Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - Not All Propaganda is Art 6: The Kitsch Debate

Episode Date: March 5, 2024

In the summer of 1959, Nixon and Khrushchev argued over a washing machine in a backstage kitchen in Moscow, while American Cold War intellectuals gathered in the Poconos to defend Kitsch. Dwight Macdonald, whose theory of mass culture translated too easily into Anti-Americanism, was barred from participating because this was no ordinary mass culture conference; it was an Anti Anti-Americanism operation. Meanwhile, in London, Dwight Macdonald delivered a mass culture lecture of his own called "America, America,” based on the most famous article Encounter magazine never published. Shownotes: Jefferson Pooley wrote about Edward Shils and The Remobilization of the Propaganda and Morale Network. Sophie Scott-Brown wrote about Raphael Samuel and the New Left. Support ToE and get access to the incredible exclusive bonus companion series to Not All Propaganda is Art by subscribing at https://theoryofeverything.supercast.com/, or subscribe directly in Apple Podcasts by hitting “Subscribe” right on the show page. Support ToE and get access to the incredible exclusive bonus companion series to Not All Propaganda is Art by subscribing athttps://theoryofeverything.supercast.com/, or subscribe directly in Apple Podcasts by hitting “Subscribe” right on the show page.

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. Previously on Not All Propaganda is Art In 1956, writer and critic Dwight McDonald set out to write the book on the dangers of mass and middle-brow culture. We now are threatened with something even more insidious, and that is what I call mid-cult or middle-brow culture. We now are threatened with something even more insidious, and that is what I call mid-cult or middle-brow culture. Mid-brow is allied to very familiar ultra-American themes. They're all very American, in quotation marks. America's cold warriors had their own theory of mass culture

and a powerful means to get it out into the world. I call it the mighty word. It's one of those old organs that rose through the floor of silent movie theaters and you could sit at it and produce, you know, all these different tunes. Vice President Nixon escorts Soviet Premier Khrushchev on a preview of the United States Fair at Skolniki Park in Moscow. It's the official opening of the American Exposition, counterpart of the Soviet trade show in New York, and dedicated to showcasing the high standard of life in our country. But on this occasion, traditional diplomacy goes by the board,

and the story of the fair itself is eclipsed by a crackling exchange between Nixon and Khrushchev, begun off camera and finished off before the American Ampex color videotape recorder. This, Mr. Khrushchev, is one of the most advanced developments in communication that we have, at least in our country. In July of 1959, Richard Nixon went to Moscow to demonstrate the raw power of American videotape.

But Nikita Khrushchev was not impressed. We have surpassed you in rockets and communications, he said. Where do you see the picture? Prerecorded television is a corrupt medium, Khrushchev lectured Nixon. You speak with no one present, plus afterwards the tape just gets put on the shelf. A far superior form of exchange would be for me to speak live in front of the American people so that they can see and sense the Soviet Union. Nixon rejected Khrushchev's challenge.

You must not be afraid of ideas. He did not go to Moscow to debate media theory. This 1959 exchange between Khrushchev and Nixon is one of the most absurd moments of the entire Cold War. But it's famous for the debate that happened off-camera, backstage, in the Showcase kitchen, where a young model named Lois Epstein demonstrated Westinghouse's latest washing machine for the two men.

Americans are interested in making life easier for their housewives, Nixon explained. We do not have this capitalist attitude towards our women, Khrushchev retorted. Says Mr. Key, the Soviet will overtake America and then wave bye-bye. The Khrushchev-Nixon kitchen debate was not the only Cold War showdown that took place in the summer of 1959. A month earlier that June, a bunch of American academics, writers, and propagandists gathered together in a small wooded resort in the Poconos to debate kitsch. One of the central preoccupations of the cultural Cold War was this question of mass

culture. My name is Benjamin Walker, and this is episode six of Not All Propaganda is Art. It's called The Kitsch Debate, and it's a story about a mass culture conference that took place in the summer of 1959. One of the most influential propaganda operations of the Cultural Cold War. This question of mass culture and American mass culture in particular, and defending it, was of utmost importance. This is Jefferson Pooley. He's a professor of media and communication at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania, which is about an hour away from where the 1959 kitsch debate took place. He's going to be our primary guide for this episode.

The group of social scientists that gather, mostly sociologists, a few artists and others, at the Poconos had really come to know one another in the run-up to and during World War II when they were mobilized, along with lots and lots of other social scientists, to help in the war effort, to help out with propaganda and morale, you know, on behalf of the Allies. In the mid-1950s, America, rattled by the force of Europe's anti-Americanism, summoned its elite psychological warfare veterans to both defend American culture and launch a counter-offensive. There was a really strong motivation and interest to counter that anti-American impulse in populations that, after all, we had to make sure stayed on our side in the struggle with the Soviets. And so they were brought back onto projects, lots of them funded by the same

or the successor agencies from World War II. In effect, it was almost like a remobilization of what had happened in World War II. And they took up a kind of martial aim for the field a second time. The 1959 Mass Culture Conference had two official sponsors. The first was a scholarly journal called Daedalus, which at the time was published by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences out of Boston. They published the conference proceedings in a special issue that came out in the spring of 1960. And yes, it was another magazine in the CIA's family of periodicals. The magazine that this conference appeared in was one of those funded indirectly by the Central Intelligence Agency. The other sponsor was the Tamiment Center, a New York City socialist labor organization.

They owned Camp Tamiment, the Poconos Resort where the conference took place. And yes, they were family as well. The Tamiment Center's director and the conference's point man was a former Voice of America propagandist named Norman Jacobs. Norman Jacobs was the guy Mike Jocelson, the CIA agent in charge of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, hired back in 1956 to write up an internal review of Encounter, the CCF's flagship British magazine. We talked about this review in episode three. The Congress for Cultural Freedom's Melvin Lasky disagreed with Norman Jacobs' criticisms and recommendations that Encounter magazine use its power and influence

to aggressively confront and attack European anti-Americanism. It's time to let European writers grumble, Melvin Lasky wrote in a memo one month before England's angry young men burst upon the scene. In 1959, Melvin Lasky was now one of Encounter's two editors, and that January, Norman Jacobs wrote him a letter in which he laid bare the plan for the Mass Culture Conference. The seminar is taking place June 2nd and June 3rd, Norman Jacobs reported. We hope to have a thorough exploration of some of the value presuppositions underlying conventional pessimistic accounts of mass culture,

and also to give the operators in the field a chance to present their points of view. Many of the writers Norman Jacobs lined up to attend the kitsch debate in the Poconos were Congress for Cultural Freedom operators. Many of them, like James Baldwin, have already made an appearance in our series. But the cultural cold warrior who was enlisted to chair the Mass Culture Conference and write the keynote paper, the guy who pulled the kitsch debate off, is someone we haven't talked about yet. His name is Edward Shills. And he's also the reason our man Dwight McDonald was barred from participating. Edward Shills was a Mandarin theorist. He was interested in the sociology of intellectuals. His view of intellectuals was that they are attached to their own societies in such a way that they hold them to a much too high standard. And they come to,

therefore, despise their own cultures. And there was nothing that would set him off, set off his kind of verbal, vituperative stream, like the anti-American intellectual in particular. I think most bohemians in the United States that I know, except for Dwight McDonald, supported the war. This is Edward Schills dissing our man Dwight's pacifism in a 1978 lecture on bohemianism. It's a really bizarre name drop that speaks to just how intensely Schill's hated

Dwight McDonald. It's hard to separate out like how much was knee-jerk emotion, if you want, and you know, almost like aesthetic disgust and how much was an actual articulated argument. But the argument is absolutely that these critics of culture, folks like McDonald, are not merely wrong, they are threatening society. Edward Shills first got involved with the American security state during World War II. Organizations like the OSS, the predecessor of the CIA, of course, were absolutely filled up with people from the social sciences departments of Harvard University and Columbia. I even have a few from Chicago, including myself. And after the war, Shills was deeply involved in numerous CIA-funded operations, both in the U.S. and in England, where he lived and worked half of every year. If I were a betting man, I would endorse the idea or the speculation

that he remained involved in the CIA in one way or another. He certainly knew about the cultural Cold War entanglements. Created a link between government and academic intellectuals. In 1955, Edward Shills tried to stop his friend and colleague Mike Josselson from hiring Dwight MacDonald to edit Encounter. As you know, Shills wrote, I shudder and always have shuddered at the thought of Dwight McDonald in the Encounter offices. And when Dwight turned in his first piece for Encounter, a scathing critique of the Congress for Cultural Freedom's 1955 International Future of Freedom Conference,

Shills felt vindicated. I was a little disturbed by the luxury atmosphere, luxe hotels, meal tickets to expensive restaurants, Dwight wrote. But the main defect of the conference, of course, was its almost complete failure as a medium for the exchange of ideas. Jocelson, having promised Dwight McDonald editorial freedom, felt obliged to publish his critique. But he buried it behind a glowing account of the conference

penned by Edward Schills, a piece called The End of Ideology. There was a conviction that communism had lost the battle of ideas with the West, Schills wrote. This turning point might be described as the end of ideological enthusiasm. The End of Ide ideology is an argument further developed and made famous by the sociologist Daniel Bell. It was actually Edward Shills who brought Daniel Bell into the field and the fold when he hired him to work on his OSS team in 1942.

Edward Schill's worst fears about Dwight McDonald working in the Encounter offices were confirmed in June of 1957, when Dwight decided to review a new mass culture book for the magazine. This review was actually the final piece Dwight wrote for Encounter during his year in London, which is relevant because, as we've talked about, Dwight's original plan was to use his year at Encounter to finish his own big book on mass culture. And his failure to do so most certainly colored his response to the anthology of essays compiled by the sociologist Bernard Rosenberg. This gigantic 561-page book, he noted, nothing like it has appeared before. 49 articles by 51 authors. 21 good, 18 bad, and 10 borderline. Now, even though Dwight doesn't mention that his own 1953 essay on mass culture is one of the 49 articles in this gigantic book, I feel it's safe to assume that he put it in the good category.

The bad ones, he makes clear, are all the ones written by academic sociologists. The American academic style, Dwight wrote, is to collect the data by impersonal research methods and then to devise a series of rather abstract generalizations that summarize it. The next step, which is simply to think about the material oneself, is rarely taken. I'm gonna buy a paper doll that I can call my own A doll that other fellows cannot steal In his 1957 Encounter Review, Dwight quotes the lyrics to this popular 1940s song by the Mills Brothers, Paper Doll, highlighting the singer's preference

for a fake imitation paper doll over a real live girl. As we talked about last episode, Dwight was convinced that mass culture was corrupting high culture. The false good drowning out the true good. This song, Dwight wrote, is mass culture's theme song. The important and neglected aspect of mass culture, Dwight concluded in Encounter, is its relation to and effect on high culture. The important and neglected aspect of mass culture, Dwight concluded in Encounter, is its relation to and effect on high culture.

Edward Shills, the rigorous sociologist, was incensed by Dwight McDonald's review. And he penned a response that ran in the fall 1957 issue of the Sewanee Review, another magazine in the CIA's family of publications. Schill's piece is called Daydreams and Nightmares, and on the surface, like Dwight's essay, it is a review of Rosenberg's big mass culture anthology. But Edward Schill's piece is actually a scorching takedown of the critics of mass culture, most of whom Schill's points out are ex-Marxists. Their earlier economic criticism of capitalistic society has been transformed into a moral and cultural criticism

of the large-scale industrial society. This is Schill's. They no longer criticize the ruling class for utilizing the laws of property and religion to exploit the proletariat for the sake of surplus value. Instead, they criticize the merchants of kitsch. The indissoluble residue of their Marxism shows itself particularly in the expectations which form the standard of judgment which they apply to mass culture.

Cultural Marxism is an argument right-wing pundits make all the time now. But this 1957 piece from Edward Schills might be the first time it ever saw print. It was a cornerstone of Schill's thinking, as you can hear in his 1978 lecture on bohemianism. The demise of the reputation of Stalinism did not destroy the faith in the kind of ideal which was thought to have been represented by the Soviet Union. They simply found the Soviet Union an inadequate vehicle, an inadequate carrier of this ideal. But the ideal remained, the belief in the value of the life of the artist. In 1957, Edward Shills called Our Man Dwight the most influential cultural Marxist of them all. Mr. Dwight McDonald,

Shills wrote in Daydreams and Nightmares, did more than any other American writer to bring this interpretation of mass culture to the forefront of the attention of the intellectual public. Jefferson Pooley told me that before the war, Edward Schills was actually a critic of mass culture. Like the philosophers and thinkers of the Frankfurt School, Edward Schills saw mass culture as a dangerous breeding ground for demagoguery and authoritarianism. He had an infatuation in the 1930s with German Jewish emigres in particular and shared with them this terrifying thought that American and other Western societies were just as susceptible to a Goebbels and Hitler as was Germany itself. And he shared that fear. That changed in World War II. He was exposed to figures in Britain where he was serving in the agency that would become the CIA, the OSS, and came to have a different view about mass culture.

The root of the trouble lies not in mass culture, but in the intellectuals themselves. That's Schill's 1957 Daydreams and Nightmares. So one of his pet theories delivered with vitriol was that folks like McDonald, who criticized society, would cause its fabric to fray in such a way that they might bring about some of their critique into existence by undermining the society that they purported to merely describe. This is a view of his. I must confess that I never could get excited about this, concerned about the erosion of society by popular culture.

This is Edward Schills being interviewed by a German newspaper man. So therefore, popular culture doesn't worry me very much. And if there's a danger to high culture, it's because the custodians of high culture are a collection of traitors. The reason Dwight McDonald was not invited to participate in the 1959 mass culture debate was not just because cultural cold warriors like Edward Shills and Norman Jacobs didn't like his theory of mass culture. In their eyes, Dwight McDonald was a traitor. And this was because of an article

Dwight McDonald published in the fall of 1958, an article called America, America. America, America is one of Dwight McDonald's most famous pieces of writing, but not because of the words he wrote. It's because America, America is the most famous article Encounter magazine never published. I'm just going to let Dwight explain. This is the preface note he appended to America, America when Dissent Magazine published it in their fall 1958 issue.

America, America was written early this year as a New York letter to Encounter. The editors accepted it, then a month or so later rejected it. These shifts reflected the attitude of Encounter's front office, the Congress for Cultural Freedom in Paris, which publishes the magazine with funds supplied by several American foundations. The people in Paris felt the letter was exaggerated, one-sided, unfounded, and in bad taste, and they feared it might cause American foundations

to cut off supplies. I'm sorry to feel obliged to make all this public because I very much enjoyed the year I spent in London on Encounter. But I do feel obliged because I think readers have a right to know when a magazine makes an editorial decision for extraneous reasons, especially this kind of reason.

For many historians and scholars who've written about Encounter Magazine and the CIA, Dwight McDonald's unpublished Encounter article is proof, a smoking gun, that the Congress for Cultural Freedom was indeed a front office for American propaganda. Personally, I find this argument leaves something to be desired, which is why in this series we've spent so much time scrutinizing articles Encounter actually published. Articles designed to influence and advance American propaganda. Articles like James Baldwin's critique of the 1956 Congress of Black Writers and Artists. Also, there's really no mystery as to why Encounter did not publish America, America.

Dwight's article is basically a bottle of concentrated anti-Americanism. I found the thesis statement scrawled at the top of one of his early drafts. American life is so damn ugly. Another alternate title was Shine, Perishing Republic. But another alternate title, For Jason Epstein, reveals, I believe, what our man was actually up to. You see, Jason Epstein was Dwight McDonald's editor at Doubleday, the man whom he had promised that his big mass culture book would be done

upon his return from London in 1957. For Dwight McDonald, America, America was simply a chapter in his now overdue book on mass culture. Specifically, an attempt to answer the pressing question why American mass culture was shapeless, soulless, ill-mannered, violent, ugly. One of the main things you'd see when you come back to this country from Europe, you're so conscious of the enormous flood of material that inundates the American reading and looking

and listening public. There's nothing like that still in Europe, even though they complain about being American. America, America is essentially a letter from Dwight McDonald to Europeans, reassuring them that their anti-American prejudices were justified. Obviously, Encounter,

a magazine designed to fight anti-Americanism in Europe, was not going to publish that. Now, a British magazine called 20th Century did publish America, America. But they did not run Dwight's preface about Encounter's Paris front office. That only ran in the magazine Dissent. And since Dissent was an American magazine, Encounter's British editors decided to just ignore Dwight's provocations and let the whole thing blow over. But then, in early December 1958, the New Left's Universities and Left Review Journal published its autumn issue, and the whole thing blew up. In episode two, we talked about the birth of England's New Left, a generation of young people who broke with the Soviet Union and the Communist Party over the invasion of Hungary in the fall of 1956. By 1958, the New Left was publishing an influential journal of its own

called Universities and Left Review. And in the autumn issue, on page five, they printed a giant open letter to the Congress for Cultural Freedom. This open letter was written by an American sociologist named Norman Birnbaum, who at the time was teaching at the London School of Economics. Gentlemen, he wrote, many people in this country will have read the brilliant essay by Dwight MacDonald in the October issue of the 20th century, America, America. But unless they happen to see the autumn issue of the American Quarterly Dissent, they may not know that this essay was originally accepted for publication in Encounter,

but later rejected because it was too critical of American culture. Perhaps I can refer to Mr. MacDonald's own account of the matter, as printed in Dissent. Oh yeah, Norman Birnbaum read Dwight MacDonald's entire complaint about Encounter into his open letter and British intellectual discourse. But he went even further than Dwight. Listen to this. What the Congress for Cultural Freedom has done

is to give evidence for the widely held view that it is more interested in ideological apologetics than in the substance of the great spiritual issues of our time. It seems to subscribe to something very like a Stalinist view of the great spiritual issues of our time. It seems to subscribe to something very like a Stalinist view of the truth. Truth is whatever serves the interests of the party. The party is different, the reasoning, unfortunately, rather less so. You have dishonored the cause you profess, and the dishonor is not much diminished by the contemptible pettiness of its occasion. I strongly suggest that you apologize to Encounter's readers and contributors,

to the British public generally, and to those who have in the past taken the Congress for Cultural Freedom at its own valuation. This is how Dwight Mac McDonald came to be branded a traitor by the security oath obsessive Edward Shills. And it's why, I believe, he was barred from participating in the kitsch debate of June 1959. You can actually see evidence of this in the records for the Mass Culture Conference, which are housed in the Tamiment Institute Collection at New York University. The planning for the seminar began in the summer of 1958, and Dwight MacDonald shows up as a potential speaker on some of the early roadmaps and outlines.

But by January of 1959, when Norman Jacobs began mailing out invitations, Dwight McDonald's name is notably absent from the list of speakers, backup speakers, and potential backup backup speakers. But in my telling of the 1959 Kitsch debate, Dwight MacDonald remains very much in the game. A participant, even. Because on June 1st, the night before the two-day mass culture conference in the Poconos began, our man Dwight gave a mass culture lecture of his own, in London, for the University's End Left Review Club. A lecture he called America, America. I propose to talk tonight about my country, the USA, which I love, or at least am fond of, but which more and more worries, irritates, and depresses me. I found Dwight's lecture notes for his 1959 talk mixed in with his drafts of America, America. how bad things are at home and what precisely is wrong. England provides a standard by which American life may be judged, a standard and to some extent an ideal. This is an incredible example

of just how easily Dwight McDonald's critique of mass culture translates into pure anti-Americanism. But these notes reveal that Dwight did not come to London to lecture on the ugliness of America or the heavy hand of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. This was a talk about his own personal cultural turn. In the 1930s, I was passionately interested in politics and economics. But in the 50s, I'm not, Dwight wrote in his lecture notes. What interests me now is arts and letters and the way people live together in society. This is, of course, the classic evolution of a rebel as he gets deeper into middle age. But I think not only

that. Fact is, political questions are not as interesting in the U.S. as they used to be. The main problem as I see it is cultural. That's the last line in Dwight's lecture notes. It scrawled at the bottom of the page and crossed out. So I don't know if he actually said it, or if he realized at the last moment that he was in fact speaking to an audience of young people who were already deeply engaged with this idea. This is an argument that runs right through and goes to the core of the new left. It's very deliberately trying to kind of step away from that socialist in-house language and say to people, what are the things, what are the problems that you're encountering in your life? Because actually, if you start talking about them, then whether or not you'd want to call yourself a socialist capitalist or not,

you're going to start participating in politics. This is Sophie Scott Brown. She's a professor of intellectual history, and she's written on most of the key figures in the new left, the young Turks who invited Dwight McDonald to lecture on June 1st, 1959. When you've got all these very cynical, skeptical, and actually deeply ironical young people who want to be political but don't believe in politics. Someone like Dwight McDonald is super interesting because he's had all these fights before. He's almost become jaded with it.

The young Turks of the new left, Sophie told me, would have found Dwight's story about his cultural turn way more interesting than his issue with Encounter. Well, the relationship with Encounter is really interesting. In some ways, the student cohort in the New Left don't care as much. They just take it as read that this was probably CIA-funded propaganda. They pick and choose from it. But my understanding of MacDonald was he was just that kind of a character in some ways. He was just wonderfully spiky. I mean, the British equivalent would have been Orwell. He hated to be pigeonholed and he was going to be an awkward sod wherever he went. And that was actually why we love him. had clubs all over England that regularly came together to discuss politics and culture. Dwight's lecture was an official ULR London club event.

The clubs are the kind of real nuts and bolts. So the journal, that's wonderful. You can have this journal, you can have all these ideas floating around, but how are you going to convert that into a meaningful alternative social structure? You're going to do it through a club network. The club network was the brainchild of Rafael Samuel, one of the New Left's Young Turks. Samuel's also the guy responsible for the ULR's Soho Cafe,

or anti-espresso bar, as he liked to call it. A left-wing journal, the ULR, couldn't make ends meet and hit on the idea of making coffee pay for the printer's ink. Samuel was an organisational genius without being remotely organised in any way, shape or form. Yet another contradiction of the new left. Excellent practice for the game of politics. Samuel managed to get this headquarters slap-bang in the middle of Soho

and he did that by raiding all these old communist contacts. But they were surrounded by these sort of very American style cafes and diners that were popping up all over the place. So from the offset, they're positioning them in opposition to them whilst also being it. The partisan was too small to host Dwight McDonald's lecture, so the ULR club rented out the marquee ballroom. Three years later, almost to the day, the Rolling Stones would make their grand debut in the same room. But it sounds like Dwight's night was also one to remember. In 1959, I gave a talk on mass culture at the Universities and Left Review Forum in London.

I was not prepared for the reaction to my attacks on American mass culture. These were resented in the name of democracy. To some of those who took the floor after my talk, Hollywood was a genuine expression of the masses. They seem to think it's snobbish of me to criticize our movies and televisions from a serious viewpoint. Now, just as Dwight McDonald took the stage on June 1st, the Universities and Left Review published its spring 1959 issue. And in one of the main articles, Raphael Samuel laid out his critique of the critics of mass culture.

Underpinning their arguments, Samuel wrote, is a gross exaggeration of the power of mass media. Are the dreamland images of show business glitter and middle class manners really so compulsive? I am not at all trying to diminish the value and truth of the recent discussions on mass media, but only pointing to an alternative conclusion. Why should we assume that images so banal, trivialized, and candy floss have overwhelmed a strong working-class culture or are likely to do so. When Raphael Samuel wrote this optimistic critique of the pessimistic critics of mass culture, he was working at a place called the Institute for Community Studies, a sociological research center in London, co-founded by Dwight McDonald's enemy,

Edward Schills. Edward Schills, in partnership with Michael Young, started the Institute for Community Studies. Samuel is one of their researchers. Whilst he's running around being an active New Left person, that is his part-time job. So at the moment that Samuel writes this essay in the spring of 1959, Edward Schills is leading this coordinated attack on the critics of mass media and mass culture in America. And I'm curious if you see the influence of Edward Shills in this essay, in the ULR by Raphael Samuel as well. Yes. Yes. Because I mean, Shills is, I mean, Shills is one of the directors of the Institute. So Shills actually gives him a lot of ideas and a lot of tools, a lot of different kinds of questions.

We underestimate the strength and importance of working class culture. This is Samuel again. If we think it can disappear before the impact of the washing machine. I think what Samuel wants to say, and again, this is coming back to this sort of deeply ironical, kind of skeptical youth culture that he's coming from, which wants politics, but doesn't believe in politics,

all that sort of thing. And he's saying the problem is not whether or not people are going to be beguiled by this stuff. And possibly he's being very over-optimistic. But on the other hand, he's sort of also wanting to say, it's not that the atomized individual is being manipulated. Perhaps they're not. Perhaps they always have this knowingness to them. It's a bit like you get with kitsch. Something like kitsch is you've bought it and you've therefore participated in consumerism, but you've done it with a kind of knowingness about the whole process that you haven't been manipulated that you know that it's a sort of capital capitalist thing and almost by the fact you do know this and it sort of opens up that potential space and it's

it's about potential and that's what people like samuel are interested in got myself a crying talking sleeping walking living down interested in. I like to imagine that it was Raphael Samuel himself who argued with Dwight McDonald about mass culture on the night of June 1st, and that the two continued their conversation at Samuel's anti-espresso bar in Soho. But I don't believe that's what happened. Because even dazed, our man would have noticed Mass Culture's new theme song. Take a look at her hair. It's real and don't believe what I say, just feel.

Living Doll by Cliff Richard and the Drifters also came out in the spring of 1959, and it quickly shot to the top of the charts. This 1959 song totally overwhelmed England's skiffle clubs and coffee bars. And like the tune I played you earlier, Cliff Richard is professing love for an imitation girl. But this doll's not made out of paper. This doll is real.

This doll is real. The morning after Dwight's lecture in London, speakers, operators, and wives gathered together at Camp Tamiment in the Poconos for breakfast. Unlike the rest of the Mass Culture Conference, this session was not transcribed, which is unfortunate, as I would love to know what some of these wives, like writer Shirley Jackson, made of all this. The conference, like so many of the cultural Cold War gatherings from this period, was a sea of dudes.

In fact, the kitsch debate of 1959 had only one woman speaker, the philosopher Hannah Arendt. That's the exception that proves the rule. It was mostly a bunch of sociologists who had been talking with each other in a pretty incestuous way for at least two decades. Paul Lazarsfeld, Edward Schills. Once again, Jefferson Pooley. He's going to help us understand what this mass culture conference was really all about.

The speaker's list itself, he says, is revealing. Yeah, if you were to look over the roster of speakers in advance, you could have predicted what the transcript would look like. It was stacked with people who, one way or another, mostly sociologists, who defended American culture one way or another against its critics. After breakfast, Paul Lazarsfeld, the official chairman and emcee, stood up and made his opening remarks. Practically everyone here, he said, surveying the room, has continually changed his position on mass culture. It's almost like a minuet. The opening remark from Lazarsfeld is pretty interesting because you can't understand this

whole period from the early Cold War through to 1960 without distinguishing between what these social scientists published and said in public and what they wrote and circulated in private backstage. Most of these sociologists had been working in the early 1950s behind the scenes for the national security state. And they were trying to figure out how do you make propaganda work? It's complicated. It's hard.

How do we do it? That stuff was happening between themselves and circulating in the national security community they were part of. At the same time, they would publish in the front stage a different spin on the same basic data to say, not here's how to do propaganda, you American Cold Warrior agencies. No, here's evidence that we shouldn't be worried about mass media, because as we found out using sophisticated new methods, those effects are minimal. For Jefferson Pooley, the most influential example of this front-stage, backstage phenomenon is a 1955 book called Personal Influence, published by the emcee of our mass culture conference, Paul Lazarsfeld. In the late 30s, working with Frank Stanton, the future CBS president, he had found that to his surprise, radio broadcasts don't tend to change people's opinions much.

He also found that attempts to change people's opinions face-to-face tend to work a little bit better. And what he would then proceed to do is relate those two things together in different ways with different conclusions. So on the one hand, he could say something like, here's a blueprint to do propaganda. It's really hard because mass media doesn't work on its own. However, if you want to influence Indian intellectuals, make sure you send an American message through credible third-party Indian opinion leaders, and that will be effective in a way that American messages wouldn't be. On the other hand, he could take the same basic idea that personal influence is more powerful and treat personal influence, these small social groups, as a buffer between the mass media and the local community, as reassuring evidence that the fears of domestic mass media influence are overblown and that we need not be worried.

We've been talking about the influence of personal influence for most of this series. The CIA's Congress for Cultural Freedom's magazines Encounter and Prove were designed to target British and French influentials. In 1956, Radio Free Europe supplemented its radio broadcasts with balloons and youth operators in order to successfully inform and incite its listeners in Hungary. Many of the communication experts

who attended this mass culture conference in the Poconos were official advisors for agencies like Radio Free Europe and the Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Information Research Department in the UK, the agency that disseminated Enlightenment propaganda through journalists and intellectuals. Antoine Bonmaison, the French propagandist we met in episode 4, he also had numerous connections to American mass communication research. In 1956, he launched a lecture tour to persuade and influence the French elite that France was fighting not a war of liberation with its colonies,

but rather a revolutionary war with the Soviet Union. But this 1959 mass culture conference is absolutely the ultimate iteration of personal influence. Blasersfeld was especially talented at taking findings and packaging them to different audiences. And he was able to take the same set of rough findings he had in place in the late 1930s and present them according to the audience, whether it was advertisers, propagandists, fellow social scientists, members of the public. And you can read his personal influence book, this 1955 capstone, as a kind of statement to the public, as of wading into the mass culture debate that was then raging

on the pages of little magazines and New York intellectual culture. It was a sort of social science entry into that world. The conference in 1959, given the small fraternity of like-minded sociologists who helped organize it, was likewise a kind of packaging of personal influence. Another statement, this time in junket form, of the basic conclusion, the one that says something like, mass culture is safe for democracy.

After Paul Lazarsfeld's opening remarks, he turned the floor over to Edward Schills, the keynote author and the first speaker of the day. I think the problem that has been raised is a false problem, Schills announced. I do not attribute very great significance to the damaging effect or the allegedly damaging effect of the so-called mass culture. I think that the problem has been badly misstated. The very use of the term popular or mass culture in a sense begs the question. That is my position. It's an incredible preemptive move. Before anyone else can speak, Edward Schill's downgrades the argument that mass culture is corrupting high culture

to an unsupportable, irrational fear. He was so determined to react against critics of American culture, he wanted to say one of their fears, maybe the one that was most commonly articulated that high culture was going to get bankrupted by the barbarians at the gate, that in fact, this fear had no proof, there was no evidence for it, and we shouldn't really worry about that. This dismissal of conventional pessimistic accounts of mass culture, was of course the plan all along. As Norman Jacobs made clear in the letter we talked about earlier, the one he wrote to Melvin

Lasky at Encounter. But in his paper, Shills goes even further. He advances an optimistic account of mass culture. Kitsch is ridiculous, Shills wrote, yet it represents aesthetic sensibility and aesthetic aspiration untutored, rude, and deformed. The very growth of Kitsch and of the demand which has generated the industry for the production of Kitsch is an indication of a crude aesthetic awakening in classes which previously accepted what was handed down to them, or who had practically no aesthetic expression and reception. Yeah, I mean, he was very keen to have his cake and eat it too, in that the essay and his talk were suffused with snobbery, right? In fact, he calls the low culture brutalist throughout, on the one hand. On the other hand, his is a defense of

popular culture in a way. In fact, it might even be healthy to have this new mass culture. It might even benefit the culture. After Shills made his remarks, a young social scientist named Patrick Hazard jumped up to speak. I come not to bury mass culture, but to praise it, he announced. Now, Norman Jacobs had tapped Patrick Hazard in advance to jump in like this. And this is something that happens at academic gatherings all the time. There's nothing odd or sinister about this at all, regardless of what this background music might imply.

But it's worth taking a close look at this guy. In 1959, Patrick Hazard was helping UPenn write its first curriculum for its new Annenberg School of Communications, one of America's first big mass communication and media programs. During his intervention at the Kitsch debate, Hazard argued that intellectuals were ignoring the real art that was coming out of mass culture. He cited a recent visit to the New York Art Directors Club at the Waldorf in New York, where he watched 45 minutes of television commercials

that were extraordinary in their almost minor lyric art, working within the discipline of the distribution of goods, and yet instead of appealing to man's lower nature, appeals to his sense of irony and wit. Hazard also offered what might be one of the earliest defenses of prestige TV. He argued that if mass culture's critics would just tune in, they would discover playwrights working within the discipline of this new medium, creating original works of art. After the conference, Edward Shills wrote Patrick Hazard a letter and thanked him for his intervention. We are fighting the battle on the highbrow's terms, and we ought to reformulate the terms so that they, the highbrows, will have to meet us on our terms. It is a long, hard pull, and it involves going against the ingrained prejudices of intellectuals for a very long time.

As I mentioned earlier, all the papers from this conference were published in an issue of the journal Daedalus in the spring of 1960. A year later, it was repackaged as a book called Culture for the Millions. And then a few years later, Beacon Press put out a paperback edition. In the 1960s, Culture for the Millions was a popular textbook in many of America's new mass communication programs, a history book that told the story of how America's mass culture debate came to an end. The actual kitsch debate of 1959 ended the way all academic gatherings end, with an aimless, incoherent monologue. In this case, it was William Phillips of the Partisan Review

who prattled on and on about a need for cultural coexistence. Finally, Paul Lazarsfeld stood up and thanked all the speakers and the wives behind the speakers and Norman Jacobs and the organization behind Norman Jacobs. If we haven't lived up to their expectations, it is their fault, he concluded. They should have invited a better committee. Dwight McDonald gets a single mention in Daedalus' spring 1960s special issue on mass culture. A friendly shout-out from James Baldwin, who wrote,

The people who run the mass media are not all villains, and they are not all cowards, though I agree, I must say, with Dwight McDonald's forceful suggestion that many of them are not very bright. At the same moment, in the pages of Partisan Review, our man Dwight gave Edward Schills a shout-out, albeit a much less friendly one. Defenders of our mass cult society, like Professor Edward Schills of the University of Chicago, he is of course a sociologist, see phenomena like Life magazine as inspiriting attempts at popular education. Just think, nine pages of Renoir! But that roller skating horse comes along, and the final impression is that both Renoir and the horse were talented. That's from Mass Cult Mid-Cult,

Dwight McDonald's seminal critique of mass and middle-brow culture, the first half of which was published in the spring 1960 issue of Partisan Review. We're going to deal with mass cult mid-cult in the last episode of our series, but I want to linger for a moment on these two journal issues from the spring of 1960. To me, they emphasize Dwight McDonald's superposition in the intellectual debate over mass culture. He was both important and marginal, acclaimed yet excluded. I suppose also you noticed that Shills

has included only people from the Congress for Cultural Freedom. This is from a letter Dwight McDonald wrote to a friend over the summer of 1960. At this point, he understood what Shills was up to. But he also called Shills a longtime pet of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which suggests to me that Dwight did not understand the real power and influence of Edward Shills. You see, when it comes to the mass culture debate, Edward Shills was the most influential influencer of them all. It's a remarkable fact that Edward Shills, this Mandarin theorist who had no

interest in the study of mass communication, ended up furnishing the plot that would become the first chapter of Personal Influence, this 1955 book that Lazarsfeld published. In his groundbreaking research paper, 15 Pages shook the field, personal influence Edward Schills and the remembered history of mass communication research, Jefferson Pooley lays the whole thing out. During World War II, while working for the OSS, Edward Schills studied German pilots to better understand why they didn't respond to Allied propaganda messages. And after the war, he narrated the conclusion that small groups seemed to withstand propaganda. And he provided, in that sense, some of the evidence that would be used by Lazarsfeld and others. But more important by far is how he narrated the story. He provided a two-stage plot that personal influence, this book, would then establish as canonical. The plot said something like, before World War II, intellectuals and social scientists naively judged media influence to be potent, like a magic bullet? And only with the measured scientific empirical study of mass media did we learn, in fact, that media effects are minimal. So he provided the emplotment of this

story that would be made famous in the 1955 book. And it turned out, even though he had provided it inadvertently even in the late 1940s, it turned out to be the one that he ran with and everyone else did in the 1959 conference. When you put it that way, though, it almost feels like the biggest operational secret for propagandists is that propaganda works. That's a really wonderful statement because when they say in effect that propaganda doesn't work, they mean blunt propaganda doesn't work and that it's very hard to pull off. But the follow-on sentence is, here's how to pull it off. Not all propaganda is art.

It's research written and produced by me, Benjamin Walker. The one and only Andrew Calloway mixed it. Thanks to both Jefferson Pooley and Sophie Scott Brown. You can find links to their work in the show notes. And special, special thanks to Jefferson Pooley, who helped me see all this stuff that was going on in the backstage during the mass culture debate,

especially in regards to Edward Schills. If you want to support more work like this, the best way to do that is to subscribe to the exclusive standalone companion podcast that I made for this series. It's called Propaganda Notes and Sources. Each episode of Not All Propaganda is Art gets its own corresponding episode of Propaganda, Notes, and Sources. And I take you through the script and cite all the corresponding original sources I consulted and the archives I visited while reporting this series. There's also a few extras. I'll play the part where Sophie Scott Brown actually blows my mind and tells me that Raphael Samuel worked for Edward Schills, something I kind of didn't understand when I first spoke to

her. You can access the whole thing, the whole run of Propaganda Notes and Sources, the exclusive companion series, by subscribing at theoryofeverythingpodcast.com slash subscribe. All the info on what you need to do is there. And it's a really simple process. We're using Supercast and Apple subscriptions. And if you're listening on Apple Podcasts right now, just tap the subscribe button on the show page. In the next episode of Not All Propaganda is Art, we're going to catch up with Kenneth Tynan. In 1959, he gets a commission to make a movie

about American nonconformists. It's one of the craziest pieces of anti-anti-American propaganda ever made. A movie that was supposedly lost to history. Well, I found it. We think it important for these varied minority views to be seen in Britain as a reminder that the America of the so-called American century is not just what it appears on the surface.

In fact, it is still a dynamic society with new ideas, wise and foolish, half-baked and profound. All these ideas bubbling up inside it. That's next time on Not All Propaganda is Art. Radiotopia from PRX