Every Citizen a Statesman by David Allen

Author:David Allen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2022-07-21T00:00:00+00:00

5.1 From a promotional booklet for the Dayton Council on World Affairs, c. 1950. Dayton’s booklet poses organized discussion as the alternative to nuclear war, guaranteeing peace, but the rise of nuclear weapons—and the secrecy that protected their development—seemed to some to make meaningful discussion on the World Affairs Council model impossible, or at least ineffectual. Special Collections and Archives, Wright State University Library.

If this was an unusual path for a Council premised, as they all were, on the idea that even explicitly educational mass media were not enough to create meaningful participation, Dayton’s experiment only proved the point. There seemed to be “no end to the possibility for expansion” in terms of numbers reached through television, one of its annual reports noted, but “the value of the television program as an educational project” remained “difficult to determine.” Fears persisted that television, combined with suburban patterns of leisure and consumption, would sate people rather than prompt further discussion. Dayton officials commissioned a survey in 1953 that found a “diffuse, favorable disposition to education and discussion about world affairs” among Daytonians, with 79 percent of respondents noting that efforts to help “people in this city get the facts about world affairs” were a good idea, and 49.5 percent agreeing that it was “absolutely true” that “world affairs are your affairs.” But the Council was not converting ideals into action. Although nearly half of Daytonians claimed to have heard of the Council, only 4 percent of those respondents claimed to be members. Reaching a quarter of the population in even the most passive, limited sense, the survey concluded, would be “the Utopian goal for an agency like the Council.”48

Even the most ambitious Councils found their ambitions dashed, then, most painfully the Cleveland Council itself. Witman had kept the faith at first, insisting that “no problem of world affairs is too difficult for any citizen to see” and maintaining the tempo of events that had made the Council an example seemingly worth following. But as white middle- and upper-class Clevelanders left the city for the suburbs, the Council drifted. Witman spent more time away, starting a series of residential seminars aimed at developing a more sophisticated awareness of world affairs among “civic, governmental and academic leaders.” Staffers trained in Cleveland went off to replicate its workings elsewhere; those who remained had started to revolt by the end of 1953. One fear was that the Council was making little contribution to foreign policy, despite the promises policymakers often made. Another was that the Council’s offerings were shallow. “I wonder whether we are not simply creating in the name of mass citizen education an elaborate system of filling stations,” one internal critic wrote, “from which the local consumer chooses his brand of gas and oil and then has absolutely no clear idea of where to drive the contraption.” And there was also the fact that the Council itself had remained so stubbornly elitist, whatever its achievements in the community. 89.8 percent of its members earned more than the national median wage, a survey found in 1955.

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