Chapter 48 - The Institute Of General Semantics: Part 6 - Mira Returns

Korzybski: A Biography (Free Online Edition)

Copyright © 2014 (2011) by Bruce I. Kodish 

All rights reserved. Copyright material may be quoted verbatim without need for permission from or payment to the copyright holder, provided that attribution is clearly given and that the material quoted is reasonably brief in extent.

The death of his friend Calvin Bridges on December 27, at the age of 49 after a brief illness, was sad news for Alfred. Still, on the whole, 1938 had concluded positively—both for the Institute and for Alfred personally. Crane’s support seemed reasonably secure. Alfred’s work and the Institute were getting national publicity. Time Magazine had featured an article on him and the Institute under “Education” in its November 21 edition. 

He also had another paper accepted and presented in abstract (since he couldn’t appear in person) at the December 29th AAAS Mathematics Section meeting in Richmond, Virginia: “General Semantics: Extensionalization in Mathematics, Mathematical Physics, and General Education. Paper II: Thalamic Symbolism and Mathematics”. And Mira had returned home.

Her ship, coming from Trinidad, had docked in New York City in November. The private apartment Alfred had rented for them around the corner from the Institute was still filled with unpacked boxes. He had not spent much time there, and had even sublet the apartment for a while, sleeping on his office floor. Now he had to unpack and get the apartment ready. He asked Mira to delay coming to Chicago and she spent the month in New York and Boston, visiting friends. When she arrived at the end of the month, one can assume a warm welcome from Alfred who had genuinely missed her. In their letters, they had seemed to come to some kind of agreement as to how to renew their relationship.

But some things would have to be different. Alfred had made clear in letters that he did not want her to be involved with his work or the Institute. Given her interest in general semantics, she would find this difficult but would do her best to comply. (Alfred did relent on this a bit, since over the next year and a half he allowed her to attend three of his seminars.) Although he still expressed some desire for a personal life with her, he had told her that he hadn’t initially anticipated the degree to which the Institute would dominate his time. He didn’t expect this to change anytime soon. Mira had said she understood this. Ever hopeful, she believed that despite Alfred’s conditions they would be able to share some kind of decent life together.

Notes 

You may download a pdf of all of the book's reference notes (including a note on primary source material and abbreviations used) from the link labeled Notes on the Contents page. The pdf of the Bibliography, linked on the Contents page contains full information on referenced books and articles. 

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Chapter 48 - The Institute Of General Semantics: Part 5 - Cornelius Crane

Korzybski: A Biography (Free Online Edition)

Copyright © 2014 (2011) by Bruce I. Kodish 

All rights reserved. Copyright material may be quoted verbatim without need for permission from or payment to the copyright holder, provided that attribution is clearly given and that the material quoted is reasonably brief in extent.

After the September intensive, Korzybski had a break of a few weeks prior to the seminar starting October 10. He traveled to Ipswich, Massachusetts, north of Boston for discussions with Crane at Castle Hill, the country estate of Crane’s mother. Crane had ideas for developing the Institute. No doubt Korzybski had some things to tell him as well. Korzybski felt a responsibility towards Crane as the Institute’s main donor. Both he and Kendig had tried by means of letters to keep Crane informed of Institute goings-on. But some things were probably best said face-to-face.

Crane, then in his early thirties, was wealthy enough to have never needed to work for a living and had made a career for himself as a philanthropist and patron of science. His main accomplishment so far had involved leading a sailing expedition around the Pacific islands in the late 1920s, which had collected archeological artifacts and biological specimens for Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History. In the late 1930s, Crane was providing financial support to a number of individuals besides Korzybski, including George Devereux, a Hungarian-born anthropologist who had done field research among the Mohave Indians and became known as a pioneer in applying psychoanalysis as a framework for anthropological research. Korzybski, initially impressed with Devereux’s brilliance and interest in GS, agreed to have him work at the Institute. Crane acted as if Devereaux’s salary was to be taken out of the Institute’s operational funds, rather than from a special fund for that purpose (as Alfred had understood the arrangement). Korzybski sought to dissuade Crane of that notion but the issue soon became moot because it turned out that Devereux’s and Korzybski’s personalities didn’t mix well. Korzybski dismissed him early in 1939. Later in 1939, Crane was paying to get psychiatrist N. E. Ischchlondsky’s books translated from German into English. Ischchlondsky had worked with Pavlov and written on the confluence of Pavlovian reflexology and psychiatry. Crane again asked Korzybski to dispense payments through the Institute and Korzybski, perhaps foolishly, agreed to do so. 

Cornelius Crane

Korzybski’s visit to Castle Hill in the fall of 1938 seemed to go well, with Crane enthusiastic about him and the work of the Institute. Crane’s extended family, with whom Alfred got better acquainted, seemed enthusiastic too. Indeed, in a few months, Crane attended the Holiday Intensive Seminar with his wife Cathalene and his adopted teenage daughter from his wife’s previous marriage—also named Cathalene (later, the mother of actor Chevy Chase). Crane, despite his enthusiasm, had a number of criticisms which he expressed in a letter to Alfred written on the first day of the Intensive. The letter clearly shows he felt uncomfortable with the out-of-the ordinary nature of general semantics; he expressed his distress upon hearing people talking about “the new cult” that he was interested in.

Korzybski’s demeanor and lack of concern for social conventions didn’t help: “I believe your foreign accent, shaven head, work clothes, constitute a bizarre general impression which may be beneficial and attractive if your conduct is at all times stable, suave, “gentlemanly”, etc.” He then went on with three more pages of complaints about Korzybski’s speech and behavior which he considered ungentlemanly, unscholarly, and suspicious—including the fact that Alfred kept a roll of toilet paper on his desk to blow his nose with. Some of the criticism seemed apt. For example, Crane wanted him to do better about keeping his fingernails clean and washing his hands before doing the hands-on work of ‘relaxing’ a student. Korzybski seemed unlikely to do anything about most of Crane’s concerns other than shrug them off as petty. Still the letter definitely showed Crane’s ambivalent feelings towards Korzybski and the Institute. Alfred was going to have to watch his step.

Crane had also invited Douglas Campbell to Camp Hill to participate in the discussions with Alfred. Campbell had recently left Chicago for New York City with his wife Berta (Bertha) Ochsner, a well-known Mid-Western dancer-choreographer. Among other things, Campbell planned to do psychoanalytical work with Karen Horney. He would remain in New York for a year. Whether his work with Horney did him any personal good seems hard to say. By 1940 after a twenty-year marriage, he would leave Berta, move to San Francisco, and marry Marian Van Tuyl, a dancer with whom Berta had worked in Chicago. Since 1937 Campbell had published a number of articles on psychiatry and general semantics in professional journals and given numerous presentations and courses on GS. Then, in 1942 Berta killed herself.(23) Afterwards, Campbell’s writing and work in general semantics virtually ceased (although he did remain on the IGS Board of Trustees for a number of years). Perhaps he felt embarrassed to do more than maintain minimal contact since Korzybski and others at the Institute knew Berta and likely knew the circumstances of her death. (Years after Korzybski’s death, Campbell—who died in 1983—made a kind of return to the Institute by agreeing to become an honorary trustee. He reminisced about his old friend Alfred at the Korzybski Centenary Celebration in New York City in 1979.)

Notes 

You may download a pdf of all of the book's reference notes (including a note on primary source material and abbreviations used) from the link labeled Notes on the Contents page. The pdf of the Bibliography, linked on the Contents page contains full information on referenced books and articles. 

23. See Wilson, Hagood and Brennan. Cambria Press, p. 50.

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Chapter 48 - The Institute Of General Semantics: Part 4 - Seminars and Scholars

Korzybski: A Biography (Free Online Edition)

Copyright © 2014 (2011) by Bruce I. Kodish 

All rights reserved. Copyright material may be quoted verbatim without need for permission from or payment to the copyright holder, provided that attribution is clearly given and that the material quoted is reasonably brief in extent.

Even before finishing his first evening seminar, Korzybski had begun a second, week-long course which went from August 15 to August 20—the Institute’s first “Intensive” seminar. The twenty-four attendees included nine people who had studied with Wendell Johnson, a Professor of Speech Pathology and Psychology at the State University of Iowa, who had been presenting general-semantics material in his speech hygiene course. Johnson had become interested in Korzybski’s work—and had been privately studying with him—as a result of his own lifelong stuttering problem.

Wendell Johnson

Johnson had taken his interest in finding a remedy for stuttering quite far—to the extent of getting a PhD in clinical psychology and speech pathology in 1931. In the fall of 1936, while convalescing from an emergency appendectomy, he started reading Korzybski’s ‘blue peril’, which a friend had just given him. Johnson recalled in a 1956 article:

As soon as I recovered sufficiently to hold this massive tome I began to read it—and I have never been the same since. My convalescence lasted about two weeks and by that time I was so thoroughly enmeshed in what I found in Science and Sanity, that I ended up spending the greater part of my reading time for the next year or so reading and rereading, evaluating and re-evaluating Korzybski’s complicated document. I satisfied myself that it is not a book about which one can be glib. (19) 

Soon afterwards he met Korzybski in Chicago and began to work with him privately. “I had never before encountered a teacher quite like him and he had never had a student who stuttered as I did, and so between the two of us we licked the platter of our mutual interests.”

...By 1936 I had the feeling that I had pretty much exhausted the possibilities of gaining substantial benefit from the existing theories of stuttering and the current methods treating it... 

Coming to Science and Sanity...I was motivated to gain from the book anything I could that might be helpful. I found a good deal that was intriguing...There is nothing in Science and Sanity about stuttering, as such, except one sentence which I believe to be in error, but the book generally is about the processes of abstracting, and I recognized it therefore, as being peculiarly relevant to the particular problem with which I was concerned...It seems to me that stuttering is similar to many other human problems that involve anxiety-tensions, and to the degree that this is so the possibility exists that the field of general semantics holds promise for the improvement of our understanding of a number of other human problems in addition to that of stuttering. (20) 

Korzybski soon met another individual with great promise. From September 8 to 15, he gave a special course mainly devoted to one-on-one individual training for Wilma Lloyd, a psychologist working with the Progressive Education Commission on Secondary School Curriculum. Three other individuals also attended for several days. One of them, Samuel Ichiye Hayakawa would play a significant role in generating interest in Korzybski and his work, although Korzybski and others would ultimately come to consider his contribution a mixed blessing.

Hayakawa, a Canadian citizen of Japanese descent, had gotten his PhD in English and American literature at the University of Wisconsin in 1935 for his work on Oliver Wendell Holmes (published as a book with Howard Mumford Jones in 1939).(21) He had also done work in lexicography. At the time he met Korzybski, he was about to return to his job as an English professor at the University of Wisconsin Extension Department in Madison. He had just come from a summer course in Linguistics at the University of Michigan. People there had heard of Korzybski but knew little about his work. Hayakawa, who had done some reading, gave a few presentations and felt curious to find out more. He wrote to Korzybski, who invited him to visit. Hayakawa later reported what happened when he met Korzybski that first day:

Korzybski greeted me with great cordiality. “So you are Hayakawa! You have been lecturing on general semantics at the University of Michigan and you don’t know a goddam thing about it!” I couldn’t take offense at this greeting. It was warmly meant—and I was certainly in no position to disagree. I laughed and he laughed and we were on good terms at once. (22)

S. I. Hayakawa

In Hayakawa, Korzybski recognized a man who had a special ability to write with ease. And Hayakawa found in Korzybski’s work the fresh and integrative point of view for teaching English he had been looking for. Hayakawa’s few days at this 1938 seminar appeared to give impetus to his ongoing interest in developing a vitalized approach to language instruction. He had been reading various writers on what he called ‘semantics’, such as Bloomfield, Bridgman, Ogden, Richards, Sapir, and others. General Semantics, with its emphasis on the total behavioral response of the individual, seemed to him to provide an important and practical unifying approach to these other studies.

Over the next year he would write an introductory text-book, Language in Action, using ‘general semantics’ as his framework for bringing together these various other, related approaches to understanding words and their ‘meanings’ in human communication. Initially, he had the book mimeographed and published privately as a textbook for classes at the University of Wisconsin. It was soon picked up as a text by other universities. In 1940 he produced a second revised book, giving discounted copies to the IGS, which agreed to be listed as the publisher. Korzybski recommended the book to his friend David Fairchild. Fairchild told another friend, an editor at Harcourt, about it. Harcourt and the Book of the Month Club published it at the end of 1941 and it soon became a huge success both as an English textbook and for general readers. The book in its Fifth Edition, with the title Language in Thought and Action (renamed in 1949), remains in print. By now, it has sold over one million copies. By the mid-1940s, differences between the two men would emerge as a major source of trouble for Korzybski. However, at the beginning of their relationship, Korzybski felt delighted with Hayakawa’s interest in his work.

In these early days of the Institute, as GS was becoming better known, Korzybski wanted to focus on teaching professionals in different fields how to train their own nervous systems, achieve some kind of improved adjustment for themselves, and then to apply GS to their work, teach it, and write about it. Some people were already confusing Korzybski’s educational work with psychotherapy—although there was no denying some overlap. He welcomed the interest of students of speech and language instruction like Johnson and Hayakawa because—for one thing—it clearly showed that GS could not be isolated within the bounds of therapy.

However, the prominence of such students in the early days of the Institute may have encouraged an equally mistaken view. Many people had trouble understanding that GS was not another school of speech or language study but provided a general methodology dealing with problems in any human activity involving evaluation (not exclusively a linguistic matter). One could get a glimpse of the discipline’s generality in the Institute’s first copyrighted publication. Earlier in the year, Hansell Baugh, a librarian of the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, had started putting together a volume of papers from the 1935 Congress at Ellensburg, Washington. Korzybski and Kendig corresponded with him for several months to assist with the editing. The book, entitled General Semantics: Papers from the First American Congress for General Semantics came out in October and included papers relating GS to mathematics, logic, psychology, linguistics, education, sociology, biology, and psychiatry. The printing of around 200 copies sold out within a year (it was reprinted in 1940).

Korzybski had several more seminars scheduled in 1938. He found the pace grueling but deemed it necessary if the Institute was to get a large enough core of professionals working to apply the discipline. For some time, the Institute would continue to experiment with different formats for delivering the twelve or so lectures of two or more hours each that Korzybski considered necessary for conveying the basic content. (This didn’t include the additional time needed for students’ personal interviews with Korzybski.) Formats included bi-weekly evening, Saturday, and longer continuous courses. After that first August intensive, Korzybski gave a number of other intensive courses over the next year, including a Holiday Intensive that winter which ran from December 26–31. Success with the intensives led Korzybski and Kendig to judge that format particularly useful for busy professionals and Korzybski delivered at least one, usually more than one, every subsequent year of his life. The Winter Holiday Intensive became an annual IGS tradition, usually starting a day after Christmas and continuing through the first few days of the New Year. Korzybski’s lecture time—in whatever format—gradually increased over the next two years from about twenty hours per course to from thirty-six to forty hours, which would become his standard.

Korzybski at the lecturn,
Autumn 1938

Notes 

You may download a pdf of all of the book's reference notes (including a note on primary source material and abbreviations used) from the link labeled Notes on the Contents page. The pdf of the Bibliography, linked on the Contents page contains full information on referenced books and articles. 

19. Wendell Johnson 1956 ‘I Knew Korzybski When’ in Kessler, p. 7. 

20. Ibid., pp. 8-12. 

21. Oliver Wendell Holmes: Representative Selections. 

22. Hayakawa 1979, p. xiii.

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Chapter 48 - The Institute Of General Semantics: Part 3 - The Institute of General Semantics

Korzybski: A Biography (Free Online Edition)

Copyright © 2014 (2011) by Bruce I. Kodish 

All rights reserved. Copyright material may be quoted verbatim without need for permission from or payment to the copyright holder, provided that attribution is clearly given and that the material quoted is reasonably brief in extent.

For several days in March, Korzybski lectured to the medical staff at Peoria State Hospital, Peoria, Illinois. His presentation there marked the end of his career as an independent, itinerant teacher. 

Kendig, Dr. Walter Baer, and Korzybski at Peoria State Hospital,
(The Peoria Star, Tuesday, March 22, 1938)

For the next twelve years—until his death on March 1, 1950—he would carry on his work under the auspices of the organization, the Institute of General Semantics (IGS), which he and a few of his closest students were in the process of setting up in Chicago. The state of Illinois incorporated it in May as a non-profit institution for “Linguistic Epistemologic Scientific Research and Education”.

Besides Korzybski, the Director of the Institute (the position he kept until his death), the founding trustees included Campbell, Congdon, Kendig, and Cornelius Crane. Kendig, having moved to Chicago to work with Korzybski, took the role of Executive Secretary and Education Director. Korzybski was named President of the Institute Board of Trustees and Crane, heir to a plumbing-fixtures manufacturing fortune, the Vice-President. Crane had had a number of personal consultations with Korzybski over the last year or two, which had helped him. Enthusiastic about general semantics, he had pledged a total of $50,000 to be paid out to the Institute in semi-annual portions of $10,000 each on the first of July and January of each year until mid-1940. He had indicated he might give additional money after that, but hoped the Institute by then would have begun to generate income on its own from seminars, book sales, and additional fundraising. (Alfred had wanted Crane’s pledge in writing, but Crane never got around to doing so.) Korzybski got Crane’s first check on July 1, 1938. The Institute was ready for business.

Korzybski had signed a personal lease for a little apartment to house the Institute. These quarters, at 1330 East 56th St. on the outskirts of the campus of the University of Chicago, had a large reception room or parlor for lectures, a dining room serving as a library, and two bedrooms for Korzybski’s and Kendig’s offices. Pearl Johnecheck, a young woman with a secretarial background who had studied with Korzybski and helped out at previous Chicago seminars, would serve as his office manager and confidential secretary. Pearl, who planned to become a psychiatrist, attended morning pre-med classes at the University of Chicago, and then worked at the Institute ‘part-time’—in other words from around 1:00 in the afternoon until some indefinite evening hour. She seemed to be one of the few people whom Korzybski could relax around—it doesn’t appear she had any significant ‘emotional’ problems that he ever had to deal with. He could depend on her to keep mum about his personal student files and private correspondence. Pearl, Alfred, and Kendig constituted the initial Institute staff, along with one or more clerical workers.

Pearl Johnecheck,
circa 1940

The humble first home of the Institute seemed a far cry from the headquarters for anything like an “International Non-Aristotelian Society”—Korzybski’s 1933 vision of a center for a world-wide movement of institutions of learning with the aim of reducing misevaluation in science and life. Still, the new Institute provided a partial fulfillment of Korzybski’s earlier dream. With its location in Chicago—a major, centrally located U.S. city and university center—Korzybski would no longer have to travel to teach. He could focus on working with so-called ‘normal’ people rather than institutionalized ones. (He was no longer referring to students as “patients”.) And he wouldn’t have to go it alone. He could develop his work further with the help of others. He looked forward to the fructifying effect of students from different professions coming to the Institute for assistance in applying GS in their fields. He also wanted to write more and to encourage others to write. The Institute would be able to serve as the conduit for further publishing, another old dream going back to the early 1920s when he first envisioned “The Library of Human Engineering”.

1938 certainly seemed like a good time for starting an institute dedicated to educating people about the perils of human evaluating—and what they could do about it. In March, 1938, just prior to the founding of the Institute, Nazi Germany had marched troops into Austria and annexed it. In May, while the Institute was being incorporated, Hitler and Mussolini declared their eternal friendship. Hitler was threatening Czechoslovakia over the Sudentenland, the German-speaking portion of Czechoslovakia bordering Germany. Both the British and French leaderships seemed prepared to appease Hitler in the belief they could thus prevent a wider conflict. Meanwhile in Asia, Imperial Japanese forces carried on with their brutal invasion of China, having recently accomplished that rampage of atrocities and mass murder now known as the “Rape of Nanking”, in China’s then-capital city. An atmosphere of concern, even fear, hung in the air.

On July 6, the Institute sponsored its first Korzybski seminar. (He wrote to Mira that he felt so extremely nervous about doing it—believing so much depended on its success—that on the first night, he untypically soaked his bed clothes with sweat.) (13) The seminar ran for six weeks, until August 17 (although the personal interviews with Korzybski continued afterwards). Thirty-nine students met with Alfred twice weekly in the evenings—convenient since many of them were graduate students at the University of Chicago and/or taught at other institutions. Tuition was twenty dollars.

It seems unlikely that Korzybski—an inveterate newspaper reader—would have missed the following story, which made headlines midway through the seminar. On July 18, Douglas Corrigan had landed his single-seater plane in Ireland after supposedly trying to fly it from New York City to Los Angeles. He claimed that with the cloud cover beneath him and a stuck compass directing him, he had flown east when he thought he was traveling west. With “dumb luck” he ended up in Dublin instead of Los Angeles. Corrigan became a celebrity. His new nickname —‘Wrong Way Corrigan’ also became a favored label for anyone addled by a severe map-territory mismatch. (Suspicions remain that Corrigan—a seasoned airman—had indeed known what he was doing and faked his trans-Atlantic blunder in order to evade punishment from aviation authorities who had refused his initial flight plan to Europe.) This story didn’t just provide a lighthearted sidelight to more serious news. Korzybski was probably not the only person wondering about the ‘Wrong Way Corrigans’ who seemed to be running the governments and institutions of the world.

He felt he was in a position to help those who wanted to do something besides simply lament ‘wrong-way’ evaluation. In his first lecture he told the class, “Fear is ruling the world today. Why that fear? Because we have no rational means to be rational. It practically amounts to a world neurosis. In [general] semantics we will find means with which we can deal with these problems.”(14) On August 1, he was telling this first Institute of General Semantics seminar class:

I wonder if you have ever thought of the extreme dishonesty etc. going on in the world. Can you trust a Mussolini or a Hitler or a Jap? Can we depend on their promises? Can we have dependability; predictability? Do you realize the anti-human, anti-civilized [forces] depending on lies and treachery? You can see how personal issues spread to wider issues. This has spread across the world. Fear is the result, and fear is at the bottom of all neuroses. Is this class here only because of scientific curiosity? No. You want to get at some of these mechanisms. Lack of predictability and dependability is at the bottom of life today. ...(15) 

Dishonesty, lack of predictability and dependability not only characterized the extreme behavior of Hitler, et al., but also of more benign leaders. For example, after the annexation of Austria the situation for European Jews, especially those directly under Nazi rule in Germany and Austria was becoming desperate. While this first IGS Seminar was taking place, an international League of Nations conference called by President Roosevelt, was being held in Evian, France to discuss the fate of German and Austrian Jewish refugees. Delegates from nation after nation bemoaned the fate of the Jews. None of them, including the U.S., made even a tiny opening in their restrictive immigration policies (except for the Dominican Republic). At Evian the map had replaced the territory it was supposed to represent. The words of concern expressed there substituted for the policies actually needed.(16) 

Korzybski felt perpetually peeved by this kind of behavior, again demonstrated a few months later in September by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and French Prime Minister Edouard Deladier. The two leaders went to Munich for a conference with Hitler and Mussolini. There the British and French leaders acceded to Nazi demands to annex the Sudentenland in return for which Hitler promised to cease all further aggression. (Czech government representatives were not invited to participate in the deliberations dividing up their country.) Chamberlain returned to England with a piece of paper in hand, signed by Hitler. He declared to a cheering throng “I believe this is peace for our time.” Korzybski felt sheer disgust. (Several months afterwards, at the end of January 1939, he wrote to his friend R. B. Haseldon, “Since the Armistice I have never been so depressed as because of the latest Deladier-Chamberlain performances.”) (17) Korzybski felt confident that Chamberlain’s policy of appeasing the Nazis through negotiations and concessions wouldn’t work. He definitely expected Hitler to break his promises. Indeed, Nazi Germany soon invaded and annexed the remainder of Czechoslovakia in the spring of 1939. Predictability. Korzybski had already predicted a second world war coming.(18) Feeling that the world desperately needed what he had to teach, he knew of nothing else to do but to work harder.


Notes 

You may download a pdf of all of the book's reference notes (including a note on primary source material and abbreviations used) from the link labeled Notes on the Contents page. The pdf of the Bibliography, linked on the Contents page contains full information on referenced books and articles. 

13. AK to MEK, 7/26/38. MEK Archives, Box 17. 

14. Korzybski, ‘Transcript of July,1938 IGS Summer Seminar’, p. 4. Unpublished. IGS Archives.

15. Ibid., p. 53. 

16. Dwork and Van Pelt. Holocaust: A History, p. 124. 

17. AK to R. B. Haseldon, 1/30/1939. Ralph Hamilton Papers. 

18. Korzybski 1937, pp. 20, 54, 143. 

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Chapter 48 - The Institute Of General Semantics: Part 2 - The Tyranny of Words

Korzybski: A Biography (Free Online Edition)

Copyright © 2014 (2011) by Bruce I. Kodish 

All rights reserved. Copyright material may be quoted verbatim without need for permission from or payment to the copyright holder, provided that attribution is clearly given and that the material quoted is reasonably brief in extent.

To say the least, Korzybski’s time in Cambridge had not turned out very well. Still, he was not leaving Cambridge with a complete sense of failure. Although he had lost a number of long-time friends and boosters in 1937—including Cora L. Williams, who died in December—he had also found new friends and supporters in Cambridge, even as he was preparing to leave. One new friend, Porter Edward Sargent—a Boston-area writer and the publisher of the well-known Handbook of Private Schools—had read Science and Sanity, become very enthusiastic, and introduced Korzybski to Harvard anthropologist Ernest Hooten. In a letter to Kendig on January 28, Sargent wrote: 

Hooten...has had two sessions this week of three hours with Korzybski, has devoted his leisure time to reading the book, and in a recent address at the Harvard Club talked Korzybski in the aftermath of his address. (3) 

People were also getting excited about Stuart Chase’s book,  The Tyranny of Words , just published in January. Chase, by then a popular non-fiction writer and social critic, had decided to examine his tools—i.e., words. By studying ‘semantics’, he hoped to learn “how words behave, and why [verbal] meaning is so often frustrated.”(4)  Chase had become aware of Korzybski’s work as early as 1935 and had studied it, as well as the writings of Malinowski, Ogden and Richards, P.W. Bridgman, and others. In 1937 Chase began corresponding with Kendig, Korzybski, and Walter Polakov; the latter had guided Chase through Science and Sanity. Chase’s resulting book emphasized the commonalities amongst the various formulators he had investigated. Without question The Tyranny of Words drew a lot of interest to the works of these men. But whatever use the book may have served as a simple introduction to their writings, Chase’s melding of their different approaches obscured the uniqueness of the individual formulators. Chase’s purposeful neglect of the “subjective”, psycho-logical, inner life of the individual—as if this could be neatly separated from the “objective relationships between the individual and the outside world”—especially shortchanged Korzybski. (5) Chase’s treatment of general semantics contained a number of other subtle and not-so-subtle misrepresentations. (An early reviewer, Henry Hazlitt, who had not read Science and Sanity, argued that Chase misinterpreted the other formulators as well.) (6) 

In late 1937, when Polakov saw excerpts in The New Republic from the soon-to-be-published book, he wrote to Alfred: “[Chase] must be spanked.”(7) He felt bothered by, among other things, what he saw as Chase’s apparent animosity towards higher-order abstractions. As Korzybski had emphasized repeatedly—apparently not enough—science is not possible without them. Once the book was released, Walter wanted to give it a favorable review but felt he couldn’t since, in his opinion, it didn’t do justice to Korzybski. He wanted Alfred’s opinion on the matter.(8) Alfred replied that, given his limitations, Chase hadn’t done such a bad job: “I sincerely suggest do not give Hell to Chase, neither try to explain your semantics [in any possible review]. I suggest praise his book, although you may suggest he did not go far enough.”(9) As Korzybski told his first Institute of General Semantics seminar class later that year: “[The Tyranny of Words] is a fine first attempt [at popularization]. Not sharp; not good enough. Superficial, but the best there is, just the same.”(10) (Korzybski may have been too generous in his assessment of the benign impact of the book, since many of its readers appeared to incorrectly conclude that it accurately represented Korzybski’s work.)

Stuart Chase

At the start of 1938, The Tyranny of Words—the first popular book dealing in a significant way with Korzybski’s work—had no competition. Widely publicized and reviewed, its publication marked the beginning of a new level of public recognition for Korzybski. The Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature, a widely-recognized index of ‘popular’ magazines in the U.S. and Canada, provides a rough indication of popular print media attention to a topic. Korzybski had received a surprising amount of newspaper and magazine coverage over the years. However, prior to 1938, the Reader’s Guide had only one reference to him or his work—his 1929 Science obituary of Vasiliev (in Volume VIII, published in 1932). With Volume XI, covering the period from July 1937 to June 1939, things changed. There were five articles directly related to The Tyranny of Words listed under “Stuart Chase”. Most of the articles listed under “Semantics” (used for the first time as a heading) also related to Chase’s book. Many of these articles at least mentioned Korzybski. Another article was listed under the heading “Korzybski”. “General Semantics” was not used as a heading at all. Over the remainder of Korzybski’s life, subsequent editions of the Reader’s Guide (published every few years) would index a respectable number of articles directly related to his work (listed mainly under “Semantics” or his name—never as “General Semantics”).

As the year began, Alfred got more good news. George Houck from The Science Press wrote to tell him that out of the 2000 originally-bound copies of Science and Sanity only about 240 copies remained.(11) The Science Press awaited instruction from him as to when to bind the 1000 additional books they held in storage. He told Houck to hold off until they were down to 100 copies. Science and Sanity may not have qualified as a bestseller but it was selling.(12)

Notes 

You may download a pdf of all of the book's reference notes (including a note on primary source material and abbreviations used) from the link labeled Notes on the Contents page. The pdf of the Bibliography, linked on the Contents page contains full information on referenced books and articles. 

3. Porter Sargent to Kendig, 1/29/1938. AKDA 42.75. 

4. Chase 1938, p. 7. 

5. Chase 1938, p. vii. 

6. Hazlitt, “On the Importance of Meanings: Stuart Chase Attempts to Popularize Recent Studies in the Relationship of Words, Thoughts and Things”. New York Times Book Review, 1/23/1938. AKDA 2.863–864.

7. Walter Polakov to AK, 11/29/1937. IGS Archives. 

8. Walter Polakov to AK, 1/5/1938. IGS Archives. 

9. AK to Walter Polakov, 1/15/1938. IGS Archives. 

10. Korzybski, “Transcript of July, 1938 IGS Summer Seminar”, p. 65. Unpublished. IGS Archives. 

11. G. M. Houck to AK, 1/27/1938. AKDA 35.290. 

12. AK to G. M. Houck, 1/30/1938. AKDA 35.289.

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Chapter 48 - The Institute Of General Semantics: Part 1 - Introduction

Korzybski: A Biography (Free Online Edition)

Copyright © 2014 (2011) by Bruce I. Kodish 

All rights reserved. Copyright material may be quoted verbatim without need for permission from or payment to the copyright holder, provided that attribution is clearly given and that the material quoted is reasonably brief in extent.

At the start of 1938, with Mira still in South America, Alfred was in Cambridge by himself packing their stuff when he got a newspaper death notice in Polish along with a formally addressed letter from Boleslaw Olszewski, his friend and lawyer in Warsaw, dated January 2. Alfred’s mother had died. (1)

Whatever sadness he felt, he experienced significant relief as well. His mother Helena’s prolonged illness, her helplessness and complaining, her disastrous business dealings, and the troublesome marriage to her manager Pawlowski had led to a great deal of grief for Alfred. He could leave that behind now. There were still the matters of recovering his and Mira’s mortgage money on the house at 66 Wilcza St. and his (and his sister’s) inheritance. Olszewski would work on it.

In the meantime, his mother’s death broke another thread in the cord of connection drawing him back to Poland. Even after the publication of Science and Sanity, he and Mira had still planned to eventually return there to live. Future visits might still be possible. But Mira and he were no longer young—he was heading towards his 59th birthday. With this new venture in Chicago, he was committing them to remain in the United States. A sign of this commitment—soon after the move to Chicago, he began the process of becoming a U.S. citizen (accomplished in 1940). (2)

Alfred informed Mira about his mother’s death and details of the move. He anticipated leaving Cambridge around February 1 (he managed to leave by the middle of the month.) In Buenos Aires, Mira had a law firm draw up a document giving Alfred power of attorney to represent her in any business done in Poland. The document gave her and Alfred’s address as Dearborn Lodge, 1347 North Dearborn, Chicago. The North Dearborn apartment, which Alfred had used during his previous stays in Chicago, would be their official residence until he got the Institute of General Semantics established and could find a residence for them. As to when Mira would return to their new city and home, the date became somewhat open-ended. She had recovered her equanimity, had gotten painting commissions, and seemed to be enjoying herself in South America. But she missed Alfred and was eager to return. Alfred didn’t want her to come back until he had gotten things more firmly established in Chicago.

Notes 

You may download a pdf of all of the book's reference notes (including a note on primary source material and abbreviations used) from the link labeled Notes on the Contents page. The pdf of the Bibliography, linked on the Contents page contains full information on referenced books and articles. 

1. Boleslaw Pobog-Olszewski to AK, 1/2/1938. AKDA 38.440. Translated by Teresa Grabiec Silverstein, October 16, 2008. 

2. IGS Memo dated 7/22/1938 - “As citizenship—what procedure?” IGS Archives.

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