Review: Samuel W. Franklin, The Cult of Creativity: A Surprisingly Recent History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023)
Gavin Miller (University of Glasgow)
As cultural historian Samuel W. Franklin points out in this thought-provoking book, the value of “creativity” is taken for granted in contemporary society. Creativity is good for you, good for business, and good for the world. It makes you happier, fuels innovation, and provides solutions to those wicked problems that plague us. Not only that, we are all potentially creative people, whose creative ability can be optimised by education and training. This is why Franklin, in his introduction, characterises creativity as “a cult object” (p. 5) that is beyond reproach within our contemporary culture.
Despite its celebrated status, creativity, as Franklin shows, emerged after the Second World War in the United States, where it became “a topic, an object of academic study and debate, an official personality trait, a goal of educational and economic policy, [and] an ideal of personal transformation” (pp. 6-7). The story begins in the 1950s when psychological research on creativity was fuelled by two aims. Firstly, enhanced creativity was seen as a way of maintaining US economic and military dominance, particularly over the Soviet Union. Secondly, creativity was a way to preserve and promote human individuality in the age of so-called “organisational man”. Funding flowed into psychology, prompting a boom in creativity research. A new psychometrics arose that displaced research, much of it eugenically inspired, on general intelligence. Creativity was operationalised in supposedly measurable phenomena such as divergent thinking, which measured inventiveness of responses to a challenge, such as uses for a housebrick. Creativity soon turned from something attributed to products into something that was attributed first and foremost to persons as a trait. Moreover, the use of “eminence as a proxy for high creative ability” (p. 38), and a focus on a narrow range of middle-class professions dominated by white men, threatened to make creativity an elite rather than democratic endowment.
This narrowing of creativity was though resisted by the craze for brainstorming in the late 1950s, which had been created by self-help author Alex F. Osborn and his Creative Education Foundation. Brainstorming, with its emphasis on rapid group creation of ideas with minimal sifting, was divergent thinking’s vulgar sibling, and closely linked with an ideal of individual entrepreneurship. As Franklin explains, “Osborn was in many ways perpetuating the republican ideal of the yeoman farmer, but instead of little plots of land people had their minds, and ideas were the crops” (p. 57). By using brainstorming, you could find out how to get rich, beat the Soviets and tame juvenile delinquents. Although both business and academia came to disagree, brainstorming nonetheless cemented the demand for creativity, and the need to solve its mystery.
The humanistic psychology of Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow and Rollo May also focussed on creativity in its quest to understand the positive psychological phenomena of human growth, thriving and fulfilment. Humanistic psychology refurbished an essentially Romantic image of the creative individual epitomised by Maslow’s fetishisation of epiphanic peak experiences. But despite this genealogy, humanistic psychology also staked its claim in the defence of US society. Democracy was best supported by a creative personality that could be detected in features such as a preference for asymmetrical figures and abstract art, and a tolerance of ambiguity, disorder, the irrational, and one’s inner femininity (the creative person was still stereotypically male). Franklin perceptively notes Maslow’s call for the US to become a nation of improvisors better suited to a society in constant change and endless dislocation.
The improvisor was also best suited to organisational forms required in an emerging form of playful, imaginative capitalism that had to create consumer demand for new types of products. In a fascinating case study, Franklin shows how in the 1960s the United Shoe Machinery Corporation employed Synectics, Inc., a new consultancy that specialised in creative innovations. Its founders used a method inspired (however loosely) by group therapy to access the creative pre-conscious via a kind of free association of analogies to a proposed problem (which could be as mundane as “designing a new hair dryer or a wheelchair or a marketing plan” (p. 112)). More predictably, Madison Avenue was also a key locus in the consolidation of creativity via the so-called “creative revolution” of the late 1950s. In an entertaining narrative, Franklin shows how managers, rather than copywriters and artists, fretted over the best way to liberate creative energies stifled by a “scientific approach” characterised by “a careful process of research, statistical analysis, and vetting” (p. 141). In this way, the professional identity of the “creative” was born – an expert who could manufacture the desires and meanings required for new commodities.
School educators also found much that was appealing when the “creative child” was invented as a category in the 1960s. The creative child could not be identified by IQ tests, nor was he or she suited to the strict discipline of conventional schooling. Psychologist Ellis Paul Torrance promoted the category widely through his “Torrance Tests for Creative Thinking”, a pencil and paper instrument that became widely established as an operationalisation of creativity. The test was highly attractive to teachers and parents who worried about the squandered potential of children who were not conventional scholastic performers. Ellis also pioneered educational interventions that promised to enhance creativity for all children.
By the mid-1960s though, enthusiasm for creativity was beginning to wane. Critics argued that psychologists had failed to provide a shared definition of the term, let alone a distinct mental capacity for creativity, or a creative personality type. Other, more mundane explanations for creativity threatened the bubble: hard work, wealth, high intelligence. Creativity clung on though as a concept in wider public discourse. Franklin shows clearly how it imbued technoscientific progress with “personal, expressive values” that ameliorated “overlapping concerns about white-collar alienation, militarism, and the moral limits of a technocratic society” (p. 183). To take one of Franklin’s many striking examples, an “Aloca Chemicals ad featured a brightly colored, cubist rendering of four missiles jabbing up into the sky” – painted by an artist who would “provide similar abstract images for the covers of the Dave Brubeck Quintet’s Take Five and Charles Mingus’s Mingus Ah Um” (p. 180).
Franklin rounds off his book with a chatty survey of creativity since the late-1960s, covering such developments as creativity in the higher education curriculum and the paradigm of the creative economy. He also offers caveats on the cult of creativity, such as its obsession with novelty, and its propensity for psychologised remedies to social problems. But the main contribution of Franklin’s book is as a history of US developments in the 1960s. The Cult of Creativity is a fascinating account of the origins of contemporary creativity discourse that is sure to inspire further research in this area. The book is full of striking visual and verbal illustrations of a time, place, and context that made “creativity” a commonsense concept and a taken-for-granted value. The book will interest a wide readership, including of course historians of the human sciences, but also those active in other, putatively creative disciplines, as well as the interested general reader.
Gavin Miller is Reader in Contemporary Literature and Medical Humanities at the University of Glasgow.