David Manning White

From Profiles in Communication, Max McElwain

Television is capable of contributing its share to the best in our popular culture, “David Manning White wrote in Mass Culture (1957). "While [network television] may not be of the same cultural status as the works of Kant or the music of Bartok, it's a pretty substantial diet - certainly not pap.”

Twenty-five years later, in his Murray Lecture at the University of Iowa, White said he had changed his mind. "I will be candid with you at the outset and tell you that I have concluded that the price mass culture in America is exacting from contemporary society is one that we cannot afford," he told the audience in 1982.

The Murray Lecture that David Manning White delivered that evening in Iowa City - a public scolding of the "mediacrats" and its nation of "videots,” climaxing in a plea to reduce violence in the mass media by taking legislative action "compatible with the First Amendment"- ended up with 11 others in the 1982-83 volume of Representative American Speeches. One of the other speeches belonged to President Reagan, whom White had met in 1934 when he was a teen-age janitor at WOC Radio in Davenport. White knew the President's brother, who worked at the station. "Dave, come into my office," said Neal "Moon" Reagan one night. "I want you to meet my kid brother, Dutch."

Ronald "Dutch" Reagan had once worked at WOC, where David White, the son of a laborer who never earned more than $100 a month, worked when he wasn't attending Davenport High School.

"Listen, kid. My brother tells me you're a bright guy," Reagan told the kid. "You're going to college, aren't you?" 

"I'd love to," stammered the young janitor, "but I'm afraid it's not in the books."

"You can go, but you'll have to work," said Reagan. "Moon and I shoveled crap for a while, but we got to go to college."

Young White went home. "Ma, I met Mr. Reagan's brother tonight," he told his mother, "and he said I should go to college."

David Manning White did go to college-eventually to the UI, where he earned a doctorate in English in 1942. That Murray Lecture marked the occasion of his induction into the Hall of Fame.

Almost 50 years after he was cleaning up WOC and met Moon Reagan's kid brother, David Manning White mailed a copy of his most recent book to the President of the United States. "I sent along a note that said, 'I know what happened to you. Now let me show you what happened to me after I went to college.' I got a personal letter back, too, that began like this: 'My heartfelt thanks for your magnificent book so beautifully inscribed. It will be within reach, indeed is so now, at all times in the White House.' If Reagan didn't write it, then he's got some pretty good writers," White said.

What happened to David Manning White after he left WOC was that he became an international figure in the field of mass communication and popular culture. He spent World War II with the Office of War Information and then worked for newspapers and for television and radio stations in the cities where he was teaching. A full professor at 30, White rode the drift of the times in the 1950s, wading into the new fields of consultation work and communication research.

In a period of one year, White published two books that would make him a household word in his field: Mass. Culture: The Popular Arts in America (1957) and, with Ralph Nafziger, Introduction to Mass Communication Research (1958). The first book brought White credit for introducing the term "mass culture" into the language.

As a journalism educator, White taught on four continents and watched four of his students earn Pulitzer Prizes before he retired from teaching in 1982.

And when he wasn't doing all that, David Manning White was writing for the Saturday Review, New York Times Magazine and dozens of other publications. "I am not now a poor man," said White, who spent the weekend before his Ph.D. comps working in a downtown Iowa City restaurant. He now runs his own publishing house.

When White graduated from Davenport High School at the depths of the Depression, he took Dutch Reagan's late-night advice. He found two good colleges that would pay his tuition. The University of Chicago offered him a full-tuition scholarship, but Cornell College in Mount Vernon offered to pay for his room and board as well. "I was a good debater in school, which was why I got the offers," he said. "But my dad never had a penny, and he couldn't help out. I needed the room and board, so I went to Cornell."

With his AB. degree and Phi Beta Kappa key from Cornell, White was hired by the father of fellow Hall of Fame member Philip Adler to work as a general assignment reporter for the Davenport Times. It was the summer of 1938, and he was paid $15 a week.

"Times were still bad. There was nothing to eat," said White. "Later in New York restaurants, I'd eat ketchup off my finger because it was free. And when I got back in Davenport, I put my Phi Beta Kappa key away and never showed it to a newsman again. I had taken it into the newsroom, where I got the funniest looks. There weren't many college graduates in the newsroom at that time."

White left Davenport for good that fall, packing up for graduate school at Columbia University in New York. He met two particularly memorable people the year he was earning a master of science degree. Author Walter Pitkin (Life Begins At Forty) employed him as a research assistant. "I got by. I didn't starve," said White. "If you had faith in yourself, things worked out.

The other memorable person was a Pulitzer Prize-winning member of the Columbia faculty. "Douglas Freeman took a liking to me, and he told me I was a scholar," White said. "I wanted to be a writer. He told me, 'You can be more than a journalist. Get a Ph.D.-it will mean more to your life.' So I took his advice and enrolled at Iowa in the fall of 1939."

At the end of the Depression and the onset of World War II, the Iowa School of Letters and the recently founded Writers' Workshop were bustling with future Hall of Fame members such as Paul Engle, Wallace Stegner and Wilbur Schramm. White, like Schramm, would soon join the emerging field of mass communications, but in 1939, White still yearned to become a novelist. "I wasn't ready to write fiction, and there was no communications field yet,” he said.

So David Manning White took a doctorate in English from the UI, supporting himself by stringing for United Press, teaching freshman English Pod working the counter at the Princess Cafe in downtown Iowa City. “I was making $40 a month as a teaching assistant, and I thought I was rich,” he said. "Then I worked nights in the restaurant. The Ph.D. comprehensive exams lasted from Monday through Saturday. When I took mine, I was working in the restaurant the Sunday night before. I could make $5 on a weekend. It was 1 a.m. and one of the professors on my committee walked in and saw me. What are you doing? You've got comps tomorrow.' I just

kept on making sodas and sundaes at the counter.”

When war broke out in December 1941, White was intent on joining the war effort as a pilot. Unable to meet the physical standards, he instead became one of the first employees in the Office of War Information in Washington, packing up just one month after earning his Ph.D. at the UI. For nine months, from midnight to 8 a.m., he was night editor for the domestic news branch of the OWI, working with playwright Robert Sherwood.

Still bent on joining the war effort firsthand, he joined Naval Intelligence and was sent to Boulder, Colorado, to learn Japanese in 1944. As he finished up the course, he was struck down by appendicitis. 'They told me I wouldn't see active service and gave me an honorable discharge," he said. "I could either go back to D.C. to the OWI or leave the service. Well, when I went to be drafted and they classified me 1 B, I was furious. I wanted to be in the war and help save the country. So when I went back to D.C. and was sent to General MacArthur's staff, I was delighted."

White was sent to Australia, where he spent the remainder of the war as editor of a propaganda newspaper dropped on enemy personnel and was able to use his knowledge of Japanese. "I finally got to go to war," said White.

Horne from the war, White taught English for one year at the College of William and Mary. In 1946 he became an assistant professor of English at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois, where, a year later, at the age of 30, he was made chairman of the journalism department. At Bradley, he undertook a pioneer study in newspaper readership that was published in Journalism Quarterly. It was the first readership survey to integrate the factors of age, education and economic status.

Suddenly, David Manning White, aspiring novelist, was venturing onto new turf: mass communications. 

"After being in the war, working all night on releasing war information , it wasn't that hard moving from the study of literature to mass communications," he said. "I loved teaching literature, and I loved communications, and here they could be combined."

The year was 1947, and just down the road in Champaign, Wilbur Schramm was starting up something called the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois. Schramm had just left Iowa where he started the first mass communications doctoral program in America. David Manning White was soon to heed the advice of an elder once more. This time, the words of wisdom came in the form of a job recommendation, and the mentor was Wilbur Schramm.

"Schramm was a kingmaker," White remembered. 'With a telephone call, he could make a career."

The phone call came in the fall of 1948. Schramm informed White of a personnel problem" at Boston University's journalism school that left an opening for a research professorship. He asked White if he was interested in the job. White said yes. "Okay. You'll be getting a call from the dean," said Schramm.

"I was just a kid when I was a student of Schramm's in Iowa City, but I felt I was the luckiest guy in the world," said White. "It was great being in the School of Letters back then. I sat at the foot of Schramm and

Norman Foerster; how lucky could a guy like me, making sodas for a living get? A seminar on Whitman and Twain I took with Schramm was the finest course I ever had, and it changed my life. Schramm led me to what I wanted to be, and that was a writer."

White, wife Catherine, and sons Steven and Richard moved to Boston in 1949, where they Jived for 26 years. Until 1964, when he was named chairman at B.U.'s School of Public Communication, White's title was "research professor." He was, however, like a walking, talking media extension. During the quarter-century he spent in Boston, electronic media from television to video-sprouted in unimagined directions, and David Manning White grabbed the nearest branch. When he wasn't doing news commentary for a local TV station or covering state and national elections for the Associated Press, White might be found in Washington working for UNESCO or in New York doing research for the International Press Institute. He also did research in Rangoon, Burma, where he worked from 1957 to 1958 while doubling as an NBC news correspondent.

When White wasn't teaching in Boston, he was a visiting professor in Berlin, Strasbourg and Quito. And when he wasn't doing that, White was working on one of his 18 books, the first of which, Elementary Statistics for Journalists (1954), contained a foreword by George Gallup. For eight years, beginning in 1954, White supervised the Gallup Poll in the Boston district. 

In his second book, Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America (1957), White loosed his "gatekeeper theory" of media on the public, a theory that became a staple in journalism classrooms. White had written about this theory as early as 1950 in an article that appeared in Journalism Quarterly.

One year later, White and Ralph Nafziger had to go all the way to Louisiana to find a publisher for Introduction to Mass Communications Research, a seminal book in the burgeoning field. 'We couldn't find a publisher interested in it. After all, the field had just begun in 1945 or so," said White. "The LSU Press finally published it."

As if to show his versatility, in 1960-the same year he published the ominous Identity and Anxiety: Survival of the Individual in Mass Society - White lightened up with The Funnies: An American Idiom, followed four years later by From Dogpatch to Slobbovia: The World of L'il Abner.

White left Boston in 1975 and taught at Virginia Commonwealth University until 1982. That same year, he was elected to the Hall of Fame and revealed his disgust with much of contemporary media in his Iowa City lecture, "Mass Culture: Can America Really Afford It?" 

"When it comes to the inordinate amount of violent content that the media moguls apparently feel is necessary to entice a mass public," he  said, "I have the right and the mandate to be concerned. The social environment that this bottom-line violence engenders is one from which I cannot run."

“Yes, I've done an absolute, 360 degree turnaround," said the man who defended television programming in the 1950s. '1'm not optimistic anymore. What I said in Iowa City still stands. Advertising caters to the lowest common denominator in culture, and 'Dynasty' is seen around the world. The surgeon general says there is scientific evidence that TV violence leads to violence in children. I'm leery of touching the First Amendment, but something has to be done. Short of that, there is nothing we can do - we live in a democracy. Something we can do is to start teaching the use of mass media in the first grade, because this is something just as important as the three Rs. A child will spend 4,000 more hours in front of TV than in school. And what children watch is decided by the buck merchants."

White did his part by publishing children's books and books of regional writers. He also made video cassettes and television commercials through Corporate Communications Collaborative, Inc., which he founded in Richmond in 1983. His writing took a religious orientation with The Affirmation of God and The Search For God, and he finally began writing fiction.

White also took a position as a contributing editor to Runner magazine, a job he became interested in when his third son, Max, set the American record for the 50-mile run.

In a life graced with such pleasant improbabilities, an unanticipated occurrence drew White to the AEJMC convention in Florida in the summer of 1984. White was there to present the first Nafziger-White Dissertation Award, a $500 prize to the author of the best Ph.D. dissertation in mass communications for the year.

"When Nafziger and I finally found a publisher for Introduction to Mass Communication Research, we were so delighted and so sure we wouldn't make any money off it that we laughed and promised the royalties to the AEJ research committee," White explained. However, many years of royalties allowed the committee to establish the annual award.

''Nafziger is dead, but this award will be something to remember both of us by," White said. "That's a great joy, knowing you'll be remembered."