Personalities in the Crowd: The Idea of the “Masses” in American Popular Culture

Abstract

“There are no masses,” Raymond Williams wisely reminds us, “there are only ways of seeing people as masses.” This idea of the social crowd, usually organic and with a mind of its own, rarely is used self-referentially; “masses” always describes others. During and immediately following World War I, American intellectuals, especially social theorists, were preoccupied with this new model for society. Authoritarian regimes abroad, America's own wartime hysteria (fueled by new communications technologies), the insistent urban context, and a consumer-based economy all made discussion of crowd behavior and mass persuasion an obvious product of new circumstances. Newer fields of sociology, psychology, and behaviorism, promised the necessary tools for understanding these “phenomena.” Walter Lippmann'sPublic Opinion(1922) was but the most popular and enduring in a genre that drew upon earlier native and European theorists like Gustave Le Bon, E. A. Ross, Boris Sidis, and William Trotter. By 1925, the American library on the mass mind includedThe Behavior of Crowds(Everett Dean Martin),Social Psychology(Floyd Henry Allport), andIntroduction to the Science of Sociology(Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess). This new body of work distinguished “the concept of the mass, a dispersed and passive body of uprooted individuals, from the pre-World War I concept of the crowd, a physically united and active throng.” The bestremembered effect of these ideas, upon the likes of H. L. Mencken, Walter Lippman, and other leading critics, was a skepticism about democracy's survival in the face of such new knowledge. But the idea of the “masses” had another life, outside of more formal circles, among Americans who were not so quick to decry a “boobocracy,” or perhaps more important and long-lasting, in the rising industries of mass communication and popular culture.