1. Creel, George, Rebel at Large: Recollections of Fifty Crowded Years (New York: Putnam's Sons, 1947), p. 4.Google Scholar

2. Bernays, Edward L., “Manipulating Public Opinion: The Why and How,” American Journal of Sociology 33 (05 1928): 971.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3. Watson, John B., Behaviorism (1930; rept. New York: Norton, 1970), p. 248.Google Scholar

4. Williams, Raymond, Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), pp. 298–300.Google Scholar

5. Leach, Eugene E., “Mastering the Crowd: Collective Behavior and Mass Society in American Social Thought, 1917–1939,” American Studies 27 (Spring 1986): 100.Google Scholar

6. The best study of the effects of modernism upon traditional democratic philosophy is Purcell, Edward A. Jr., The Crisis of Democratic Theory: Scientific Naturalism & the Problem of Value (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1973).Google Scholar

7. It is important to note that these men were not an intellectual circle in the familiar sense. While their experiences intersected at points, especially in the pivotal importance of the war to their respective careers, the three did not know one another, let alone refer to each other much in their public work.

8. Creel, , Rebel, p. 3.Google Scholar

9. Creel, George, “Denver Triumphant,” Everybody's 27 (09 1912): 314.Google Scholar

10. See Creel, George, “The Hearst-Owned Town of Lead,” Harper's Weekly 59 (12 19, 1914): 580–82Google Scholar; Children of Bondage (with Edwin Markham) (New York: Hearst's International Library, 1914)Google Scholar; “The ‘Protected Sex’ in Industry,” Harper's Weekly 60 (05 8, 1915): 443–46Google Scholar; and “Salvation Circus: An Estimate of Billy Sunday,” Harper's Weekly 60 (06 19, 1915): 580–82.Google Scholar

11. Creel, George, “The Insurgent Sunday School,” Everybody's 25 (10 1911): 472.Google Scholar

12. Creel, George, “Four Flush Radicals,” Harper's Weekly 59 (08 8, 1914): 26.Google Scholar

13. Creel, , Rebel, p. 96.Google Scholar

14. Creel, George, Quatrains of Christ (New York: Paul Elder, 1907)Google Scholar, unpaginated, poem “LXV.” In another telling stanza, Creel insists, “Nor do I ask to have displayed / Disrupted Science's confusing page / O'er writ with guesses restless minds have made” (poem “XXXIII”).

15. Creel, , Rebel, p. 154.Google Scholar

16. Creel, George, “The High Cost of Hate,” Everybody's 30 (06 1914): 770.Google Scholar

17. The most accurate description of Creel appeared in 1913, a portrait that helped elevate him from regional infamy to national notoriety. According to Collier's, he was a sort of barnstorming “everyday American” (Macfarlane, Peter Clark, “The Fortunes of Citizen Creel,” Collier's 51 [07 19, 1913]: 5).Google Scholar

18. Creel, George, “‘The Next Four Years’: An Interview with the President,” Everybody's 36 (02 1917): 134.Google Scholar

19. Kennedy, David M., Over Here: TheFirst World War and American Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 47.Google Scholar

20. Creel, , “Salvation Circus,” p. 582.Google Scholar

21. Creel, , Rebel, pp. 105–6.Google Scholar

22. Creel, George, “The Commoner,” Harper's Weekly 60 (06 26, 1915): 604.Google Scholar

23. “Let the war go on,” Creel proclaimed in 1914. He, like many American pacifists, hoped that Europe's primitive “militarism” would bludgeon itself into oblivion and allow the irresistible “Brotherhood of Man” to emerge triumphant (“The Ghastly Swindle,” Harper's 59 [08 29, 1914]: 196–97.Google Scholar

24. Creel attributes the idea to a letter to Wilson after war was declared, in which he urged the president to reject the rumored proposals for a censorship agency and use publicity in his favor (see Rebel, p. 158Google Scholar). Apparently, Wilson received similar advice earlier from Walter Lippmann, Arthur Bullard, and his own cabinet (Vaughn, Stephen, Holding Fast the Inner Lines: Democracy, Nationalism, and the Committee on Public Information [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980], pp. 3–18).Google Scholar

25. Letter from the Secretaries of State, War, and Navy to Woodrow Wilson, April 13, 1917, in Leland, Waldo G. and Mereness, Newton D., Introduction to the American Official Sources for the Economic and Social History of the World War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1926).Google Scholar

26. Committee on Public Information, National Service Handbook (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1917), pp. 3–4Google Scholar. Within the pages of the widely circulated Handbook, the committee used the war crisis to revive some old reform themes. Religious organizations were urged toward social, rather than spiritual, involvement and toward greater ecumenical unity, two of the Social Gospel's perennial goals. At least in the early months of the war, great efforts were made to discourage antilabor sentiment. And the prohibition of alcohol, later to become the reform era's last great failure, was tested under the excuse of the war emergency; drinking was illegal for servicemen and officially discouraged of all others (Handbook, pp. 5–6, 13, 36).Google Scholar

27. Creel, George, “Introduction,” in CPI, National Service Handbook, p. 1.Google Scholar

28. Croly, Herbert, “A School of Social Research,” New Republic, 15 (06 8, 1918): 167.Google Scholar

29. Creel, George, “Four Million Citizen Defenders,” Everybody's 36 (05 1917): 554.Google Scholar

30. Creel, George, “Public Opinion in Wartime,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 78 (07 1918): 188.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

31. Reprinted in Official Bulletin (06 2, 1917): p. 13.Google Scholar

32. As Creel later recalled, Mark Sullivan was one of the loudest detractors. “In Creel's cosmos,” Sullivan explained, “there are no shadings and no qualifications. His spectrum contains no mauve….” (quoted in Creel, , Rebel, p. 143Google Scholar). Even forty years after the fact, Creel was still able to bring John Dos Passos into a froth, describing the chairman as a “little shrimp of a man with burning dark eyes set in an ugly face….” (Passos, John Dos, Mr. Wilson's War [Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1962], p. 300).Google Scholar

33. The jailings of Eugene Debs and Bill Haywood are symbolic of the increased intolerance for radical thought that flourished during the war and led to the postwar “Red Scare,” notorious Palmer raids, and belligerent “Americanism” campaigns.

34. More than once, the NSL even accused the CPI and Creel of aiding the enemy with an all too open information policy. Creel always insisted, both during and after the war, that censorship came, not from Washington, but from “the intolerances and bigotries of individual communities” (Creel, , “Public Opinion,” p. 192).Google Scholar

35. The ambiguities of CPI activities have occupied several scholars. For the debates on the committee's pro's and cons, see Vaughn, , Holding FastGoogle Scholar; Mock, James R. and Larson, Cedrick, Words That Won the War: The Story of the Committee on Public Information (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1939)Google Scholar; and the relevant chapters in Kennedy, , Over Here.Google Scholar

36. Creel, , “Public Opinion,” p. 185.Google Scholar

37. Edward L. Bernays was a CPI participant whose later success in “public relations” exemplifies the ways in which the committee helped sanction new modes of media and image management. Significantly, he later praised Creel's work while also recognizing the chairman's antiquated presumptions about the nature of public opinion (Bernays in a letter to the editor of the Boston Globe, 06 6, 1967, p. 24).Google Scholar

38. In addition to a number of Madison Avenue reputations that would be made during wartime, Edward Bernays and Carl Byoir, the giants of twenties public relations, were trained by the CPI.

39. Creel often made it quite clear that European restrictions on information were tactically and philosophically antiquated, for they only bred popular suspicion of government, making the country more susceptible to enemy propaganda, and revealed a “distrust” of democratic common sense” (Official Bulletin 1 [06 2, 1917]: p. 13).Google Scholar

40. “Kultur,” in War Cyclopedia: A Handbook for Ready Reference on the Great War, ed. Paxson, Frederic L., Corwin, Edward S., and Harding, Samuel B. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1918), p. 147.Google Scholar

41. “What Really Matters,” Loyalty Leaflet # 7, pp. 3, 5.Google Scholar

42. “Conquest and Kultur: Aims of the Germans in Their Own Words” (Washington, D.C.: CPI War Information Series, 1917), p. 7.Google Scholar

43. Secretary Lane, “Why Do We Fight Germany?” Official Bulletin 1 (06 4, 1917): p. 5.Google Scholar

44. Creel, , “Citizen Defenders,” p. 517.Google Scholar

45. Paxson, , War Cyclopedia, p. 29.Google Scholar

46. Creel, George, How We Advertised America, (New York: Harper, 1920), pp. 104–5.Google Scholar

47. Kennedy, , Over Here, pp. 46–49Google Scholar. Robert Wiebe alludes to a similar idea in his study of Progressivism. As faith in the “melting pot” waned, social reform began devolving into simplified calls for social regimentation (Wiebe, Robert, Search for Order: 1877–1920 [New York: Hill and Wang, 1967], p. 288).Google Scholar

48. Public support for the Central Powers before 1917 was common in all areas of American society, but it was most noticeable among Eastern Europea emigres. In this sense, the fear of conflicting loyalties had some foundation, though, as I am trying to show here, it suggested a broader fear of democratic and pluralistic inadequacies.

49. One common explanation of CPI involvement in the spy mania contends that liberal assimilationists from the old reform order, like Creel and even pacifist Jane Addams, were simply overcome by popular chauvinism and the bigotry of “100% Americanism” (see Vaughn, , Holding Fast, pp. 67–69Google Scholar). Mock and Larsen and Kennedy express similar views in their respective studies. Creel himself always decried the excesses of the gangs that harassed immigrants during and after wartime.

50. See Life 71 (06 20, 1918): 1003Google Scholar. CPI advertisements were distributed and printed widely. I have supplied the most popular and accessible examples available in most cases for easier reference.

51. Creel, , “Public Opinion,” p. 190.Google Scholar

52. The basic history of the Four-Minute Men is ably laid out in Cornebise, Alfred E., War As Advertised: The Four Minute Men and America's Crusade, 1917–1918 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1984).Google Scholar

53. See Vaughn, , Inner Lines, p. 140.Google Scholar

54. Quoted in Mock, and Larson, , Words That Won, p. 116.Google Scholar

55. In his superb study of interwar advertising, Roland Marchand suggests that the same is true of later commercial art as well (Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940 [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985], p. 236.Google Scholar

56. See Creel, , How We Advertised, p. 140.Google Scholar

57. One especially striking poster, “Save Food and Defeat Frightfulness” (by “PAUS”), made free use of social and ethnic visual types to represent a vision of all of humanity suffering and hanging from an immense Iron Cross. It was simply representative of a wartime poster style that assumed a certain visual literacy among all Americans. The free play and often surreal use of symbol, as well as the absence of all but the barest written slogan, make clear the progress made by the use of the image as a common language.

58. See Riesenberg's “Lend as They Fight” and Clyde Forsyth's “And They Thought We Couldn't Fight.”

59. Until the war, images of the machine tended to adopt a dutifully scientific regard for detail and accuracy of proportion. This was a remarkable shift in poster art during the war, for artists incorporated technology into the same colorful, often cartoonish style that seemed to inform much of their technique with human figures.

60. The shift between artistic style, from the first to the second war, is apparent even superficially. By comparison, World War II posters were drab and uninspiring, preferring photorealism to the abstractions of the brush.

61. “They Kept the Sea Lanes Open” places the viewer on a gunship during the attack. In another, we are in the trenches as a hapless gunner reaches toward us asking for “Ammunition.” F. Strothman, “Beat Back the Hun,” physically confronts us with a German soldier and his bloodied knife.

62. James Montgomery Flagg, quoted by Fox, Stephen, The Mirror Makers: A History of American Advertising and Its Creators (New York: Morrow, 1984), p. 76.Google Scholar

63. In the hundreds of posters surveyed for this study, only two or three even approached a wartime landscape comprising more than five people.

64. “Labor and the War,” Liberty Leaflet # 3 (text of Wilson's address to the AFL, 11 12, 1917).Google Scholar

65. Creel, quoted in Mock, and Larson, , “Words That Won,” p. 225.Google Scholar

66. See Vaughn, , Holding Fast, passim.Google Scholar

67. Flagg, James Montgomery, “The Navy Needs You.”Google Scholar

68. “Have You Met This Kaiserite?” New Republic 15 (07 6, 1918): ix.Google Scholar

69. Creel, George, “Where Do We Go From Here?” Collier's 68 (07 9, 1921): 15.Google Scholar

70. Creel, , “Where Do We Go From Here?” p. 23.Google Scholar

71. Creel, , Rebel, pp. 277, 318, 333.Google Scholar

72. It is revealing that Creel spent much of the next decade writing about heroes of the American past.

73. In a telling irony, news of this celebration of progress shared the front pages with the first rumblings of the imminent stock crash. See “Edison Young Again” and “Stocks Slump Again,” New York Times, 10 21, 1929, pp. 1, 2Google Scholar; and October 22, 1929, pp. 1, 2, 3. For the architect's own retelling of the tale, see Bernays, Edward L., Biography of an Idea: Memoirs of Public Relations Counsel (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1965), pp. 444.Google Scholar

74. See Boorstin, Daniel, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961; rept. New York: Atheneum, 1982), pp. 91–11.Google Scholar

75. Bernays, , Biography, p. 6.Google Scholar

76. Ernest Jones points out that Freud greatly disliked Ely Bernays, who, not surprisingly, seemed to fit his model of Victorian inhibition. Nonetheless, Eddie's uncle remained civil to the brother-in-law and always affable with his nephew, though Bernays often overstated the closeness of the relationship (Jones, Ernest, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud [New York: Basic, 1953], vol. 1, p. 119.Google Scholar

77. Bernays, , Biography, p. 3.Google Scholar

78. Bernays, , Biography, pp. 103, 107.Google Scholar

79. Bernays, , Biography, p. 146.Google Scholar

80. Bernays in a letter to the editor of the Boston Globe, 06 6, 1967, p. 24.Google Scholar

81. Mock, and Larsen, , “Words That Won,” p. 322.Google Scholar

82. Bernays, , Biography, p. 97.Google Scholar

83. Few serious attempts have been made to investigate the real history of public relations, and one of the most succinct remains Goldman, Eric F., Two-Way Street: The Emergence of the Public Relations Counsel (Boston: Bellman, 1948)Google Scholar. See pp. 6–10 for a brief survey of Ivy Lee's career.

84. Lee, Ivy, Publicity: Some of the Things It Is and Is Not (New York: Industries, 1925), p. 23Google Scholar. Goldman offers a simple but sound model for understanding the profession's evolution: late-19th century hawkers ascribed to “fool the people”; Lee moved to “inform the people”; and Bernays prescribed that business “listen to the people” (Goldman, , Two-Way Street, p. 19).Google Scholar

85. Lee, , Publicity, p. 8.Google Scholar

86. Goldman, , Two-Way Street, p. 11.Google Scholar

87. Eric Goldman has counted at least 28 titles on the subject between 1917 and 1925, a published bibliography, and the introduction of the term “public opinion” in the 1920 edition of Webster's (see Two-Way Street, pp. 13–14).Google Scholar

88. Bernays, , Biography, p. 291.Google Scholar

89. Bernays, Edward L., Crystallizing Public Opinion (New York: Liveright, 1923), pp. 61–64.Google Scholar

90. “One of the psychological results of homogeneity is the fact that physical loneliness is a real terror … and that association with the herd causes a feeling of security” (Bernays, , Crystallizing Public Opinion, p. 106).Google Scholar

91. Bernays, , Crystallizing Public Opinion, p. 99.Google Scholar

92. Bernays, , Crystallizing Public Opinion, p. 171.Google Scholar

93. Bernays, , Crystallizing Public Opinion, p. 173.Google Scholar

94. This aspect of Bernays' thought is highlighted in an interview with him during his last years, though by this point he seemed to have arrived at even more extreme views. See Olasky, Marvin, “Bringing 'Order Out of Chaos1: Edward Bernays and the Salvation of Society Through Public Relations,” Journalism History 12 (Spring 1985): 17–21.Google Scholar

95. Bernays quoted in Atlantic article, pp. 567–68.Google Scholar

96. Bernays, Edward L., Propaganda (New York: Liveright, 1928), p. 9.Google Scholar

97. Olasky, , “Bringing ‘Order Out of Chaos’,” p. 19.Google Scholar

98. Bernays, , Propaganda, p. 19.Google Scholar

99. Bernays in letter to the Boston Globe, 06 6, 1967, p. 24.Google Scholar

100. William F. Ogburn, a sociologist from Columbia, offered one of the first formal definitions of the idea in 1922: “The Thesis is that various parts of modern culture are not changing at the same rate, some parts are changing much more rapidly than others; and that since there is a correlation and interdependence of parts, a rapid change in one part of our culture requires readjustments through other changes in the various correlated parts of culture” (Social Change: With Respect to Culture and Original Nature [New York: Huebsch, 1922], p. 200)Google Scholar. Similar ideas proved quite attractive throughout the decade, especially to intellectuals who felt that America had fallen to reactionary postwar ways. Its ultimate application would come with Robert and Helen Lynd's study of Middletown in 1929.

101. Bernays, Edward L., “Manipulating Public Opinion,” American Journal of Sociology 33 (05 1928): 959.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

102. Bernays, , “Manipulating Public Opinion.”Google Scholar

103. On this point, Bernays openly parted with one of his theoretical sources, Walter Lippmann: “Propaganda is a purposeful, directed effort to overcome censorship – the censorship of the group mind and the herd reaction” (Crystallizing Public Opinion, p. 122).Google Scholar

104. Bernays, , Crystallizing Public Opinion, p. 146.Google Scholar

105. Martin, Everett Dean, “Our Invisible Masters,” in “Are We Victims of Propaganda? A Debate,” Forum 81 (03 1929): 14.Google Scholar

106. Martin, , “Our Invisible Masters,” pp. 149, 144.Google Scholar

107. Bernays, , “Our Debt to Propaganda,” Forum 81 (03 1929): 147.Google Scholar

108. Bernays, , “The Minority Rules,” Bookman 65 (04 1927): 151.Google Scholar

109. Bernays, , Public Opinion, p. 72.Google Scholar

110. Bernays, , Public Opinion, p. 86.Google Scholar

111. Bernays, , Public Opinion, p. 76.Google Scholar

112. Bernays did champion and publicize several far-sighted causes, namely, sexual and racial equality and greater sexual liberation. Nonetheless, none of his activities place him at the center of any social controversy during the twenties.

113. Bernays, , Biography, pp. 82, 299.Google Scholar

114. Bernays, , Propaganda, pp. 112–13.Google Scholar

115. In his autobiography, Bernays seems almost gleeful over convincing Georgia O'Keefe, via her husband Alfred Steiglitz, to do illustrating for a dress firm. So, too, did he reform the likes of Pierre Cartier and Jacques Seligmann, two salesmen to the aristocracy who were convinced of the uses of public relations.

116. Flynn, John T., “Edward L. Bernays: The Science of Ballyhoo,” Atlantic 149 (05 1932): 563.Google Scholar

117. Bernays, , Biography, p. 234.Google Scholar

118. Bernays, , Propaganda, pp. 113–14.Google Scholar

119. See Marchand, , Advertising the American Dream, p. 13Google Scholar, on advertising's ability to sell the by-products of a new industrial world with the reassuring images and themes of tradition.

120. Bernays, , Crystallizing Public Opinion, p. 106.Google Scholar

121. Bernays, , Biography, p. 144.Google Scholar

122. Bernays, , Propaganda, p. 135.Google Scholar

123. MacGowan, Kenneth, “The Adventure of the Behaviorist,” New Yorker (10 6, 1928): 30.Google Scholar

124. Buckley, Kerry W., “Behaviorism and the Professionalization of American Psychology. A Study of John Broadus Watson, 1876–1958” (Ph.D. diss., Univeristy of Massachusetts, 1982), p. vGoogle Scholar; and Birnbaum, Lucille, “Behaviorism in the 1920's,” American Quarterly 7 (Spring 1955): 15–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Although it focuses almost exclusively upon intellectual reaction, Birnbaum, here and in her larger dissertation, provides the most comprehensive study of Watsonian thought and its place within the mainstream of American intellectual history. See also Birnbaum, , “Behaviorism: John Broadus Watson and American Social Thought” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1964).Google Scholar

125. The facts of Watson's life have recently come under dispute. Watson himself composed a sketchy and oblique self-portrait late in his life for a collection of psychologists' autobiographies, in Murchison, Carl, ed., A History of Psychology in Autobiography (New York: Russell and Russell, 1961), vol 3, pp. 271–81Google Scholar. The only published biography is Cohen, David, J. B. Watson: The Founder of Behaviorism: A Biography (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979)Google Scholar. Buckley's more recent account takes issue with Cohen on several points of fact. For my purposes, I have stayed with the broadest and most verifiable aspects of his life.

126. Watson, in Murchison, , History of Psychology, p. 271.Google Scholar

127. Lucille Birnbaum suggests that Behaviorism carried in it more than a few Baptist traits. Named after a local preacher, John Allen Broadus, Watson was himself raised on the doctrine of man's depraved nature, which required that the child be well prepared for a harsh and unpleasant experience (See “Behaviorism: John Broadus Watson,” p. 37).Google Scholar

128. Watson, in Murchison, , History of Psychology, p. 272.Google Scholar

129. Watson, in Murchison, , History of Psychology.Google Scholar

130. Watson, in Murchison, , History of Psychology, p. 274.Google Scholar

131. Watson, in Murchison, , History of Psychology, p. 276.Google Scholar

132. Watson, in Murchison, , History of Psychology.Google Scholar

133. An adequate description of the state of early American psychology can be found in Cohen, , J. B. Watson, pp. 13–14Google Scholar. As Birnbaum points out, even James, who elevated the importance of instincts over reason and the soul, still clung to the centrality of consciousness (see her Behaviorism, p. 11).Google Scholar

134. Watson, John B., Behavior: An Introduction to Comparative Psychology (New York: Henry Holt, 1914), pp. 67–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

135. MacGowan, , “Adventure of the Behaviorist,” p. 32.Google Scholar

136. Watson, , Behavior, p. v.Google Scholar

137. Watson, , Behavior, pp. 1–7.Google Scholar

138. Watson, , Behavior, p. 317Google Scholar. In later writings, Watson was convinced that people actually were more malleable and subject to acquired habits than lower forms for the relative lack of congenital instinct.

139. Watson, , Behavior, pp. 1, 11.Google Scholar

140. Cohen, , J. B. Watson, pp. 78–79Google Scholar. Robert Yerkes and Thorstein Veblen also rejected Watson's ideas, but some famous commentators, including John Dewey, G. Stanley Hall, and Hugo Muensterberg, overlooked the assault on consciousness and welcomed him as yet another antidote to absolutism (Birnbaum, , Behavior, pp. 62–65).Google Scholar

141. Cohen, , J. B. Watson, p. 91.Google Scholar

142. Watson, John B., “Practical and Theoretical Problems in Instincts and Habits,”Google Scholar in Jennings, Herbert S. et al. , Suggestions of Modern Science Concerning Education (New York: Macmillan, 1917), p. 69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

143. Watson, , “Practical and Theoretical Problems,” pp. 75, 77.Google Scholar

144. Watson, in Murchison, , History of Psychology, p. 277.Google Scholar

145. Watson, in Murchison, , History of PsychologyGoogle Scholar. Ironically, Watson had little use for the predictive devices of aptitude testing, always insisting that individuals were too complex for such simplistic sorts of analysis. As to the psychological effects of army propaganda, Watson discovered that the films had no effect on sexual activity among the troops (Cohen, , J. B. Walson, p. 125).Google Scholar

146. Watson, in Murchison, , History of Psychology, p. 271.Google Scholar

147. The scandal was a remarkably colorful and public incident, with notices appearing in the local and New York papers. Cohen has provided the most satisfactory summary of the events of 1920 (J. B. Watson, pp. 145–167).Google Scholar

148. Watson, in Murchison, , History of Psychology, pp. 279–80.Google Scholar

149. After being made vice-president in 1924, and until his departure from J. Walter Thompson in 1936, Watson spent time researching the market for various companies and products: General Motors, Johnson & Johnson (Baby Powder), Pebeco toothpaste, and Pond's (Thompson, J. Walter Archives memo, Sandecki, A. V., 11 11, 1982)Google Scholar. According to Stephen Fox, Resor and Watson shared a philosophical lineage that is worth noting. Resor, too, had become enamored with William Graham Sumner, when he was at Yale, and, like Watson, went into advertising with a rather bleak vision of man as an animal of impulse, not thought, desire, not belief (Fox, , Mirror Makers, p. 83).Google Scholar

150. Macgowan, , Adventure of the Behaviorist, p. 31.Google Scholar

151. Watson, in Murchison, , History of Psychology, p. 281Google Scholar. Significantly, Watson devotes only the last two pages of the self-portrait to his postacademic career.

152. Watson, , in Jennings, , Suggestions of Modern Science, p. 54.Google Scholar

153. Watson, John B., Behaviorism, Preface.Google Scholar

154. Roback, A. A., Behaviorism at Twenty-Five (Cambridge, Mass.: Sci-Art, 1937), p. 13.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

155. New York Herald Tribune, 06 21, 1925, p. 5Google Scholar; quoted in Buckley, , “Behaviorism,” p. 274.Google Scholar

156. Birnbaum, , Behaviorism, pp. 115–25.Google Scholar

157. Santayana, George, “Living Without Thinking,” Forum 68 (09 1922): 734.Google Scholar

158. See Alpert, Augusta, “More Behaviorism,” New Republic 55 (06 20, 1928): 128Google Scholar; and MacDougall, William (with J. B. Watson), The Battle of Behaviorism: An Exposition and an Exposure (New York: Norton, 1929).Google Scholar

159. “Perhaps Dr. Watson is one of those individuals who unconsciously shrink from looking inside themselves, deny that they have any subjective depths into which they might look, and immerse themselves in objective reality” (Clark, Evans, “Human Conduct Reduced to a Science” [Review of Behaviorism], New York Times, 08 2, 1925, sec. 3, p. 14Google Scholar; see also Robinson, Edward S., “Behaviorist: l'Enfant Terrible,” New Republic 57 [01 2, 1919]: 181.Google Scholar

160. Roback, , Behaviorism, p. 162.Google Scholar

161. “Is Man a Machine? A Socratic Dialogue” (a round-table discussion involving Watson and Will Durant), Forum 82 (11 1929): 265.Google Scholar

162. Watson, John B., Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1924 rev., pp. 3, vii.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

163. Watson, , “Feed Me on Facts,” Saturday Review of Literature 4 (06 16, 1928): 966Google Scholar. The strain of unreal presentation in modern art was especially troubling to Watson. Facts are verifiable, and so should be art. “No ‘imagination’ is good unless every word is conditioned by actually observed events” (p. 967).

164. Watson, , “Feed Me on Facts.”Google Scholar

165. Watson, , “Memory as the Behaviorist Sees It,” Harper's Magazine 153 (07 1926): 250.Google Scholar

166. Watson, , “Instinct and Habits,” pp. 54–55.Google Scholar

167. Buckley, , “Behaviorism,” p. 198.Google Scholar

168. Unlabeled clipping, 1922, JWT Archives, Watson Collection.

169. Watson, , Behaviorism, p. 9.Google Scholar

170. Watson, , Psychology from the Standpoint, p. 9.Google Scholar

171. Prohibition and the Soviet system were principle examples that Watson labeled unscientific social change.

172. Watson, , Behaviorism, pp. 36–37.Google Scholar

173. Watson, , Behaviorism.Google Scholar

174. Watson, , Behaviorism, p. 144.Google Scholar

175. Watson, , Behaviorism, pp. 36–37.Google Scholar

176. Birnbaum, , “Behaviorism in the 1920's,” p. 16.Google Scholar

177. Watson, John B., “Heart or Intellect?” Harper's Magazine 156 (02 1928): 345–52.Google Scholar

178. Dorsey, George A., Why We Behave Like Human Beings (New York: Harper, 1925), p. 362.Google Scholar

179. Watson, , “Heart or Intellect?” p. 346.Google Scholar

180. Watson, , Behaviorism, p. 248.Google Scholar

181. Watson, John B. (with Rosalie Rayner Watson), Psychological Care of Infant and Child (New York: Norton, 1928), p. 150Google Scholar. George Dorsey's popular tract tried to make a similar point, that man could be both diverse and socially useful.

182. Watson, , Psychology from the Standpoint, p. 401.Google Scholar

183. On one notable occasion, he complained that there was altogether too much emphasis upon freedom of speech, and that society had the ultimate right to regulate itself.

184. The book's influence was far greater than its sales, impressive though they were. While professional psychologists denounced its methods, and, as always, Watson himself, the book sold over 100,000 copies, was recommended to parents by Parents Magazine and the Atlantic, and eventually influenced the U.S. Department of Health's own guide to childrearing. Most Americans probably read excerpts and revisions, which saturated popular magazines.

185. Watson, , Behaviorism [1925], p. 82.Google Scholar

186. Watson's obsession with an orderly schedule, cleanliness, and even the importance of regular bowel habits took absurd shape in a proposed timetable for childhood, in which virtually ever minute was assigned a useful purpose (Watson, , Psychological Care, pp. 9, 114–35).Google Scholar

187. Watson, , Psychological Care, pp. 9, 141, 146.Google Scholar

188. Watson, , Psychological Care, p. 150.Google Scholar

189. Watson, , Psychological Care, p. 186.Google Scholar

190. “Man's ancestor won his freedom not so much by specialization as because he kept his plasticity, extended his wits, and improved control” (Dorsey, , Why We Behave, p. 70)Google Scholar. For a short while in the mid-1920s, Dorsey, whose book was remarkably popular, almost eclipsed Watson as the authority on behaviorism.

191. Lears, T. J. Jackson, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (New York: Pantheon, 1981), passim.Google Scholar

192. Watson, , Psychology from the Standpoint, p. 330.Google Scholar

193. Watson had addressed the problem as early as 1919: “In our opinion conditioned love responses, especially those directed towards the mother and father, breeding too great dependence upon the parents as they do, are probably the most sinister factors in the whole system of human organization” (Psychology from the Standpoint, p. 235Google Scholar; see also “Urges Plan to Train Children,” New York Times, 03 4, 1928, sec. 2, p. 6.Google Scholar

194. Watson, , Psychology from the Standpoint, pp. 247–48.Google Scholar

195. Ironically, much of Watson's advice to parents leaned toward leniency rather than punishment. “A calmer mode of behavior,” he believed, “would enable the child, and the adult it is to become, to conquer the environment instead of being conquered by it” (Watson, , Psychological Care, p. 43).Google Scholar

196. Watson, , Psychology from the Standpoint, p. 8.Google Scholar

197. “Invalidism,” as Watson called it, was a modern scourge that he linked directly to “overaffection” in childhood, presumably fostering an inability to confront the hard knocks of life (Watson, , Psychological Care, p. 76).Google Scholar

198. Meyer, Donald, The Positive Thinkers: Religion as Pop Psychology from Mary Baker Eddy to Oral Roberts (1965; rept. New York: Pantheon, 1980), pp. xvi–xvii.Google Scholar

199. Watson, , Behaviorism, p. 200n.Google Scholar

200. Dorsey, , Why We Behave, p. 341.Google Scholar

201. Watson, , “Heart or Intellect?” p. 352.Google Scholar

202. Watson, , Psychological Care, p. 59.Google Scholar

203. Watson, , Psychology from the Standpoint, p. 238.Google Scholar

204. Collins, Frederick L., “Knock Wood!” Colliers 78 (10 23, 1926): 28.Google Scholar

205. Susman, Warren I., “‘Personality’ and the Making of Twentieth Century Culture,” in Culture as History: Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon, 1984), pp. 273–74, 277.Google Scholar

206. Watson, who always waffled between the complexity of human behavior and its basic simplicity, was unsure about the possibility of adult behavior modification. At times he insisted that the web of adult psychology was so involved and obscured by time that changing it substantially was nigh impossible. Nonetheless, he never lost sight of his philosophy's chief public appeal, and in the thirties much of his work promised self-transformation as well as the manipulation of others.

207. Watson, John B., “How to Grow a Personality: Address by John B. Watson, in the Psychology Series Sponsored by the National Advisory Council in Education” (Chicago: n.p., 1932), p. 9.Google Scholar

208. Watson, , “How to Grow,” p. 3.Google Scholar

209. Watson, John B., “It's Your Own Fault,” Collier's 82 (12 22, 1928): 34.Google Scholar

210. , L. J. P., “Parents Take Your Choice,” Outlook 149 (05 23, 1928): 154, 155.Google Scholar

211. Watson, John B., “What Is Behaviorism?” Harper's Magazine 152 (05 1926): 725.Google Scholar

212. “There is no inherent reason,” George Dorsey insisted, “why the miner, plowman, and milkmaid should not be as intellectual as the poet, auditor, or school teacher” (Dorsey, , Why We Behave, p. 472)Google Scholar. Watson himself occasionally addressed issues of race and sex, insisting that worldly competence, which immigrant minorities, blacks, and women were supposed to lack, was socially conditioned rather than genetic. Eugenic tampering, he once claimed, “is more dangerous than bolshevism” (Watson, , “The Behaviorist Looks at Instincts,” Harper's 155 (02 1928): p. 229).Google Scholar

213. Donald Meyer has found that members of the “mind-cure” fringe movements seemed to detect this problem early on. Julia Seton, an early self-help writer, understood that ascendancy of “personality” over “character,” “threaten[ed] a split in the self, between inner and outer, private and public,” transforming the self into a theatrical presentation rather than an expression of essential nature (Meyer, , Positive Thinkers, p. 115).Google Scholar

214. Watson's conception of life's two worlds was often inconsistent. At times he seemed to covet a necessary and separate private life, while on other occasions he suggested that such a divide was precisely the problem with an out-of-place Victorian sensibility (see Watson, , Psychological Care, pp. 161–69).Google Scholar

215. Overstreet, H. A., Influencing Human Behavior, p. 3.Google Scholar

216. Overstreet, , Influencing Human Behavior, p. 11.Google Scholar

217. Watson, John B., “Influencing the Mind of Another” (address delivered to the Advertising Club of Montreal), J. Walter Thompson Archives, 1935, p. 2.Google Scholar

218. Watson, , “Influencing the Mind,” p. 3.Google Scholar