the MASS MAN
Lens, Sidney
the MASS MAN by SIDNEY LENS One of the striking features of American postwar life has been the virtual disappearance of the American Left. A generation ago the radical Left, though small by...
...Eisenhower is presented as the all-knowing father—to give the citizen a feeling of security...
...A whole pattern of life is emerging in which conformity is the highest value...
...one owned 1600 acres of land and was moderately wealthy, the other owned 160 acres and was having a hard time...
...And," writes Farrell, "none of the books was gloomy...
...As late as 1954 one of every six income units (families and unattached individuals) was earning less than |40 a week...
...and a belief in the application of science to achieve the belongingness...
...But it is significant that rebelliousness in youth has no causes to latch on to...
...Before the Left goes forward in America it will have to wrestle with these problems...
...William H. Whyte has written a penetrating book about the "organization man" who likes to pride himself on individuality, but who pays compulsive fealty to the organization and to conformity...
...The new American views everything in the narrow light of home and family...
...For the most part they agree on the issues of foreign policy, war, militarism...
...Thousands of sincere pacifists vote for candidates with avowed militarist programs, because "we have no other choice...
...It described social climbing" as "healthy" and gave 12 "scientific" ways to participate in this activity...
...You must also know how to act, acquire the "secular rituals of eating, dressing, behaving correctly in social and work situations...
...The American Legion of Illinois this year demanded that the state stop committing patients to mental hospitals until an investigation could determine whether mental health programs were being "infiltrated by socialistic and subversive influences...
...If it were confined only to the purchase of cosmetics or brassieres this might not be shattering to the nation...
...But the organized Left in America is obviously weaker than in any other Western nation...
...The major issues of the day are "sold" to the American mass man in the same way as cosmetics...
...Norman Thomas, running for President on the Socialist Party ticket in 1932, polled nearly a million votes and enlisted a respectable segment of the labor and intellectual world in his cause...
...He runs away from the big problems—war, peace, depression, social injustice, political corruption...
...Much of this is spent on the most expensive of all media, television...
...These include specific selection of appeals and planned repetition...
...There is] also a dread of disaster because this country is conscious of the possibility of total destruction...
...Speaking to a British reporter recently, Walter Reuther insisted that "the labor movement in America is developing a whole new middle class...
...The era of McCarthyism— now tapering off—made people fearful for their jobs, but not for their lives...
...How to interest him in his own vital welfare, in the problems of war and peace, depression and hunger...
...the hysteria mounted and became a national obsession...
...liberalism becomes merely a left-wing of conservatism...
...Gandhians...
...One of the depressing features of political campaigns in the United States is the paucity of issues...
...Yet no Left emerges...
...He responds therefore only to subconscious motivational appeals, and the whole society soon learns to rely on such appeals...
...He is a retreat from individuality and cre-ativeness, a buttress of the status quo (except in technological matters or in business ideas...
...It quotes reams of statistics about high wage scales, the number of workers who own their own homes, the number who own their own automobiles, as "proof" of happiness...
...Stalin murdered a whole generation of Bolshevik leaders and imprisoned millions in slave camps to create a similar mood of fear and conformity...
...The "organization man" is the antithesis of Toynbee's creative minority...
...Even viewed from the simple material point of view there is both need and room in America for a Left to express the aspirations of the millions of underprivileged who still live in slums and in poverty...
...But the trend to conformity is engulfing this "creative minority...
...Consider the rationale behind Mc-Carthyism...
...All of this indicates not only how garbled is the estimate of civil liberties by the new mass man, but how easily and childishly he accepts conformist views...
...The American mass man no longer makes mature judgments in the purchase of commodities...
...The social ethic of the organization man, according to Whyte, has three propositions: "a belief in the group as the source of creativity...
...what is relevant is how "sincere" the candidate can be made to appear, how resonant is his voice, how masculine he looks, how "fatherly...
...The individual American has quietly but methodically changed into a new type of man...
...These men, it should be noted, were among the best informed and most socially conscious unionists...
...Presumably this was intended to explain why American labor does not need a labor or socialist party...
...Politics in America, in the age of the mass man, is rapidly becoming an exercise in superficiality...
...The escapist mass man seeks no insights into politics...
...Most youngsters, of course, are decent, law abiding, often even studious...
...Here in a single vulgar appraisal of the "good life" is the essence of the new social ethic that guides America's middle class—superficial friendships, getting ahead, climbing socially, belonging, conforming...
...More than half the high school children polled thought that wire-tapping and the third-degree should be legalized and that police should censor books, movies, radio, and TV "to shield us from improper thinking...
...and the concentration upon it [becomes a] flight from larger issues...
...But in postwar America, without slave camps, without frame-up trials, without totalitarian terror, a whole nation has mesmerized itself into conformity...
...Billboards will push slogans of proven power...
...There are still large wellsprings of dissent...
...They had to take no authors to lunch, and they had to pay no royalties except a very small one to Ignatius Bulganov for the use of one of his Worthy Worthingtons...
...Outside of a dozen or two political prisoners, Communists and Trotskyists prosecuted under the Smith Act, no one was jailed for his political beliefs...
...they speak the same baby-talk as their constituents because that is the only way to "win votes...
...Eighty per cent said that Communists should be expelled and 75 per cent wanted Communists to be deprived of their American citizenship...
...Now both the working class and the middle class are discouraging bold leadership because their members are becoming mass men...
...In the era of the mass man even the people who are politically articulate succumb to the theories of the "lesser evil...
...it was they who gave it its elan vital...
...Hitler had to use unabashed terror and concentration camps to exact conformity from the German people...
...Beyond that, however, there is a need for a Left that arises from such questions as war and peace and the tragic foreign policy of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles (and before him, Dean Acheson...
...Above all, you must find a "sponsor," a man ahead of you who can help you climb the ladder to "success...
...They have organized walks on Washington and the United Nations, sent a small ketch into the Pacific to protest the bomb tests, and have been the principal force in initiating whatever there has been of public protest against rampant militarism...
...Last year the average automobile worker got more than $5,000 a year income...
...He is told that the "enemy" is communism, and he accepts this thesis without knowing what communism is (except that it presumably is "atheistic, Godless, materialistic...
...Never in history has a nation imposed on itself the strictures of conformity as thoroughly as America has done since World War II...
...How to appeal to the mass man...
...But this was a mature estimate and the great majority of people were not prepared to face it...
...The moods of the mass man make it difficult for a creative minority to function or to flourish...
...The salient characteristic of this new man is his desire to escape from the big world around him...
...The advertiser not only insists on the half-truths or half-lies used in peddling his product, but vetoes any controversy or hard fact of life in the television or radio programs that he sponsors because the result might be a bad association with the product...
...In its propaganda overseas the United States likes to picture its citizens as happy people...
...The Madison Avenue salesmen tried similar tricks with Adlai Stevenson in the 1956 campaign, but he evidently was not as saleable a commodity as Eisenhower...
...The reason for such confusion is not hard to find...
...Thus the average American who spends thousands of dollars on his son's education will refuse to spend a penny to fight against radioactive fall-out which may thwart his son's future, or upon a political campaign against the Dulles foreign policy which may lead to his son's extermination...
...At one time the Communist Party had 100,000 members and many times that number of sympathizers and fellow-travelers...
...But the American is not happy...
...Americans would say—if asked—that they are unaffected by the nonsense that passes for advertising, but the process is more invidious...
...His ideas, if any, are limited, narrow, tailored for the organization rather than for society as a whole...
...A few decades ago the working class found many leaders in the middle class...
...The failure of the Left to grow is thus the result not merely of Leftist errors, but also of the mass man mentality which is robbing a once rebellious and radical nation of its voice of dissent...
...The American woman doesn't buy cosmetics, she buys hope and surcease of sexual anxiety, itself often the product of the propagandists...
...It combined plots, descriptions, and verbiage like a giant Uni-vac machine...
...in the extreme, therefore, it ends in delinquency and crime...
...You ought not to make friends that you can't easily detach yourself from, and you ought not to have ideas which make you unacceptable to your "sponsor...
...One of the most frequently heard arguments for voting for a particular candidate is that "the other fellow can't win...
...the other farmer also supported Eisenhower, but because he expected him to continue the welfare policies of the New Deal...
...Perhaps the most effective force on the Left in the United States these past few years has been the SIDNEY LENS is a rare type of labor union official whose articles have appeared in the Harvard Business Review, the Yale Review, The Christian Science Monitor, and many other publications...
...It entrenches childish attitudes...
...That staggering total of $10.5 billion worth of propaganda annually has a pervasive effect on American behavior patterns...
...He is told that we must have more and better armaments than the Russians, and he accepts the expenditure of $42 billion a year for armaments even while he is decrying inflation and the "high spending in Washington...
...Instead McCarthy, the demagogue, came along with a more simple answer which gained wide acclaim...
...Once you become too comfortable in a specific environment, you are likely to stop Herblock in The Washington Post "We've Got to Stop All This Spending on Essentials" climbing...
...The employed workers in the mass production industries, like the employed workers in the construction industries, earn $100 a week and up...
...Thousands of rebellious youth—"rebels without a cause" —become juvenile delinquents, who in another era might have become young socialists...
...But the techniques of motivational selling and the fraudulent symbols that go with it are used also in politics, in "culture," in book-writing, in almost everything of significance in American life...
...Apologists for "the American way of life" conclude that there is no longer a need for a Left in the United States...
...Almost every new idea must run the gamut of the charge of "communism," the Twentieth Century's counterpart of the Seventeenth's "witchcraft...
...many of them live on a standard considerably higher than any comparable group in Europe...
...Arnold Toynbee has written that a society begins to decline at what seems to be the height of its power, when it loses its "creative minority...
...Ignatius Bulganov Worthington had invented a Worthy Worthington Writing Machine which in an eight-hour day "could shed four books" without any authors...
...The American people woke up a few years after the war to find that though they had won the military phase of the conflict they were losing the cold war...
...Millions of Americans, unwilling or unable to look at the problem maturely, accepted this childish nonsense...
...At the very time when the world hangs by a thread in the struggle between East and West, when it lives in the shadow of atomic extermination, the mass man votes as though he were betting on a football game, rather than deciding on the life or death of himself and the human race...
...The number of these favored workers is certainly no more than eight or ten million...
...There are still tens of thousands of fine, idealistic youth looking for new ways of life...
...Radio spot announcements and ads will repeat phrases with a planned intensity...
...He would never read such liberal publications as The Nation, The New Republic, or The Progressive as he rides to work on his commuter's train...
...Candidates need, in addition to rich voices and good diction, to be able to look 'sincerely' at the TV camera...
...The "organization man" would never dream of subscribing to the Communist paper, The Worker, so that he could be more effective in answering the arguments of communism...
...Professors who questioned University of Wisconsin students found that most of them rejected the rights of freedom of the press, assembly, and worship guaranteed by the American Constitution...
...Instead it sent out dozens of salesmen to find out what Catholics would like to read about in a novel on Catholicism...
...There are millions of hotel employees, laundry workers, retail clerks, and white collar employees who similarly earn only 40 per cent or less of what an auto or steel worker receives...
...Dissenters are afraid of their own dissent...
...There are two million agricultural workers who are paid only 72 cents an hour—less than one-third an auto worker's pay...
...Of the six and a half million employed Negroes in the United States in 1950 (the latest figures available in the Statistical Abstract) fully two-thirds earned less than $30 a week...
...a belief in 'belongingness' as the ultimate need of the individual...
...He must have it presented in the least argumentative form...
...A year ago the National Labor Service made a survey of local union leaders at labor summer schools...
...he accepts the synthetic and superficial politics of the mass media, the partisan press, the radio commentator...
...Acceptance of conformist cliches "Dear Boy, Where Have You Been Keeping Yourself...
...These men figure out all the "gimmicks" for "selling" their candidates just as if they were selling soap or cigarettes...
...he seldom if ever ties it in with social rebellion...
...It's almost as if they were trying to live a 50-year life within ten or fifteen years...
...The citizen must not be tired with long discourses...
...Almost no one in Washington had the courage to attack this ridiculous thesis front-ally...
...A few years ago a large publishing house decided to publish a novel with appeal to Catholics...
...As an influence in national affairs, it does not exist...
...A generation ago the radical Left, though small by European standards, nonetheless played a significant role in American affairs...
...the trick is to sell his personality...
...The editors then called in a prominent writer, gave him a list of the points that those polled wanted, and assigned him the task of writing a novel to order...
...he did not have a fatherly appeal...
...He tries to be slightly different from his neighbor so that he can get ahead in the business and professional world, but he must never be so different that he stands out as a nonconformist...
...The clergymen were grateful because they no longer had to write sermons about immoral books and could speak from the pulpit of God and Goodness...
...But it wasn't written in any creative sense...
...There are men who speak against the conformist trend, but their number has diminished and above all their seed has found no soil in which to take root...
...The mass man indulging his leisure in escapism forms only child-like rather than mature opinions...
...has penetrated even into the supposedly radical heart of the labor movement...
...and their disagreements on matters of internal policy such as taxes are often so minor that they can not be built up into significant issues...
...Our contemporary Western society," writes Erich Fromm, "in spite of its material, intellectual, and political progress, is increasingly less conducive to mental health, and tends to undermine the inner security, happiness, reason, and the capacity for life in the individual...
...How to win him as a friend of the underdeveloped nation now in its national revolution, other than by appealing to his naive and ineffective anti-communism...
...Before America itself can march ahead it will have to reverse the trend toward conformity and begin once again to cultivate, or at least tolerate, a "creative minority...
...The Trotskyists add another 700 to 1,000 members to the roster...
...You must be dissatisfied enough to want to "get ahead," to "climb socially...
...The Madison Avenue public relations experts had sold both farmers on opposite views of the same man...
...he must get his politics in short one minute radio announcements or five minute television talks...
...They whirred out works of joy and hope at a cost of ten cents a copy . . . . " Probably no aspect of American life so reveals the mass man nature of the average citizen as the introduction of advertising and public relations techniques into politics...
...And these include not only the Negro sharecroppers in Mississippi, but many white workers in the North...
...The question is: Why...
...How to win him back to reality...
...The policemen could read them without making an arrest and this saved the taxpayers money, because the police were no longer needed to seize books, and to arrest booksellers, authors, and publishers...
...We have achieved a standard of living so high, they say, that a Left is irrelevant...
...Instead of buying oranges he is buying the symbol of vitality...
...The McCarthyist tirade in the Senate is finished, but the drive of conformity makes "anti-communism" the accepted pattern of thought...
...There is slowly evolving in America a "mass man" who is immune to radicalism, even when his social needs demand it, and whose horizons seem incapable of being extended beyond the present scheme of things...
...it was mass-produced for a mass-mind—for the mass man...
...We were losing the war, said the late Senator from Wisconsin, because the Communists had "infiltrated" our State Department and were traitorously yielding one bastion after another to the Soviets...
...But here certainly is one of the major new problems of our epoch, an unexpected feature of life that neither Marx nor any other socialist thinker blueprinted in any detail...
...The differences between candidates of the two major parties is usually negligible...
...Behind them are many millions who still live in varying degrees of poverty...
...These "hidden Communists" had betrayed such fine allies as Chiang Kai-shek and Syngman Rhee, or had given away our atom bomb secrets...
...It points to the 55 million automobiles, the tens of millions of refrigerators, TV's, and gadgets of American life as "proof" of a superior standard of living...
...The noted novelist James T. Far-rell published a fable a few months ago about a great publisher who became rich when he invented an automatic machine which did away with authors completely...
...Political views are irrelevant...
...He can simulate all kinds of emotion on political problems, but he argues only in the ignorant terms of cliches: "Labor is taking over the country," "The Communists are infiltrating our schools...
...The Socialist Party, which re-merged with the Social-Democratic Federation two years ago and has now absorbed the small Independent Socialist League, has 1,300 members...
...He "rebels" only in his own behalf or that of his family...
...instead of buying an automobile he is buying prestige...
...A survey by Purdue University of the opinions of teen-agers was equally revealing...
...Yet this is not the full picture...
...As you go up the social scale," the writer advises the reader, "you must be able to leave your old friends and old environment if need be...
...The Congress of Industrial Organizations, formed in 1935, was studded with Socialists, Communists, Trotskyists, and Syndicalists...
...Advertising appeals to deep-seated fears or wishes—to the child in man, rather than to his mature self...
...What takes place in this vacuum is a build-up of the individual...
...As a consequence his leaders are also child-like...
...Yet 94 per cent insisted that Negroes must be given full rights in the unions and in job promotions, and 80 per cent said the Negro children should be permitted to attend schools side by side with whites...
...What the Labor Service found was painfully illuminating: "Three out of five unionists would deny an atheist the right to teach in college...
...The "organization man" is thus merely a species of the mass man, a specific form of mass man suited for the new middle class...
...and "socialism" becomes merely a moderate liberalism...
...Something new has been added to the sociology of our times, and unfortunately the Socialist movement in America has not kept pace with developments...
...Such estimates, of course, are part truth and part fable...
...All but one of many hundreds approached refused to sign this "Communist" document...
...To exploit this craving for escape America spends the fantastic sum of $10.5 billion a year on advertising and public relations—$1 of every $40 of its total national income...
...In the United States it was self-imposed, willingly accepted by the majority of its citizens as the normal way of life...
...The Communist Party today has no more than 5,000 members, of whom perhaps 2,000 remain in persistent "rightist" opposition...
...The wealthier farmer intended to vote for President Eisenhower because Eisenhower was an "individualist" who opposed the "collectivism of the Roosevelt New Deal...
...As Aldous Huxley has pointed out, "the methods now being used to merchandise the political candidate, as though he were a deodorant, positively guarantee the electorate against ever hearing the truth about anything...
...The average American today seeks essentially material pleasure—as if he were living just for today, his last moment on earth...
...He belongs to such non-controversial organizations as the Parents-Teachers Association, the Ki-wanis, the Junior Chamber of Commerce, and "the" Club—the social organization of members of his class where he can swim, dance, and play golf, poker, or bridge...
...Millions of Americans are far worse off than their counterparts in, say, Sweden or Denmark or Norway...
...How this drive has corroded individualism is indicated by what has happened to the junior executive in the business and professional world...
...One quarter thought that atheists and socialists should be expelled from their unions...
...The publisher didn't wait until some writer had presented such a novel to its editors...
...The mass man turns inward on himself, away from the reality of the world at large...
...The "dream" of this "organization man" is not any social idea but "getting ahead...
...The book eventually sold more than a million copies...
...The 13,000-member Fellowship of Reconciliation and such groups as the War Resisters League have played the most spirited role in America in fighting militarism, a traditional target of the Left...
...There are still many men who think bold new thoughts...
...he has merely found the most extensive way in all history to escape from his unhappi-ness, his insecurity...
...These machines never erred and never produced an immoral or sad book...
...According to anthropologist Margaret Mead the new American seeks to "escape into one's own little house and one's own garden and one's own children, and the small bit of life which one can make a success in...
...His views are fashioned by the "collective" in which he works and lives...
...It is not the "happiness" of the American citizen that undercuts radicalism, as much as the efficacy of escapism and conformity...
...According to the writer, you must be "somewhat dissatisfied" —not too happy, not too unhappy...
...The Legion also asked for the right to "help" select textbooks, again because of the danger of "subversive influences...
...it tends to turn him into an automaton who pays for his human failure with increasing mental sickness, and with despair hidden under a frantic drive for work and so-called pleasure...
...For the "organization man" to be a maverick is the worst crime of all...
...Both political parties, the Democrats and the Republicans, engage top Madison Avenue advertising agencies to guide their national elections...
...There is, says Margaret Mead, "a sense that the world's gotten so big and unmanageable that it's very hard for individuals to be able to influence it very much...
...It has as yet neither sufficiently analyzed this phenomenon nor found an adequate answer to it...
...His views on political issues are underplayed...
...Conformity was not won with the whip...
...A militant, leftist, unemployed workers' movement and a radical intelligentsia gave the 1930's an aura of leftism now completely gone...
...There is a new "aristocracy of labor" in America that is well-off by previous standards...
...Many a voter who has socialist leanings votes for a Democrat because "the Socialists have no chance...
...Two years ago the popular Sunday supplement Parade published an article on "How to be a Social Climber...
...Almost half felt that socialists should also be refused the right to teach...
...His books include "Left, Right, and Center," "The Counterfeit Revolution," "A World in Revolution," and, soon to be published, "The Crisis in American Labor...
...Conformity in America is whittling away that creative minority...
...With an electorate disinterested in political issues the pendulum swings inexorably to the right...
...During the 1956 campaign a reporter interviewed two farmers in North Dakota...
...A few years ago the Capital Times of Madison, Wisconsin, assigned a reporter to get signatures to a "petition" which was actually a section of the Declaration of Independence on which the nation was founded in 1776...
...Whatever rebelliousness there is in this mass man is a rebelliousness without a cause to harness it...
...The average citizen considers men like Justice William O. Douglas, George Kennan, and James P. Warburg, who are proposing a foreign policy more sensible than Dulles' brinkmanship, as "soft" on communism...
...They asked themselves why...
...And of course the publishers were happy...
...A mature insight would have indicated that we were losing to the Communists because we were fighting against or were neutral on the great revolution surging throughout Asia and Africa...
...A leading business journal commented in the last Presidential election campaign that "both parties will merchandise their candidates and issues by the same methods that business has developed to sell goods...
...For many the much vaunted American standard of living is a statistic rather than a reality...
...The world of American television, and consequently of the American viewer, is a make-believe world, which is the ideal escape from the real world...
Vol. 23 • January 1959 • No. 1
