In 1901 in the Atlantic Monthly the ex-Congregationalist minister Gerald Stanley Lee warned his readers about the risks of a new tyranny that was threatening American society, “the tyranny of crowds,” an obvious play on the phrase “the tyranny of the majority,” around which Alexis de Tocqueville had built his critical arguments.¹ A little more than ten years later, in a book that became a best seller, the same author, an advocate of the importance of “preaching” the new values of consumer democracy, described an ideal crowd—active and participatory—gathered around the new president, Woodrow Wilson. Like an artist,...

Faith in modernity drove the great engine of progress. In the words of Richard Ely, founder of the Department of Economics, Political Science, and the History of Science at the University of Wisconsin: “Keep off the track! The train of progress is coming!” The metaphor was most fitting. Railroads had been one of the components driving industrialization; for the generation growing up in the rural Midwest and South, railroads were emblematic of the passage from a society of isolated communities to a modern urban-industrial environment. As William Thomas, one of the founders of the Chicago School of Sociology, recalled, the...

Savages, women, and children represented the three groups most easily swayed by the mob, according to the vocabulary used by social scientists. Beginning with the theories of Darwin and Spencer, people in these categories were traditionally considered as having the characteristics of irrational thinking and emotionalism. “The more advanced mental functions, imagination and reason, were presumed to be characteristic of the more highly evolved brains of civilized man,” the historian Louise Newman writes.¹ The crowd, like the mob, women, and savages, had no legitimacy as a responsible collective subject because of its mutability and irrationality.² Degenerating to the female, the...

The analysis of crowds-public-mob paralleled in public discourse at the end of the century the debate about the real characteristics of individuality. The French school of Le Bon and Tarde emphasized the crowd as something that “swallowed up” the individual, in accordance with the European state-centered traditions, while American scholars were intent on redefining a basic assumption of their own cultural tradition: liberal individualism.

A desire to safeguard both single and collective values was evident in the Americans’ search for a harmonious relationship between the two. Rather than following the dictates of evolutionism, the task of the social sciences became...

The solar eclipse of 1919 after the end of World War I had aroused world-wide expectation: on that occasion it would be possible to test Einstein’s revolutionary general theory of relativity. This expectation was matched by enthusiasm about the result: “Jazz in the world of science” was the definition the New York Times gave the new theory that questioned the foundations of current scientific thinking.¹ As such, according to the Times article, the general theory of relativity (1916) had the same impact as the social upheavals going on at the same time: “It is bolshevism in the world of science,”...

The director of the American Management Association, Sam Lewisohn, in reference to the “harmony of interests” advocated by entrepreneurs, insisted they should ask themselves to what extent it respected the workers’ interests. He observed that “the modern employer realizes that in order to secure results there are certain desires of the workman that he must satisfy. But what does the worker want?”¹ Lewisohn was reminded of George Bernard Shaw’s sarcastic but apt admonition that “one must beware of doing unto others as you would that they do unto you, because tastes differ!”²

The human element of factory work had become...

The Great Depression had swept away not only economic certainty but also public confidence in the values underpinning American society. In the aftermath many quarters strongly questioned the very concept of democracy, presenting controversial arguments far beyond the political sphere.¹ In the winter of 1932–33, before the installation of Roosevelt’s new Democratic administration, the crisis had reached a critical stage. The gross national product had shrunk by a third since 1929, and the number of unemployed exceeded fifteen million, or nearly 25 percent of the workforce. Among the unemployed were something between one and two million hoboes who drifted...

At the end of the 1930s with the United States facing the threat of international conflict, social scientists attempted to redefine the democratic principles and values in the name of which the entire country would be asked to mobilize for war.¹

Sidney Hook expressed the need for sharpening the ideological weapons in defense of democratic principles in these terms: “Today we are not living in ordinary times. Nor fortunately have we in America reached a state of mass despair. But time is short…. We are now awake to the fact that more fundamental than armament, as essential as that is,...