Imagining American Democracy: Meaning As Motivation and Stake in Collective Actor Formation

Thank you all in advance for reading this paper. It has lately been rejected from a somewhat general social theory oriented journal with some modestly helpful feedback and some suggestions for other journals. I am hopeful the workshop will offer helpful guidance on what journals might be a good home for the paper, and how I might alter and revise the paper to increase my chances of finding that home. -Dan

Daniel A. Sherwood

PhD Sociology

“Imagining American Democracy: Meaning as Motivation and Stake in Collective Actor Formation”

Adjunct Assistant Professor of Sociology at Baruch College

Abstract:

Using the peculiar process by which students came to strike in response to the Knickerbocker-Davis Affair (or KDA) at The City College of New York in the late 1940’s as a case study isolating the role of the social imaginary in processes of collective actor formation, this paper argues for a new conceptualization of and analytical role for cultural meaning within social movement processes and research. Confronting racist practices against Jews and blacks by two professors, the process by which City College students came to strike present several analytical puzzles that challenge dominant approaches to cultural meaning, such as frame analysis and political repertoire analysis, in social movement research. I argue by integrating the concept of social imaginaries into a practice-based theory of collective actor formation analysts can go beyond the prevailing culturally reductive analytical models. In particular, the paper shows how cultural meaning functions on two levels: a) as the underlying principles, interests and motivations driving action, as well as, b) a creative force generating new lines of action. The analysis of the case therefore points to expanded conceptualizations of the political than those currently underlying social movement research.

Acknowledgements:

A fellowship from The New School for Social Research aided in the research and writing of this work. I also would like to thank Amy Stuart, Carlos Forment, Monica Brannon, Eiko Ikegami, Robin Wagner-Pacifici and Iddo Tavory for reading and commenting on this paper at various stages of it’s construction.

“Imagining American Democracy: Meaning as

Motivation and Stake in Collective Actor Formation”

Introduction:

On April 11, 1949, 75% of the student body of The City College of New York refused to attend classes. They were protesting the college administration’s handling of accusations of racism against two faculty members. On the one hand, William E. Knickerbocker stood accused of administering the Romance Language Department according to an anti-Semitic agenda. Despite having been found guilty by New York’s City Council of anti-Semitism amounting to “reprehensible and unworthy conduct,” the college’s administration lauded Knickerbocker’s service to the school, refusing the possibility of any wrongful action on his part.[1] On the other hand, a faculty investigatory committee had found William C. Davis guilty of segregating a City College student dormitory by Jim-Crow principles. When Davis resigned as head administrator of the dormitory, Harry Wright, City College’s President, reappointed Davis, a trained economist, to the Economics Department, even giving him a raise. The striking students picketed the school, carrying signs that read, “Bigotry has no tenure at City”; “We Are United, Bigotry Must Go!!” “Racism Has No Room At CCNY,” and “We Fight for Democracy in Education,” and demanding the two professors be fired.[2] The strike, which made front-page news in The New York Times,[3] was the culminating act in what would become known as the Knickerbocker-Davis Affair (hereafter KDA). In striking, City College students, Jewish and black alike, “lumped” together Knickerbocker’s anti-Semitism and Davis’ Jim-Crowism (Zerubavel 1996), coming to understand them as commensurate cases of American racism (Espeland and Stevens 1998). While the strike was an impressive enactment of student unity, it was only achieved after eight months of contentious intra-student conflict.

From an instrumentalist standpoint the intra-student conflict is puzzling. Amongst students, the facts of the two cases were not in dispute, as students quickly came to view both Knickerbocker and Davis as guilty of racist practices. Furthermore, a consensus quickly emerged among students that both Knickerbocker and Davis should be dismissed from the college’s faculty. Yet, despite their shared goal, for eight months students devoted their political energy to a bitter conflict over what tactics they ought to employ to achieve the professors’ dismissal. However, the intra-student dispute over tactics eschewed any discussion of the hypothetical effectiveness of the potential courses of action, disregarding means-ends calculations all together. Peculiarly then, the students were immobilized by a dispute over tactics that in no way revolved around strategic concerns.

Thus, a series of analytically challenging questions emerge around the process by which City College students constructed themselves as a collective actor. If students ignored the strategic implications of various tactical courses of action, what was at stake for them in their rift over tactics? Considering it’s shared goal of having the two professors fired, why did the student body surrender its collective power to engage in an internecine conflict? What accounts for the deep hostility of the intra-student struggle? Finally, why and how did a bitterly divided student body ultimately unite in collective action?

According to Polletta, the way social movement scholars have integrated culture into their analytical models has reproduced “a strategy/ideology divide whereby activists’ strategic considerations are by definition non-ideological” (2006:54). This false divide blinds analysts to the ways in which deeply meaningful normative investments and understandings of the world are enfolded in the problem of political tactics and cultural repertoires (Bourdieu 1998:75-9). The key to explaining both the emotionally charged intra-student conflict over tactics, as well as how students ultimately overcame their divisions to unite in collective action, is understanding “the meanings that collective action had for the actors” themselves (Sewell 1990:532). Indeed, taking a hermeneutical relationship (Cohen 1985) to the practices comprising the KDA reveals underlying the surface dispute over tactics was a deeper normative conflict of interpretations over the nature and legitimacy of American democracy, for which the question of tactics served as a symbolic proxy.[4]

The leading models integrating cultural meaning into social movement research, such as framing theory (Snow et al. 1986; Snow and Benford 1992; Benford and Snow 2000; Tarrow 1998) and political action repertoires (Tilly 1978, 2006; McAdam 1996; Taylor & Van Dyke 2004) cannot illuminate the social force meaning wielded throughout the KDA because they tend to reduce culture in two ways; on the one hand, to the intentionally manipulated symbols of already constituted actors; and on the other hand, to a symbolic environment with which an intentional actor strategically interacts (Snow 2004). In regards to action theory, beyond understanding actors as using culture to achieve pre-given ends, framing and repertoire theories of culture do not conceive of actors as being constituted by and driven to act by cultural interests.[5]

In this article I turn to two broadly influential theoretical sources that have nevertheless been relatively untapped by social movement scholars to solve the puzzles of the KDA. I argue by analytically integrating the concept of social imaginaries (Taylor 2004; Perrin 2006) into a practice-based theory (Bourdieu 1990; Crossley 2002) of collective actor formation, analysts can go beyond prevailing analytical models within the social movement literature that have limited the importance of culture to, on the one hand, a constraining symbolic environment, and on the other hand, tool(s) to achieve pre-given ends. In particular, the social imaginary’s orientation towards the normative meanings underlying practices articulates with practice theory’s critique of the intentionalist subject (for an especially clear presentation, see Bourdieu 1998) to point to how investments in particular interpretations of reality can function as the distinctly cultural interests driving practices or action (ibid.; Vaisey 2009). In addition to apprehending cultural interests, integrating theories of the social and cultural imaginary into practice theory can isolate the processes by which meaning can operate as a creative or productive force (Lee 1999), reconfiguring or producing new dispositions to act. Analyzing the mechanisms by which cultural meaning operates as the interests driving action, as well as the creative force generating the new greatly expands the narrow definitions of the political that currently limit social movement research (for trenchant critiques see, Armstrong and Bernstein 2008; Oliver and Johnston 2000).

The Role of Cultural Meaning in Social Movement Processes and Collective Action Events

Scholars working within the Resource Mobilization/Political Process paradigm of collective action research have long been interested in the collective “repertoires” of political action (Tilly 1978, 2006; McAdam, Tarrow & Tilly 2001; Taylor &Van Dyke 2004). Such structuralists have understood changes in prevailing tactical repertoires over time as indices of macro-structural transformations tied to modern state formation. By insisting on the strategic intentionality of collective action tactics (Taylor & Van Dyke 2004:269), even when analyzing their symbolic elements (McAdam 1996), such theorists have importantly corrected structural functionalist understandings of collective behavior as irrational outbursts (McAdam 1982). However, the important effort to return instrumental rationality to collective actors has been made at the expense of other modes of rationality, minimizing the importance of culture within social movement processes (Cohen 1985; Calhoun 2012). Indeed, according to Armstrong and Bernstein, even as the Political Process model has been refined in the face of a generation of criticism (see for example, McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly 2001), it continues to conceive of state and economic structures as the primary structuring forces of society, relegating culture to supplementary analytical importance (Armstrong and Bernstein 2008:74).

Responding to such concerns, sociologists since the 1980’s have increasingly examined the importance of cultural meaning in social movement processes (Williams 2004; see also Polletta 2008). Developed to complement the dominant structural theories of collective action, the framing perspective has been the most influential of these approaches (Snow et al. 1986; Snow and Benford 1992; Benford and Snow 2000; Tarrow 1998). In grounding itself in the symbolic interactionist tradition, the framing perspective portrays movements and their adversaries as engaged in a contest over the social construction of reality, and therefore retains a theoretical role for the constitutive power of cultural meaning. However, in as much as it’s analytical models tend to assume pre-constituted actors strategically engaged in manipulating cultural meaning to achieve predefined ends, the framing perspective reproduces the culturally reductive and instrumentally biased logics of action it was meant to complement or supplant (Goldberg 2003; for an exception see Ellingson 1995). Because it’s approach to culture is hampered by contradictory epistemologies, one constructivist, the other rational-actor (Steinberg 1998, 1999), the framing perspective reduces the political actor to a market model of the “entrepreneur” (Oliver and Johnston 2000), who attempts to align her framing practices with already existing symbolic structures, rather than attempting to transform them. Thus, prevailing models of culture in collective action research cannot grasp two particularly significant political facets of cultural meaning: culture as constitutive of actors and their interests; and the creative, productive and transformative power of cultural meaning within processes of political struggle.

Political Dispositions at City College

In order to isolate the productive force of cultural meaning within processes of group formation, Brubaker and colleagues (Brubaker 2004) have urged analysts to resist conflating their analytical categories with the categories of practice used by the actors being studied. Indeed, before unifying as a collective actor, two distinct and conflicting dispositions towards political tactics existed within the City College student body. One disposition, which I will call liberal, urged and argued for procedural remedies to the crisis, pressing the college’s administration through formal channels. The other disposition towards tactics, which I will call leftist, urged and argued for extraordinary confrontational actions such as sit-down demonstrations, pickets and strikes. Importantly, the terms “liberal” and “leftist” are used here as categories of analysis rather than categories of practice. They were not identity terms used by discrete groups of students, nor did any group mobilize in their name. Rather, these two terms analytically describe the two distinct and durable political tendencies amongst students that more or less exhausted the field of student political discourse throughout the KDA.

Such an analytical procedure is important for making sense of the KDA because the conflicting political dispositions that divided the student body cannot be mapped onto traditional sociological variables such as class, race, political party or social network. The vast majority of City College students in the 1940’s were from similar working class, Jewish families, and many were first or second generation immigrants (Strayer 1944). Thus, the City College student body had few class divisions upon which political conflict could be mapped. While ethnic boundaries did exist between blacks and Jews, they were not politically salient because both groups saw themselves, and were seen by others, as minority groups. Furthermore, Jews figured their own difference in terms of “race” as often as they did in terms of religion, eliding two terms of difference most often thought of as conceptually distinct today. Indeed, while the majority of the City College student body in the late 1940’s was Jewish, both Jews and blacks alike understood Knickerbocker and Davis to be guilty of similar, or even equivalent acts of racism, and no student ever argued or suggested anti-Semitism and Jim-Crowism might be different in kind. In the late 1940’s, race was an important unifying political force amongst black and Jewish City College students in contrast to the principle of division it would become in subsequent decades (see Sherwood 2015).

The most compelling traditional hypothesis to explain the conflict between the liberal and leftist political dispositions would embed those dispositions within distinct social networks and political organizations based in party affiliations (McAdam 1986). However, while many students who pursued confrontational tactics were members of the Communist Party, the majority of leftist students were not. In fact, four of the student leaders of the eventual strike sued William Knickerbocker and The New York Times for libel for labeling the strike “Communist-organized and Communist-led.”[6] Knickerbocker settled with the four students out of court for $300.00 after an initial trial ended in a hung jury. The Times was exonerated of libel in a second trial, however they did not argue that the students in question were members of the Communist Party, but rather that their labeling of the strike as Communist led did not refer in particular to the four students who brought suit, whom The Times admitted were not Communists.[7] Indeed, the Times’ own original report on the strike noted the college administration’s judgment that the strike was not Communist inspired or led.[8] While network connections and party affiliation may have been an important driving force for some students, it cannot explain the breadth of the leftist political disposition, nor can it explain why or how the larger student population, including those whose liberal dispositions had most opposed confrontational tactics, ultimately unified behind the strike action.