Chapter 60 - SNAFU: Part 7 - A Model Seminar-Workshop

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.

Korzybski, who usually didn’t give titles to his seminar lectures, called his first one on August 12, “SNAFU,” Situation Normal — All Fouled Up (he considered this more ‘polite form’ “the more serious form, not the physiological one.”) The term seemed to him “a supreme generalization of thousands of years of misculture” summarizing “the whole trend of our so-called civilization.”* (43)  
*Ralph C. Hamilton, one of the seminar-workshop participants, noted what Korzybski said at the start, “When you look at this snafu, all you can do is laugh...To get all tragical and desperate about it is to get into dramatics and role-playing and conflicts. We can cope only by saying ‘What is going on? How can we fix it?’” [Ralph C. Hamilton in letter to Bruce Kodish, 11/17/2005.] 

Fortunately, the term did not sum up the seminar-workshop itself; it went far better than anyone could have reasonably expected. They had only known in mid-July—just one month before the start of the seminar—that it would not be held in Chicago, Denver, or New York but at the Indian Mountain School in Lakeville, Connecticut. Neither the extended workshop staff nor registered students had much time to adjust travel plans, yet this didn’t seem to affect seminar attendance. The setting at the school proved ideal; the intensified interaction of staff and students learning, eating, and living together for several weeks encouraged a GS-permeated atmosphere—a model for subsequent seminar-workshops for many years to come. 

1946 IGS Summer Seminar-Workshop group
at the Indian Mountain School, Lakeville, CT

The workshop lineup of lecturer/presenters seemed more than adequate in both quantity and quality: Douglas Kelley assisted Kendig with workshop administration and dazzled participants with his presentations on military ‘mental’ hygiene and rehabilitation, the Nuremburg Nazis, the nervous system, magic, and the Rorschach test; speech professor Wilbur Moore, once again demonstrating the psycho-galvanometer, presented his research showing how GS training decreased student’s measurable signal reactions to words; Lou LaBrant of N.Y.U. spoke about her ‘genetic approach to language’; Charles Glicksberg discussed his use of GS in high school and college English classes to teach creative writing; May Watrous Niles discussed her use of GS techniques to deal with the psycho-somatic side of physical therapy; Allen Walker Read presented the history of the word ‘semantic(s)’; Ray Bontrager detailed his extensional analysis of reading difficulties (‘Ninety-five percent of the teaching of reading’ he said, ‘concerns maps, minus territory.’); Captain Saunders lectured on his GS-derived system for evaluating national policy problems for the Senate Committee on Naval Affairs; plus a number of other presentations, panels, etc. Of course, Charlotte taught neuro-semantic relaxation in small groups; while Kendig did a workshop on writing, led group discussions, and administered the whole thing. Korzybski seemed in top form. Robert Redpath, having found the seminar location for the Institute, spent four days as a guest, attending three of Korzybski’s lectures; he later wrote to a friend, “...Korzybski’s teaching methods impressed me.”(44) 

Twenty-seven year-old Ralph C. Hamilton, who had taken a bus from his parent’s home in Wooster, Ohio to attend the seminar-workshop, later recalled his first impressions of Korzybski and colleagues:

Kendig knew how the program was supposed to proceed and was determined to see that it did. Charlotte, on the artistic side, [was] energetic [and] capable in administration...Korzybski surprised me. Not at all academic; vigorous; direct; pragmatic; focused on application; humorous; possessed of a vast background of experience and learning. His personality reminded me—and subsequent acquaintance strengthened the impression—of Winston Churchill. (45)

Korzybski with Douglas M. Kelley, M.D.
at the 1946 Summer Seminar-Workshop

Hamilton—born in Manila, the son of Presbyterian missionaries—had spent much of his early years overseas, coming back as a teenager to his hometown of Wooster, Ohio to attend the last two years of high school. Having already ‘fallen from grace’ by becoming agnostic at the age of 13, he majored in physics and mathematics at church-associated Wooster College. He graduated in 1941 just in time to enter the Army Signal Corps that October, serving in England and North Africa. In his last year of college, he had read The Tyranny of Words. “The notion that words and language shape our ‘thinking’ and don’t necessarily correspond to ‘facts’ was a light turning on.” The light stayed on during his time in the Army.

When I got home...I bought a copy of Science and Sanity and dug in. More revelations. ... Came up bemused; dived in again and went through the book a second time. The next step was obvious, get in touch with IGS and go there for a seminar...What I got from the seminar was [a] deeper grasp of GS, especially in application, and hope for my own development. This was strengthened by my interview with AK at the end of the seminar. He analyzed my personality, gave suggestions of measures to take—by way of coming down from the fascinating heights of theory and grubbing about in day-to-day experience. (46)  

Hamilton received no profound revelations about himself, but felt he had gotten something tremendously useful from Korzybski and company, and spent the next year in GS-related study, including writing an article on GS for John Campbell’s Astounding Science Fiction (subsequently rejected). He would return for the 1947 seminar and then come to live at the Institute and work with Korzybski.

At this seminar, a number of new Institute staff members helped Kendig administer, including: Thomas Leonard, a student assistant who had just started working for the Institute a few months before (he would stay on for about a year); Elizabeth Kirkpatrick, Kendig’s new assistant, a graduate of Earl English’s GS-flavored School of Journalism at the University of Missiouri (she would leave early in the spring to get married); Hansell Baugh serving as seminar librarian, a professional librarian who had edited the Papers from the First American Congress on General Semantics (he would soon leave his job in Atlanta to work at the Institute where he stayed until mid-1948 taking care of the library, orders, registrations, general correspondence, mailing lists, etc.); and Guthrie E. Janssen, who flew in from Tokyo to attend the seminar.

In 1943 the Institute had begun getting cables from Egypt ordering dozens of copies of Science and Sanity. Letters soon followed from Janssen, a 1938 graduate of the University of Illinois, teaching English at the American University in Cairo. Janssen was teaching GS to third-year journalism and social science students with much enthusiastic response: one student, Anthony M. Economides, wrote a monograph entitled A Non-Aristotelian Study of Philosophy as his 1945 Bachelor of Arts project, eventually published in 1947 by the Institute. In 1944, Janssen began working for NBC (National Broadcasting Company) as a correspondent in Egypt, Greece, and the Far East (becoming one of the first foreign journalists to enter recently atom-bombed Hiroshima). He had corresponded with Kendig about plans to study with Korzybski.

During the seminar the plans gelled; he received the Straus Fellowship, which provided money for him to work for approximately a year at the Institute, starting September 2, although his fellowship soon nearly ended precipitously. On November 11, returning from a speaking engagement in Illinois, he was seriously injured in a plane crash near Cleveland, Ohio. Back at the Institute by March 1947, his main work involved preparing Selections from Science and Sanity, consulting closely with Korzybski who wrote in his Author’s Note, “I personally am most grateful to Guthrie Janssen for his considerable painstaking work,...” When Janssen completed his Fellowship at the end of September 1947, he worked on the staff of the Institute until April 1948 when he married another student of Korzybski, dermatologist Guila Beattie. As Korzybski often did with people he felt affection for, he gave them nicknames—‘Jan’ for Janssen and “the Beat” for her ‘because she can’t be beat’. The couple briefly lived in New York City, before moving back to Lime Rock and then Lakeville, where they remained in close touch with Korzybski and the people at the Institute (the couple named their son, born in November 1949, Alfred Guthrie Janssen).

A talented writer, Janssen wrote a number of significant GS-related pieces including: an important paper in 1949 on the political implications of time-binding (published in the General Semantics Bulletin in 1951); a moving memorial article after Korzybski’s 1950 death; and two interesting books published later in 1950, Basic Human Engineering Handbook and A Salesman’s Handbook Course in Human Engineering, both mainly based on Korzybski’s work. Then, within a few years, Janssen disappeared completely from the GS scene with the last trace I found of him in the IGS archives, an August 1954 edition of You: The Magazine for Everyone edited by him. Despite its brevity, Janssen had a brilliant, productive GS-related career. 

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. 

43. Korzybski, ‘SNAFU’ lecture transcript, 8/12/1946. IGS Archives. 

44. Robert Redpath, Jr. to Ross Runnels, 9/3/1947, in Redpath 2007c (Vol. III – Letters), p. 173. 

45. Ralph C. Hamilton to Bruce I. Kodish, 11/17/2005. 

46. Ibid. 

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Chapter 60 - SNAFU: Part 6 - With Friends Like These...

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.

Hayakawa’s standoffishness had continued, as had his failure to consult his “Consulting Editors” Korzybski and Kendig, and the increasing lack of rigor in his own writing and in the general content of ETC. Korzybski’s pleasure at seeing his “Veteran’s Re-Adjustment” paper in the summer 1946 issue of ETC., must have quickly deflated when he also saw the five-page “Terms in General Semantics: A Glossary” by Hayakawa and Anatol Rapoport. Among other misstatements from Korzybski’s point of view, the two men continued presenting ‘general semantics’ as a kind of ‘semantics’. Korzybski felt seriously nettled. He later wrote to Hayakawa:

Practically every ‘definition’ misses the main point and trend of my life work. For instance, what is said in the glossary about the use of the term ‘semantic’ in my ‘General Semantics’, i.e, in a new theory of values, is entirely misleading, for reasons explained before. Such initial common errors must lead automatically to further more aggravated misinterpretations,... 

Unfamiliarity with a new discipline might be historically forgivable, but what is unprecedented among serious individuals is that the authors should undertake such misevaluations in my lifetime without ever consulting with me, although they lived then only a few blocks away from the Institute. I saw the glossary only after it had been printed and distributed to the public. Such behavior may seem unbelievable, but it is all there, in print, a public document of misinformations. (33) 

It didn’t help Korzybski that Rapoport had become Assistant Editor. (He would remain in that role—or later “Associate Editor”—for several decades.) Rapoport looked up to Hayakawa as his mentor in ‘semantics’/‘general semantics’ and the two became close friends. He surely qualified as one of the people least likely to help Hayakawa modify his misconceptions about Korzybski. Indeed, Rapoport probably helped amplify and solidify many of Hayakawa’s negative attitudes.

Anatol Rapoport was born in Russia in 1911. His parents, who had consciously rejected their Jewish roots, raised their son as an atheist and socialist. He remained a dedicated leftist all his life. Coming to the U.S. with his family in 1922, he pursued a career in music as a young man, studying piano in a conservatory in Vienna from 1929 to 1934. He toured Europe, the U.S., and Mexico as a concert pianist in the mid-1930s, before realizing the unlikelihood of his success in that career. Disdainful of business as a bourgeois capitalist pursuit, his growing interest in science and mathematics led him to enter academic life. He applied to the University of Chicago and after only a short time as an undergraduate passed a comprehensive exam and entered graduate school to study mathematics in 1938, obtaining a PhD in 1941. (With an interest in applying mathematics to biology and sociology, he would later become well known for his contributions to mathematical game theory.) In 1938, he also joined the Communist Party, U.S.A. Although he resigned from the Party—on orders from its leadership—when he joined the U.S. army in 1941, he continued to admire Joseph Stalin for some time afterward and maintained his loyalty to the Soviet Union as a model of democracy until sometime around mid-1948, when the so-called Lysenko affair, which banned the study of genetics in the Soviet Union, finally burst his Bolshevik bubble.(34)

Rapoport’s deep ambivalence about Korzybski and his work began when he first encountered Science and Sanity in 1943 or 1944 during his wartime army air force service in Alaska. Someone loaned him a copy of the book.

My first impulse was to dismiss Korzybski as a crackpot. [This or similar epithets about Korzybski—often attributed to ‘others’—often came up later in Rapoport’s writings.] I was reading Hegel’s Science of Logic at the same time, and the “non-Aristotelian system” constructed on a “law of non-identity” looked to me like an impertinent and awkward imitation. I could not see how anyone could take Korzybski seriously. But Hayakawa evidently did, as I was told by a Red Cross girl who had read Language in Action and talked the G.S. lingo. I recalled what I had heard about that book, borrowed it from her, and was enchanted.  

My attitude toward Korzybski changed from contempt to anger. If this was what the man meant, why didn’t he say so... Why couldn’t Korzybski write lucid prose like Russell’s or Hayakawa’s?... Why could not Korzybski be at least logically rigorous? If he was not a crackpot (this previous impression of mine was now vigorously shaken), why was he so repetitive, verbose, pugnacious, redundant and self-congratulatory, manifesting all the symptoms of crackpot delusions? (35)

Rapoport never did shake off that impression, although he felt enough of a pull from Hayakawa’s work to inspire him to send in his first article to ETC., which Hayakawa published in 1944. (Korzybski liked the article.) Later that year, his first encounter with Korzybski reinforced his negative attitude even further. While on leave he went to Chicago, where his parents still lived, and visited the Institute while Korzybski was lecturing. He was invited to sit in and found Korzybski’s lecture dull, his demonstrations unimpressive.

...To the extent that the lecture had a topic, it was that “things are not what they seem,” something Longfellow had said in a sentimental poem a century earlier. Bored by the lecture, I scanned the audience and recognized Hayakawa...He was the man I really wanted to meet.... 

After the lecture, I introduced myself and was cheerfully greeted. Hayakawa insisted on introducing me to Korzybski, to whom, he said, he had spoken about me. We went to Korzybski’s study, where he, too, greeted me with disarming warmth. It was embarrassing. I had formed an unflattering opinion about Korzybski’s intellect...Korzybski’s first remark to me made the situation definitive: “You have read Science and Sanity...how many times?”  

I made some noncommittal remarks about rereading certain portions and started halfhearted attempts to engage him in a substantive discussion about his assumptions, lines of reasoning, and conclusions. It was useless...(36) 

As a result of this initial meeting he wrote elsewhere, “I decided to write him off. But I didn’t. The basic idea of what he called “general semantics” stuck with me.”(37) What stuck with Rapoport seems hard to fathom, given his condescending attitude toward Korzybski. However, as Rapoport struggled away from the communism he still embraced in the mid-1940s, ‘general semantics’—at least Hayakawa’s version of it—probably served as a lifeline to a saner viewpoint and to somewhat more moderate views on science and values in human life. He eventually did express a number of useful things in doing so. But, like Bertrand Russell, he seemed most comfortable in the theoretical realm; when it came to practicing a ‘scientific approach’ in his own personal conduct—certainly in relation to Korzybski—Rapoport appeared quite remiss.

For their part, as reflected in correspondence, Korzybski and his colleagues remained unfailingly cordial and often complementary to Rapoport, even when later honestly confronting differences. They liked his early ETC. articles, in 1945 inviting him to lecture on one of them, “The Criterion of Predictability” at the Institute Holiday seminar—which he did. But although Korzybski invited him numerous times to attend a seminar, Rapoport stayed away. He never attended more than a few of Korzybski’s lectures. He spent little personal time with Korzybski or any of the people from the Institute. Yet based on this limited experience, he felt comfortable—after Korzybski’s death—alluding in public print to Korzybski’s ‘demagogic’ personality, his incompetence as a teacher, and the ‘cultism’ of “Korzybski-ites”, an unspecified group of people whose distinguishing mark may have amounted to the fact that they had more respect for Korzybski than he did.

In addition to the barely veiled personal attacks from the early 1950s on, Rapoport until the end of his life consistently pooh-poohed Korzybski’s originality, the scientific status of his system, and its practical value. Korzybski’s individual work with students seemed to him no better than the faith healing of primitive medicine men. He found Korzybski’s terminology irritating. He saw the extensional devices and the structural differential as gimmicks. Of the latter he wrote in 1975, “I have always remained in the dark about the point of this demonstration.”(38) 

Whatever faint praise he gave, it seems clear from private letters that he came to find Korzybski insufferable. In 1956 he wrote to Russell Meyers [who most probably sent the letter to Kendig, since a copy of the letter got into Kendig’s files]:

We [Rapoport and others from the Society for General Semantics]...were able to stem the tide of contempt which kept pressing against g.s. prestige in academic circles. We knew this contempt was rooted in A.K’s buffoonery and in his complete negation in his personal conduct of all the principles he preached. On the other hand, those of us who enjoyed the respect of honest scientific workers were sometimes successful in explaining why AK’s vision was important and just what his peculiar contribution had been. (39)

As a man in his mid-sixties, Rapoport wrote in 1976: “Korzybski’s lasting achievement consisted in pointing out the dangers of [a severely polluted semantic environment] at the time when its toxic effects were just becoming manifest.”(40) In theory, Rapoport seemed to genuinely appreciate this. But for most of his life, he never appears to have questioned the toxic effects of his own public misrepresentations and downgrading of Korzybski and his work. (To Hayakawa’s credit, he appears to have never descended to disparaging Korzybski in public print as Rapoport did.) In his autobiography published in 2000, Rapoport—approaching his nineties—admitted with hardly veiled irony that “I now take perhaps somewhat unjustified exception” to the view in academic circles of Korzybski as a crank.(41) Did it entirely escape him that his own decades-long denigration of Korzybski may have helped to promote that view?

Until the summer of 1946, Rapoport seems to have kept his misgivings about Korzybski to himself. But then, he confessed,

...When the Institute moved to Connecticut, there was no longer any necessity, dictated by decorum, for either Hayakawa or me to maintain personal contact with Korzybski, and we talked about him freely. Our talks were not centered on Korzybski’s baffling excursions into neurophysiology (Hayakawa didn’t give a damn about the colloidal level and things like that). We talked about the man himself...(42) 

“Ahh,” as Korzybski might have put it, “those ‘sweet’,‘sweet’ human relations.”

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. 

33. “Korzybski’s ‘Protest Letter’ to the Editor of ETC”, March 1947. Reprinted in Alfred Korzybski Collected Writings, p. 820. 

34. See Certainties and Doubts: A Philosophy of Life where Rapoport revealed his admiration of Stalin and devotion to the Soviet Union during the late 1930s and a good part of the 1940s.

35. Rapoport 1976. p. 352. 

36. Ibid., pp. 352–353. 

37. Rapoport 2000, p. 80. 

38. Rapoport 1975, p. 385.

39. Anatol Rapoport to Russell Meyers, 4/18/1956. IGS Archives. 

40. Rapoport 1976, p. 365. 

41. Rapoport 2000, p. 79. 

42. Rapoport 1976, p. 354.

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Chapter 60 - SNAFU: Part 5 - Leaving Chicago

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.

Korzybski felt glad to be leaving Chicago. At least that’s what he told Ken Keyes a year later. Perhaps some ‘sour grapes’ were involved. Although the Institute building itself seemed just about ‘perfect’, he had come to feel disgusted with the city itself: 

...the whole lot of us was disgusted with Chicago, mis-administration due to politics [Chicago had remained an American stronghold of machine ‘boss’ politics]. We were plain disgusted, and that endless dirt. Did you ever live in Chicago? There [was] a 16th of an inch of black dirt everyday over the furniture. You can imagine that. It was due to soft coal in the manufacturing all around. It was a simply impossible place. Even the water happened to be plain mud. Couldn’t drink that water. It was a perfectly impossible city, so we were in a way glad to move. (23) 

Chicago. 1946 - Walker Evans

The Institute’s proximity to the University of Chicago, along with whatever connections it had made there, didn’t provide any significant incentive for the Institute to stay in Chicago either. Some students and faculty had shown interest in Korzybski’s work and studied with him. A campus chapter of the Society for General Semantics had gotten organized. But there also remained a fair amount of unfavorable talk on campus about Korzybski, GS, and the Institute. Ed MacNeal, a University of Chicago student at this time, who had attended an Institute seminar, later noted a joke going around: “Do you know the difference between ceramics and semantics? Semantics is crackpottery.”(24) However, perhaps surprisingly to some, Korzybski had corresponded and established cordial relations—at least on the surface—with University President Robert Maynard Hutchins, and the Dean of Humanities, Richard McKeon. Neither man seemed particularly hostile and had given at least a positive nod in his direction.

McKeon, a philosopher and Aristotle scholar, had even given a number of talks in which he dealt with Korzybski’s work. Both Mira (taking extensive notes for Alfred) and Kendig had attended some of those sessions. In a letter to one of Korzybski’s students, Kendig observed:

...During the Fall [1943] Quarter, [McKeon] taught a public course on ‘Semantics and Modern Thought’. I attended some of his lectures and although he misinterpreted parts of S&S, he showed a respectful attitude and it was also evident that he had really seriously studied the book and his misinterpretations were honest mistakes. I had a very pleasant little meeting with him after one of the lectures. I heard favorable comments on me afterwards; also, Count Alfred had written him a very good letter, to which I understand, he reacted favorably. (25) 

Hutchins, an educational reformer and promoter of “the Great Books” program with Mortimer Adler, had made a small but friendly contribution to Korzybski’s “Introduction to the Second Edition 1941”. Korzybski had written to a number of people in 1940, including Hutchins, asking for examples of over/under defined terms in their fields:

...The most extensional answer was given by that brilliant jurist, Dr. Robert Maynard Hutchins, who sent to me his Convocation Address of June, 1940 with a letter, which he has kindly given me permission to quote, as follows: ‘I am afraid you will feel that all the words I use are examples of the errors you are attacking. Here is my last Convocation Address, with a sample in every line.’ Such a judgement is profoundly justified whenever language is utilized. This address is a splendid piece of work, and it implies the intuitive recognition of the fundamental neuro-linguistic difficulties we are up against. (26) 

Korzybski later wrote to Hutchins, “I repeat that in spite of your official ‘aristotelianism’, which is very unpopular and controversial, you are not an aristotelian in the vulgar sense, but you just protest against the abuse of Aristotle, with which we are in full sympathy.”(27) Maybe. But in spite of polite nods in either direction, there remained considerable distance between the Institute and ‘aristotelians’ (official or not) at the University. Nothing much had developed as a result of Korzybski’s and others’ efforts to connect—nothing that contributed any urgency to staying in Chicago. 

The fact that the Society for General Semantics had its center of activity in Chicago also did not provide a compelling reason for the Institute to stay in the city. Indeed, the Society had become a source of increasing frustration to Korzybski and his co-workers. As an organization, the Society had fallen seriously short in regard to two of the major activities for which it was founded (as set out in its 1942 Charter and By-laws): “to secure financial support” and to secure “wider recognition for the Institute of General Semantics as a center of training, study and research.” Among people who had an interest in GS and made inquiries and/or who wanted to help the Institute, there seemed to exist a great deal of confusion about the distinction between the two organizations. Mail to one often was addressed and got delivered to the other. Some believed that a significant amount of their membership fees to the Society, as publicly announced, was going to support the Institute. They wondered why the Institute was sending out additional fundraising appeals. Korzybski, Kendig, and Charlotte all perceived a lack of communication and cooperation from Society leadership on various issues. They believed both organizations could benefit by working together more. In spite of persistent efforts—including letters, and memos—to try to resolve their issues with the Society and to work together with it, things just seemed to get worse.

The failure to contribute any significant financial support to the Institute seemed mainly a result of the measures originally set out to do so. As specified in its by-laws, the society was to retain only $5 from any membership fee category (basic annual participating membership started at $10). Wendell Johnson, who served as the Society President from mid-1945 to mid-1947, wrote in 1947,

...from April of 1942 to June of 1945, the arrangement had secured only $2258.00 for the Institute, and the Society was in arrears to the extent of $166.75 (paid November 29, 1945). At the same time these payments had involved such a severe drain on Society funds that by 1945 it had become clear that the very continuation of the Society was being seriously endangered. (28) 

Not only continuation but also growth had importance to Johnson and others involved with running the Society. In addition to publishing ETC., the Society had in April 1945 started to publish a free, more-or less monthly newsletter for members entitled Quotesn—each issue would get sequentially numbered. Among other activities, the Society was also organizing lecture series and attempting to bring a number of study groups around the country under its wings as local chapters. To help do all these things, the Society had hired Anne Coleman (the former Anne Cleveland who had worked at the Institute) in 1945 as a full-time Business Manager. Later that year, she needed an assistant. Salaries, office expenses, etc., had stretched the Society’s meager income. If the Society was going to continue to exist—and to grow—something had to change in its arrangement with the IGS.

In February 1945, the Society board had prepared a proposed revision to the by-laws that would change membership categories, fees, and the amount of money given to the Institute.(29) According to its own by-laws, such a revision would require a vote by all Society members, but no vote was taken. Nonetheless around July—soon after Wendell Johnson became President—the Society sent out a new membership invitation brochure. The brochure simply announced the new membership fees as an accomplished fact, including a range of $4 to $9 per year to become a basic Participating Member. One could reasonably expect a larger number of people—paying the reduced $4—to join; according to Society bylaws, it would not have to contribute any of this to the Institute. (Not surprisingly, over the next six months, the society’s membership more than tripled.) (30)  Korzybski undoubtedly saw the brochure.(31) It seems astonishing that anyone on the Society board could expect Korzybski to ignore this ‘little’ change.

At the end of 1945, Korzybski had gotten another surprise from the Society—Wendell Johnson’s Editorial in ETC. as the Society’s new President. Johnson announced plans to encourage the teaching of general semantics in schools and colleges, to organize local chapters, start a ‘Semantic[s] Book Club’, provide financial support for scientific research dealing with ‘semantic’ problems, conduct more lecture series, etc. The several-page editorial notably omitted mentioning either the Institute or Korzybski, whom Johnson had not consulted. So much for securing “wider recognition for the Institute”. Korzybski, who had promoted the Society from its beginning, believed Johnson’s editorial violated the Society’s own By-laws (which had not been changed) and compromised those of the Institute. Furthermore, if the Society was going to carry out its programs without consulting and coordinating with Korzybski and his colleagues, it seemed more likely to pull income and interested people away from the Institute—helping to keep the Institute financially strapped.

If not destitute, the Institute at least qualified as seriously short of money. From July 1945 to May 1946, about 75 percent of the Institute’s earnings still came mostly from participants’ fees from Korzybski’s seminars and consultative interviews—along with publication sales and other services. Only about 25 percent of Institute operating income came from donations. For such a “non-profit pioneering Institution” as the IGS, Kendig wanted that ratio closer to 50-50.(32) Without a serious fundraising campaign, Korzybski would have to continue with the never-ending round of seminars he’d done for so long to keep the Institute going. He would not have the freedom to do the writing he wanted or to focus his teaching on advanced training to develop competent teachers of the methodology and to train leaders in various fields who could apply it.

The Institute had demonstrated it could do serious fundraising on its own. In the summer of 1945, an ‘emergency’ campaign had quickly raised enough money to hire Francis Chisholm for a year to do special educational projects. (Chisholm decided to decline the position and instead joined the English faculty at the State Teachers College–River Falls, Wisconsin, where he spent the rest of his academic career.) Nonetheless, Korzybski and his colleagues had considered it better to work with the Society. In the fundraising letter sent out in 1944 (sent again in 1945), they had purposely promoted membership in the Society as a way to support the Institute—given the Society’s founding mission to do so. In so promoting the Society, the Institute had held back a full-blown fundraising campaign of its own. Johnson’s editorial came as a definite blow.

Perhaps Johnson’s neglect of Korzybski and the Institute resulted from distraction. He had completed the manuscript of a book on ‘the semantics of personal adjustment’ in the fall of 1945. People in Quandaries, to be published by Harper & Brothers, expanded on Johnson’s monograph published a few years before by the Institute. The book included his own development of GS formulations and applications in psychotherapy and speech pathology (stuttering) with material he’d amassed on teaching GS and an appendix on research. Publication had gotten delayed due to post-war paper and labor shortages. Distraction and preoccupation—how else could one account for Johnson writing to Science Press in March to ask them for permission to quote from Science and Sanity? Korzybski finally got the note in May. Having known Korzybski for so long and having had his own monograph published by the Institute, Johnson surely must have known that Science Press was not the publisher and that he actually needed to contact Korzybski directly. A quandary to ponder—no doubt. Korzybski demonstrated no interest in pulling away from Johnson. He had continued to write enthusiastically to others about Johnson’s teaching and research. When Johnson’s book came out later in the year, Korzybski wrote a congratulatory letter to him and had the book placed on the Institute’s list of publications for sale. Korzybski invited him to lecture at the upcoming seminar-workshop. And Johnson was later invited to join the Institute Board of Trustees. Nonetheless Johnson’s detachment seemed indicative of a general attitude among leaders of the Society—an attitude epitomized by Hayakawa, as Editor of ETC. perhaps the group’s most prominent figure.

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. Korzybski 1947, p. 335. 

24. MacNeal, p. 47. 

25. M. Kendig to Eleanor Parkhurst, 3/3/1944. Ralph Hamilton Papers. 

26. Korzybski 1994 (1933), p. lxviii. 

27. AK to Robert Maynard Hutchins, 9/24/1941. IGS Archives. 

28. Wendell Johnson, “Editorial – Report of the Retiring President of the Society for General Semantics”, ETC. Vol. VI, No. 3 (Spring, 1947), p. 232. 

29. “Charter and By-Laws of the Society for General Semantics, Proposed Revision, February 1945”. AKDA 41.561 [IGS Scrapbook]. 

30. Wendell Johnson, “The Society for General Semantics”, ETC., Vol. III, No. 2, p. 140. 

31. “Benefits of Membership in the Society for General Semantics”. AKDA Scrapbook 41.564 

32. Kendig, IGS Student Newsletter, Summer 1946, p. 8. AKDA, IGS Scrapbook 5.42–49.

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Chapter 60 - SNAFU: Part 4 - A Helping Hand

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.

Robert Upjohn Redpath Jr. hadn’t yet met Korzybski and colleagues when he found a place for the Institute in July. With a long dormant but recently revived interest in Korzybski’s work, he had decided to help when he learned that the Institute could use a location around New York City—if not for a permanent home, then at least for a place to hold the summer seminar-workshop. 

Science and Sanity had gathered dust on Bob Redpath’s bookshelf for years. A highly successful, 39 year-old insurance underwriter working in New York City, he had first gotten the book in 1935 on the recommendation of a former Yale classmate, the writer Wilder Hobson. Hobson told Redpath at the time that he considered Korzybski’s book the “only revolutionary thinking he had come across in the twentieth century.” Redpath skimmed through it quickly—an error, he later realized: “I...made the mistake of looking at some of the chapter headings in the latter part of the book and, in my then profound ignorance, putting it away unread on the shelf.”(20) With so many ‘foreboding’ terms, he assumed he needed to know advanced mathematics and science to get much out of it.

...I later told Korzybski that I regretted that I came to the study of his work with so little knowledge of mathematics. He said in effect that the content of knowledge in any area, including those, was so small a proportion of the to-be-known that I need not waste time in acquiring more content or feeling myself handicapped by the lack of it. Instead, the important skill to acquire was the feel of the mathematical-scientific way of thinking. (21)

Bob Redpath 

An omnivorous reader with a hungry curiosity, Redpath had probably gotten a little of that feel already, even from his cursory 1935 reading. In a 1949 letter to Yale psychiatrist Clements C. Fry, who was consulting with him about possibilities for mental hygiene research at the University, he recalled his return to studying GS:

In the fall of 1945,... I was lucky enough to be confined for a period of ten days and started the book at the very beginning. I studied it during my train rides to New York, while waiting in business offices, etc., over a period of six months. I have never read a book that so enormously enlarged my understanding of the potential that may accrue to man through applying certain general methods of evaluation, some of which are admittedly still untested. (22) 

In Redpath’s effort to help the Institute, he found the Indian Mountain School in Lakeville in Northwestern Connecticut. The private school had classroom as well as food and lodging facilities available in August. The Institute quickly made arrangements with the school. The seminar, at least, was no longer in limbo. Korzybski, Kendig and Charlotte—understandably stressed by the exigencies of moving—felt most grateful. All of them would form a close bond with Redpath over the next few years.

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. 

20. Robert Redpath, Jr. to Clements C. Fry, in Redpath 2007c (Vol. III – Letters), p. 76. 

21. “What Korzybski’s thinking-methodology have contributed to me”, 6/1/1950. In Redpath 2007b (Vol. II – General Semantics and Tributes), p. 76. 

22. Robert Redpath, Jr. to Clements C. Fry, in Redpath 2007c (Vol. III – Letters), p. 76.

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Chapter 60 - SNAFU: Part 3 - Promising Developments

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.

Korzybski didn’t seem worried about the move—at least not in the letters he wrote at the time. Despite the Institute’s problems, he could see many promising developments for his work. More people than ever were ordering Science and Sanity, which had finally gotten into print again in February. Science Press was already looking for paper (still in scarce supply) for another printing. Meanwhile, new articles about GS continued to appear. Elwood Murray and two co-authors, Wilson Paul and Frederick Sorenson, had written, “A Functional Core for the Basic Communication Course”, about their University of Denver curriculum for the April Quarterly Journal of Speech. “Human relations”, they wrote, “[are] the core of the Basic Communications Course with General Semantics as the principal method for training in appropriate evaluative reactions.”(8)  Another article, “General Semantics and The Science of Man”, by Charles L. Glicksberg had come out in the May Scientific Monthly—“really a splendid paper” by Korzybski’s standards.(9) Glicksberg had just become a Professor of English in the Department of Education at Brooklyn College, where he would go on to a long, distinguished career as a teacher of literature and creative writing. A prolific writer, he had already produced several articles and reviews for ETC. since 1943 and had another article, “General Semantics in English Teaching”, published in February in The English Leaflet, a journal for English teachers. Glicksberg, who had attended the 1945 New York seminar, was invited to teach at the upcoming seminar-workshop, wherever it would be held. 

Korzybski’s work had also gotten favorable mentions in some recently published books. In A Nation of Nations, social critic/historian Louis Adamic devoted several pages in a chapter on “Americans from Poland” to Korzybski, describing him so: “Picturesque, patently honest, immensely learned, often witty, [he] is still essentially an engineer. He uses engineering and mathematical terms; they are constructive, they mean what they say.”(10) University of Chicago philosopher Charles Morris in Signs, Language and Behavior, his new book on semiotics, briefly noted, “The work of A. Korzybski and his followers, psycho-biological in orientation, has largely been devoted to the therapy of the individual, aiming to protect the individual against exploitation by others and by himself. ...”(11) 

Korzybski’s name had turned up in the U.S. Congressional Record as well. This came about primarily through the efforts of James A. Saunders, a retired U. S. Navy Captain, who had worked for a number of years as liason officer with the U.S. Senate Committee on Naval Affairs—soon to get incorporated into the Senate Armed Services Committee. A long-time enthusiastic student of Science and Sanity, Captain Saunders had made explicit use of korzybskian methodology in his work for the Committee, making note of it in reports published in the Congressional Record as far back as 1940. Most recently he had made use of GS in a March 13, 1946 report published in June by the Naval Affairs Committee, entitled “A Scientific Evaluation of the Proposal that the War and Navy Departments be Merged into a Single Department of National Defense”. The report recommended preserving institutional structures of the different armed services that had already proved effective. Part VI of the report, “Methods Employed in Making the Evaluation” included Science and Sanity and other GS references. The report may have had some influence in helping the Navy and other armed service branches to maintain some relative independence when in 1947 the cabinet level Department of the Navy, along with the other armed services, got absorbed into the newly created Department of Defense.

By mid-1946, Saunders had corresponded with Korzybski and Kendig, but had not met them in person. Nonetheless, on the strength of his letters and his Congressional reports, they invited him to lecture on his committee work at that summer’s seminar-workshop. At the end of the year, he also attended Korzybski’s Holiday Seminar. Korzybski seems to have found Saunders a helpful influence and a commendable teacher. In 1947 Saunders got appointed to the IGS Board of Trustees and also for several years taught at the IGS seminar-workshops—in 1948 serving as chief administrator and lecturer of the workshop sessions and in 1949 lecturing on GS and problem solving. He began teaching General Semantics at the Graduate School of the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1947 and—at least into the late 1950s—continued giving that course and others in the Washington, D.C. area. Saunders, a central figure in stimulating GS-related activities in Washington, D.C. throughout the 1950s, doesn’t seem to have published any articles or books of his own. But a student of his, Frank Reed Eldridge a Washington, D.C. diplomat and intelligence officer, published a book, General Semantics, in 1949 with his wife Kathleen Tamagawa Eldridge, based on Saunders’ course lectures. (When Eldridge joined the Central Intelligence Agency in 1951, he was asked to cease his leadership activities with the Lemma Society, the local GS group.) (12) 

Partly through Saunder’s influence, Korzybski’s work caught the attention of others in the Navy. After the August seminar, Saunders wrote a lengthy memorandum to his Naval Academy classmate Vice Admiral Louis E. Denfeld, then Chief of Naval Personnel (soon to become an Admiral and Chief of Naval Operations).The memo suggested incorporating GS into various aspects of Naval operations and training.(13) Apparently Denfeld got interested. Captain Karl Poehlmann, attached to Denfeld’s office, attended Korzybski’s Holiday seminar—on orders—and got deeply interested. Korzybski and Kendig both met with him privately during and after the seminar. The Office of Naval Research had a section exploring various kinds of medical, behavioral and social science research pertaining to human relations, instruction of officers, psychological warfare, combating propaganda, etc. Poehlmann believed that GS, providing a kind of ‘master map’, could play an important role in guiding such research.(14) Perhaps the Institute could provide some training for the Navy. If this took off, a contract to do GS training throughout the Navy could do a lot to ensure the survival of the Institute.

Korzybski was willing to devote a lot of time and attention to such a project, which he believed could have world-changing effects.(15) The kind of project he envisioned—a long shot—ultimately didn’t work out. However, Korzybski’s work still had notable influence in the Navy. Either Saunders or Poehlmann may have had something to do with the strongly GS-flavored 1949 edition of Naval Leadership, a manual for Naval Academy midshipman published by the U.S. Naval Institute. Part I of the book, “Psychological Principles”, particularly Chapter 1 “Science and Human Relations”, was described in a subsequent General Semantics Bulletin as “an excellent example of general semantics-in-action. [The unknown author’s] account of scientific attitudes and methods applied to the problems of leadership is written in a lively, down to earth fashion, refreshingly free of ‘rehashing’.”(16) 

Interest in Korzybski’s work was not limited to the United States. In June, he had received two separate letters of invitation to speak at the Second International Summer Conference of the Netherlands-based International Society for the Study of Significs, from August 24 to August 31. The Dutch Significs circle—to some extent influenced by the work of Lady Victoria Welby—had started as a discussion group among psychiatrist Frederik Willem van Eeden (who had met Lady Welby), L. E. J. Brouwer (founder of the non-aristotelian, intuitionist school of mathematics), and Brouwer’s teacher, mathematician Gerrit Manoury, among others, in the early 1920s. These individuals—and those who joined them later—had some interest in more ‘holistic’ (i.e., non-elementalistic) living, and in practical approaches to problems of symbolism, the foundations of mathematics, the unity of science, etc. At least some of the younger members of the circle had carefully studied Korzybski’s work, seeing a connection to their concerns. Psychiatrist P. H. Esser had published two articles on Korzybski in Dutch journals just prior to the Nazi invasion. Korzybski felt that, for the most part, neither Lady Welby nor her Dutch followers went far enough. But he did recognize their aims as similar to his. He particularly admired Brouwer’s work and felt deeply honored to be invited to speak to the group.

Dr. W. M. Kruseman, the Assistant Secretary of the organization, and one of the editors of its journal Synthese, wrote that he and his colleagues had read Science and Sanity “with great interest and approval.”

...They would welcome your visit as an opportunity to establish and to further a regular scientific contact between your Institute for [sic] General Semantics and our International Society for the Study of Significs. They would be delighted if, on this occasion, you would be willing to read on a special subject (e.g. on “Everyday language with regard to the Structure of our nervous system”). (17) 

In a letter written a few days later, E.W. Beth, University of Amsterdam professor of mathematical logic, apologized to Korzybski: the Conference’s organizing committee only had enough money to offer him free food and lodging. They could not pay for his travel expenses.(18) The Dutch organization had only recently reconstituted itself after years of Nazi occupation and they undoubtedly had a quite limited budget. But apart from the question of money for a trip to the Netherlands, going there was not an option for Korzybski, given the impending move and the seminar-workshop scheduled at the time of the conference. However, his work was represented by E. A. Pritchard, an American educator living in New York with an interest in GS. Pritchard hadn’t studied with Korzybski or even met him. The two men corresponded briefly but Pritchard wasn’t able to see Korzybski before leaving in early August. Despite some reservations, Korzybski decided to cooperate with him since no one else was going to represent the Institute. In addition to a talk Pritchard prepared, he read Korzybski’s latest version of the “Silent and Verbal Levels” handout written in July, and organized a booth of GS publications.

In the fall, Pritchard visited Korzybski and reported on the conference, having found a great deal of interest. With at least one other presentation by a Dutch student of Science and Sanity, a whole conference day had been devoted to GS. The GS booth was always crowded. (Given that it was the only booth there, Korzybski likened this to the increased public interest when a new animal gets brought for exhibition to a zoo.) (19)  Over the next few years, Korzybski continued to correspond and exchange publications with members of the Dutch Significs group. However, although subsequently invited, he couldn’t attend further conferences either.

Through the influence of Esser, a small significs group—and with it a pocket of interest in Korzybski’s work—continued in the Netherlands for a number of decades after Korzybski’s death. Esser, who was made an Honorary Trustee of the Institute, seems instrumental in having founded a Methodology and Science Foundation in Haarlem, which operated at least throughout the 1970s. Its journal, Methodology and Science, had a “Special Korzybski Issue” in 1977 (Volume 10, No. 2). Synthese, although still (2011) getting published in the Netherlands, has become a philosophy of science journal and seems to have little if any connection to its earlier roots in the now apparently defunct Dutch Significs Movement.

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. 

8. Qtd. in IGS Student Newsletter, Summer 1946. IGS Scrapbook 4, AKDA. 

9. AK to Jerome Alexander, 5/20/1946. IGS Archives. 

10. Adamic, p. 304. 

11. Morris, p. 283.

12. Robinson and Creef. “Introduction”, p. xxx in Tamagawa. 

13. Memorandum – Captain James A. Saunders (U.S. Navy, Ret.) to Vice Admiral Louis E. Denfeld, 9/27/1946. IGS Archives. 

14. Kendig, “Report on Talk with Capt. K.F. Poehlmann, 10 to 12:30 PM Dec. 29, 1946”. IGS Archives. 1

5. AK to Captain Karl F. Poehlmann, 1/21/1947 with “Some Notes Taken At An Interview January 4, 1947 [between A. Korzybski and K. Poehlmann] by C. Schuchardt”. IGS Archives. 

16. “Items Biographic and Bibliographic: News of People, Their Writings, Activities, Comments, etc”, General Semantics Bulletin 4 & 5, p. 68. 

17. W.M. Kruseman to AK, 6/14/1946. IGS Archives. 

18. E.W. Beth to AK, 6/17/1946. IGS Archives. 

19. AK to Ken Keyes, 11/2/1946. IGS Archives.

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Chapter 60 - SNAFU: Part 2 - "Where Shall We Go?"

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.

As Korzybski neared the end of the last seminar he would teach in Chicago (an evening one which ran from February 26 to March 27), he wrote to Frances R. Dewing: 

...Where we shall go, to New York or San Francisco, we really don’t know. In both places our old students and friends are working for us looking for a place with as yet unknown results. There is one thing certain, that no one of us wants to remain in Chicago, and are willing to move to the far East or far West, but no middle West anyway. (2) 

Several years before, Mira had suggested a fund-raising campaign to buy the Institute building. At that time she told Alfred “I would be sick to the bone if I had to move from here, or you had to move from 1234 before we coagulate.”(3) Now, they didn’t have the option to buy and Alfred had to move. Furthermore, wherever the Institute would go, he and Mira couldn’t afford to have her leave her comfortable apartment across the street. Besides, she was getting free medical care at nearby Billings Hospital. Still, Mira took the bad news about the move rather well. She even suggested printing cards to hand out to seminar students to elicit their help in finding a new place in New York City.(4)  

Alfred had time to ponder where the Institute would go while in New York in mid-April to present an intensive seminar for The New York Society for General Semantics and then to give his Scripta Mathematica lectures. Kendig went with him, and seemed especially harried. Just before they left for New York, her mother—in Cambridge, Massachusetts—had died after a long illness. Kendig felt so pressed by Institute business, including the seminar arrangements, that she didn’t go to the funeral.(5) 

Charlotte remained in Chicago. A few years before, with Korzybski so desperate for help, she had decided to stop teaching dance or going to dance classes for one year in order to devote herself full-time to work at the Institute. One year had turned into several. Now if she stayed with the Institute, it might doom her dance career for good, simply due to lack of opportunity wherever they might end up. (At this point, she had reached her late thirties, but she may have been able to continue for years in modern dance—especially teaching.) She decided she would stay with the Institute.(6) Now, she had a lot of things to do including getting files, books, and other Institute materials into storage in Chicago and setting up a small, short-term transitional office in Kendig’s apartment. (The Institute would maintain this Chicago office well into 1947.)

Korzybski’s New York seminar and lectures went well. The large and lively seminar group included Princeton historian Erich Kahler—a friend of Einstein and Thomas Mann—who seemed favorably impressed with Korzybski. Another seminar attendee, Robert K. Straus—a grandson of Isidor Straus, one of the founders of Macy’s Department Store—gave the Institute money to fund a working fellowship for one or more students to train with Korzybski for up to a year. During a time of extra expenses, this and other students’ donations would give the Institute a little monetary cushion to get more help and even begin some new projects.

Korzybski and Kendig returned from New York in May. They continued preparations to leave, but as July began, they still didn’t have a place—not even for the summer seminar-workshop, which remained on the schedule. In “a brief historical survey” of the Institute, which Charlotte wrote 42 years later, she recalled, “That we had to move was perceived by us as a catastrophe, and indeed the process was exhausting.”(7) Perhaps she especially felt that way—she had major responsibility for the logistical details of the move.

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. 

2. AK to Mrs. Arthur Dewing, 3/22/1946. IGS Archives. 

3. MEK to AK,10/20/1943. AK Archives, Box 22, Folder 3.212. 

4. MEK to AK, 4/4/1946. AK Archives, Box 22, Folder 3.7. 

5. Kendig to W. Benton Harrison, 4/15/1946. Ralph Hamilton Papers. 

6. Charlotte Schuchardt Read, an interview with Louise Boedeker, 4/11/1997. Sensory Awareness Foundation Newsletter, Summer 2000, edited excerpt reprinted in Time-Bindings: An IGS Newsletter, Vol. XX, Nos. 2 & 3, Spring & Summer 2002, pp. 4-5. 

7. Charlotte Schuchardt Read 1988, p. 64. 

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Chapter 60 - SNAFU: 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.

The U.S. Army acronym for “situation normal—all fucked up” had originally referred to any confused outcome resulting from an “excess of Army rules and routine”, then had expanded to include any complication resulting from human stupidity, and by 1946 had entered civilian usage and could refer to any “snarled”, “haywire”, “ruined”, or “fouled up” state of affairs.(1) 

from the complete, uncensored Private Snafu
cartoons from World War II. Volume 1

The human stupidity behind any particular snafu might not be apparent. There was also the factor of plain bad luck—all the disturbing factors in the universe that could defeat human purposes. But one could probably safely assume human stupidity—or at least the general tendency toward opacity in human thinking-feeling—as a factor in most human messes. ‘Snafu’ might well serve as a one-word label for the human condition and rather neatly summarized the world’s post-war situation. 

Snafus. Across the former battlegrounds of Asia and Europe, people tried to piece their lives together, struggling with wartime injuries, psychic traumas, loss of loved ones and possessions—as poverty, hunger, and disease all continued to take their terrible toll. In China, the civil war between Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Chinese government and the Communist “Red Chinese” guerillas under Mao Tse Tung had resumed in full. In Europe, as noted by now-former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in a March speech at a small Missouri college, “...an iron curtain” had “descended across the continent.” Franklin D. Roosevelt (perhaps too agreeably) and Churchill (more reluctantly) had both acquiesced to Stalin’s hegemony in Eastern Europe at Yalta in early 1945. Now the Stalinist sealing off of Poland and East Germany behind this iron curtain—with other countries soon to follow—seemed much worse than what even Churchill had previously feared.

Snafus. In the United States, the country was straining in 1946 with consequences of the peacetime “reconversion” of the wartime economy: food shortages, inflation, and high unemployment. Crippling strikes by autoworkers, miners, and railroad workers had only been averted by President Truman’s threats of severe government action. A nationwide housing shortage had set in. The depth of this shortage in Chicago created multiple snafus for the Institute of General Semantics. Since the end of the war, out-of-town people coming to IGS seminars even had trouble finding temporary lodging, with some participants having to book a different hotel room every night. And regarding housing, the Institute got very bad news in March. The owner of 1234 East 56 Street was selling the building and the new owner wanted to live there. The Institute would have to move by August 1.

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. Wentworth and Flexner, pp. 493–494.

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