Living On in the Number One Country: The Legacy of Herbert I. Schiller

Abstract

For nearly five decades, beginning with his book Mass Communication and American Empire and ending with the recently published Living in the Number One Country, Herbert Schiller had an enormous impact on several generations of scholars, policy makers, media practitioners and media activists. This article provides brief review of his career, his intellectual contribution, and his influence. It concentrates on how his life experience affected his work and on his important conceptual achievements. These greatly expanded the field of communication studies in North America, primarily by bringing political economist's vision to the study of communication. The following paragraphs also describe his enduring belief, tested severely over the years, in the public's ability to govern itself and to produce democratic communication environment. In Living in the Number One Country, Schiller (2000) provides us with his first published account of his life's work and how it was influenced by his experience of world in upheaval. It contains some of the thoughts he also shared with me in series of 1992 interviews which helped me to write my own account of the field, The Political Economy of Communication (Mosco, 1996). This brief overview of Schiller's scholarly contribution draws from both sources. I became aware of Herb Schiller's work as sociology graduate student at Harvard in the early 1970s when Daniel Bell kindled my interest in communication media and new technology. Looking for scholars who took more critical position, I found Schiller's work unique for its political punch and engaging style. We began to correspond in 1977 when, as postdoctoral fellow with what was then called the U.S. Office of Telecommunications Policy, I developed an interest in the who and how of international communication policy. Herb Schiller was kind enough to comment on drafts of my work and invited me out to San Diego for visit. We got along right from the start, sharing commitment to critical communication studies and, perhaps just as importantly, common New York City background. Schiller attributed his political and intellectual development to his experience of social transformation in the United States and in several regions of the world. Specifically, like many people of his generation, Schiller was profoundly influenced by the Great Depression, which he lived through during his high school and university years. He witnessed unemployment first-hand, seeing how it devastated human beings. Schiller attended the City College of New York, which provided free education to the city's working class, and, although his interests ran to the literary, he chose to study economics for him, a Depression-induced choice, more likely to lead to job. As with many people living through this economic cataclysm, he was left with an intense sense that Western society was fundamentally flawed, increasingly divided between haves and have-nots, and dominated by big business. The other substantial formative influence was his service in World War II and his work for the U.S. military government in Germany immediately thereafter. The former took Schiller to Morocco for two years where the waning of French colonial power, the burgeoning of American influence, and the utter destitution of daily life, had substantial influence on his career-long critique of neo-colonialism and his concern for the Third World. Schiller's experience in Germany was particularly important because it provided the opportunity to observe first-hand the imposed transformation of nation's political, economic and social life, transformation that was compressed in very short period. When recalling the intellectual influences on him, Schiller emphasized the research carried out by U.S. government bodies in the 1930s on the structure of the American economy and the causes of the Depression. For him, these detailed political economies provided concrete, systemic evidence of the structure and exercise of business power. …