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Public Opinion and Propaganda. by Frederick Clarence Irion Review by: Alfred McClung Lee Social Forces, Vol. 29, No. 2 (Dec., 1950), pp. 211-212 Published by: Oxford University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2571675 . Accessed: 15/06/2014 12:48 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . Oxford University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Social Forces. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 195.34.79.228 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 12:48:41 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

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Page 1: Public Opinion and Propaganda.by Frederick Clarence Irion

Public Opinion and Propaganda. by Frederick Clarence IrionReview by: Alfred McClung LeeSocial Forces, Vol. 29, No. 2 (Dec., 1950), pp. 211-212Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2571675 .

Accessed: 15/06/2014 12:48

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

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Oxford University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Social Forces.

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Page 2: Public Opinion and Propaganda.by Frederick Clarence Irion

LIBRARY AND WORKSHOP 211

There are several drawbacks to Surveys, Polls, and Samples, both as a text and as a handbook for conducting a survey. The topic of sampling is not given adequate treatment, even though five of the seventeen chapters are devoted to various aspects of sampling. A discussion of the theory of sampling would provide an organizing frame of reference which would give the student a better under- standing of the principles and procedures of sam- pling, which appear in the book largely as disjointed topics, rather than as interrelated parts of the same body of theory. More reference could be made to the empirical work which has already been done on gains from various types of stratification, optimum size of sampling unit, and advantages and disadvantages of various sampling plans. While the procedures suggested by the author are usually sound, the student is not provided with enough understanding of why they are sound, or under what conditions the suggested procedures do not hold.

The book contains a number of "practical sug- gestions" some of which are too general to be useful. For example, in discussing the amount of stratifi- cation ... . the number of controls should be kept to as few as is feasible" (p. 115). Other statements, while generally true, have exceptions which are not pointed out. For example, ". . . the same unit should be used in tabulation and analysis" (p. 222). Finally, as in most works of this magnitude, there are some errors. Table 1 on page 309 contains several incorrect standard errors, and there is an inverse probability interpretation of confidence limits (p. 501).

In spite of these drawbacks, Surveys, Polls, and Samples provides a valuable addition which does much to summarize and organize a rapidly growing field. The author's clear readable style is another feature worth mentioning.

JoHN FOLGER University of North Carolina

PUBLIC OPINION AND PROPAGANDA. By Frederick Clarence Irion. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1950. 782 pp.

Sociologists, psychologists, political scientists, educationists, and journalists have all contributed to the body of relatively objective literature on public opinion and propaganda. Among the gen- eral recent books, especially notable have been Leonard W. Doob's Propaganda (1935-succeeded by his amplified Public Opinion and Propaganda,

1948), William Albig's Public Opinion (1939), and Mildred Parten's Surveys, Polls, and Samples (1950). But the area is so central to the various social sciences and so depends for full treatment upon all of them that no book has yet appeared fully acceptable as a text in all the departments offering a general course in the subject. Such a book must await considerable advances in the synthesis of the social sciences and in the accept- ance of such a synthesis.

Irion approached his task with considerable curiosity and industry from a practical background in the newspaper industry, academic training in political science, and an interest in anthropology. His product reflects strengths and weaknesses of these emphases and suggests only passing acquaint- anceship with basic contributions by sociologists and social psychologists. To illustrate, Charles Horton Cooley receives mention, but his major contributions to public opinion theory are neither summarized nor assimilated. Herbert Blumer's excellent criticisms are abstracted, but the out- standing papers by Daniel Katz receive no atten- tion at all! Irion pleads, quoting anthropologists, for more adequate field observations of behavior related to public opinion without taking ade- quately into account basic developments in survey techniques during the past forty years by Manuel Conrad Elmer, Robert S. and Helen M. Lynd, and many other sociologists and social psycholo- gists.

Throughout his text, Irion's preoccupations are with the content of public opinion, compulsions toward the acceptance of orthodox opinions, the relative autonomy and amorality of public opin- ion, and ways in which selfish interests use and manipulate it and in which "people-of-good-will" might offset destructive tendencies in public opin- ion. Current literature on criminality and leader- ship would not help Irion to establish such an absolute ethical category as "people-of-good-will." Wolves in sheep's clothing and sheep in wolf hides create a bewildering picture. Robert Morrison MacIver's writings on interest and association membership would place the whole matter in a different perspective. I wonder, too, if Irion has contemplated fully the implications of his state- ment, "without direction it [public opinion] is amoral." Democratic tradition places faith-based upon abundant human experience-in the de- pendability of public opinion as a pro-democratic guide, granted that "direction" can be kept diffuse

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Page 3: Public Opinion and Propaganda.by Frederick Clarence Irion

212 SOCIAL FORCES

or to a minimum! Generally speaking, the problem is to counteract special direction through such antidirectional intellectual tools as propaganda analysis. (See the writer's "Can the Individual Protect Himself Against Propaganda Not in His Interest?" Social Forces, October 1950.)

From a sociological viewpoint, the most un- fortunate aspect of the work is perhaps Irion's failure to understand adequately forces making for differentiation in society and his consequent treatment of public opinion chiefly as an overriding entity. He makes statements, to illustrate, such as this, "public opinion, more than any other force, will determine how people think and act." Public opinion thus has become for him a protean generality. His concern with the degree of con- formity in American expression is, of course, a healthy offset to current ritualistic demands for "unity."

From the standpoint of students of government and of business, it is difficult to understand how Irion succeeded in missing so completely the whole "public relations" movement.

Despite these weaknesses, Irion has faced a most complex task and has brought together challenging facts about media of communications (trend toward monopoly), institutions forming public opinion (family, churches, schools), the utilization of instruments and institutions, the influence of public opinion, and techniques for measuring public opinion. Irion's inquiring mind and energy have carried him a great distance in his quest, and the sincerity and vividness with which he points to pressing problems of propaganda control will jog the thoughts of complacent teachers and students. It is just unfortunate that he does not go behind such a statement as this one, "There is one trend that is somewhat frightening: the monopolization of public opinion by government." After all, government is no discrete force; it is a network of channels and a battleground of con- flicting forces. Far more dangerous than govern- mental monopoly is the control of an increasingly monopolistic government by an integrated special interest organization. Donald C. Blaisdell spelled this out in his Economic Power and Political Pres- sures (1941).

ALFRED MCCLUNG LEE Brooklyn College of the Citv of New York

RACE AND CULTURE. By Robert Ezra Park. Glencoe: The Free Press, 1950. 403 pp. $5.00.

This is a volume of twenty-nine essays on racial and cultural relations by Robert E. Park, written over a span of some thirty years (1913-44) and assembled here by his students in a manner that suggests-what Park never bothered to quarrel about-a systematic theory of race and culture.

The book is divided into four parts: Part I: Culture and Civilization (6 articles); Part II: Race Relations (10 articles); Part III: Racial Attitudes (9 artides); and Part IV: The Marginal Man (4 articles).

It is, for us all, always a thrilling adventure to reread the writings of Dr. Park. This is so, I suppose, because thereby we are redirected to and given a fresher, clearer view of the eternal themes and processes of human life which it is our business to isolate, explain, and control.

The basic fact about social life suggested in Race and Culture is that human beings interact at two distinctly different levels of conduct-the one consensual, the other symbiotic. Thus it is that man lives in society-a world of traditions, sentiments and beliefs, but also in a community-a natural economy of competitive-cooperation and mutual adaptation. The former is realized and extended in and through communication, and the inter- penetration of minds, the latter in and through transportation, trade, and a division of labor.

In the little sacred, folk groups of which Sumner made so much and to which Dr. Park often al- ludes, these consensual and symbiotic relation- ships-the society and the community-were for the most part coterminous, nicely fused into a stable order. But this was never completely so; and it was as peoples became mobilized-migrated to extend their areas of barter-that cities with their market-places arose, "encirding the earth like a girdle" and forming a sort of "main-street of the world." It was here in the city where differ- ent races and cultural groups came into contact- struggling for existence and economic advantage in the community, for preeminence and status in the society-that there emerged the problem of race relations.

In what he calls this "catastrophic" interaction of these consensual and symbiotic processes in race relations, Dr. Park discerns a natural history, beginning in competition, and then, following ir- reversibly, conflict, accommodation and assimila- tion. Incidental to the process are such phenomena as race prejudice, marginal personalities, frontier cultures, public opinion, social distance, racial

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