Free-Market Socialists: European Émigrés Who Made Capitalist Culture in America, 1918–1968

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The Hungarian artist-designer László Moholy-Nagy, the Austrian sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld, and his fellow Viennese Victor Gruen―an architect and urban planner―made careers in different fields. Yet they shared common socialist politics, Jewish backgrounds, and experience as refugees from the Nazis. This book tells the story of their intellectual migration from Central Europe to the United States, beginning with the collapse of the Habsburg Empire, and moving through the heady years of newly independent social-democratic republics before the descent into fascism. It follows their experience of exile and adaptation in a new country, and culminates with a surprising outcome of socialist thinking: the opening of the first fully enclosed, air-conditioned suburban shopping center in the United States. Although the American culture they encountered ostensibly celebrated entrepreneurial individualism and capitalistic "free enterprise," Moholy-Nagy, Lazarsfeld, and Gruen arrived at a time of the progressive economic reforms of the New Deal and an extraordinary open-mindedness about social democracy. This period of unprecedented economic experimentation nurtured a business climate that, for the most part, did not stifle the émigrés' socialist idealism but rather channeled it as the source of creative solutions to the practical problems of industrial design, urban planning, and consumer behavior. Based on a vast array of original sources, Malherek interweaves the biographies of these three remarkable personalities and those of their wives, colleagues, and friends with whom they collaborated on innovative projects that would shape the material environment and consumer culture of their adopted home. The result is a narrative of immigration and adaptation that challenges the crude binary of capitalism and socialism with a story of creative economic hybridization. Cover Front Matter Half Title Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents Aknowledments Introduction What’s Socialist about Capitalism? I. New Republics and New Ideas Chapter 1: New Republics and New Ideas:Paul Lazarsfeld in Vienna Chapter 2: Building Socialism’s Future: Victor Gruen in Vienna Chapter 3: Bauhaus for the Masses: Moholy-Nagy, from Budapest to Berlin II. Exile and Underground Chapter 4: The Art of Asking “Why?”: Lazarsfeld in America Conclusion Chapter 5: Little Dictators, Little Theaters, Little Shops Conclusion Chapter 6: Design for the Future:From London to Chicago Conclusion III. New Deal in a New Country Chapter 7: Rockefeller’s Radio: Lazarsfeld and Mass Communications Research Conclusion Chapter 8: Planning for Postwar: Gruen and Krummeck in New York and Los Angeles Conclusion Chapter 9: The Industrialist and the Artist: Walter Paepcke Rescues the Bauhaus Conclusion IV. Making Postwar America Chapter 10: The Focused Interview becomes the “Focus Group” Conclusion Chapter 11: A Downtown for the Suburbs: Gruen and the Shopping Center Conclusion Chapter 12: Moholy’s Death and the Afterlife of the Bauhaus Conclusion Synthesizing Socialism and Capitalism Bibliography Archives & Manuscript Collections Index Back Cover