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The Cult of Creativity: A Surprisingly Recent History
A history of how, in the mid-twentieth century, we came to believe in the concept of creativity.
Creativity is one of American society’s signature values. Schools claim to foster it, businesses say they thrive on it, and countless cities say it’s what makes them unique. But the idea that there is such a thing as “creativity”—and that it can be cultivated—is surprisingly recent, entering our everyday speech in the 1950s. As Samuel Weil Franklin reveals, postwar Americans created creativity, through campaigns to define and harness the power of the individual to meet the demands of American capitalism and life under the Cold War. Creativity was championed by a cluster of professionals—psychologists, engineers, and advertising people—as a cure for the conformity and alienation they feared was stifling American ingenuity. It was touted as a force of individualism and the human spirit, a new middle-class aspiration that suited the needs of corporate America and the spirit of anticommunism.
Amid increasingly rigid systems, creativity took on an air of romance; it was a more democratic quality than genius, but more rarified than mere intelligence. The term eluded clear definition, allowing all sorts of people and institutions to claim it as a solution to their problems, from corporate dullness to urban decline. Today, when creativity is constantly sought after, quantified, and maximized, Franklin’s eye-opening history of the concept helps us to see what it really is, and whom it really serves.
Creativity is one of American society’s signature values. Schools claim to foster it, businesses say they thrive on it, and countless cities say it’s what makes them unique. But the idea that there is such a thing as “creativity”—and that it can be cultivated—is surprisingly recent, entering our everyday speech in the 1950s. As Samuel Weil Franklin reveals, postwar Americans created creativity, through campaigns to define and harness the power of the individual to meet the demands of American capitalism and life under the Cold War. Creativity was championed by a cluster of professionals—psychologists, engineers, and advertising people—as a cure for the conformity and alienation they feared was stifling American ingenuity. It was touted as a force of individualism and the human spirit, a new middle-class aspiration that suited the needs of corporate America and the spirit of anticommunism.
Amid increasingly rigid systems, creativity took on an air of romance; it was a more democratic quality than genius, but more rarified than mere intelligence. The term eluded clear definition, allowing all sorts of people and institutions to claim it as a solution to their problems, from corporate dullness to urban decline. Today, when creativity is constantly sought after, quantified, and maximized, Franklin’s eye-opening history of the concept helps us to see what it really is, and whom it really serves.
259 pages, Kindle Edition
Published April 18, 2023
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
February 3, 2025
Creativity is central to our conceptions of self and value, at least in the 21st century West. Creative people are valorized, creativity is something we encourage in our children and try to develop for ourselves, and organizations seek profit and the social good in creative solutions. Given how much weight is placed on creativity, you'd think that it is an ancient concept, or at least a clear one. And you'd be completely wrong.
A simple Google ngram shows 'creativity' as non-existent in usage in the early 20th century, gradually rising through the 1940s, and entering a sharp upwards curve in 1950 that plateaus in 2016. Statistics are the start, and as Franklin explains through comprehensive historical work, creativity was deliberately constructed and reified by an alliance of research psychologists, management consultants, and advertising men to resolve contradictions in early Cold War American society. And it worked.
Don Draper is perhaps the perfect example of what creativity is all about.
That basic tension was between the social mass and the individual. Liberal democracy cast itself as liberating each person to pursue their own best life, as against the totalitarian systems of fascism and communism. Yet workers in America, whether in factories or offices, were an infinitesimal part of a much larger system they did not understand or control. In a strategic sense, American leaders did not know how to identify, support, and deploy talent to beat the Russians. And for the final social contradiction, if the victory of democracy required acts of supreme genius, where did that leave most people who were decidedly not geniuses.
The structure of the book alternates the between the empiricists and the practitioners. Taking the empiricists first, the book begins with J.P. Guilford and the Institute for Personality Assessment and Research at UC Berkeley, where a group of psychologists had gathered esteemed artists, scientists, and architects as research subjects to try and distill something that could be measured as creativity distinct from intelligence. This research grew out of pre-war psychometrics and the complex that had grown up around the IQ test, and could be reasonably described as effort to square the circle of psychology as a discipline which had become oriented towards behavioral experiments in research, and one which was asked to solve human problems in practice. IPAR's work was a mirror, one which showed that the most creative people were white males closer to middle age than adolescence, who were technically minded professionals with an amateur interest in abstract art and jazz.
The psychological story then moves to Abraham Maslow, and the idea that creativity was key to self-actualization and the highest goals of human life. Though what I did not realize is that Maslow was a decided sexist, and regarded intellectual creativity as a solely male province--women would have to be satisfied with merely having children. The final psychologist examined is Ellis Torrance, who set out to find creativity in children and recast rebellion against school as a good sign, rather than a bad one.
The practitioners cover from Alexander Osborn the father of brainstorming, a freeflowing analogical system called Synectics, which came out of the United Shoe Machinery Corporation, and finally the rebirth of Madison Avenue advertising agencies (including Draper Daniels, one of the real life inspirations for Don Draper), and how creativity was used to provide intellectual heft to bolder and much more expensive advertising campaigns.
The book closes with an intellectual confrontation with Richard Florida, and the orientation of modern work towards the "creative class". The idea that artists, work-for-hire designers, software developers, engineers, copywriters, and scientists are one unified thing with the generic spreadsheet jockey, and that they all work to express their soul rather than to increase shareholder value, is one of the load bearing ideologies of the past few decades.
I wish this review did more justice to the book. The Cult of Creativity is a fantastic intellectual history which delves into the contradictions of the past and shows that they are all necessary and productive. Further, creativity is not some fringe concept, it is a central organizing pillar of our current world. Franklin managed a masterpiece, a deeply thoughtful academic work which is also a joy to read.
A simple Google ngram shows 'creativity' as non-existent in usage in the early 20th century, gradually rising through the 1940s, and entering a sharp upwards curve in 1950 that plateaus in 2016. Statistics are the start, and as Franklin explains through comprehensive historical work, creativity was deliberately constructed and reified by an alliance of research psychologists, management consultants, and advertising men to resolve contradictions in early Cold War American society. And it worked.
Don Draper is perhaps the perfect example of what creativity is all about.
That basic tension was between the social mass and the individual. Liberal democracy cast itself as liberating each person to pursue their own best life, as against the totalitarian systems of fascism and communism. Yet workers in America, whether in factories or offices, were an infinitesimal part of a much larger system they did not understand or control. In a strategic sense, American leaders did not know how to identify, support, and deploy talent to beat the Russians. And for the final social contradiction, if the victory of democracy required acts of supreme genius, where did that leave most people who were decidedly not geniuses.
The structure of the book alternates the between the empiricists and the practitioners. Taking the empiricists first, the book begins with J.P. Guilford and the Institute for Personality Assessment and Research at UC Berkeley, where a group of psychologists had gathered esteemed artists, scientists, and architects as research subjects to try and distill something that could be measured as creativity distinct from intelligence. This research grew out of pre-war psychometrics and the complex that had grown up around the IQ test, and could be reasonably described as effort to square the circle of psychology as a discipline which had become oriented towards behavioral experiments in research, and one which was asked to solve human problems in practice. IPAR's work was a mirror, one which showed that the most creative people were white males closer to middle age than adolescence, who were technically minded professionals with an amateur interest in abstract art and jazz.
The psychological story then moves to Abraham Maslow, and the idea that creativity was key to self-actualization and the highest goals of human life. Though what I did not realize is that Maslow was a decided sexist, and regarded intellectual creativity as a solely male province--women would have to be satisfied with merely having children. The final psychologist examined is Ellis Torrance, who set out to find creativity in children and recast rebellion against school as a good sign, rather than a bad one.
The practitioners cover from Alexander Osborn the father of brainstorming, a freeflowing analogical system called Synectics, which came out of the United Shoe Machinery Corporation, and finally the rebirth of Madison Avenue advertising agencies (including Draper Daniels, one of the real life inspirations for Don Draper), and how creativity was used to provide intellectual heft to bolder and much more expensive advertising campaigns.
The book closes with an intellectual confrontation with Richard Florida, and the orientation of modern work towards the "creative class". The idea that artists, work-for-hire designers, software developers, engineers, copywriters, and scientists are one unified thing with the generic spreadsheet jockey, and that they all work to express their soul rather than to increase shareholder value, is one of the load bearing ideologies of the past few decades.
I wish this review did more justice to the book. The Cult of Creativity is a fantastic intellectual history which delves into the contradictions of the past and shows that they are all necessary and productive. Further, creativity is not some fringe concept, it is a central organizing pillar of our current world. Franklin managed a masterpiece, a deeply thoughtful academic work which is also a joy to read.
August 9, 2025
2.5 interesting idea and discussion, but I just couldn't get invested in the details.
January 8, 2025
Pretty interesting intro but decided a few chapters in that the best insight was behind me.
July 23, 2023
The Cult of Creativity: A Surprisingly Recent History (Hardcover)
by Samuel Weil Franklin
ordered today from library
Heard au on radio today:
https://www.npr.org/2023/07/12/118730...
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/11873... 51 minute listen
quote:
ARABLOUEI: His research led him to an actual starting point, a moment in U.S. history when anxieties about technology and conformity led to an explosion of interest in what made Americans and their values unique, special and superior.
FRANKLIN: The concept of creativity arises as a container to mash together romantic ideas about art and poetry and self-expression and self-creation with older ideas about ingenuity and inventiveness and mechanical innovativeness. And it mashes those together, the practical and the impractical, the serious and the whimsical, the profit-driven and the kind of self-driven. And it matches those together because those are the contradictions that are tearing at the post-war era. The very idea that there is this thing called creativity that encompasses all of these human desires and abilities to make something new in some kind of general sense is an idea that was packaged and solidified in the 1950s and '60s and continuing on to this day to make you think that it's always been there, to make you think that it's human nature. That's the invention.
... The paragraphs below were chosen for the use of the word 'racialized' which I bolded.
So the Cold War - the Russian threat starts to kind of decline, so there's less need to say we're creative. We're Americans, and the Soviets are conformist. But then, right about that moment in the late '70s and '80s, you have the rise of Japan and East Asia more generally. And so you kind of, again, have this nationalist racialized need to define what America has going for it in this post-industrial era. And again, that becomes creativity. So I think creativity then again kind of takes on this very American kind of American value. You also kind of have, in many ways, the world that the creativity champions of the '50s and '60s wanted to see kind of coming to be in some ways. So they foresaw a post-industrial world. They were saying - they were seeing the rise of this white-collar workforce, and they were kind of saying, like, this is the future. And so that we need to reorient our values around this new class, right?
So the values of the past were, like, loyalty and hard work and all this stuff, and that makes sense if you're working in a factory or if you're working in a stenography pool or something like that - just, like, put your nose down and do it. But in this new world, which they were generally optimistic about and thought would kind of be a venue for human flourishing - in a world that continued to be driven on knowledge, on research, on science, and less and less on manufacturing. That world kind of came to be - not actually, but in a weird way where a lot of those manufacturing jobs got sent overseas or south of the border or got automated - and so that white-collar workforce does indeed become a greater and greater part of the economy.
But the kind of bright side - the part that people want to pay attention to is what gets termed the creative economy or the creative industries - all of these people who are creating content and branding and marketing and messaging and design. So on Apple products, I'm talking to you on an Apple computer, and on the back, it says, made in China, designed in California. And that's a perfect encapsulation of this thing where it's, like, OK, so we lost the manufacturing. We lost that good blue-collar base that used to make us great and powerful. But what we got was design - designers. We still design things. We still invent things. We still do the, quote-unquote, "creative work."
So you still get that kind of racialized, nationalized Americanization of creativity, although creativity now has become this worldwide phenomenon. That's one thing. I think that the search for meaning in work is still a huge thing. The crisis of alienation was a big thing in the '50s and '60s, and I think we're still dealing with that today. Even though we've supposedly had this kind of, like, entrepreneurial era, I think a lot of people are still feeling really stuck in work and looking for meaning in work. And so I think we're still trying to solve that problem through creativity.
see also
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...
chosen paragraphs:
For example, intelligence. Can we assign amounts or degrees of intelligence to individuals in the same way that we assign them heights and weights? One way of doing this, some people thought, was by measuring skull sizes, cranial capacity. [me: cranial capacity showed white males to have the biggest skulls, then white females, then all people of color. !!! It may be 2023 but somehow nothing much has actually changed. ] There were also scientists who speculated about the role of genetics and heredity. By the early nineteen-hundreds, though, the preferred method was testing.
...
When psychologists asked what sort of habits and choices were markers of creativity, they came up with things like “divergent thinking” and “tolerance for ambiguity.” They reported that, on tests, creative people preferred abstract art and asymmetrical images. As Franklin points out, those preferences also happened to match up with the tastes of the mid-century educated classes. To put it a little more cynically, the tests seem to have been designed so that the right people passed them.
...
But, of course, this is also the problem with the SAT. In a meritocratic society, if creative accomplishment is, like intelligence, rewarded in the workplace, then it must be correlated with some inborn aptitude. Otherwise, we are just reproducing the existing social hierarchy. As Franklin observes, the creativity fad of the nineteen-fifties seems to have had zero impact on the privileged status of white males.
Meanwhile the gold standard in studying creativity isn't mentioned.
Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention
by Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly.
by Samuel Weil Franklin
ordered today from library
Heard au on radio today:
https://www.npr.org/2023/07/12/118730...
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/11873... 51 minute listen
quote:
ARABLOUEI: His research led him to an actual starting point, a moment in U.S. history when anxieties about technology and conformity led to an explosion of interest in what made Americans and their values unique, special and superior.
FRANKLIN: The concept of creativity arises as a container to mash together romantic ideas about art and poetry and self-expression and self-creation with older ideas about ingenuity and inventiveness and mechanical innovativeness. And it mashes those together, the practical and the impractical, the serious and the whimsical, the profit-driven and the kind of self-driven. And it matches those together because those are the contradictions that are tearing at the post-war era. The very idea that there is this thing called creativity that encompasses all of these human desires and abilities to make something new in some kind of general sense is an idea that was packaged and solidified in the 1950s and '60s and continuing on to this day to make you think that it's always been there, to make you think that it's human nature. That's the invention.
... The paragraphs below were chosen for the use of the word 'racialized' which I bolded.
So the Cold War - the Russian threat starts to kind of decline, so there's less need to say we're creative. We're Americans, and the Soviets are conformist. But then, right about that moment in the late '70s and '80s, you have the rise of Japan and East Asia more generally. And so you kind of, again, have this nationalist racialized need to define what America has going for it in this post-industrial era. And again, that becomes creativity. So I think creativity then again kind of takes on this very American kind of American value. You also kind of have, in many ways, the world that the creativity champions of the '50s and '60s wanted to see kind of coming to be in some ways. So they foresaw a post-industrial world. They were saying - they were seeing the rise of this white-collar workforce, and they were kind of saying, like, this is the future. And so that we need to reorient our values around this new class, right?
So the values of the past were, like, loyalty and hard work and all this stuff, and that makes sense if you're working in a factory or if you're working in a stenography pool or something like that - just, like, put your nose down and do it. But in this new world, which they were generally optimistic about and thought would kind of be a venue for human flourishing - in a world that continued to be driven on knowledge, on research, on science, and less and less on manufacturing. That world kind of came to be - not actually, but in a weird way where a lot of those manufacturing jobs got sent overseas or south of the border or got automated - and so that white-collar workforce does indeed become a greater and greater part of the economy.
But the kind of bright side - the part that people want to pay attention to is what gets termed the creative economy or the creative industries - all of these people who are creating content and branding and marketing and messaging and design. So on Apple products, I'm talking to you on an Apple computer, and on the back, it says, made in China, designed in California. And that's a perfect encapsulation of this thing where it's, like, OK, so we lost the manufacturing. We lost that good blue-collar base that used to make us great and powerful. But what we got was design - designers. We still design things. We still invent things. We still do the, quote-unquote, "creative work."
So you still get that kind of racialized, nationalized Americanization of creativity, although creativity now has become this worldwide phenomenon. That's one thing. I think that the search for meaning in work is still a huge thing. The crisis of alienation was a big thing in the '50s and '60s, and I think we're still dealing with that today. Even though we've supposedly had this kind of, like, entrepreneurial era, I think a lot of people are still feeling really stuck in work and looking for meaning in work. And so I think we're still trying to solve that problem through creativity.
see also
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...
chosen paragraphs:
For example, intelligence. Can we assign amounts or degrees of intelligence to individuals in the same way that we assign them heights and weights? One way of doing this, some people thought, was by measuring skull sizes, cranial capacity. [me: cranial capacity showed white males to have the biggest skulls, then white females, then all people of color. !!! It may be 2023 but somehow nothing much has actually changed. ] There were also scientists who speculated about the role of genetics and heredity. By the early nineteen-hundreds, though, the preferred method was testing.
...
When psychologists asked what sort of habits and choices were markers of creativity, they came up with things like “divergent thinking” and “tolerance for ambiguity.” They reported that, on tests, creative people preferred abstract art and asymmetrical images. As Franklin points out, those preferences also happened to match up with the tastes of the mid-century educated classes. To put it a little more cynically, the tests seem to have been designed so that the right people passed them.
...
But, of course, this is also the problem with the SAT. In a meritocratic society, if creative accomplishment is, like intelligence, rewarded in the workplace, then it must be correlated with some inborn aptitude. Otherwise, we are just reproducing the existing social hierarchy. As Franklin observes, the creativity fad of the nineteen-fifties seems to have had zero impact on the privileged status of white males.
Meanwhile the gold standard in studying creativity isn't mentioned.
Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention
by Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly.
November 1, 2023
Really interesting if you love academia stories. Though most of the book had meh stories, and too many characters to keep up (all real people who contributed to the creativity research and culture) the conclusion was really good and well written and left me with more things to think about than I expected. Insightful into what corporate America was after WW2 and what it has meant for the world.
March 8, 2025
What a disappointing effort from some who is clearly a dedicated researcher and a fine writer. Essentially a take down of the concept of creativity as promulgated in the post war West, calling it ‘a vector of false consciousness for a bad system’ (capitalism). His avowed goal is the ‘four hour work week’ and sees the concept of creativity as at best a distraction but in fact another means to tie workers to their jobs.
On the plus side, the research into the rise of the concept through the fifties is thorough and thought-provoking, and engagingly presented.
On the plus side, the research into the rise of the concept through the fifties is thorough and thought-provoking, and engagingly presented.
November 9, 2024
A really interesting analysis of what "creativity" means, and how it has come to function in modern capitalist society. Combines economic, social, and business history to weave a larger story of the drive for creativity and what it means in the medical/corporate/educational worlds. Would benefit from a deeper/more fulsome consideration of feminist and Indigenous theorizing which is touched on but not explored in depth.
November 26, 2024
Creativity is one of those words that businesses have issues with, but no one worried about it until the 1950s, Thus book explains all the efforts that were made to teach creativity to various groups of people in advertising and on companies that made things. It sometimes took, and it sometimes didn't.
Want to read
May 28, 2023Read the book review by Louis Menard in The New Yorker (April 24 & May 1, 2023) titled Inspiration, Inc: How "creativity" was created. Very interesting review, so the book maybe be very interesting and "creative" too!
July 24, 2023
Fantastic exploration of the concept of creativity! As a longtime "creative professional," I can't believe the topics within hadn't been explored more deeply before. I found this book stimulating yet accessible, and have recommended it to many people in my social and professional network.
June 1, 2023
A compelling examination of a universally admired concept that has no clear definition but a lot of baggage.
November 29, 2023
Sometimes interesting, sometimes not. The most difficult part is that author does not tell his narrative in chronological order, which makes it hard to keep track of things.
April 13, 2024
Excellent, particularly the last chapter, in which Franklin synthesizes prescription out of description. Shout-out to Laura for lending me your copy.
May 8, 2024
Clinical and dry, reads like a scientific white paper.
July 31, 2024
Always historicize! (This book does that).
November 26, 2025
Well researched and written but really dragged at times. Appreciated the Deleuze shout out at the end and always like hearing about Carl Rogers.
February 15, 2024
Did you know that before the early part of the Twentieth Century, "creativity" as a concept wasn't really part of our cultural lexicon? I thought it was a concept as old as art itself. Not true. Sure, we had words like unique, innovative, new, etc. But Franklin demonstrates that "creativity," ironically, is almost entirely a construct of the modern American military-industrial complex -- a concept that could be studied, possessed, identified, cultivated, taught, propagated, and most importantly, monetized. ... If I were to have read this description a month ago, before reading the book, I would have been extremely skeptical of the argument as like being likely an overly-clever academic exercise. But Franklin relies on example after example of texts, interviews, pamphlets, and accessible analysis to make his entirely convincing case. This book has completely shifted the framework through which I think about the concept of "creativity."
Read
April 19, 2024Môj rozhovor s autorom knižky na českom Enku tu: https://denikn.cz/1383260
A na slovenskom tu: https://dennikn.sk/3917628
A na slovenskom tu: https://dennikn.sk/3917628
July 8, 2025
Bright and sharp, Franklin questions the rhetorical foundations of white collar American individualism. This book deserves more attention in academic circles, but it might be too well written for that…
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews