Jonathan MacDonald is a Ph.D. Student in the Department of American Studies at Brown University, and 2024-2025 Consortium Research Fellow.
My dissertation project explores media produced by American social scientists for general audiences in the postwar decades. Alongside popular texts, Americans encountered the language, disciplinary concerns, and epistemologies of the social sciences in a variety of mass mediated contexts: films, radio broadcasts, and on television. Directing their insights into myriad problems of social and civic life after the war, many social experts sought out roles as collaborators and content supervisors to educational mass media with the belief that projects of popular education could impart normative values necessary for democratic life.
My work sits at the center of the histories of the social sciences and mass media. I examine educational and didactic media as both historical and aesthetic objects, combining archival research with close readings of audiovisual materials. Recent work in “useful film” or “nontheatrical media studies” has revised canonical accounts of audiovisual history, drawing new scholarly attention to diverse and neglected sources including industrial, advertising, and educational films. My work draws from this emerging literature and the history of the social sciences to examine projects of popularization across several case studies. The Consortium supported my research at three crucial archival collections: the Hagley Museum and Library, the Rockefeller Archive Center, and the National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health.
Material gathered at the Hagley comprises much of my first chapter, which traces the early career of marketing psychologist Ernest Dichter (1907-1991). Best known as the titular Hidden Persuader of Vance Packard’s 1957 expose, Dichter founded and led the Institute for Motivational Research which applied a mixture of social research techniques to explore consumer motivations on behalf of corporate clients. In his early years, however, Dichter worked a variety of jobs including a Madison Avenue consultant, a member of his mentor Paul Lazarsfeld’s radio research team at CBS, a career counsellor and psychoanalyst, and as popular psychology writer. I focused on Dichter’s three-year stint as author of Look magazine’s illustrated column “Psychoquiz,” later titled “Look’s Personality Clinic,” published 1944-1947.
Dichter’s papers revealed substantial intellectual investment and careful attention to the preparation of these popular psychology quizzes, including multiple drafts, alterations, marketing and publicity material. I also consulted Dichter’s unpublished diary, written sporadically in the mid-1940s, which recounts his friendship with Maragret Mead and association with other figures in the interdisciplinary “Culture and Personality” movement. Dichter did not invent the pop-psychology personality quiz, but he did invest it with his own psychological authority and unique brand of self-help. Several of Dichter’s “psychoquizes” adapted well-known psychological tests used across twentieth century social research, including the Thematic Apperception Test and the Rorschach Test. Reflecting the civically engaged values of wartime social science, many of Dichter’s personality quizzes included attached essays offering advice that encouraged readers to revise attitudes towards interpersonal conflict and to take a more open minded approach to religious and racial difference based on findings in the social sciences. Dichter’s attention turned towards highly profitable consumer research in the late 1940s, but as his business slowed in the 1960s and 1970s, he revisited and updated many of these earlier, quizzes selling them anew to Cosmopolitan and Elle magazine before collecting them in book form as Total Self Knowledge (1976).
At the Rockefeller Archive Center, I followed archival traces of The Basic Issues of Man, a television program produced by the Ford Foundation for National Educational Television (NET) in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Basic Issues was an outgrowth of the Ford Foundation’s interest in adult education, an initiative led by the Ford’s subsidiary Fund for Adult Education (FAE). Working through FAE records helped me to connect Basic Issues to earlier Ford experiments in community discussion programs for adult learners. The FAE was also instrumental in creating National Educational Television (NET), which established most of the television stations which continue today as PBS member stations. Following my visit to the Rockefeller Archive Center, I conducted a supplementary research trip to the NET collection at the Wisconsin Historical Society.
The Ford Foundation records helped me to establish the funding and planning of Basic Issues of Man. As a collaborative adult education program funded by the FAE, NET, and the Georgia Center for Continuing Education (at the University of Georgia) the program faced significant administrative bottlenecks in achieving its educational ambitions. The program, written by an interdisciplinary team of UGA faculty, adapted a “Liberal Studies 101” college course to television. Consisting of six purpose written volumes and twelve television episodes, Basic Issues was intended to operate in a modular fashion as incidental educational television viewing, as an impetus for organized community discussion groups, and as a multimedia college course. The television episodes were produced with a distinctly experimental and artistic flair, intended to “provoke” viewers into active intellectually engaged encounters with television. Episodes ranged from traditional Cold War critiques of totalitarianism to melodramatic apologetics for abstract art, ethnographic docudramas, and allegories exploring the perils of conformity, each centered around exploring a fundamental anthropology of the human subject, “Man.”
I explored two significant collections at the National Library of Medicine: the papers of Lawrence K. Frank (1890-1968) and the papers of Julius S. Schriber (1908-2001). In addition to leading major research foundations and helping to organize the famous Macy cybernetics conferences, Frank was a dedicated public educator, hosting several educational radio programs in the 1930s and 1940s which communicated findings in child development for a nation of anxious parents. Frank also served as an educational collaborator with Encyclopaedia Britannica Films on child development. Besides these direct interfaces, Frank’s papers revealed keen interest in the educational possibilities of audiovisual education and especially in the emotional and psychological mechanisms by which it was thought to operate.
Julius Schreiber, a psychiatrist, was a leading figure in the US Army Orientation Branch during World War II. Schreiber’s team designed group discussion programs to be paired with orientation training and propaganda films, including Frank Capra’s Why We Fight series. As the war continued, Schreiber’s interests gravitated towards using group therapy to combat issues of racial and religious prejudice in the armed forces, which he reckoned as a form of psychiatric illness. He carried this mission forward in a civilian context with the short-lived National Institute for Social Relations (1946-1948), a progressive social science and social work organization active in multiple American cities. The NISR conducted ethnographic research, led discussion groups, and crafted radio programming and discussion guides, among other activities. Funded predominately by the American Jewish Committee, the NISR board consisted of an alliance of interfaith religious leaders (including Frank Weil and G.B. Oxnam) and leading social researchers (including Paul Lazarsfeld and William Menninger). In late 1948 the AJC withdrew funding as the political climate hardened and Schreiber returned to private practice. In 1954, Schreiber was brought before the United States Senate and questioned by William Jenner, a close ally of Joseph McCarthy.
Support from the Consortium has proven invaluable in supporting not only my dissertation research, but also in archival discoveries which have inspired my next project. My encounter with Schreiber and the NISR prompted me to issue a FOIA request, the results of which I hope to see in several years time. The materials I encountered in these collections have greatly enriched my understanding of the diversity and range of media produced by midcentury social science popularizers and formed the basis of my primary body of research. Support and guidance from staff at the aforementioned archival collections made each research trip a wonderful and intellectual gratifying experience.
