Citizenship in times of crisis: the case of working-class white men in post-World War II New York

In the summer of 1945, the American Jewish Committee funded a study to determine the effectiveness of visual propaganda in fighting prejudice. The study was undertaken at Paul F. Lazarsfeld’s Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia University. The study, led by Patricia Kendall and Dr Katherine Wolf, included interviews with some 160 subjects – white working-class men. In the framework of the study, prejudice was always already understood to be situated in these male subjects.
Eighteen female interviewers cruised around Central Park looking for appropriate subjects, ultimately conducting 160 interviews. The transcripts became part of quantitative data, showcasing the effectiveness or lack thereof of visual propaganda to fight prejudice. However, reading these interviews against the grain, they also present white working-class men at a time of crisis.
At the end of World War II, many of these men were striking against their employers for better working conditions; they were already organising against racism; and they were providing an in-depth analysis of the workings of capitalism as a system of divisive exploitation. These ideas, however, did not fit into the dominant pre-existing understanding of the location of prejudice. Interviewers therefore dismissed these men as flamboyant communists.
Yet these men’s voices tell us about the complex and contradictory experience of being a white working-class American man at a time of political and economic crisis. Their voices also point to the presumption of neutrality and progressivism of early communication, as opposed to their research subjects’ imagined prejudice and bigotry.