Mass Observation Redux
Tony Kushner, We Europeans? Mass-Observation, ‘Race’ and British Identity in the Twentieth Century, Studies In European Cultural Transition 25, Aldershot, Hampshire, 2004; 292 pp., £50; 0-7546-0206-0.
Nick Hubble, Mass-Observation and Everyday Life: Culture, History, Theory, Basingstoke, Hampshire, 2006; 250 pp., $76.50; 1-4039-3555-6.
Caleb Crain, ‘A Critic at Large: Surveillance Society: the Mass Observation Movement and the meaning of everyday life’, New Yorker, 11 September 2006, pp. 76 –82.
In September 1941 the New Statesman published an ‘East End working girl's’ testimony about the conditions in a Stepney air-raid shelter, as told to the anthropologist and ethnographer Tom Harrisson. Winston Churchill read Harrisson's essay and his outrage at its revelations led to the dismissal of the borough's Air Raid Protection Officer. Critic Nick Hubble's new study of Harrisson and his collaborators’ Mass Observation (MO) project cites Churchill's quick response to the testimony as evidence of the efficacy of MO's method as deployed in the war emergency. At least in this instance, the retelling of his informant's visceral story resonated in the halls of power. Strangely, given the complexity of Hubble's excellent appreciation of Harrisson and his fellow MO co-founders, he does not comment upon the racial perceptions so starkly evident in the young woman's testimony. Along with a plaintive description of the physical conditions of the decrepit shelter, she averred
Everyone there was working class. The shelter is near the dock area, and near the coloured quarters. Mostly Cockneys, but also many Jews and Indians. On the whole, the Jews lay on the right-hand side, the Cockneys in the middle, and the Indians on the left. Race feeling was very marked – not so much between Cockneys and Jews, as between White and Black. In fact, the presence of considerable coloured elements was responsible for drawing Cockney and Jew together, in unity against the Indian. There were a lot of cases of mixed marriages – in fact, it was more usual to see a mixed one, than to see husband and wife coloured. Some of the coloured people were Indian, some Negro, a few Chinese. Some of the Indians, those not occupied with girls, played cards.1What disturbed Churchill most – ‘the smell of humanity and dirt’? The coughing that ‘spread and lasted throughout the evening’? Or the crossing of racial barriers even as the crowd sought to maintain them? Harrisson's selection of this testimony for publication, as well as Churchill's outrage, signal the multiple legacies and uses of the vast MO inheritance. Now at MO's seventieth birthday, as young scholars and researchers new to its lore contemplate its relevance to understanding mid twentieth-century life, they will find themselves looking afresh at collections that have already engendered significant debate and even dismissal. What can we savour from this project in the new century, and what place does it now occupy in the documentary and investigative traditions that led into oral history's boom era in the 1970s and ’80s, encompassing the History Workshop movement and much else?
Mass Observation was the brainchild of Harrisson, the poet Charles Madge, and the documentary film-maker and painter Humphrey Jennings, but the Madge-Harrisson partnership was its vortex; Jennings left MO in the year of its founding. Amongst their associates were the documentary photographer Humphrey Spender, brother of the poet, and a band of researchers and co-workers who comprised their teams, many headquartered with Madge in Bolton, Lancashire. Springing from an admixture of documentary realism in film and art, strongly influenced by the Soviet example and by European surrealism, MO was a resolutely English hybrid – one of the most original aesthetic expressions of practical imagination known to British modernism. Its purpose was, as the New Yorker's Caleb Crain explains, to create ‘weather-maps of public feeling’, to plot the everyday psychology of parts of interwar England.2 MO published twenty-five books between 1937 and 1960, including the fruits of the Bolton Worktown project like those more recently collected in Humphrey Spender's Worktown People: Photographs from Northern England, 1937–38,3 and volumes focused upon the special projects that MO launched. These include surveys of attitudes surrounding the coronation of George IV, the Munich Crisis, the Lambeth Walk craze and the Blitz. MO's wartime work crowned its first cycle of existence, and includes Harrisson's essay on the Stepney air raid shelter, as above.4 Tom Jeffery has written two short histories of MO, and there is a long list of other kinds of analyses of its purposes and achievements. Nick Hubble's is the first lengthy cultural-studies critique of MO, and Tony Kushner's the first large examination of MO's treatment of ‘race’ in many forms.5
Kushner's We Europeans takes it title from the 1935 work of the same name by Arthur C. Haddon and Julian Huxley, whose collaborators Charles Seligman and Charles Singer did not attach their names to its cover lest their Jewish identities prejudice the reading of the text. Haddon and Huxley sought to end the ‘lamentable confusion between the ideas of race, culture and nation’, and to assume an anti-fascist posture, but in so doing managed to propagate other norms of racial perception. Kushner sees the original volume as infused with a tolerant paternalism that grew amongst left-liberals in the interwar years. Within that sensibility, the authors still expressed many less than egalitarian views, mired in a ‘race science’ that bespoke essential difference if not innate racial inferiority. ‘"Racial crossing" may be inadvisable’, Haddon and Huxley declared, ‘but chiefly because the ethnic groups involved happen to be in different national worlds or on different cultural levels.’ Huxley even supported the American South's segregationists.6 MO burst on to the scene at the same time as the original We Europeans, and Kushner seeks to revive the counterpoint that it offered, asking how far MO went in identifying and tracing the expressly British origins and conventions of racism.
The new We Europeans is an assessment of MO's record on race, defined in part as skin colour and otherwise as ethnicity, national identification or classification, and – unsurprisingly given Kushner's larger research commitments – as a religio-cultural affiliation. (This volume was published in a series on ‘European cultural transition’ that grew out of the Race, Ethnicity and Memory project of the AHRB Parkes Centre for the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish relations at the University of Southampton, directed by David Cesarani). Indeed MO asked its contributors in a 1939 directive to rank ‘the French, American, Italian, Irish, Polish and Russian races, and others: the Jewish, Asiatic, Scandinavian and Negro races’.7 Kushner's own largely unexamined assumption that Jews constitute a ‘race’, both in a discursive and ontological sense, is an issue that confronts his readers from the outset. He also contends that responses to issues of German identity have been as formative for contemporary British sensibility as the imprint of empire, and is eager for MO's treatment of Anglo-German relations to enter the scholarly canon.8 The proximity of empire-racism, domestic racial violence and the rise of interwar anti-Semitism are his concerns, and he explores MO's commitment to investigate each.
Kushner sees a post-9/11 world preoccupied by the persistence of racial injustice even before the ‘British-born bus bomber’ arrived on the scene. He contrasts MO's democratic and participatory conventions with those of the top-down, inefficacious race relations industry that has grown up since the War. His book is a kind of ameliorative plea on behalf of MO and its ‘mass observers’, the largely lower-middle-class contributors to its nearly half-a-million pages of surveys, diaries and directives. Kushner is an advocate for the MO process and its deliberative and intrusive concern for the subliminal lives of forgotten brain workers. The European interwar ‘lower middle class’ was long identified as the swing group in the rise of Continental fascism, and its British counterparts as early shock troops for National Government radical conservatism. In some older accounts, this sector's unreliability as agents of progress appears as the reason why the war occurred.9
MO observers were neither reliably socialist nor immune to fascist persuasion. The prewar mass observers were mostly a literate, black-coated group, leading lives of quiet desperation in hard times. Kushner's account affirms the heterogeneity of lower-middle-class opinion, confirming the findings of more subtle and penetrating scholarship that shuns generalization. It even makes the case for some mass observers as a new proto-progressive force who articulated an inspirational inter-racialism and anti-racism, instructive for today's readers. For Kushner, MO's files help to redress the balance amongst views on the era; the record of racist attitudes and violence in the 1930s and ’40s is confronted by very welcome material, much needed, on ‘those who have fought prejudice or worked sympathetically with immigrant and minority groups’.10
Yet the evidence that Kushner chooses to examine from the more than 3,000 files held at the University of Sussex Library's MO archive, reveals far more racial thinking than it does racial progress. One London bank clerk excitedly forecast a British victory over Italy in 1940, after the Abyssinian war. ‘We’ll show the wops. They’re not fighting niggers now.’11 Harrison's own anthropological background influenced his affirmation of the use of white working and lower-middle-class subjects as ‘domestic natives’, who were asked to juxtapose themselves to others, including Jews, ‘Negroes’, Blacks in Britain, and various European imperial peoples.12 I have worked in the MO files for the 1939 ‘Race Directive’ in which the observers were asked to provide such commentary. Their responses ranged from loving Paul Robeson to not wishing to touch or smell Black people.
I haven't much to say about Negroes. I know that the popular conception of them as a lazy, throat-cutting, fried chicken eating race is wrong but I do think that they are different from the white races –less civilized if you like. I suppose the Tropics are not the place to look for a Leonardo, an Einstein or a Faraday – but I don't think that means they are intellectually inferior. The policy of the white races has always been to exploit the negro (sic), but now that they are getting some measure of Freedom and the benefits of Western culture, they are proving that though they may be backward, there is no reason, given good conditions, why they shouldn't play a very important part in the world.13If this thirty-nine year old Yorkshire housewife's ruminations are more complex than others’, they serve to support Kushner's enthusiasm for the jewels of the archive, while exposing to view the deep racial assumptions so ordinarily expressed by whites in the thirties. Many responses reflect a commitment to racial hierarchy, and at the same time bespeak a utilitarian belief that assimilation might allow talent ‘to out’ if (in the language of our times) Negroes were permitted to ‘mainstream’. Other responses to the 1939 directive were less forgiving. A seventy-year-old shoemaker bluntly put it, ‘They are just niggers ... [I have] been in the South African war’.14 A retired woman in her early fifties, then living in Northwest London, wrote: ‘I have lived in a Black Country [South Africa]. I look upon negroes (sic) as animals, without the fidelity of a dog.’15 Kushner euphemistically acknowledges that even if MO's purpose was to forge a ‘truly democratic organization, its observers’ own desire to think racially displayed their will to ‘essentialize difference’ that ‘came at the expense of a greater universalism’.16 Kushner concludes that the observers did not advocate ‘Nazi style discriminatory race politics’, but, unsurprisingly, they still adhered to notions of innate racial difference.17 As late as 1943 only one in five of those surveyed stated that they believed in racial equality. MO's approach relied on a series of binaries, starting with observers and observed. It was a layered arrangement. Observers watched others while they themselves were watched over; early MO disingenuously called this ‘an anthropology of ourselves by ourselves’.18 The fixed distinctions between Home and Empire, Black and white, English and Negro, English and Jew, English and German, filled their inquiries. The existential quest of the MO diarist who offered years of detailed and self-reflexive notes on his or her daily life was in some sense undermined by the rigidity and fixity of category that the MO organizers set in other parts of their work. It is to this conundrum of MO epistemology that Nick Hubble turns.
Mass Observation as it emerges in Hubble's study is a broad, capacious effort to define and instil a new social-patriotic order in middle England with a progressive, anti-Fascist beat. He identifies Walter Benjamin and the Neue Sachlichkeit movement of Weimar Germany as major influences upon the project. According to Hubble, MO served as a prop to the welfare state, seeking to enforce a prescriptive, normative social transformation of English society. It is no coincidence that Hubble is an Orwell scholar, and he sees MO through the prism of its founders’ sociology of knowledge and their flâneur presences, not so very far removed from sitting incognito at the Brookers’ breakfast table.19 Hubble works from a strong, hopeful, consumerist notion of modernity. When everyday life was freed of the impediments to individual consumption and expression, one might then become a mass observer and engage in a ‘shared interwar cultural politics’.20 Like Kushner, but more so, he describes the Madge-Harrisson architectures of thought as deeply influenced by anthropology. George IV's 1937 coronation became in Harrisson's world, an analogue of ancient, indigenous kingship rites that appeared in thirties anthropological studies of colonized regions. For Hubble ‘comic primness’, the satirical representation of England's mythic and comforting domestic interior of hearth and home, is a central MO trope. In a description familiar to historians of the music-hall and variety stage, this ‘ability to accept and revolt against convention at the same time’ bears out a sense of moral decency or fundamental Englishness, that wishes to unite the habitual with experimentation, honour with self-deprecation, and moderation with vicarious adventure.21 In short, for Hubble, the everyday-life studies gathered by MO present an intriguing problem for cultural critics, while Kushner unpacks and pulls apart the archival stash, looking for empirical evidence of past racial attitudes.
Hubble's study appropriately explores the communist and ex-colonial backgrounds of some of its leading participants, Madge in South Africa and Harrisson in Argentina. The life of Zita Baker, formerly married to Oxford eugenicist John R. Baker, lover of Harrisson, and later married again to Richard Crossman, typifies the crossovers between race science, fellow-traveller culture, and Labour Party activism that united MO's strands of interwar intellectual life. Zita Baker and her friend writer Naomi Mitchison, an MO diarist, even journeyed to the American South in the thirties to see Jim Crow up close.22 Given all it absorbed, no portrait of interwar England's intellectual or cultural scene would be complete without an understanding of MO, yet Hubble's treatment stops short of connecting all the dots. The academic circles around anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, for example, highly influential upon MO, included Trinidadian intellectuals George Padmore and Eric Williams, Jomo Kenyatta, and African-American intellectual and diplomat Ralph Bunche.23 None is mentioned in this text, nor in Kushner's. In this respect, the wider racial politics of MO within a larger interwar discourse is neglected by both Hubble and Kushner in favour of an emphasis on ‘race’ simply as a category of MO surveys. There were few mass observers of colour and no concerted effort to recruit them until the 1970s, when the project had become a market-research operation. The England that Hubble believes MO wished to transform was a white and Protestant land, whose working class could be brought out of their interiors into public space through processes of collective expression. It was interesting for the observers to note the problems of difference and antagonism with ‘other cultures’ but these were perceived as outside Englishness, in terms recently described in Paul Gilroy's essay ‘Has It Come to This?’. Gilroy shows the centrality of nostalgia to England's national, racial self-understanding during the wartime era:
... Powerful feelings of comfort and compensation are produced by the prospect of even a partial restoration of the country's long-vanished homogeneity. Repairing that aching loss is usually signified by the recovery or preservation of endangered whiteness—and the exhilarating triumph over chaos and strangeness which that victory entails.24One way to consider MO's contributions to documenting past attitudes in the light of the present is to see the observers’ commentaries, and the conceit of the MO leadership, as a recasting of social transition that was open to new ideas about race and other issues, but would not dislodge the conventional, bedrock culture of national experience. Instead, MO sought to reposition this culture and ready it for the postwar era. Foreignness, in the form of fascism or foreigners, was challenged. MO's penetration of a picaresque and mythic middle England legitimated and reified the very differences the project sought to investigate. It did so in a time when there were already at least 30 000 non-whites living in the UK and when the MO founders had intellectual peers of colour in London and other places. Hubble celebrates the lost potential of MO in the neglect of some of its deep structures of prejudice and bigotry, while Kushner despairs at some of what he reads. But neither offers a full defence of MO ‘warts and all’ against those who dismiss its importance as an historical treasure-trove.
Kushner and Hubble would not feel content with the simple verdict that only hard work in the archive and an adept mode of interrogation can unlock many of MO's best-kept secrets. It is nevertheless liberating to advocate a fundamental empiricism of method. The observers can speak for themselves, even if that was not the intention behind the intricate design imposed upon them in MO's forays. Much that passes for historical interpretation lacks a substructure of evidence of any popular opinion, no matter how circumscribed its catchment. Posterity will welcome MO with gratitude, so long as historians remain open to the richness of its chambers. Documentary evidence has lately lurched not just toward the sound bites of the CNN polls, but to the confessional, filmed public spectacle of Oprah Winfrey, film-maker Michael Moore, and social satirist Ali G.25 Even the acclaimed documentary artists’ passionate narratives of everyday life, like Iraq in Fragments, or Spike Lee's recent work on New Orleans, rely upon visual representation, and words uttered in space that is instantly public space. Where ‘hard’ data exists, it is quantified in ways meant to eliminate idiosyncratic sentiment or individual reflection. Where ‘soft’ accounts appear, they are often retrospectives, as in Luisa Passerini's work on Turin, or the Windrush project, shorn of the immediacy of the private moment.26 The outrageous statement of contempt for ‘others’ now becomes visible and audible only as uttered before an audience. Few speak confidentially in the ways that the mass observers wrote of Negroes. ‘All right in jazz bands and Africa but nowhere else. Negresses disgust me and whenever I see a white woman and a coloured man I feel like shooting both.’ Consider the more tentative ‘... negro (sic) women sometimes attract me strongly,’ or the defiant ‘Quite sincerely, and in spite of the sinister meaning a psychologist might read into such a statement, I can visualize myself falling in love with a negress (sic). If I did, I wouldn't hesitate about marrying her.’27
MO's diversity of existential revelation belongs to a bygone era of public discretion and private passion, closer to the nineteenth century than the twenty-first. The mass observers may have imaginatively confronted those whom they wrote to, but not on the TV couch or in front of a video with instant links to the rest of the world. As many researchers continue to explore the MO holdings at the University of Sussex, aided by a new century website and the legacy of its long-time director Dorothy Sheridan, they will find treasures aplenty.28 If we consider the other societies of the thirties – Spain, Italy and Germany, the colonized world, and the Soviet empire – no archive of this proportion presents itself. MO's scale, longevity and relative freedom to pry was uniquely productive of useful information. Kushner pays homage to the Oyneg Shabes archive of interwar central European Jewish life, buried in milk-cans beneath the Warsaw Ghetto and retrieved after the War. Its story appears as part of historian Samuel Kassow's splendid new account of the life and work of Immanuel Ringelblum.29 But the Oyneg Shabes's partial preservation was miraculous and unparallelled. The era is awash with speculation about ‘mass opinion’ and cultures no longer known, with precious little to work from on the order of MO. The debate should continue over how rather than whether to use it. Both these provocative volumes can serve as guides to what Caleb Crain identifies as MO's ‘subversive eccentricity’,30 but only the researcher labouring in the archive will see the thrilling testimonies – annals that comprise more than the problematic sum of their parts.
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NOTES AND REFERENCES |
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 TOP NOTES AND REFERENCES |
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Susan D. Pennybacker teaches modern British and European history at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, where she also directs the Hartford Studies Project in twentieth-century documentary history and film. She is the author of A Vision for London, 1889–1914 (Routledge, 1995) and the forthcoming From Scottsboro to Munich: Race and Political Culture in 1930s Britain (Princeton, 2008). Her current research focuses upon postwar Britain and South Africa.
1 Tom Harrisson, ‘War Adjustment’, New Statesman and Nation, 28 Sept. 1940, pp. 300–1, cited in Hubble, p. 188. 
2 Tom Harrisson, Humphrey Jennings, Charles Madge, ‘Anthropology at Home’, New Statesman and Nation, 30 Jan. 1937, p. 155, as cited in Crain, p. 76, citing Hubble, p. 188.
3 Humphrey Spender, Worktown People: Photographs from Northern England, 1937–38, Bristol, 1982.
4 See for example Tom Harrisson and Charles Madge, Britain by Mass-Observation (Penguin, 1939), new edn intro. Angus Calder, London, 1986, chap. 2 (on Munich), and throughout.
5 See Tom Jeffery, Mass-Observation: a Short History, Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies Occasional Papers, Birmingham, 1978, and ‘Mass-Observation – a short history’, Mass-Observation Archive Occasional Paper #10, Falmer,1999. Hubble's bibliography is extensive. See also, http://www.massobs.org.uk/publications_1974.html
6 Julian Huxley and A. C. Haddon, We Europeans: a Survey of ‘Racial’ Problems, London, 1935, pp. 107–8, 282–3, cited in Kushner, pp. 48, 51 (notes 92, 95).
7 Mass Observation Directive ‘Race, 1939’, Mass Observation Archive, University of Sussex. For the full text of the Directive, see Angus Calder, ‘Mass-Observation, 1937–49,’ in Essays in the History of British Social Research, ed. Martin Bulmer, Cambridge, 1985, p. 134. See Kushner, chap. 4, throughout and esp. p. 111.
8 See Kushner, p. 34: ‘The relationship with Germany ... has to be considered ... as great in significance as that of the legacy of empire in the formation of national identity in contemporary Britain.’
9 For discussion of this historiography, see for example Splintered Classes: Politics and the Lower Middle Class in interwar Europe, ed. Rudy Koshar, New York, 1990, and especially Tom Jeffery, ‘A Place in the Nation: the Lower Middle Class in England’, pp. 70–95.
11 Mass Observation, Diary D5103, 10 June 1940, cited in Kushner, p. 181.
12 MO Directive, ‘Race 1939’, cited in Kushner, p. 27.
13 MO Directive, ‘Race, 1939’, #1362, cited in Susan Pennybacker, From Scottsboro to Munich: Race and Political Culture in 1930s Britain (Princeton University Press, forthcoming), chap. 6.
14 MO Directive, ‘Race, 1939’, #1457.
15 MO Directive, ‘Race, 1939’, #1014.
19 See George Orwell, Road to Wigan Pier (1937), Penguin, 1982, pp. 5–18.
22 See Pennybacker, Scottsboro to Munich, chap. 1 for discussion of Mitchison and Baker's southern sojourn.
23 See Pennybacker, Scottsboro to Munich, chap. 2 and throughout.
24 Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia, New York, 2005, p. 88.
25 For the Oprah Winfrey Show, see: http://www2.oprah.com/index.jhtml; Fahrenheit 911, director, Michael Moore, Lion's Gate Films, 2004; Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, director, Larry Charles, Twentieth Century Fox, 2006, starring Sacha Baron Cohen (Ali G.).
26 See Iraq in Fragments, director, James Longley, Typecast Releasing in association with HBO Documentary Films, 2007; A Requiem in Four Acts, director, Spike Lee, Home Box Office, 2006; Luisa Passerini, Fascism in Popular Memory: the Cultural Experience of the Turin Working Class, transl. Bob Lumley and Jude Bloomfield, Cambridge, 1987; and Autobiography of a Generation: Italy, 1968 (1996), transl. Lisa Edberg, Middletown, Connecticut, 2004; Mike Phillips and Trevor Phillips, Windrush: the Irresistible Rise of Multiracial Britain, London, 1998 (in association with BBC Series, Windrush).
27 MO Directive, ‘Race, 1939’: #2094; ‘a thirty-one year-old male journalist from Surrey’; #1122; cited in Pennybacker, From Scottsboro to Munich, chap. 6; and see also Kushner, pp. 121–2.
28 See http://www.massobs.org.uk
29 Samuel D. Kassow, Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive, The Helen and Martin Schwartz Lectures in Jewish Studies, Bloomington, Indiana, 2007.
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