Pscychological Warfare
History
Mark Stahlman:
"Stimulated by Hitler's rise to power, the Rockefeller Foundation launched its famous “Radio Research Project” in the late 1930s, initially headed by Paul Lazarsfeld, the “father of empirical sociology,” first at Princeton and then at Columbia University (1901-1976). Lazarsfeld hired Theodor Adorno (1903-1969) for the “Project” to work on the psycho-social impact of popular music (Adorno was also a composer). They fought over the application of “statistics” to the problem and Adorno left. But he soon returned at the head of a new effort, resulting in the publishing of The Authoritarian Personality in 1952,15 long treated as the “handbook” of the burgeoning field of Social Psychology, which had absorbed many engaged in psy-war in WWII. In it, Adorno & al proposed an “F-scale” (named after “fascism,” understandable since Adorno was affiliated with the Marxist/Freudian Frankfurt School). Adorno's 1927 habilitation thesis had been titled “The Concept of the Unconscious in the Transcendental Theory of the Psyche.”
Christopher Simpson skillfully traced the history of psychological warfare transitioning into academia in his Science of Coercion: Communication Research and Psychological Warfare, 1945-1960. The dust-jacket introduces the volume by saying, “In this provocative study, Christopher Simpson demonstrates how the government-funded psychological warfare programs of the Cold War years underwrote the academic studies that formed the basis for much modern communications research.” Like the work of Frances Stonor Saunders with her The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (originally titled Who Paid the Piper?, as well as her other books, plus Simpson's and others), the focus has been on trying to find someone to blame. But, given the context that produced psy-war, tracing back to the origins of experimental psychology a century earlier, a wider view might well consider these developments to be far more “systematic.” Many more were implicated. In 1953, the Ford Foundation, which by then had taken over many of the research topics previously paid for by the Rockefeller agencies, funded an extension to the earlier Radio Research Project by awarding a $43,000 grant (roughly $400,000 in today's money) to Marshall McLuhan and the Inuit-studying anthropologist Edmund “Ted” Carpenter to research “The Changing Patterns of Language and Behavior and the New Media of Communications.” This was the television update to the previous study on radio and it launched McLuhan's career as a “media guru.”
McLuhan was no “statistician,” like Lazarsfeld had been. He described himself as a “grammarian” (with expertise in rhetoric) and he took an expansive view of the effects of the media itself on people. Thus, “The Medium is the Message.”19 An English professor, with significant knowledge of the artistic movements which paralleled the rise of experimental psychology, beginning with French Symbolism, McLuhan had been clipping into, analyzing and lecturing on the effects of advertising for years. What would later be captured in the Mad Men television series reflected what McLuhan considered to be the greatest “art” of his times. It was a quite manipulative art, to be sure. "