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The intense demands of learning and teaching, of curriculum development and negotiation, of staff recruitment, and of service on the interdisciplinary committees all prevented me from embarking on research of my own. By the nature of the interdisciplinary curriculum in the College, only a part of my research interests and disciplinary ties could be embraced except by accident or at the periphery. For example, my interest in survey research and in the survey interview could only be brought vicariously into the classroom. In my few spare moments I wrote several articles that were extended essay reviews or drawn from addresses I was invited to make. Only in occasional work with doctoral students who had research interests congruent with mine was I able to combine research interests with my commitment to teaching.

I do not recall when I met Harold D. Lasswell, but I know I read his work with excitement long before going to Chicago; he was the principal American-born political scientist who in the 1920s was using a psychoanalytic approach to politics. I went to hear him lecture in downtown Chicago some months after my arrival, and when the lecture was over, he suggested that we go across Michigan Avenue to the Art Institute. There he proceeded to delight me by his detailed and discriminating knowledge of painting. In person, more than in print, he was fascinating.^[39] Lasswell was then a professor at Yale Law School. In 1947 the interdisciplinary Committee on National Policy at Yale, composed among others of Lasswell and his law school colleague Eugene V. Rostow (whom I had met when I was a law professor as well as at their summer place not far from us in Vermont) invited me to come to Yale to do research on some aspect of national policy. There was no definite assignment of what I was to investigate, but previous work had been in economics, and there was some talk that I would focus on public opinion and mass communications. But I was to be free to proceed as I liked—an awesome prospect, but one I saw as an opportunity. However, more immediately troubling was whether I could seize this occasion when I could give Chicago little advance notice. I did not have tenure and was warned that a request for leave would make me seem flighty, even disloyal to Hutchins's aims. But when I made clear that I would teach the fall quarter, and do so for two successive years, the arrangement went through with the support of Milton Singer and Dean F. Champion Ward.

In his essay in this volume Nathan Glazer gives at once an acute and

generous account of our collaboration on what became The Lonely Crowd and Faces in the Crowd . I had not met Glazer but had been reading his "Study of Man" columns in Commentary, with their cogent analysis of sociological work. I knew he had a connection of some sort with the Columbia Bureau of Applied Social Research, and having admired its director, Paul Lazarsfeld, since his days running the Office of Radio Research in Newark and then Princeton, that was a connection from which I thought I could learn. When I asked Glazer to join me in this research project, at first he was in doubt, but in the end he agreed to come part-time; Glazer's part-time, however, is worth more than time-and-a-half for most people! We began by examining interviews concerning political issues at the eastern office of the National Opinion Research Center. We were struck by the opinion-proneness of the respondents: that there were so few responses of "don't know" and that so many people had opinions on matters quite remote from them and often outside the orbit of even vicarious experience. Americans appeared to feel entitled to have opinions and almost embarrassed not to have any. My own continuing sense of the fragility of a democratic society helped lead Glazer and me to look at political apathy, including nonvoting, as not necessarily a bad thing; on the contrary, a wholly civic, mobilized population, expressing itself by referenda and similar direct measures, can be a risky departure from representative government.

Glazer had been working on the interviews done for C. Wright Mills that later went into White Collar, and we studied those interviews and made rough efforts to code them according to a dichotomy we first termed conscience directed and other directed .^[40] Then we started to do interviews ourselves, borrowing what we thought might be projective questions here and there, adding our own, and then working painstakingly to interpret the answers as a gestalt in the mode illustrated in Faces in the Crowd . Reuel Denney contributed materials on popular culture. The effort to understand social character drew especially on the Fromm-Schachtel study of German workers. Glazer and I both profited from a seminar the Yale anthropologists were conducting to see whether or not culture and personality theorists, such as Ralph Linton, who chaired the seminar, and Erich Fromm, who came up from New York to participate, could interpret a culture on the basis of ethnographic accounts of the Truk Islands presented primarily by George Murdock and Ward Goodenough.

Rostow and Lasswell arranged for me to have a pleasant office on the

top floor of the Yale Law School building, but I had virtually no contact with the school. The Yale committee that sponsored the work kept pressing me to make a report on it to Yale's social scientists, but knowing the tentativeness of our ideas, I was reluctant to do so. I recall that my audience, when I finally had to present material, was generally critical, with the economist Max Millikan being rather harsh—he had been, and remained afterward, personally friendly. Economists understandably dismissed our ideas as lacking in scientific rigor and probative value; some sociologists said we were simply translating into new terminology familiar concepts of gemeinschaft and gesellschaft. More derisively and imposingly, Joseph Schumpeter, whom I greatly admired, ridiculed my notions when I spoke at Harvard, declaring that I was trying to pull a heavy historical load with an oxcart. In the Department of Social Relations, M. Brewster Smith, Clyde Kluckhohn, and Talcott Parsons were interested and supportive. My rather limited Yale colleagueship came from John Dollard and other psychologists with anthropological connections and interests, from political scientists, and from historians—Yale at that time had no sociologists to speak of.

In the second preface to The Lonely Crowd, written in 1968–69 for the Yale paperback edition, I make clear how speculative and tentative an essay the work was intended to be. Friedrich had read it in manuscript and said that it was a difficult book, which he would use with graduate students, but it was too subtle to assign to undergraduates. We never anticipated the kinds of adolescent sophistication that would lead many to read the book while in high school. Moreover, since the themes of the book were confined to certain sectors of American life, we did not anticipate the following it continues to have. Although attacks on me by reviewers and essayists have never been particularly agreeable, attacks on the theses of the book itself, even when astringent, discovered few lacunae that Glazer and I had not already sensed. We saw the book as a contribution to an ongoing discussion shifting away from national character to the character of particular strata at a particular period—a less ambitious, but also perhaps more fugitive, focus than the nation as a whole.