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Market Research and the American Consumer Unconscious, 1933-1976 by Joseph Malherek BA I

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Market Research and the American Consumer Unconscious, 1933-1976 by Joseph Malherek BA I Émigré Scientists of the Quotidian: Market Research and the American Consumer Unconscious, 1933-1976 by Joseph Malherek B.A. in Political Science and Cultural Studies, May 2002, University of Minnesota M.A. in American Studies, May 2009, George Washington University A Dissertation submitted to The Faculty of The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy August 31, 2015 Dissertation directed by Joseph Kip Kosek Associate Professor of American Studies The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University certifies that Joseph Malherek has passed the Final Examination for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy as of May 22, 2015. This is the final and approved form of the dissertation. Émigré Scientists of the Quotidian: Market Research and the American Consumer Unconscious, 1933-1976 Joseph Malherek Dissertation Research Committee: Joseph Kip Kosek, Associate Professor of American Studies, Dissertation Director Chad Heap, Associate Professor of American Studies, Committee Member Elisabeth Anker, Associate Professor of American Studies, Committee Member ii © Copyright by Joseph Malherek All rights reserved iii Acknowledgments I would like to thank my advisor, Joseph Kip Kosek, as well as the members of my dissertation committee, Chad Heap and Elisabeth Anker, for their guidance, support, patience, and wisdom over the years it has taken to complete this project. I would also like to thank the faculty readers of my dissertation, Dara Orenstein and Andrew Zimmerman, who offered helpful comments and made the dissertation defense a lively and productive meeting. The dissertation could not have been completed without research and writing fellowships from the following organizations: the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes (the scholarship foundation of the German government), which supported me with a Leo Baeck Fellowship; the Botstiber Institute for Austrian-American Studies; and the Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society at the Hagley Museum and Library, which supported me with a Henry Belin du Pont Dissertation Fellowship. I also received research grants from the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming, Columbia University Libraries, the Hagley Museum and Library, and the Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising and Marketing History at Duke University. I am also grateful for several years of summer research funding from the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences at George Washington University. Finally, I would like to thank my wife, Josie Torres Barth, for her constant encouragement and stimulating ideas. iv Abstract of Dissertation “Émigré Scientists of the Quotidian: Market Research and the American Consumer Unconscious, 1933-1976” This dissertation is a transnational intellectual and cultural history that examines the role played by a cohort of Central European market researchers and designers in the creation of modern American consumer culture. Each of four principal figures I consider —Paul Lazarsfeld, Ernest Dichter, Walter Landor, and Victor Gruen—was a German- speaking Jew who fled the rise of Nazism in the 1930s and established a very successful career in the United States. Although they all contributed their specialized knowledge and skills to the marketing strategies of American, consumer-oriented businesses, they worked in different fields: Lazarsfeld was a sociologist who practiced his technique, developed his methodologies, and supported his academic institutes by doing market research; Dichter was a psychologist who offered a kind of Freudian psychoanalysis as a consulting service for businesses and advertising agencies; Landor was an industrial designer and graphic artist who created attractive packages for consumer products; and Gruen was an architect who first imagined the suburban shopping center as a pedestrian space with malls and courts that fostered community as much as it facilitated commerce. Lazarsfeld, Dichter, and Gruen were from Vienna, which, in the course of their lifetimes, transformed from a liberalized imperial capital, to a hotbed of social democracy, to an outpost of fascism. Landor, meanwhile, was from Munich, the other city in which Adolf Hitler developed a virulent anti-Semitism that would have such profound consequences in the lives of these Jewish professionals, and for the world. While the work of Lazarsfeld and Dichter influenced the strategies of marketers, Gruen and Landor labored to produce the objects and physical environments that were v the material manifestation of postwar consumerism. Their contributions to the material culture of American consumer capitalism grew out of the leftist ideology of Austro- Marxism, the radical experiment in social democracy that characterized interwar Vienna, transnational trends in empirical sociology, the popularization of Freudian psychoanalysis, the modernist aesthetic ethos of the German Bauhaus movement, and the ideal of cosmopolitan internationalism that motivated many German-speaking Jewish intellectuals in the capitals of Central Europe. This dissertation explores the surprising ways in which a cohort of émigrés integrated these Continental ideas and aesthetic sensibilities into the day-to-day operation of the burgeoning consumer economy of postwar America. Relative to existing scholarship, which is vexed by the problem of consumer agency and segregated into several historical genres, this thesis uses documents of the work of market researchers and designers to explain the complexity of consumers’ behaviors and motivations, and it synthesizes the methods of intellectual, business, and cultural history in the style of the new history of capitalism. My research shows that, from a business perspective, consumers’ choices and behaviors were never taken for granted; instead, consumers were intensely studied and even feared for their whims and unpredictability. vi Table of Contents Acknowledgments iv Abstract of Dissertation v Introduction 1 Part I: The Viennese Origins of Motivational Research Chapter 1: Émigré Scientists of the Quotidian: The Interwar Years 30 Chapter 2: Psychological Probes and Social Engineering through Market 114 Research Part II: Marketing and Mass Culture in the Postwar Years Chapter 3: The Origins of the Postwar Mass Culture and Mass Society Debates 200 in Commercial Market Research Chapter 4: The Segmentation of the Mass Market 253 Part III: Architecture and Design, from Central Europe to the American Suburbs Chapter 5: Packaging Personality: Walter Landor and Consumer Product 329 Design in Postwar America Chapter 6: An Austro-Marxist in American Suburbia: Shopping Mall Architect 372 Victor Gruen and the Ideology of Planning Conclusion 475 Bibliography: Primary Sources 481 Bibliography: Secondary Sources 488 vii Introduction This dissertation is a transnational intellectual and cultural history that examines the role played by a cohort of Central European market researchers and designers in the creation of modern American consumer culture. Each of four principal figures I consider —Paul Lazarsfeld, Ernest Dichter, Walter Landor, and Victor Gruen—was a German- speaking Jew who fled the rise of Nazism in the 1930s and established a very successful career in the United States. Although they all contributed their specialized knowledge and skills to the marketing strategies of American, consumer-oriented businesses, they worked in different fields: Lazarsfeld was a sociologist who practiced his technique, developed his methodologies, and supported his academic institutes by doing market research; Dichter was a psychologist who offered a kind of Freudian psychoanalysis as a consulting service for businesses and advertising agencies; Landor was an industrial designer and graphic artist who created attractive packages for consumer products; and Gruen was an architect who first imagined the suburban shopping center as a pedestrian space with malls and courts that fostered community as much as it facilitated commerce. Lazarsfeld, Dichter, and Gruen were from Vienna, which, in the course of their lifetimes, transformed from a liberalized imperial capital, to a hotbed of social democracy, to an outpost of fascism. Landor, meanwhile, was from Munich, the other city in which Adolf Hitler developed a virulent anti-Semitism that would have such profound consequences in the lives of these Jewish professionals, and for the world. The historical context that shaped the ideals of these entrepreneurial émigrés— defined by world wars, radical experiments in social democracy, a socially-conscious modern architecture, anti-Semitism, and the rise of Nazism that forced their emigration— 1 was both the catalyst and intellectual foundation for their contributions to postwar consumer capitalism in the United States. I argue that, through their work, these exiled social scientists and designers served as vehicles for the incorporation of the Continental ideas of psychoanalysis, Bauhaus modernism, Austro-Marxism, and social democracy into to the practical strategies of American businesses operating under the banner of “free enterprise.” The immigration of these Jewish intellectual-professionals in the interwar period thus helped to create the commercial conditions for postwar, Keynesian initiatives to nurture a national, mass market; and the emergence of psychoanalysis as a technique of market research made possible division of that market into segments that transcended traditional
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