How Creative was Creativity's Midcentury Moment?: On Samuel Franklin’s “The Cult of Creativity”
Samuel Franklin |The Cult of Creativity: A Surprisingly Recent History |University of Chicago Press | April 2023 | 264 Pages
In June 2023, University of Montana researchers evaluated the capacities of ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence chatbot system released by OpenAI. To gauge the capability of the flashy new technology, psychologists tested it using an older tool for measuring human creativity: the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking, developed in the 1950s by psychologist Ellis Paul Torrance. Their findings? When Science Daily circulated the story, the headline led with an attention-grabbing statistic – the artificial intelligence chatbot “tests into top 1% for original creative thinking.”
Amidst the enthusiastic and anxious debates about ChatGPT since its November 2022 release, public commentators have applied the concept of “creativity” to describe the new AI technology’s surprising abilities: creation, imagination, and production of novel works seemingly indistinguishable from those made by human hands, minds, and hearts. In between drafts of this review, a number of music industry professionals – including Billie Eilish and Katy Perry – circulated a petition warning about the industry’s use of AI to devalue songwriters and music alike. Their open letter used the construct of “creativity” to articulate what they saw as the proper boundary between the capacities of humans and machines.
A quick Google search, too, elicits distressing headlines such as “The End of Human Creativity?” and “ChatGPT: A Creative Tool or a Threat to Human Creativity?” These fears are grounded in the very real prioritization of cost and efficiency by those seeking to capitalize on the new technology’s imitation of human culture and ideas.
The intense and alarming discourse about artificial intelligence is just the most recent episode in a longer history of creativity in American politics and culture since the Second World War. This modern story animates Samuel Franklin’s timely and insightful new book, The Cult of Creativity: A Surprisingly Recent History. From Franklin’s perspective, “creativity” is not a natural human ability but rather an historically constructed concept that was meant to describe and encourage certain kinds of cultural activities. Taking the early Cold War as his starting point, Franklin finds evidence of the early history of creativity in seemingly incommensurate zones: from Madison Avenue’s ad agencies to the ivory tower, from scholarship to workplace training sessions. Though the idea of “creativity” may seem like a strange organizing structure for a study of the modern United States, Franklin offers a persuasive case that careful attention to the concept can help readers better understand our recent past and the epistemologies that continue to drive contemporary public life.
Franklin’s study begins in the late 1940s—a period during which American citizens feared the loss of humanity against the eroding forces of technological development, state power, and organized life. These anxieties were not unjustified; Americans’ involvement in vast, impersonal structures achieved new heights by the end of the Second World War. These familiar elements of postwar history were a major impetus behind the growth of creativity research in the 1950s. Psychologists and white-collar managers alike sought to understand this new ideal, which they believed would offer a panacea to machine-age woes. “The concept of creativity,” Franklin tells us, “emerged as a psychological cure for these structural and political contradictions of the postwar order.” Creativity managed to critique the de-individualizing aspects of organized work and life while also providing managers with a handy concept that dovetailed nicely with the social, cultural, and political necessities of the early Cold War. Creativity was the “big-tent” solution to these endemic modern problems, Franklin writes, one that sought to redress the general public’s psychic alienation without snuffing rapid structural advancement.
As soon as creativity research emerged in the late 1940s, scholars were split on elemental questions about what creativity was and who possessed it. Was creativity the sole province of geniuses and artists, the best of the best, or was it equally distributed throughout the population? Was it something that could be trained and nurtured or was it a biological quality like hair color or blood type? Writing about the Institute of Personality Assessment and Research (IPAR), Franklin recounts how scholars such as J.P. Guilford attempted to supplant “intelligence” as an explanation for exceptional ability. Like intelligence had been, “creativity” was seen as a trait that some possessed more than others. In a chapter on corporate practices, Franklin recounts the development of “brainstorming” by self-help writer Thomas Osborn. In these practices, “creativity” was something that could be teased out from existing employees. Humanist psychologists such as Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow further elevated creativity to the apex of existential fulfillment and happiness. These efforts to define creativity were part of a patchwork project to encourage it in American citizens. Franklin uses these different contexts to guide his narration of the concept’s dense history.
One question was knowing what creativity “was.” Another concern was the proper tools and methods used to evaluate who was creative. Some used evidence that creative work had occurred, such as finished artistic products or contributions to bodies of knowledge. Early thinkers turned to reputation and performance in order to evaluate who among the masses deserved the label. This involved using nominations from colleagues, teachers, and experts. But these methods were remnants from earlier eras of psychological knowledge production, which many Cold War experts criticized as anti-democratic. In the 1950s, researchers attempted to develop what they saw as more modern, scientific apparatuses that could enable psychologists, employers, and teachers to better evaluate creativity among mass society. “Creativity research,” Franklin notes, “began with a remarkably utilitarian goal: to devise a better test.” One technique was creating standard evaluations that improved upon IQ tests in their effort to determine degrees of creativity. Guilford, for instance, developed a “battery of open-ended tasks such as listing anagrams, interpreting ink blots, and coming up with a story based on a picture of a dramatic situation.” Later on, Franklin recounts the efforts of Torrance to develop his eponymous test for creative thinking, “the first widely available pencil-and-paper test for creative ability and the gold standard on which much subsequent creativity research would proceed.” These efforts to standardize evaluation of creativity were at odds with existing testing regimes that codified general intelligence.
But once creativity was understood and identified, what was its proper role in a liberal democracy like the United States? Contemporary readers accustomed to finding creativity enthusiasts among the hipster and neo-Bohemian cultures of the last several decades will be surprised that the majority of Franklin’s work deals not with creativity in artistic domains such as music, but rather among the “socially useful” domains of science, business, and education.
In a brief but enlightening chapter on group creativity at the United Shoe Machinery Corporation, Franklin inspects the attempts of a firm called Synectics to use group work to tease out creative “potential” and ultimately adjust the methods of scientific management that had ruled earlier eras of work culture. The end goal of these sessions was to develop ways of working, thinking, and being that countered the alienating structures of modern life. Here, too, there were fault lines. Humanistic psychologists were skeptical that creativity was something that could be “managed,” and had their doubts that creative development in white-collar settings genuinely deserved application of the concept. Nevertheless, taking a page from intellectual historian Jamie Cohen-Cole, Franklin argues that among white-collar managers and some academics, the “creative man” played a key role in the U.S. national project. The creative citizen of the midcentury moment was not detached from the primary containers of American work and life, but rather an integral feature of them. And having more creative citizens was tantamount to having a more creative society, and this was seen as a benefit in an age of lurking totalitarianism.
Franklin outlines this early history in brisk, accessible chapters. By the end of the 1950s, there was little consensus on these elemental questions about what creativity was and how scholars and educators could know it was there. The elusiveness of creativity as a concept was not a weakness, however. Creativity’s power lay not just in its articulation of a real physical phenomenon but also in its plasticity. The concept’s opaqueness allowed users to commit neither to the elite circles and institutions that lauded its virtues, nor to the egalitarian sensibilities that insisted creativity was a latent trait evenly distributed across the population. Its portability enabled the concept to enter boardrooms and classrooms alike. If readers leave these chapters with a murkier understanding of creativity, it is because of Franklin’s skillful ability to trouble our grasp of this seemingly permanent fixture of modern being.
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Although experimental psychology, corporate brainstorming workshops, and standardized evaluations of children’s creative capacities achieved new heights during the 1950s, Franklin demonstrates that these seemingly fresh sensibilities were not entirely novel. Though creativity’s advocates attempted to improve upon a number of fault lines that had cleaved Americans at midcentury, enthusiasm for creativity’s own sake often reinforced – at times unintentionally – the inequities endemic to ostensibly less-democratic eras of American history. Franklin’s inspection of the historical bounds of creativity can provide readers with greater context for contemporary worries about its seeming “end.”
Creativity researchers were careful to distinguish between “creativity” and an older object of study, “genius.” Yet traces of this past agenda nevertheless lingered. Francis Galton, who in 1869 published Hereditary Genius, had fallen out of favor within the mainstream psychological profession during the Second World War. By the early 1950s, psychological researchers explicitly distinguished between “genius” (which was rare, among the likes of Galileo, Darwin, and Newton) and “creativity” (which was widespread and thus a more suitable civic ideal for a liberal, scientific democracy like the United States). However, Franklin reveals that the new psychological methods of the midcentury generation were not a full departure from hereditarian psychology. Early creativity psychologists, Franklin notes, embraced Galton “as a sort of spiritual father.” For instance, when Guilford “penned a history of creativity research in 1967, he started with Galton and characterized himself as a standard-bearer,” Franklin writes.
The connections between genius and creativity research extended to the problems they were aiming to solve. Creativity researchers, from Franklin’s perspective, “eagerly took up the original spirit and aim of [Galton’s] psychometric research: to save a mental elite from the forces of mediocrity.” In practice, the flashy new “creativity” research did not entirely break from earlier tradition.
“Creativity” as a civic ideal also reflected the limited legacy of midcentury American democratic sensibilities. Take, for instance, figures like Maslow and Rogers. While these humanistic psychologists articulated slightly more liberalized ideas of gender performance and presentation, they nevertheless embraced an ideal of creativity that reinforced older beliefs about the differences between the sexes. The self-actualized creative man in Maslow’s renderings enjoyed access to his inner emotive state and was in touch with his feminine side. Rogers, too, insisted that creativity existed among scientists and “housewives” alike—a formulation in the creativity literature that is surprisingly frequent given the fact that, as Franklin points out, scholars rarely took care to research creativity among housewives. In his discussions of gender, Franklin notes the limits of this liberalization, gesturing toward Maslow’s private anxieties about the “feminization” of midcentury society, an anxiety that had animated revolts against cultural modernism earlier in the twentieth century. From Maslow’s perspective, both psychology and the creative person should “remain essentially male, with just enough of the feminine to remain vital.” Despite its proclaimed democratic stance, creativity research was not cut from an entirely new cloth.
Inspecting the origins and legacy of concepts like “creativity” is a tall task, and there are constraints to books of such ambition. For instance, readers may leave Franklin’s pages unconvinced of the boundary between “creativity” and analog concepts that the author identifies, such as imagination, inventiveness, and genius. Further, Franklin gestures toward creativity’s participation in the breakdown of the midcentury order, and more scholarly attention to this will sharpen our understanding of this seemingly familiar story. But even those skeptical of the scope of Franklin’s book will find it an illuminating examination of a highly visible yet under-examined feature of contemporary life. By opening creativity up for theoretical critique, Franklin’s work joins a number of recent historians working to grasp the cultural inheritances of the Cold War—a history that, as Franklin suggests, is still evolving.
Better understanding the enthusiastic rise of a nearly permanent component of our cultural scene can shed light on the constraints of the concept’s political potential. In his concluding chapter, Franklin gestures to scholars of Science and Technology Studies and the history of capitalism, many of whom encourage us to turn our fixation away from novelty and innovation in order better understand the neglected labor that keeps our society afloat. This is not to say that Franklin recommends dispensing with creativity entirely. Rather, he urges his readers to adopt a more thoughtful, balanced understanding of its place in our world. Those anxious about AI’s threat to creative work may not walk away from The Cult of Creativity feeling comforted. But paying considered attention to the recent theoretical history of creativity can give readers a sharper sense of both the necessary work that the concept performs, alongside its limits.