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Can, adl.'a Robert E. Park's theory of newspapers and news.

Andrew McLeliand

Graduate Program in Communications McGili University, Montréal

March,1995

A Thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Master of Arts.

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Canada Robert E. Park's theory of newspapers and news.

Contents.

Abstract: page i.

Chapter one: Robert E. Park's theùry of mass communications: page 1.

Chapter two: Park's theory of immigrant newspapers: page 35.

Chapter three: news and public opinion: page 62.

Chapter four: pragmatic and traditional interaction in Park's work: page 91.

Works cited: works by Robert E. Park: page 114.

Works cited: secondary sources: page 117. Abstract.

The essay e)(amines Robert E. Park's ttleory of the raie news and newspapers have in processes of social interaction, and of the mie they consequently play in the constitution of society. Park's theoretical work is often cited for its appreciation of the dynamic aspects of social interaction. This perspective is evident in his analysis of news and newspapers.

ln The Immigrant Press and its Control (1922), Park examined how immigrant groups responded ta the experience of immigration and how their

ne..'spapers contributed to that response. Ethnie newspapers served to preserve traditions and solidarity, but at the same time insinuated American practices and

values and advanced the assimilation of their readership. Park saw the papers as

allowing immigrant groups ta engage in a process of cultural reformation; they

pravided a means by which immigrant groups could bring their culture into accord

with the society surrounding them.

Park adopted fram American pragmatism a definition of pragmatic or

'rational' social interaction and applied it ta interaction over news. Rationality in this

sense is a capacity to understand others' motives or goals, and a capacity ta

speculate about the conditions and consequences of actions. It is primarily an

attitude of detachment, where personal beliefs and interests are suspended. John

Dewey contrasted pragmatic interaction ta interaction clominated by adherence ta

tradition. For Park, attention ta newspapers and discussion of news tended not ta

favour adherence ta tradition, but encouraged a prag~1atic or rational attitude. In ii articles on news and public opinion written in the 1940's, Park saw attention to news as a pot,'r'tial threat to belief systems and as a source of social conflict.

Challenges to fundamental values lead to blind, defensive reactions and the behavior propel' to a ·crowd'.

ln his earlier work on immigrant newspapers, conflict attending immigration led to efforts to accommodate new social realities, with newspapers as the means of building consensus. Later, in his articles on news and public opinion, conflict and loss of solidarity were seen as permanent features of modern social Iife, exacerbated by organs of mass communication. In Park's work, newspapers and news could lead to both integration and disintegration of community.

L'essai traite de la théorie de Robert E. Park sur la façon dont les nouvelles et les journaux interviennent dans des processus d'interactions sociales et, par conséquent, du rôle que les nouvelles et les journaux jouent dans la constitution d'une société. Le travail théorique de Park est souvent cité en ce qui a trait à l'appréciation qu'il porte aux aspects dynamiques des interactions sociales. Cette perspective est mise en évidence dans son analyse des nouvelles et des journaux.

Dans The Immigrant Press and its Control (1922), Park a analysé comment des groupes d'immigrants ont réagi à l'expérience de l'immigration et comment les journaux ont contribué à cette réaction. Les journaux ethniques ont aidé à preserver les traditions et la solidarité tout en permettant, de façon indirecte, iii l'intégration aux pratiques et valeurs américaines et da ce fait même, on participé

à l'assimil'ation de leurs lecteurs. Park considérait les journaux comme des

éléments permettant à des groupes d'immigrants de s'engager dans un processus

de restructuration culturelle. Ils fournissaient un moyen au travers duquel des

groupes d'immigrants faisaient concorder leur propre culture à celle qui les

entourait.

Park a tiré du pragmatisme américain une définition de l'interaction sociale

pragmatique ou 'rationelle' et l'a appliquée à l'interaction des nouvelles. La

rationalité dans ce sens est la capacité de comprendre les buts et les mobiles des

autres ainsi que la capacité de s'interroger sur les conditions et conséquences des

actions. C'est avant tout une attitude de détachement où les croyances et intérêts

personnels sont exclus. John Dewey a opposé l'interaction pragmatique à

l'interaction dominée par l'adhérence à la tradition. Pour Park, l'attention portée

aux journaux ainsi qu'à la discussion des nouvelles n'avait pas tendance à

favoriser l'adhérence à la tradition mais plutôt, à encourager une attitude

pragmatique ou rationnelle. Dans les articles écrits dans les années 40 concernant

les nouvelles et l'opinion publique, Park considérait l'attention portée aux nouvelles

comme une menace potentielle aux systémes de croyances ainsi qu'une source

de conflit social. Les remises en question des valeurs fondamentales pouvaient

conduire à des réactions défensives aveugles, de tels comportements étant

propres à une 'foule'. • iv

Dans son travail sur les journaux ethniques, les conflits auxquels fait face l'immigration ont conduit à des efforts visant à une adaptation aux nouvelles réalités sociales, avec les journaux comme moyen d'atteindre un consensus. Plus tard, dans les articles écrits dans les années 40, le conflit et la perte de solidarité

étaient perçus comme des caractéristiques permanents de la vie sociale moderne exacerbés par les organismes de communication de masse. Dans le travail de

Park, les journaux et les nouvelles pouvaient à la fois mener a l'intégration ou la desintégration de la communauté. Chapter one: Robert E. Park's theory of mass communications.

Park's writings and focus.

Lewis Coser says that Robert Park, teaching at the beginnings of sociology as ascientific discipline, made two substantial contributions to his field: the direction of students to concrete research, and the development of theory at new levels of sophistication (Coser, 1971: 383).

Park's contributions to theory are contained in various articles and pamphlets he published from the 191 O's to the 1940's, and in An Introduction to the Science of Sociology, a sourcebook first published in 1921 which contains extensive classification and interrelation of its materials. Most of his articles were collected by Everett Hughes in three volumes in the early fifties. Some of the headings

Hughes chose as most reflective of Park's interests were race, collective behaviour, human ecology, culture, news and opinion, and sociology and modern society. The last two categories, newspapers and modern society, were also featured prominently in the book Park published in 1922, The Immigrant Press and its Control. The cultural adaptation of ethnie and racial groups to modern, largely urban, society is the concern of the book which Park abetted W.1. Thomas in getting published in 1921, ald World Traits Transplanted. Park's doctoral thesis,

'Masse und Publikum', written in 1904, was translated and published in 1962 as

The Crowd and the Public. Finally, Ralph H. Turner selected some important 2 theoretical articles of Park's in 1967 under the title, Robert E. Park on Social

Control and Collective Behaviour, subjects Turner takes as illustrati'le of Park's approach to sociology, how it is that behaviour can be collective and therefore under a 'social' control (Turner, 1967: x-xi).

Focus of the essay.

The object of this essay is to examine Park's theory of the role news and newspapers have in pracesses of social interaction, and of the raie news and newspapers consequently play in the constitution of society. Park's theoretical work is often cited as being distinctive because of his appreciation for the dynamic and subjective aspects of social life. In particular, this essay examines the ways in which Park brought this appreciation io his analysis of news and newspapers.

Ralph Turner says that the 'two prime objectives' of Park's sociology were the description of 'meaning and process' (Turner, 1967: xxi). Fred Matthews finds

Park's sociology distinctive in its portrayal of the 'subjectivity and relativity' of human existence, and in its 'orientation to process rather than structure'

(Matthews,1977: 134). It has been suggested that this distinction is due to two related sets of concepts utilized in his work: sociological theories of interaction, derived in part from Georg Simmel (Matthews,1977: 48; Madoo-Lengerman, 1988:

365-367), and fram C.H. Cooley and George H. Mead (Matthews, 1977: 149), and conceptions of the social nature of consciousness, derived from the current of thought known as American pragmatism, especially as represented by William 3 James and John Dewey (Lai, 1990: 88; Coser, 197î: 373). This confluence of

pragmatism and interaction is aiso identified with two col!eagues and mentors of

Park's at the University of Chicago's Department of Sociology, Albion Small and

W. 1. Thomas (Matthews, 1977: 96; Mellor, 1972: 222-228). Both sets of ideas

were used by Park in emphasizing the role of communication in social relations,

developed in his theory of collective behaviour. The question of what role the

newspaper medium plays in social organization was answered by Park within the

context of his interactionist, pragmatist theory of communication and collective

behaviour.

For Park, col!ective behaviour was primarily communicative interaction,

where individuals came to hold cultural values in common and act in concert. In

communicative interaction, also, cultural values were themselves developed and

changed. As such, collective behaviour engendered social control, through the

evolution and dissemination of a normative order and the contribution to organized

social behaviour such an order makes. Park was interested in the formative

powers of communication and the conditions under which such powers operated.

News and newspapers were, for Park, types of communicative interaction. News

was the circulation of reports of events within a community, which process could

have specific social consequences. Newspapers were institutions servicing this

process, and affecting it by promoting the circulation of certain forms of news. As

types of communicative interaction, news and newspapers engendered typical • sorts of social control and cultural change. And they were felt by Park ta be 4 characteristically modern forms of communicative interaction, which had

cOJ'tributed to the development of modern forms of social control.

The nature of Park's concern with modern society and communication links

him to other theorists of his era such as John Dewey and C. H. Cooley; ail three

are held by Daniel Czitrom to be 'pioneers' in the field of mass communications

studies in America (Czitrom, 1982: 117). Of special interest is the contention that

their concerns evince a particular approach to the study of mass communications:

what James W. Carey calls a 'cultural view of communications', where

communication is seen as the fabrication of cultural meanings and the creation of

a community (Carey, 1975: 10). For Hanno Hardt, Park and other American social

theorists Iinked wilh pragmatism accepted that communication contributed

substantially to the constitution of a specifically modern society and culture; this

view he relates ta a shared 'cultural historical' perspective derived from German

social theory (Hardt, 1988: 560-562). Park's interest in news and newspapers,

then, is attributable ta the theoretical view he held of social organization, sa that

he approached the task of understanding modern society and culture as a task of

understanding modern media of communication. Park's theoretical work on news

and newspapers, issuing from his pragmatist, interactionist view of collective

behaviour, was conjoined with broader concerns about the nature of modern

American society which he shared with a number of his contemporaries.

Preliminary ta the examination of Park's work on news and newspapers, • these two areas will be clarified: Park's theory of interaction and collective 5 behaviour, and Park's representation of the nature of modern American society.

It is intended ta isolate the key themes under which Park's work on the American press is ta be examined.

Park's theory of interaction and collective behaviour.

1. Interaction.

Park's ttleory of interaction and collective behaviour was premised on the concept of human interaction generating a common perspective, embodied in cultural forms, from which perspective issued important features of social groups and their organization. Culture was understood by Park as the result of interaction, and was liable ta continued revision and interpretation as interaction itself continued (Park, 1927a: 15-18). A second important premise was that specifie conditions could constrain or could enable the progress of interaction, and could therefore enter into processes of cultural formation in significant ways (Park, 1921 :

508-509). Along with interaction, the career of various cultural forms, used and reformed in interaction, provides a basic focus for Park's work, the 'historical and situational evolution' of different forms of social control (Turner, 1967: xv).

Park had a sense of interaction as dynamic reciprocity, which has been attributed ta the influence of Georg Simmel, under whom Park studied in Germany.

For bath, interaction was an on going balance and exchange, existing in 'the temporary aggregation of guests in a hotel', as weil as in 'the intimate bond of a 6 medieval gui Id' (Simmel, 1898: 348). Park attempted to unite this idea of dynamic interaction with a conception of a stable moral order, or established, regulative social norms that govern behaviour, adopted from Emile Durkheim and W.G.

Sumner (Levine, 1971: lii-liii).

Barbara Baillis Lai points out that subjectivity, andmutual stimulation and response, were for Park basic elements of social relations, and he employed an idea of social control very similar to that of George H. Mead: individuais willingly participated or engaged in a 'subjective world of meaning and value', and submitted in this way to social control. She takes the most significant aspect of

Park's theory to be its appreciation for 'the sociological importance of affective and sentimental cultural bonds' (Lai, 1990: 4). Park's term for a normative order, the moral order, incorporates as essential the valorization and recognition of a subject.

The foundation of group Iife is moral consensus, or, in a term which emphasizes a commitment to a common destiny, solidarity. And Park was centrally interested in sentimental groups, such as ethnie groups, which provided what he considered to be a subjectively needed identity to their members.

Collective behaviourwas, for Park, interaction within shared understandings and commitments. Group Iife occurs when individuals are subject to and act within a cultural mode of understanding, a 'collective imagery' (ibid: 4). Continuing communicative interaction generates common patterns, or forms of association, and gradually composes these into a coherent organization. Social organization is in effect formalized interaction. Interaction stabilizes as it comes to embody and 7 reiterate commonly recognized values, through individuals taking on roles and acting out a collective imagery. Interaction becomes social control in this case, the willing observance of proprieties, and the affirmation of the moral valuations which lie behind those proprieties.

ln his overview of Park's theory, Ralph Turner points out that social control commonly means the control of individuals via cultural imperatives. Park's general approach did not take culture to be inherently repressive nor model it as an automatic control mechanism. Rather, culture was a productive avenue of individual expression, and was subject to modifications according to the situation

(Turner, 1967: xi). Park's peculiar focus was on interaction as a group phenomenon, on 'patterns of interaction' 'on a large scale' (ibid: xv). Park's work on collective behaviour was to generalize and typify the processes or characteristic patterns social interaction followed on the level of the group, taking as the basic process involved communication. Communication is the medium of interaction in so far as it contains in its vocabulary forms of association and allows them to be transmitted and adjusted or reformed. Interaction, occurring via forms, can at the same time progressively alter them.

For Park, a moral arder was an authoritative cultural tradition, which evolved as tradition was altered in interaction (Park, 1937: 181). The impact of news and newspapers on social organization was judged in terms of their impact on this process of cultural change (Park, 194Db: 86). Park's study of news involved questions of the sort of association and social control it provided. The circulation 8 of news is a type of collective behaviour, a particular process of interaction, promoting certain sorts of group Iife and social control. Newspapers create a forum for group communication, contributing in specifie ways to the maintenance and adjustment of a group's culture, a process exemplified in a paper's style and content. This role is played by the foreign language press for immigrant groups, and Park saw the same collective process behind the newspapers addressing the mixed, new urban working classes.

2. Collective behaviour.

Park's theory of collective behaviour uses assumptions derived from three areas: ideas of the early 'crowd theorists' such as Gustave Le Bon and Gabriel

Tarde, and adumbrated first by Park in his doctoral thesis, The Crowd and the

Public (1904) ; an analogy Iikening society to an organism operating in its habitat; and a perspective on culture derived from American pragmatism. Park used these assumptions in his attempt to model the fluid network of mutual support and influence engendered by communicative interaction, and the ways in which it determines behaviour in both the short and long term.

The basic sociological phenomenon which The Crowd and the Public (1904) examined was the conformity of individuals belonging to a group, the fact that they shared a complex of beliefs, attitudes, and mannerisms. Park accepted that this was a result of 'reciprocal interaction', individuals mutually influencing each other's thought and feeling, and achieving a common emotional and psychological 9 disposition. The individual in society takes on traits of personality and submerges

other potentials by communication; communication has the effect of developing

some proclivities and inhibiting cthers and imposing on the individual social control.

The essence of the phenomenon is expressed in Gustave Le Bon's idea of the

'psychological crowd', a group existing together because of similar psychological

consequences engendered in each individual through interaction. The emotional

and intellectual effects of contact are conformity (Park, 1904: 12-18).

The specific aspects of the homogeneity of a group, how many differences

should give way to a single unity, is explained through the analogy of society being

like an organism. The analogy unites the work of Auguste Comte, Herbert

Spencer, and Emile Durkheim (Matthews, 1977: 36-40). It defines a discrete

organism as made up of differentiated members (organs) which are yet mutually

supportive or functionally integrated within the whole (the organism). Society, like

an organism, is made up of interdependent parts in a definite organization. An

organism acts as a whole because its various organs are coordinated. But it is the

actions an organism must perform which have dictated this coordination. The

internai arrangement of the parts of an organism is explained as their orientation

to the performance of specific actions. An organism lodS a 'teleological unity' (Park,

1904: 22).

ln An Introduction to the Science of Sociology (1921), Park followed

Auguste Comte in asserting that the principle behind social organization is the • existence of a 'consensus', or a common value system. But consensus is the 10

reflection of a common purpose, of cooperation in the achievement of an aim, and

is built through 'corporate action'. The idea of the crcwd was relevant to the

organism analogy in so far as a crowd was conceived of as a collection of

individuals who come together, interact, and then as a whole perform some

corporate action. The crowd develops a common purpose, and demonstrates,

therefore, how reciprocal interaction develops consensus and coordination in a

group.

Park develops his analogy of collective behaviour as Iike an organism in two

articles, 'Human nature and collective behaviour' (1927a), and 'Human nature,

attitudes, and the mores' (1931 a). When any organism acts, it responds to a

stimulus in its environment. It can act because its various organs are fully

Integratedas a result of its biological evolution within a habitat. In individual human

behaviour, however, this coordination is not automatic or instinctive but occurs as

a result of subjective emotional and intellectual deliberations, which process of

coordination is expressedin incidental behaviour (Park, 1931a: 270-274). But

because they can be expressed and therefore responded to, individual responses

are also involved in a social period of coordination; they are involved, in fact, in a

process of communicative interaction. Tlle result is an occasion of collective

deliberation, or coordination of a social organism. In this collective deliberation,

Park sees the creation of consensus and cooperation in a group occurring (Park,

1931 a: 282). By various communicative gestures, individuals 'invade one another's • lives and participate one with another in their efforts to direct, control and give 11 expression to their own conflicting impulses'. In attention to the expressions of

others, a collective response to conditions in the environ ment develops. A group

achieves a common purpose as individuals come to share common attitudes The

result may be a sustained 'action pattern', as the coordination of collective

behaviour develops and becomes fixed in institutions and other social structures

of the social organism (Park, 1927a: 15-18). Collective behaviour was, for Park,

this study of corporate action, and basic to sociology. He distanced himself trom

the 'nomina'ism' of a sociology emphasizing individual aims, preferring instead a

'collective psychology' of the 'group mind' (Park, 1921: 41-42).

An emphasis on action, therefore, is used in the organism analogy to

explain that a group achieves consensus by being directed to some practical

achievement. What Park meant concretely by 'corporate action', however, is not

too clear in his writings, but it seems to be informed by the idea of practical activity

as developed in American pragmatism. Dmitri Shalin writes that the main premise

of pragmatism was that thought was tied to aetivity in a concrete environment.

Reality for William James, for example, was 'practical reality'; things exist not just

as they are perceived but as they are acted upon and implicated in human

purposes. The flux of indeterminate sense perceptions is made determinate or

made sense of as an individual attempts to deal with situations in an environment.

This idea found a home in interactionist sociology, as Park's work shows, in the

conception that the determination or definition ot a situation is a group process. • Groups detine for themselves their own reality; they create an intelleetual and 12 emotional context or understanding through which both their environ ment and their place and conduct within that environ ment makes sense. The universe of discourse constructed by any group is, however, unstable, subject to variations both in empirical reality and in the processes of cognition and communication by which the universe of discourse is maintained and applied (Shalin, 1986: 10-13).

According to Andrew Feffer, instability was conceived of as social conflict in the work of George H. Mead and John Dewey. When normal conduct is frustrated, frustration is expressed and a search for solutions undertaken.

Difficulties appear as departures from the normal, leading to expressions of frustration, Interpretations, and oppositions. The situation becomes one of different possible meanings and purposes, and therefore of a conflict of views. The variety of interpersonal exchange which ensues, in discussions, arguments, even in indifference, can be seen as efforts to reconcile oppositions and as a search for consensus. In so far as difficulties and conflict necessitate communicative interaction, they are grounds for an expansion of social cooperation and interdependence (Feffer, 1990: 238-249). In John Dewey's work, social groups provided opportunities for 8 resolution of difficulties; problems were social in the fundamental sense that both their definition and their resolution depended on communication and cooperation with others (Dewey, 1922: 314-316).

Park's theory of collective behaviour is in severai essentials a pragmatist view of social interaction. Perceived difficulty leads to a tension that is collective, manifested in attention to expressions of anxiety and to various articulations of 13 difficulty. In this way, problems are defined and rEJsolutions sought for. Eventually

resolutions become habituai and contained in tradition, in which cultural forms the

consènsus of a group is embodied and inculcated in the young. Socialization into

the cultural forms of a group is another case of reciprocal interaction determining

individual psychology. By attention to the expressions of others, individuals are

initiated into the affections, discipline, and purposes proper to their group. Park's

theory of collective behaviour can be seen a conceptualizing communication as an

extended process of socialization and iniHation, but where the process of

socialization or involvement with others can generate new cultural forms. This is

especially the case when new, anomalous situations are confronted, and new

consensual purpose develops (Park, 1929: 180-181).

Park applied his theory of collective behaviour to news and newspapers by

seeing interest in news as creating 'public attention'. Through news, and informai

discussion of it, a group as a whole could be oriented to its environment. It is when

the attention of ail is directed to a situation that a collective response to that

situation develops. The circulation of news within a group is in principle a process

of collective attention and deliberation, and so the idea of the environment which

any individual has is a reflection of communicative interaction with others. News

primarily concerns anomalous situations and unexpected developments which have

as yet no given or determinate social meaning. Because it surprises and causes

tension, news leads to discussion and interpretation, and to a process of

coordination within a group. Thus communication of news is a means for • individualsto respond to their environment as members of a group. 14

3. Conditions affecting collective behaviour.

ln defining, as Ralph Turner says, the historical and situational evolution of

forms of social control, the scope of Park's study of communication as a process

of group coordination included attention to the conditions under which it occurs.

Park attempted to isolate and classify factors of the environment which stimulate

and then constrain the course of communicatio:'1, and thus to clarify ways in which

features of the environment can affect the social order over time. Park's

development of the organism analogy in his theory of collective behaviour isolates

two broad categories of conditions: those affecting communication and those

occasioning communication. The first might be considered material constraints,

the simplest, for example, being factors of demography and mobility which

determine the extent and duration of contact. The second would be those

environmental conditions which elicit actual social responses, the anomalies which

concentrate the attention and response of a group. Discontinuous physical contact,

for example, is made up for by written correspondence or, notably, by familiar

newspapers of the type seen in the foreign language immigrant press. Park

conceptualized in this way communication as an historical process, Iinked

inextricably to its concrete environment. Park's theory of interaction led to an

interest in a number of actual conditions which seemed to be involved in the

ongoing development of group Iife.

The method of studying the development of group Iife which Park proposed • was the 'natural history' of a form of interaction: tracing in time the changes 15 occurring in its nature in conjunction with its environment. The notion of an

evolution of social organization in conjunction with various contextual factors was

worked out in many early sociological theories through the organism analogy

(Matthews, 1977: 38-39). In Park's work, a normative tradition was held to be a

means of adapting to an environment. It contains a set of cultural 'traits' issuing

in efficacious behaviour. As an organism's natural traits have evolved over time in

response to pressures within its habitat, a human comrnunity's cultural traits have

also developed over time to cope with an environment, and are subject to

alteration as the environ ment changes. The natural history was to trace this

evolution of cultural forms.

The primary means through which a community could adapt its traditions

was communicative interaction. The social impact of newspapers lay, for Park, in

their contribution to this process of adaptation. He related the rise of mass

circulation daily newspapers to a need in modern society for information about the

social environment. For Park, newspapers were primarily urban institutions,

because urban life in particular is subject to rapid economic, political, and social

change. The size, speed, and complexity of modern social organization meant that

informai, face to face communication had to be complemented by more extensive

and rapid sources of information. Newspapers evolve within a social context that

requires constant adaptation of practices and priorities; they grow up serving a

requirement for news. In turn, they foster new forms of collective deliberation, both • broader in scope and more dynamic, more sensitive to new developments. 16

American pragmatism defined social interaction as in itself pragmatic or

'rational'. Interaction called upon a human capacity ta understand others' motives

or goals, and upon a capacity ta speculate about the conditions and consequences

of actions directed ta realizing one's own goals (Delaney and Widdison, 1990: 31).

Rationality in this sense is primarily an attitude of detachment, an ability ta

suspend personal beliefs and interests. Detachment or disinterest is necessary if

the validity of others' beliefs is ta be entertained, and if the fuli difficulties of putting

one's own beliefs into practice are ta be admitted. Detachment implied a further

ability, ta compromise; understanding others' motives led ta sympathy, while

recognition of the conditions and consequences of actions led ta an understanding

of the practical value of cooperation. In pragmatism, rational understanding and

cooperation were seen as a 'natural function' of the human 'organism', as the way

it coped with and adapted ta its environment (Rucker, 1969: 163). Dewey,

however, contrasted pragmatic interaction, with its quality of detachment, ta

interaction dominated by traditional knowledge. In pragmatic interaction, values

were opened ta compromise and measured in terms of their practical efficacy. In

adherence ta tradition, on the other hand, established values and practices were

allowed ta inhibit pragmatic inquiry; received ideas easily became 'sterile and

repressive' (Hal linger, 1980: 93-94). As modern conditions had made tradition

obsolescent, and had increased difficulties and conflict, they had made necessary

a pragmatic reconstruction of values (Dewey, 1927: 141-142). • 17

For Park, newspapers served and reinforced a pragmatic attitude, a

heightened awareness of difficulties and problems, a readiness to discuss these

with others, and an ability to entertain novel solutions. Attention to newspapers and

discussion of news tended not to favour adherence to tradition, but ta encourage

a pragmatic, or, in fact, a much more rational attitude. In The Immigrant Press and

its Control (1922), Park showed how the stresses attached ta immigration ta a

foreign environment made a necessity of newspapers clarifying that environ ment

and its opportunities. And he showed how communities using newspapers

effectively drew away from traditional judgements and practices and assimilated

'American' ones. These new world judgements and practices were not only

efficacious in the American social environment, but they also in themselves

embodied a pragmatic point of view, conceived of as open, practical, and

innovative. In America, immigrants 'discard their habits and acquire "ideas'" (Park,

1922: 9-10).

Park employed, then, the constructs he associated with collective behaviour

and communication in his analysis of newspapers: the moral arder, the natural

history, the organic analogy. His treatment of 'news' directed attention ta its role

in interaction, interaction itself being defined as a collective attempt ta cape with

an unstable environment. News, consequently, had a raie in processes by which

interaction generated social change. Newspapers in his time, largely local in

character and often directed to specifie cultural groups, prt;lsented excellent • subjects for the investigation of communicative interaction operating at a group 18 level. His studies of newspapers examined them as modern cultural fOims, reflecting specifically modern conditions, and were concerned with the conditions under which these forms arase, praspered, and faded. For Park, newspapers were indicative of developments in communicative interaction occurring in American society generally, and indicative of its specifie capacities for social change and social organization.

The intellectual context of Park's theory of mass communications.

Park's theory of interaction and collective behaviour, as has been seen, directed attention ta concrete, historical situations of communicative interaction. In the case of bath news and newspapers, Park took them ta be affected by conditions prevalent in modern industrialized America, as seen especially in

American cities. The circulation of news took on specifie importance and had specifie consequences in the modern social enviranment. One consequence was the popular use of newspapers, institutions formed in conjunction with a requirement for news.

Park's ideas were similar ta those of several other social theorists of his time, notably John Dewey and Charles H. Cooley (Czitrom, 1982: 119-121). Park's work in the '20's and '30's coincides with the rise of mass communications studies in the United States, and he is cited as sharing several theoretical assumptions with other pioneers of the field in America: symbolic interaction as a key social process, a theory of culture derived from American pragmatism, and 'progressive' 19 or Iiberal social concerns (see Carey, 1975; Czitrom, 1982; Robinson, 1988).

These assumptions are associated, especially through Park, with the 'Chicago school' of sociology (Robinson, i 988: 101-104; Smith, 1988: 59-65). The potential of communication to provide for cultural community, understood theoretically, was used in the analysis of the historical development of modern society. This led these American scholars to considerations of the social and historical raie of the press (Hardt, 1988: 159).

Besides a shared theoretical orientation, Park and contemporaries of his such as Dewey and Cooley shared a view of the nature of modern society, defining it as one of rapid change in which traditional ties had become attenuated, and where a dynamic economy and had undermined stabilities of time, place, and custom. Park and his contemporaries at Chicago saw the rapid industrialization

and urbanization of American society as having led to serious social

disorganization. Faster transportation and urban economies of scale had

destabilized traditional community and family functions, and burgeoning

immigration in answer to labour shortages seemed to have quickly created a

multicultural society with no common values or consensus. Competition, ambition,

and rivalry distinguished modern social relations: economic competition forced by

Iiberalized markets, struggles for status and social mobility, and conflict between

different social groups.

The problem Park and his contemporaries addressed was the problem of

normative unity in a society marked by instability and diversity in its communities 20 and traditions, typically dealt with as a problem of the attenuation of the sources of social control. Interaction, pragmatism, and progressive goals came together in the idea that a viable and benign social order is a matter of community solidarity, and in the idea that solidarity is the outgrowth of participatory communication

(Robinson, 1988: 103). Jean Quandt writes in her study of the progressives of

Park's generation that the most serious problem they saw themselves facing was the breakdown of compelling family and group ties in an urban, industrial society; the small town virtues identified with intimate or face to face communication were being overtaken by the anonymity of the city (Quandt, 1970: 17).

C.H. Cooiey, for example, represented intimate ties, involving mutual respect and recognition, as 'primary' associations, and contrasted these to

'secondary', more utilitarian associations, Iinked to cosmopolitan and commercialized social relations. These latter did not engage the individual, but left people in a state of 'normlessness' similarto Durkheim's anomie (Martindale, 1958:

39). Community, in the sense of a common emotional and spiritual ground, was lacking in the city, so it was necessary to re-establish community. The typical progressive solution, say Lucia and Morton White, was to create 0PPlJrtunities for small group communication and moral consensus (White and White, 1964: 158).

Dewey, Cooley, and others recognized that it was not a question of reestablishing archaic forms of social solidarity, but of establishing new grounds for community.

John Dewey, for example, thought this project could be advanced through such things as progressive education, where part of what was learned was salutary cooperation th.rough openness and communication with others. 21

Park was also centrally concerned with the social disorganization of urban

Iife, and with the possibility of achieving benign social control through restoring

morally viable communities (Mellor, 1972: 217). An interest in small group culture

is key to much of Park's work, involving as it did extensive attention to 'racial', or

ethnie groups, to sects and crowds, or to urban neighbourhoods. But Park and his

contemporaries were also cruciaily concerned with the developing mass media. As

Hanno Hardt points out, the common understanding of these early theorists, that

communication integrated individuals in a social order, prompted their common

interest in modern 'mass' media of communication. Mass media might have the

potential to effect new processes of achieving consensus, commensurate with

modern conditions. Since mass media operated across groups and throughout

large social aggregates, they might span the 'polyglot' of ethnie groups and be a

means of reaching common consensual cultural and political values (Turow, 1990:

483); as such, mass media could serve as a public forum for cultural Integration

in a rapidly changing society. Conversely, Cooley, Dewey, and Park also raised

concerns about the potential of mass media to accomplish the opposite, to inhibit

in various ways the creative potential of public discourse, and impose instead a

superficial, secondary type of association (Czitrom, 1982: 91-93).

Park, in fact, tended to believe that news and newspapers were ineffective

institutions of social control. He was sceptical about the possibility of mass media

providing a cultural and moral connection (Quand!, 1970: 70). The America of his • time was perceived to be mobile and 'polyglot', and Park typicaily thought that 22

stability in space and over time was lacking in American urban social conditions.

Instability prevented the elaboration of cultural understandings necessary to

integration and social control. In sorne articles Park numbered newspapers among

the destabilizing influences on group cultures, since they increased the diversity,

extent, and rapidity of communication (see Park, 1916; and Park, 1929a). In

company with Cooley and Dewey, Park could entertain the idea that a 'public', a

new sort of association based on the rnass media, was emerging in America, an

association which was popular, rational, and democratic, and which cut across

traditional differences (see Park, 1918; and Park, 1931 a). But public opinion was

a complex, variable matter. The degree to which any issue could become a subject

of public or general concern and the extent to which that concern could become

clarified and concretely political depended on a number of social conditions. In

general for Park, mass media did not necessarfly produce a culturally deep

association. And they could encourage dissension and conflict as weil as

consensual agreement.

Much of Park's theory is focused on conceptualizing a peculiarly modern

culture, urban and industrial, but also secular, commercial, and bureaucratic. Ralph

Turner notes that Park sometimes united these features in his idea of civilization,

elaborated fram ideas of George Simmel, Ferdinand Tonnies, and Oswald

Spengler: a recent and expansive social organization, and a concomitant, particular

kind of 'social consciousness' (Turner, 1967: xxx-xxxi). Park's appraisal of modern • society is not entirely negative; he did appreciate modern urban Iife, its variety, 23 opportunity, and liberty. But these were qualities felt to pose a danger to solidarity

as it was conceived of by Park. Fred Matthews says that Park remained

fundamentally sceptical about the kinds of connection modern association and

communication would promote, seeing them as types of secondary association and

as 'peculiarly disembodied' sorts of community (Matthews, 1977: 192).

Park's idea of social process.

Park's theoretical approach to news and newspapers has been described

above as based on a pragmatist, interactionist view of social organization, taking

interaction to be a collective process. Park's emphasis on social processes has

been noted by many commentators, olten as the most distinctive feature of his

sociology; Fred Matthews' and Ralph Turner's opinions have already been

mentioned (Matthews, 1977: 134; Turner, 1967: xxi). Park's idea of process bears

sorne further clarification.

One general difficulty commentators have with Park's work is with what

Matthews calls the 'duality' apparent in his theories. In many of his writings there

is a recognition of individual and group volition, corresponding to the picture of

collective behaviour presented above, what Matthews refers to as a 'solt'

determinism. Eisewhere, however, and olten in the same articles, Park could put

forth a quite different view of the nature of social organization, a 'hard'

determinism, where unconscious forces lead to a total social organization • (Matthews, 1977: 132; see, for example, Park, 1936a). In any assessment of 24 Park's theories, this duality must be negotiated. The 'soft' version of social

organization, with an expansive view of the possibilities of interaction, is of primary

interest when examining Park's theories about news and newspapers. In the

circulation of news, collective behaviour is seen as a relatively autonomous

process of adjustment, one interior ta group Iife. Newspapers are institutions

serving ta make the circulation of news and 'collective action' permanent features

of a community. Yet in some respects, as will be seen, Park regarded these

processes as of limited consequence in themselves and could subsume them ta

largely conceived, macrosocial processes, sa that group life is reduced ta a

reflection of organizing principles beyond human control.

A potential for assertions of strict causal determinations can be seen in the

organism analogy; it lends itself ta an emphasis on evolutionary adaptation, or a

version of social Darwinism. Richard Helmes-Hayes describes the two elements

of Park's duality as social Darwinist determinism versus an idea of an 'emergent,

plastic' culture (Helmes-Hayes, 1987: 391). Patricia Madoo Lengerman says that

Park remained in much of his work true ta the 'spirit' of the social Darwinists

Herbert Spencer and W.G. Sumner, conceiving of 'macrosocial processes' by

which large scale systems tend towards a stable 'equilibrium'. This is true of his

work in the 1930's especially, when Park formalized his theory of 'human ecology',

Iikening social organization ta the balance of natural forces in a habitat. Here he

emphasized the organization of society by competition and natural selection, and • emphasized the subordination of the individual ta a given moral arder, itself an 25 efficient mode of adaptation to an environ ment. Both these processes of

competition and socialization 'function' to maintain a social system; in this respect,

Park's theory even 'anticipates' elements of structural-functionalist sociologt

(Madoo Lengerman, 1988: 369-372).

ln addition, however, this other side of Park's sociology can be seen to have

contributed to the particular perspective on social processes used in his theories

of news and newspapers. Through having a particular idea of social stability or

equilibrium, Park gained a particular idea of social change. According to Lewis

Coser, Park was sensitive to social organization being achieved only to a degree,

and sensitive to the antagonisms and conflicts besetting it. Unlike Emile Durkheim,

Park did not focus on the constraints holding a society together, but on the 'novel

forms' which threaten and break through an established social order (Coser, 1971:

366). For Fred Matthews, Park's view here was not inconsistent with social

Darwinism and an llclea of an environment subject to constant change, where

organisms, including the 'social organism', are forced to constantly adapt

themselves. Social organization was constantly disrupted by altered environmental

and social conditions, and constantly involved in processes of internai change. As

a result, social organization had to be conceived of as 'fluid', and not static

(Matthews, 1977: 140). Ralph Turner finds the states of social equilibrium theorized

by Park to function as 'ideal end points' of a process, never quite arrived at. On

the contrary, the essential descriptions in Park's natural histories are of various • temporary states, and of shifts from one state to another, a 'process' of movement 26 and interruption. It is in this context that Ralph Turner calls Park's view a 'dynamic disequilibrium model', which manages to picture established forms or stages and also to picture them as subjeet to a variety of change (Turner, 1967: xxii).

The effect of these assumptions is to allow for a wide range of cultural variation within a society, and to allow for the possibility of conflict and fragmentation within a society. If it is to cope with adynamie environment, collective behaviour should be seen as a relatively creative process. It is related to external conditions, but not determined by them; it produces rather a group's own, historically specifie cultural forms. While cultural forms grow up under specifie historical conditions, they are the developments of a number of tendencies and possibilities, material, economic, and social. A culture is a creative 'response' to the conditions of human existence. Park was also willing to examine the role that conflict plays in the development of cultural forms, and the sorts of defensive responses which arise as stable social organization became undermined and as different cultures came into contact with one another. He investigated the evolution of cultural differences and conflicts, the means by which groups attempted to maintain their own cultural viability and resist disintegration, and the role newspapers played in these processes (Hardt, 1988: 563-565). Since he accepted wide variations in cultural forms and the possibility of confliet and fragmentation, communicative interaction involved for Park at ail levels the possibility of disharmony and distrust, as weil as the possibility of consensus being reformed.

The focus of his theory on process was a focus on the general conditions and processes by which an existing consensus might break down, or by which divisions might be transformed, through communication, into consensual arrangements. 27 Plan of the essay.

The preceding discussion has identified certain assumptions about

subjectivity and culture as key to Park's theory of collective behaviour. Park's

interactionist, pragmatist theory of collective behaviour led him to a consideration

of the centrality of subjective responses in group Iife. News and newspapers, as

forms of collective behaviour, were studied by Park as ways in which individuals

interact to form a common comprehension of their world and each other. He

looked at the ways in which news functions within a group to orient it within its

environment. And he looked at the ways in which newspapers develop and the

effects of that development on local cultures. Park was particularly interested in the

conditions under which this particular type of collective behaviour arose. For Park,

extensive attention to news and extensive interest in newspapers were largely the

results of modern, urban conditions, and represented a modern cultural

development.

Park's work on news and newspapers falls into two areas: his work on the

immigrant press, and more general theoretical work on news and public opinion.

Both exhibit the central themes of Park' sociology, briefly, a tension between social

stability and social change, or between established understandings and cultural

innovation through interaction.

The second chapter of this essay will examine The Immigrant Press and its

Control (1922), Park's depiction of newspapers serving particular cultural groups, • and his study of these newspapers' involvement in processes of cultural change. 28 Here he concentrated on how these groups responded to the experience of

immigration and changed social conditions, and how their newspapers contributed

to that response. Ethnie newspapers served to preserve traditions and solidarity,

but at the same time adopted the methods and style of American commercial

newspapers, insinuating American practices and values, and advancing the

assimilation of their readership. In sum, Park saw the papers as allowing immigrant

groups to engage in a process of cultural reformation; they provided a means by

which immigrant groups could bring themselves into accord with the society

surrounding them. An examination of W.1. Thomas' book, Old World Traits

Transplanted, will show the extent to which Thomas' ideas on the cultural

adaptation and assimilation of immigrant groups informed the ideas of Park.

Chapter three examines Park's articles on news and public opinion: 'News

and the human interl;'st story' (1940a), 'News as a form of knowledge' (1940b),

'News and the power of the press' (1941 a), and 'News and morale' (1941 b). While

Park's book on the immigrant press concerned newspapers serving groups with

an existent tradition, Park approached the analysis of news by looking at it in

isolation, theorizing about the type of social relation it in itself could construct,

public opinion. He extended an idea underlying The Immigrant Press and its

Control (1922), that the readership of newspapers had primarily a 'practical' and

'rational' interest in events, rather than an interest defined and limited by tradition.

So Park developed his theory of the role of news in collective behaviour further • along pragmatist Iines, and the specifies of this theory will be examined. However, 29 having defined public opinion in these later articles as practical and rational, Park

contrasted it to solidarity and social control. He concluded that public opinion could

not foster the deep er.lOtional commitments thought to lie behind solidarity and

social control. On the contrary, public opinion, as rational, threatened social belief

systems, and was a potential source of social conflict. His ideas in this were based

on ideas drawn from crowd theory and developed in The Crowd and the Public

(1904), and based on W.G. Sumner's definition of the nature of solidarity and

tradition. Park's notion of solidarity, and of its incompatibility with public opinion,

forms a second focus of the chapter.

Park can be seen to have conceived of two ways in which news and the

informai discussion which accompanies it might lead to cultural change: one

graduai and consensual, the other dramatic and a cause of conflict. His work on

immigrant newspapers in the early twenties showed groups achieving graduai,

consensual revisions of traditional beliefs and practices. Twenty years later, in his

work on news and public opinion, attention to news is opposed to solidarity based

on tradition, and is a cause of dissension and disunity. Chapter four examines this

change in Park's views, picking up on themes broached in previous chapters. It will

be seen that Park's earlier work on the immigrant press was informed by

pragmatism, and especially by ideas of John Dewey's about modes of cultural

reform that both cape with difficulties and create community feeling. But in Park's

later work, his articles on news and public opinion, this notion of consensrial • revision of culture and management of change was lost. It was replaced by a 30 dichotomy between a 'rational' public opinion, and an 'irrational' solidarity. Public

opinion is severely limited in the types of change it can achieve. If fundamental

values are challenged, the rational, pragmatic public essentially disappears; rather,

community modes of interaction become characterized by blind, defensive

reactions and behaviour similar to that identified as proper to a 'crowd'. Park was

here in agreement with ideas of Walter Lippmann's about the defects of modern

publics, felt to be largely concerned either with superfluities or with venting

prejudice.

The abandonment of his earlier formulation was due in part to Park's idea

of the disjunction between modern society and traditional society, adopted from the

European social theorist, Ferdinand Toennies. Park always to an extent saw

modern society as unstable and lacking solidarity, and as prey, therefore, to

conflict. Models of social interaction drawn from pragmatism, however, presented

the possibility of cultural revision, of maintaining necessary cultural forms at the

same time as the forms are altered. Such models reconciled modernity and

tradition, change and solidarity. Immigrant communities were interesting in large

part because they seemed to be able to overcome the disjunction between

modemity and tradition. Park's later, negative assessments of cultural change are

a reemphasis of the disjunction. It will be suggested that actual social changes in

the twenties and thirties lent themselves to a sense that conflict and turmoil, rather

than reconstruction, were characteristic of modern society. • 31 Chapter four will also examine the change in Park's work as a reflection of

his abiding concern with two aspects of interaction, consensus and conflict. Bath

were operative in complex ways in communicative interaction for Park. In his

earlier work, conflict attending immigration led ta efforts ta accommodate the new

social realities, with newspapers as the means of building consensus. Later,

conflict and loss of solidarity are seen as permanent features of modern sociallife,

due in part ta the effect of modern techniques of communication. Communication

can lead ta bath Integration and disintegration of community. Variations on the

themes of Integration and disintegration are characteristic of his work, and give that

work some of its most interesting and valuable insights.

Method.

This essay is an exercise in explication and Interpretation. It is first of ail an

attempt ta describe and clarify the definitions Park provided for his terms and the

relations he made between them. Secondly, the essay interprets the work as

having an internai organization available ta rational exposition and commentary.

The work is to be explained by its own internai principles. These principles can be

regarded as the central themes of a work, important assumptions around which the

theory is built, and which explicitly or implicitly govern its argument. The work is

ta be explained as in large part the logical, and, ta an extent, imaginative,

development of these assumptions. In the case of Park's theories of immigrant • newspapers, and of news and public opinion, the pertinent themes are his 32 particular view cl interaction and communication, his use of notions of rationality

and solidarity as applied ta popular culture, and his particular view of the nature

of modern society. The task at hand is ta discover and bring out these themes

which, as they cohere or compete within Park's work, give it its character. Of

course, no work is immediately selt-evident, but requires analysis and reflection.

The resulting observations must then themselves be put into a coherent form, with

the hope that this final synthesis has embodied the essentials of the original text.

Sa the task is not ta simply paraphrase or reiterate what Park said, but ta give it

an Interpretation, by making a claim that in these themes an essential meaning of

the text is revealed.

Most, if not ail, of the suppositions upon which a theory is bui~ are drawn

from the historical context of the theorist; that is, they are points at which the

theory is clearly influenced. This is especially the case with Park's theories of

newspapers and news, since in both he was engaged with contemporary American

social problems, and in both he expressed contemporary moral and intellectual

concerns. Park's theories were the results of a continuai attempt at synthesis, as

Lewis Coser said (Coser, 1971: 373), a complex drawing together of current

sources as diverse as the work of W.1. Thomas and that of W.G. Sumner, or

American pragmatism and European crowd theory. Since the intellectual context

in which Park worked informed his theories, sorne understanding of that context

is necessary to an understanding of the theories. Similarly, Park clearly focused • on current social issues in his analyses of immigrant communities and of public 33 opinion formation, and in his concern with urban conditions and with the

developing American social context generally. At this peint also concerns

contemporary to a theorist become important. The socie-cultural milieu is taken to

impose upon a theory not only certain crucial issues to be dealt with, but a specific

perception of the nature of those issues.

Dealing with influences is, of course, more than an heuristic device; any

work is intricately bound up with the conditions of its production. So this essay is

also a modest contribution to a 'historiography' of the field of communications

studies, an attempt to look for thematic unities and differences, and to account for

the context in which these themes exist (Robinson: 98-101).

As Dominick La Capra points out, one of the most salient methodological

problems in Interpretation is the relation of a reader or interpreter to a text. The

reader's interest or perspective plays a role in how the reader understands the

text; in fact, the reader can be seen as providing another 'context' which may

account for the sense a text has (La Capra, 1983: 65). This essay constructs

certain themes and claims to explain Park's work in their terms, attempting to show

that Park's theories can be understood as developments of these themes. The aim

is, then, to provide a thematic context for Park's work. Such an approach leads,

no doubt, to an account which is particular and persona!. Furthermore, the context

provided is above ail a rhetorical context, following the conventions of its genre,

and ultimately confined by the presuppositions of its genre. And yet, these • consequences do not make an interpretation wholly personal, nor wholly Iimited. 34

They only limit the extent to which it can claim an objective validity, that is, the extent to which it can claim to be more than personal, and more than rhetoric.

Interpretation and comprehension are in this light tentative pursuits, and part of a continuing 'dialogue' with the past (ibid: 69). Rather than a definitive account, an informed and judicious one is their object. Chapter two: Park's theory of immigrant newspapers.

Park published a book and sorne articles in the early twenties on foreign language newspapers serving the numerous immigrant ethnie groups then in the

United States. It is in these writings especially that Park developed a theory of newspapers using a pragmatist, interactionist idea of collective behaviour. His approach to analysing the role of newspapers in immigrant communities was thoroughly informed by assumptions drawn from American pragmatism and theories of social interaction. Newspapers constitute a pragmaticform of interaction within a community, a form suited to coping with a problematic environment.

Immigrant communities were actively adapting their traditional cultures to the circumstances of American life, and the process of adaption was a collective one,

occurring on a corn munity levaI. Newspapers were central vehicles of the process,

gathering, as it were, individuals into a forum where common problems and values

could be defined.

Park's writings on immigrant newspapers also present a second major

feature of his theory of newspapers, that, as they are vehicles of a pragmatic

interest, they are distinct from other types of interaction, most especially that based

on a traditional interest or loyalty. Park linked pragmatic interest, and newspapers,

to urban society in particular, and modern society in general, which he

characterized as dynamic, opportunistic, and iconoclastie. Immigrant groups were

themselves undergoing a cultural transition from traditional to modern social forms,

and were excellent subjects for understanding the sorts of adaptations likely ta be 36

made under modern conditions. It was Park's thesis that attention to newspapers

was a modern cultural adaptation, and an instance of a form of interaction suited

to existence in modern circumstances.

Finally, Park's work on immigrant newspapers shows his affinities to the

progressive movement in the United States; in this work he presented a positive

view of the potential for modern urban masses to achieve consensus and

overcome social disorganization and isolation. Park employed an idea very close

to John Dewey's idea of constructive, engaging community Iife; newspapers

provided a forum for the elaboration of new values and perspectives, which at the

same time elaborated mutual understanding. Newspapers, as a form of

participatory, communicative interaction, built a viable community Iife.

Park's main thesis was adopted from work of W.1. Thomas, who claimed

. that immigrant organizations functioned to re-establish in the United States cultural

practices and values familiar to immigrants, and yet at the same time served to

adjust and eventually assimilate immigrant cultures to American society. Park saw

the same process occurring by way of immigrant newspapers. They helped form

and consolidate immigrant communities along traditional Iines, most obviously by

using the immigrants' native language. Yet, Park demonstrated, the content and

style of the newspapers contributed to changes in cultural values, changes in what

Thomas called the 'definition of the situation', or the emotive categories used to

identily and organize experience. Newspapers introduced and circulated within

immigrant communities novel attitudes and ideas, and publicized in their style and

content revised cultural values appropriate to Iife in American society. 37 W.I. Thomas on the social role of immigrant organizations.

ln 1921, Old World Traits Transplanted was published, a book addressing

the social impact of immigration on immigrants themselves, examining their

experiences in America and the typical responses they had. Ostensibly it was

written by Park and HA Miller; W.1. Thomas, however, iS generally accepted to

have been the author. (A little earlier, Thomas had been discovered in an illicit

relation, and the scandai led to temporary ostracism). The following year there

appeared Park's book The Immigrant Press and ils Control (1922), a 'sequel' to

the previous volume (Park,1922: xix). It examined foreign language newspapers

serving various ethnie groups, looking at the role they played in the life of thase

groups and in their capacity to adapt 10 American society. Both books contended

that immigrant organizations, including their newspapers, were a stage in the

assimilation of immigrants. The tendency of immigrants to form organizations

together with others from the home country established for them a viable sub­

culture within the larger society, which served as a stepping stone to participation

in American social life.

A great number of immigrants came into America during Park's lifetime; in

1900, around 80% of Chicago's population of 3.3 million were foreign born.

Controversy centered on the effect of this influx on American social and political

life, and whether American society would be able to assimilate so many people of

divergent backgrounds (Lai, 1990: 93-94). The practical considerations were of the • conditions under which assimilation might take place and traditional attitudes be 38 changed, in order to avoid anti-democratic practices, animosity, and strife,

especially in the great cities Iike Chicago. It was supposed that immigrants might

not be able or willing to conform to American political and cultural life, and that

they would either intrude foreign values upon their fellow citizens, or, through the

experience of dislocation, come to not hold any social values at ail and indu Ige in

delinquent behaviour.

Old World Traits Transplanted (1921) begins with a definition of the

'heritages', or national cultures, of immigrants: 'the fund of attitudes and values

which an immigrant group brings to America - the totality of its sentiments and

practices' (Thomas, 1921: 3-4). These ethnie traits are developed in the old world

and transplanted to the new. The tendency to cherish and live by these values

explains immigrants gathering together in ethnie groups in the United States,

where each individual can share a cultural comprehension with others (ibid: 30).

But the existence of ethnie organizations and ethnie enclaves raised problems of

prejudice and antagonism between groups and problems of assimilation to a

common culture (ibid: 24). However, Thomas pointed to the real value of ethnie

groups in the prevention of a cultural isolation of individual immigrants.

Culture provides individuals with a sense of self worth, or even with a sense

of self: values are internalized, become personality traits, are recognized and

approved by the social circles to which individuals belong, and are recognized and

approved by the individuals themselves. Individuals accede ta a sense of self • worth through a satisfying conformity (ibid: 47-48). In America, the prevalent values 39 and moral foci differ from those in the immigrants' home country. There are

different standards upon which individuals are judged, standards with which the

values and personalities of immigrants are in conflict. In particular, American

culture respects a set of individualistic character traits that Thomas telt were

foreign to the peasant background of many immigrants (ibid: 41). In America, it is

the proper expression of American cultural values that has currency and gains

individuals positive recognition; they are the values concretely operative in daily

associations. Immigrants' values, and the habits and mannerisms accomparying

them, have no currency, except very possibly as social handicaps. The result, for

an immigrant, is 'demoralization' (ibid: 61). The essentials of self-respect are lost,

and consequently the means of social control, individuals' willing participation and

cooperation in social Iife.

The typical response for immigrants in this situation is to seek out a

community with values close to their own, usually in immigrant organizations and

communities which have already been established along ethnie Iines to meet the

need for valuable associations (ibid: 119-120). As Peter Kivisto points out, Thomas

presented immigrant groups as an answer to demoralization and the 'pathology of

rootlessness'. Immigration was perceived at the time as leading to the breakdown

of tradition in the new world and as leading, therefore, to a breakdown of social

control. Thomas saw, in the effort of immigrants to preserve their dignity by

gathering together and organizing themselves, the important consequence of the • re-establishment of social control (Kivisto, 1990: 458-460). 40 Moreover, for Thomas, the sort of heritage present in such groups was not simply that prevalent in the region from which the immigrants originated, it was

'transplanted', It was adapted, in fact, to cope with the particular experiences and exigencies of Iife in America, Such groups answered the needs of individuals, not in the home country, but in America. The groups reflected a need for heritages adapted or 'adjusted' to American conditions (Thomas, 1921: 120), and one major emphasis of their activity was on what resisted demoralization and on what might contribute to success in the new circumstances (ibid: 295). Immigrant groups are means of adapting values to the American environment, and, in seeking to be successful in this adaptation, immigrants assist in their own 'Americanization' (ibid:

283).

The culture exhibited by an immigrant group is, then, a product of a specifically American experience. Inherent in a cultural heritage is a common

'universe of discourse' or 'apperception mass', a fund of common meanings associated with objects and situations (ibid: 272). The values and attitudes which make up a heritage provide a 'definition of the situation' (ibid: 81), definitions utilized and reaffirmed in interpersonal relations and thus essential to social existence. Assimilation is the process of finding identities between immigrants' given universe of discourse and that prevalent in America. New definitions are taken on as they can be related to what is 'already known and fell', and older definitions are revised in the process. The revision of old values and the adoption of new ones is 'the process of making warm and personal something that would 41 otherwise remain cold. extraneous, irrelevant, and foreign, by identifying it with a

body of sentiments that is already warm' (ibid: 273-275). Revision occurs within an

immigrant group; the definition of a situation undergoes change in its 'gossip.

conversation, disputes, doctrine' (ibid: 81). By a collective, communicative process

of relating new experiences to heritages. immigrant groups provide their members

with identities between their old Iife and their new (ibid: 119-120).

Park on the social role of the immigrant press.

Park's book The Immigrant Press and its Control (1922) can be seen as

taking up and expanding the idea of a revised definition of the situation, where

revision is the result of communication within an immigrant group. Foreign

language newspapers, published by and for immigrant groups. are one medium

of this sort of communication. Immigration to the United States had occasioned

multiple ethnie groups, served by a surprising number of newspapers; 106 papers

were published in Chicago alone in 1920, in 20 languages (Park, 1922: 297).

Taking up Thomas' view of immigrant institutions in general. Park saw the

immigrant p.'ess being used 'in making adjustments to a new environment. in

changing old habits, and forming new opinions' (ibid: 9).

Park's observations and classifications are presented in The Immigrant

Press and its Control (1922) along with a wealth of data, such as advertisements

and articles from the papers themselves. reminiscences by reporters and editors, • and extended reports by correspondents in various communities, ail of which give 42

an idea of the great diversity and energy present in the immigrant press at the

time. The immigrant newspapers are first of ail directed to the interests of their

readers, 'reflecting' in intimate ways 'the characteristic interest, ambitions, and

social attitudes of the people who read them' (ibid: 287). Thus immigrant

newspapers are an 'index' to the general types of cultural communities established

in America and the differences among them (Park, 1925a: 153-154). The

'cosmopolitan' newspapers, fol' example, serve the great numbers of lower class

urban workers, often recently arrived, and fairly isolated from the society around

them. The papers feature local news, and stories of crime and the 'dramatic

phases' of Iife, echoing the fast pace of the city. Personal problems, many to do

with common predicaments, are dealt with. And finally there is news of America,

otherwise inaccessible to the readers (Park, 1922: 150-155). In sum, the papers

provide a sense of place to their readers and speak in their own language about

their own concerns. The papers address themselves to a need for 'mere human

expression' in the 'mother-tongue', and for events to be presented in an intelligible

contex,. (ibid: 11-13). In the much smaller 'provincial' press, Park found evidence

of more established, rural communities, the results of earlier immigrations,

removed as a group from many of the cultural influences and social and economic

pressures experienced by urban workers. Here he found the gossip and religious

news typical of small towns, and an indulgent nostalgia forthe home country (Park,

1925a: 157). As weil as differences in the content of newspapers attributable to • such things as urban versus rural conditions or length of residence, Park observed 43

differences due ta the particular heritages of the groups served. He found. for

example, in Japanese and Yiddish papers the fullest articulation of 'subjective lite',

that is, the greatest degree of interest in their people's motives and aspirations and

the most developed capacity for insight, due ta the level of education a'1d

sophistication prevalent in these communities (Park, 1922: 154).

ln line with what Thomas observed of immigrant institutions general!y, Park

felt that it was the dislocation of immigrants from a familiar, stable social

environment ta one unfamiliar and seemingly unstable which created a readership

for the immigrant press. A survey of Russian immigrants, for example, found that

most read no papers in their homeland, while almost ail read in the United States.

The newspapers, along with other organizations designed by immigrants ta help

themselves, provided for immigrants' new needs (Park, 1923a: 166-167). And, • following Thomas' thesis, Park asserted that there was a common trend among the papers towards the 'Americanization' of immigrants. "The immiurant himself is

disposed ta use his language and his press ta help find his way in the New World.

The Foreign-Language press, if it preserves old memories, is at the same time the

gateway ta new experiences" (ibid: 449)

The immigrant newspapers facilitate assimilation by including immigrants in

a community oriented ta Iife in America. They do this. Park said, in three ways,

arising from their nature as commercial enterprises. In competition with others in

the same language, the papers are driven ta seek as wide as possible circulation. • This is especially true of the city papers, where populations are sufficient ta 44

support a number of papers in the same language, or to make starting up another

paper feasible (Park, 1922: 91). The first effect of competition is that newspapers

tend to simplify their style and language, dropping intellectual formalities and

adopting the prevalent vernacular. Intellectual considerations are also left out of

their content; editoria! and dogmatic renditions of the news give way to coverage

of the sentimental and dramatic aspects of the readers' own lives and environment.

Finally, important issues in the community are reported on, and as weil American

news and issues. These features of style and content have the effect of appealing

to readers across boundaries of class, education, and local dialect, addressing an

interest in what is presented as a common community and surroundings. The

newspapers thus tend to 'create a public' (ibid: 71-79), although, in fact, they

contribute to a general trend among immigrants to consolidate themselves in

groups. The sorts of news printed is especially important in the creation of a sense

of community and the encouragement of assimilation. The papers assume a

'national' unity and pass over the parochial differences and mistrusts which may

have existed in the home country. News and issues of the home country are

covered, fostering the replacement of regional loyalties for a national one. Again,

this is especially true of city papers, whose potential market includes a number of

regional groups (Park, 1925a: 157). In the same fashion, readers are initiated into

American conditions and manners. American news, printed out of readers' need

to know how to work and live, encourages a more general interest in the country • (Park, 1922: 87). Advertisements also bring American influences into readers' lives 45 (ibid: 449). The immigrant press can in this way 'introduce America to the

immigrant, and give him materials on which to build interest and affection' (ibid:

359).

The propagandist press and assimilation.

Park observed the same assimilationist tendencies in the immigrant

newspapers most Iikely to resist assimilation: the nationalist papers, devoted to the

cultural and political struggles of the homeland and to the preservation of its

heritage, and the socialist papers, radically opposedto the dominant economic and

moral values of the United States. Many of the immigrant newspapers, in fact,

began as versions of either of these types of 'propagandist press' (Park,1922:

331), and Park's study of their potential for organizing and helping to assimilate

immigrants represents the essential features of his theory of the evolution of the

immigrant press into a vehicle of Americanization.

Socialist intellectuals were inclined to originate papers in order to publicize

their views. Out of a desire to address and serve urban proletarians, they used

their readers' idiom and began dealing with issues of direct relevance to their

readers' lives. Socialist writers began in this way to temper the exposition of

doctrine and factional politics with articles and items dealing with the substance of

immigrant Iife. This was the case with the most successful socialist papers, such

as the New York Yiddish newspaper 'Forward' (ibid: 356). An interest in publicity • and solidarity also spurred expatriate nationalist intellectuals to start papers. Olten 46

members of ethnie groups suppressed in Europe, they were disciples of the

movements of national revival current in the nineteenth century, and held to a

romantic idealization of folk cultures. The papers they started were to help protect

those cultures through protecting their language. The attention ofthese papers was

concentrated on the homeland, and many had the avowed aim of preventing

assimilation, as in the case of the Quebecois 'Le Publique Canadien'.

Nevertheless, by promoting a national consciousness, they promoted unity among

their readers, helping ta constitute them as a group within American society, which

had the consequence, according to Thomas and Park's theory, of facilitating the

recognition and comprehension of American conditions. Furthermore, ma:1Y of

these papers helped promote a common speech among the community, since ttley

were established with the intention of popularizing a folk language which was at

the same time a national language, or a language of the people in general (ibid:

55-5'9).

The güneral course of development of the successful nationalist papers was

the same as that of the successful socialist papers. In order to gain or i\Sep

circulation, th,e intellectuals, romantic and analytical, were forced to tone down their

rhetoric and broaden their subject matter to appeal to the public in which they were

interested. Those radical papers which insisted on emphasizing a particular

position within a notoriously divided and acrimonious left stood only to lose readers

(ibid: 331-332). Both types adopted the American style of reporting news: terse • reports on an eclectic range of subjects, presented separately from editorials and 47 without comment, and human interest stories featuring sensationalized versions

of 'real Iife' dramas. The editors learned 'sooner or later that the common man

would rather reM news, or what passes for news, than the opinions of editors'

(ibid: 335). Park found editors who reserved their greatest energies for their

editorials, written in formai language and expounding favourite, programmatic

themes, while their news pages were filled with rushed translations of American

papers, written in a jargon of vernacular mixed with American idioms and

grammatical forms (ibid: 72). And it was the news pages which were most read.

Even the nationalist papers tended to adopt the increasingly 'Americanized'

vocabulary and expressions of the urban labourers (ibid: 80).

So both types of newspaper stood to be successful if they gathered

circulation, the priee of which was concessions ta their readers in style and

content. Under competitive pressures, businessmen tended to replace intellectuals

as owners, and intellectual values were tempered with more pragmatic ones. The

editor of the Hungarian nationalist paper '8zabadsag', for example, only allowed

his chauvinistic and demagogic opinions to complement, and never Interfere with, , the business of playing on the sentimentality and nostalgia of his readers (ibid:

349). The Croatian 'Narodni List' kept its virulent editorials, but added sensational

and local news in accessible language (ibid: 342). An 'opportunistic policy' among

editors and publishers led them to print what was most Iikely to interest readers,

and to attempt to satisfy, rather than influence, public tastes (ibid: 346-347). The

features of content and style which the propagandist press gradually took on were, 48 in fact, common to a third type of immigrant paper which Park identified, the

'commercial' press, by far the most popular. Starting as steamship line circulars, these newspapers had been committed early to the business of gaining circulation and selling advertising by devoting their pages to news and other popular features

(ibid: 337-339).

Under their 'terms of existence', competition for circulation, immigrant newspapers tended to adopt a content and style which contributed to the assimilation of tlleir readership (ibid: 79), whatever the intentions of those who started or operated the papers (ibid: 87). On the whole the immigrant press ended up, for Park, expressing an American experience in an American style: the experience of the urban lower classes, where the largest circulation was to be had.

The characters, places, and issues of immigrant enclaves were rendered in a common speech already containing American forms. Eventually, as English became more familiar to readers, immigrant papers were taken up less and

American dailies more (ibi(j: 303-304). Indeed, the transition was predictable since the most successful and therefore most widely read immigrant papers had already converged on an 'American type' (ibid: 80), the mass circulation papers pioneered by James E. Scripps and William Randolph Hearst. In these newspapers also circulation was served by human interest stories, sensationalism, brevity, simplified language, and local colour (ibid: 353-356). 49

Difficulties in the assimilationist thesis.

Park built a substantial case for the contribution of immigrant newspapers to the assimilation of immigrants in his study of radical and nationalist papers.

They had been perceived as particularly resistant to the American way of Iife. But if successful, and therefore at the broadest extent of their contact with immigrants, such newspapers were not barriers but introductions to American values. Stephen

Riggins writes that the dual role of ethnie media adumbrated by Park, thelr problematic nature as agents of both preservation and assimilation, is still a crucial issue. It can be seen, for exampie, in the question of the extent to which

appropriations of mainstream style and content by ethnie media are also

appropriations of dominant cultural definitions (Riggins, 1992: 276).

The assimilationist thesis proposed by both Thomas and Pé"irkpresents

certain theoretical problems when compared to their focus on processes of

community interpretation. On the one hand, immigrant organizations were seen to

function as creative responses to changed conditions. Park showed immigrant

newspapers involved in relatively autonomous, local processes of cultural

reformation. Yet on the other hand, Thomas and Park asserted that these

processes had ail the same result or end, 'Americanization' (Thomas, 1921: 293),

or convergence on an 'American type' (Park, 1922: 80). An overarching process

of assimilation ultimately governs the evolution of local cultures; a 'process of

assimilation by contact' accomplishes a 'drift towards the American community'

(ibid: 79). 50 Peter Kivisto sees a social Darwinist 'cultural determinism' in the conclusions of both Thomas and Park. He feels that the diversity of heritages and

responses documented by Thomas and Park are rendered 'insignificant' by their

assimilationist thesis. Diversity and innovation become reduced to uniformity, and the human agency they saw operative in immigrant cultures becomes subjected to an immutable cultural process (Kivisto, 1990: 463-469). Park, for example, could define assimilation as a 'trend toward a common language, a common life and a common tradition of ail the peoples in this country', which is 'glacial' in its progress,

'wholly irresistible, under conditions of American Iife' (Park, 1925a: 161). The sense of the press as an instrument of interpretation or forum for reworking a definition of the situation is lost once its formulations, its content and style, are attributed to a 'glacial' process of assimilation.

Yet, as Peter Kivisto also notes, there are many qualifications of a deterministic point of view in Thomas' and Park's work on immigrant institutions.

The qualifications can be related in Park's case to the 'duality' prevalent in his work generally, a tension between broad, seemingly inevitable developments and local, seemingly unique innovations (Matthews, 1977: 132). In The Immigrant

Press and its Control (1922), inevitable homogeneity is belied by the extensively quoted documents and by Park's commentaries on them, which show the wealth of diversity in immigrant cultures, and bring out in detail cultural ditterences and idiosyncrasies. Park admits that there are groups which seem to have successfully

maintained a viable, but separate, culture (Park, 1922:66-67); he quotes Florian 51

Znaniecki, for example, on the preservation of Polish folk-culture (ibid: 85-86).

While some heritages are 'congenial' to American society, others are 'inimical' and do not admit of easy assimilation (ibid: 448). These statements tend to cali into question the assertion that cultural contact produces eventually a uniform assimilation.

But it is important to recognize that Park's idea of assimilation was not quite that of an inevitable absorption of immigrant groups by a dominant American culture. Rather, the idea seems to reflect a progressive conviction that consensus was possible in American cities. Park's work implied that the fears of the more xenophobie nativists, that many immigrants were incapable of internalizing

American values, were unfounded; a common American identity could be constructed out of the disparate, conflicting cultures of the immigrant population.

Furthermore, Park's idea of this consensus as a type of 'assimilation' should be understood in the context of three related arguments he made about immigrant newspapers. The first is that they were a popular, broadly based medium, and so they interconnected and related otherwise diverse individuais and groups. As a medium of communicative interaction, newspapers did provide the grounds for a common, community experience. The second argument is that the papers had a pragmatic or practical value for their readers, and in their practical value lay the papers' major contribution to consensus. They encouraged among their readership the adoption of a pragmatic or judicious point of view, both towards tradition and towards the opportunities offered by urban life. The third argument Park made was 52 that the Americanization of immigrants lay in their adoption of just this pragmatic point of view. It was a perspective which he took to be peculiarly modern, and peculiarly American, a product of the cosmopolitan, dynamic character of American life. The papers, despite their ethnic reference, encouraged the adoption of specifically American practices and values.

Sa immigrant newspapers were a popular medium, had a practical value ta readers, and embodied a perspective suitable ta life in American cities, and in this way contributed ta the adaptation of immigrant cultures ta American culture. These three aspects of Park's work on the immigrant press bear further examination. In them can be seen more fully his development of a pragmatist, interactionist theory of newspapers, where a medium of communication institutes a process of cultural adaptation, understood ta be internai ta a group.

The immigrant press as a popular medium.

Park's treatment of the immigrant press revealed its role as a vehicle for forming a group identity, in terms of individuals being able to recognize through the press important issues and interests that united them with others. Immigrant newspapers allowed a common knowledge ta be produced in fundamentally the same, informai way as gossip, which was, indeed, often one of their contents. In

'capturing and centering the public attention', the papers became 'an organ of social control' and 'a mechanism through which the community acts'. 'It is this that defines the function of the press and makes its role in the community intelligible' 53 (Park, 1922: 330). Clearly, the mode in which the community is represented has

salient effects on the way readers perceive themselves, their community, and their

environment. Throughout The Immigrant Press and its Control (1922), there are

profiles of the influence of immigrant papers' content and style in the formation of

a cultural basis for immigrants' experiences. Through news, gossip, and human

interest stories, an Interpretation is given of the local community and of America,

which is also an idea or definition of the local community and of America. The

human interest story and other sensationalized accounts clearly present people

with whom the readers are asked to identify, and present situations familiar and

compelling to readers. News and especially gossip, Park stressed, is primarily

local; Iike human interest staries, they are about the community, the same

community portrayed in nationalistic rather that parochial rhetoric. Finally, Park • realized the importance of colloquial language to the comprehension of and participation in a social world, and the role of newspapers in collecting,

standardizing and helping to create an idiom suitable and necessary far the

development of social understanding and participation.

The relation of press and readership, where immigrant papers are fully

involved in the local and personal interests of their readers, suggests a community

participating, through its newspapers, in a constitution of its values and attitudes.

For example, Park treated the Yiddish newspapers in New York as a creative

cultural force. He saw them reconciling European Jewish culture with that of

America, but in the process they evolved new cultural forms. An ancient tradition 54 of learning in combination with the intellectual ferment of socialist thought became popularized in the Yiddish papers, and the combination was extended beyond the doctrinaire, to become a 'criticism of Iife'. In the Yiddish press, Park said, there appeared 'a new Iiterature and a new culture, based on the life of the common man' (ibid: 108-109). He quotes articles on such topics as laziness, begging, the conflict between old ways and new, education, and being Jewish in America, ail apparently (they are in translation) expressed in a vigorous, innovative style drawn from the speech of daily Iife and remarking with insight and sensitivity on the nature of that Iife (ibid: 166-192).

Park was often inclined to describe the immigrant papers as simple reflections of the sum of individual readers' interests, which adversely affects the picture he also presented of newspapers as community instrum6nts of adjustment.

Park could say that the immigrant press 'expresses, rather than creates, public opinion' (ibid: 466). He attributed this to their commercial nature; the successful publishers are the ones who simply 'give the public what it wants' (ibid: 355). In assuming a model by which consumer preference alone determines the product, he also seems to have underestimated the impact of a commercial interest on content and style. This is so even though he felt that the need to attract as many readers as possible had led to an appeal to a sort of 'Iowest common denominator', to an emphasis on the sensational, and to choices of certain loyalties over others to avoid offending some readers. 55 However, Park's main point about the commerical pressures on papers was

that they tended to make newspapers into genuinely popular forms of culture,

intimately tied to the 'preferences of the average man' (ibid: 466). The overall

consequences of the drive to circulation remained, in his opinion, the creation of

a popular medium of expression. The most successful papers were sensitive to

readers' interests, and did not much pursue specifie ideological projects, for

example. It must be remembered that the immigrant newspapers in Park's time

were a particulartype of commercial media. They functioned within relatively small,

compact communities, often of the character of neighbourhoods, often isolated

from the society surrounding them. The newspapers were dailies, widely read, and

reported in detail the life of thase communities. Furthermore, the sheer number of

newspapers, and of start ups and failures, indicates that they were relatively • impermanent, informai institutions, organized ad hoc and largely without their own established practices and goals, and were in this way responsive to a variety of

community interests, rather than interests of their own.

The immigrant press as a practical discourse.

Park's analysis of the Yiddish papers shows his interest in the historical

development of particular cultural forms, and his appreciation for the variety of

factors which may be involved in that development. The portrayal of the fortunes

of the radical and nationalist papers is also an example of the method of 'natural

history' used by Park (Park, 1922: 356). The natural history was to be a description 56

of the development of a cultural form in its surrounding social context, which Park

hoped would lead ta generalizations about the developmental processes involved

(Park, 1921: 16). The generalization made in the case of the immigrant press was

its trend towards assimilation.

The characteristic focus of Park's theory of historical processes, Lewis

Caser says, was the collision of established cultural forms with new circumstances,

leading ta the 'obsolescence' of traditional practices and the 'emergence of novel

forms' (Caser, 1971: 366). Cultural change is inevitable in the general sense that

tradition undergoes accommodation te changed social circumstances. On the

whole, 'accommodation' would be a betterterm than assimilation forthe processes

Park described; accommodation is indeed a term favoured in other writings of

Park's at this time (see Park, 1921). It better reflects his sense of the internai • processes of cultural change that can occur in a community, where people make 'new and conscious efforts ta control the conditions of their common Iife', and

attempt ta resolve the tensions they experience by an accommodation or

modification of cultural conventions (Park, 1921: 508-509).

Park's assessment of the influence of the immigrant press on immigrant

heritages rested in large part on seeing them as practical aids in the adjustment

ta American life. In the final pages of The Immigrant Press and its Control (1922),

Park talked of the tension between tradition and changed ccnditions in terms of

two motives operative in the immigrant press and in immigrant Iife generally: there • is a desire among immigrants 'ta preserve their own cultural heritages', especially 57 their language and religion, but there is also, a desire 'to participate in the common

Iife and find a place in the American community' (Park, 1922: 467-468), ln saying

that the immigrant press served practical need as weil as sentiment, Park

delineated the social function of the press as the provision of practical information

about a new social and economic context, and the introduction of this context into

existing tradition,

The basic reason Park offered for the popularity of newspapers was their

provision of Immediate, comprehensible information about the social and economic

environment P:"-k showed how, intheir advertisements, accessible language, and

news coverage, immigrant papers addressed their readers' practical interests, The

preference of readers for news over editorial rested, in fact, in the need to be

oriented in a number of ways to an unfamiliar environment, and to seize the • opportunities which that environment offered, The papers provided speedy, cheap, and varied reports about ail phases of urban Iife in easily comprehended form,

Attention to practical, Immediate COilcerns also gave the papers a particular

perspective or style, qualitatively different fram other, more traditional modes of

expression, Both the content and the style of the immigrant newspapers were

viewed by Park as particularly suited to helping readers' adapt to the situation in

which they had found themselves (ibid: 90).

News, for Park, was always implicated in the confrontation of unfamiliar

conditions with tradition. In praviding news, newspapers were instruments of • orientation within a concrete, problematic environment, in tension with the given 58 sentimental orientation provided by tradition. That newspapers operated at the intersection of culture and C0ncrete experience could explain to a great extent their populist, sensational style and eclectic content, as revealed in Park's analysis of

Yiddish papers. Urban life as experienced by immigrants was non-traditional, and it was, therefore, scandalous, sensational, and innovative. The newspapers developed forms of expression essentially appropriate to immigrant life in America

(ibid: 91). Its typical situations and dilemmas could be represented in ail th2ir novelty and variety. The style and content of immigrant newspapers, it might be said, defined the situation as both problematic and invigorating. They helped define also a number of possible responses, individual and collective, to this problematic setting. Immigrant newspapers, as a cultural form, opened experience to the novel, whereas tradition for Park c10sed off experience in pre-given definitions. The immigrant newspapers functioned to alter tradition, as they brought to expression contact with unforseen circumstances.

The immigrant press and American society.

Park was certainly aware that many of the groups he studied, such as the

Poles or the Lithuanians, had existed in European empires without their language or culture being assimilated, even when sustained attempts had been made at suppression. The assimilation which he and Thomas theorized was presented by both as a specifically American experience, occurring under American conditions.

American culture itself was cosmopolitan and individualistic, and different in kind 59 from the generally peasant heritages of the immigrants (Thomas, 1921: 41). It was

less that immigrants were being assimilated to a traditional American culture, than

that they were in fact losing a traditional culture, and replacing it with new cultural

forms, forms prevalent especially in the modern American cities.

The experience of novelty and variety was, for Park, symptomatic of the

growing, industrialized American city. Heterogeneous populations drawn from

domestic and foreign countrysides came together in an environment dominated by

economic competition and a complex and dynamic labour market. Various

institutions emerged among city dwellers to manage social life in this context,

urban newspapers among them. News, presented regularly and in volume, became

something of a necessity if an understanding of the vast, fragmented activities of

a city were to be even approached (Park, 1916: 25-28). Urban newspapers were • instruments of a 'pragmatic and experimental' approach to a situation where few values or practices had proven viability, but where received definitions had to be

tested for their utility and efficacy (Park, 1929a: 75).

Park took the 'yellow press' to be a typical form of urban newspaper, and

described it in much the same terms as he described immigrant newspapers. The

enormous popularity of these papers was a result of a popular need for news and

information, and of an evolution of a popular form of representing city Iife, dwelling

mainly on its sensational aspects and items of local appeal (Park, 1927a: 4-11).

Urban newspapers, including the immigrant newspapers, funetion to address both • practical and sentimental needs, creating a sense of a community, and therefore 60 a sense of a personal identity, but in doing so create also a new, non-traditional

perspective.

But in his descriptions of urban newspapers Park expresses directly what

is only intimated about the immigrant newspapers. The interpersonal exchange of

news is a typical and necessary pursuit in any community; gossip and rumour are

forms of reiterating a comm:.mity's values and forming a 'public' opinion about

important situations. The increase in the size of urban communities and the

complexity of urban situations make newspapers, both widely read and widely

varied in their contents, an efficient means of maintaining something Iike an

interpersonal exchange of news. And that is part of their appeal: in an urban

context where neighbourly relations are not easily achieved, but where

interpersonal relations are more olten 'fortuitous', 'casual', and short Iived,

newspapers encourage a sense of participation and intimacy. The formulas

developed by the writers in the yellow press, such as the sensational accoLJnts of

local dilemmas in human interest staries, and the passionate outrage over

scandais demanded by the 'muckraking' stories, were substitutes for intimate and

responsive interpersonal exchange (Park, 1916: 45-47; 1923b: 90-99). In the case

of immigrants, what was lost in America was the command of the normal given by

a stable, traditional social order and an intimate, extensive acquaintance with

neighbours. The loss was made up for by joining fraternal organizations, and by

reading, in newspapers written in their own colloquiallanguage, daily accounts of • what they came to considertheir own people (Park, 1923a: 166-168). 61 The same conditions which lead ta a search for substitutes ta intimacy are

those, however, which iead ta a different perspective on tradition. The experience

cf urban dwellers is not of intimate acquaintance throughout their lives with a

neighbourhood, and this human sensibility cannat really be recovered in the urban

situation. But in seeking to recover it, urban dwellers are open to a reconstruction

of community on a different basis, that provided by newspapers. Readers become

involved in a pragmatic attitude and wider horizons, and a definition of a situation

which is no longer embedded in intimate personal experiences or in intimately

familiar traditions (Park, 1929a: 74-75).

At least part of Park's idea that assimilation was inevitable was due ta his

theory of the larger cultural processes at work in modern society. The features he

identified as fostering assimilation were later expanded in his work as features of

'modern' society in general. There is an attenuation of parochial loyalties as

interests are broadened. Newspapers are used to become oriented to a complex,

obscure social environment. There is a development of a generally accessible

language, and a development of surrogate forms of intimacy. Ali of these features

of modern society Park Iinked ta the effects of a dynamic market economy, and

the creation of a mobile, heterogenous population. Newspapers are implicated

directly in modern developments as a medium of change in expression, interes!,

and loyalty, fostering a shift away from narrow, traditional horizons to a much more

cosmopolitan culture. For Park, this was a shift to a culture open to novel

experiences, one much more involved in a sensation of the immediaf<3, and able • to express a sense of the dramatic pace of modern existence. Chapter three: news and public opinion.

Park mentioned news and newspapers in passing throughout his writings

but did not give sustained attention ta them again until the end of his career, with a cluster of four articles concentrating mainly on defining 'the news' and 'the public': 'News and the human interest story' (1940a), 'News as a form of knowledge' (1940b), 'News and the power ot the press' (1941a), and 'Morale and the news' (1941 b). In these articles, Park agai:, used a pragmatist modei of collective behaviour The informai circulation of news within a group is a form of collective perception of problems in the environ ment. A public is a group engaged in discussion of and decision about such problems, or engaged in forming a common, public 'opinion' about issues of concern. Bath the circulation of news and collective deliberation, in promoting public opinion formation, promote a form of consensus. Park added, then, ta his theory of communicative interaction based on newspapers and news, clarifying in many respects a Iiberal idea of public opinion he entertained, where a public is a community engaged in deliberations of an ostensibly pragmatic or rational character. This notion of public opinion is, of course, consonant with his analysis of immigrant communities in The Immigrant

Press and ils Control (1922).

However, Park in these articles also severely qualified the Iiberal idea of public opinion; processes of cultural reformation receive a treatment radically different from that in The Immigrant Press and its Control (1922). He returned ta considering processes of commllnicative interaction in periods of crisis, when 63 received definitions and modes of conduct no longer contain a social situation, and new cultural forms and institutions must be developed. In Park's work on the immigrant press, fundamental values had been fully implicated in moderate processes of cultural revision. A revision of old world heritages had been the most significant social consequence of attention ta newspapers. In his later articles on news and public opinion, however, Park excluded fundamental values from the sort of collective behaviour attributed to a newspaper public. Collective deliberation does not touch fU'1damental values. Rather, to explain the sort of collective behaviour and cultural change occurring in times of crisis, Park returne:J to ideas first broached in crowd thf!ory: a group is united by irrational enthusiasm and unquestioned prejudices, exacerbated and heightened in times of crises, when those prejudices are felt to be under threat. Park used, in these !atsr ariicles, not an idea of inevitable cultural assimilation, but one of inevitable cultural division and conflict. The result was a view that, while there does exist some form of public opinion and discussion, it is not a viable means of constructing consensus.

Park's theory of collective behaviour developed and changed throughout his career. By the time of his articles on news in the 1940's, Park was emphasizing the creation in interaction of a profound solidarity, and the general incapacity of public opinion to create solidarity. The descnptions of interaction and consensus contained in Park's earlier work, on the other hand, showed consensus to be a result of 'socially negotiated meanings' (Helmes-Hayes: 401), and showed interaction to be flexible and accomodating. Later Park chose, however, to 64

emphasize an idea of consensus as based on a strict adherence to a rigorous

normative order, and to downplay the view of interaction suggested by pragmatism

and Park's own work on the immigrant press.

Behind Park's later use of ideas of conflict and defensive reactions were,

no doubt, the recent social developments leading to war in Europe and the

approach of war for the United States. The background concern seems to have

bee" about how to build a degree of national morale sufficient to conduct another

modern war. The example Park used of high morale was Germany, and the

success oi the Nazi party in creating a mass movement, characterized by a mass

enthusiasm appropriate to a religious revival. He gave as a concrete illustration a

description of a Nuremberg rally by William Shirer, an experience of apparently

complete solidarity and enthusiastic conformity to a single purpose, embodied in

the figure of the leader (Park, 1941 b: 128). A broad social crisis seemed to have

been answered by extreme, chauvinistic appeals to race hatred, and to have

animated a population to such an extent that it was willing to engage in another

ruinous total war. The threat of the foreign as expressed in the propaganda of the

Nazi party appeared to have united and invigorated a people in a way that

democracy had not, or, Park concluded in these articles, in a way democratic

forms of deliberation and discussion actually could not. Pubik; opinion appeared

to be a weak bond at best in comparison, and to be fostering experiences contrary to those prepared by the designers of Nuremberg. 65 ln orderto explore further Park's ideas about news and public opinion at this time, this chapter will first examine the extensions he made of his earlier, pragmatist formulations, where social change is managed or regulated through communicative interaction, Then the limits he put on the efficacy of this process will be examined, and why Park felt an imagery of conflict and impulse more appropriate to descriptions of communicative interaction when fundamental va.lues were at stake,

Collective behaviour applied to news and public opinion.

Park conceived the circulation of news and public opinion formation in terms of his theory of collective behaviour, developed in articles in the late '20's and in the '30's, The important social consequences of news reports lay, for Park, in their being circulated within a group and being therefore a continuous focus of attention and commentary, ln having a shared awareness of occurrences in the news, a community as a whole can be oriented to simple changes in its surroundings and can respond to those changes, And in discussion, public or community opinion about important issues is built. Through the exchange of news and in subsequent discussion of the practical considerations raised, a public is constituted, and a consensus or resolution of views can be developed, ln turn, this public opinion, once formulated, can effect changes in established values and praetices,

The organism analogy used by Park in his theory of collective behaviour points to the importance of perception and reaetion as group processes; a group 66 exists in its dealings with the environment, and, in dealing with its environ ment, forms its purposes and consensus. In a period of coordination, individual attitudes towards novel developments issue in gestures which are qualified and balanced by the gestures of others. Any action taken, or rather, any change in habituai or conventional conduct, is not taken in isolation, but depends on an orientation to the situation arrived at in concert with others. Stresses are not resolved by the individual; rather, they are resolved in individual interaction with others.

An example of the development of consensus during a period of coordination is given in Park's comments on labour agitation in 'The strike'

(1928a). Individual agitation is expressed and, if it resonates, is taken up and bl3comes involved in a collective expression and demonstration of sentiment, a

'public sentiment', manifested in 'spontaneous and unpremeditated' group actions.

It then, perhaps, receives organization in the form of leaders, strategies, and techniques of discipline, so that 'what was a gesture assumes the form of a political movement'. There is thus established a 'conflict group', a definable social form with devices and mechanisms by which it maintains itself (Park, 1928a: 30·

33). Public gestures eventually issue in acts, aets have ramifications, issuing in further gestures, and so on. As a situation develops, the means of collectively managing it evolve into accepted practices.

Park's theory of collective behaviour isolates three stages in the process of building consensus. The first is the perception of difficulties in the situation of a group, a collective attention to some anomaly not provided for by customary 67 definitions and practices, and experienced as tension or stress. The second stage

is the period of coordination, in which stress leads ta collective deliberation. The

experience of tension leads ta an openness ta the expressions of others, and a

graduai working out of a consensus or opinion which is no longer individual but

shared or public. The final stage is the action itself, an attempted resolution of the

problem by behaviour which reflects the consensus of the group. Roughly, the

circulation of news corresponds ta the first of these stages, and the formulation of

public opinion ta the second.

Ideas common ta American pragmatism are evident in Park's defining news

as providing the basis for a 'collective attention' ta the environment. News in

circulation is a means by which a group monitors its surroundings. Anomalies and

problems in the envimnment are key foci of human intelligence, recognized and

defined through the agency of communication within the group. In 'News and the

human interest story' (1940a), Park characterized news, first of ail, as appealing

ta a material and practical interest, in the world as it is developing. News gives

'evidence of things in process', and has 'interest'; it refers ta events where the

consequences might conceivably have an effect on the reader's actual situation.

'rime and place are the essence of news'; its importance lies in a practical need

ta be aware of what is going on around one (Park, 1940a: 107-110). In 'News as

a form of knowledge' (1940b), Park calls news the 'not wholly unexpeeted'. In the

course of such things as business, politics, or even the weather, there is a range

of possible but unpredietable developments, and what actually chances ta happen • is the subject of the news. Interest in the news is 'pragmatic' (Park, 1940b: 82-83). 68 The provocative and Immediate character of the news, its interest and importance, leads it to be the subject of conversation. News is 'what makes people talk' (Park, 1940a: 108), or what provokes discussion. If 0. ;';(lWS report excites reaction, that reaction is shared. News is anything that will 'startle, amuse, or otherwise excite the reader so that it will be remembered and repeated'; it

'circulates spontaneously without any adventitious aids' and 'without inhibitions'

(Park, 1940b: 80) What doesn't excite interest and comment ceases to be news, while what does begins to occupy more space until interest wanes. News is a

'perishable commodity', served up promiscuously and without order (ibid: 78).

ln general, for Park, reciprocal interaction united a group of individuals at various levels of intensity and conscious awareness. At a basic level, there is a sense of the group's existence communicated, which Park Iikened to the Collective awareness present in a herd, manif~1st in its contagious excitement or collective repose. Human society is also 'en rapport' in this way, 'participating in a collective existence'. 'Communication often takes place below the level of clear consciousness. We live in an atmosphere of suggestion and counter suggestion, the changes and fluctuations of which influence and control us like a social weather' (Park, 1931 a: 282). News in any form circulates subject ta this sensitivity to others and sense of the group. Individuals are responsive to the 'mood' of the group partially through the exchange of news. Specifie sorts of news obviously have individual interest, but in those reports Iikely to be subjects nf common attention, the interest and importance of news is relative to an idea of the Iife of 69

a group and what can affect il. Usually this 'public attention' is not focused tb any

great extent on a single issue, but is vaguely attentive to the environ ment as a

whole.

Another analogy Park employed, very similar in its formulation to the organic

analogy, was one taken from behavioural psychology. It also stresses the potential

for unified awareness afforded by reciprocal interaction: "... news performs

somewhat the same functions for the public that perception does for the individual

man; that is to say, it does not so much inform as orient the public, giving each

and ail notice as to what is going on" (Park, 1940b: 79). This behavioural analogy

occurs also in The Immigrant Press and its Control (1922). Park used it to model

how innumerable reports of news circulating among a group are subjected to a

process of selection, or to a collective determination of their relative importance.

ln the individual human organism, attention serves to select among the

'innumerable stimulations' affecting it those which are most important, and which

become 'represented in the focus of consciousness'. Other stimuli are 'pushed

back into the margin of consciousness, where they occupy a position and exercise

an "influence" that is subordinate.. .' ln the 'public mind', news is s!milar to stimuli

and public opinion similar to attention (Park, 1922: 329-330). Through the informai

circulation of news, ail members of a group can be oriented to various

developments of interest, react to them, and share their reactions. If a single issue

begins to be perceived of as important, public attention concentrates on it and • interest and talk develops. 70 Attention, as has been seen, depends on a certain amount of 'tension' within a group, the result of the sensitivity of its members to the mood of the whole, expressed in the readiness to pay attention to events which may be important to collective life. Since news is communication, it requires involvement in a community and susceptibility to the expressions of others. The idea of the group is inherent in the sort of attention Park is speaking about, expressed in curiosity about the group's situation, which eventually issues in a group's internai deliberation and coordination. By representing the idea of an identifiable group, immigrant newspapers were means of participating in the group, and contributed to the orientation of individuals to a common set of values and practices. The newspapers were instrumental in publicizing the variety of responses in the communities they served, and in helping to formulate a collective response or definition of the situation. Immigrants did not react to their environment separately, but together, aware through the newspapers of each other's reactions and sensitive to them, because they had a sense of being members of the saIT.;) group and had a means of communicat!ng with it, the effect of which was a form of socialization or ready conformity.

So, as eventually some developments concentrate public attention, they become subject to a process of evaluation which issues in public opinion. The most important social consequences of the circulation of news occurs when public talk becomes focused on some issue, and begins what corresponds to the 'period of coordination' outlined in Pévk's theory of collective behaviour. Here again, as in 71

The Immigrant Press and its Controi (1922), is an elaboration of W.1. Thomas' idea

that definition of the situation occurs in various sorts of conversation within a

group, when individuais participate with others in the Interpretation of generally

undecided issues. The continued circulation of news stimulates conversation and

commentary, which issues in a clash of opinions as the question of the significance

of events is debated. Consensus evolves over the Interpretation to be given, and

over the proper actions to be taken. Thus, if the public is oriented by the circulation

of news, it is informed by discussion. In discussion the information presented in

detached form in the news is organized, and given a context and an interpretation

(Park, 1940b: 79).

The novel and unexpected, as reported in the news, raise questions of

practical action, which forms the substance of discussion: '... when there is nothing

to be done about the events recorded in the newspaper they have ceased to be

news' (Park, 1940a: 110). In 'News and the power of the press' (1941 a), Park

wrote that the importance of the changes reported in news leads to discussion of

possible and proper responses. Each individual has their own opinion, dependent

on their personal disposition, broached to others and modified in the course of

conversation. If an issue becomes pressing or controversial, this process of

modification continues until a public opinion is formed about practical actions to be

taken. The circulation of news th us allows a special, democratic mode of

par'dcipation in determining the purposes and actions of a group. ~. 72 ln times of cri sis, when public attention and energy are sufficiently focused

on an issue, public opinion is most likely to be constructed, 'the interpretation

which the great mass of readers put on events'. At other, more moderate times,

the opinions of various leaders serve to mediate discussion, and interest groups,

which for various reasons have the interest and energy to pursue an issue, are the

only mobilized sectors of the population. But in times of difficulty and rapid change,

previous leaders may no longer inspire confidence, and large sectors of the public

are aroused and prepared to take action (Park, 1941 a: 118-123).

The circulation of news and talk about important issues, then, involves

individuals in group life. Park quite insightfully linked certain newspaper

conventions to this social habit. A comparison Park made again in these articles

was between news and editorials. Editorials are attempts to provide a context for

the news, and explain the relevance of events to the Iife of the community and to

its values. They 'interpret' the news, or give its 'significance'. As SUGh, Park said,

they have less real interest for the reader: the 'common man' prefers news to

editorial, and entertainment to edification. The essence of the appeal of news is

that it is something to be responded to, its reports are something to be concerned

with and talked about. Editorial, which presumes to impose a response and an

Interpretation ready-made, is slightly irrelevant, or unsociable perhaps. Reporters

eventually learn this, and write 'without colour and without comment' so that 'the

reader can supply the moral'. The apparent 'objectivity' of news resides partially • in reporters' capacity to provoke discussion without themselves seeming to voice 73 a point of view; reporters learn to leave the news uninterpreted by adopting an impersonal stance towards il. Reporters and news editors, then, are primarily interested in anything that might prove stimulating and provocative. Reporting was not, for Park, a profession, with a directing ethos and explicit responsibilities, but a game and a 'form of excitement' (Park, 1940a: 106-108).

News is presented as authentic or factual by reference to time and place

or by the documentation of sources. This verified its reality, said Park (ibid: 108),

and it also seems to verify the importance which the reader may give to il. News

is important because it is what is happening here and now. Thus reporters and

news editors guarantee the authenticity of reports to guarantee the reactions which

readers may have, but leave the content of those reactions, commentary and

opinion, to the readers.

Park's Iiberal model of public opinion.

The clear affinities with pragmatism in Park's description of the circulation

of news and the formation of public opinion end when Park assessed the

significance of these processes to the achievement of consensus. He Iimited, in

fact, public opinion to matters of practical interest, and excluded questions of

values, asserting that values are not generally subjects of discussion, and, if they

are, cannot be reinterpreted ta f.lny great degree.

Park actually offered two models of cultural change in the articles on news

written in the 1940's, referring inboth to public opinion and in both using his later 74

conception of consensus and solidarity. The first model incorporates a pragmatist

definition of public opinion and a 'liberal' view of its raie '" social organization. It

presents public opinion as having a very graduai influence on an established consensus. The second model concerns much more dynamic changes in consensus, occurring when the usuai social institutions have become debilitated and when traditionai forms of social solidarity have become challenged.

ln the first model, Park accepted that public opinion can alter the traditional assumptions of a group, or its 'mores', a term Park adopted fram William Graham

Sumner, which refers to much the same cultural norms as did the term 'heritages'.

The changes in attitude effected in the normal course of public opinion formation could be insinuated gradually il1to the mores, revising them and revising the social behaviours based upon them. Social and institutional change occurs 'piecemeal and more or less imperceptibly', as attitudes towards a new situation come into play and perhaps alter social norms to suit the situation (Park, 1940b: 86). There is a graduai alteration of an established consellsus by public opinion, occurring under stable social conditions, a 'general drift and tendency' in the mores of a society (Park, 1931 a: 288). These graduai shifts which are occurring in the mores of a society can be read in the public opinion polis (Park, 1941 b: 141). When public opinion effects such things as legislation, the legislation is 'interpreted and enforced' over time, and its strictures are eventually incorporated into the mores

(Park, 1940a: 115).. 75 Public opinion is a stage, then, in a popular political process, Il can impact upon political programs and leçislation, to the extent that Park could say that groups which appeal to the public diï6Ctly through publicity and the press have circumvented previous channels of political influence; they 'have more or less superseded Congress in the forming of public opinion and, indirectly, in the making of laws' (ibid: 111). This can occur, he said, only in a 'free society', where the news, or 'what is actually going on', circulates widely and without restriction, and is the subject of discussion among individuals. Access to information both

authentic and important and the opportunity of discussing its importance are the

bases of public opinion as a political force (Park, 1941 a: 119). So, Park Vias

adhering to elements of a liberal theory of the relation of a free press to political

democracy and personal liberty.

However, earlier articles by Park set forth a considerably more extensive

role for public opinion in determining social values and organization. In 'Human

nature, attitudes, and the mores' (1931 a), Park wrote that public opinion could

represent a demand for reform or change contrary to traditional assumptions, and

could dismantle their authority and replace them with the principle implicit in its

own demands (Park, 1931 a: 290). In an early article, 'Public opinion and social

service' (1918), Park expressed the idea that via public opinion, individuals could

become personal participants in the direction of public institutions, establishing a

community of purpose and sense of morale. The basis would be a press which

covered important issues in a responsible manner, and he looked forward to a 76 change in the popular press from the sensationalist style then pn"valent ta one

more engaged in serious examination of pressing social issues (Park, 1918: 148­

149). Through public opinion, institutions would be subject ta popular pressures.

But there are, in the four articles on news and public opinion, serious

qualifications of the view just described, which form the substance of Park's

second model of cultural change. Not least among the qualifications is a growing insistence that change through public opinion is graduai and not dramatic. Park did not see public opinion as leading definitively ta the third stage of his process of collective behaviour; it does not in itself lead ta substantial decision and 'corporate action'. Rather, when substantial collective response is necessary, such as when usual institutional forms have been debilitated, a very different type of collective behaviour arises, similar ta crowd behaviour. The root of Park's qualifications lay, as has been said, in his changed idea of the nature of consensus, and in his new emphasis on social solidarity. Park seems ta have abandoned the pragmatist,

Iiberal idea of interaction when he entertained the necessity of compelling psychological ties as a basis of group life, relying instead on a model of interactive processes which had much more in common with Le Bon's psychological crowd than a pragmatist definition of the public.

Social solidarity and public opinion.

Social solidarity was an essential concern in sociology in the years when

Park received his education and pursued his career. The cohesion and unity of 77

human groups was thought to lie in deep and compelling attachments. That they

must be powerful was in part an implication of the idea that individuals 'naturally'

sought their own self interest, and were remarkably dissimilar in disposition.

Socialization must involve under these circumstances the inculcation of common

values at the most fundamental levels of an individual's psychology (Matthews,

1977: 36-37). For example, W.1. Thomas' discussion of demoralization among

immigrants involved positing, in the absence of values at once common and

personally compelling, a radical disconnection of individuals from each other. In his

article, 'Morale and the news' (1941 b), Park took up the topic of social solidarity

and examined it as a question of morale, the willingness to continue to join with

others in a collective life. Morale is an enthusiasm for the group and a faith in its

fortunes. Ali groups require it in some measl're if individuals are to continue to

adhere to common practices in both mundane and critical matters (Park, 1941 b:

127-128). Since it is a social relation, Park examined morale as a consequeficG of

communication. His approach is much the same as that used in speaking of a

group orientation, or a group 'en rapport': awareness of and responsiveness to

others involves a sense of the group as a whole, of its 'mood'. When looking at

this sensibility as a question of morale, Park emphasized that it is not disinterested

but emotional and receptive, leading to individuals being caught ur> in the mood of

the group and experiencing a 'collective excitement', or 'tension' (ibid: 134-135).

At another level morale is manifest as ethnocentrism and vigourous prejudice, the • tendency to take personally any perceived threat to one's group (ibid: 128). 78 ln these later articles, by far the most important assumption Park drew from the organism analogy and crowd theory was that, to be effective in social organization, communication must instil in participants a profound psychological commitment ta a common purpose; there must be an intense psychological motivation for a period of coordination ta issue in a collective action, for only under conditions of concentrated attention ta others can individual differences be subsumed ta the discipline of the group. The idea of pragmatic interaction, the collective activity of working out a resolution of differing Interpretations, is lost.

Instead, Park felt he had ta model processes of collective enthusiasm and the intensification of emotional responsiveness.

"At certain times and under certain con,~itions this collective excitement, 50 essential ta communication if not ta understanding, rises ta a higher level of intensity....As tension arises, the Iimits of public interest narrows, and the range of events ta which the public will respond is limited. The circulation of news is Iimited; discussion ceases, and the certainty of action of sorne sort increases. This narrowing of the focus of public attention tends ta increase the influence of the dominant persan or persans in the community. But the existence of this dominance depends upon the ability of the community, or its leaders, to maintain tension. It is in this way tf·at dictators arise and maintain themselves in power. It is this that explains likewise the necessity ta a dictatorship of some sort of censorship" (Park,

1940b: 85).

On/y in times of crises and social tension are there sufficient conditions for a communit'.' ta originate collective actions. Times of crisis are times of unrest, 79 when usual institutions and priorities appear unable to control a situation. Anxiety

increases and seeks release, and it is for this reason that 'discussion ceases'; at

a certain point, the collective behaviour of a public mayes itself beyond discussion

and interpretation to enthusiasm for a single point of view. Public attention is

concentrated and a 'collective will' developed which 'mobilizes the community to

ac!' and 'tends to terminate discussion' (Park, 1941 a: 116). There is, Park was

suggesting, a point at which public opinion can become a mass movement and a

popular dictatorship, and no longer an activity centered around the free circulation

of news. This occurs when public opinion becomes organized to the extent that il

develops leaders and a program, or a capacity to ac!. Park asserted in 'News and

the power of the press' (1941 a) that the power of the press lay in its capacity to

seize on and publicize grievances and sources of unrest, which might capture

public attention and be made into a 'cause' by editorial writers and e.

politicians. Put)lic opinion is now characterized not as the discussion of personal

opinions, but as a process of building a sense of collective outrage and sense of

collective strength. Group unrest and anxiety are fertile grounds for political

solidarity in the sense of a commitment to a common cause. As was the case with

a strike, public discontent, when it leads to movements or factions, has political

impact (Park, 1941a: 116-117).

Thus, times of stress usually issue in cultural crisis and confrontation. A

collective response to stress occurs in the development of factions and the • selection of moral enemies. This involves not public opinion, but another form of 80 collective behaviour, one which celebrates the morale of a Qfoup; and discussion at this point ceases. Profound commitments and prejudices are aroused and expressed, and propaganda and editorial now govern public discourse, as a group perceives itself to be involved in a moral struggle with its opponents. A group in this case is involved in a process of collective 'definition of the situation'; its perception of its situation and its ai ms alter. Fundamental assumptions change as a group redefines itself and its values in opposition to its real or imagined rivais, as happens, for example, with nationalist or racial consciousness. The experience of conflict leads a grOiJp to develop a new awareness of itself as different from and perhaps superior to others. So a type of collective interpretation occurs in this case, propaganda being the 'principal weapon' of this process of justification and satisfaction, and of building morale (Park, 1943a: 303-305).

News and public opinion do not, as Park defined them here, contribute to the creation or intensification of morale. They can contribute to a general tension or awareness, and to a sense of crisis, on which morale is based. But interaction only leads to collective action under conditions where the individual can be subo~dinated to the group, and the activity of interpretation subsumed to unquestioned loyalties. This requires the maintenance or building of morale, not discussion, and a fundamentally irrational loyalty and responsiveness. The essential consequence of collective behaviour is in this case the development of a common purpose, less in the sense of a goal for action than in the sense of a common will. Communication and participation are essentially extensions of the 81 psychological crowd in this anc,lvsis, for only under the circumstances of an inner compulsion can individuals become part of a social organism, as the 'capacity to act collectively' is engendered by 'an Interpenetration of mind' (Park, 1941 b: 136).

If solidarity in the form of devo:ion to authoritative mores is strong, public discussion can proceed within its Iimits, so that Interpretation and divergence of views are bounded by the universe of discourse the mores provide. This is why public discussion is 'practical and pragmatic'; it is generally not about ultimate values or ends, but about practical means of implementing given purposes (Park,

1943a: 306). According to Park's formulation, the discussion of news which reaches beyond merely practical concerns debilitates morale. When Park looked at the consequences of discussion about more critical issues, news appears as a demoralizing influence. Discussion implies a difference of opinion, the result of individuais making their own Interpretations of events. It thus emphasizes personal differences and divisiveness, and obscures the established, common values held by individuals in a group which make for unity. If an issue becomes important it excites emotion, and the rifts between individuals become wider; indeed, people become, in such discussion, more Iike individuals, increasingly investing their point of view with their personal resentments and frustrations, setling themselves

implacably against others in their social circle. The experiences and relations

involved in public opinion become those of dissension and disharmony. The idea

of discussion involving a mutual modification and reconciliation of Interpretations

such as would issue in a public opinion is lost, and consequently the idea that 82 public opinion can lorm itsell with sufficient vigour to ellect political change is lost.

Discussion does not lead to a unilied public opinion, but to a divided and diversilied one; that individuals provide their own interpretations lor the news means that these largely stay individual.

"Public opinion is therefore not a good index of morale because, being the fruit of discussion, it intensifies diflerences. Public opinion is on the surface 01 things and does not rellect the attitudes and points 01 view on which the community is united. The very existence 01 public opinion is Itsell evidence that we are not at the moment as one in regard to what as a nation or a people we should do" (Park, 1941b: 141).

Park concluded that what should be the strongest provocations of united public opinion are actually counter to solidarity. Times 01 crisis are times 01 the greatest and most visceral dissension. Issues which capture and locus public attention are now described as stories lollowed by obsessed individuals, who become 'enthralled' with the daily developments, to increasingly brood and worry over them, until they become 'possessed' and 'disoriented' (ibid: 140).

Park's thinking at this stage is usually attributed to his adoption 01 ideas 01

William Graham Sumner's about culture and social solidarity. The 'mores' were, for Sumner, a deepseated, implacable heritage 01 moral imperatives dictating sociallile (Smith, 1988: 119-122). The mores are articles 01 absolut€', blind laith; they 'admit 01 no exception or variation', and govern conduct 'without rational reflection or purpose' (Sumner, quoted in Park, 1931 b: 248). The mores 83 themselves, as they govern individual conduct, are not 'articulate and communicable' (Park, 1940b: 74). They issue in a vital sense of what Sumner called the 'we group', and in ethnocentrism and prejudice, a powerful emotive commitment which can be rationalized, perhaps, but not rationally articulated. In these terms Park defined consensus and solidarity (Park, i 931 a: 288). As a result, a universe of discourse, the 'fund of fundamental ideas and assumptions which are understood and taken for granted', is not 'discussable' (Park, 1943a: 306).

ln times of crisis, the mores are no longer effective forms of social control.

This was, in fact, Park's definition of a social crisis, a period when the certainty

and confidence inspired by the mores is no longer operative (Park, 1943b: 319).

The result is demoralization and anxiety. Early on in his thinking, Park presented

urban communities as in 'a chronic state of crisis' because of the rapid social and

cultural changes they underwent. But he still identified viable cultural forms growing

up in local neighbourhoods, maintaining some continuity with past traditions and

providing social Integration and understanding (Park, 1916: 17-18, 31). In his

articles on news in the 1940's, P2.fk could not conceive oi anûther process of

interaction occurring in a situation of crisis other than demoralization, which is the

felt absence of purpose, or the fanaticism of a crowd, and the revivification of

passionate commitment and prejudice.

Besides using Sumner's idea of the mores, Park returned to some

assumptions drawn tram crowd theory, and represented in The Crowd and the

Public (1904). There, the distinguishing feature of the public is also defined as 84 discussion, and also differentiated from the enthusiasm and unity characteristic of a collective will, and the type of relationship achieved by a crowd. The collective will, or common purpose of a group, is objectified in the mores a~; unquestioned moral absolutes, traditional values which are internalized and accepted wholeheartedly, since only in this fashion do individuals willingly submit along with others to the 'aims of the collectivity'. Ethnocentric prejudice is the reflection of this moral absolutism (Park, 1904: 77). In a public, on the other hand, moral relativism is implicit; the correct values to apply in any situation are subjects 01 discussion, and, as weil, therefore, the priorities and claims of basic values are themselves easily opened to debate. Under such conditions, public opinion can produce agreement but never conviction; it cannot produce a consensus of a type corresponding to the absolute validity of the general will. Public opinion remains a personal conviction, expressed as an argument with which others may agree. It never takes on the 'supra-individual' authority 01 the mores (ibid: 61).

The relativism Inherent in discussion is seen in the perception 01 news as

'Iactual' by a public. For this to occur, the idea oi iact separate lrom value must be operative. Reality is reported objectively, that is, as already differentiated Irom evaluations 01 its importance. In the case 01 traditional mores, however, objects and values are represented in given relations, and perceived as one (Park, 1904:

60-62). In 'Morale and the news' (1941 b), Park wrote that editorial and propaganda

~resent the 'truth', while the news presents 'Iacts'. Facts require rellection about their signilicance, and are subject, therelore, to different Interpretations. Reliection 85 of this sort is 'fatal' to the 'finality' of truth, but it is only the confidence of 'having the truth' that leads to unity and collective action (Park, 1941 b: 130).

Difficulties in Park's later theory.

According to Park's later theory, discussion itself cannot provide a definition

of the situation when it is required that definitions be unacknowledged, ineffable

norms. On the contrary, public opinion, if operating in the face cf a breakdown of

solidarity, exacerbates disunity and leads to conflict. Without a common universe

of discourse, there is nothing to impose agreement on differences in interpretation.

There are no common premises under which differences can be reconciled, and,

more importantly, Park had defined cultural norms in such a way that they cou Id

not be compromised; they were absolutes. Nothing can impose agreement except

the experience of being caught up in a mass enthusiasm. Differences in

Interpretation, on the other hand, easily evolve into bitter confrontations. They

cannot be resolved in discussion, and discussion, if it continues, tends to expose

them for what they are, differences in prejudice. At that point, a difference in

opinion is exposed as a struggle of rival claims to absolute truth.

"Whenever in any political society the diversity of interests and points of

view from which the news in interpreted becomes 50 great that discussion is no

longer possible, then there is no longer any public opinion, at least no effective

public opinion. In that case nothing but force, in some form or other, is capabie of

maintaining sufficient order to permit, if not the normal, at least the necessary,

social processes to go on" (Park, 1941 a: 120). 86 Collective bJhaviour as a process is not in this formulation capable 01 accommodating different values. Rather, in unstable times, if a common tradition and sense of morale are lacking, the result of divergent opinion is conflict and seUlement by force. Domination seUles contentious issues, and those who will not conform are forced to conforrn: 'one must recognize, it seems to me, that the most elementary lorm of political action is war, and discussion, when it takes place, is merely a substitute or surrogate for war' (ibid: 120). The idea of conflict and

'surrogates for war' informs Park's thinking at this time. When discussion is pursued outside the Iimits of a universe of discourse, its outcome is 'violence in either work or deed'; any other outcome is 'practically impossible' (Park, 1943a:

306). 'Discussions not only make public opinion', Park wrote, 'they sometimes make wars. But as far as my observation goes, they rarely make peace' (Park,

1941b: 130).

An accommodation of different values is exactly the sort of process which

W.1. Thomas thought to explain, and is proliled also in The Immigrant Press and its Control (1922). The unfamiliar is interpreted in terms of the familiar, having the effect of altering familiar, traditional definitions, accommodating them to a new environment. Only in the case that received values are malleable, not through individual fiat, but through some process by which groups can shift the priorities of social recognition, could demoralization be avoided in the experience of immigration. A 'new environment' is of course a new or changed social environment, a confrontation with unknown conventions and values. There is a 87 process of recovering in a new social situation still meaningful personal and moral

terms, of reconstructing those modes of conduct and expression which unite the

individual to ideas of worth and status. Success in this is a group achievement, a

process of communication. But such a model requires that cultural values be

conceived of as in some fashion open to compromise and accommodation.

The same process was described by Park in 'Negro Œce consciousness as

reflected in race Iiterature' (1923c). Here, the popular songs and poetry of African

American communities are seen as interpretations of their own experience. They

circulate widely and provide a sense of belonging to a community of shared

attitudes and values, and as such, provide also a means by which interpretations

are made, communicated, and accepted (Park, 1923c: 287). This is not an

explicitly rational process, and yet it allows for active expression and interpretation

of cultural forms within a group.

An essential problem in Park's later writings on news and public opinion is

a lack of a conception of how the mores, conceived of as psychologically obscure,

can be, first of ail, expressed, and secondly, altered. The definition offered by

Sumner and Park, of the mores as unquestioned absolutes, tends to eliminate the

possibility of managed cultural change. The rejection of pragmatist alternatives is

based on a rather abstract dichotomy between rational scepticism and absolute

10yalty, which has the result of excluding the mores from any process which

suggests they are subjects of Interpretation and evaluation. Effectively, any • process of cultural Interpretation is seen as a species of 'discussion' and 88 rationality, and is opposed to solidarity, although models of such a process were

available in studies of popular culture, engaged in by Park himself in earlier work.

ln his articles on news, Park's interest in the tension between cultural

stability and change had been reduced to a theory which essentially could not

define change in any terms but confrontation, conflict, and struggle. Change in

cultural forms is either imperceptible or a symptom of conflict and fanaticism.

There is no proces~ of collective interpre1.ation and synthesis, or of bridging the

gap between the familiar and the unfamiliar. Resolution of controversy occurs only,

therefore, through power and domination, and the triumph of one totalitarian

worldview over another.

Conclusion.

Park's earlier work had been more sanguine about the possibility of

constructive social change. However, Park did not at any time share some key

political beliefs of the progressives, as noted by many commentators; he disliked

reformers intensely, and could be sceptical of the idea of public rationality which

Michael Sproule says distinguished American social theory at the time from

European crowd theory (Sproule, 1991: 228). A deep conservatism, bred by

pessimism, is clearly evident in these later articles on news. Social control is

inhibition of the individual, and the individual is conceived of as largely emotional

and impulsive, to be channelled into cooperative behaviour by tradition. Stability

in itself is good, because its only alternative is released impulse, conflict and • hatreds, and social chaos. 89 Before he moved to the University of Chicago, Park spent nine years in

Alabama, working as a press agent and publicist for Booker T. Washington. It is not difficult ta see in Park's later work a basic agreement with Washington's meliorative politics, and an extrapolation of the operations of race ,Jlations in the

American south to the operation of social relations generally. In the segregated

American south, any agitation on the part of African Amer:cans, including agitation for reformist legislation, would be met by immediate and violent reaction on the part of the white population. Conflict, sudden and aggressive, wou Id result, behind which would be essential and unquestioned beliefs of the white population about the status of the two groups and the perception that these beliefs were being threatened. Compromise of any sort seemed impossible. In Iight of the concrete intransigence of white attitudes and institutions, Booker T. Washington proposed a policy of 'opportunistic cooperation' (Elkins, 1959: 12), or graduai, non­ confrontational improvements in the Airican American economic and social position. Vet the conditions allowing a favourable social evolution may not have been present. The system of segregation was clearly being undermined by economic and social changes, and by resentment and unrest in the African

American community. Crisis and conflict were unavoidable in such a situation. The extent of violence in the south was, in fact, an indication that the social structure was disintegrating and being preserved by force (Park, 1937: 181-186).

The vision of society Park presented in his articles on news was of a community regulated by stable, traditional ties, yet where that stability was fragile, 90

liable to periods of unrest and crisis. Factions al :se, animated by extremes of

emotional resolve. Such things as race riots, industrial strife, or religious revivais

periodically disrupt sociallife, and the moral 'issues' of which they are symptomatic

are decided by struggle. The collective Interpretation of the significance of news

beyond the quotidian reflects this situation of perceived moral crisis. In his writings

on the immigrant press, Park had felt a new consensus could be reached among

the disparate cultural groups making up America. But in his later articles on news,

he portrayed America between the wars as a society prone to instability, lacking

a basic solidarity, because 'composed of people who have come to us fram the

ends of the earth' (Park, 1941 b: 142).

• Chapter four: pragmatic and traditional interaction in Park's work.

There is a discontinuity oatween Park's earlier w0rk on the immigrant newspapers and his later work on news and public opinion. Commentators have noted a transition in his work f,S a whole; Park's early debt was ta W.1. Thomas and American pragmatism, while his later work emphasized unconscious forces in the manner of W.G. Sumner (Madoo Lengerman, 1988: 367-371). In his early work on the newspaper medium, Park saw immigrant newspapers as involved in a process of cultural Integration and synthesis, which eventually assimilated different groups within a single, extended community. Later, Park characterized this same community, the public formed by newspaper readership, as lacking integration, except in cases where mass, enthusiastic movements formed. The causes of its disunity were the disintegrating effects of a primary type of newspaper content, the news.

The two phases of Park's work are simiJar, however, in the particular form of interaction that Park saw newspapers occasioning. Through the mass print medium, a certain style of collective response ta the social world developed, a typical approach or point of view. Park throughout his work characterized that typical point of view as 'pragmatic', 'practical', or 'rational'. And in bath his early and his later work he praposed that the point of view afforded by newspapers was different in kind fram that afforded by 'heritages', 'tradition', or 'mores'. The essential difference between the two phases of his work is that he later came to define the pragmatic point of view as wholly separate from tradition, and in conflict 92 e with it, whereas in earlier work he showed pragmatic and traditional demands being reconciled, in the communitios served by the immigrant press.

Park's work was a continuai attempt at synthesis, as Lewis Coser said

(Coser, 1971: 373). He drew a number oi concepts fram disparate sources in

social theory, W.1. Thomas and W.G. Sumner, for exarnple, and from Western

philosophy, Iiterature, and natural science (Matthews, 1977: 131). In order to

explain the discontinuity in Park's work further, it is necessary to further explore

some of the conternporary intellectual currents from which Park drew key

assumptions. In the case of the mass newspapèr medium, his thinking seems to

have been formed in relation to three sets of ideas: a notion of the rational public,

a notion of solidarity, and a notion of a radical disjunction between modern and

traditional society.

The liberal ideal of the public was that it was a forum for free, reasonable

debate (Peters, 1989: 200); it was a body capable of making informed decisions

about its common interests, and a body, therefore, seeming to exhibit a rational

point of view. Of central importance tu Park was the relation the conduct of a

public bore to the sociological concept of solidarity, a comn:cG, deepseated

commitment to a set of values. Park's own assessment of the extent to which a

public is rational, and his opposition of rationality to solidarity, has already been

described. As weil, Park's use of Sumner and crawd theory in conceiving of

solidarity has been dealt with. 93

It remains ta examine more closely the background of his idea of public

opinion as rational, and the influence of two of his contemporaries, Walter

Lippmann and John Dewey. Also, Park identified solidarity c10sely with tradition,

and cast his considerations of the opposition of rationality ta solidarity within contemporary thinking about modern society. The background of his thinking on the disjunction of modern and traditional society also needs ta be explored, especially the influence cr. Park of an idea developed by Ferdinand Toennies, that the nature of consensus in modern, industrial societies was radically different fram that in traditional societies. Briefly, Park accepted that newspapers were evidence of a practical and, in a sense, rational point of view, and that this point of view was incommensurate with traditional modes of conduct. As such, newspapers were agents of a modernizing trend, rational and secular, in which tradition and solidarity were being dismantled. An increasing emphasis on modern processes of dislocation and conflict, ratherthan proce$ses of reintegration, characterizes Park's later work.

Dewey and Lippmann on public opinion.

Park's definition of the rational character of newspaper readership reflects in its essentials the views of two eminent American theorists of democratic practice, Walter Lippmann and John Dewey. Dewey's application of pragmatism and social theory informed much of Park's sociology; Park was fond of quoting

Dewey on communication: 'Society not only continues to exist by transmission, by 94 communication, but it may fairly be said to exist in transmission, in communication'

(Park, 1922: 37). The pragmatist idea of practical activity was used by Dewey to define and evaluate culture. Just as individuals engaged in self-realization through activity which actualized or developed their own potentials, so also a community developed itself. The medium for such collective developmental activity was democratic communication, that is, open and tolerant exchange (Peters, 1989:

203-205). John Peters writes that communication is tied closely to intelligence in

Dewey's thought; on going, practical activity in and through a community of engaged individuals is the ongoing cultivation of their shared intellectual culture

(ibid: 205-206). In The Public and its Problems (1927), Dewey looked forward to the evolution of a 'Great Society', an image celebrating modernity which was

current at the time. Dewey saw the Great Society as a collective moral and cultural

advance, commensurate with the advances made in science and industry. He

recast it as a 'Great Community', achieved through the medium of extensive public

discussion and a vital, informed public life (Peters, 1989: 206).

The Public and its Problems (1927) was written by Dewey in answer to a

much less sanguine view of the potentials of public opinion, that of Walter

Lippmann. Lippmann believed that public opinion, if too influential, restricted the

growth of intellectual culture, and was even destructive of institutions of proven

worth. His book Public Opinion (1922) began by postulating the dissonance

between the real and our ideas of the real, or between the actual environment in

which we must live and the constructed 'pseudo-environments' which suit our 95 various purposes (Lippmann, 1922: 15-17). The problem in a democracy subject

to public opinion is how to bring the various popular pseudo-environments into line

with the actual; it is how to make public opinion 'sound' (Ibid: 32). Lippmann

proposed various institutional measures to correct public opinion, something of a

'technocracy of experts' (Peters, 1989: 209). Without this corrective, Lippmann felt

public opinion would be a mere elaboration of prejudice (Lippmann, 1922: 397).

Left to itself, public opinion was superficial, mercurial, inconsistent; in The Phantom

Public (1925), Lippmann wrote that the 'sovereign and omnicompetent citizen'

required by Iiberal theories of popular democracy was nowhere to be found (Blum,

1984: 69-74).

Essentially, both men were arguing about the nature of popular power. The differences between Lippmann and Dewey is that between a conservative distrust

of popular power, and a progressive, populist idealism. For Lippmann, a view held by a majority represented that requiring the least intellectual effort and embodying the greatest emotional contagion, and therefore was bound to involve crass prejudice (ibid: 73). On the other hand, popular communication about problematic

situations was, for Dewey, necessarily challenging é3.nd Iiberating, demanding a

release or detachment from prejudice. It required creative innovations, and tolerance of the other's point of view. It ran counter to prejudice also in that it forged an emotional bond among actual interlocutors, undermining traditional

biases (Carey, 1982: 28-29). 96 Park's relation ta Lippmann and Dewey.

Characteristically, when Park came ta discuss public opinion in the early

1940's, he attempted ta include bath views. The course of public discussion of

salient practical prablems in times of stabi!ity is a muted version of Dewey's Iiberal

ideas; the transformation of a public into a reactionary crawd in times of crisis

corresponds in its'3ssentials ta the ideas of Lippmann. Park's own argument about

the nature of the public centres on the question of its rationality, and, it has been

suggested, in employing a narrow view of the rational as opposed ta the irrational,

Park concluded that the public is rational in only a rudimentary sense, while many

large scale developments of public opinion are not rational at ail. James W. Carey

sees this same dichotomy operating also in Uppmann's work. There scientific

objectivity serves as the model of rational behaviour, beside which ail else was

superstition (Carey, 1982: 24-25).

ln a remark that may point ta the intellectual basis of Park's distinction,

Carey notes the nineteenth century utilitarian argument that rational practices were

involved in ascertaining the most efficient means ta reach a desired end, but were

not involved in the choice of ends themselves. Ends, and the desires which gave

them importance, were determined irrationally (Carey, 1982: 23). Thus Park

relegated attention ta news and discussion of news ta practical fields of interest,

whereas, when ultimate values came into question, he applied Sumner's ideas of

blind ethnocentrism and prejudice.

Park was alsoin agreement with Lippmann and other crities like H.L. • Menken about the superficial qualities of public opinion as it exists fram day ta day. Public opinion is wavering, diffuse, unpredictable, mere fashion and fado It is, if 97

rational, an undisciplined rationality, the reflection of shitting curiosity and attention

within an unorganized mass of individuals. In 'News as a lorm of knowledge'

(194Üb), Park compared knowledge gained fram news to more substantial types

01 knowledge. Scienœ is 'knowledge of' the world, and experience grounded in traditional beliefs is 'acquaintance with' the world, but the sort of comprehension achieved through consumption and discussion of news is neither. Its signilicance is momentary, aiding an unsteady course through transient events. News informs only about the 'specious present' (Park, 194Gb: 87), and lends itself neither to scientific organization nor to the realization of deeper truths.

News and public discussion, while rational in form, appear to have a limited uselulness in the development of a cultural intelligence. Dewey was also sceptical about the value of public opinion as it was then operating, yet was optimistic about what might be done. Park elsewhere, in 'Education and the cultural crisis' (1 S43b), suggested that education could develop skills in the analysis and comprehension of news, a praject similar to ideas of Dewey's (Park, 1943b: 328-329). Vet, on the whole, in articles written through the thirties and early forties, Park defined news and public opinion as necessarily Iimited and insubstantial, and by implication rejected the theoretical possibilities which Dewey saw.

Park's difference fram Dewey rests in the notion of rationality Park employed, which removed the discussion of news from the construction of fundamental assumptions and loyalties. News, Park wrote, was referential and practical, not symbolic and expressive. These latter qualities were products of 98

more meaningful communication, which constructed sympathetic understanding.

Practical matters involved no deeper understanding or commitment; they involved,

in fact, no necessary engagement of personality or values (Park, 1938: 52). In this

manner Park distinguished news fram the human intere;st story and other types of

popular literature (Park, 1940a: 113), and fram types of popular entertainment such

as Hollywood films (Park, 1938: 52). Ali these forms of popular culture extend

sympathetic understanding by an aesthetic mode of persuasion; that Is, they allow

a grasp of values by representing them as inherent in the events depicted. They

appeal directlyto the faculty of imaginative orientation felt ta lie behind conceptions

of beauty and moral worth, and ta lie behind loyalties and moral responses ta

others. Park referred ta this intersubjective process, instanced in the human

interest story and in films, as acculturation, the grasp of novel, fundamental values

(Park, 1938: 49-51). The idea was further developed by a student of Park's, Helen

MacGill Hughes, in her book, News and the Human Interest StOry (1940).

The idea that social relations must have aesthetic praperties is derived,

according ta Charles Taylor, from European ramanticism and its beginnings in the

late eighteenth century. For Johann Gottfried Herder, for example, the nation was

a cultural, and therefore aesthetic, entity. For Jean Jacques Rousseau, the general

will was the will ta devote oneself ta ideals beyond one's own immediate interests;

the substance and attraction of these extra personal ideais were best expressed

through works of art (Taylor, 1989: 414-415). Dewey and Park bath belonged ta • this tradition, and Dewey explained his hopes for public opinion in its terms. 'Free 99 social inquiry' could be 'wedded to the art of full and moving communication' in the presentation and circulation of news; in this manner a sense of community solidarity could be developed (Dewey, 1927: 183-184). The Immigrant Press and its Control (1922) can be considered a model of the process envisioned by Dewey, and earlier by Herder. It presented a theory of substantial change in cultural forms through popular processes of Interpretation, capable of instilling El sense of community solidarity and morale. The process of 'Americanization' was a cultural synthesis of foreign values and practices, urban necessities, and traditional, intersubjective understandings. The circulation of news within a community was implicated in a process of coliective reorientation, so that the news did not appear to the reader as isolated, practical problems, but in the context of a community and a set of problems and possibilities both personal and shared. The newspapers and their public were conceived of as an effort to organize and evaluate experience on many levels, and thus represented a popular, intellectual culture. News and discussion were pragmatic in the sense that they were caught up in a process of localized, situated Interpretations, as the events reported in the news were reconciled with a range of values and loyalties.

But in general in his later articles, Park did not relax the distinction between sympathetic communication and the practical, objective exchange occurring in the circulation of news. The distinction is untenable, even on grounds Park himself provided: in so far as it is interpreted in discussion, news can surely become expressive and a part of personal experience or 'acquaintance with'. Nevertheless, 100

Park habitually in his later work kept to definitions of news as engendering a particularly narrow type of awareness, removed from the subjectively expressive and the aesthetic. As has been seen in the comparison of Park's writings on mass

communications in the 1920's to those in the '1930's, the basic change was a

narrowing of the range of Interpretation Park felt could be engaged in by a

community. Despite his references to acculturation, which are in any case not

much developed, Park found it difficult to conceive of any moderate processes of

cultural interpretation and change, and increasingly emphasized a common,

inflexible tradition as the only source of sympathy and solidarity. Fundamental

values are not really open to Interpretation and variation, so the Interpretation

involved in the circulation and discussion of news is relegated to practical matters,

confined to debate about means, not ends. In so far as it does suggest some

Iikeness to solidarity, interaction over news creates merely a superficial, specious

kind of relation, that of fashion and fado

Park's view of modern society.

Park's limitation of public opinion to a rudimentary rationality, and his

neglect of the type of cultural process envisioned by Dewey and by himself in his

earlier work, was due to a complex of ideas he held about modern society. In

these he was influenced by thinkers whom he had studied in producing The Crowd

and the Public (1922), especially Ferdinand Toennies, and Toennies' distinction

between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. Gemeinschafi is knowledge based on 101 shared, face ta face experience, and is different in kind from Gesellschaft, knowledge based on participation in an impersonal regime. Toennies located the conditions of these knowledges in close, traditional communities and modern, industrial aggregates respectively (Hardt, 1975: 81-87). Gemeinschaft and crowd theory are expressions of the romantic tradition mentioned above, which emphasizes the construction of sympathetic understandings in social groups.

Modernity is held ta be destructive of such understanding. American progressive social theorists tended ta restrict its possibility ta small group communication and the intimate, face ta face contact proper ta Cooley's primary groups, and tended ta regard these relations as threatened by modern forces of large scale social organization (White and White, 1964: 158-160). Park's work repeatedly refers ta the passing away of tradition, and its replacement by modern forms of association, described in a fashion similar ta Toennies'.

The Great Society was, for Park, first of ail a rapidly expanding

Interpenetration of economic markets, increasing the mobility of persans, commodities, and technology, effecting changes in existing practices and institutions, and, in sum, undermining 'familial and tribal bonds' (Park, 1944: 340).

Tradition was deteriorating in the face of progress (Park, 1942: 332-337). The expanding economic order was largely 'symbiotic' for Park; that is, it was based on relations of labour and exchange, rather than on a properly social and moral arder of elaborated values and loyalties. It is, in fact, a world of interaction largely uninhibited by moral and personal claims; the expansion of the marketplace 102 removes both objects and people from associations based on a variety of

definitions of their worth, and subjects them to a measure of worth based on

supply and demand, or simple measures of efficiency (Park, 1925b: 28-29). The

modern world is a secular and rational one, where the individual is freed from

traditional strictures, but experiences a profound absence of a sense of worth

(Park, 1931c: 365).

The nature of Park's disaffection with modemity further shows his affinity for

elements of European romanticism. The idea that modern society lacks spiritual

depth is not uncommon in social theory. To Max Weber, for example, there had

been a 'disenchantment' of the world (Taylor, 1989: 500). Park quoted Uppmann's

opinion that a 'vast enlightenment' had occurred; individuals were free of dogmatic

traditions, but newly subject to the vicissitudes of the market, unchecked by the

duties and charities which are demanded by tradition. Individuals were newly

subject to necessities without purpose (Park, 1942: 340). Park's definition 0'1 news

and his description of public discussion opposed them to tradition, and put them

as part of the trend towards secularization, and towards interdependence and

contact without sympathetic understanding. The circulation of news is an

undisciplined rationality, practical but insubstantial. News enables people to

distance themselves from traditional definitions of the world, and is the agent of an

expanded, practical world view. But it promotes existence in the specious present,

and does so at the expense of modes of awareness informed by tradition (Park, • 1941b: 132). In his later articles especially, Park stipulated that the point of view 103 praper to an interest in news did not integrate individuals in relations beyond the symbiotic. Perception remains open and practical as long as individuals participate in an open and practical social order. Discussion of news disintegrates traditional notions and individualizes purposes, but does not provide an adequate vocabulary for overcoming the differences, or lack of common graund, thus generated. Rather, the 'cultural emancipation of mankind' had led to the distractions of public opinion, to 'the substitution of fashion for custom and of propaganda for tradition' (Park,

1940c: 303). For Park, the results of this situation were two: cultural crisis and conflict, the reactionary defense of moral orders being undermined, and a concurrent malaise and sense of formlessness, as old orders failed, and became replaced by a nondescript culture emptied of significance (Park, 1925b: 32).

The change in emphasis in Park's view, from an expansive pragmatism ta a diagnosis of malaise and crisis, can be related ta changes in the course of informed opinion in America generally fram the end of the first world war ta the beginning of the second. Up ta the 1920's, as Park received his education, worked for Booker T. Washington, and began at the University of Chicago, 'progressive' optimism was undaunted, and America seemed ta have an unprecedented opportunity to construct a Great Society. But from the 1920's onward, Richard

Hofstadter writes, the 'mood dissipated'; progressive ideas started to seem naively moralistic, and narrowly midwestern and small town (Hofstadter, 1955: 280-286).

Instead, and especially with the success of New Deal politics in the 1930's, enthusiasm began to shift to finding solutions to social problems based on 104 organization, technique, and bureaucracy, an interest shared by Lippmann, for

example (Peters, 1989: 212). Many central progressive concerns, such as for a

participatory solidarity, and their vision of a great community, appeared

'operationally useless' (Hofstadter, 1955: 317-321). There was a concurrent shift

in sociology away from humanist definitions of culture (Sproule, 1991: 228).

Structural-functionalist paradigms were developed, more able to define large scale

social problems in terms of systems and management (Smith, 1988: 141-145).

Notably, C. Wright Mills, in his 1943 essay on the 'ideology' of the earlier

generation of American sociologists, excoriated them for their 'failure to consider

larger problems of social structure', a failure he attributed to their overly

'humanitarian' and 'rural' idealism (Mills, 1943: 527).

Much American sociology also came to see mass media as implicated

within a larger social structure, and as contributing in their own way to the stability

of that structure. Morris Janowitz, in his book, The Community Press in an Urban

Setting (1952), found that urban community newspapers were primarily

conservative, stabilizing institutions, which promoted existent norms and integrated

individuals into the established social organization (Janowitz, 1952: 22-23). Park

also held, of course, that there was a modern social organization, and that

newspapers contributed to its realization. But he chose to characterize its

normative order, the consensus upon which social organization was based, as

nondescript and insubstantial. Park thought there were significant ways in which • modern society lacked coherence, and perceived its potential for conflict, mutual 105

incomprehension, and rootlessness. His analysis reflected the essentially

'humanist' preoccupations of the progressives, or what Daniel Czitrom calls the

'speculative moral concerns' of Dewey and Park, their abiding interest in the moral

and spiritual qualities of modern consensus (Czitrom, 1982: 121). In fact, Park's

later work, with its assertion of the evolution of modern organization and the

dissipation of traditional community, seems to document the failure of modern

American society to move toward the sort of cultural and political vitality for which

the progressives had hoped. Modern economic circumstances causing dislocation

and disruption were concretely manifest in the depression of the early 1930's and

the resulting social chaos. Institutional and industrial organization based on rational

measures of social and economic utility had grown unabated. Aggressive, racist

social movements were present in both Germany and the American south,

evidence that intractable, volatile prejudices still underlay social relations, and

could emerge at any time. In the south, especially, economic decline had

exacerbated relations between the races, and made them more violent and bitter.

The Great Community, perhaps, seemed no longer a possibility to Park.

Park's revision of his ideas about popular processes of communicative

interaction can be seen as a symptom of intellectual malaise. The later articles

contaip an increasing emphasis on the limits to a community's capacity of

comprehension and cultural development. His later views of processes of

interaction have much more in common with Lippmann's idea of pseudo­ • environments than with Dewey's idea of evolving cultural intelligence. Issues and 106 controversies in the public sphere are primarily reflections of confusion and

anxiety, leading not to expanded awareness and compromise, but on the contrary,

to building tension, and to collective action as a release from tension. There seems

to be a new, Freudian emphasis on social relations as symptoms of obscure

impulses and anxieties. Park's earlier, pragmatist idea of community Iife had been

overcome by a pessimistic sense of the irrationality of consensual Ideals. Despite

a certain nostalgia fortraditional community solidarity, Park could still ~haracterize

it as limiting, oppressive, and Intolerant. And despite Park's comments about

modern society being itself characterized by a specious present and nondescript

culture, he recognized it as also a Iiberation from the dogmatic and blind

conformity imposed by tradition. Vet ultimately Park's later work argues the

existence of only two alternatives, traditional order and modern chaos, and so Park

approached the evolution of modern society with great suspicion. Park accepted

Sumner's view, that 'any morality is better than moral anarchy' (quoted in Smith,

1988: 213). If the roots of Park's optimism about community Iife can be traced to

romanticism, his later writings can be characterized as evincing a sort of romantic

despair or disillusion. The realization of earlier aspirations had come to seem

impossible, and no values of any weight had been discovered that might replace

them. • 107

Ideas of integration and disintegration in Park's work.

The idea that communication integrates people in a community appears throughout Park's work, and does much to explain his emphasis on tradition and

mores. Customary forms of interaction establish communicative situations, and thus establish the ground of social relations. Given these customary forms of interaction, emotional and intellectual loyalties can be built up and a mutual comprehension of individuals can evolve. In this fashion, individuals are integrated into a community. Park's suspicion about modern society was that it was without form, and without Integration. But in much of his earlier work he held that, even as older forms of interaction decay, new practices and understandings develop. The earlier work, in fact, payed more attention to the phenomenon of subcultures, local variations or Interpretations of given social situations and definitions. Ongoing interaction produces new cultural definitions, often in conflict with the old. But his work never completely loses an appreciation for the subtleties of individual and group response, and never loses an appreciation for the variety of historically specifie cultural forms.

Park's understanding of communicative interaction is largely opposed to

'overly structural' definitions of social phenomena, either structural-functionalist or marxist; it is usually for this reason that Park's work is now appreciated (Lai, 1990:

6-8). These tend to view public discourse as primarily resistant to change, as a question of predetermined responses and largely functional fonns. Park himself could entertain this latter view in its essentials; for example, in his use of Sumner's 108 idea of 'nondiscussable and nonrational' mores, which Park took ta be one with

W.1. Thomas' definitions of the situation, and Karl Mannheim's closed ideologies

(Park, 1943a: 303-305). His later work exemplifies the difficulty of reconcilini) the manifest authority of received definitions with the equally manifest pt'enomfJnon of cultural innovation and conflict.

A large part of what distinguishes Park's view of interaction fram more deterministic models is his idea that social Iife also involves conflict and dissolution. It finds expression in the work studied here as the idea that, while it can integrate, communication can also disintegrate. Communication can be the cause of the decay of understanding. This is evident in Park's considerations of the eventual impact of newspapers on immigrant groups. The efforts of nationalist editors to prevent assimilation of their people instituted a process of cultural change and adaptation, through which, in fact, the old loyalties and language were dissolved. Park's later version of the activity of keeping tradition intact and resisting disintegration, the reactionary enthusiasms sparked by cultural crisis, still involved an unintended revision and alteration of tradition. But the power of communication to cause disintegration appears most clearly in Park's descriptions of urban Iife, in his view of modem society, and in his descriptions of the impact of news on traditional beliefs. The decay of established cultural forms occurs as contact and communication outsidè the circle of the given occurs. Interaction with the foreign

undermines or causes crisis in the familiar. 109 The double function of communication as both integrating and disintegrating, as an agent of both authority and nonconformity, can be seen also in the idea that, in so far as communication integrates, it does so by channelling or c10sing off interaction. The potential range of interaction is restricted by established cultural forms; they are effectively barriers to communicative interaction. Tradition in Park's work is largely defined as a set of conventions and expectations which predetermine the course of interaction. The mores are strictures imposing éi pattern on human relations and, therefore, are institutions of control over the occasion and extent of communication between individuals. Communication must be controlled because it is potentially subversive, a vehicle of the unconventional and unforseen, in simple, accidentai contacts with strange cultures, in the spread of works of popular culture, or in the growth of private, informai understandings and affections across barriers of custom and prejudice.

ln many articles Park attempted to develop a definition of social conventions as 'social distances', known and accepted Iimits to familiarity, and barriers to interaction. The observance of social conventions distances people one from another according to their social status. This social propriety is an ethical assumption, but also role played out in social space. It found an extreme form in the racial etiquette and actual, physical segregation operative in the American south (Park, 1937: 183). The stability of such a social order is threatened by

'mobility', the introduction of individuals, groups, or ideas which have no given place, 'the incidental collisions, conflicts and fusions of people'. Through mobility, 110 people are, from one point of view, 'emancipated' from an hitherto unchallenged social order, or, fram another, let loose 'without direction and control' (Park, 1928b:

346-350).

Park throughout his work presents urban newspapers as essential contributors to mobility and dislocation, 'multiplying and complicating' social contacts and opportunities for contact, serving to 'alter the geography' of sociallife

(Park, 1925c: 174-176). Immigrant newspapers were primarily vehicles of the novel: the unconventional and the as yet uninterpreted. News, for Park, was of interest to people precisely because it reported disorderly and unexpected situations. Both newspapers and news therefore always potentially contradicted readers' assumptions about themselves and their world, and prompted changes in those assumptions. The point of view adopted in reading newspapers, then, tended not to be focused on final things, and not to be conventional or habituai, but to be, as Park put it, in 'tension'. The community informed by newspapers is also in tension or in solution, in a process of attending and responding to change.

As such, it seemed a particularly modern community, permanently in transition and

lacking a sense of collective purpose.

Much communication theory posits interaction as primarily an integrative

process. There is an emphasis on the inculcation and reiteration in communication

of central values, often functional values. If contradictions and confusions are

introduced, it is only in order to resolve them, and present a picture of a reunited

community. Park's theory of communicative interaction is a valuable, alternative 111 conception, in that it broaches the possibility of communication which does not end in resolution, hegemony, or consensus. Park presented in many places what may be called open genres of interaction. Newspapers are cultural forms which rio not admit of convenient closure, and at times can serve to detach interlocutors from their value systems, and displace them from accustomed raies. He offered a commentary on the potential of communication for disruption, and on its potential for social disorientation, and felt that these might be permanent features of modern sociallife.

ln part the idea of disruptive communication shows Park's own application of ideas of American pragmatism. If pragmatic interaction challenged traditional beliefs, and praduced detachment fram them, Park recognized that it also undermined the security and certainty which unchallenged beliefs provided. And, if pragmatic interaction is directed to conflicts, with the intention of resolving them,

Park simply recognized that a resolution is not given, and the process of discovering one may not be successfully braught to a close. He recognized, therefore, the raie that delusion and force can play in social interaction. The insecurity and uncertainty of a prablematic situation can be relieved by fanatically embracing some saving illusion. And, in lieu of convincing, adequate resolutions of conflict, conformity can be imposed.

Park's ideas of social distance and mobility were developments of work of

Georg Simmel's (Coser, 1971: 374; see Simmel, 1898). Furthermore, the idea that conflicting or contradictory principles are at play in social situations, such as 112 mobility versus stability, or Integration versus disintegration, was derived from

Simmel and his particular 'dialectical imagination' (Madoo Lengerman, 1988: 366). l\I'ost importantly, Park acquired from Simmel a sense that social stability can be elusive, because interaction has the potential to dismantle social conventions; through Simmel, Park said, he 'finally gained a point of view for the study of the

newspaper and society' (quoted in Levine, 1971: 1). For Simmel, spontaneity and

innovation were Inherent in communicative interaction. Interaction is intrinsically a

work of interpreting the other, and of being interpreted oneself; it therefore requires

creativity, and has always a potential for the emergence of idiosyncratic and

unexpected expressions. No matter what formai regulations are imposed on a

social situation, it has the potential to develop in unforseen ways (Levine, 1971:

li-Iii).

Newspapers and discussion of news were, for Park, forms of communicative

interaction where openness and spontaneity were everpresent features. Park

worked as a reporter fer city dailies for many years before he took his doctorate,

and he appreciated the robust eclecticism of the papers of his day, and their

sensationalism and caprice. The appreciation appears in his observation that news

aild entertainment were preferred in the papers to editorial. Debate about

community values was slightly irrelevant in the face of the actual changes in values

going on through the medium of the newspaper. The people most interested in

news were participating in a vigorous process of development and

experimentation, whieh editorial and argument could not regulate. But when Park 113 became less enthusiastic about the possibilities 01 collective tolerance and cooperation in times 01 instabilily, and instead lelt that delusion and conllict might rule social relations, he ceased to regard papers in a lavourable Iight. The same excitability and promiscuousness displayed by the papers seemed unlortunate sources 01 disorientation and conllict. 114

Works cited: works by R.E. Park. With the exception of citations of 'The yellow press' (Park, 1927b), ail citations of Park's articles in this essay have page numbers corresponding to Everett Hughes' three volume collection (Park, 1950; Park, 1952; and Park, 1955).

1904. The Crowd and the Public and Other Essays. (Masse und Publikum). Tr. Charlotte Elsner, Ed. Henry Elsner, Jr.. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1962),

1916. 'The city: suggestions for the investigation of human behavior in the urban environment'. American Journal of Sociology, vol. 20.: 577-612. ln Park, 1952.

1918. 'Public opinion and social service'. Proceedings of the National Conference of Social Work, 1918. In Park, 1955.

1921. An Introduction to the Science of Sociology. Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1967).

1922. The Immigrant Press and its Control. New York: Harper and Bros.

1923a. 'Foreign language press'. Proceedings of the National Conference of Social Work, 1920. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. In Park, 1955.

1923b. 'The natural history of the newspaper'. American Journal of Sociology, vol. 29: 80-98. In Park, 1955.

1923c. 'Negro race consciousness as reflected in race Iiterature'. American Review, vol. 1: 505-516. In Park, 1950.

1925a. 'Immigrant community and immigrant press'. American Review, vol. 3: 143-152. In Park, 1955.

1925b. 'Culture and cultural trends'. Publications of the American Sociological Society, vol. XIX: 24-36. In Park, 1950.

1925c. 'The urban community as a spatial pattern and moral order'. Presidential address to the American Sociological Society, 1925. ln Park, 1952.

1927a. 'Human nature and collective behavior'. American Journal of Sociology, vol. 32: 695-703. In Park, 1955. 115

Î 927b. 'The yellow press'. Sociology and Social Research, vol. 12: 3-11

1928a. 'The strike'. Introduction to The Strike. E.T. Hiller. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. In Park, 1955.

1928b. 'Human migration and the marginal man'. American Journal of Sociology, vol. 33: 345-356. In Park, 1950.

1929a. 'Sociology, community and society'. ln Research into the Social Sciences. Wilson Gee, ed. New York: Macmillan Co. In Park, 1952.

1929b. 'The city as a social laboratory'. ln Chicago: an Experiment in Social Science Research. T.V. Smith, L.D. White, eds. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. In Park, 1952.

1931 a. 'Human nature, attitudes and mores'. ln Social Attitudes. K. Young, ed. New York: Henry Holt and co. In Park, 1955.

1931 b. 'The sociological methods of William Graham Sumner, and of W.1. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki'. ln Methods in Social Science: a Casebook. SA Rice, ed.. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. In Park, 1955.

1931 c. 'Personality and cultural conflict'. Publications of the American Sociological Society, vol. XXV: 357-371. In Park, 1950.

1933. 'Newspaper circulation and metropolitan regions'. ln The Metropolitan Community, RD. McKenzie, ed. New York: McGraw-Hiil Book Co.. In Park, 1952.

1936a. 'Human ecology'. American Journal of Sociology, vol 42: 1-15. ln Park, 1952.

1936b. 'Succession, an ecological concept'. American Sociological Review, vol. 1: 171-179. In Park, 1952.

1937. 'The etiquette of race relations in the South'. Introduction to The Etiquette of Race Relations in the South. B.w. Doyle. • Chicago: University of Chicago Press. In Park, 1950. 116

1938. 'Reflections on communication and culture'. American Journal of Sociology, vol. 44: 187-205. In Park, 1950.

1940a. 'News and the human interest story'. Introduction to News and the Human Interest Story. Helen MacGill Hughes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. In Park, 1955.

1940b. 'News as a form of knowledge'. American Journal of Sociology, vol. 45: 669-686, ln Park, 1955.

1940c. 'Physics and society'. Canadian Journal of Econornics and Political Science, vol. 6: 135-152. In Park, 1955.

1941 a. 'News and the power of the press'. American Journal of Sociology, vol.47: 1-11. In Park, 1955.

1941 b. 'Morale and the news'. American Journal of Sociology, vol.47: 360-377. ln Park, 1955.

1942. 'Modern society'. Biological Symposia VIII. Lancaster, Penn.: The Jacques Cattell Press. In Park, 1955.

1943a. 'Race ideologies'. ln American Society in Wartime. F'w. Ogburn, ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. In Park, 1950.

1943b. 'Education and the cultural crisis'. American Journal of Sociology, vol. 48: 228-736. In Park, 1950.

1944. 'Missions and the modern world'. American Journal of Sociology, vol. 50: 177-183. In Park, 1950.

1950. Race and Culture. (Selected articles). Everett Hughes, ed. Glencoe, III.: The Free Press.

1952. Human Communities. (Selected articles). Everett Hughes, ed. Glencoe, III.: The Free Press.

1955. Society. (Selected articles). Everett Hughes, ed. • Glencoe, III.: The Free Press. 117 Works Cited: secondary sources.

Blum, D. Stephen. 1984. Walter Lippmann: Cosmopolitanism in the Century of Total War. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.

Carey, James W. 1975. 'A cultural approach to communication'. Media. Culture. Society, Vol. 2: 1-22.

1982. 'The mass media and critical theory: an American view'. Communication Yearbook 6. Michael Burgoon, ed. Beverly Hills: Sage.

Coser, Lewis. 1971. Masters of Sociological Thought. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Czitrom, Daniel J. 1982. Media and the American Mind. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press.

Delaney, H.R.; 1990. 'Contributions of American Pragmatism to Widdison, Harold A. the sociology of knowledge'. Sociological Inguiry. vol. 60: 20-33.

Dewey, John. 1922. Human Nature and Conduct. New York: Henry Holt and co.

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Elkins, Stanley M. 1959. Siavery. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Feffer, Andrew. 1990. 'Sociability and social conflict in George Herbert Mead's Interactionism, 1900-1919'. Journal of the Historv of Ideas, vol. 51: 233-254.

Hardt, Hanno. 1975. 'Communication as theory and method of community'. Communication, vol. 2: 81-92.

1988. 'Communication and Economie Thought: Cultural Imagination in German and American Scholarship'. Communication vol. 10: 141-163. 118

Helmes-Hayes, Richard. 1987. 'A dualistic vision: Robert Ezra Park and the classical ecological theory of social inequality'. The Sociological Ouarterly, Vol. 28: 387-409.

Hofstadter, Richard. 1955. The Age of Reform. New York: Alfred A. Knopf (1981).

Hollinger, David A. 1980. 'The problem of pragmatism in American history'. The Journal of American History, vol. 67: 88-107.

Hughes, Helen MacGill. 1940. News and the Human Interest Story. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Janowitz, Morris. 1952. The Community Press in an Urban Setting. Glencoe, III.: The Free Press.

Kivisto, Peter. 1990. 'The transplanted then and now: the reorientation of immigration studies from the Chicago school to the new social history'. Ethnie and Racial Studies, vol. 13: 456-481.

La Capra, Dominick. 1983. Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. • Lai, Barbara Ballis. 1990. The Romance of Culture in an Urban Civilization. New York: Routledge.

Levine, Donald N. 1971. 'Introduction' to George Simmel on Individuaiity and Social Forms. Donald N. Levine, ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lippmann, Walter. 1922. Public Opinion New York: Harcourt Brace.

1925, The Phantom Public. New York: The Macmillan Company.

Madoo Lengerman, Patricia. 1988. 'Robert E. Park and the theoretical content of Chicago sociology: 1920-1940'. Sociological Inquiry, vol. 58: 361-377.

Matthews, Fred. 1977. Ouest for an American Sociolgy. • Montreal: McGill-Oueens University Press. 119 Martindale, Don. 1958. 'Prefaratory remarks' to The City by Max Weber. Don Martindale and Gertrude Neuwirth, eds. New York: The Free Press.

Mellor, Julia R. 1972. Urban Sociology in an Urbanized Society. London: Routledge and Keegan Paul.

Mills, C. Wright. 1943. 'The professional ideology of social pathologists'. American Journal of Sociology, vol. 49: 165-180. ln Power, Politics and People (selected essays). New York: Ballantine Books (1961).

Peters, John Durham. 1989. 'Democracy and American mass communication theory: Dewey, Lippmann, Lazarsfeld'. Communication, vol. 11: 199-220.

Quandt, Jean B. 1970. From the Small Town to the Great Community. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.

Riggins, Stephen. 1992. 'The promise and Iimits of ethnie minority media'. ln Ethnie Minority Media, Stephen Riggins, ed. Newbury Park: Sage.

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Rucker, Darnell. 1969. The Chicago Pragmatists. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Shalin, Dmitri. 1986. 'Pragmatism and Social Interactionism'. American Sociological Review, vol. 51: 9-29.

Simmel, George. 1898. 'Social interaction as the definition of the group in time and space'. Translation by Albion Small from Soziologie. ln Park, 1921.

Smith, Dennis. 1988. The Chicago School. London: Macmillan Education Ltd.

Sproule, Michael J. 1991. 'Propaganda and American ideological critique'. Communication Yearbook 14. James A. Anderson, ed. • Newbury Park: Sage. 120

Taylor, Charles. 1989. Sources of the Self. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Thomas, W.1. 1921. Old World Traits Transplanted. (R.E. Park; New York: Harper and Bros. HA Miller).

Turow, Joseph. 1990. 'Media industries, media consequences: rethinking mass communication'. Communication Yearbook 13. James A. Anderson, ed. Newbury Park: Sage.

Turner, Ralph H. 1967. 'Introduction' ta Robert E. Park on Social Control and Collective Behaviour. Ralph H. Turner, ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

White, Morton; 1964. The Intellectual versus the Cj!Y: White, Lucia. New York: Mentor. •

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