Wilbur Schramm: beginnings of the "communication" field.

McAnany, Emile G.

Introduction

This review is not a history of the beginning of communication study as that probably goes back to the development of speech among humans or at least to the time of the Aristotle and Plato. Rather this is a review of some of the literature in our field about the man some have called the founder (Rogers, 1994) or the definer (Tankard, 1988) of the field. There are many accounts about this beginning surrounding Schramm and others who have a claim to the beginning of what is now called Communication Studies or, less recently, Mass Communication. What is clear historically is that Wilbur Schramm made significant contributions to institutionally establishing the field of communication as it is defined and practiced in universities in the U.S. and indirectly with the establishment of similar studies around the world. As is common in this review, the article will present the published record surrounding this beginning in the U.S. at mid-20th century that concerns Schramm's role in the establishment of the field, and the remembered and the contested accounts of this establishment.

One reason why this history is important is that the field of Communication Studies, as it is often referred to currently, needs to reflect upon itself so that it can justify its rationale for being a large and flourishing part of global university study. It is often criticized as being without a core set of theories and methodologies to justify itself as a social science or of being too undefined, all-inclusive, and even chaotic to justify its standing as a discipline at all. As we will see subsequently, all of these issues were with the field from the beginning of "communication" studies in the early- to mid-20th century when Schramm attempted to move the established departments of journalism and speech (rhetoric) into a single communication department or school. That he did not entirely succeed is still evident in the U.S. at least by separate departments of mass and interpersonal communication. But he did succeed in placing "communication" as an important identifier for what had been very separate studies within the American academy. But before we approach the story of Wilbur Schramm as an important figure in the field, we might well begin with the first major crisis that Schramm had to face after the study of mass communication had barely begun in the U.S.

1. Challenge from the Inner Circle: The Field is "Withering Away"

Many students, in the U.S. at least, know the reference to a 1959 article by Bernard Berelson, one of the original researchers who helped begin the field of mass communication research (Berelson, 1959) at the beginning of the 1940s. Berelson began his challenge with an opening shot that might have unnerved Wilbur Schramm and the whole emerging field of mass communication. He began his article with the pronunciation of a death knell for the field: "My theme is that, as for communication research, the state is withering away" (p. 1). He went on to describe the work of the previous 25 years by political scientists, sociologists, experimental and social psychologists as doing communication research that was the foundation of the field that Schramm had identified and had inaugurated at the University of Illinois in 1948. Now, 11 years later, one of the early thought leaders in the field (Lazarsfeld, Berelson, & Gaudet, 1944) was saying that the field was dead. What was at stake, however, was not the field but Berelson's career in the field. He was leaving the University of Chicago where he had been for many years to take Paul Lazarsfeld's place at Columbia University. Recently, two researchers have helped to clarify the Chicago background to Berelson's gloomy view of the field. Pooley (2008a) argues that there was a split between the sociologists like Lazarsfeld and other early pioneer researchers in the communication field because communication studies in the late 1950s were more concentrated on media audiences and attitude change (more psychological orientation); moreover, the funding for sociological research in communication was drying up. Another author, Wahl-Jorgensen (2004) makes another kind of argument. She shows how the University of Chicago had originally begun a communication program immediately after World War II that would train graduate students in an interdisciplinary program in communication research that was close to the one Schramm was to create three years later. The problem for the program was that it was never established as a department but remained only a program that depended on faculty interest. Berelson refers to the closure of the program at the University of Chicago where he had been a strong proponent. His leaving Chicago might have been a sad farewell to his career in communication which he argued was true of the field itself. Schramm (1959a) in the same issue argued quite the opposite, and the subsequent history of communication study would be on his side. The decade-old field was not "withering away" but was showing signs of growth.

2. How a New Field Was Created: Begin at Iowa and Go to Illinois

The contribution of Schramm to founding the communication field was that he recognized that if it were to become a recognized field of study in the U.S., it had to take its place along side of other recognized fields within university structures. In other words, it had to be a department or school with the name "communication" attached to it. As Wahl-Jorgensen (2004) pointed out, the University of Chicago's Committee on Communication, begun in 1947 with a MA degree, was only an interdisciplinary program and did not survive (it closed in 1960). Schramm's achievement was that he was able to take a journalism program and turn it into a communication program. He accomplished this partially at the University of Iowa (Cartier, 1988) after he returned from serving during the war for 15 months (1942-1943) in Washington D.C. But it was a hybrid program that did not escape from its journalism identity. Schramm's journey to that point has been often told (Cartier, 1988; Rogers, 1994; Lerner & Nelson, 1977) but bears a quick reprise.

Schramm came to the University of Iowa with a MA in English from Harvard at age 23 with the intention of finishing a Ph.D. in English, but also because Iowa had a well known speech lab. Schramm for all his accomplishments had a profound stutter. Once there, he finished his dissertation in two years, then undertook a two-year study with psychologist Carl Seashore about quantifying sound in English verse (Schramm, 1935) and quickly rose to prominence in the Department of English. In 1939 he took over a creative writing class and became the founder and first director of the still famous Iowa Writers Workshop. In December 1941, he volunteered to work under Archibald McLeish in the Office of War Information but also was assigned to work with Robert Sherwood as a speech writer for President Roosevelt. In the course of 15 months, Schramm began to meet many of the recognized social scientists who were working to help Washington win the propaganda war (Rogers, 1994). It marked the start of his immersion in the new communication research field. When he returned to Iowa in 1943, he was offered the deanship of the School of Journalism. Here was a new beginning for the high energy new administrator, but it ran into limitations of budget and a lack of vision about the creation of a new field.

When Schramm was recruited to the University of Illinois in 1947, he was hired by George Stoddard, his mentor from Iowa who had become the university's president. Stoddard had a free hand in the post-war expansion in university growth, and he, in turn, gave Schramm a free hand to create the structure for a new field. This consisted of a new Institute of Communication Research and then the inauguration of a new graduate program in Mass Communication. The second part of Schramm's strategy for creating a new field was to begin publishing books that would become the first textbooks in the field of Mass Communication. The third part of Schramm's action was to turn out Ph.D. students who began within a very few years to replicate the Illinois model elsewhere (see Rogers, 1994; and Schramm, Chaffee, & Rogers, 1997, for more details). Schramm had an ability to write clear and concise prose for all of his professional life and to formulate his thoughts in persuasive plans. His proposals to Stoddard were strong and could pass the critical review of both administration and departmental eyes who might have found the proposals far-fetched. But this was a time of change, and with Stoddard's support, Schramm got his proposals accepted. It was not just that he could write clearly and persuasively, but that he could provide evidence to back up the prose. This talent also allowed him to write proposals in the post-war world of university research funding that helped his research institutes and graduate students at Illinois and later at Stanford.

The history of his success at Illinois began, of course, with the strong support of Stoddard, but Schramm had already made a number of other important colleagues in the first wave of communication research (1935-1959 as Berelson, 1959, reminds us) who had been stationed in Washington D.C. during the war. In order to inaugurate his Institute of Communication Research, Schramm invited a number of these and other leaders in a field that was rapidly expanding as a research topic. The meeting was an opportunity to bring the pioneers of communication research to the university where Schramm planned to transition this promising beginning into a university department whose identity was to be communication (McAnany, 1988). Among invitees were luminaries from early communication research: Paul Lazarsfeld from Columbia University's sociology department, Carl Hovland from Yale's psychology program, Bernard Berelson from Chicago University's Division of Social Science. All had worked in the mass communication field and were making the field a thriving research focus. In addition Schramm had invited Ralph Casey, Ralph Nafziger, and Raymond Nixon, three prominent journalism professors (a reminder that if he was to succeed in his mission, he would have to gain the collaboration of journalism professors). Elmo Wilson and Hugh Beville came from the broadcasting industry, also a reminder that the study of the growing mass media was at the heart of much early research. From the papers delivered and the discussion among the assembled experts, Schramm quickly published (he also had been appointed the head of the University of Illinois Press) the first Mass Communication book that would be a textbook for future graduate students in Communication. Communication in Modern Society (1948) was simply the edited papers delivered by the distinguished experts. It might have passed unnoticed since a number of such titles were circulating at this time, but it was the first such book from a department called Mass Communication. It also made the brief bibliography when UNESCO published its first list of media statistics in 1950. And this international recognition would presage an important role that Schramm would play in international communication in subsequent years (McAnany, 2012).

Within a year of this first book, Schramm published a second volume similar to that first one but more substantial and much more influential to the establishment of a separate university identity for Mass Communications. The book, Mass Communications (1949a; 2nd edition, 1960) like the previous one from the year before, was a collection of earlier research on topics related to the media field. But what Schramm had begun to do was to write commentary and introductions to different parts of the book. It was the beginning of his effort to justify his new department and to provide another textbook for his new graduate program (both MA and Ph.D.). It was the beginning of Schramm's own writing about what he conceived the new field to be. A year later, Schramm was asked by the U.S. government, with its Cold War concerns about psychological warfare, to go to Korea and study both refugees and North Korean prisoners. He and his fellow researcher turned out several articles and a book within a year (Schramm & Reilly, 1951). The following year he was involved, once again in Washington D.C., in helping to create the new U.S. Information Agency as an adviser for the research department of that agency. He developed another edited book with similar readings for the agency. It was published a year later as The Process and Effects of Mass Communication (1954b) which, along with Mass Communications, was to become a classic in the emerging field (both were given second editions in 1960 and 1971 by the University of Illinois Press where Schramm was director 1947-1954). In Process Schramm began a long effort to describe in straightforward language how he thought human (interpersonal) communication worked and how that process was mirrored in mass media communication with audiences. It was the first attempt by anyone at the time to bring the two fields of interpersonal and mass communication together. The chapter also reflected Schramm's exposure to the prevailing social scientific approach reflected in the work from Lazarsfeld and Laswell in sociology and political science to Hovland in experimental psychology. It placed an emphasis on media effects that would carry through the next 20 years before it was replaced by other emerging paradigms. What was important was that Schramm was beginning to publish books that would become the texts that other new departments of communication would use to train their students. There were a number of research interests that Schramm developed at Illinois during his seven years that will be touched upon subsequently. Schramm continued to publish books, research reports, review articles, but his time was running out at Illinois.

3. The Changing of the Guard and the Move to California

Schramm's mentor at Iowa and his patron at Illinois, George Stoddard, began to run into difficulties as president for a variety of reasons. Rogers (1994) points out his determined pursuit of a discredited cure for cancer and his stubborn anti-religious ideology did not endear him to the board of regents, but part of it may have been the pressure of Senator McCarthy's accusations about left-leaning academics (personal communication from Dallas Smythe in 1985). In any case, Stoddard was fired in 1953, and Schramm was gradually removed from various positions outside of Communication over the next year. Seeing the problems facing his ambitions for Illinois, Schramm took a sabbatical in 1954 and began to consider other opportunities. He took a position as head of a newly created Institute for Communication Research at Sanford University in 1955. It was a time when Stanford was beginning its evolution toward national prominence under its president, Wallace Sterling. Schramm did not want any more university-wide administrative roles after his recent experience at Illinois. But as head of the Institute for Communication Research (not even chair of the Communication Department), he was free to concentrate on teaching and research and building another university program in communication. He continued his output of books, research reports, and articles at the same pace as at Illinois and turned Stanford over the next decade into a nationally recognized doctoral program. It benefitted from the prestige that Stanford was building under Sterling.

In some ways, the work at Stanford was similar to that which Schramm had begun at Illinois. Schramm continued with a heavy scholarly, grant writing, and consulting schedule; he was to write over 5 million words in the 18 years at Stanford according to Nelson, a close colleague (Lerner & Nelson, 1977). But he ceased to publish as much in journalism as he had at Illinois, partly because by 1955, he had begun to win the battle for adding mass communication to a number of existing journalism programs; also, when he came to Stanford, his new department was already called Department of Communication, so he had no need to convince faculty and administration to adopt the name and the focus. What continued to grow was Schramm's work in application of communication research to a variety of topics, including a focus on mass media and communication in education. He also undertook his most ambitious field research with children and the rapidly emerging medium of television. His book (with graduate students Jack Lyle and Edwin Parker) Television in the Lives of Our Children (1961) was a success and the first such study in the U.S. It fit with his increasing interest in education and technologies that were being used for that purpose, including programmed instruction and instructional television. The other strategy that Schramm continued from Illinois and even from Iowa was his insistence on having a doctoral program that was interdisciplinary. Ph.D. students took half of their courses outside of Communication (often in the social sciences but also in statistics, engineering, and education).

As Stanford's general reputation increased, Schramm made connections with other faculty members with whom he shared interests. Earnest (Jack) Hilgard was a well known psychologist who had worked with Schramm in Washington D.C. during the war. When he was hired, Schramm brought a $75,000 grant with him from the Ford Foundation, and Hilgard, as Dean of the Graduate School, was able to supplement his salary to hire him (Rogers, 1994). Schramm continued his close connection with the Psychology Department when he helped bring Nathan Maccoby, a psychology professor at Boston University, with whom he had worked during the war, to a position in Communication. Maccoby's wife Eleanor came to the Psychology Department where she became a well known researcher in developmental psychology and later in women's studies. He also reached out to the School of Education when he began his work on educational technology. His work with the School of Engineering began with an interest in media technologies that might help education in developing countries. He was also one of the early writers on the use of communication satellites for education and development (Schramm & Nelson 1968). Beginning in the early 1960's Schramm began an interest in development communication and was asked to participate in three meetings that UNESCO promoted in Asia, Latin America, and Africa on the importance of mass communication for development and social change (McAnany, 2012, Ch. 2). When Schramm was asked to summarize the meetings, the result was much more than a simple editing task. Schramm wrote a book that not only synthesized the meeting conclusions but added his own understanding of the issues in one of his best known books, Mass Media and National Development: The Role of Information in the Developing Countries (1964b).

After almost 18 years at Stanford and as head of the Institute for Communication Research, Schramm faced the dreaded deadline for mandatory retirement in 1973. He was not happy with the requirement since he was as active as ever with writing and research, but he also recognized that he had spent the last quarter of a century establishing the communication field and perhaps it was time for a change. But he was not ready to retire. Fortunately, he had another offer waiting.

4. The Final Stage: East-West Center in Hawaii and One More Institute

Not untypical of Schramm, his next role at the East-West Center came out of a chance encounter with the Center's new director, Everrett Klienjans (Kleinjans, 1977), on board of a cross-Pacific flight in 1968. The two discussed the Center's plans, and Schramm talked at length about the potential role of communication in research for a number of fields the Center was involved with. Typical of Schramm, a few days later, he had summarized the many hours of discussion about the role of communication in Kleinjans' plans for the Center for the next five years and sent the plan to his new acquaintance. Kleinjans persuaded Schramm to create a new East-West Communication Institute for which he would become the director when he retired from Stanford. Thus the transition was relatively simple, and Schramm immediately undertook the new task with his usual high energy. But Hawaii was not Palo Alto and within a couple of years, Schramm stepped down from the directorship and even from the Institute by 1978. He was to spend the next decade doing research and writing about Asia and communication issues as well as circling back to issues that he had begun early in his communication career. For example, he made a final effort toward the end of his life to summarize the work he had done from the beginning to make Communication a focus for understanding the connection of communication with human development from the beginning of time. The Story of Human Communication: Cave Painting to Microchip (1988) was a return to writing a textbook for the many hundreds of communication programs in the U.S. that he had helped to foster. But much of what Schramm had begun 40 years before at Iowa and Illinois had begun to be contested by critics with new paradigms to promote. He died on December 27, 1987 at the age of 80 with an unfinished manuscript in his computer (later finished and published by colleagues as The Beginnings of Communication Study in America: A Personal Memoir (Schramm, Chaffee, & Rogers, 1997). This was his last book in a lifetime of writing and research that helped to establish a new field and spawned a global expansion of university departments and programs of communication.

5. The Intellectual Legacy: Schramm's Writings in Communication

The legacy of Schramm did not lie in major communication theories nor in methodology as his colleagues Chaffee and Rogers admit (Schramm, Chaffee, & Rogers, 1997). Rather Schramm had a strategy that began to take shape on his return to University of Iowa in 1943 and his move from the Department of English and head of the Iowa Writers Workshop to become Dean of Journalism. It was a change that was not planned by Schramm, but he had begun to have disagreements with the chair of the English Department. The University wished to keep him as he had already achieved a reputation beyond English during his years at Iowa. There was a need for a head of a journalism department that was growing. Schramm had brought back with him ideas about communication research that he had witnessed in Washington D.C. When asked to consider taking the position, Schramm wrote not just a simple acceptance letter but an entire plan for his vision of how the Journalism Department at Iowa could begin a transition to a communication program. The document was never published, but it showed how much Schramm had absorbed of the research on communication and how he had quickly translated it into a plan to create a renewed field of journalism studies (Cartier, 1988). It also presaged his plan for creating a new independent communication department and a new field of study when he arrived at Illinois four years later. It was remarkably prescient for someone who had been only a part time journalist in college but had not taught nor ever looked carefully at journalism education. He was beginning to build a new journalism program at Iowa, but it was clearly a step toward his vision for a new field.

A. Defining the new field of (mass) communication

At Illinois, with President Stoddard's help, Schramm began a writing career in communication that would last for the next 40 years. His first two edited books, Communication in Modern Society (1948), the papers given at the inauguration of his new communication institute, and a similar book a year later, Mass Communications (1949a) were collections of writing from social scientists already publishing in mass communication in addition to that journalists and media industry researchers. Schramm did not contribute much beyond editing to either volume, but they became the textbooks for his new graduate program in Mass Communication. Mass Communications began selling widely as other programs in journalism began to add Communication to their department titles and, more importantly, to their courses. Thus Schramm began to choose writings that he saw as constituting the new field. He had had experience in editing and book and journal publishing in his years in English (Reid, 1977).

In 1953, Schramm began to make a more personal contribution. He had been asked to continue his wartime work as a research advisor in the creation of the U.S. Information Agency in 1953. His assignment was to provide a communication reader for researchers in the new agency. The result was a book-length report that began to address some of the basic outlines of the new field of communication. He published the report as Process and Effects of Mass Communication (1954b). It was the beginning of Schramm's own writing about what he thought "communication" meant for the field. He opens the book with his long first chapter, "How Communication Works," with the sentence: "It will be easier to see how mass communication works if we first look at the communication process in general" (1954a, p. 3). He is proposing that the model for mass communication is human communication. It was an original contribution, not so much a theory, but Schramm's attempt to explain in his own clear style of prose, what he is thinking about how mediated and interpersonal communication belong to the same phenomenon, if not the same university departments.

But soon he defines the human process with a paradigm that reflects the mechanistic approach that would be repudiated 20 years later by some of Schramm's own students (Berlo, 1977). It was the famous Source--Message--Channel--Receiver that may have been a good summary of how telephone systems performed (as Shannon & Weaver, 1949, in their book on information theory argued), but it left out much of how human communication is constituted. Nevertheless, Schramm, as a person of his times, helped to introduce a model that would endure for decades. The other important contribution that Schramm made to the book was a series of introductory notes to sections of the book on Attention, Channels of Communication, Getting Meaning Understood, Attitude Change, Communication in Groups, and Achieving an Effect in International Communication (i.e. the "psychological warfare" of the Cold War era). Schramm was beginning not only to introduce other peoples' writings but his own understanding of the field. He added different chapters over the subsequent decades, culminating with Men, Messages, and Media: A Look at Human Communication (1973) just as he was leaving Stanford. His contribution, then, was in articulating in understandable language what the new field was about.

B. Journalism, responsibility and public broadcasting

Although Schramm was new to journalism study in 1943, over the next 15 years he published a number of articles in the main journal in the field, Journalism Quarterly. He also began a life-long effort in summarizing research on different aspects of the field. For example, in 1949 he published "The Effects of Mass Communication: A Review" (Schramm, 1949b) and in 1957 "Twenty Years of Journalism Research" (Schramm, 1957b). His major contributions to journalism were in three books, all in the 1950s: Responsibility in Mass Communication (with an introduction by Reinhold Niebhur, 1957a; 2nd ed., 1969). This was a response to the Hutchins Report in 1947 that first raised the issue of how the growing mass media were responsible to society for their actions. Schramm's book was the first to raise similar ethical concerns within the new field of mass communication. A book that Schramm helped initiate on theories of the press with two colleagues at Illinois (Fred Siebert and Theodore Peterson) was the enduring classic Four Theories of the Press (Siebert, Peterson, & Schramm, 1956). This book was critiqued for years without being able to dislodge it from the many journalism programs in the U.S. It was a book from the Cold War era that reflected the prevailing focus on the fear of totalitarian and Communist propaganda. A final contribution was Schramm's first foray into international communication/journalism research: One Day in the World's Press (1959b). This traced the variety of coverage by a number of international newspapers of the Soviet Invasion of Hungary and Israel's capture of Gaza. This was one of the first publications to show how different cultures and political systems interpret important news events differently as the New World Information Communication Order would demonstrate two decades later.

Another pioneering effort by Schramm at Illinois was his promotion of broadcasting for education to the public from a university non-commercial base. He initiated a campus organization that was to become Public Broadcasting in the U.S., and the University of Illinois was to become the first home of the National Association of Educational Broadcasters. It was the beginning of the effort to bring non-commercial broadcasting of radio and television to U.S. audiences that would become first, NET, and later, PBS (Hudson, 1977). Among the first studies of television in the U.S. was found in the work of Dallas Smythe who had been hired by Schramm because of his previous role at the Federal Communication Commission (1954).

C. Media for instruction and education for all

Schramm's interest in education and communication study dated from his years at Iowa, but became one of his main topics after he came to Stanford. He had begun to look at public broadcasting at Illinois, but at Stanford that began to include instructional media, including television (1962) and the new "programmed instruction" or "learning machines" (1964a). He also became involved with UNESCO's dual interests in education and communication with three volumes of case studies in New Educational Media in Action (Schramm, Coombs, Kahnert, & Lyne, 1967a) and a companion volume The New Media: Memo to Educational Planners (Shramm, Coombs, Kahnert, & Lyle, 1967b). These were books that had wide distribution through UNESCO's global network of educators in developing countries.

Schramm was also one of the first authors to introduce communication satellites as tools for education and development (Schramm & Nelson, 1968). He led a research team to study instructional television in El Salvador but allowed his former graduate students to publish the final study (Mayo, Hornik, & McAnany 1976). His best summary of his many years of work in educational technology was Big Media, Little Media: Tools and Technologies for Instruction (1977) in which he argued more for the Little Media than the Big. His work in Western Samoa over a number of years to help introduce a new media system for schools turned out to be a failure which he detailed in a book toward the end of his career (Schramm, Nelson, & Betham 1981). Schramm was recognized in the educational community with membership in the National Academy of Education, a singular recognition for someone not officially in education but communication.

D. Communication for development and social change

One area where Schramm's name is most recognized was that often referred to as development communication. His role, in fact, is recognized as one of the three "founders" of the field. Daniel Lerner's 1958 book The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East, Everett Rogers' Diffusion of Innovations (1st edition, 1962) and Schramm's Mass Media and National Development: The Role of Information in the Developing Countries (1964b) are widely recognized as being the first and most influential in beginning this area of study (McAnany, 2012). Schramm's involvement in this effort was at the request of UNESCO when the organization began to articulate the role of communication media in its policies in the mid-to late-1950s. The U.N. organization asked Schramm to do a summary of the discussions among three large meetings in Asia, Latin America, and Africa concerning how the emerging communication media might help promote development and social change (see Ch. 1 and 2, McAnany, 2012). With UNESCO's help, Schramm's book became an important stimulus for using communication for developing in many countries. However, after a decade or more when plans for a swift change due to mass media did not happen, other approaches began to displace the original paradigm that came in for heavy criticism beginning in the mid-1970s.

But Schramm did not cease his work in this field. With Daniel Lerner, he promoted an early meeting with many participants from developing countries concerning communication's role in development (Lerner & Schramm, 1967). This volume reflects the high-tide of the original paradigm by Lerner, Rogers, and Schramm, with little dissent. A decade later, when early promises seemed to be failing, another meeting at the East-West Center in Hawaii indicated doubts as to whether communication could deliver significant change (Schramm & Lerner, 1976). The two volumes looked at together indicate a change over the decade of belief in the efficacy of mass communication for social change and led the way for other approaches that included more interpersonal communication and participation by people in their own development. But Schramm continued his work in communication for development throughout his career from 1964 until his death (he had sponsored another conference on the topic just three months before he died).

6. Assessing the Role of Schramm in the History of the Field

A. The remembered history: Schramm as founder

Schramm's role in the communication field is not without contestation. Part of the reason for this is that in many ways he played an outsized role in its development, and not everyone agreed with the result. Beginning with the charge from Berelson (1959) that the field of communication research was "withering away," Schramm was challenged in his view of what the field should mean. There was no one, however, that denied his influence. The writing of history is complicated by different assumptions and interpretations, which is the work of history. It was not until the late 1980s or 1990s that Communication Studies in the U.S. had developed a sense of history. Perhaps the best known mainstream history of the field of communication studies is Rogers' A History of Communication Study: A Biographical Approach (1994). The book devoted two chapters to Schramm but makes the case to call him the real founder. It argues that Schramm's own account of the field, repeated many times, about the four founders was not accurate. Rogers argues it was Schramm who was the founder and the others were forefathers. These forefathers were Kurt Lewin, a social psychologist whom Schramm knew well at Iowa; Paul Lazarsfeld, the pioneer researcher of mass communication, from Columbia University (also a friend of Schramm); Carl Hovland, a cognitive psychologist who worked in Washington D.C. during the war and later started a communication program at Yale in psychological studies of mass media; and Harold Lasswell, who had early (1927) identified mass communication as a key propaganda factor in political power and continued to contribute over his long career at the University of Chicago and Yale. Schramm began to write his own narrative beginning with his response (1959a) to Berelson's challenge and continuing to come back to the four founders' theme. His taking the research of these four as central to the field he was promoting made it clear from the beginning that Schramm was defining the field as a quantitative, social scientific endeavor that was "objective" and "scientific." This approach began to unravel in the 1970s with both a cultural critique (Carey, 1965, 1988) and challenge from the critical and Marxist approach (e.g., Schiller, 1969; Golding, 1974; Mattelart & Dorfmann, 1975). But although Rogers mentions critical and other critiques in passing, his thesis is focused on Schramm's role as founder of the field of communication study.

Another important contribution to this remembered history is a collection of interviews by early communication researchers edited by Dennis and Wartella, American Communication Research--The Remembered History (1996). These are relatively brief interviews done over a number of years by people, who like Schramm, made a career in the communication field. Since there is no narrative structure, the book offers a variety of experiences that the reader has to put together to arrive at a "history," but it provides much raw material from the previous 50 years or more. Two chapters at the end by Robinson (1996) and Wartella (1996) are more structured with Robinson arguing for a careful historiography and Wartella providing a history and a defense of the long critiqued effects paradigm of which she is a well known practitioner.

When Wilbur Schramm died of a heart attack in December 1987, he left an unfinished manuscript in his computer called "The Beginnings of Communication Study in America: A Personal Memoir." The major chapters had been completed about the four founders, but a final chapter about the future of the field was outlined but not written. Two well known scholars, Steven Chaffee, a former Schramm student at Stanford and Everett Rogers, a colleague and acquaintance of many years, edited and published the book in 1997 with two added chapters about how Schramm managed to move most journalism programs in the U.S. to add mass communication to their identities and another on how Schramm was also a builder of three institutes of communication research and how that affected the growth of the field.

A final often-cited chapter by Delia (1987) helped to summarize the field and its history just prior to Schramm's death. The advantage that Delia brings is that he is neither an advocate of Schramm as founder nor a critic of his research approach. In fact, Delia is from a department of speech, a discipline which early adopted communication into its name but often remained aloof as the human part of the duo (mass and interpersonal) that Schramm had argued early on for combining into one scientific endeavor. Delia concentrates on the period 1900-1960 in the U.S., dividing sections by period. He begins with a reminder that the rise of the mass media in this period was a critical influence for its study that culminated in communication research and communication departments. Other periods concerned the rise of the social reform movement 1900-1930; the move of social science toward quantification, with more theory tied to methods for collection of empirical data. The influence of propaganda studies from 1920-1950 was key to its continuation in public opinion theory and finally in attitude change research in the 1940-1960 period. He adds a unique insight into how his field of speech was influenced by these changes and how in the 1950s speech departments, like journalism, began to add the term communication to their programs. The changes and the names of researchers during this period track well with the changes that Schramm adopted and synthesized into a new field in the last decade of this overview. One can conclude from this remembered history that Schramm was very much a man of his times, and the field he envisaged reflected those influences.

B. The contested history:

Culture, capitalist structure, and critique

The beginning of critique came from within as has been noted with the Berelson article in Public Opinion Quarterly in 1959. Schramm (1959b) in his response to Berelson came out on the winning side of history when he argued that the field, far from "withering away," was just getting started. It continued with increasing numbers of departments and schools of communication over the next decades, and to this day. It is ironic that the critique of Schramm's social science paradigm was best represented by James Carey who came to study at the Institute of Communication Research in Illinois very shortly after Schramm had left. Beginning in the late 1960s Carey took a humanistic and historical approach to communication with an emphasis on the content of peoples' ideas and theories as to what role communication played in society. In an early article (1965) Carey articulated a critique of the "communications revolution." He would later be remembered for his counter model by arguing that communicating was more like a ritual than a scientific process (1988). He was critical of what he called the "transportation theory of communication" where the standard sender--message--channel--receiver reduced the richness of content to a mechanistic process that accounted rather for how a system worked and not how humans really communicated. He also introduced the Chicago School of Sociology whose early work was a progressive effort to ameliorate social ills. This suggested that a critical approach to problems of society should also focus on the mass media as part of a theory of communication.

If Carey was a product of Schramm's second home at Illinois, so too was the early work of Herbert Schiller and Dallas Smythe, both overlapping at Illinois briefly in the early 1960s. Both were to follow economic theories of mass communication a few years later. Schiller (1969) began a structural critique of media ownership and the role of the U.S. government's promotion of U.S. transnational corporations. It was the beginning of a long career of critique of both media and capitalism for the next 30 years. Most of the work of both Schiller and Smythe (Smythe & Walker, 1981) was not directed at Schramm but offered a different paradigm for communication study that gradually grew into an important presence by the 1980s. The irony was that Smythe was recruited by Schramm in 1950 to help with the launch of public broadcasting that would eventually lead to the creation of the Public Broadcasting System of today (see his early work was on television content, 1954).

The other form of additional critique of Schramm appeared more in development communication. This field has had an agreed upon beginning, but the paradigm begun by Lerner, Rogers, and Schramm soon became a field of contestation. In the early 1970s, the use of communication technology for development and social change was challenged by the work of Freire (1970), Beltran (1976), and Mattelart (Mattelart & Dorfmann, 1975). But the most direct attack appeared in an article by Golding (1974) in the key U.S. Journal of Communication. In the article the author criticized by name the three founders of development communication and made a critique of their theories. This was the beginning of a long running critique of both Lerner's Modernization Theory and Rogers' Diffusion Theory. The theoretical and empirical critique was taken up over the following decades by many others in the field of communication and development (e.g., Mody, 2003; Wilkins, 2000; Melkote & Steeves, 2001). Alternative paradigms, especially participatory approaches, have shifted the criticism away from the modernization/diffusion paradigm as being less relevant to today's work (cf. Christians & Nordenstreng, 2014),

A final set of revisions of communication history began with much work in the 1990s and coalesced in the next decade. The scholarly work on early communication history, beginning early with Lippmann and including the establishment of communication as a field by the 1960s appears in an edited book by Park and Pooley (2008). In a chapter entitled "The New History of Mass Communication Research," Pooley (2008b) argues that two important strands in establishing the early field were the work of Katz and Lazarsfeld's Personal Influence (1955) establishing limited effects of media (and escaping the dilemma of stronger impacts that had emerged from the 1920s to the 1950s in propaganda studies). Pooley adds the second strand about Schramm: "The second strand was a self-conscious creation of Wilbur Schramm, a consummate academic entrepreneur who was almost single-handedly responsible for the mass communication field's institutionalization" (p. 45). Pooley's and others' critique was not that Schramm had not been key to founding the field but that the field represented a sanitized version of events. Pooley especially calls attention to the work of other scholars who have exposed the Cold War propaganda that helped fund and promote early communication research and its theories and institutions. The role of the Rockefeller Foundation in promoting mass communication study before World War II is seen as a sinister move to hide the U.S. government's effort to promote its own form of propaganda in WWII and the Cold War's Psychological Warfare up to the 1960s.

In brief, the history of communication is and remains a contested field. The recent historical research makes a valid point in asking for much more rigorous research, especially institutional research (like accounts of how the established departments of journalism and speech were transformed into Communication programs). The impact of media on audiences remains a major point of contention to this day, and the immense growth of communication industries of all kinds from the old forms of broadcast to myriad newer forms of the Internet only make the task more daunting. What then can we learn from this one person's life that might help guide the field toward a more open, democratic and humane system?

7. Conclusion: What is the Legacy of Wilbur Schramm?

It is clear that Schramm played a key role in the beginning of the field of Communication Study in the U.S. and most likely beyond. It is also clear that the field has evolved as have the media that propel communication in the modern world. A third thing is clear about Wilbur Schramm: He was not just a scholar whose career may be summed up by an assessment of his writings (which were phenomenal in variety and abundance): he was also a thought leader, a fundraiser, and grant writer; a widely sought after consultant by governments and academic institutions; and an academic institution builder. Schramm was trained as a humanist and writer, a researcher, and a publisher. Schramm often saw early trends and promoted innovative ideas or institutions that might later come to fruition. For example, he read and recognized the importance of Claude Shannon's basic information theory in 1948 and was instrumental in getting a more widely comprehensible book published in 1949 by Illinois Press). He tried several times to argue the importance of information theory for his own field without much success until later when the consequence of Shannon's Mathematical Theory of Communication became apparent in our digital age (Gleick, 2011). There were other sides to Schramm as well. He was a published poet and short story writer, a musician (played with the Boston Symphony), a baseball player (given a try out by a major league team), and a pilot of his private plane. The dilemma in trying to understand the man is that there is much that he did in his life that is widely recognized, but as a person he was hard to figure out. He had few close friends. In other words, it is difficult to understand how Wilbur Schramm the person explains Wilbur Schramm the achiever.

One common legacy that both admirers and critics agree upon is that Schramm was an institution builder. First was his effort to bring the existing journalism and speech programs into the mass communication field as he saw it in 1948. The work he accomplished in journalism was much more direct. He help start and was an early president of the major journalism professional society. These activities slowed down after his move to Stanford, but by the late 1950s, the movement toward mass communication was well enough established for journalism programs that not only the names of departments had been modified but many journalism graduate programs had begun to use the textbooks that Schramm had developed for both Illinois and Stanford. Chaffee and Rogers (1997) spend a good deal of time on the journalism connection. The second set of institutions for which he was responsible were the research centers he founded. He had proposed one early at Iowa but had little time to carry it out fully (Cartier, 1988, Ch. 14). When he came to Illinois, President Stoddard gave him the resources to found his Institute of Communication Research where he could promote communication research of his own, but also that of his colleagues and graduate students. Schramm was able to garner grants and contracts that helped support the research of the Institute. He created a similar Institute at Stanford and was able to maintain its vigor during his 18 years there in the context of Stanford's rise to research prominence during this time. He did something similar at Hawaii (but without an academic department). Although the institute structure remains in name at Illinois and Stanford, it no longer functions as it had in Schramm's time. Nevertheless, research remains as a key identifying characteristic for most departments and schools of communication today and may be seen as a legacy of Schramm's own research and those of his original research institutes. He had from the beginning recognized research and theory building as essential to the academic birth and growth of communication as a legitimate new field.

Schramm made contributions that reached beyond Communication Study. His major focus on education since his early days at Iowa brought the field of educational technology to such things as today's interest in MOOCs. Schramm was well acquainted with the British Open University and collaborated with one of its original technology experts, David Hawkridge, to write the early plan for a similar institution in Israel (Schramm, Howe, & Hawkridge, 1972). Much of his work on media and education was aimed both overseas as well as in the U.S., but the extensive and continuing research over decades resulted in the field moving toward educational technology departments in schools of education with only a minor presence in Communication Studies. His early recognition of Shannon's critical work in communication (1949) was never taken up by the communication field until toward the end of his life. Today the interest in digital technologies within the communication field is full affirmation of its importance to the field, but Schramm's early advocacy is hardly remembered. In communication for development (C4D), the move away from this focus within communication studies is more a question of U.S. scholars leaving much of this work to people in developing countries, as it should. Although Schramm has been criticized for some of his work here, he is still remembered as one of the three originators of the effort.

Two institutions that are not often connected with Schramm's name, but endure in U.S. society, owe a mention among his legacies. The Iowa Writers Workshop was founded by Schramm in 1941 when he was Professor of English. He had taken over a creative writing class in 1939 and saw in it more than just a class, but an opportunity to build an institution that would appeal to aspiring creative writers to come for a year of intense work that might lead to a professional writing career (Wilbers, 1980). It remains today not only the first of its kind in the country but still the recognized leader. The other creation that was germinated by Schramm was the beginning of public broadcasting at Illinois in the early 1950s. Schramm began an effort to coordinate university radio stations and helped found the National Association of Educational Broadcasters (NAEB) with national offices at Illinois. He was also created one of the first university television stations. His work continued in research on public broadcasting and helped in the eventual creation of NET and its later form as PBS (Smythe, 1954; Hudson, 1977).

Finally, Wilbur Schramm was a mentor to many communication scholars who went on to create their own identities and research interests, including my own. (I was one of Wilbur Schramm's last doctoral students at Stanford, graduating in 1970 but continuing to work with Schramm both at Stanford and Hawaii. We remained in contact until his death in 1987.) This legacy of those he mentored has not been traced, but it has continued over many generations of contributors to the field. Even though the paradigm that Schramm promoted has passed, his living legacy of people in the field has not.

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Emile G. McAnany

emcanany@scu.edu