576
PARTISAN REVIEW
DB:
Is it true that one factor in leading you to write about the American
social character was the research you had undertaken in the late 1940s,
which led to your essay, "The Ethics of We Happy Few"?
DR:
There's so much chance and haphazard in the way
The Lonely Crowd
began. I had become interested in public opinion research through my
other great mentor, Carl Joachim Friedrich, when I was a Harvard stu–
dent. And he had brought to Harvard from the BBC a man named
Charles Siepmann, who had initiated some public opinion surveys in the
UK. Friedrich also alerted me to what's been my habit ever since: when–
ever
I
open a newspaper I look first at the letters column. With Nathan
Glazer, whom I had not met but whose work I'd read,
I
started looking at
interviews in New York City in the Eastern office of the National
Opinion Research Center with, as
I
now realize, a kind of characterolog–
ical slant. My curiosity was, "Why are there so few 'don't knows'?" Ten
percent or less of the people being asked questions in a national survey re–
spond, "Don't know." What does this say about Americans? (And now,
as a footnote, if one listens
to
C- SPAN or National Public Radio call-in
shows, again one has the sense of the arrogance of Americans, that they
know - we know - how to fix everything. We know that all politicians
are corrupt, and so on.)
Looking at those interviews, we then proceeded to do our own inter–
views with students at a boarding school near New Haven. We sat down
and looked at them. And then we hit on what we first called
"conscience-direction" versus"other-direction."
DB:
Was "conscience-direction" the forerunner of the term "inner-di–
rection"?
DR:
Yes.
DB:
Did this research evolve into your essay, "The Ethics of We Happy
F
"?
ew .
DR:
I think that question can be answered this way: I recently happened
on David Halberstam's book,
The Best and the Brightest.
In it he quotes me
on something I'd completely forgotten: my asking these Washington
people who came from Harvard and were talking about counter-terrorist
work they were planning in Vietnam, "Have you ever been to Utah?"
They said, "No. Have you?"
And I said, "No."
