The Federal Bureaucracy literally paid for and bought American psychology.

What Did This Money Buy?
by Susan Kaiser Vogel

After his discharge from the service in 1946, I-2 was offered a well-paying fellowship to graduate school at the University of California in Berkeley. The funding came from a federal agency, the Veterans Administration, an obvious spin-off of the War Department.

During the first week of training, the graduate fellows were assembled to meet a representative from Washington who announced, with considerable solemn satisfaction, that the Federal Government was getting into psychology in a big way. Enormous grants of money for salaries and research could be expected.

This prediction was no exaggeration. Before World War II, psychological research was a gentleman's game of little interest to the Firm [A-B Librarian's Comment: now the Company] and thus with almost no bureaucratic funding or supervision. After 1946, federal support of psychologists in the form of fellowships, salaried posts and research grants became the dominating fact of university life.

The Federal bureaucracy literally paid for and bought American psychology.

What did this money buy? Exactly what the Firm wanted -- a science of Adjustment and Control. Branches of psychology which study management of human behavior leaped into prominence: clinical psychology, personality, social psychology.

Leadership and direction of these new fields was assumed by former OSS (i.e., CIA) functionaries, wise in the ways of government support. The field of personality psychology in particular was covered with CIA fingerprints.

Professor Harry Murray, wartime director of the OSS Psychological Project, assembled at his Harvard center the cream of personality researchers. The aim was to investigate, not clinical pathologies (teams of Firm-supported psychiatrists were gleefully taking care of that), but to assess normal and successful humans.

By 1950 most of Murray's staff had fanned out to universities throughout the country in posts of executive power. Donald McKinnon, for example, organized the Institute of Personality Assessment and Research at the University of California in Berkeley (IPAR).

To IPAR came Air Force officers and creative, successful subjects from many professions to participate in weekend assessments based directly on OSS-CIA methods. IPAR was funded by the Ford Foundation, the U.S. Government, and God knows how many fronts.

In spite of the prestige, affluence and power of its staff, IPAR was a curiosity because it never published any important papers, never had to compete for funding and seemed to be (like some Soviet tower) isolated from the exciting self-revolution in personality which occurred from 1950-1976.

This is not to say that the IPAR psychologists-administrators were idle. Plenty was going on. IPAR was "running" American psychology -- monitoring the field, quietly screening new ideas and promising recruits emerging from the graduate ranks, arranging back-scene support for useful researchers, lining up exchanges of staff with selected foreign departments. Get it? IPAR psychologists kept popping up in the funniest places. One energetic post-doctoral went along on an Everest climb. Not a bad place for overlooking (surveiling) China.

Another profoundly significant IPAR project attempted to institute a Brave New World Psych-tech Control. A crew-cut, pink-cheeked church-going staff-member named Harrison Gough designed a personality questionnaire to diagnose "normal and superior" persons. The test had scales for "rebelliousness-conformity," anti-hive thinking, independence, etc.

Gough received a lot of publicity when he floated the proposal that personality questionnaires could be given to every school child in the country in the first grade. It would then be possible, claimed Gough, to pin-point at age seven, potential troublemakers, [and] future talented specialists. Specialized training and surveillance could then be instituted from the earliest years. No great outcry arose from the liberal psychologists.

Which was interesting. Although the average psychologist is a good-natured, reasonably progressive person, and although psychologists would be expected to understand human castes and hive-thought-control interventions, the profession is, by and large, amazingly innocent and unconcerned about the fact that it has been controlled by the Federal Bureaucracy for decades.

From 1920-1960 American psychology was as much a captive of the CIA as Russian psychology of the KGB. In some ways American psychology was more coopted, because everyone in and out of the Soviet Union knows what the KGB is doing, but well-paid American psychologists were blandly unaware of their sponsor-masters.

All this was completely changed, however, by the American Psychological Revolution which exploded in the 1960's.