Chapter 6 Mass communications ushers in the polling industry: The Tavistock Instutute for Human Relations by Dr. John Coleman from antimatix.org
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.
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