Then: Packard writes of his horror that “cabled TV” will allow the “possibility of getting ‘an instantaneous readout’ home by home of what millions of people are [watching] in the entire country in about fifty seconds.” Now: regarding the cables that connect our computers to networks of servers around the world, there have been too many horror stories to count, and more on that below. Then, “In some instances undercover men have been sent into plants to report on workers attitudes toward the union that is recognized or is seeking union recognition, and to report on union strategy”; in one case a detective insinuated himself so effectively into a textile plant the rank and file voted him onto the employee bargaining community. Now—well, too many horror stories to count on the labor front, too, but a great place to start is Human Rights Watch’s 215-page report “Discounting Rights: Wal-Mart’s Violation of U.S. Workers’ Right to Freedom of Association” on how the world’s largest corporation and its owners “violate their employees’ basic rights with virtual impunity.”6
By now you get the point. I have no doubt whatsoever that this is a book that should be read, and carefully. This runaway bestseller in its own time indicts us—not just because the privacy crisis that began taking shape in Packard’s own time has grown so much worse, but because nobody any longer writes bestsellers about it. Re-reading The Naked Society can help us understand why.
II.
Vance Packard was born in 1914 in Granville Summit, Pennsylvania and raised in nearby State College, where his dad was a superintendent at the Penn State University farm. He majored in English there and worked for the literary magazine, earned a masters degree in journalism from Columbia University, and entered the newspaper business, eventually becoming a feature writer for the Associated Press, then a freelance magazine writer focusing on social science and human behavior.7
“He is of medium height, medium age, talks slowly, loses the thread of what he is saying, regains it, acts on the whole like a professor at a small college a little unsure of tenure and with an important lecture coming up with the president in attendance. At the typewriter he is something else again.”8 The New York Times Magazine said that in a profile when Packard was at the height of his influence, when that influence was very high indeed. His first book, The Hidden Persuaders (1957), on advertising, compared the hidden field of “motivational research” to “the chilling world of George Orwell and his Big Brother.” The book also introduced the concept of “subliminal projection”—images flashed on screens too quickly for the conscious mind to register but long enough, Packard claimed, to instill longings in individuals they didn’t know they actually had. The ad industry responded indignantly, and denies the practice to this day.9 But the intensity of their backlash attested to the success of Packard’s message: the book reached number one on the New York Times bestseller list. (As for whether subliminal project is still practiced, that remains an active debate decades later—for instance after Democrats alleged a George W. Bush ad emphasized the word “RATS” in a chyron reading “BUREAUCRATS” during the 2000 presidential campaign.10)
Packard’s successive books, The Status Seekers (1959); “under the gloss of prosperity,” it argued, society was becoming more and more corroded by “new ways to draw lines that will separate the elect from the non-elect”), and The Waste Makers (1960). an exposé of “the systematic attempt of business to make us wasteful, debt-ridden, permanently discontented individuals” which presciently foregrounded environmental concerns) were also number one bestsellers, an extraordinary run. It was around that time that Betty Friedan heard Packard lecture and decided to turn the magazine article she was planning based on a questionnaire she circulated to her fellow members of Smith College’s Class of 1942 on their experiences since graduation into the book which became The Feminine Mystique.11
Packard’s work, in fact, heralded a golden age of American social criticism that played an outsized role in shuddering the country out of the somnolent fifties. The conventional wisdom, as the sixties began, was stated by the nation’s young president in 1962: that most of the day’s problems “are are problems, administrative problems”—that is to say, not really problems at all.12 As I wrote in my book on the period, Before the Storm, those few writers who demurred were spending most of their energy begging people to acknowledge that serious social problems existed.
Three masterpieces of left-wing social criticism appeared around the same time in 1962 and 1963, the year before The Naked Society appeared. In The Other America, Michael Harrington argued forcefully that there appeared to be little poverty in the United States because in that poverty was hidden; Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique which said that women were miserable because they could not call out the name of their problem; and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, on the subtle, progressive degradation of the environment. Such figuration of the implicit—hidden persuaders; problems with no name—were articulated most explicitly in the New Left manifesto penned by Tom Hayden in 1962. The Port Huron Statement said that America’s alleged consensus of happiness might “better be called a glaze above deeply felt anxieties.” James Baldwin entitled his 1963 collection of essays The Fire Next Time; the Establishment was aware there was kindling on the ground.13
With Packard, such books helped demonstrate how eager readers were for work that could articulate how civilization they were supposed to be celebrating was failing them. The New York Times Book Review, in a long and glowing front page essay they devoted to The Status Seekers, noted the paradox: that Packard’s “books on various shortcomings of American society—hidden persuaders, status seekers, waste makers—have without exception been welcomed with almost fervent enthusiasm by many members of the society they partially condemn.”14 Not so partially, actually. Wrote biographer Daniel Horowitz, whose Vance Packard and American Social Criticism came out in 1994, Packard “went farther in asking his readers to question basic assumptions about the beneficence of the American society and economy” than just about anyone else—and was devoured by readers nevertheless.15
The Naked Society was published in March of 1964, one month after the Beatles arrived on the tarmac at Idelwood Field, two months before Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society speech resounded with the Packardian aspiration that “the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community,” and just as Barry Goldwater was campaigning in the New Hampshire primary on behalf of a conservatism (as 1960’s Conscience of a Conservative, arguably another monument to the new critical wave, put it) that “knows that to regard man as part of an undifferentiated mass is to consign him to ultimate slavery.”16 It spent twenty-three weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.
Packard had been kicking around ideas with his publisher for his next project for a year. First, he began researching a book about private investigators.17 But his clipping file soon became dominated by a parallel obsession: the extraordinarily detailed questionnaires applicants for employment as diverse as gas station attendant and corporate executives, probing everything from Cold War “security risk” (Lockheed: “Does he [she] have relatives abroad?” “Has he [she] traveled abroad?” “If [employee] is youth or woman, what is reputation of parents or husband?”) to the most intimate matters of personal conduct and psychology. At that, he had his subject: a survey of “the numerous rights heretofore considered characteristically American that we seem to be in danger of scuttling,” from “the right to be different” to the “right to a fresh start.”
III.
There are two broad reasons why it can be valuable to revisit a long-ago text like The Naked Society. The first is for all the ways it remains relevant to us—how it helps us grasp the evolution of the world we live in now. The second is for such