Hadley Cantril

Hadley Cantril wiki

"In 1935 the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) established the Federal Radio Education Committee (FREC) – which was chaired by John W. Studebaker – to examine ways in which broadcasters and non-profit groups could work together. The following year, Levering Tyson – the first Director of NACRE – reported that he “expected few results from the activities of [FREC’s initial] subcommittees, except for the technical subcommittee under the direction of Hadley Cantril” who is widely regarded as a founding father of modern mass communications research (cited in Buxton, 1994, 161). Just days later, John Marshall met with Cantril, and proposed that the Foundation finance his research (Buxton, 1994, 161). Cantril, however, was not funded directly by the Rockefeller Foundation but instead (in January 1937) he was offered a place on the FREC committee that would decide which research proposals should be supported, and it was not surprising that Cantril envisaged that his own work should “serve as the organizing framework for all of the studies under consideration” (Buxton, 1994, 163). Cantril was then joined on the FREC committee by two other educators (W. W. Charters and Levering Tyson) and three broadcasters...

"According to Simpson (1994, 60-1, 81), while Leland DeVinney headed the social science funding at the Rockefeller Foundation in the 1950s, the Foundation “appears to have been used as a public front to conceal the source of at least $1 million in CIA funds for Hadley Cantril’s Institute for International Social Research.” Prior to this in 1940 with a $90,000 grant, the Rockefeller Foundation had established the Office of Public Opinion Research at Princeton University, which was also led by Cantril (Parmar, 2002, 253) who as discussed earlier had been an integral member of FREC. Glander (2000, 88) notes that in the same year the US government’s Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, Nelson Rockefeller, invited Cantril to study public opinion in Latin America. Thus in 1941 Cantril accepted this position and along with George Gallup set up a company called American Social Surveys. In 1942, Cantril then set up The Research Council Inc with his associate Lloyd Free (who was the secretary of the Rockefeller Communications Groups) in an office within his own Psychological Warfare Research Bureau at Princeton (Glander, 2000, 88). Interestingly subsequent media investigations have shown that The Research Council received “almost limitless” funds from the government, mostly in the form of covert funding channelled to them from the CIA (Annon, 1977, 37). Therefore it is not surprising that during World War II, the government ran its G2 program in an office within Cantril’s Psychological Warfare Research Bureau (Parmar, 2002, 256)."


 * Former Head, Institute for Propaganda Analysis