The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations: Ch 6 Mass communications ushers in the polling industry by Dr. John Coleman

Mass communications ushers in the polling industry

CHAPTER 6

For Bernays, his recognition of Wells' idea won him a key place in the hierarchy of U.S. public opinion controllers; in 1929, he won a position at CBS, which had recently been taken over by William Paley.
By the same token, the advent of mass communications ushered in the polling/sampling industry, to organize the perceptions of the masses for the media mafia (part of the "invisible government" running the show from behind the scenes.)
By 1935-36, polling was in full swing. In the same year, Elmo Roper began his Fortune magazine FOR surveys, which evolved into his "What People Are Thinking" column for the New York Herald Tribune.

George Gallup and the British Institute of Public Opinion

George Gallup initiated the American Institute of Public Opinion; - in 1936 he opened up the British Institute of Public Opinion. Gallup was to headquarter his activities around Princeton University, intermeshing with the Office of Public Opinion Research/Institute for International Social Research/Psychology Department complex run by Hadley Cantril, who was destined to play an increasingly important role in developing the psychological profiling methods later to be used in manufacturing the Aquarian Conspiracy.

In the same 1935-36 period, the first-time use was made of polling in presidential elections, under the impetus of two newspapers owned by the Cowles family, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune and the Des Moines Register. The Cowles are still in the news business.
Based in Spokane, Washington, they are active opinion makers and their support of the Bush war in Iraq was a crucial factor.
It is not certain who introduced the practice of "advisers to the President," - those persons who are not elected by the citizens and whom they have no opportunity to vet, but who decided the internal and external foreign policies of the Nation. Woodrow Wilson was the first American President to make use of the practice.

Opinion Research and World War II

These were all small lead-ups to the next phase, triggered by two important intersecting developments: the arrival of emigre psychological warfare expert Kurt Lewin in Iowa, and the involvement of the United States in World War II.
World War II provided the emerging Tavistock Social sciences scientists with enormous scope for experimentation. Lewin's leadership put together the key-force that would deploy after World War II to utilize those techniques developed in warfare against the population of the United States. In fact in 1946, Tavistock declared war on the civilian population of the United States and has remained in a state of war ever since.
The basic conceptions expounded by Lewin, Wells, Bernays, and Lippmann remained in place as the guidepost for manipulation of public opinion; the war gave the Social scientists the opportunity to apply them in highly concentrated form and to bring together a large number of institutions under their direction to further the ends of their experiments.
The core institute which was the vehicle for making "public opinion," was the Committee on National Morale. Ostensibly established to mobilize support for the war in much as President Wilson had set up his management committee to "manage" WWI, its real purpose was to carry out the intensive profiling of both the "Axis" and Americans population for the purposes of creating and maintaining a means of social control.
The committee was headed by several leaders of American society, including Robert P. Bass, Herbert Bayard Swope, among other notables. Its secretary was Margaret Meade's husband, Gregory Bateson, one of the principal instigators of the CIA's notorious "MK - Ultra" LSD experiments that some experts consider as the launch vehicle for the U.S. counterculture of drugs, rock and sex.
The committee's Board of Trustees included poll-taker George Gallup; intelligence agent Ladislas Farago and Tavistock psychologist, Gardner Murphy.
The committee ran a number of special projects, the most important being a major study on how best to wage Psychological Warfare on Germany. The key personnel critical to the development of the public opinion project were:

• Kurt K. Lewin, Education and History; Psychology; Social Sciences
• Professor Gordon W. Allport, Psychology
• Professor Edwin G. Borin, Psychology
• Professor Hadley Cantril, Psychology
• Ronald Lippitt, Social Sciences
• Margaret Mead, Anthropology, Social Sciences; Youth and Child Development

The staff numbered more than a 100 researchers who comprised the staff of the Committee, and several opinion-profiling institutions critical to the project.

Office of Strategic Services (OSS)

One such a special project team was in the Office and Strategic Services (OSS) (the forerunner of the CIA) composed of:

• Margaret Mead,
• Kurt Lewin,
• Ronald Lippitt,
• Dorwin Cartwright,
• John K. French and public-opinion makers like
  
• Samuel Stouffer (later chairman of the Laboratory Social Relations group at Harvard University);
• Paul Lazarsfeld of Columbia University's Sociology Department, who developed with profiler Harold Lasswell an "opinion research" methodology for the OSS based on detailed "content analysis" of the local press of enemy countries
• and Rensis Likert.

Likert, a Prudential Insurance Company key executive immediately before the war, had perfected profiling techniques as the director of research for the Life Insurance Agency Management Association. This equipped him to interact favorably with the head of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, who was the former head of Prudential Life Insurance Company. Likert served as director of the division of morale of the Strategic Bombing Survey from 1945-1946 from which position he had enormous scope for mass public opinion profiling and manipulation.

The making of public opinion

CHAPTER 7