "emotional outburst" and added: "It might be of interest to research the motivations of some of the recent heated attacks on motivational research by individuals with vested interests in alternative research techniques." Others in the social-science field pointed out that some of the researchers were sometimes prone to oversell themselves—or in a sense to exploit the exploiters. John Dollard, Yale psychologist doing consulting work for industry, chided some of his colleagues by saying that those who promise advertisers "a mild form of omnipotence are well received." In the same breath, however, he stressed that M.R. is not a fad and will not disappear, provided that advertisers and agency people were willing to concentrate on improving its performance. Burleigh Gardner, director of Social Research, made another telling point about the uses being made of M.R. One of the movement's main problems, he said, is the fact "many people make superficial use of it, largely as a talking point for their agency or company." And almost every market-research firm, he said, is quick to say, "We do it." As the controversy over M.R. first became heated in the early fifties the Advertising Research Foundation set up a special Committee on Motivation Research, as I've indicated, to appraise the situation. Wallace H. Wulfeck, the chairman, after surveying many of the ventures into M.R., began taking a middle ground. He said that those who attacked M.R. as "fakery" were just as wrong as those who claimed it worked "miracles." He stressed that M.R. must be approached with caution as it is still experimental, but he seemed completely confident that M.R. techniques, when perfected, would become standard procedures in market research. I will set down here, briefly, some of the more serious criticisms made against M.R. as a valid tool (at least as it has been used) along with evidence indicating its values. Here are four of the major complaints made against M.R. and its practitioners. 1. Overenthusiastic supporters have often implied it is a cure-all for every marketing problem and challenge. Actually, of course, it is false to assume that there is any single or major reason why people buy—or don't buy—a product. A host of factors enter in, such as quality of the product, shelf position, and sheer volume of advertising. In this connection it should be noted that many of the findings of M.R. about a product, while perhaps fascinating, are not particularly useful to marketers. Researcher Albert J. Wood pointed out to the American Marketing Association: "Unless all advertising is to become simply a variation on the themes of the Oedipus complex, the death instinct, or toilet training we must recognize that the motives with which we deal should be the manipulable ones. . . . The manufacturer has no way of compensating the consumer for the fact he was insufficiently nursed as an infant." (Others might dispute this last assertion by pointing out that some of the products valued for the oral gratification they offer definitely make insufficient nursing in infancy a manipulable motivational factor.) Researchers point out that the intensity of our subconscious motivational influences has a clear bearing on the usefulness of a subconscious factor to a manipulator. As Professor Smith points out: "The fact that a given product is thought of favorably, or regarded as a sex symbol, or reminds respondents of their mother has limited value unless we know something about the intensity of the feeling it creates and whether this feeling is apt to be translated into the desired practical reactions at the consumer level." Most of the analysts themselves when pressed or when talking casually drop remarks indicating their awareness that M.R. is far from being a one-and-only answer, at least as yet. For example: Mr. Cheskin conceded: "Sometimes I think we can go in too deep." The psychological director of a large research firm said. "We still are in the very beginning, with more promise than delivery." The chief psychologist of another research firm cautioned: "You've got to be able to take this thing with a little grain of salt." The research director of an ad agency deeply involved in M.R. (it has made nearly a hundred motivational studies) said: "Motivational research is not the whole answer. In 20 to 30 per cent of our investigations we don't find anything useful at all." Even Dr. Dichter and his aides occasionally drop cautionary remarks, as when he said, "M.R. is still far from an exact science"; and an aide pointed out that people make buying decisions on both rational and irrational bases. The market-research director of one of the nation's largest psychological testing firms said: "Even the best techniques are only adding a little bit to our understanding of why people do what they do." Professor Smith in his book surveying the M.R. field summed up by saying that the best way to look at M.R. is as "a plus factor." 2. Another charge made against some of the motivational analysts is that they have lifted diagnostic tools from clinical psychiatry and applied them to mass behavior without making certain such application is valid. This aspect of M.R. has bothered Dr. Wulfeck, of the Advertising Research Foundation, as much as any other. Some of the clinical techniques such as the Rorschach ink-blot test are not infallible even when used on an individual basis with clinical patients. There is always room for error at least in interpreting the meaning of a given ink blot, or interpreting an answer given in a sentence-completion test. When conclusions are drawn about mass behavior on the basis of a small sampling of test results there clearly is a chance for error. Individuals vary considerably in their motivational make-up. In the minds of most objective observers the size of the sample used in any given piece of motivational research is crucial. Unfortunately motivational testing is expensive. A good deal of time must be spent by a skilled practitioner with each subject if there is to be a real exploration in depth. Thus there is a temptation to keep the size of the sampling small. As Dr. Wulfeck pointed out in late 1954, however, "The question of the size of sample is of considerable importance." At that time he said that the largest sample he had encountered in the depth approach was two hundred. And he added: "Is that enough?" (Since then Louis Cheskin, of the Color Research Institute, has stated that the smallest sample he uses for a national brand test is six hundred persons.) 3. A further aspect of motivational research that bothers many people is that results depend too much on the brilliance and intuitiveness of the individual practitioner. Little has been achieved as yet in standardizing or validating testing procedures. Dr. Wulfeck's group has, as one of its aims, the determination of the validity or nonvalidity of various M.R. techniques. One such testing, he advises, has been under way at Columbia University recently, with the help of foundation money. The validity of sentence-completion tests for M.R. use is being scrutinized. Alas, that was the only attempt being made in 1956 to validate M.R. procedures. Dr. Wulfeck pointed out sadly that while merchandisers spend millions of dollars on campaigns based on M.R. insights it is hard to get companies to support research that merely validates research techniques. "People who have the money to finance this kind of research," he said, "are more concerned with the solutions to everyday problems than they are with trying to find ways to improve our methods." Some scientists are disturbed by the fact that projective tests— by their very nature—typically are not subject to statistical proof. They feel more comfortable if they are dealing with a method that gives its answers in terms that can be counted up statistically. The way a person responds to a depth interview, for example, can't possibly be toted up. The same applies to the ink-blot tests. Psychologist William Henry, however, contends that traditional researchers overstress this need for statistical proof. He says: "There are comparatively few quantitative studies that demonstrate statistically the value of either the Rorschach or the T.A.T. (two projective tests). Yet I don't know one clinician—and I know many who have worked with these instruments—who doesn't feel on the basis of his general psychological training that he gets far more reliable information from these tests than he does from those instruments that have the respectability of the statistical psychologists' approval conferred upon them." Some of the depth approaches are more subject to "scientific" procedures than others. Mr. Cheskin likes to insist that his probings, based on association and indirect preference tests (where the subjects aren't even aware they are being tested), are more reliable than so-called depth interviews. (His old rival Dr. Dichter was a pioneer of the depth interview.) Cheskin says that the kind of M.R. he uses is "as pure a science as physics, chemistry, or biology." Most of Cheskin's work is with package testing. He pointed out that he tests one factor at a time, such as name, color, shape, images, etc., and only after this tests them all together. And before he even tests a package in the field it is subjected to ocular-measurement lab tests that determine eye movement, visibility, readability. As for the depth interview, he says the person being tested, even though in depth, knows he is being interviewed and so sets up defense mechanisms and rationalizes his answers at least to some extent. Also, he added, the results in depth interviewing depend on the "skill of the interviewer." Actually the skill of the interviewer is not the only area for error. As an executive of the Psychological Corporation pointed out, equally trained research experts can look at the same projective test results and come up with different interpretations. Further, there is evidence that some of the researchers have played fast and loose with their test results. Emanuel Demby, an executive of Motivation Research Associates, has pointed out that criticism is justified in certain situations. Those he specifically cited were where the findings reported by the researchers are self-serving; or if all the substantiating data on which the judgment is based is not provided to the client; or "if the report is written before all tests are in, as has happened in a number of cases." He, too, added, however, that the depth approach to consumer behavior was "a fact of modern life." 4. Finally, it is charged that the findings of the depth probers sometimes are not subjected to objective confirmation by conventional testing methods before they are accepted and applied. The big danger, as one critic put it, is to call "the initial idea a conclusion." Business Week, in its analysis of M.R. procedures, concluded that any study of behavior that "aims at some degree of scientific certainty is likely to have two steps: First, a pilot study—a fast informal survey of the subject to get the feel of it. Second, a rigorous, careful investigation to find out whether the conclusion really stands up, and under just what conditions it is true. For many advertising problems a shrewd suspicion of the facts is plenty good enough. So advertisers' motivation studies are likely to stop with the first step." Some of the researchers, it should be added, do rigorously test their M.R. findings by conventional methods before accepting them as fact. One of the pioneer motivational workers, Herta Herzog, director of creative research at the huge McCann-Erickson ad agency, now reaches her conclusions in four stages. First, she uses conventional research methods to spot likely prospects for the product in question. Second, her staff depth-probes three to four hundred of them. Third, the findings of the probing are tested by a more conventional "structured" questionnaire on a large group of people (up to three thousand). Fourth, when ads have been drawn up based on the M.R. findings, they are tested on selected consumers in various areas of the United States to see if the M.R.-inspired conclusions are correct. By 1957, the thinking of the most responsible practitioners of motivational research seemed to be that M.R. is most useful as a starting point, or as a clue spotter, and that the findings of M.R. should be validated by other methods whenever possible. Even its critics agree that M.R. has an important place in market research at the idea-gathering or hypothesis stage. Some merchandisers contend that even the unvalidated ideas and clues the analysts can offer are immensely valuable. Business Week opined: "Any copywriter . . . could produce better ads if he had talked to a dozen or four hundred customers first than if he had contented himself with batting bright ideas around the table at Twenty-One." The research director of a food company who often consults Ernest Dichter told me he likes to get "Ernst" just talking about a problem such as a cake mix. Sometimes this can be as helpful as a formal survey. "If he sparks one good idea, it's worth at least $2,500 to us," he explained. However, not everyone in the merchandising field accepts Dr. Dichter's findings as infallible, but Tide in a 1955 article stated that even his informed guesses were "brilliant." The president of National Sales Executives, Inc., likewise pointed out that the findings of the social scientists are valuable in two ways: "First, the probers often come up with answers that, when tried, have worked. Second, even if recommendations haven't panned out exactly as hoped, they have lifted managements out of mental ruts." Perhaps the most compelling evidence that motivation research must be taken seriously, at least by the public being probed and manipulated, is the fact that merchandisers themselves still are taking it very seriously indeed. More and more are basing campaigns on it. Tide stated in its February 26, 1955, issue: "In ten years motivation analysis will be as common as nosecounting. By 1965, if the present trend continues, few national marketers will launch an advertising campaign or introduce a new product without first conducting a thorough study of consumer motivations." This, in fact, can already be said of one of the nation's largest advertising agencies. Every single account now gets a motivational run-through! These same marketers are the kind of people who would abruptly kill off a million-dollar TV program without a qualm if its rating dropped a few points. They would not use M.R. if they had any better tool for persuading us to buy their product. (In 1956 survey maker A. C. Nielsen, Jr., revealed a survey finding that in general marketing executives in the past have been right or substantially right only 58 per cent of the time!) Executives have concluded that the depth approach, whether they like it or not, can provide answers they can't afford to ignore. In late 1954 Printer's Ink asked its Jury of Marketing Opinion what its members thought of motivational research. Sixty-four answered the questionnaire. Of them thirty-two said they were using or have used motivation research. The journal concluded: "Most of those who have tried M.R. like it." As to specific testing methods, here are the number who said they had used each: Depth interviews 27 Panel reaction 12 Group interviews 12 Projective techniques 9 Word association 7 Thematic apperception 4 Attitude tests 3 Sociodrama 2 Rorschach 1 (There seems to be some confusion or duplication in those responses because the Rorschach, for example, is one of several projective techniques.) To sum up, while there was considerable argument about various probing techniques there is little argument that the depth approach in general is here to stay. Advertising Age quoted an economics professor at the University of Illinois as stating: "Few today question the value of psychiatry or of psychology in explaining behavior patterns." This, of course, does not mean the M.R. practitioners are dead right or even mostly right in each case. M.R. is a new and still inexact science. Dr. Wulfeck says it is about as far advanced as public opinion polling was in the early thirties—in short far from infallible. A great deal must still be done to refine, standardize, and validate procedures and train qualified practitioners. Dr. Wulfeck is confident that as more work is done the tools will become more precise. Business Week pointed out that M.R. practitioners were already achieving indisputably solid results. It cited as an example the work being done at the Survey Research Center of the University of Michigan. The center's psychological research, it said, "is providing a continuing, trustworthy measurement of consumer attitudes that shape the course of business. This measure is already an important indicator of the business climate." (The Federal Reserve Board is guided by it to a large extent.) The alternative to the depth approach, in the words of a research analyst for Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, "is to fly by the seat of your pants." Business Week's study of M.R. summed up the situation in this emphatic way: "Today's emphasis on people's motives, the search for a science of behavior, is more than just a fad. Far from blowing over, you can expect it to keep getting more important—because it meets business needs arising from a real and important change in the American society over the past two or three decades." Then the report added this hopeful or ominous comment— depending on your viewpoint: "It seems rather likely that, over the course of time, the present studies will develop into something considerably more elaborate, more rigorous. That will happen if businessmen get accustomed enough to psychological techniques to want to use them on something besides advertising themes." That was written in mid-1954. As I've indicated, businessmen and others are now seeking to apply these potent techniques in mind-molding projects far removed from the merchandising of products. As the use of the depth approach, despite its fallibilities, has met increasing acceptance and spread into other fields, the moral implications of its increased use need to be faced. 

The disturbing Orwellian configurations of the world toward which the persuaders seem to be nudging us—even if unwittingly—can be seen most clearly in some of their bolder, more imaginative efforts. These ventures, which we will now examine, seem to the author to represent plausible projections into the future of some of the more insidious or ambitious persuasion techniques we've been exploring in this book. In early 1956 a retired advertising man named John G. Schneider (formerly with Fuller, Smith and Ross, Kenyon and Eckhardt, and other ad agencies) wrote a satirical novel called The Golden Kazoo, which projected to the 1960 Presidential election the trends in political merchandising that had already become clear. By 1960 the ad men from Madison Avenue have taken over completely (just as Whitaker and Baxter started taking over in California). Schneider explained this was the culmination of the trend started in 1952 when ad men entered the very top policy-making councils of both parties, when "for the first time" candidates became "merchandise," political campaigns became "sales-promotion jobs," and the electorate was a "market." By 1960 the Presidency is just another product to peddle through tried-and-true merchandising strategies. Speeches are banned as too dull for citizens accustomed to TV to take. (Even the five-minute quickies of 1956 had become unendurable.) Instead the candidate is given a walk-on or centerpiece type of treatment in "spectaculars" carefully designed to drive home a big point. (Remember the election-eve pageant of 1956 where "little people" reported to President Eisenhower on why they liked him?) The 1960 contest, as projected by Schneider, boiled down to a gigantic struggle between two giant ad agencies, one called Reade and Bratton for the Republicans and one simply called B.S.&J. for the Democrats. When one of the two candidates, Henry Clay Adams, timidly suggests he ought to make a foreign-policy speech on the crisis in the atomic age his account executive Blade Reade gives him a real lecture. "Look," he said, "if you want to impress the longhairs, intellectuals, and Columbia students, do it on your own time, not on my TV time. Consider your market, man! . . . Your market is forty, fifty million slobs sitting at home catching your stuff on TV and radio. Are those slobs worried about the atomic age! Nuts. They're worried about next Friday's grocery bill." Several of the merchandising journals gave Mr. Schneider's book a careful review, and none that I saw expressed shock or pain at his implications. So much for fictional projections into the future. Some of the real-life situations that are being heralded as trends are perhaps more astonishing or disconcerting, as you choose. A vast development of homes going up at Miramar, Florida, is being called the world's most perfect community by its backers. Tide, the merchandisers' journal, admonished America's merchandisers to pay attention to this trail-blazing development as it might be "tomorrow's marketing target." The journal said of Miramar: "Its immediate success . . . has a particular significance for marketers, for the trend to 'packaged' homes in 'packaged' communities may indicate where and how tomorrow's consumer will live. . . ." Its founder, youthful Robert W. Gordon, advises me Miramar has become "a bustling little community" and is well on its way to offering a "completely integrated community" for four thousand families. What does it mean to buy a "packaged" home in a "packaged" community? For many (but apparently not all) of the Miramar families it means they simply had to bring their suitcases, nothing more. No fuss with moving vans, or shopping for food, or waiting for your new neighbors to make friendly overtures. The homes are completely furnished, even down to linens, china, silver, and a refrigerator full of food. And you pay for it all, even the refrigerator full of food, on the installment plan. Perhaps the most novel and portentous service available at Miramar—and all for the one packaged price—is that it may also package your social life for you. As Mr. Gordon put it: "Anyone can move into one of the homes with nothing but their personal possessions, and start living as a part of the community five minutes later." Where else could you be playing bridge with your new neighbors the same night you move in! In short, friendship is being merchandized along with real estate, all in one glossy package. Tide described this aspect of its town of tomorrow in these words: "To make Miramar as homey and congenial as possible, the builders have established what might be called 'regimented recreation.' As soon as a family moves in, the lady of the house will get an invitation to join any number of activities ranging from bridge games to literary teas. Her husband will be introduced, by Miramar, to local groups interested in anything from fish breeding to water skiing." In the trends toward other-mindedness, group living, and consumption-mindedness as spelled out by Dr. Riesman, Miramar may represent something of an ultimate for modern man. Another sort of projection, a projection of the trend toward the "social engineering" of our lives in industry, can be seen perhaps in a remarkable trade school in Los Angeles. It has been turning out students according to a blueprint and in effect certifies its graduates to be co-operative candidates for industry. This institution, National Schools, which is on South Figueroa Street, trains diesel mechanics, electricians, electrical technologists, machinists, auto repairmen and mechanics, radio and TV mechanics, etc. (Established 1905.) I first came across this breeding ground for the man of tomorrow in an article admiringly titled "Custom-made Men" in Diesel Power. The article faced another on "lubrication elements" and appeared in the early days of the depth approach to personnel training. The diesel journal was plainly awed by the exciting potentialities of social engineering, and said that while miraculous advances had been made in the technical field "one vital branch of engineering has been, until recently, woefully neglected—the science of human engineering." It went on to be explicit: "Human engineering, as we refer to it here, is the science of molding and adjusting the attitude of industrial personnel. By this process a worker's mechanical ability and know how will be balanced by equal skill in the art of demonstrating a co-operative attitude toward his job, employer, and fellow employees." The newest trend, it went on to explain, is to develop in the worker this co-operative outlook prior to his actual employment, while he is receiving his training, when "he is most receptive to this new approach." National Schools in Los Angeles, it said, has been a unique laboratory in developing many phases of human engineering. It followed the progress of the graduate as he went out into industry and checked not only on the technical skills he showed but on "his attitude toward his work and associates." These findings were compared with a transcript of his school work. By such analysis plus surveying employers on the traits they desire in employees National Schools, it said, has been able "to develop the ideal blue print for determining the type of personnel industry needs." National students, it stated, were taught basic concepts of human behavior, and "special emphasis is placed on the clear-cut discussion and study of every subject that will tend to give the student a better understanding of capital-labor co-operation. To this end . . . representative authorities in the diesel industry have been made associate faculty members at National Schools—where they lecture." Truly, it exulted, here was the "custom-made" man ready to help build a greater tomorrow for diesel engineering! The kind of tomorrow we may be tending toward in the merchandising of products may be exemplified by the use of depth probing on little girls to discover their vulnerability to advertising messages. No one, literally no one, evidently is to be spared from the all-seeing, Big Brotherish eye of the motivational analyst if a merchandising opportunity seems to beckon. The case I am about to relate may seem extreme today—but will it tomorrow? This case in point, involving a Chicago ad agency's depth probing on behalf of a leading home-permanent preparation, was proudly described by the agency's president in a speech to an advertising conference at the University of Michigan in May, 1954. He cited it in detail, with slides, to illustrate his theme: "How Motivation Studies May Be Used by Creative People to Improve Advertising." The problem was how to break through women's resistance to giving home permanents to their little girls. Many felt the home permanents ought to wait until high-school age, "along with lipstick and dating." (Some mothers, I've found in my own probing, also suspect home permanents are bad for the hair of little girls and have some moral pangs about it.) At any rate, the agency found, by depth interviewing mothers, that they needed "reassurance" before most of them would feel easy about giving home permanents to their little ones. The agency set out, by depth probing little girls, to find a basis for offering such reassurance. It hoped to find that little girls actually "need" curly hair, and to that end devised a series of projective tests, with the advice of "leading child psychologists and psychiatrists," which were presented to the little girls as "games." When the little girls were shown a carefully devised projective picture of a little girl at a window they reportedly read into the picture the fact that she was "lonely because her straight hair made her unattractive and unwanted." When they were given projective sentence-completion tests they allegedly equated pretty hair with being happy and straight hair with "bad, unloved things." The agency president summed up the findings of the probing of both mothers (their own early childhood yearnings) and daughters by stating: "We could see, despite the mothers' superficial doubts about home permanents for children, the mothers had a very strong underlying wish for curly-haired little girls." (This is not too hard to believe in view of the fact that hair-preparation merchandisers have been hammering away to condition American females to the wavyhair-makes-you-lovely theme for decades.) A seven-and-a-half-pound volume of data detailing all the probings was turned over to the agency's "creative" people and a series of "creative workshops" was held with "a leading authority in the field of child psychology" conducting the discussions. This authority apparently needed to reassure some of the creative people themselves about the project because the authority stated: "Some of you may react, as many older women do, and say, 'How awful to give a child a permanent,' and never stop to think that what they are really saying is. 'How awful to make a girl attractive and make her have respect for herself.' " The child psychologist analyzed each piece of copy, layout, and TV story board for its psychological validity to make sure it would "ring true to parents." One upshot of all this consulting was a TV commercial designed to help a mother subconsciously recognize "her child's questions, 'Will I be beautiful or ugly, loved or unloved?' because they are her own childhood wishes, too." Another possible view of tomorrow may be seen in the search to find ways to make us less troublesome and complaining while staying in hospitals. Dr. Dichter undertook this exploration, and his findings were reported in detail in a series of articles in The Modern Hospital. The study was undertaken because of the constant complaints of patients about food, bills, routine, boredom, nurses. They were generally irritable, and hospitals that tried to remove the complaints by changing routines, diets, etc., seemed to get nowhere. So the depth probing of patients began. One fifty-year-old woman recalled her shame at being chided by a hospital aide for calling out for her mother several times during the night. Probers found that patients in hospitals were often filled with infantile insecurities. They weren't just scared of dying but scared because they were helpless like a child. And they began acting like children. Dr. Dichter reported that his most significant finding "deals with the regression of the patient to a child's irrationality. . . . Over and over in each of the interviews, in one form or another, there echoed the basic cry, 'I'm frightened. . . .' " He said the grownup's regression to a child's helplessness and dependence and his search for symbolic assurance were clear. In searching for this symbolic assurance the patient begins seeing the doctor as father and the nurse as mother. What should the hospitals do with all these adult-children? The answer was obvious. Treat them like children, apply to grownups the same techniques they had been applying in the children's wards to make the children feel loved and secure. For one thing there mustn't be any signs of dissension between doctor and nurse because it would remind the patients of their childhood fears when mother and father quarreled. Eventually—say by A.D. 2000—perhaps all this depth manipulation of the psychological variety will seem amusingly oldfashioned. By then perhaps the biophysicists will take over with "biocontrol," which is depth persuasion carried to its ultimate. Biocontrol is the new science of controlling mental processes, emotional reactions, and sense perceptions by bio-electrical signals. The National Electronics Conference meeting in Chicago in 1956 heard electrical engineer Curtiss R. Schafer, of the NordenKetay Corporation, explore the startling possibilities of biocontrol. As he envisioned it, electronics could take over the control of unruly humans. This could save the indoctrinators and thought controllers a lot of fuss and bother. He made it sound relatively simple. Planes, missiles, and machine tools already are guided by electronics, and, the human brain—being essentially a digital computer—can be, too. Already, through biocontrol, scientists have changed people's sense of balance. And they have made animals with full bellies feel hungry, and made them feel fearful when they have nothing to fear. Time magazine quoted him as explaining: The ultimate achievement of biocontrol may be the control of man himself. . . . The controlled subjects would never be permitted to think as individuals. A few months after birth, a surgeon would equip each child with a socket mounted under the scalp and electrodes reaching selected areas of brain tissue. . . . The child's sensory perceptions and muscular activity could be either modified or completely controlled by bioelectric signals radiating from state-controlled transmitters. He added the reassuring thought that the electrodes "cause no discomfort." I am sure that the psycho-persuaders of today would be appalled at the prospect of such indignity being committed on man. They are mostly decent, likable people, products of our relentlessly progressive era. Most of them want to control us just a little bit, in order to sell us some product we may find useful or disseminate with us a viewpoint that may be entirely worthy. But when you are manipulating, where do you stop? Who is to fix the point at which manipulative attempts become socially undesirable.

Back in the twenties Americans across the land were chanting, ten times a day, "Every day in every way I am getting better and better." They were applying to their problems the formula for "Self-Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion" devised by the French druggist-psychologist Émile Coué. Gradually this formula became pretty well discredited as a way of coping with our basic problems. By 1956 Couéism seemed to be enjoying a hearty revival, particularly in the highest circles of business and government. In almost every day's newspaper some tycoon was announcing vast expansion plans or unlimited faith in the future. Economists in the employment of industry were making reassuring pronouncements that our economy was rock-solid despite the mountainous growth of unpaid consumer debts. Business Week in March, 1956, was exulting over the fact that "confidence is high. . . . A new wave of confidence is sweeping the business community." A week later another journal widely read by businessmen was exclaiming happily over the fact that all the important indices were going up, up, up. Its subheads were "Enter Optimism" and "Exit Fear." While such happy exclamations were filling the air in late 1955 and early 1956, Tide explained to any merchandisers who might still be in the dark what was behind it all. Much of this exuberant chest beating, it said, was "carefully calculated psychology" devised by professional persuaders. The journal even coined the phrase "psychological marketing" to describe "this new marketing technique," which it said was geared to meet the special needs of the "psychoanalytical age in which we live." You see examples of it every day [it continued]. Just recently there were the announcements of huge jet plane orders, indicating confidence in the travel market in the next decade. There are other ones . . . like Harlow Curtice's Billion Dollar Bet. . . . Other leaders in business, industry, and finance speak out, week after week, expressing their faith in the economy. Auto men talk of the 10,000,000-car year just around the corner. Steel makers talk expansion and more expansion. . . . There are other less dramatic examples. . . the releases on expansion plans, the speeches to local groups, even the talk across luncheon tables. . . ." Then it explained what all the talking was about, in these blunt words: "These men aren't talking just to hear their voices, nor do they enjoy venturing out on an economic limb." Their main aim is to beef up the confidence level of the nation by counteracting "pessimism" that sometimes gets voiced, so that dealers will keep on ordering goods and consumers will keep on buying goods, at a higher and higher rate, and if necessary go into debt to do it. "To maintain a pace of increasing consumption," it asserted, "a high level of credit buying must be maintained as well. There must be a continued willingness to expand. . . ." Such a willingness to expand, industrial thinkers had concluded, rested on confidence. "Confidence and spending are handmaidens of an expanding economy," Tide stated. From a persuasion standpoint this matter of confidence transcended everything else. The minute a glow of confidence left the landscape all sorts of disagreeable things might happen. One thing that would surely happen would be that people might start watching their dollars and become more cerebral in their buying. That would make things difficult all over for depth merchandisers trying to tempt people into impulse buying, status-symbol buying, leisure buying, and many other kinds of self-indulgent buying. Dr. Dichter was most emphatic on the hazard involved if confidence was not kept at a high level. "Our prosperity is based on psychological foundations," he warned and added that economists and business leaders who predict any dip in business are "playing with fire and doing a disservice to the country." What was the evidence that confidence was crucial? Merchandisers were strongly influenced by the findings of the Survey Research Center psychologists at the University of Michigan, who kept a running chart on the buying mood of the United States public for the Federal Reserve Board. These probers found there is such a thing as a national buying mood and were reported as being convinced that a generally cheerful atmosphere, more than any rational calculation, seems to make people feel like spending their money. Not only consumers but smaller businessmen were believed to feel the contagion of confidence or lack of it of big business and to peg their action to the way the big businessmen seemed to be feeling. The small businessman or the retailer, perhaps hesitating whether to plunge his bank roll (or a large part of it) on a large and perhaps chancy order, is presumed to be reassured by faith-in-thefuture talk by the leaders and disconcerted by any talk of "soft spots" in the economy. Still another character in the picture who apparently needs regular doses of reassurance is the small investor. The president of the New York Stock Exchange journeyed to West Virginia in 1956 to ask ad men of the American Association of Advertising Agencies for help in persuading more people to invest in United States firms. "Additional millions of people have to be carefully introduced to the investment process and encouraged to 'risk' some of their money in business. . . . Putting this story across calls for considerable skill, imagination, and ingenuity," such as the creative ad men have, he said. Still, there were some old-fashioned people left in America in 1956-57 who persisted in publicly expressing uneasiness over what they felt were soft spots in the economy, such as the mounting indebtedness of installment buyers. As Dr. Dichter lamented, there were some people who were forever "worrying the consumer with doubts and black predictions," or are, as Tide admitted, "incapable of any degree of optimism." (One such comment that got into print was an observation made in early 1957 by the chairman of the Department of Commerce's National Distribution Council. He commented to a financial writer: "In traveling around the country, I've come across a surprising number of corporations which already are privately lowering their forecasts of sales and profits in 1957.") It was to counteract the pessimists that "psychological marketing" was discovered and perfected as a marketing technique. Although the leaders of industry were voicing most of the optimism being heard it was the behind-the-scenes public-relations experts, Tide pointed out, who were carrying the main burden of strategy. "More than likely, a good deal of the credit should go to the high-level public-relations men involved; they are, after all, psychologists first and publicists second," it said. "They are the people who disseminate this confidence to the public, they frequently are the people who give the proper interpretation to industry announcements, and they very often are the people who write the speeches." Tide surveyed the nation's top persuaderpublicists and found them fully in agreement that psychological marketing had become "another tool in the public-relations man's kit." As Tide said, "It is the P.R. men, guiding top management in the proper manner, timing, and approach in expansion announcements and expressions of confidence, who are winning the public's collective mind over to confidence." It explained that the crucial part of the psychology was not in the announcement of an expansion but the reason for it: "To fill the needs of a nation whose future is bright, and as an expression of absolute faith in economic growth." The result of this new type of psychological marketing, it added, would be more sales, greater demand, higher gross national product. Tide conceded that some marketers were not sure of the soundness of "psychological marketing." It quoted the marketing director of the A.O. Smith Corporation as raising the thought that such an approach to marketing somehow smacked of deviousness. He felt that business was beginning to do a good job of humanizing itself, and he hesitated to thwart this by considering such efforts as a part of some psychological strategy. However, he was evidently a part of a small if not lonely minority. Tide was so pleased with the movement to systematic optimism-generation that it became close to lyrical. "When they write the textbook of the economic history for the twentieth century," it said, "one chapter should deal with psychological marketing. The marketing leaders of today are laying down the basic lessons for the marketers of tomorrow to follow." When in 1956 a top executive of one of the nation's top ad agencies passed the hat among his underlings for contributions to the Republican campaign, he put it squarely on the basis of preserving optimism. In his letter he said contributions to re-elect President Eisenhower would serve "to preserve this climate of business confidence." Whether by instinct or by intent, President Eisenhower was their kind of man to have in Washington, optimistic to the core. As Dorothy Thompson, the columnist, put it: "He is optimistic, come hell or high water." The New York Times's political analyst, James Reston, devoted more than a thousand words to detailing the resolute optimism of the Eisenhower Administration. At a time when the Middle East was sizzling, the Russians were off on a new tack, there were brush fires from Turkey to Indo-China and fairly substantial headaches at home, the Administration, he said, was looking upon the world "with determined optimism." He said, "Secretary of State Dulles . . . took correspondents on a tour of the world yesterday and found an optimistic side to every question. President Eisenhower, who is a living symbol of confidence, carried on the cheery offensive in his news conference today." Reston mentioned that the President talked a lot about the "morale" of Western peoples and concluded that the Administration was striving to keep up "morale" by persistently looking on the bright side of things. He added: "Some observers here believe this determination to look on the bright side of things . . . is precisely why the President is so effective and popular a leader. Others think it is a Pollyanna attitude, a form of wishful thinking that wins votes but encourages popular illusions about the true state of world affairs." When five hundred Republican leaders gathered at the Eisenhower farm in 1956 to launch the active campaigning, Chairman Hall cried, "Is everybody happy?" (They all chorused that they were.) The essence of Mr. Eisenhower's counsel was this thought for the campaign: "Don't underestimate the value of a grin." Later a New York Times reporter following the grinning Mr. Eisenhower in his campaign travels commented: "The symbol of this campaign has been the smile on the face of the crowd in the President's wake. It is a peaceful, dreamy, faraway smile of pure contentment. . . ." This was written just a few days before the election, and just a few days before war broke out in the Middle East. The faraway smiles were replaced by looks of startled consternation.

Persuaders who earn their livelihood as public-relations experts sometimes feel a little underappreciated when they see the massive persuasion efforts undertaken by their colleagues, the ad men. As one complained in The Engineering of Consent, a manual of publicrelations techniques edited by Edward L. Bernays: "Many more millions are spent in engineering consent for products than in creating favorable attitudes toward the companies which make them. . . ." He went on to urge his co-workers to borrow from the advanced persuasion techniques being practiced in the marketing field "because organized research is much more highly developed here." By the mid-fifties public relations had become quite a bursting field for persuasive endeavor, much of it in depth. One hundred leading companies alone were reported spending a total of more than $50,000,000; and the number of practitioners in supervisory capacities in the United States was estimated at about 40,000. Some of the larger P.R. firms such as Carl Byoir and Associates and Hill and Knowlton were reported having billings running into millions of dollars a year. The Harvard Law School, in setting up a study of public opinion and persuasion, explained that the move seemed imperative because of the "multiplication of channels of communication to the public. . . . At every turn we see manifestations of the systematic consideration of efforts to inform and persuade the public. . . ." These channels of communication of mid-century America were enumerated, as inviting pastures for public-relations endeavors, in The Engineering of Consent, as follows: 1,800 daily newspapers 10,000 weekly newspapers 7,600 magazines 2,000 trade journals 7,635 periodicals geared to race groups 100,000,000 radio sets 12,000,000 TV sets 15,000 motion-picture houses 6,000 house organs. Judge Learned Hand expressed himself as being enormously disturbed by the growth of professional publicists in our society. He called publicity "a black art" but agreed it has come to stay. "Every year adds to the potency, to the finality of its judgments," he said. By the fifties some of our publicist-persuaders, feeling their power, were no longer content with such bread-and-butter chores as arranging publicity and helping their company or client maintain a cheerful, law-abiding countenance to present to the world. They were eager to get into mind-molding on the grand scale. As one P.R. counselor, G. Edward Pendray, stated: "To public-relations men must go the most important social engineering role of them all—the gradual reorganization of human society, piece by piece and structure by structure." Evidently it was vaguely felt that by such grandiose feats their calling of public relations might finally be given full professional status. The more successful operators in public relations were sensitive about the fact that a motley assortment of people flew the flag of "public relations": hustling press agents, lobbyists, greeters, fixers. There were efforts to define public relations. One of the most prominent practitioners, Carl Byoir, however, stated that "public relations is whatever the individual practitioner thinks it is." Some leaders in the field began groping for a new name for public relations. They felt "public relations" had a rather insincere sound. The outgoing president of the Public Relations Society of America in 1954 pointed out that some companies were dropping the "public-relations" identification of their executives in charge of P.R. to prevent "the illusion that their program is contrived" and not a part of the company's basic philosophy. As public relations grew and grew, it found itself in some seemingly strange fields. The Public Relations Journal of March, 1954, carried a glowing report on the way smart preachers were putting P.R. to work to fill up the pews and maintain a "strong financial condition." It conceded that one "obstacle" to a really hard-hitting use of P.R. in sacred activities was that a "dignified approach" is demanded. Another obstacle is "the problem of showing the practical worth of some religious values." But it added: "If we are to pattern our techniques on those of the Master, we must bring the truth down where people can understand it. . . talk about common things . . . speak the language of the people. [Here was shown a picture of Jesus in a boat talking to Disciples.]" The report detailed how the smart preacher can use TV and other mass media, and how to cope with "Mr. Backslider." (He is wooed back by "psychological influences.") The final tip to preachers was to check results carefully to find just "what clicked." In striving to increase their penetrating powers (and perhaps their own sense of importance) publicist-persuaders turned to the depth approach in great numbers during the fifties. Raptly they soaked up the lore of the social scientists. The book The Engineering of Consent edited by Mr. Bernays, the famed publicist (University of Oklahoma Press, 1955), is studded with references to the findings of psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and social psychologists. The studies of these scientists, he notes, are "a gold mine of theme-symbol source material" for public-relations counsels. Bernays explains the need to take the depth approach with people in order to give them the right attitudes in these words: "It would be ideal if all of us could make up our minds independently by evaluating all pertinent facts objectively. That, however, is not possible." In a later chapter a publicist amplifies this by discussing Vilfredo Pareto's theory on the nonlogical elements in human activities and then quotes Richard Worthington's comments on Pareto's General Sociology, in these words: There are [in this book] certain ideas and discoveries which may . . . be of considerable value. . . to those who wish to modify society. . . . Many men . . . have tried to change the conduct of people by reasonings, or by passing certain laws. Their endeavors have often been peculiarly barren of results. . . . Pareto shows how their failure is associated with the importance of the non-logical. . . . People must be controlled by manipulating their [instincts and emotions] rather than by changing their reasonings. This is a fact of which politicians have always made use when they have persuaded their constituents by appealing to their sentiments, rather than by employing [reasoning], which would never be listened to or at least never prove effective for moving the crowds. Mr. Bernays has gotten his views published in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, where he pointed out that "newsworthy events involving people usually do not happen by accident. They are planned deliberately to accomplish a purpose, to influence ideas and actions." The files of The Public Relations Journal contain what to an outsider may seem like a startling number of accounts of American men of science co-operating intimately and confidentially with the mind-molders, and would-be molders, of public relations. To cite a few examples: In June, 1953, the journal described, under the title "Orientation in the Social Sciences," a series of seminars held at Columbia University Teachers' College for New York members of the Public Relations Society of America. Six doctors in the social sciences, headed by Lyman Bryson, social anthropologist, did the "orienting." (All were Columbia men.) Dr. Bryson told the publicists: "If you are engineering consent, then I think the social sciences would like to warn you that you should begin with a basic analysis of three levels upon which consent moves in a society like ours." The first level, he said, is human nature. He added that little could really be done here to "manipulate" people. The second level was cultural change, which is where you must operate, he said, if you want to influence people's ideas. The third level is the region of choice. Here is where an impulse is running in a particular direction, and some sort of choice will be made regardless, "as when a choice between similar products is made." At this level, he said, "it is relatively easy to manipulate people." On the other hand, if you are trying to change their ideas, "you work on the second level," where different "psychological pressures, techniques, and devices from those successful on the third level" must be used. Earlier in the year two different issues covered at length "The Social Science Session," which explored the "close interrelation of public-relations practice and the social sciences." The Journal introduced the report with this blurb: "Social Science holds the answer—if we can but get hold of it—to many of the . . . problems with which we are so ineffectually struggling these days." On hand to advise the publicists on how to "get hold of" the answers were two social scientists of the first rank: Dr. Rensis Likert, director of the Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan; and Dr. Samuel A. Stouffer, director of the Laboratory of Social Relations, Harvard University. Dr. Stouffer said it was a great privilege to come before the gathering of "practitioners of human relations," and he proceeded to tell his listeners it was a good working rule that people's attitudes are more easily reached through their emotions than through their intellects. He added that at the Harvard laboratory "we are doing some intensive research on the subject of fear in connection with learning theory." He held out promise that in years to come public-relations practitioners might be able to find in the material "practical guides for action." Dr. Likert talked at length on what motivates people and how their behavior can be changed by changing "the motivational forces working upon them." Those were just two of several accounts of scientists orienting the publicists. A bystander reading the accounts might feel an impulse to tug the doctors' sleeves and warn them to give thought to the uses to which their insights might be put by unsqueamish or rough-playing listeners who might possibly be in the audience. There was some evidence that the American public was becoming accustomed to having its attitudes manipulated by publicrelations experts. David Riesman noted in The Lonely Crowd that residents of a great suburban development outside Chicago took an odd way of showing their annoyance against the management for all the irritating aspects of the arrangements there. He said complaints were frequently put in terms of the bad public relations shown by the management. "In effect people were complaining not about their direct grievances but because they felt they had not been so manipulated as to make them like it," he reported. The engineering of consent has taken hold to a startling extent in a field that might at first seem unlikely: fund raising. Americans are reputed to be the most generous people in the world. By midcentury philanthropy ranked as the nation's fourth largest industry in terms of dollars. Spontaneous giving, however, was just a memory as far as large-scale philanthropy was concerned. To assure big giving, big persuaders came into existence. By 1956 there were more than four hundred professional fund-raising firms dotted across the land, most of them schooled in manipulative techniques. Business Week counseled its executive readers not to be scornful of the professional fund raisers who might approach them for help. These people, it said, are not necessarily "impractical visionaries." As a matter of fact, it added reassuringly, "you'll find that many have a surprising grasp of sound business principles." The professional fund raisers claim they can collect for a cause many times as much money as they cost. And they are probably right. America's most noted fund raiser, John Price Jones, contended in The Engineering of Consent (he wrote a chapter) that fund raising is one of the most highly developed forms of public relations. "It takes better public relations to get a man to give a dollar than it does to convince him to spend a dollar," he explained. Jones contends that with solicitors even enthusiasm is not enough unless it is "brought into an organized machine." The professionals themselves usually stay in the background, because local residents are apt to resent them, and confine themselves to master-minding the drive. If you are an important prospect the professional fund raiser probably knows more about you than do your best friends. As Jerome Beatty explained it in describing Mr. Jones's operations in The American Magazine: The expert fund raiser will tip off solicitors as to your weaknesses and how to touch the tender spot in your heart just as a baseball pitcher knows whether the batter goes for a curve or for a fast ball. John Price Jones has a file of more than 66,000 names of persons all over the U.S. who have given substantial sums to worthy causes and who are likely to give more if properly approached. This file is kept up to date by six girls and one man who read and clip newspapers, magazines, trade journals, collect corporate reports, financial ratings. For each person there is a file almost as complete as the FBI keeps on suspected Communists. These professional fund raisers soon got into the depth approach to their calling when they sought to discover the real reasons people are willing to give away large parcels of their money, and the real reasons citizens are willing to volunteer to punch doorbells as solicitors. The "real" deep-down reasons people can be stimulated most easily to give to charitable causes or to serve as volunteer solicitors for those causes appear to be several in the view of leading fund raisers. Most of the explanations boil down to masked forms of selfaggrandizement or ego-gratification. First is self-interest. Mr. Jones feels that when this motive is properly promoted, for example, it can always bring recruits into service as solicitors. He accepts the fact as basic that self-interest is a primary motivation in all of life and is "basic to successful organization." This self-interest angle was stressed in The Public Relations Journal in a discussion for publicrelations men on the way they should guide their companies in the matter of local causes and philanthropies. The writer, a publicrelations director, stated: "Contributions should always serve the best interests of the corporation. They should return direct benefits, as through improved community hospitals where employees reside, or there should be a long-range return, as through schools." A second reason people may be impelled to give is "public interest," according to the professional persuaders' viewpoint. Mr. Jones, however, says this is far less forceful than self-interest and actually may often involve some self-interest, too, "as in the case of those who have private interests which can benefit from the reflection of their service in the interest of the public." The third force Mr. Jones mentions is the social or business benefit that accrues from associating with "the best people in town." He pointed out that if you get the best people it is surprising how many other people are downright eager to serve. And he adds that salesmen have often found that being active in a drive is a "fertile field for building their own acquaintanceship." Researchers have found more than thirty reasons why people give, according to Mr. Beatty, who mentions as potent stimulants the possibility of the amount of their contribution appearing in the local paper, or their picture, or "fear of what people will say if the contribution is small." If you are sensitive to the status angle, he added, the professionals will let you buy "all the publicity and social prestige you will pay for." In smaller communities a generous contribution is often solicited on the golf course. If the president of the bank casually mentions to you on the street, "By the way, we need a fourth on Saturday. How about it?" Mr. Beatty warns that you may be the next prospect on his list. Beatty added: "You probably beat him at golf, but at the nineteenth hole he will probably sign you up for a big contribution." 

The manipulative approach to politics is of course not a discovery of the nineteen-fifties, or even the twentieth century. Napoleon set up a press bureau that he called, perhaps in a playful moment, his Bureau of Public Opinion. Its function was to manufacture political trends to order. Machiavelli was another who made some original contributions to the thinking in this field. Manipulation of the people by a tyrant with a controlled society is a fairly simple matter, and he can be heavy-handed or light-handed about it, to taste. The real challenge comes in dealing effectively with citizens of a free society who can vote you out of office, or spurn your solicitation for their support, if they are so minded. Effective political manipulation and mass persuasion in this kind of situation had to wait upon the appearance of the symbol manipulators. They did not turn their attention to politics in a serious way until the nineteen-fifties. Then in a few short years, climaxing in the Presidential campaign of 1956, they made spectacular strides in changing the traditional characteristics of American political life. They were able to do this by drawing upon the insights of Pavlov and his conditioned reflexes, Freud and his father images, Riesman and his concept of modern American voters as spectator-consumers of politics, and Batten, Barton, Durstine and Osborn and their mass merchandising lore. As the decade of the fifties was beginning, a portent of things to come appeared in The New York World-Telegram, a normally Republican newspaper, in describing preparations for the 1950 Congressional campaign. The headline read: THE HUCKSTERS TAKE OVER GOP CAMPAIGN. And the lead explained that "the politicians are beginning to apply all the smart advertising techniques used by mass production America to merchandise autos, bath salts, and lawn mowers." It went on to explain: "Under Chairman Leonard W. Hall (R., N.Y.) and Robert Humphreys, publicity director, the Republican Congressional Committee has made-to-order productions for the candidate who wants to use television, movies built around cartoons and charts, dramatized radio spot announcements . . . newsletters, street interview techniques, etc." Those two men were to rise to greater eminence in Republican affairs. A leading Democrat, William Benton, former cohead of the ad agency Benton and Bowles, ran a successful campaign for the Senate using many mass-merchandising techniques. He explained: "The problem is to project yourself as a person." To do this he used one-minute radio spots that were pre-evaluated for crowd appeal, comic strip ads pretested for reader interest, pretty girls in streetcorner booths, five-minute movies. By the 1952 Presidential campaign the professional persuaders had been welcomed into the inner councils by at least one party. Stanley Kelley, Jr., of Brookings Institution, made a study of the 1952 campaign, which he reported in his book Professional Public Relations and Political Power (1956). He said: "The campaign. . . reveals some interesting differences in the place occupied by professional publicists in the councils of the opposing parties. The strategy, treatment of issues, use of media, budgeting, and pacing of the Eisenhower campaign showed the pervasive influence of professional propagandists. The Democrats used fewer professionals, were less apt to draw upon commercial and industrial public-relations experience in their thinking, and their publicity men apparently had less of a voice in the policy decisions of the campaign." The Democrats, of course, took a shellacking and, Kelley suggested, had learned their lesson and would make greater use of public relations and advertising men in 1956. The depth probers, too, were turning their attention to politics. During the 1952 campaign Dr. Dichter announced that all the longwinded talking about issues such as inflation and Korea would actually have very little to do with the outcome. The crux of the campaign, he insisted, was the emotional pull exercised by the rival candidates. After the campaign Burleigh Gardner stated in Tide, the merchandisers' magazine, that depth techniques should be applied to political forecasting. He contended that by using projection techniques to detect underlying emotional tones (rather than just asking people how they were going to vote) the Eisenhower landslide could have been predicted. A New York ad executive using depth techniques contended that if ad men were given really free rein they could successfully swing crucial voters in just about any election, with appeals geared to the undecided or listless mass. His agency made a test study during the 1952 campaign with the "I don't know" voters, using the same projective techniques used to spot affinities for brand images, to get the voters' underlying emotional tone. After the election it called up the people who had been probed (all of them professedly undecided) and found it had been 97 per cent right in predicting how each one would vote. The spokesman for the agency said that the undecided voter is not the thoughtful "independent" he is often pictured. The switch voter, he said, "switches for some snotty little reason such as not liking the candidate's wife." Depth-prober James Vicary did some similar work in Kingston, New York, during a mayoralty campaign and found he could usually diagnose how the "I don't know" voter was actually going to vote. By 1956 even the famous nose-counter George Gallup, director of the American Institute of Public Opinion and of the Gallup Poll, was conceding that he was starting to use "interviews in depth" to supplement his more conventional methods. The depth approach to politics seemed justified by the growing evidence that voters could not be depended upon to be rational. There seemed to be a strong illogical or nonlogical element in their behavior, both individually and in masses. A sample of this nonrational behavior was the reaction of voters to President Eisenhower's heart attack in 1955. In early September, 1955, just before his seizure the Gallup Poll showed that 61 per cent of those questioned said they would vote for him if he ran against Mr. Adlai Stevenson, the leading Democratic possibility. Then he was stricken, and during the months that followed, when it seemed touch and go whether he would ever regain his health enough to run again, his rating on the poll rose steadily until in March it stood at 66 per cent in the hypothetical contest with Stevenson. In commenting on this rise James Reston, of The New York Times, remarked: "The explanation of this escapes me for the moment, but when I find it I'll send it along." The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology got into this seeming nonrational element in voters' thinking when it reported an experiment with people known to be either strongly pro- or antiDemocratic. All heard a ten-minute speech on national affairs. Half of the material was carefully slanted to be pro-Democratic, and half slanted to be anti-Democratic. The people were told they were being tested on their memory. Twenty-one days later they were tested on the material. It was found that people's memories were "significantly better" in recalling material that harmonized with their own political viewpoint or "frame of reference." There was a clear tendency for them to forget the material that didn't harmonize with their own preconceived notions. Several political commentators (Reston, Dorothy Thompson, Doris Fleeson are examples) took special note in 1956 of what they felt was the growing role of "personality" in American politics. Dorothy Thompson called it the "cult of personality." Sociologist David Riesman, in noting the same phenomenon, considered it a part of the trend to other-directedness in American life. Americans, in their growing absorption with consumption, have even become consumers of politics. This has brought an increased emphasis on giving the nod to the best performer; and in evaluating performance the "sincerity" of the presentation has taken on increased importance. He pointed out, in The Lonely Crowd, "Just as glamour in packaging and advertising of products substitutes for price competition, so glamour in politics, whether as charisma— packaging—of the leader or as the hopped-up treatment of events by mass media, substitutes for the type of self-interest that governed the inner-directed." Not only do the American people, the depth probers concluded, want political leaders with personality, but in the Presidency they want a very definite kind of personality. Eugene Burdick, teacher of political theory at the University of California, made a study of the qualities of the perfect President while serving as a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behaviorial Sciences at Stanford. (This is the same Eugene Burdick who in 1956 brought out a bestselling novel The Ninth Wave on the irrational trends in politics.) Dr. Burdick found that the perfect President doesn't arise out of great issues but becomes "great" in our minds because of his personality. He becomes "great" to the degree that he becomes a "father image" in our minds. Burdick relates: "Recent polls and psychological studies reveal the extent to which the President has now become what psychologists call a 'father image' in the average American home." Burdick summed up (in This Week) a composite picture of the perfect President: "He is a man who has great warmth, inspires confidence rather than admiration, and is not so proper that he is unbelievable. He must have 'done things' in another field than politics, and he must have a genuine sense of humor. His stand on individual political issues is relatively unimportant. . . ." After filling in the portrait, Burdick adds: "Clearly there are some aspects of this portrait that are disturbing. (1) Is it, for example, ominous, that issues are less important than personality? (2) Is it healthy in a democracy that citizens desire a leader who will protect them? (3) Are Americans in their dislike for politicians looking for a heroic leader of the totalitarian type?" By the mid-fifties most enterprising politicians were checking themselves in the mirrors to see if their images were on straight. Printer's Ink, the merchandisers' trade journal, quoted a ranking Democrat as saying in 1955: "Any candidate is aware, of course, that. . . the sooner he begins to build a favorable image of himself in relation to the issues of the day the more likely he is to come through." Even Adlai Stevenson, the genial, rapier-tongued egg-head of the ill-fated 1952 campaign was criticized in 1956, by his opponents, as lacking "the Presidential image." He reportedly began trying to correct this alleged shortcoming by presenting an image of himself to America as being a little less of a wit and a little more a man of determination and decisiveness. Meanwhile, the image of President Eisenhower in 1956 was reported undergoing a change. Louis Harris, the noted pollster and political analyst, conducted 1,200 "qualitative interviews" after President Eisenhower's illnesses, to find the "deep reasons and motives that lie behind" the people's feelings about the President. In his report, in Collier's magazine (July 20, 1956) he mentioned that many people who had supported General Eisenhower in 1952 had seen him as a vigorous man of integrity who could clean up things and get the country out of trouble. "This led some to say that American voters, especially women, had a 'father image' of him," Mr. Harris said, and added, "Today this has changed to a real extent. Eisenhower is no longer looked on as being vigorous. Courageous he still is, people will tell you when discussing the farm or natural-gas bill vetoes. But the image has mellowed. He is now looked on as being more kindly, wiser, and as one voter put it: 'kind of a grandfather of the Republic' " By the mid-fifties both major United States parties had become deeply involved in the use of professional persuaders to help in their image-building problems. In early 1956 Nation's Business, which is published by the Chamber of Commerce of the United States, happily heralded the new, businessman's approach to politics. It proclaimed: "Both parties will merchandise their candidates and issues by the same methods that business has developed to sell goods. These include scientific selection of appeals; planned repetition. . . . No flag-waving faithfuls will parade the streets. Instead corps of volunteers will ring doorbells and telephones. . . . Radio spot announcements and ads will repeat phrases with a planned intensity. Billboards will push slogans of proven power. . . . Candidates need, in addition to rich voice and good diction, to be able to look 'sincerely' at the TV camera. . . ." Let's look briefly at some of the more vivid examples of the new style of political persuaders at work. First, the Republicans. The extent to which the merchandising approach had taken over at the Republican National Headquarters by 1956 was shown by a statement issued by Leonard Hall, national party chairman, explaining why the Republican Party was going to regain control of Congress. He said, among other things, that "it has a great product to sell. . . . You sell your candidates and your programs the way a business sells its products." The committee's public-relations director, young crew-cut L. Richard Guylay, who had helped pioneer the merchandising approach to politics by handling the image building for a number of Senators, explained that the new "scientific methods take the guesswork out of politics and save a lot of wasted time and effort. . . . Len Hall is a great supporter of modern techniques." In the White House itself the Republicans had a persuader of proven talents in Governor Howard Pyle, deputy assistant to the President just under Sherman Adams. A former ad man from Phoenix, Arizona, he explained that the Republican Party would put its trust, in 1956 as in 1952, in the big New York ad agency, Batten, Barton, Durstine and Osborn. He explained in late 1955: "The Republican Party has long been identified with B.B.D.&O. They represent us at campaign time and all the time in between on a retainer. We're a regular account, and when you get to kicking around the appropriations, it's a valuable account. We have underlying obligations to B.B.D.&O." (Mr. Pyle in one of his rare public appearances made a foot-in-mouth statement in unemployment-plagued Detroit that "the right to suffer is one of the joys of a free economy.") The B.B.D.&O. executive who is in charge of the GOP "account," Carroll Newton, proclaims that he is an advertising man, not a politician. Another big account he has supervised is U.S. Steel. He reportedly had forty people on his GOP account. Perhaps the most influential persuader of all in GOP ranks, in 1956, was James Hagerty, press secretary. President Eisenhower's two illnesses brought him to the fore as the man between the President and the world. Newsweek noted this growing power of Mr. Hagerty. It called him one of the most influential officials in the Administration, a man who not only announced decisions but helped, behind the scenes, to make the decisions. The magazine revealed that he regularly attended Cabinet meetings and frequently referred to himself and the President interchangeably by saying, "We also signed today. . ." Before each press conference, it reported, Mr. Hagerty carefully coached the President on questions to expect and suggested possible answers by saying, "Mr. President, why don't you say. . ." The magazine further reported the President's personal secretary, Mrs. Ann Whitman, as revealing, "Usually, the answer the President gives is what Jim has been saying." Some of the more picturesque persuaders associated with prominent individual Republicans as image builders come from California. This may spring from the fact that the political climate there is ideal for the new type of persuader. The state has no real party machines in the traditional sense, the voters have little party loyalty, can cross lines easily, and many are relative newcomers. This has proved an ideal setup for the husband-wife team of political press agents Clem Whitaker and Leone Baxter. He is a lanky, genial, white-haired man; she is an attractive redhead. Between them they have managed seventy-five political campaigns and won seventy of them. Time credits them with "creating" many of the many recent political eminences in California. It reported: "They taught Earl Warren how to smile in public and were the first to recognize the publicity value of his handsome family. They brought the ebullient Goodie Knight before the public with a grueling speechmaking campaign and have tried to keep a check on him ever since. When San Francisco Mayor Roger Lapham was threatened by a petition for his recall, Whitaker and Baxter saved his job. . . ." A reporter once asked them if they would have had their record of seventy successful campaigns if they had worked for the other side. Baxter said: "I think we could have won almost every one of them. . . . " When they were guiding Goodwin J. Knight into the Governor's chair in California, they kept him tied up before the cameras for most of a day in order to make four one-minute "spots" for TV. In taking over a campaign they insist on controlling the entire strategy and lay down, or hold veto power over, almost every move that may influence the public image being built for the candidate. In discussing his problems with a group of fellow publicists Whitaker reportedly complained that selling a candidate is not as simple as selling a car because while an automobile is mute a "candidate can sometimes talk you out of an election despite the best you can do in campaign headquarters." Another California persuader of the new school of build-up artists is Murray Chotiner, Los Angeles lawyer, who groomed Richard Nixon for national stardom and managed Nixon's 1952 campaign. (In 1956 Republicans were busily disavowing him when he came under Congressional investigation as an alleged influence peddler.) Like Whitaker and Baxter his system of star-building operated mainly outside the party framework. His work was so spectacularly successful that until he came into bad odor he was in great demand as a lecturer at GOP campaign schools around the country. GOP campaign director Robert Humphreys brought him to Washington in late 1955 to indoctrinate state chairmen on the topic, "Fundamentals of Campaign Organization." Humphreys called him a smash hit, with his visual aids and pointers on how to master mass-communication media. Chotiner's basic technique was to present the public with two images: the good guy (his man), the bad guy (the opponent). One of the topics he covered in his 12,000-word speech to the forty-eight state chairmen was the use of, and defense against, the "smear"; and he told about the art of implying that the opponent has leftish leanings by using pink paper. He also talked about the techniques of generating the appearance of public demand and the technique of winning people's hearts with carefully simulated candor. Mr. Nixon, the man who benefited from many, if not all, of these techniques has been described by perceptive observers as a new breed of American politician. Richard H. Rovere, political essayist for The New Yorker and Harper's, stated in his book Affairs of State: The Eisenhower Years, "Richard Nixon appears to be a politician with an advertising man's approach to his work. Policies are products to be sold the public—this one today, that one tomorrow, depending on the discounts and the state of the market. He moves from intervention (in Indochina) to anti-intervention with the same ease and lack of anguish with which a copy writer might transfer his loyalties from Camels to Chesterfields." A few days after reading the above I noticed in the newspapers that the VicePresident, busy as he was, found time to make an address at the Brand Names Week ceremony at New York's Waldorf-Astoria. As the 1956 campaign got under way, party spokesmen made it clear that the days of whistle stops and torchlight parades were dead. The President himself stated he was going to rely on mass communication, and his press secretary mentioned that everybody had a lot of ideas on how to gear the 1956 campaign to the new age we are in, "the electronics age." Primarily this meant television— which had brought a new kind of persuader-consultant into the party councils: the TV adviser and make-up consultant. When in the spring the nation was intensely curious to know whether President Eisenhower would or would not run again in view of his illness, the tip-off came when reporters saw Robert Montgomery, the President's TV adviser, walking into the White House the day before an announcement was expected. This could only mean the President was going on the air, which probably meant he was going to run. The hunch was correct. After that appearance, incidentally, Mr. Montgomery received a scolding from TV columnist Harriet Van Horne, of the Republican newspaper The New York World Telegram and Sun. She mentioned that Mr. Montgomery, "whose NBC show is also a B.B.D.&O. enterprise," was on hand to advise the President on lighting, make-up, and delivery. Then she stated: Now I am going to be presumptuous and make a few suggestions to Mr. Montgomery. First, Mr. M., those pale-rimmed spectacles must go. They enhance the natural pallor that comes to every man after forty winters have besieged the brow. Also, pale rims tend to "wash out" when worn by anybody of fair coloring. Second, both lighting and make-up—if, indeed, the President permitted the pancake touch-up he submitted to so reluctantly at the Chicago convention—seemed to be aimed at making Gen. Eisenhower look pale. A man just back from a Southern vacation should look tanned, Mr. Montgomery, and the lighting should play up this healthy glow. [The President had been in Georgia to recuperate.] As the Republicans made plans for a "national saturation" of TV and radio persuasion in 1956 they carefully checked to see how much of a candidate's image was diluted by electronic relaying. Their early conclusion was not much. A careful check was made after President Eisenhower in January spoke over closed-circuit TV to 53 dinners attended by 63,000 persons. Chairman Hall reported: "We made a survey afterward of the effect. We found the full impact was there—the same emotion, the same tears—just as if the President had been there in person." The wonderful advantage of electronics over whistle-stopping and street parading was summed up by former GOP Chairman Hugh Scott in The New York Times Magazine: "Look, many of us can remember the peddler who went from door to door selling pots and pans. One single TV commercial saying 'Kelley's Kettles Cook Quicker' will sell more kettles than all the peddlers since the beginning of time." The Republicans planned for the 1956 wind-up an even heavier "saturation" barrage by TV and radio than in '52 when more than a million dollars a week was spent largely in commercial "spots" of less than a half minute each. The aim was to make them inescapable, hammering in on the average person several times a day. This ceaseless barrage was conceived by ad executive Rosser Reeves, who later was reported summing up his strategy in these words: "I think of a man in a voting booth who hesitates between two levers as if he were pausing between competing tubes of tooth paste in a drugstore. The brand that has made the highest penetration on his brain will win his choice." A full year before the 1956 elections the GOP was blocking out $2,000,000 worth of prime TV time. (This was being done by B.B.D.&O.) Shrewdly the GOP reserved segments before and after such top-rated shows as This Is Your Life and The $64,000 Question. The Republicans decided that in trying to compete with such shows at prime times as Phil Silvers' and Jackie Gleason's they couldn't get many people to listen to a half-hour political speech, no matter how carefully it was laced with visual aids and film clips. Public-Relations Director Guylay declared that the half-hour speech was dead. He surmised that even Lincoln with his second inaugural couldn't hold a modern TV audience at a prime listening time. He decided the GOP would go in extensively for five-minute "quickies." And he added: "You can really say a lot in five minutes." The GOP strategists, in studying the best possible place to buy those five minute spots, adopted an idea that they felt was extraordinarily brilliant: they would buy up the last five minutes of the big entertainment shows. That would give them essentially a captive audience because most people would feel it was too late to switch to another program. John Steinbeck commented on the receptivity of such audiences, in The Saturday Review. The audience, he said, has been amused and half-hypnotized by a "fat comedian." The time following such a program, he said, "is very valuable, for here you have X millions of people in a will-less, helpless state, unable to resist any suggestion offered. . . ." One thing that worried practical politicians out on the grass-root fronts was that telecasts emanating from Washington or some other distant out-of-state city would deprive them of the coattail benefit. In the past they had gained votes by being seen riding in the Presidential candidate's car or photographed with his hand on their shoulder at the local school auditorium, giving them an endorsement. Variety reported in early 1956 that this problem was absorbing the attention of the GOP mass communicators, and they felt they could lick it along these lines: "The President might invite important candidates from various states to sit near him in Washington when he speaks, and he may then commend them to the voters. Also his talks may be trimmed, so that the local candidates can cut in with speeches of their own— live, taped, or filmed—in the last three or four minutes as cow catchers on the Prexy's talks." The Republican Campaign Director Robert Humphreys explained the strategy by saying that if he were a small-town storekeeper he would give his shirt to be able to "buy a fifteen-second spot right after Godfrey." Well, he added, a Senator or local Congressman can "tie in right after Ike with a fifteen-or twenty-second spot for himself as a member of the team." Then Mr. Humphreys carefully added: "He will, of course, pay for this himself." The GOP's 1956 convention in San Francisco provided a showcase for the new approach to nominating a President, historically a democratic and often rowdy procedure. Even the ministers in their opening and closing intonations (over TV) worked in key GOP slogans. The man supervising the production—he was called "producer" of the show—was George Murphy, the Hollywood actor and public-relations director of M-G-M. Mr. Murphy seemed to regard all the delegates as actors in his superspectacular pageant. Wearing dark glasses, he stood a few feet back of the rostrum. Reporters noted him "making the professional gestures for fanfare, stretch-out, and fade. Delegates took their cues right along with the orchestra." He was thrown into a frenzy of activity when a Nebraska delegate tried to nominate "Joe Smith" for Vice-President as a protest against the GOP strategists' insistence that delegates vote by acclamation. Mr. Murphy finally got the objectionable delegate off the floor, with the help of others. The motions of the 1956 convention, in contrast to those of yesteryear when fierce battles often raged over the presenting of motions, were carefully prearranged. As The New York Times noted, "The Chairman . . . often has to jog the movers into moving." Another innovation was the introduction of outsiders onto the convention floor. Not only were they not accredited delegates, but many publicly professed that they weren't even Republicans. Purportedly they were clear-thinking "citizens" fervently seconding motions. The Times observed that they were "actually deliverers of additional Administration commercials." Despite all these clear advances in taming politicians, Mr. Murphy still was not satisfied with the results he achieved in San Francisco. He confided to the Alsop columnists that someday, if he had his way, conventions would be run as they ought to be run, in a proper theater with proper direction and control. Meanwhile, he said he would be happy to settle for an automatic trap door to get rid of the politicians who insisted on speaking beyond their allotted time. The manipulative approach to political persuasion through carefully staged productions carried over into the campaign itself. The GOP, for its big rally featuring Mr. Eisenhower in Philadelphia, prepared a thirty-two-page "Scenario and Timetable." It specified that the audience be equipped with "dignified noisemakers." The climactic Election Eve rally glorifying Mr. Eisenhower and Mr. Nixon even made the TV columnist for a GOP-inclined chain flinch. Harriet Van Home called the little speeches of presumably typical citizens "patently rehearsed testimonials borrowed from the tobacco ads." One of Mr. Eisenhower's warmest admirers among political columnists, Roscoe Drummond, revealed that the accent of the campaign was being put "less on speeches and more on appearances." In one TV show where Mr. Eisenhower was featured for half an hour, he spoke for one minute. The TV columnist of The New York Times complained that some of the GOP's showmanship "bordered on embarrassing deification." The ad-man approach to building up Mr. Eisenhower was perhaps best demonstrated in a short TV spot drama in which an alleged taxi driver was shown walking his dog at night in the park facing the White House. The man looked in awe toward the light in the White House window and said fervently: "I need you!" A TV director who assisted the White House in some of its staged productions featuring Mr. Eisenhower was, in the privacy of his heart, a Stevenson man. He justified his cooperation by explaining to the author: "The American public is so inured to slickness that, at the least, you have got to come up to the level of slickness expected on TV before your message comes through." In the last days of the campaign, when the paramount and special problem of the GOP was to convince the nation that Mr. Eisenhower was in robust health despite his two major illnesses, it lessened somewhat its reliance on TV in projecting Mr. Eisenhower. Television—even as stage-managed by Mr. Montgomery—tended to make the President seem a little more pallid than GOP strategists wished. It turned more to public "appearances" in which the President waved, grinned, and perhaps said a few words. Now to turn to the Democrats. They were struggling as best they could to catch up with the times in the matter of persuasion techniques. The fact that their efforts seemed punier than the Republicans' can at least in part be attributed to the fact that big persuaders cost big money, and they were complaining that the big contributors were mainly on the Republican side. Also being less attuned to the advanced thinking of business management they were slower to grasp the lessons of persuasion being learned by merchandisers. Like the Republicans they began committing a large portion of their campaign money to five- and ten-minute TV spots. They, like the Republicans, set up an indoctrination school in campaign techniques. And they brought in from the universities social scientists such as Paul Willis, of Indiana University, to do their trend spotting for them. They busily bought up stock film footage from the NBC Film Library and other sources to dress up their TV pitches. They began lining up Hollywood stars such as Henry Fonda and David Wayne to help make long-playing music-narration platters to be passed out by local Democratic clubs. Hollywood made such a vivid film of Democratic voices of the past that some planners feared it would take the edge off live speakers. The Democrats' difficulties were aggravated by the fact that even though they planned to spend $8,000,000 (at least) in massmedia persuasion they couldn't find a major ad agency willing to handle their account. The big persuaders mostly looked the other way. This became something of a scandal in advertising circles in late 1955 and early 1956 as the months passed and still the Democrats evidently could not interest a major agency in their multimillion-dollar account. The merchandising magazine Printer's Ink acknowledged that the Democrats were having difficulty lining up a suitable agency "allegedly because big agency men don't want to alienate the Republican businessmen who head many many client companies. Some agency executives call this idea ridiculous." Advertising Age also thought such a notion was pretty ridiculous, but admitted that there "was probably just enough truth in the assertion that the Republicans had a much wider potential choice to be slightly embarrassing." It went on to say it was pleased that advertising men and methods were being more and more widely used in politics. "This is all to the good." What was not good, it added, "is the growing public discussion of the importance of advertising in politics" and the growing notion that it is important for a party or candidate to have "the right advertising agency." (An indication of the personal political sympathies of ad executives was seen in the Senate's post-mortem report on campaign contributions. Officials of thirty-seven leading agencies gave $51,000 to the Republicans, nothing to the Democrats.) As the embarrassment over the Democrats' plight grew there was talk of sending a rescue mission or "task force" to the Democrats in the form of an unlabeled pool of bright ad men drawn from the various agencies. There was also some talk of setting up some sort of a special "anchor" agency to serve any party that couldn't get an agency. The suspense ended when the relatively small but lively ad agency Norman, Craig and Kummel agreed to take the Democrats' account. This was the agency that had created the successful "I Dreamed I Went Walking in My Maidenform Bra" campaign. While it was a David compared with the Goliath B.B.D.&O. on the Republicans' side, ad men looked forward with relish to the campaign, all politics aside. It promised to be an exciting exhibition of persuasion techniques, because there was bad blood between the two agencies. Norman, Craig and Kummel hated B.B.D.&O. worse than the Democrats hated the Republicans. It seems that Norman, Craig and Kummel built the TV quiz show The $64,000 Question up to an all-time high rating only to have the prize grabbed away by the bigger B.B.D.&O. Walter Craig, agency executive, said his agency was counting on its "creative flair as much as anything else" to beat the B.B.D.&O. Republicans. He said that all the top people on the Democratic account were bona fide Democrats. The account executive, Chester Herzog, thirty-four, previously had had the Blatz Beer account. One touch the Norman, Craig and Kummel people added to the Democrats' convention in Chicago was a little "quiz" show on the platform involving youngsters Gloria Lockerman and Lenny Ross, who had proven themselves prodigies on The $64,000 Question. The quiz master who questioned them about big national problems was keynote speaker Frank Clement. Another touch the agency presumably added was the keynote speech itself. Mr. Clement did a dry run of it on kinescope film to test the impact of each gesture and peroration. Also at the Democratic Convention, on advice of persuaders from the world of mass communication, the old-style display of red-white-and-blue motif was abandoned. Instead, everything, even the platform chairs, was a telegenic blue. Like the Republicans, the Democrats of 1956 were well represented by showmen from Hollywood and Broadway to keep the show "moving." Their entertainment director was Dore Schary, head of M-G-M. (Reportedly he got himself in trouble with influential M-G-M stockholders of Republican persuasion for these efforts.) Another Democratic official of note was Mrs. Lynn Nichols. She was in charge of the "Hoopla Division" with responsibility for supervising demonstrations both inside and outside the hall. As Mr. Stevenson's campaign approached its ill-fated conclusion Democratic strategists—now psychologically oriented— were reportedly unhappy because he was not "projecting" himself well and still lacked a really convincing Presidential image. Mr. Stevenson himself was heard to mutter that he felt as if he were competing in a beauty contest rather than a solemn debate. He voiced his irritation at the symbol manipulators' approach to political persuasion—at least the Republican variety—by saying: "The idea that you can merchandise candidates for high office like breakfast cereal. . . is the ultimate indignity to the democratic process.

The trend in American society to the other-directed man—the man who more and more belonged to groups and played on teams—was welcomed and abetted by a large segment of United States industry. People who coalesce into groups, as any general knows, are easier to guide, control, cope with, and herd. The "team" concept was an aid, if not an outright necessity, to the big business, big labor, and big government that came increasingly to dominate the American scene at mid-century. Charles Wilson, a graduate of big business who went to work for big government as Secretary of Defense, summed up the new thinking when, in 1956, some of his leading subordinates were airing their feelings. He was reported growling: "Anyone who doesn't play on the team and sticks his head up may find himself in a dangerous spot." Early in the fifties Fortune magazine, which has frequently articulated the conscience of big business, viewed the trend uneasily and used the Orwellian word "Groupthink" to describe much that was going on. It suggested that businessmen while deploring creeping socialism in Washington might well look at some of the "subtle but pervasive changes" going on right in their own backyard. Its writer, William H. Whyte, Jr., stated: "A very curious thing has been taking place in this country almost without our knowing it. In a country where individualism—independence and self-reliance—was the watchword for three centuries the view is now coming to be accepted that the individual himself has no meaning except as a member of a group." He said that a "rationalized conformity" was coming more and more to be the national ideal and cited the appearance in growing numbers of "social engineers" willing and eager to help business managements with their personnel problems. These social engineers, he pointed out, bore some resemblance to the students of human relations of the Elton Mayo School who did pioneering work in diagnosing factors that cause us to work most enthusiastically. "But where the latter shy at the thought of manipulating men," he added, "the social engineers suffer no such qualms." (In early 1957 Mr. Whyte spelled out his apprehensions in his book The Organization Man.) This trend to the other-directed person was a fact of deep interest to every persuader interested in more effective manipulation of human behavior. It showed up in many areas of American life, even in our novels, TV shows, and children's books. Social scientist David Riesman devoted a section of his The Lonely Crowd, which blue-prints the trend to other-directedness, to an interesting analysis of one of the best-selling children's stories of mid-century, Toodle, the Engine, issued by the hundreds of thousands as a Little Golden Book. Toodle is a young engine who goes to a school where the main lessons taught are that you should always stop at a red flag and never get off the track. By being diligent in those two respects, he was taught, he might grow up to be a main streamliner. Toodle in his early try outs conformed to the rules for a while, but then he discovered the fun of taking side trips off the track to pick flowers. These violations are discovered, because of telltale signs of meandering in the cowcatcher. Toodle's waywardness presents the town of Engineville with a crisis, and citizens assemble to scheme ways to force Toodle to stay on the track. Still he keeps going his own way. Finally they develop a strategy to keep him on the track. The next time he leaves the track he runs smack into a red flag. Conditioned to halt at red flags, he halts, turns in another direction only to be confronted by another red flag. Red flags are planted all over the landscape. He turns and squirms but can find no place to romp. Finally he looks back toward the track. There the green and white flag is beckoning "go." He happily returns to the track and promises he will stay on it and be a good engine for ever after, amid the cheers of the citizenry. Dr. Riesman concludes: "The story would seem to be an appropriate one for bringing up children in an other-directed mode of conformity. They learn it is bad to go off the tracks and play with flowers and that, in the long run, there is not only success and approval but even freedom to be found in following the green lights." In its study of the "space" shows on television, Social Research noted that this same other-directedness is glorified. The team is allimportant and the shows' appeal is based, it concluded, on the child's "lack of confidence in his own ability to cope with situations that can be overcome by his 'gang' or 'team.'" The crisis or basic dilemma arises when the individual becomes isolated from his team and has to fight evil alone. A professional persuader who devotes much of his effort to persuading people to support worthy causes observed that midcentury man is more easily persuaded to "follow as one of a crowd under a leader than to work alone for the same end." (John Price Jones in The Engineering of Consent.) And an M.R. enthusiast at one ad agency pointed out that the public service ad company urging people to "Take somebody to church next Sunday" owed much of its potency in increasing churchgoing to its other-directed appeal. A picturesque manifestation of this trend to other-directedness can be seen, I suspect, in the small matter of laughter on television. It has been discovered, or purportedly discovered, that people are more apt to laugh and enjoy themselves if they hear other people laughing. Since live audiences are often bothersome or difficult to manage (because of all the cameras, etc.) the trend in TV has been to the canned laugh, a laugh reproduced by recording from some previous happy crowd, or synthetically manufactured. The president of one network defended the canned laugh by stating: "No one likes to laugh alone." An "honestly made laugh track," he said, can project you right into the audience to enjoy the fun. As a result of this need for canned laughter companies have sprung up selling laughs by the platter, with such labels as "applause"; "applause with whistles"; "applause—large spirited audience"; and "large audience in continuous hilarity." TV comedy writer Goodman Ace explained how this works when he wrote in The Saturday Review (March 6, 1954): "The producer orders a gross of assorted yaks and boffs, and sprinkles the whole sound track with a lacing of simpering snorts." On another occasion he said that the canned laugh is "woven in wherever the director imagines the joke or situation warrants a laugh. It comes in all sizes and the director has to be a pretty big man who can resist splicing in a roar of glee when only a chuckle would suffice." Among the major shows that have been mentioned as regular users, at one time or another, of the canned, or semi-canned laugh, are the George Burns show and the Ozzie and Harriet show. With the growing need for synthetic hilarity in precise dosages more refined techniques for producing it were developed. One network engineer invented an organlike machine with six keys that can turn on and off six sizes of laughter from small chuckles to rolling-in-the-aisle guffaws. By using chords the operator can improvise dozens of variations on the six basic quantitative laughs. Also according to Newsweek the producer of the I Love Lucy show developed a machine that can produce one hundred kinds of laugh. In industry, which is our main concern here, the stress on team playing coincided with the appearance of psychologists and other "social engineers" at the plants and offices. They brought to bear on sticky personnel problems the insights of group dynamics, sociodrama, group psychotherapy, social physics. As Fortune put it: "A bewildering array of techniques and 'disciplines' are being borrowed from the social sciences for one great cumulative assault on the perversity of man." The magazine protested that groupconference techniques had taken such a hold that in some companies executives "literally do not have a moment to themselves." If an employee becomes disaffected by company policy or environment, the social engineers feel it their duty to help him get rid of his mental unhealth. Fortune quoted one social engineer as stating: "Clinical psychologists have had great success in manipulating the maladjusted individual. It seems to me that there is no reason we shouldn't have as much success applying the same techniques to executives." The growing insistence that management people be "team players" started producing business officials with quite definite personality configurations. This was revealingly indicated by Lyle Spencer, president of Science Research Associates in Chicago, when he made a study of the Young Presidents' Organization. These are men who became presidents of their companies before they were forty. Necessarily, or at least consequently, most of the young presidents are heads of relatively small companies rather than the big ones. In commenting on the personalities of these young presidents Mr. Spencer said, "They are less team players. One thing prevents them from being president of General Motors. They haven't learned to be patient conformists. They have lived too long free wheeling." The growing trend of companies to screen employees for their team-playing qualities showed itself in a variety of ways. Dun's Review and Modern Industry in February, 1954, stated: "In reference to an applicant for a job or a prospect for promotion: is he the kind of man who will make a good team member, make good. . . . The way the individual fits into the teamwork of industry is so important to management as well as to the individual that what the psychiatrist can tell about the individual becomes important to the group." Iron Age in an article entitled "Psychology Sifts Out Misfits" told of Armco Steel Corporation's new enthusiasm for psychology, which the journal described as "a fancy word for a technique that lifts the 'iron curtain' that humans often hide behind. . . ." (Increasingly industrial employees were finding, to use a popular phrase, that they had "no place to hide.") The pay-off for Armco, the journal said, was that the company had been able to cut from 5 to 1 per cent the number of new employees who turned out to have undesirable or borderline personality faults. One of the things employees were tested for at Armco, it said, was "sociability." The report stated that 20,000 employees had been "audited" on their personality traits to determine who would get promotions and assignments to more important jobs. On the West Coast an electrical association was lectured by a psychologist on how to handle stubborn people. Among the unfortunate traits that characterized these stubborn, unruly people, he said, was that they were "sensitive" and "touchy." He added that it "is unfortunate, time-consuming, and perhaps infantile, but it is often necessary to come up on the blind side" of such people to soothe them. A personnel executive of Sears, Roebuck in writing a booklet for the guidance of hundreds of thousands of American school youngsters stressed the thought that, "When you take a job you become a member of a working team. . . . Don't expect the rest of the group to adjust to you. They got along fine before you came. It's up to you to become one of them. . . ." As David Riesman observed in another connection, "Some companies, such as Sears, Roebuck, seem to be run by glad handers. . . ." An indication of the ways the depth approach to employee relations was put to use is seen in these developments. Science Research Associates, Chicago, which has a dozen Ph.D's on its staff, began offering businesses the services of "trained, experienced psychologists and sociologists" for these functions, among others: evaluating candidates for executive positions; finding out what employees think about their jobs and company, evaluating the performances of employees more effectively. Several companies were reported employing a psychiatrist on a full-time basis. And increasingly employees began being psychoanalyzed in various ways while on the job. At a Boston department store girl clerks had to wait on customers with the knowledge that a psychologist was somewhere in the background watching them and recording their every action on an instrument called an "interaction chronograph," which recorded data on a tape recorder. The notations made of each girl's talk, smile, nods, gestures while coping with a customer provided a picture of her sociability and resourcefulness. Industrial psychologists were bringing the depth approach to labor relations. One of the most successful practitioners, Robert McMurry, reportedly received $125 an hour for giving management people fresh insights into the causes of their difficulties with labor. Purportedly when workers join unions they do so to win higher pay, greater job security, and other tangible benefits. Dr. McMurry concluded, after sizing up the situation at more than 100 companies where he had served, that these very often were not the main reasons at all. The more important reason, he decided, was that the workers felt an unconscious urge to improve the emotional climate of their jobs, and often struck just to give vent to unresolved, aggressive impulses. He summed up his "psycho-dynamic" conclusion about the root of much of the trouble he had seen in these memorable words: "Management has failed to be the kindly protective father, so the union has become the caressing mother who gets things from that stinker of a father." He found that about 5 per cent of all workers were chronic malcontents. Nothing much could be done that would please them. But for the other 95 per cent he felt a great deal could be done by modifying the emotional tone of their place of employment to bring more harmony. One firm that provides psychological bug-hunting services to industry cited the service it performed in trouble-shooting an employee problem in Ohio. An employer there received the sad, and to him baffling, news that the white collar workers at his plant were so unhappy they were on the verge of joining the factory workers' union. He sent an appeal to the depth-probing firm to find out what was wrong and whether anything could be done to keep these people out of the workers' union. A team of two psychologists and one sociologist cased the plant and asked a good many questions. They found that some of the malcontents were women who worked in a dark, isolated area and felt neglected. Their morale went up when they got Venetian blinds, better lighting, and certain privileges. Other unhappy employees felt lost at their jobs in large departments. When they were divided up into teams, they acquired more identity. Most of the manipulating of personnel in industry, I should stress, was done to achieve the constructive purpose of making employees happier and more effective at their jobs. Very often this simply involved giving them recognition and individual attention or recognizing that status symbols can become enormously important to a person caught in a highly stratified company, as with the case of a man who had all the seeming status and privileges of his peers but still felt grossly unhappy. Investigation turned up the root cause: his desk had only three drawers while the desks of associates in comparable jobs had four drawers. As soon as he was given a fourdrawer desk his grousing ended. Some of the advice given management by psychologists, I should also add, has been in the direction of urging the companies to give employees more freedom and individual responsibility as a means of increasing efficiency. Few of us would argue with that. The more outright manipulation and depth assessment, interestingly enough, was being done by companies with their own management personnel. Early in the fifties Fortune noted that "nothing more important has happened to management since the war than the fact that many companies have begun to experiment psychologically on their supervisors and top executives." It cited as companies doing this: Standard Oil of New Jersey, Sears, Roebuck, Inland Steel, Union Carbide and Carbon, General Electric. The psychological services provided by management-consulting firms grew apace. The major consulting firm of Stevenson, Jordon and Harrison, for example, had no psychological service until 1940 but by 1945 it had thirty psychologists on the staff. One of those, Perry Rohrer, then departed (reportedly with eighteen staff members) and set up his own firm, which by the early fifties had diagnosed the key personnel of 175 firms. In these early days one of the significant developments was the construction of a depth test (by Burleigh Gardner, Lloyd Warner, and William Henry) for spotting the officials of a company who were the real comers. One crucial trait they must have, they found, was a respectful concept of authority. "He accepts it without resentment. He looks to his superiors as persons of greater training . . . who issue guiding directives to him that he accepts without prejudice." And the report added: "This is a most necessary attitude for successful executives, since it controls their reaction to superiors." The authors proceeded to cite case histories of men who seemed magnificently fitted for leadership but upon psychological analysis were found unfitted because they had poor concepts of authority. One saw his associates "as competitive persons whom he must outwit. He had no clear-cut image of superiors as guiding or directing figures." Another man, alas, had a concept of authority by which he placed himself at the top of the heap: "Unconsciously he felt himself to be better than most of his superiors." That discovery evidently finished him. Some companies began giving all candidates for executive jobs psychiatric tests such as the Rorschach (ink blot) analysis of their emotional make-up to spot neurotics and potential psychotics. A pencil company which did this reported that it frequently paid off and cited the instance of discovering that one man had a conspicuous tendency to narcissism. He was not dropped but rather given special handling—all the praise that his self-centered nature seemed to need. To show its management readers the benefits of a complete psychological analysis of all key officials, Fortune in July, 1950, showed a chart prepared on one company by staff psychologists of Stevenson, Jordon and Harrison. The chart showed graphically— with dots, blocks, and arrows—the findings on forty-six top supervisors and executives of the company. Each rating was based on long interviews and testing. Those dots, blocks, and arrows stood for such things as effectiveness in job, emotional adjustment, etc. Their color was what was significant. Colors ranged from blue (outstanding) down through black and yellow to red (just about hopeless). Not surprisingly the rating for the president of the firm, to whom the report presumably was submitted, was "outstanding" in his effectiveness in present position. Several others had blue dots, too. A reader might start feeling sorry for the comptroller of the company who had a yellow block, black dot, and yellow arrow, which when translated meant: "Below average. . . working at his potential level. . . . Below-average adjustment; requires major development aid." Worst off in the upper level was the director of industrial relations. We should hope he doesn't have ambitions because on the chart he had a red block, arrow, and dot, meaning: "Unsatisfactory in position. . . . Potential worth doubtful. Severe maladjustment; unprofitable to attempt correction." Once the diagnosis is completed, the report added, the "development" or therapy begins. Said one psychologist of another firm: "To leave a man unaided after he has bared his problems is to invite frustration and confusion." Mr. Whyte, in his book The Organization Man, tells executives how they can outwit the psychological tests by cheating. Some of the efforts to assess and remold management men are being done under concealed conditions. Psychologists often get at the subject to be appraised or molded at a golf game or over a drink. One of the larger psychological testing services in the United States provides businesses with a special psychological test form specially designed to permit an appraisal of intelligence without the subject's awareness. He thinks it is just a routine form. The head of one psychological testing firm advises me that he is often called upon, where an important promotion is at stake, to assess the prospect without his awareness. He says that one of his standard approaches is to talk with the man after he has had a couple of Martinis so that he can appraise the man's personality while his basic emotionality is closer to the surface. One psychological technique that came into wide industrial use to modify the behavior and attitudes of key personnel was role playing of two or more officials before an audience of colleagues. Literature of the personnel world contains many references to role playing. The journal Advanced Management carried an enthusiastic description of the benefits of role playing in a 1954 issue. An executive of a large insurance company related: "We needed a motivating device, something with a 'kick.' Role playing looked like the answer. It helps people get their feet wet and at the same time teaches at the emotional level." Before an audience of associates one official would play the role of boss ("counselor") and another the role of subordinate ("counselee") while they discussed the subordinate's behavior or problem. What the boss didn't know was that the play subordinate had gotten a "hidden briefing" on how he was supposed to perform in the interview. As the official enthusiastically explained: "Here we slipped in a 'kicker'—a motivation not known to the counselor." The official cautioned management men that such hidden briefing "is not to be advised if the counselor is uninitiated or sensitive. It can be rough on him." But he was enthusiastic about this "trial by fire" technique of indoctrination and exulted that it is the "sort of stuff you can't get from books." Even a man's home life at many companies began being scrutinized to see if it conformed to the best interests of the "team" or company. A business writer for The New York Herald-Tribune reported in the early fifties on the great man hunt for qualified executives that was being carried on by professional recruiting firms which had come into existence for this specialized purpose. He related some of the qualities they were looking for in the modern executive and said, "Another point of equal importance is the wife. That is being emphasized more and more. Professional man hunters place family adjustment high in job qualifications. The same story is being told by all firms in this field, including Ward Howell, Handy Associates, Inc., Ashton Dunn Associates, Inc., Boyden Associates, Inc., or Sorzano, Antell and Wright. Important men may not be recommended for higher priced jobs because the wives may be too flirtatious or she may not drink her cocktails too well, or she may be an incorrigible gossip. Investigations in this respect are quite thorough." Psychological consultant James Bender advises me that a major producer of cellucotton products asked him to help set up a manpower program built around wives. He said that before the company hires an executive or salesman the man's wife is interviewed, as the last step before the hiring decision is made. It is a mutual sizing up, he explained. The wife is appraised of what the job may mean in terms of demands on the family life and inconveniences such as moving, husbands being away a good deal, etc. He said that in a few cases wives after the interview have persuaded the husband not to take the job. "And in a few other cases we have decided—after sizing up the wife—not to hire the husband." Some of the companies tend to look at the wife as a possible rival to them for the man's devotion. Fortune, in a remarkable article in October, 1951, detailed the growing role of the wife in company thinking. It surveyed executives across the nation and quoted one executive as saying mournfully: "We control a man's environment in business and we lose it entirely when he crosses the threshold of his home. Management therefore has a challenge and an obligation deliberately to plan and create a favorable, constructive attitude on the part of the wife that will liberate her husband's total energies for the job." What were the main traits corporations should look for in the wife? Fortune continued: "Management knows exactly what kind of wife it wants. With a remarkable uniformity of phrasing, corporation officials all over the country sketch the ideal. In her simplest terms she is a wife who is (1) highly adaptable, (2) highly gregarious, (3) realizes her husband belongs to the corporation." The Harvard Business Review put the demands of the corporation even more vividly in carrying a report on a study of 8,300 executives made by Lloyd Warner and James Abegglen. It stated that the mid-century American wife of an executive "must not demand too much of her husband's time or interest. Because of his single-minded concentration on his job, even his sexual activity is relegated to a secondary place." Becoming a successful team player clearly can have its joyless aspects. In July, 1954, a magazine published primarily for businessmen, Changing Times, took a look at the "World of Tomorrow." By tomorrow it meant a decade hence, 1964. It explained that big business, big government, and big unions would tend to level people down to a common denominator where it will be harder for a man "to be independent, individualistic, his own boss." An upper level of scientists, engineers, and businessmen will pretty much run business and industry. It then explained: "They themselves will be more highly trained technically and less individualistic, screened for qualities that will make them better players on the team. . . . Almost everybody will have to go through extensive psychological and aptitude screening. No longer may the bearded scientist fiddle with retorts in his cubbyhole. . . ." Perhaps that day when there would be no place for an individualist to hide was not as far off in the future as Changing Times seemed to assume. At graduation time in 1956 Newsweek ran the results of a survey on what kind of college graduates (especially traits) industrial recruiters were looking for. It reported that the words "dynamic conformity" kept cropping up as the recruiters outlined their specifications, and explained: "Industry's flesh merchants shy off the bookwormy . . . and the oddball. 'We'd rather have a Deke than a Phi Beta Kappa,' they report. 'Let the freaks go into research.' " Even there, in research, apparently, they shouldn't assume they can go off in some retreat by themselves. "Team research" is the coming thing.