book review of samuel w. franklin’s the cult of creativity: a surprisingly recent history in journal of society history.
X-posted from the Journal of Social History, 2024.
Creativity, Samuel W. Franklin writes, is overrated. The “creatives,” so celebrated by urban studies scholar Richard Florida and others as saviors of the postindustrial economy, turn out to have rather banal origins. This, Franklin contends, is precisely why the term creativity is so fascinating. In The Cult of Creativity: A Surprisingly Recent History, the historian argues that during the decades after World War II, the concept arose not among artists, bohemians, or hipsters, but rather in the precincts of corporations, advertisers, management gurus, scientists, engineers, educators, and, later, “human-centered” designers. They sought to identify an ineffable quality of human activity and identity—a style and sensibility, maybe even a how-to program—that could resolve the tensions, soothe the anxieties, and assure the validity of both their particular professional fields and the larger Cold War society.
Franklin has come neither to praise creativity, nor quite to bury it, but rather to unearth its strange story. Instead of joining the “cult of creativity” or polemically condemning it, Franklin chooses to historicize the term. His well-written, even-tempered narrative, excellently grounded in rarely examined archival sources, does not go so far as to argue that creativity was a fantastical creation, fabricated whole cloth, but Franklin does want us to understand how creativity became a fetishized ideal. Creativity was an amorphous term, he notices, that was often used mostly to name a problem—one could even say to create a problem where there was not one—in order to justify the need for a solution. By probing its history since World War II, he explains how the concept was both “forged as a psychological solution to structural problems” in postwar America and served the specific institutional or ideological needs of various professions (208).
Creativity, he argues, became an ideal because it could mediate “a nagging tension between the utilitarian and the humane or transcendent” as well as offer a way to handle feelings of both “optimism and pessimism” concerning the future (14-15). It provided a way to balance out “elitist and egalitarian tendencies” in American life (16). It was “heroic yet democratic, romantic yet practical,” Franklin writes. It “sought to harmonize the economic and inner self” (100). Those who formed its cult, such as the very weird but successful Synectics managerial consulting group, wanted to help industrial firms achieve a “disciplined freedom, an intoxicating steadiness, a predictable gamble, an ephemeral solidity” through brainstorming sessions that sometimes bordered on the bizarre. These activities, Franklin argues, galvanized “the paradoxes at the heart of postwar America” (116).
Over the course of nine chapters, Franklin explains how creativity arose so that its cultists might have their liberated, individualist, dissident cake and eat their conformist mass society American superpower abundance too. He explores the ideas of psychoanalytic theorists in the human potential movement such as Abraham Maslow and Rollo May. They developed more sophisticated approaches to creativity as a means for people to flourish despite the existential threats of the Atomic Age, yet creativity also fit quite easily into existing regimes of Big Science, hyper-rationalization, military-industrial coordination, and even the making of the Bomb itself.
Psychologists such as Joy Paul Guilford, Frank Barron, and Calvin Taylor found ways to measure and test creativity, a rather paradoxical but well-intentioned task. Education researchers such as E. Paul Torrance drew upon their work to forge new approaches to assessing students, opening up concepts of intelligence and giftedness beyond rote memorization. Navigating the tricky waters of postwar public educational politics, Torrance “deftly hitched the Cold War liberal critique of conformity to conservative fears of mediocrity and civilizational decline,” Franklin writes (132). Placing the slippery notion of creativeness on quantitative scales of measurement, psychologists and educators not only addressed larger social concerns about creeping “soft totalitarianism” after World War II, but also found ways to thrive professionally amidst questions about the validity of their own fields as humane pursuits within a technocratic Cold War milieu.
Similarly, creativity allowed advertisers to remedy intra-professional questions about the ethics of their profession, which had been heavily criticized by the likes of Vance Packard as a mode of devious manipulation. They could claim a place as creative culturemakers rather than cold-blooded connivers. Like psychologists, educators, and advertising firms, technological-driven corporations, engineers, and scientists offered what we might call a “vibe” of creativity to shift their reputations. Instead of creating products, they enacted the creative process. So what if their rockets could destroy the world? Represented by colorful, almost Cubist-like advertisements, missiles suddenly looked part of a pastoral, aestheticized landscape of ingenuity and innovation. “Mix imagination with Alcoa Alumnias and see ceramics do what ceramics never did before!” one ad declared, continuing, “A case in point: Missile designers needed nose cone material transparent to electronic impulses and able to withstand a holocaust of heat” (181). People might not survive, but creativity made that seem like a sterile, talentless thing to point out.
It must be admitted that Franklin’s book is not always revelatory, but perhaps that is fitting for a critique of the cult of creativity. There is no bold new theory or thesis proposed to rival or replace the likes of Thomas Frank’s groundbreaking The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism, which hovers over Franklin’s study. Instead, the author calmy and cogently adds detail and specificity to critiques of Cold War American culture developed as early as 1950, when sociologists David Riesman, Nathan Glazer, and Reuel Denney described what they thought was a dramatic shift from an inner-directed American style of tradition and character to an outer-directed one of personality. Sociologist Daniel Bell would later, in the 1970s, famously argue that this transition resulted from “the cultural contradictions of capitalism,” which demanded discipline in the work lives of Americans to produce wealth, but at the same time hedonism, libidinal gratification, and therapeutic dependency to drive a mass consumer economy.
For Bell, along with historians such as Christopher Lasch and Warren Susman, as well as many others, the tension between an older, producer-oriented America dominated by Protestant-derived, republican values of self-denying thrift and a newer, more secular world of destabilizing but tantalizing plenitude and pleasure created great cultural challenges. Creativity, Franklin contends, emerged as one way to address them. “The concept of creativity served as a psychological fix for the structural contradictions of postwar America,” he concludes. “It reconciled a newfound individualism—which itself contained progressive, liberal, and reactionary ingredients—with the seemingly incontrovertible facts of mass society” (183).
Franklin’s argument is convincing, but it mostly recapitulates the going theory of how culture has functioned in United States history. Call it the “resolving paradoxes” or “reconciliation” or “both resisted and reinforced” thesis. Cultural forms, in this argument, emerge triumphant because they solve conundrums. One sometimes wonders, reading Franklin’s book, if his sources have something more to offer us in terms not only of fitting creativity into existing interpretations of American cultural history, but also revising them. Could The Cult of Creativity have been a bit more, well, creative in this regard? Perhaps.
In the meantime, Franklin’s book offers a genealogy of the concept for post-millennial generations seeking to understand the roots of their own era. Going back to the postwar years, he tries to put the cult of creativity to rest in the contemporary moment, rejecting its worst excesses. In his thoughtful conclusion, Franklin proposes we set aside innovation, disruption, rule-breaking, and postures of infantile, rebellious nonconformity. Instead, he calls for more collective political will, solidarity, sociality, maturity, and sustainability. Down with the cult of creativity, up with the actual human creative capacity for better carework, maintenance, and competency!