From Vienna to the United States and Back: Ernest Dichter and American Consumer Culture

Abstract

Hundreds of thousands of emigres, most of them Jews, fled Europe in the 1930s and early 1940s as Hitler swept across the European continent. Of those who arrived on the shores of the United States, thousands contributed to key developments in American culture. Typically, their contributions drew on European high culture and they frequently remained aloof from or critical of American culture, which many of them found debased by obedience to the dictates of the mass market. Many intellectuals gave serious attention to an understanding of popular culture but most of them did so with an elitist disdain towards American culture. The most important and critical emigre observers of American culture were members of the Frankfurt School — Herbert Marcuse, Leo Lowenthal, Erich Fromm, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer among them. In their now classic essay The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception, first published in 1944, Horkheimer and Adorno asserted that what they called the culture industry had succeeded in shaping taste, as intermediary institutions such as the family had weakened. Capitalism in their eyes powerfully formed consumer culture which, in turn, promoted a false consciousness among consumers, degrading their lives and lulling them into passivity. Adorno and Horkheimer held out the possibility that ‘Culture’, by which they most prominently meant that inspired by avantgarde creativity, had a critical function in holding up an alternative version of reality.