Social Problems, Social Issues, Social Science

The Society Papers

James Wright

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351489751
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie

Sociology has tackled some of the most formidable problems that confront contemporary society: inequality, homelessness, violence, gender, and many more. Sociologists assert that hypotheses can be formulated and tested against empirical evidence, that faulty viewpoints can be uncovered and discarded, and that plausible theory can be distinguished from mere ideology. This collection was written over a span of forty-four years and is presented in the belief that sociology is a science.In Social Problems, Social Issues, Social Science, James D. Wright presents his research on some of the social issues that have most vexed America: homelessness, addiction, divorce, minimum wage, and gun control, among others. Starting with essays first published in the flagship journal Society, Wright offers readers a foundational look at specific social problems and the methods sociologists have used to study them. He then provides an up-to-date re-examination of each issue, analysing the changes that have occurred over time and how sociologists have responded to it.This book is both a retrospective on the field and on one scholar's life and work. Using his own experience in researching and writing about America's most trenchant social issues, Wright describes the evolution of the methods and theory used by social scientists to understand and, ultimately, to confront America's most troublesome social problems.

1

Public Opinion and the War in Vietnam

Introduction

I started graduate school in sociology at the University of Wisconsin in 1969. Like many US campuses at the time, Wisconsin was in turmoil, with near-daily student protests about the war in Vietnam and other issues. The contrast with stodgy Purdue was striking. At Purdue, from the College Democrats out to the left there was but one student organization, the Purdue Peace Union, which specialized in staging polite demonstrations whenever Dow showed up to recruit chemical engineers. At Wisconsin, that same political spectrum was populated with fifty different student organizations who specialized in noisy protests about nearly everything.

I started graduate school with pretensions to becoming a social theorist. My first assignment was as the teaching assistant to Richard Hamilton and his course on Contemporary American Society. Late in the second semester, Hamilton asked me what I had in mind for a master’s thesis. I am sure I responded with enthusiastic babbling about Maurice Merleau-Ponty or some other obscure European pedant when he handed me an offprint from a recent article he had published in the American Sociological Review¹ about public opinion and the Korean War and suggested I try to replicate his analysis and findings with some recent (1964 and 1968) Survey Research Center data concerning the war in Vietnam.

This simple suggestion altered my path through life. I had tried my hand at empirical work as an undergraduate and was intrigued by the thought that there were questions that could be resolved (as opposed to argued over indefinitely, such as philosophical questions). But the undergraduate experience was a little student survey that, as I recall, generated a two-by-two crosstab and a single chi-square (all assembled and calculated by hand). What Hamilton had given me was a nationally representative survey data on a question of undeniable currency and relevance. So I set to work on the task he assigned, the beginning of my career as a “number cruncher.”

Hamilton had shown that “tough-minded” hawkish foreign policy preferences were concentrated among the highly educated, those in high status occupations, the more affluent, the young, and those who paid the most attention to magazines and newspapers—in short, the upper middle class. All this was precisely the opposite of what I would have expected. The antiwar effort was clearly the work of the college-educated youth; workers were heroic in theory, but somewhat frightening in fact. (I remember one antiwar march that was carefully steered away from a large campus construction site—the “working class” was easier to cope with as a theoretical entity than as a belching, overweight, somewhat hostile cement finisher with an “America, Love It or Leave It!” tee shirt on his back.) I started the project pretty confident that my findings for Vietnam would be very different from Hamilton’s findings for Korea. But they weren’t.

The thesis, Support for Escalation in Vietnam, 1964–1968: A Trend Study, was defended sixty-one days after Hamilton suggested the topic simply because he had accepted a new position at McGill and insisted that I defend before he left. At the debriefing in his office after the defense, Hamilton rattled off a list of people to whom he thought a copy of the thesis should be sent. The list was full of luminaries whose names and works were familiar to me—David Riesman, Irving Louis Horowitz, Angus Campbell, Howard Schuman, Herbert Hyman, Harlan Hahn, Herbert Gans, Andrew Greeley, William Domhoff, Phillip Converse, and several others of equivalent stature. The very idea that a pipsqueak first-year grad student could correspond directly with people such as these would have never occurred to me. But to my surprise, virtually every person to whom I wrote quickly wrote back, often with long detailed comments about the thesis, words of encouragement, and suggestions where it might be published. Hamilton too was insistent that I seek publication outlets for the work.

Of the many people who replied, Riesman impressed me the most. I had read The Lonely Crowd as an undergraduate and was in awe of the work. About a week after I had sent him the thesis, he wrote me to say, “As you can imagine, I look forward to your Master’s Thesis . . . but I should tell you that I am swamped and it will be a good while before I can get to it—I am also a painfully slow reader . . .” I figured this to be the standard “I’m too busy . . .” blow-off but exactly one week later, I heard from Riesman again—in a four-page, single-spaced letter providing a page by page critique of the work. The critique began: “I find your work important, interesting and well written; I hope it can be published . . .” but then moved quickly into a learned, wide-ranging, and extremely helpful commentary that touched on the history of antiwar movements, feminist opposition to war, race and regional differences, parallels between Vietnam and the nuclear test ban treaty, Catholic hawks, “Be Clean for Gene (McCarthy)”, and whether material in my footnotes could not somehow be moved into the text. Riesman concluded his magnificent correspondence with a request for a dozen more copies “for the General Education course I direct.”

My correspondence file contains a half-dozen more letters from Riesman that stretched out over the ensuing year, all of them polite, thoughtful, encouraging, and helpful. I have since interacted with many other heavy hitters in the social sciences—some arrogant, condescending, or off-putting in various ways; many kind, helpful, and sympathetic; but none as solicitous of my intellectual well-being as Riesman had been. At the beginning of my second year in grad school, I knew what it meant, empirically, to be a mentor.

Another luminary on Hamilton’s list was Irving Louis Horowitz, with whose work I was also familiar. At the time (1970–71), he was the Editor in Chief of Trans-ACTION, the journal he had founded. My cover letter said nothing about publication of the thesis, only that it had been suggested that I send him a copy and that any criticism or feedback would be appreciated.

As with Riesman, Horowitz also replied immediately and at some length. The key passage stated, “We have run a great deal of material on the Vietnam war—none utilizing public opinion research techniques with your sophistication—and we shall certainly give your manuscript very special attention.” Again, I was stunned. This seemed an obvious statement of interest in publishing the work.

A month later, I got a request for three more copies so Trans-ACTION could obtain “a broader review of the manuscript.” Three months after that, I learned that “The editors have accepted a version of [your thesis] for publication with much enthusiasm.” The thesis was far too long to publish as is, so the acceptance came with a request for “considerable cutting and condensation.” An exchange of letters with Hamilton suggested that the Trans-ACTION piece touch only lightly on social class themes and focus on the media findings. The social class findings could be gathered up and published in a second paper.²

Between 1964 and 1968, support for the hawkish option in Vietnam had declined considerably, a decline that was concentrated among people who followed the papers and magazines closely. It seemed that media consumption was associated with an important opinion conversion, and that seemed to run counter to the old Lazarsfeldian theme that media consumption reinforced pre-existing opinions but usually did not “convert” people from one side of an issue to another. The write-up of these results became “Life, Time and the Fortunes of War,” my first scholarly publication.

The initial interaction with Horowitz blossomed into a four-decade professional association—from his initial letter to me on September 10, 1970, until his last on December 1, 2011, four months before his death in March 2012. A letter from him dated June 20, 2011, notes, “Seriously, my cardiologist once again rolled the dice and spoke of the gambling odds on my staying alive. But he has been doing this for several years. Like the undertakers, he will be right someday—but not this day, and hopefully, not for many years to come.” The December 2011 letter was more somber: “. . . Know that I still live and breathe.” Horowitz lasted four more months but his legacy and his important role in my own intellectual maturation persist.

I relate the tale of my initiation into the professoriate to remind today’s generation of scholars that things do not have to be as they are. An anonymous but exceedingly helpful reviewer of an earlier version of this work remarked:

The nature of this correspondence is fascinating as it tells me something about the way in which sociology (and academia) was carried out in a very different time. The length of the letters exchanged between novices and masters, the craftsmanship of the letters themselves, the time that this must have involved—this all says something about academic work in a time that is long past. Today many aspiring academics complain about the struggle to get a meeting with their dissertation advisors.

Between my first publication in Trans-ACTION (January 1972) and my most recent one (in 2014), I have published eighteen papers, reviews, comments, and polemics in the journal Horowitz founded. These pieces chronicle the trajectory of my sociological career and are meaningful largely as an illustration of how my generation of sociologists came to be what we are. Each is reprinted here along with an introductory essay setting the context and an epilog bringing the story up to date.

“Life, Time, and the Fortunes of War”³

Unquestionably, the public’s attitude towards the Vietnam War has changed greatly. Commercial polls, media reports and academic studies bear the same message: the war has lost support. But these trend-spotters have left unanswered many questions about the nature of this change. Have the political sentiments articulated at the country club bridge table changed more radically than those voiced at the neighborhood tavern? And if they have, who or what is responsible? The mass media? Certainly, their editorial viewpoints have undergone concurrent shifts. But just how powerful are the media? Does a jolting photo-essay of war dead unlock closed minds, or lose subscribers? Conversely, could a series of prowar editorials whip up support for a waning cause? Is one medium more effective than another? Is the work-weary lower-income TV watcher any more affected by the evening newscast than the commuting stockbroker is by the news magazine he leafs through en route to his upper middle-class suburb?

The change in attitudes toward the war coupled with the change in how the war has been reported offers a unique opportunity for social scientists to investigate how mass media and public opinion interact: who influences whom; which is a cause of change and which is a reflection of it.

The period under review here is that from 1964, when President Johnson was swept into office by a huge majority, to 1968 when President Nixon took office, promising to end the war. It was a time when the United States commitment in Vietnam was vastly escalated. The number of troops involved in the war jumped from 40,000 “advisers” to a half-million combat personnel, and in the process, the war was brought home to ever-increasing numbers of people.

Another major phenomenon of the period (no doubt related to the continued escalation) was the onset of large scale protest against the war. Beginning as a relatively restricted and nonviolent movement in the fall of 1966 with the first big march on Washington, the Movement had taken on a more radical coloration by the summer of 1968. The demands of the protesters changed from the mere end of a senseless war to the end of United States “imperialism” abroad and even the overthrow of “the system” at home. The prominence given to protests in the media cannot but have had an effect on mass sentiment toward the conflict itself.

During the four years from 1964 to 1968, the major media in the country shifted their editorial stance markedly, from a prowar to a fairly obviously antiwar position. This change in the media stance creates an unusual and desirable research situation, because most studies of the influence of the media are forced to deal with them as a constant rather than as a variable.

Fortunately, the University of Michigan’s Survey Research Center (SRC) made comprehensive election studies in 1964 and in 1968, and the data from them make possible a detailed analysis of the shift in attitudes over the period and of the extent to which the media were responsible.

Before examining these studies, however, it is important to realize the theoretical background against which the analysis must be set, because, in my view, the conclusions to be drawn upset the traditional patterns of speculation about the attitudinal and behavioral impact of the so-called mass media.

There are two characteristic forms of social scientific theory in this area. First, there is the tradition of mass society theorizing. This view links the advance of industrialization and urbanization with breakdowns in the primary social bonds. Upward occupational mobility, a situation presumably endemic to industrial society, is seen as destroying a person’s ties with the past—with his parents, his friends and other primary social groups. Meanwhile, increasing urbanization locates individuals in new and unfamiliar milieux in which their old values and attitudes will be inappropriate. These demographic and social psychological processes result in the creation of “mass man,” the so-called rootless individual. Lacking strong ties to primary social networks, a society of such mass men will be manipulable and public opinion in such a society is believed to be largely “uncrystallized,” or, as sociologist William Kornhauser puts it, “available” for manipulation by national political elites. The mass media, then, function mainly as the propaganda arms of these elite groups, with the capability of reaching out and mobilizing mass opinion in support of the elites’ goals, whatever these may be.

The second theory contrasts Kornhauser’s view. Founded by Paul Lazarsfeld and his associates at Columbia University in the 1940s and early 1950s, it springs from a tradition of political analysis and media research which we may profitably call the “group bases” theory of politics. Lazarsfeld’s conception of the relationship between political attitudes and the mass media is summed up in the slogan: reinforcement rather than conversion. In other words, the media are basically successful at reinforcing and articulating already existing opinions or even at creating opinions in areas where none previously existed, but are not so successful at converting individuals from a firmly held opinion to a new one. Lazarsfeld’s concept involved a resurrection of the classical sociological image of man as being located amid an array of social and informational networks or primary groups and deriving the major portions of his political ideology and support from those networks. In sharp contrast to the mass-society view, which was then dominant, Lazarsfeld hypothesized that these networks would override the impact of the formal media. Hence, a situation of reinforcement rather than conversion would exist.

Concentric Circles

In 1964, Johan Galtung published an article in The Journal of Peace Research which attempted a quasisynthesis of these two views. In it, Galtung speculates that society, for purposes of political analysis, can best be conceptualized as a series of concentric circles. At the center is a small decision-making nucleus; this is surrounded by a social center, constituted by a core of the well-informed and articulate mass public; these are both finally enclosed by the social periphery, consisting of the majority of the mass public who remain relatively unconcerned with and uninformed about matters of public policy. On its simplest level, Galtung’s view is that mass society theories will tend to describe the state of politics in the periphery and that “social bases” theories will tend to describe politics in the center. Hence, the center (i.e., the middleaged, males, the well-educated, the high-income, white-collar workers) will consist of a fairly stable and well reinforced body of informed public opinion anchored in ideological communities, which will consequently be immune to overtures made by the media. Those on the periphery (that is the young and the old, females, the poor, the poorly educated, blue-collar workers) will be characteristically amorphous, unconcerned, unreinforced, uncrystallized—in short, more susceptible to media manipulation.

A number of political and social scientists have recently extended the analyses I have outlined above specifically to attitudes toward the war. Seymour Martin Lipset, for example, in an article on Vietnam published in the September-October 1966 issue of Transaction, asserted that “in the area of foreign policy, most Americans know very little and are only indirectly involved,” while Sidney Verba and associates in a 1967 article in The American Political Science Review, noted that “most recent academic studies of public attitudes have demonstrated that the public has little information on most issues and that most people do not have thought-out, consistent and firmly held positions on most matters of public policy.” Yet in the same article Verba admitted: “We found that the war in Vietnam was a salient problem” and later, “It is our opinion that [these data] represent fairly high levels of information on an issue of foreign policy.” Concerning the hypotheses about un...