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collected in an ongoing clandestine intelligence program underwritten by Listerine heir Gerard
Lambert on behalf of the Roosevelt administration. The U.S. Congress had in those years barred the
expenditure of government funds on most types of attitude surveys of U.S. voters, arguing that it was
the Congress’ job under the Constitution to represent “public opinion.” Congress’ concern was in part
political, because FDR used rival sources of information on public opinion to advance controversial
policies, not least of which was the president’s drive toward an “internationalist” foreign policy.
Despite the congressional strictures, the White House hired Hadley Cantril and Lloyd Free for
“government intelligence work,” as Jean Converse puts it, including clandestine intelligence
collection abroad and public opinion surveys in the United States. Cantril and Free in turn engaged
Frederick Williams and the American Institute of Public Opinion as field staff for research on behalf
of the administration. 33
Meanwhile, Public Opinion Quarterly’s board of editors included a substantial number of men
who were deeply involved in U.S. government psychological warfare research or operations, several
of whom were largely dependent on government funding for their livelihood. The journal’s editorial
advisory board during the late 1940s, for example, was made up of twenty-five to thirty individuals
noted for their contributions to public opinion studies and mass communication research. Among
those on the board with readily identifiable dependencies on government psychological warfare
contracting were Hadley Cantril, Harold Lasswell, Paul Lazarsfeld, and Rensis Likert, whose role as
government contractors are documented in Chapters 5, 6, 7, and 8 of this study. They were joined on
the POQ board by DeWitt Poole, who later became president of the CIA’s largest single propaganda
effort of the era, the National Committee for a Free Europe. 34 Another prominent board member was
CBS executive Frank Stanton, also a longtime director of both Radio Free Europe and the Free
Europe Fund, a CIA-financed organization established to conduct political advertising campaigns in
the United States and to launder CIA funds destined for Poole’s National Committee for a Free
Europe. 35 The journal’s editor during 1946 and 1947 was Lloyd Free, a wartime secret agent on
behalf of the Roosevelt administration who some years later was destined to share a million-dollar
CIA research grant with Hadley Cantril. 36
This pattern appears to have been repeated at several other important academic journals of
sociology and social psychology of the era, although quantitative studies of their content remain to be
done. The American Sociological Review (ASR), published by the American Sociological Society,
overlapped so frequently in its officers and editorial panels with those of Public Opinion Quarterly
and its publisher, the American Association for Public Opinion Research, that board members
sometimes joked that they were unsure which meetings they were attending. 37 While ASR published
articles about a considerably broader range of sociological subjects than did POQ, the ASR articles
and book reviews concerning communication remained confined to a group of fewer than a dozen
authors who were simultaneously the dominant voices in POQ. The range of views concerning
communication and its role in society remained similarly circumscribed.
Further, an informal comparison of articles published during the 1950s concerning mass
communication and public opinion in POQ and the prestigious American Journal of Sociology (AJS)
shows that its articles in this field were just as rooted in psychological warfare contracts as were
those appearing in POQ. The 1949–50 volume of AJS, for example, featured eight articles on various
aspects of mass communication and public opinion. At least four of these stemmed directly or
indirectly from ongoing psychological warfare projects, including work by Hans Speier and Herbert