Popularity and Politics
There are some consequences of our history so conspicuous and so
significant that they deserve to be separated from the rest and
examined briefly by themselves.
In the United States every week 34 million families listen on an
average four hours a day to the radio; 90 million individual movie
admissions are bought; 16 million men and women go bowling at least
once, probably oftener; thousands of couples dance in roadhouses,
juke-joints, and dance halls; in winter 12 million hunting licenses
are issued; millions of copies of the leading illustrated magazines
are sold; and, in normal times, some ten or fifteen million families
take their cars and go driving.
These are not mass enterprises; they are popular enterprises; there
are others: mass-attendance at sport, or smaller, but steady,
attendance at conventions, lodge meetings and lectures. For the most
part, all these can be divided into sport, games, fun; the search for
information in entertainment; and entertainment by mass-communication.
Sport is pleasant to think about; after all the scoldings we have had
because we like to watch athletic events (just as the ancient Greeks
did), it is gratifying to report the great number of people who are
actually making their own fun. The same ignoble but useful desire for
money which has so often served us has now built bowling alleys, dance
halls and tennis courts, so that we are doing more sports ourselves.
Sport began to come into its own after Populism and Theodore
Roosevelt's Square Deal; it is therefore not anti-social and even
withstood the prosperity of Harding and Coolidge.
_Means of Communication_
The other elements I have mentioned, movies, radio and a new
journalism, are the products of our immediate time. Although the
moving picture was exhibited earlier, it began to be vastly popular
just before the first World War, and was promptly recognized as a
prime instrument of propaganda by Lenin as he began to build the
Socialist State in 1917; the moving picture may have been colossal
then, but it did not become prodigious, a social engine of
incalculable force, until the problems of speech had been mastered.
By that time another pre-war invention, the radio, had established
itself in its present commercial base. Radio was first conceived as an
instrument of secret communication; it began to be useful, as wireless
telegraphy, when the Soviets used it to appeal to peoples over the
heads of their governments--although this appeal still had to be
printed, the radio receiver did not exist. When the necessary
inventions were working (and the tinkering American forced the issue
by building his own receivers and his own ham-senders), radio began to
serve the public. Among its earliest transmissions were a sermon, the
election results in the Harding-Cox campaign, crop reports, and music.
The entrance of commerce was easy and natural; and before the crash of
1929 the decisive step was taken: the stations went out of the
business of creating programs and sold "time", allowing the buyer to
fill it with music or comedy or anything not offensive to the morals
of the community.
By the time commercial radio made its first spectacular successes, in
the early days of Vallee and Amos and Andy, a new form of publication
had established itself, a fresh combination of text and picture,
devoted to fact and deriving more entertainment from fact than the old
straight fiction magazine had offered.
These three new means of mass communication are revolutionary
inventions of democracy. To use them is the first obligation of
statesmanship. They have been seized by dictators; literally, for the
first move of a _coup d'etat_ is to take over the radio and the next
is to divert the movies into propaganda.
Before these instruments can be used, their nature has to be
understood and their meaning to the average man has to be calculated.
_Words and Pictures_
Of the fact and picture publications _Life_ and _Look_ are the best
examples; _Time_ and _News-Week_ are fact and illustration magazines
which is basically different, although their success is also
important. The appetite for fact appears in a nation supposed to be
adolescent and given over to the silliest of romantic fictions; _Time_
and the _Readers' Digest_ become the great magazine phenomena of our
time, growing in seriousness as they understand better the temper of
their readers, learning to present fact forcefully, directing
themselves to maturity, and helping to create mature minds. Their
faults are private trifles, their basic editorial policies are public
services.
The word and picture magazine is not yet completely realized; both its
chief examples grow and develop, but the full integration of word and
image is yet to come. It is probably the most significant development
in communication since the depression struck; it promises to rescue
the printed page from the obscurity into which radio, the movies, and
conservatism in format were pushing books and magazines and
newspapers. It is odd that book publication, the oldest use of
quantity production, should have so long been content with relatively
small circulations. Changes now are apparent. The most interesting
developments in recent years are mail-order selling (the basis of the
book clubs) and mass selling over the counter, the method of the
Pocketbook series. Both withdraw book-sales from the stuffiness of old
methods and the artiness of book "shoppes" which always got in the
way of good book-sellers.
The text-and-image publication need not be a magazine; the method is
especially applicable to argument, to the pamphlet and the report. The
art of visualization has progressed in the making of charts and
isotypes and in the pure intellectual grasp of the function of the
visual. The economic and technical problems of the use of color have
been solved and all the effectiveness of images has been multiplied by
the contrast and clarity which color provides. A new language is in
process of being formed.
Until television-in-color, which exists, becomes common, the need for
this new language is great. For neither the movies nor radio can be
used for reasoned persuasion; their attack is too immediate, the
listener-spectator does not have time for argument and contemplation.
Radio profits positively by its limitation to sound when it works with
the right materials; but when President Roosevelt asked his audience
to have a map at hand, television supplied the map and the meaning of
the map without diverting attention from the speech, which radio could
not do. The movies, great pioneer in text and sound, have mastered
none of the arts of demonstration or persuasion; they have the
immediate gain of a single method and a single objective: appeal to
the emotions by absorption in the visual; and the fact that the moving
picture's appeal is to a group, means that every element must be
over-simplified and every effect is over-multiplied by the group
presence. By this the movies also gain when they use the right
materials.
The use of the new combination of text and image, growing out of the
tabloid and the picture magazine, is, in effect, the creation of a
mobile reserve of propaganda. When the radio and the movies have
established the facts and aroused the desired emotion, the final
battery of argument comes in picture and print; and this, ideally, is
carried to the ward meeting, to the after-supper visit, the drugstore
soda counter and the lunch hour at the factory--where the action is
determined by men and women in private discussion.
_Universal Languages_
Radio, which instantly creates the desired situation, and movies,
which so plausibly arouse the desired emotion, are the two great mass
inventions of America. The patents may have been taken out elsewhere,
but it was in America that these two forms of mass communication were
instantly placed at the service of all people. The errors of judgment
have been gross, but the error of purpose was not made; the movies
were kept out of the hands of the aesthete and radio was kept out of
the hands of the bureaucrat. For a generation we deplored the
vulgarity of movies made for morons' money at the box office, and
discovered that the only other effective movies were made by
dictators, to falsify history, as the Russians did when the miserable
Trotsky was cinematically liquidated, or to stir hate as did every
film made by Hitler. For a generation we wept over the commercialism
of radio and at the end found that commercial radio had created an
audience for statesmen and philosophers; and again the alternative was
the hammering of dictators' propaganda, to which one listened under
compulsion.
The intermediate occasions, the exceptions, are not significant. Some
great inventions in the realm of ideas were made by British radio
(which is government owned, but not government operated); some
exceptional and important films were made for the few. But the
dictators and the businessmen both had the right idea--movies and the
radio are for all men; they can be used to entertain, to arouse, to
soothe, to persuade; but they must not ever be used without thinking
of _all_ the people. This universality lies in the nature of the
instruments, in the endless duplication of the films, the unlimited
reception of the broadcasts; and only Hitler and Stalin and the
sponsors have been happy to understand this.
Like all those who are habituated to the movies, I have suffered much
from Hollywood, my pain being all the greater because I am so devoted;
like all those who work in radio, I am acutely conscious of its
faults; but the faults and the banalities are not in question now. Now
we have to take instruments perfected by others, and use them for our
purposes. We have to discover what the ignoramus in Hollywood and the
businessman in the sponsor's booth have paid for.
The one thing we cannot do is risk the value of the medium. We have to
learn how to use popularity; we have to learn why the movies never
could carry advertising, and adjust our propaganda accordingly; and
why radio can not quickly teach, but can create a receptive situation;
and why we may have to use rhetoric instead of demonstrations to
accomplish an end. Moreover, we have to study the field so that we
know when _not_ to use these instruments, what we must not take from
them, in order to preserve their incomparable appeal.
A coordinated use of _all_ the means of persuasion is required; to let
the movie makers make movies is good, but the exact function of the
movies in the complete effort has to be established, or we will waste
time and do badly on the screen what can be done well only in print or
most effectively on the air. There are many things to be done; we need
excitement and prophecy and cold reason, and they must not come
haphazard, but in an order of combined effect; we need news and
history and fable and diversion, and each must minister to the other.
If we fail to use the instruments correctly they can destroy us; one
ill-timed, but brilliantly made, documentary on production rendered
futile whole weeks of facts about a lagging program; and one
ill-advised news reel shot can undo a dozen radio hours. When the
means of communication and entertainment become engines of victory, we
have to use each medium only at its highest effectiveness; and we have
to use all of them together.
The movies, the radio, the popular publication are so new, they seem
to rise on the international horizon of the 1920's, to have no link
with our past, to be the same with us as they are all over the world.
With these, it is true, we return to the universals of human
expression and communication. But what we have done with them is
unique, and their significance as part of our war machinery is based
on both the universal and the special qualities they possess. That is
why I have treated them separately; because they are powerful and have
enormous inertia, the slightest error may accumulate tremendous
consequences, and the instinctively right use of them will be the most
complete protection against disaster at home.
We have to study the right use because these tools have never yet been
completely used for the purposes of democracy; and with them we have
to remind the American people of other tools and instruments they have
neglected, so many that it sometimes seems a passion with us to invent
the best instruments and to hand them over to our enemies to use
against us.