Republic on the Wire: Cable Television, Pluralism, and the Politics of New Technologies, 1948-1984

Republic on the Wire

Republic on the Wire

Cable Television, Pluralism, and the Politics of New Technologies, 1948–1984

John McMurria

Rutgers University Press

New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: McMurria, John, 1963–author.

Title: Republic on the wire : cable television, pluralism, and the politics of new technologies, 1948–1984 / John McMurria.

Description: New Brunswick, New Jersey : Rutgers University Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016015543| ISBN 9780813585307 (hardback) | ISBN 9780813585291 (pbk.) | ISBN 9780813585314 (e-book (epub)) | ISBN 9780813585321 (e-book (Web PDF))

Subjects: LCSH: Cable television—United States—History. | Broadcasting—United States—History. | Television broadcasting—United States—History. | BISAC: SOCIAL SCIENCE / Media Studies. | TECHNOLOGY & ENGINEERING / Telecommunications. | HISTORY / United States / 20th Century.

Classification: LCC HE8700.72.U6 M46 2017 | DDC 384.55/50973—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016015543

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2017 by John McMurria

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

www.rutgersuniversitypress.org

For my mother, Marion, Lytle, Miller, Lori, Fergus, and Doug

and

In loving memory of my father, my sister Ann, and my brother David

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: American Pluralism, Television Policy, and the Method of Equality

Chapter 1. Broadcast Policy, Television Spectrum, and the Pluralist Logics of Inequality

Chapter 2. Contesting (In)Equality at the Margins of Television Reception

Chapter 3. Pay-TV Orders

Chapter 4. Local Origination, Public Access, and the Hierarchical Logics of Civic Culture

Chapter 5. Blue Skies, Black Cultures

Epilogue: Neutrality, Connectivity, or Equality When Media Converge

Notes

Select Bibliography

Index

About the Author

Acknowledgments

I wrote this book within supportive communities of mentors, colleagues, co-workers, archivists, friends, and family. I am especially indebted to Toby Miller. Since taking his graduate course on cultural studies many years ago, he has inspired and supported me in my academic and life pursuits. His unwavering political commitments to thinking about the complexities of power and subjectivity continually remind me of the value of academic labor. While I was a graduate student, his invitation to join him and others on a collaborative writing project taught me how to write for publication and opened up academic opportunities. Since then he has continued to offer sage advice and warm friendship. In addition, I thank David Nasaw for teaching me the political significance of cultural history. Anna McCarthy taught me the value of conceptual clarity in rendering cultural history politically relevant for understanding the past and intervening in the present. Tom Streeter inspired me to think about how ideas mattered in understanding the history of media policy. And Rick Maxwell’s political economy perspective reminded me to never lose sight of the forest through the trees.

I have benefited from supportive communities at three universities. As I first began to develop this project as a graduate student at New York University, the faculty in the Department of Cinema Studies guided my academic pursuits. A core group of fellow graduate students sustained me through the challenges and continued to encourage me as scholars and friends ever since: Ryan DeRosa, Nitin Govil, Shawn Shimpach, Gretchen Skogerson, and Michael Spear. While a faculty member at DePaul University I received support for my research from two Research Council Paid Leave Fellowships, a Competitive Faculty Research Grant, and a Faculty Research and Development Summer Research Grant. The camaraderie among Department of Communications faculty made my four years there a joy and the interdisciplinary engagements academically stimulating. I would like to thank Department Chair Barbara Speicher and Dean Jackie Taylor for mentoring my professional development.

The University of California San Diego has supported my research through two Hellman Fellowships, an Academic Career Development Grant, and research and travel grants from the Academic Senate Committee on Research. The shared commitment to interdisciplinary critical approaches to communication among the Department of Communication’s faculty and graduate students has stretched and enriched my thinking about questions of culture, politics, and history. I thank Department Chairs Dan Hallin, David Serlin, and Val Hartouni for providing course releases and moderate committee work to give me time to complete the manuscript. I also thank Fernando Dominguez Rubio, Lilly Irani, and Christo Sims for hosting an informal discussion of my manuscript and for the faculty and graduate students in attendance who provided insightful feedback. The department graduate students, many of whom are now colleagues in the field, have helped me work through ideas central to this project, including Matt Dewey, Hannah Dick, Alex Dubee, Jahmese Fort, Reece Peck, and Pawan Singh. Working with the department’s professional and friendly staff has been a pleasure. In supporting my research pursuits I would like to thank Judy Wertin, Liz Floyd, Cindy Syacina, Gayle Aruta, and Renee Thomas in the Department of Communications, and Michelle Null in the Office of the Academic Senate. I am particularly grateful for the frequent early morning conversations with Angela Velazquez, who not only enlivened my days, but reminded me that the ivory tower is continuously a site of labor dispute.

I am indebted to those who have generously given verbal and written feedback at various stages of my project. I thank Michael Curtin, Michele Hilmes, Mary Beltrán, and the attending graduate students for their valuable feedback during a talk in the Department of Communication Arts at University of Wisconsin, Madison. I thank Sarah Banet-Weiser, Cynthia Chris, and Anthony Freitas for their sharp editorial guidance of my work on pay-TV. I thank Nitin Govil for his sharp feedback on an early chapter and for his unconditional moral support since we were graduate students. I am grateful to Robert Horwitz for spending his Sundays reading several chapter drafts and offering his valuable comments regarding clarity of writing and argument. Henry Jenkins and Karen Tongson offered insightful comments and encouragement at an important stage in the publishing process. I also thank the anonymous reviewers at Rutgers University Press for their helpful suggestions about organization and flow of argument. A special thank you goes to Jennifer Holt for her sharp advice about broadening the book’s scope and intervention as I readied it for publication.

The staff and archivists at a number of institutions have offered research guidance, expertise, and an enthusiasm for searching the past. Thank you to all those who helped me locate documents at the Dayton Public Library; the Chicago Municipal Reference Library; the Chicago History Museum; the City Archives’ Historical Records Program at the Los Angeles City Clerk’s Office; the National Archives in College Park, Maryland; the New York Public Library’s Performing Arts collection and Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; the Rand Corporation; the Wisconsin Historical Society; and the UCLA Arts Library. A special thanks to Lisa Wood at the Ohio Historical Society; to Norwood Kerr for his research assistance at the State of Alabama Department of Archives and History; to Tara Craig at the Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library; to Christine Bruzzese at the New York City Department of Records and Information Services; to my researcher, Doris Kinney, who sifted through documents at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library with guidance from Kirsten Carter; to Shehla Khawaja, Lisa Backman, and Brian Kenny at The Cable Center; and Steve McShane at the Calumet Regional Archives, Anderson Library, Indiana University Northwest. Additional thanks goes to Brian Kenny and Steve McShane for locating and clearing photographs for publication.

I would like to thank a number of advisors, colleagues, and friends who have supported my academic pursuits over the years including: Richard Allen, Luisela Alvaray, Jay Beck, Marshall Berman, William Boddy, Lisa Cartwright, Mari Castañeda, Steven Classen, Nick Couldry, Matt Fee, Des Freedman, Elfriede Fursich, Michael Gillespie, Elena Gorfinkel, Jonathan Gray, Roger Hallas, Brent Hartinger, Devorah Heitner, Liz Horn, Mark Jancovich, Michael Jensen, Jen Light, Ranjani Mazumdar, Vicki Mayer, John McGuire, Lisa Parks, Roopali Mukherjee, Allison McCracken, Denise McKenna, Heather McMillan, Laurie Ouellette, Auguta Palmer, Allison Perlman, Alisa Perren, Francis Fox Piven, Barbara Popovic, Alessandra Raengo, Jeanette Richards, Ken Rogers, Jessica Scarlata, Bob Sklar, Robert Stam, Louisa Stein, Chris Straayer, Dee Tudor, Silvio Waisbord, Barbara Wilinsky, Federico Windhausen, and George Yúdice. A special thanks to Kimberly Norton, Crystal Green, and Ann Massion for creating productive spaces for maintaining a healthy perspective on work and life.

I thank the editorial and production team at Rutgers University Press for their cordiality and professionalism, including Lisa Boyajian, Marilyn Campbell, Evie Duvert, Carrie Hudak, and Victoria Verhowsky. I am especially grateful to my editor Leslie Mitchner for her enthusiasm, sharp editorial insights, and expediency in shepherding the book through the review and production process. I also thank my copy editor, Maria Siano, for her meticulous review and smart suggestions for sharpening the writing. Thanks to Nancy Gerth for her thorough and expert work on the book’s index. And a special thanks to the inspirational gay-rights activist Dan Sherbo for his permission to use his elegant and politically searing artwork for the book’s cover.

None of this would be possible without the loving support of my family. My mom, Bev, taught me to persevere through good times and bad and never give up. My dad, Al, modeled the value of empathy and humor in life. Their unconditional, loving support provided the foundation for all I have accomplished. My siblings, Ann, David, and Lori, and my sisters’ partners, Fergus and Doug, have always been there for me. I also want to thank my supportive father-in-law, Melford A. Wilson. My amazing kids, Lytle and Miller, remind me every day that the most important things in life do not happen at the office. And I can now happily respond to their incessant question: yes, Daddy is finally done with his book. Above all, I am most thankful for having my partner, Marion, in my life. As a gifted writer she has been my trusted editorial confidant throughout the writing process—reading every word and offering her insights about readability, expressivity, and flow of argument. I have learned from her that love means knowing when to offer critical feedback and when to extend a supportive hug. She has taken on my share of the load of managing our home and kids over extended periods of time when I was deep into the writing, a debt that I am only beginning to repay. Thank you, my rock, my partner in parenting, my inspiration, my best friend, and the love of my life.

The select bibliography includes all cited sources except newspaper articles and unpublished archival documents.

Introduction

American Pluralism, Television Policy, and the Method of Equality

In 1955 the former soap opera scriptwriter and Cincinnati Post radio and television columnist Mary Wood asked her readers what they thought about a proposal to bring pay-as-you-see TV to the area. From the over two thousand readers who responded, Wood concluded that Greater Cincinnati viewers are overwhelmingly against this method of distributing television that required viewers to pay between twenty-five cents and two dollars for programs including, as the pay-TV proposal promised, current motion pictures, dramatic and musical stage shows, educational and cultural programs, sporting events, operas, Broadway hits, programs to specialized groups only—technical, medical programs, etc.—not designed for general public consumption. Wood submitted these survey findings, including a sampling of comments from her readers, to a 1956 U.S. Senate committee hearing on pay-TV. Ida B. Erb, one of those readers, wrote that many a time I read in your column that TV was the best thing since running water and how you wished everyone had a set. Erb felt the same way, writing that TV is a source of constant joy to me. But she was concerned about the poor (and there are thousands and thousands of us) who could not afford to pay and concluded, Let’s keep TV free and all of us help to make it better.¹

The prominent behavioral social scientist Paul Lazarsfeld, whose research contributed to, and epitomized, the more official discourse on questions of broadcasting and the public interest, had a different perspective about the cultural value of radio and television broadcasting and who was qualified to participate in making it better. In his analysis of a 1945 national survey to ascertain where radio stands with the public, Lazarsfeld believed that commercial broadcasters were called upon to compromise between two forces. One force was the advertisers who want to promote programs which conform to the understanding and taste of the larger and less educated sectors of the population. The other force included the critic who wants a more sophisticated radio for reasons including that in his profession he has developed certain standards of taste which he is eager to see disseminated, and persons in the upper strata who merely want to have radio more to their own listening tastes. Though Lazarsfeld interpreted the survey to reveal that the large majority of the people in this country are pleased with radio as it is, including the advertising, he argued that because a minority of college-educated viewers and social scientists like himself remained less satisfied with radio, he concluded that in cultural matters the experts who see a problem in its broader contexts should get a preferential hearing. This privileging of the perspectives and tastes of the formally educated few over the less formally educated many did not conflict with American democracy’s belief in the common man, Lazarsfeld continued, because the American tradition of checks and balances . . . was developed precisely to meet such conflicts.²

This understanding that the tradition of American democracy required that experts keep the common man in check continued to influence Lazarsfeld’s assessment of television’s first decade of rapid expansion. At a Federal Communication Commission (FCC) hearing in 1959 he recommended that a more realistic balance in broadcast regulation should be derived from empirical social research and common-sense thinking about people in modern society. This empirical research and common-sense thinking must somehow be built into the American system of television to make standards of judgment relatively objective, such as creating a standards committee composed of artists, psychologists, and research technicians to guide FCC decision-making. This empirical standard would keep in check such imbalances as those found in the daytime soap opera where it was usually the men who created the problems and the women who found the solution, because, as Lazarsfeld told the attending members of the commission, most of us will agree that it is not a good idea in the long run to expose women to such a one-sided picture of the family. In his view, exposing women and the less educated to a more balanced television culture required that the empirical sciences move away from finding out what people liked to watch on television to finding out how enforced exposure to more sophisticated programs of good taste could stimulate a desire for information and self-improvement.³

Lazarsfeld recognized, however, that investing government and a panel of experts with the authority to regulate commercial broadcasting created an American dilemma that must reconcile the First Amendment with the fact that the communications industry is affected by public interests.⁴ But for Ida B. Erb, the Cincinnati viewer cited earlier, the fact that television had a public interest purpose was not a dilemma that needed to be reconciled with the First Amendment. More profoundly, she wrote that the public interest was something that everyone should participate in defining, not just experts or those who can afford to pay for programming.

This book considers this question of qualification to participate in defining the public interest in cable television from 1948, when community antennas and coaxial cables first extended the signal reach of broadcast television into remote areas, through 1984, when Congress passed the first federal cable television legislation. During these years when cable television developed concurrently with broadcast television, the material differences between the two forms of television transmission—as a wired not wireless transmission technology, as a pay service rather than free over-the-air, and, since the late 1960s, as a communications conduit with greater capacity to deliver more channels and two-way interactivity—provoked contestations over the existing and potential value of television in American life, and over who was qualified to make such determinations.

Confronting this more fundamental dispute about qualification to participate in determining the public interest in broadcast and cable television’s concurrent development requires asking different questions about television policy and history. Cable television histories have asked how policy and industry actions have either facilitated or inhibited what Patrick Parsons calls the progressive evolution of the technology and industry or what Megan Mullen poses as the revolution or evolution of cable programming.⁵ Instead of depicting cable history and policy as the fits and starts of a progressive evolution, I pose the following questions: How were the hierarchical judgments of Lazarsfeld about people’s unequal capacity to participate in defining the public interest—judgments that were prevalent among social scientists, federal administrators, lawmakers, and many television reformers—rationalized as democratic within policymaking contexts? How were these perceptions legitimated with reference to taste and aesthetic judgment? How can we recuperate the significance of statements that claimed the equality of everyone to participate in questions of public interest, including Ida B. Erb’s, despite their marginalization in official decision-making and in policy histories?

This book’s central premise is that posing these questions about qualification to participate in defining the public interest requires situating cable television history and policy within the contexts of American pluralism, a widely circulating understanding of democracy in the United States from the 1940s through the early 1970s. Pluralism constituted a new theory of American democracy that began not with foundational principles about equality but with empirical methods to describe the political process. Drawing from social and behavioral science studies, pluralism posited that the political process largely comprised a competition for political power and influence among elected officials and interest group leaders representing religious, industry, labor, and civic organizations. Though most citizens were relatively inactive in the political process, according to pluralism, their group affiliations kept them in touch with the more active political leaders and in consensus with the legitimate governmental process. Within the contexts of the rise of communism and fascism, and within assumptions that the United States constituted the world’s most democratic society, American pluralism as a theory of democracy considered these relational dynamics between interest group leaders and their members to create both stability against threats to the American governmental system and adaptability to ever-changing political interests.⁶

Revisionist histories have critiqued these depictions of the political process in the United States as open to a plurality of interests. In his study of the workers who took part in the most widespread strikes in U.S. history during the 1940s, George Lipsitz writes how the institutionalized relationships among political leaders, including union bosses, worked against the demands of workers and left them with little influence on working conditions. He writes how women and people of color were particularly marginalized within the interest group system where increasingly large corporations forged agreements with union leaders to create a governing consensus around commitments to corporate growth.⁷ Indeed, histories of historically marginalized groups often locate democratic politics outside of interest group relations because these disenfranchised groups have been marginalized in the formal governing process, as Robin Kelley has eloquently written regarding Black working-class culture and politics.⁸

Extending these persuasive critiques, I consider how the behavioral science studies that informed pluralist understandings of democracy constituted hierarchical classifications of persons that rationalized the disenfranchisement of wage earners, women, and people of color in the formal and informal political process. As a theory that questioned understandings of democracy as the rule of the people as equals, pluralist social science classified personality characteristics, lifestyles, dispositions, and occupational status as significant indicators of qualification for political participation.

Behavioral Science, Group Relations, and the Conceptual Foundations of American Pluralism

In the early twentieth century, behavioral scientists began to question what they called the democratic dogma that all men were created equal in their capacity to participate in democratic rule.⁹ An influential proponent, theorist, and institution builder for this behavioral approach to American democracy was Charles Merriam who advocated for a new politics that could respond to rapid changes in modern society including industrialization, mass communication, human migration, and urbanization. Though he believed these changes, and the scientific revolution that made them possible, represented societal progress, he feared that they created new instabilities that could not be contained through the system of checks and balances of American constitutional democracy. The new politics, Merriam argued in 1925, required new methods that would apply the categories of science to the vastly important forces of social and political control. This included replacing classical liberalism’s natural law philosophy that began with a conception of man as equal in a state of nature and a conception of the state as limited to protecting man’s natural liberty. A science of politics, Merriam elaborated, conceived of human nature as a biological organism capable of adapting to environmental change and required an enhanced purpose for government . . . in the organization of human intelligence, in appreciation, in scientific adjustments of individuals and groups through the agencies of education, eugenics, psychology, biology.¹⁰ Merriam worked across disciplines in higher education, in government, and with private philanthropic foundations to institutionalize this new science of politics. This included founding the Chicago School of political science, co-founding the Social Science Research Council to coordinate and fund behavioral research, and serving as one of five members of Roosevelt’s New Deal planning board for its duration from 1933 to 1943.¹¹

Of particular importance to the new science of politics were the methodological techniques of behavioral psychology, which, Merriam argued, made possible the objective measurement of human traits and behavior . . . and the special conditions under which differentials in these traits are produced. Once the attributes of these traits could be differentiated, and their sources, whether of inheritance or environment, could be understood, politics would no longer consist of the rationalizations of groups in power or seeking power—the special pleadings of races, religions, classes in behalf of their special situation, but of the modern intelligence of social science. In this line of thinking, in particular need of guidance were the immigrant working-class communities that had given power to urban bosses, a power that could be dismantled through understanding of the habits, dispositions, wishes, and tendencies of the urban population, of how their traits are developed and how they are and may be modified, educated, trained, and fitted into institutions and organizations of government.¹² Regarding future immigration, the science of eugenics promised to predetermine in considerable measure the types of person desired in the commonwealth of the future, negatively at first by forbidding certain unions, a nativist rationale for the race and ethnic exclusions that were written into immigration statutes in the early 1920s.¹³ In the 1930s and 1940s Merriam believed that these scientific methods could guide civic education through encouraging citizens to accept these objective methods of thinking to understand the complex forces of a modern, industrialized society, and to adapt to new situations requiring modifications of attitudes and behavior in a universal process of acculturation.¹⁴

Merriam’s science of politics that sought to guide citizens to adapt their behavior to the rapidly changing conditions of industrial society, which included civic training to alleviate the habits and traits identified with non-white and ethnic working-class difference, were further institutionalized by his students. His most influential student, Harold Lasswell, is considered by many to be one of the most influential political scientists of the 1930s and 1940s. Lasswell drew from behavioral and Freudian psychology to study personality in politics and concluded that because irrational primitive motives in childhood motivate political action, the individual, in contrast to classical liberal conceptions of American democracy, is a poor judge of his own interests. Therefore, discussion among citizens does not promote democratic self-rule but rather often leads to modifications in social practice which complicate social problems. Because political movements derive their vitality from the displacement of private affects upon public objects, imposing fictitious values into politics, Lasswell called for social science to guide a politics of prevention through relaying the truth about the conditions of harmonious human relationships to government administrators to reduce the level of strain and maladaptation in society. According to Lasswell, this politics of prevention entailed containing political agitators and taming the political convictions of those including the socialist who desired the attention of the fickle masses, the religious revivalist, the newspaper editor who responded quickly to the appeals of the underdog and revealed injustices wherever he found them earning great popularity among minority racial and national groups, the litigious paranoid attorney who championed the causes of the poor, and the forceful, ambitious, and aggressive woman who advocated for the complete equality of the sexes.¹⁵

These perceptions that the masses, including the poor, racial minorities, and women, were susceptible to destabilizing political persuasion were shared by Harvard political scientist Pendleton Herring. In his The Politics of Democracy, first published in 1940, he depicted the populist orators William Jennings Bryan, Huey Long, and Father Charles Coughlin as rabble-rousers who appealed to the great mental lowlands of the nation through offering them the hocus-pocus they demand. Yet within the period’s growing industrialism and rapid change, Herring found that such populist appeals were tempered by politically effective power-units he called interest groups. According to Herring, such interest groups including great industrial organizations, labor unions, professional associations, and the like . . . actually govern the lives of their members much more intimately than do many official regulatory agencies of control. This governing process entailed group leaders initiating discussions with their members to facilitate compromise and moderation including, for example, accepting labor as an emerging interest without disruptive effect. In recognizing the political authority that group leaders held in facilitating the roots of consent over their group members, Herring acknowledged the existence of a paradox of political inequality and democratic equality. Yet because he was invested in identifying the hierarchical social relations that maintained political stability instead of questioning a political process that propagated democratic inequality, such a paradox was of little concern so long as through our governmental machinery we can get for all citizens that minimum of substance and security which will keep them content with the imperfect world within which they find themselves.¹⁶

Herring’s legitimating hierarchical social relations as endemic to political stability found further elaboration in David Truman’s highly influential book, The Governmental Process, which—in at least fifteen printings from 1951 through the 1960s—established pluralism as the prevailing theory of U.S. democracy. A student of Charles Merriam, Truman drew from Arthur Bentley’s group approach to the political process, first articulated in 1908, to argue that the governmental process in American democracy constituted an ongoing behavioral modifying process of hierarchical social relations within groups. The internal dynamics of group memberships, Truman wrote, form and guide the attitudes and therefore the behavior of their participants, with a significant role for the techniques of leadership that spring from the connection between group cohesion and the conflicting attitudes and affiliations of members. This behavior-guiding process among group leaders and their members, particularly within the more institutionalized groups of the state (judiciary, legislature, executive), civil society (labor unions, business associations, churches), and the family, function to produce conformity to the norms of the group and an equilibrium among the interactions of the participants. When there is a disturbance to group equilibrium, the group’s leaders will make an effort to restore the previous balance.¹⁷

Truman’s examples reveal the accepted gender and class privilege that sustained group equilibrium. In a typical American family, he observed, it will be accepted almost unconsciously and without discussion that the male parent will almost always make certain decisions regarding money and the mother will make many more decisions affecting the children. In the case of labor unions, when a sudden change in the relations (interactions) between management and workers in a factory, initiated by the former, may at first result in gossiping, griping, and picking on scapegoats, it is the role of labor leaders to direct the rank-and-file responses toward more ‘constructive’ forms of interaction. In such a highly institutionalized group such as organized labor, in the course of maintaining cohesion and of perpetuating itself, the active minority can manipulate and exploit such aspects of formal organization through regulating the flow of ideas concerning the organization and its policies to members more or less prepared . . . to accept an authoritative view of both, such as when the union leaders were able to contain rank-and-file reaction to the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 that prohibited, among other things, the worker-led wildcat strikes and sympathy boycotts that proliferated the year before.¹⁸

Just as Truman rationalized the hierarchical relations within groups as an important mechanism for generating political stability and equilibrium, he also legitimated class, race, and gender barriers to participating in decision-making within official institutions of the state. The access, influence, and effectiveness of an association on government policy, Truman explained, is greater when the position of the group or its spokesman is a member of a high-status group, such as a business leader or bar association member, because the large proportion of key officials in legislative, executive, and judicial positions share these high-status class backgrounds with similar values, manners, and preconceptions. For the less privileged classes who comprise most of the unorganized sectors of society and lack the high-status manners and values, the principal governmental leaders from the three branches of government act as their leaders or guardians, though their consideration of the less privileged is normally of a more unconscious character. As Truman argued, following Bentley, inevitably in all democracies, as in despotism, the ruling class will at least minimally represent the ruled class as well, such as when the Delta planters in Mississippi advocated on behalf of their Negroes. The most threatening source of political instability, Truman warned, is the potential for the unorganized to form interest groups along class or racial lines, including the appearance of groups representing Negroes, especially in the South, because they lack the involvement of high-status members who participate in other organized interest groups. These caste and class interpretations of widespread unorganized interests comprise a potentially pathogenic politics that deviates from what Truman referred to as America’s democratic rules-of-the-game or general ideological consensus. The mechanism for avoiding such pathogenic politics is for the established interest groups to recognize the interests of unorganized classes and races and incorporate them into the established interest group system. The interest group system, then, operates as a balance wheel to prevent instabilities that arise through race or class interpretations of the ‘rules of the game.’ An important component of this balance wheel is the educated elite who comprise an element of dynamic stability within the pluralist system.¹⁹

In elaborating the value of these educated leaders to the stability of American democracy, the highly influential political scientist Robert Dahl developed a theory he called polyarchal democracy to describe how educated leaders competed with one another for political influence—a process he called minorities rule. In A Preface to Democratic Theory, first published in 1956, Dahl agreed with James Madison, paraphrasing that democracy is an effort to bring off a compromise between the power of majorities and the power of minorities, between the political equality of all adult citizens on the one side, and the desire to limit their sovereignty on the other. But Dahl disagreed that the constitutional separation of powers fully explained why this balance had been maintained in the United States because it underestimates the importance of the inherent social checks and balances existing in every pluralistic society. Drawing from social science research on the political process, Dahl elaborated the function of these social checks and balances:²⁰

We now know that members of the ignorant and unpropertied masses which Madison and his colleagues so much feared are considerably less active politically than the educated and well-to-do. By their propensity for political passivity the poor and uneducated disfranchise themselves. Since they also have less access than the wealthy to the organizational, financial, and propaganda resources that weigh so heavily in campaigns, elections, legislative, and executive decisions, anything like equal control over government policy is triply barred to the members of Madison’s unpropertied masses. They are barred by their relatively greater inactivity, by their relatively limited access to resources, and by Madison’s nicely contrived system of constitutional checks.²¹

With the unpropertied masses in social check, the concern was no longer whether a majority will act in a tyrannical way through democratic procedures to impose its will on a minority. The more relevant question, Dahl posed, is the extent to which various minorities in a society will frustrate the ambitions of one another with the passive acquiescence or indifference of a majority of adults or voters. These active minorities typically have higher incomes, education, and status because, as Dhal wrote, we know that political activity, at least in the United States, is positively associated to a significant extent with such variables as income, socioeconomic status, and education.²²

The stability of this system of social checks and balances rests on establishing a consensus around a set of norms for conducting elections for political office and for guiding political participation between elections. These norms include allowing citizens to choose any candidate, that the majority vote-getter