Of Fear and Strangers, page 18
Walter Lippmann
Lippmann struggled to find a conceptual key that would help him articulate his concerns. In 1919, after five years of labor, he penned an article for The Atlantic but was not impressed with the results. He sheepishly wrote to another friend, the legal giant Oliver Wendell Holmes, worried that the great man would think poorly of his effort. Something better was forthcoming, he assured Holmes, a book on “how public opinion is made.” In 1922, Lippmann made good on his promise. In Public Opinion, Lippmann sought to make sense of how mass democracy was dependent on a fickle, at times hysterical, foundation, and in the process he snatched a term from printing and altered its meaning.
“Stereotypes” or “stereoplates” were a variety of metal plates that marked an early-nineteenth-century advance in the printing process; they didn’t require the setting of individual type and were used to swiftly make identical imprints. By the middle of the nineteenth century, “stereotype” migrated into general discourse to connote a mechanically repeated phrase or formula. It floated around as a useful metaphor; in medicine, a tic might be referred to as “stereotypical.” In Public Opinion, Lippmann retooled this term, for it beautifully captured commonly held distortions of ethnic and national kinds, which could be created and then easily reproduced.
Though he seemed unaware of it, Lippmann’s stereotype landed squarely in the center of debates roiling academic psychology, for it directly challenged behaviorism. Pavlov and Watson considered perception to be a matter of individual stimuli coming together in associations. There was no place for a stereotype in their then-dominant model. However, Lippmann’s theory dovetailed with Gestalt psychology. Between 1914 and 1917, the German Wolfgang Köhler had proposed that perception was not based on meticulously piecing together associations; it was grasped all at once. Humans did not build up impressions piece by piece; they took in whole configurations through inferences, guesses, and biases. Stereotypes fit neatly into the Gestalt framework.
Walter Lippmann didn’t dive into those deep waters. Quoting his teacher William James’s celebrated description, he agreed that the world was a “great, blooming, buzzing confusion.” Innumerable sights and sounds bombarded the perceiver as every moment passed. Overwhelmed by this onslaught, humans developed simplified and flattened signifiers of reality. Gesturing to Plato’s famous cave of illusion, Lippmann asserted that the mind was built to distill, generalize, and then exist in a theater of its own making.
However, these shadows of the real world were mostly not idiosyncratic, Lippmann proposed. We are primed to pick up inputs that make sense with the stereotypes laid down for us by our culture. In the flux and flow, we grasp that which already has been marked as meaningful. Faced with the incongruous and undefined, we grab for the common solution, our culture’s answer. In this way, stereotypes spread and one mind becomes much like another. When a stranger arrives in town, all that is confusing, threatening, and unreadable becomes tamed, contained, and defined when it is whispered that he is Russian. In a snap, the stranger becomes a known entity, a stereotype.
To drive home his point, Lippmann described an experiment conducted at a psychology congress. At a festive, masked ball, the experts on the psyche were hobnobbing, when suddenly a melee broke out:
A clown rushed in madly pursued by a negro, revolver in hand. They stopped in the middle of the room fighting; the clown fell, the negro leapt upon him, fired, and then both rushed out of the hall.
Afterward, the stunned experts were asked to describe what had transpired. Secretly, the whole scene had been photographed for veracity’s sake. Nearly two-thirds of the respondents got over forty percent of the basic facts wrong. Trained observers described “the stereotype of such a brawl.” The visual experience fit into a pre-existing cognitive model, which came to predictable and familiar conclusions. Lippmann did not reveal what those communal distortions had been, but perhaps he assumed his reader’s own stereotypes regarding “negroes” would fill in the blanks.
There was a great economy in having a warehouse stocked with such preconceived notions. No extra mental effort was required to get to the bottom of group or individual identities. But how closed was this system? Stereotypes, Lippmann believed, were rigid and not easily corrected; worse, they had the power to pervert the search for truth. The stereotype “stamps itself upon the evidence in the very act of securing the evidence,” he wrote. Incongruous or contradictory facts received no hearing. If behaviorists hoped that positive experiences would lessen prejudice, Lippmann’s model pointed to a source of resistance. Counterfactuals like a peaceful “negro” or a violent clown were brushed aside. Stereotypes ruled.
“By stereotypes,” Lippmann wrote to an excited Dartmouth sociologist, “I mean fixed habits of cognition.… It is a pathological term for the kind of cognition which classifies and abstracts falsely.…” Negative stereotypes did not require personal trauma or frightening Little Albert–type experiences. These ideas, once established, provided an everyday answer to the problem of sorting different beings with their weird cultures, inscrutable languages, and odd beliefs. Stereotypes provided answers by which other nations, ethnicities, and genders were typecast, so much so that many were ready to fight and even die in the service of the cartoons lodged in their heads.
PUBLIC OPINION WAS published during a time when progressive and reactionary forces struggled over America’s future. On the one hand, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People had been founded, and the so-called New Negro demanded equal rights. Suffragettes formed the National Woman’s Party and fought for women’s rights, and leftists pressed for workers’ rights. At the same time, these groups were challenged by religious conservatives, nativists, white supremacists, and supporters of anti-Semitism and European fascism. In 1920, with one constitutional amendment, Americans granted women the right to vote, and with another they sought to impose strict Christian values by the prohibition of alcohol. Affordable cars, paved roads, airplanes, and telephones brought citizens closer together, as Congress began to enact increasingly restrictive immigration laws, which culminated in the rabidly anti-Asian Immigration Act of 1924.
Lippmann was a witness to this push and pull, and his theory of stereotypes was a timely warning. A change in the way information was produced and consumed was approaching, and its impact would be enormous. If stereotypes were gestalts that could be created by simulated and reproduced experiences, then film, sound recording, and photography all carried great risk.
While Lippmann sought to alert his readers to such danger, others found different inspiration in his work. A graduate student in applied psychology named George Gallup began to measure public views. Sigmund Freud’s American nephew, Edward Bernays, read Public Opinion and then created the first public relations business: a suggestible public who were offered the right stereotypes might be led toward socially beneficial waters and made to drink. And in Germany, a philologist, having just received his doctorate from the University of Heidelberg, became deeply interested in Bernays and American ideas on public relations. His name was Josef Goebbels.
Propagandists could now reach far beyond a row of pews or a Saturday fairground. Visual and audio representations of strangers had already begun to affect the citizenry, and only more of these mediated experiences were to come. The danger that lay ahead was dramatized by D. W. Griffith’s blockbuster film, The Birth of a Nation. Technically brilliant and morally heinous, this 1915 film, based on the novel The Clansman, captivated audiences, who dizzily exited the theater filled with ugly visions of African Americans. The film itself was a justification of Jim Crow laws, and the taking back of the South by white supremacists after the Civil War. President Woodrow Wilson, who instituted Jim Crow rules in the nation’s capital, made it the first film ever screened at the White House. The box office receipts were immense, over sixteen million dollars. The Birth of a Nation’s success showcased a dangerous new power to manipulate human cognition through “derivative” experience. That the director, a grandiose racist, would dare to follow up his widely criticized film with another entitled Intolerance—an epic that made Griffith himself the voice of toleration—only heightened concern that the movies held the capacity to distort reality and establish delusions that might control the public as never before.
The Birth of a Nation poster, 1915
Lippmann’s theory of stereotypes emerged as cinema became a worldwide form of entertainment. Unlike opera or theater, movies were more affordable, reached a broader swatch of society, and could be shown anywhere, anytime. In Germany, France, the Soviet Union, and Japan, national cinemas stocked up on stereotypes of their rivals. In America, the film industry was particularly obsessed with racial stereotypes. Nearly every great technical advance in Hollywood was accompanied by derogatory images of African Americans. In 1907, the first animated film, Humorous Phases of a Funny Face, employed a joke about “coons.” The most expensive film yet made, the aforementioned The Birth of a Nation, banked on stereotypes of rapacious Black men. Sound came to the movies wrapped in racism: The Jazz Singer, a 1927 picture, featured Al Jolson in blackface calling for his “Mammy.” Steamboat Willie, the first sound-synchronized cartoon, was released a year later by Disney, and it too leaned on caricatures of Blackness.
Racial and ethnic minorities were rarely the main Hollywood characters, but more often were peripheral, intended for a cheap laugh, to evoke an exotic locale, or to spark effects like lust or contempt. Stereotypes, filmmakers understood, provided a whole backstory without any work. Viewers had these narratives preloaded in their heads: Aunt Jemima flipped pancakes, the happy barefoot Black child danced, the maternal maid tended to the white heiress, the watermelon-eating hick slobbered, while nearby the sleepy do-nothing somehow alternated with the sexually violent beast. Americans knew these … well, not people, but stereotypes. Little was required to make them come “alive” on the screen.
Animated cartoons made stereotypes even harder to miss. These were stocked with heroes, rascals, brutes, idiots, con men, and sexpots, each revealed with a few strokes of the pen. In “Uncle Tom’s Crabbin’,” the creators of the 1919 animated cartoon “Felix the Cat” took viewers down South to visit Blacks and their slothful lives. “Merrie Melodies” made a string of comic cartoons like “Jungle Jitters” and “Hittin’ the Trail for Hallelujah Land.” “Looney Tunes” created a character called “Bosco,” ambiguous as a species but clear in “Congo Jazz” and other shorts as a send-up of African Americans. Betty Boop’s “Bamboo Isle” used minstrel gags. Foreigners also provided easy laughs. In “Felix the Cat Goes to China,” “Japanicky,” or “Arabantics,” Felix gratified his viewers’ biases. The motto for these storytellers might have been “nothing strange not made familiar.”
Students of the stereotype began to comb through fiction and journalism, advertising and art, but film seemed to be the leading offender. This attraction was perhaps in part born of the medium. The constraints of silent movies could be daunting; the famed French filmmaker Abel Gance in 1927 argued that film representation was a bare form of hieroglyphics. The expense of moviemaking also meant that every second counted. Directors were forced to swiftly create recognizable characters. So why not steal powerful symbols from their culture and use what the German critic Walter Benjamin called an unconscious optics? In the early years of cinema, such cheap characterizations were combined with the power of the big screen—with its lighting tricks, close-ups, and slow-motion—to make a dazzling impact. Critics warned that no language had yet emerged to articulate what was happening to viewers as they took in the action.
Synchronized sound should have allowed movies to move beyond some technical limits; that it did not, however, showed that the problems were never merely technical. Filmmakers unwittingly relied on stereotypes because they themselves were equally preoccupied by them. For example, in the 1921 blockbuster The Sheik, starring Rudolph Valentino, the heart-throb at one point exclaimed, with a bug-eyed look, “When an Arab sees a woman that he wants he takes her!” And yet Ahmad was a kind kidnapper who abducted Lady Diana to win her heart. The dissonance created by casting the noble Valentino as an evil Arab was resolved in the end, when viewers learned near the finale—phew!—that the sheik was not an Arab at all, but rather a mix of British and Spanish. When his parents died, he had been adopted. The frisson of all this was so delightful that the studio quickly lined up their sequel, The Son of the Sheik.
As the lights dimmed in the theater palace, a world of unintelligible complexity, populated by immense differences, was transformed into an entertaining spectacle. Films, one critic declared, were “the most formidable engine of mass control the world had seen.” Uncritical movie watching, he wrote, was akin to a psychology experiment, in which derogatory and frightening stereotypes were created or reinforced.
Stereotypes performed a homogenizing function. If you got the joke—and the joke was so crude, it was hard not to get it—you were welcomed in as one of us. Lippmann himself proposed that tribal identities were nothing more than a set of shared stereotypes. He scoffed at the so-called French soul or Chinese psychology or Bolshevik character. There have been “oceans of loose talk about collective minds, national souls, and race psychology,” but these were nothing but minds infiltrated by exactly the same stereotypes. If John Watson’s phobics were ready to leap at the first stranger in an alley, Walter Lippmann’s were huddled together, certain of their own place in the world thanks to crude typologies of others.
This then was one answer to the sociologist Emory Bogardus’s conundrum, the one he faced when he realized that many Americans hated groups they never had a traumatizing experience with or had even encountered. One didn’t need to know a Mexican to hate one. One could simply exist in a community in which stereotypes of vicious Mexicans were held. Behaviorist relearning, exposure, and habituation, therefore, would not always work, because a shared stereotype offered its own rewards. Undoing all this would be difficult, even dangerous, for Lippmann warned that challenging someone’s stereotypes felt like an assault on their “universe.” These beliefs meant that “[w]e feel at home there. We fit in. We are members.” This was not just fast thinking in a tumbling, whirring world; it was a protected form of cognition that sorted out friend from foe. As Lippmann stated:
And since my moral system rests on my accepted version of the facts, he who denies either my moral judgment or my version of the facts, is to me perverse, alien, dangerous. How shall I account for him? The opponent has always to be explained, and the last explanation that we ever look for is that he sees a different set of facts.… It is only when we are in the habit of recognizing our opinion as a partial experience seen through our stereotypes that we become truly tolerant of an opponent. Without this habit, we believe in the absolutism of our own vision, and consequently in the treacherous character of all opposition.
IN THE Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, a reviewer proclaimed that the stereotype was the first great advance in Western political philosophy since John Locke. Research projects were launched, statistics began to be collected, and analyses of the effects of stereotypes were undertaken. Even the proud Nobel laureate Ivan Pavlov waved the white flag. After long rebuffing challenges from Gestalt psychologists, in 1930 the discoverer of the conditioned reflex added a cognitive element to his model, something that mediated between outer stimulus and behavioral response. He called them “dynamic stereotypes.”
In 1926, the first American research trials on stereotypes were conducted by Stuart Rice, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Rice recruited 258 Dartmouth students and 31 members of a Vermont grange to look at newspaper photos of nine white men—a financier, a prime minister, a Bolshevik, and a bootlegger, among others. Who were these men and what did they do? the researchers asked. The results confirmed the hypothesis that class and ethnic stereotypes led to gross errors. In 1926, the journal Social Forces explored the way stereotypes rationalized the subjugation of the Negro. Experimenters asked one hundred Princeton students to rank ten ethnic groups based on their preference and group characteristics, amply demonstrating racial prejudice based on stereotypes. Pedagogues asked how stereotypes infiltrated a child’s mind. Kimball Young, the freethinking grandson of Mormon founder Brigham Young, focused on how a child, oppressed by parental dos and don’ts, became angry and impulsive and then, when a negative stereotype appeared, latched on to it. In this way, he was stirred into “violent emotional attitudes and stereotypes toward the Negro or the Oriental or the immigrant.”
Some resisted this rush to apply stereotypes to America’s social problems. Their position had been previewed by the president of Princeton University, John Grier Hibben, in his 1911 essay “A Defence of Prejudice.” If all thinking relied on prejudice, then surely it alone could not be the cause of pogroms and lynchings. Stereotypes, then, would be merely thinking shortcuts, bound to include errors in generalization. Big deal. Humans did it all the time.
There was something to this rejoinder. For the theory of the stereotype did not address a critical element, the emotion, that is the “phobos” in xenophobia. To integrate that element, sociologists turned to Georg Simmel.
