Social Sciences

Lester Ward, who is considered the founder of American sociology, believed that the social sciences were far more than a “fact-gathering” enterprise (Bannister 13). He contended that “its goal is a radical ‘sociocracy,’ not the palliatives that pass for social reform” (13). Ward’s “radical ‘sociocracy'” began to take shape shortly after World War II. Many American social scientists were also alumni of the Office of Strategic Services, which plagiarized and refined Nazi psychological warfare techniques. William “Wild Bill” Donovan, who was the director of the Office of Strategic Services in 1941, believed that the Nazis’ psychological warfare methods could act as models for “Americanized” stratagems (Simpson 24). Psychological warfare swiftly became part of the U.S. intelligence community’s operational lexicon (24). Donovan believed the concept to be so significant that it would inevitably become “a full arm of the U.S. military, equal in status to the army, navy, and air force” (24). Six organizations constituted the nucleus of U.S. psychological warfare research (26). These were:

(1)Samuel Stouffer’s Research Branch of the U.S. Army’s Division of Morale; (2)the Office of War Information (OWI) led by Elmer Davis and its surveys division under Elmo Wilson; (3) the Psychological Warfare Division (PWD) of the U.S. Army, commanded by Brigadier General Robert McClure; (4) the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) led by William Donovan; (5) Rensis Likert’s Division of Program Surveys at the Department of Agriculture, which provided field research personnel in the United States for the army, OWI, Treasury Department, and other government agencies; and (6) Harold Lasswell’s War Communication Division at the Library of Congress. (26)

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Of course, this wartime network was peopled heavily by “prominent social scientists” (26). In some instances, the same social engineers participated in two or more organizations (26). Christopher Simpson enumerates the various social scientists involved:

The OWI, for example, employed Elmo Roper (of the Roper survey organization), Leonard Doob (Yale), Wilbur Schramm (University of Illinois and Stanford), Alexander Leighton (Cornell), Leo Lowenthal (Institut fur Sozialforschung and University of California), Hans Speier (RAND Corp.), Nathan Leites (RAND), Edward Barrett (Columbia), and Clyde Kluckhohn (Harvard), among others. (26)

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Social Sciences

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