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As voters, we don’t like changing our minds.

As a Super Tuesday follow-up, Mike Edwards uses the Ohio primary exit polls to illustrate the difficulty candidates face in convincing voters to change their minds.

 

As voters, we don’t like changing our minds.

It takes only a fraction of a second for us to make a first impression. As much as we might like to believe that our votes are not influenced by something as irrational as a biased first impression, research has indicated quite the opposite: our first impression of how a candidate looks goes a long way toward determining whether or not we will vote for him/her.

Of course, first impressions aren’t everything. Over time, that first impression takes on weight; we add to it a variety of other perceptions and biases based on what we think a candidate is doing or saying, and based on the impressions of the people around us.

Eventually, we tend to create these narratives about political candidates, which may or may not have any connection to reality. George W. Bush, despite his Ivy League education and tremendous political acumen, became a down-to-earth (although perhaps not the brightest bulb) man of the people. Bill Clinton was a charismatic philanderer and an incredibly astute political operative, despite the fact that he never won more than 50 percent of the vote in a presidential election.

In the case of the current presidential election, the big narrative is Mitt Romney: the pro-business, favorite of the GOP insiders, moderate who has trouble relating to blue collar Americans. That narrative, based on a combination of first impressions, media coverage, and our mass perception of Romney as a man and a candidate, has become deeply ingrained.

And as voters, we don’t like changing our minds.

In particular, Romney spent tens of millions of dollars and gave dozens of stump speeches in Ohio trying to change voters’ opinions about three things in particular:

1)      He was more of a fiscal conservative than Rick Santorum.

2)      He was just as conservative as Santorum on the basic issues important to evangelicals, particularly opposition to abortion and support for Israel.

3)      He was capable of understanding and relating to the concerns of average, blue-collar Ohioans.

So how well did that work? Did the massive ad campaign change how Ohioans perceived him? Well, let’s look at the exit polls from the Ohio primary.

Who won poor and middle class voters?  Santorum.

Who won self-identified “conservative” voters?  Santorum.

Who won evangelicals?  Santorum.

Who won voters who care most about abortion?  Santorum.

All of Romney’s money and all of his time and energy campaigning was not enough to change the underlying perception of Romney as the pro-business, moderate option who’s a bit out of touch with evangelicals and working class Americans.

Of course, advertising is useful. It can do a lot to help a candidate: by creating a first impression among people who aren’t very familiar with the candidate, by improving name recognition, by reinforcing negative impressions about a candidate’s opponent, or, alternatively, by reinforcing positive impressions about a candidate’s own image. But fundamentally changing voters’ minds is almost impossible, no matter how much time or money you throw at the problem.

 

Strategic Voting on Super Tuesday

Mike Edwards, co-author (with Danny Oppenheimer) of Democracy Despite Itself: Why a System That Shouldn't Work at All Works So Well, on voting "strategically" and Super Tuesday. Mike founded and regularly contributes to Leftfielder.org, a blog on politics and media.

 

I grew up in a very liberal neighborhood in Minneapolis, MN, surrounded by people who thought that Paul Wellstone and Jesse Jackson were clearly the two most qualified men in the country to be President. Yet, virtually all of those people fell neatly in-line behind the Democratic Party nominee every November—and in most years, by the time the Spring caucuses rolled around they had already thrown their support behind a slightly less palatable, but perhaps more electable, candidate.

In short, they were faced with the same set of options now confronting Republican voters; when, and how, should one vote “strategically”? We all vote strategically—or for candidates who aren’t our first choice—and it is really a very rational approach to a winner-take-all election. The problem is that strategic voting ultimately relies on a self-fulfilling prophecy that can cause voters to abandon preferred candidates prematurely.

Take the Georgia election in the upcoming March 6 Super Tuesday primary. Recent polling in Georgia, according to the analysis by Nate Silver at the New York Times 538 blog, showed that Newt Gingrich holds a sizeable lead in Georgia, his home state and a place where he remains popular. Clearly he will win the state on Super Tuesday, right?

If the election were held in a vacuum, perhaps.  Unfortunately for Gingrich, those Georgia voters have been feeling significant pressure  leading up to Super Tuesday to vote strategically. Gingrich’s candidacy is no longer taken seriously outside of Georgia. Which means that, heading into Super Tuesday, those pro-Gingrich voters will have basically three choices:

1)   Vote for Gingrich, despite the fact that it looks increasingly unlikely that Gingrich can win the nomination.

2)   Vote for their second-place candidate—most analysts believe this to be Rick Santorum—because he has a more realistic chance to win the nomination.

3)   Vote for whichever candidate they believe to be the inevitable nominee—most analysts believe this to be Mitt Romney—because of a desire to end the primary process quickly.

The irony, of course, is that Gingrich might have a chance to win the nomination if not for strategic voting concerns—or “momentum” as the pundits often call it. Until recently, after all, Gingrich had a sizeable lead in Georgia, and was seen as a viable contender in the other Super Tuesday states, especially Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and the various Western caucuses. But as voters in Michigan watched a few thousand caucus-goers in Colorado and Minnesota choose Santorum as their preferred non-Romney candidate, they decided to follow suit. And now, as Santorum is coming off a respectable 2nd place showing in Michigan, and holding a small lead in the Ohio polls, he has positioned himself as the “only viable” non-Romney candidate in all of those other Southern and Western states. This has in turn left Georgia as Gingrich’s last chance to demonstrate his “viability”—or perhaps as the place where the self-fulfilling prophecy of Gingrich’s doom finally comes to fruition.

 

Republicans Waking Up in Florida

Tom Barry, author of Border Wars and director of the TransBorder Project at the Center for International Policy in Washington, DC., comments on Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney’s recent clash over immigration in a CNN Republican debate in Florida. He blogs at Border Lines.

 

 

Florida is mired in a swamp of housing foreclosures and in a stagnant economy.

But last week it was the state’s demographics – the growing Latino population, constituting 70% of the voters in the Miami-Dade area – that proved the first wake-up call to the leading Republican presidential candidates.  If the GOP is to retake the White House, it needs to wake up to and accept the new reality of America.

Newt Gingrich, recognizing Mitt Romney’s vulnerability among Latinos because of his previously harsh anti-illegal immigrant rhetoric, called out Romney as being “anti-immigrant” in a television ad that appeared prior to the debates last week in Florida (which he later withdrew after being criticized by Sen. Marco Rubio).

Romney fired back, saying that the “idea that I’m anti-immigrant is repulsive.”

Latinos represent a large national voting bloc – constituting 16% of the population and 22 million potential voters -- as well as a key constituency in swing states such as New Mexico, Nevada, and Florida.

In his attempt to appeal to conservative Republican constituencies in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina, Romney sought to establish his anti-illegal immigrant credentials, taking hard line positions against legalization and the Dream Act (which Latinos overwhelmingly support).

Switching gears and policy stances – which comes easily to the former Massachusetts governor – Romney during the last two debates and in other Florida forums desperately attempted to reposition himself as a pro-Latino, pro-immigration candidate. Although burdened by his English-first policy statements and slurs about Spanish, Gingrich has maintained a more nuanced position on immigration reform, including support for the regularization of the status of illegal immigrants (although not citizenship).

At a September debate in Orlando, Governor Rick Perry criticized Romney’s hardline stance against in-state tuition for immigrant children, saying: “I don’t think you have a heart.” Echoing that line of attack, Gingrich, seeking the high moral ground (and the Latino vote), charged that Romney’s call for harsh immigration-enforcement policies (which won Romney the endorsement of leading anti-immigrant ideologue Kris Kobach) that would encourage “self-deportation” as “inhumane.”

What, of course, remains to be seen is if the widespread anti-status quo sentiment in America will persuade Latinos and others to vote Republican this November despite the heartless of now-standard party positions on immigration and immigrants – and on the country’s widening class and ethnic divides. 

 

 

Monday Eye Candy: Sidewalks

Last week, we featured photographs from Paul Shaw's Helvetica and the New York City Subway System. Today's eye candy is Sidewalks: Conflict and Negotiation over Public Space by Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris and Renia Ehrenfeucht. Sidewalks contains 35 black and white photos to illustrate the authors' examination of the evolution of the American urban sidewalk and conflicts that have arisen over its competing uses. Here are a few photographs from the book (click on each image to enlarge):

 

 

 

 

 

(A hotdog stand, at times considered sidewalk clutter, Los Angeles Fashion District, December 2005)

 

 

 

 

 

(City Walk, Universal City, California, 2002)

 

 

 

 

 

(Masked riders throwing beads, Mardi Gras, New Orleans, Lousiana, 2006)

 

 

 

(Police in front of the boarded buildings at the World Trade Organization meetings, Seattle, Washington, 1999)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(Canopied street, Coral Gables, Miami, Florida, 2006)

Happy Holidays! We will resume the Monday Eye Candy feature in the New Year (1/9/12).

"The camp's the thing"

Charlie Hailey, author of Camps: A Guide to 21st-Century Space, on Occupy Wall Street camps as urban stages.

 

The camp’s the thing. Apologies to Shakespeare but the Occupy camps have entered the global conscience. What some have criticized as a lack of goals has materialized as a network of urban spaces not just in the U.S. but throughout the world. The camps themselves were the goals all along, and they have answered the OWS Declaration of the Occupation’s gentle directive to “occupy public space” in order to “let these facts be known.” This primary objective forms the graphical center of the Declaration’s flow-chart diagram, a document that reminds me of the archetypal camp with multiple camping sites—in the radially-organized diagram, they are plotted as grievances—arranged around a central campfire. But with Occupy this central focus is more revelatory than reverie. The Occupy camps have in fact come to be scenes of disclosure, revealing the sometimes messy, at times ambiguous, process of achieving democratic consensus. Camping in public urban spaces is unavoidably theatrical, and the occupy meme camps that have sprung from OWS’s genetic code are also exercises in applied aesthetics, combining self-expression with the practicalities of self-organizing and day-to-day living. And the camps’ strategic locations have helped their visibility: OWS capitalized on zoning rules for Zuccotti Park’s privately-owned public space to allow for 24-hour occupation and to attain proximity to Wall Street; and the McPherson Square location allows Occupy DC axial linkage to the White House and interrupts a lobbyist corridor along K Street NW.  Like Colin Ward’s “seeds beneath the snow,” the Occupy camps ultimately demonstrate a vision of everyday life. Though many have been forced to close, the encampments may return with the spring thaw and will likely continue as urban stages that do not require the platforms demanded by critics.

Julius Blank (1925-2011): History and Humor

David C. Brock, co-author of Makers of the Microchip: A Documentary History of Fairchild Semiconductor, reflects on Julius Blank's sense of humor.

 

 

 

 

Julius Blank

Photo courtesy of qtschlepper/Mitchell Weinstock

http://www.flickr.com/photos/schlepper/4390485432/

Creative Commons License Terms

I was surprised and saddened on Tuesday to learn that Julius Blank, one of the eight co-founders of the seminal Silicon Valley electronics firm Fairchild Semiconductor, had died. I first met Mr. Blank five years ago when he sat for a three and a half hour oral history interview with me as part of a Chemical Heritage Foundation project supported by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. The project sought to use oral history to document the stories of the first silicon startups in Silicon Valley – the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory of Beckman Instruments and the Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation – and Mr. Blank had been deeply involved with both. I learned a lot from that oral history with Julius, as he often reminded me to address him. It, along with many other oral histories and interviews conducted by me and Christophe Lécuyer, proved to be an invaluable and enriching resource for the history of Fairchild Semiconductor that he and I co-authored recently. (Makers of the Microchip: A Documentary History of Fairchild Semiconductor, MIT Press, 2010, www.makersofthemicrochip.com) Fairchild earned its place in the history of technology by pioneering silicon electronics technology, including the planar integrated circuit (the direct ancestor of today’s microchips), and the Silicon Valley dynamic of the venture funding of new technology startups and spinoffs (of which there were many from Fairchild, including Intel).

Julius had a long career in Silicon Valley that was captured well by his obituaries in the San Jose Mercury News and New York Times. What does not come through in these accounts though was Mr. Blank’s wonderful, even disarming, sense of humor. After our oral history, Mr. Blank was kind enough to talk to me with some regularity when I didn’t understand some aspect of history. Why were four-layer diodes hard to make? What were the relative advantages of resistance versus RF crystal pullers? How did the automated wire wrapping effort at Western Electric develop in the early 1950s? He was always ready to take my call, and his droll, plainspoken answers to these questions invariably had me – and often him – chuckling. His clipped language typical of many engineers combined with a Lower East Side accent certainly aided my laughter. I’m certain that it did as well for many of his associates in the semiconductor industry and the Valley. Part of my shock at the news of his death was that less than a month ago I was on the phone with him, listening to his answers about the Western Electric question above. He was his usual self: insightful, patient, and funny. We shared a laugh at one of his characteristically unvarnished assessments of one of the characters involved. With Julius, I’d imagine it was an assessment he would have happily shared – and probably did – with them.

 

For more about Julius Blank and to experience something of his voice, consult one of his oral histories:

http://www.chemheritage.org/discover/collections/oral-histories/details/blank-julius.aspx

http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/accession/102658264

 

 

9/11: Architectural Criticism?

Jarett Kobek's novel ATTA (semiotext(e)) offers a fictionalized psychedelic biography of Mohamed Atta that circles around a simple question: what if 9/11 was as much a matter of architectural criticism as religious terrorism?  Here's an excerpt that addresses this question.

He gathers his luggage, makes his way through customs, presents his passport. His visa is in a new name. MOHAMED ATTA. He walks out of the terminal and finds a commuter bus. He travels on a highway towards the city. New York’s skyline rises in the distance. A unique horror. Direct in line of sight is the Empire State Building, an Art Deco stab at the sky. To the right, smaller buildings surround the Towers like acolytes encircle a false messiah.

The bus dives into a tunnel and leaves him on the street beside Grand Central Terminal. He enters the building, walks to its main course. The rush of people amuses him, reminds him of home. He stares at the ceiling, yellow astrological idols of Greek origin against teal background. So many false gods in America.

Atta leaves Grand Central, walks south on Park Avenue. On 40th Street, he realizes that he moves in the wrong direction. He turns right, navigates west. Each and every building is enormous, of unthinkable size. Skyscraper after skyscraper after skyscraper after skyscraper after skyscraper after skyscraper after skyscraper after skyscraper.

He reaches 6th Avenue, Avenue of the Americas. He looks south. The Towers dwarf the city. New York is a land of giants until you encounter its titans. Solid rectangle erections of architectural arrogance, total modernist faith in the ability of buildings to shape lives, of the architect’s belief that he can control his vision and utilize it towards good.

 

No Tech-fix for Justice

Virginia Eubanks, author of Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age, on the Arab Spring and whether social media promotes radical political change. 

On my recent book tour supporting Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age, audiences from Montréal, QC to Washington, DC asked incisive, insightful questions about the relationship between information technology and social justice. Audience members were particularly interested in how the high-tech equity agenda that I develop in the book applies to the thrilling revolts that took place across the Middle East and North Africa this spring. They wanted to know: Does the Arab Spring prove that social media fosters radical political change?

Social media were undoubtedly useful tools in the recent pro-democracy uprisings, and will continue to play a role in liberation movements around the globe. As Xiaolin Zhuo, Barry Wellman, and Justine Yu point out in their article “Egypt: The First Internet Revolt?,” published in the July 2011 issue of Peace Magazine, networked tools such as Facebook, Twitter and blogs facilitated rapid mobilization of protesters, developed a sense of community under a repressive regime with limited freedom of the press, and garnered global attention once protests had started.

However, as Zhuo, Wellman and Yu show, organized groups, informal networks, and formal organizing training played an equally (if not more) crucial role in these not-so-spontaneous protests. Established political groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and the April 6 Youth Movement were central to organizing the Tahrir Square protests. Word of mouth and television spread more information and mobilized more protesters than social media and internet sources. Egyptian activists received face-to-face training and support from international allies such as CANVAS (the Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies) in Serbia. So social media supported and supplemented on-the-ground organizing, rather than simply unleashing democratic forces. Even in Asmaa Mahfouz's now-famous video blog, which some credit with launching the January 25 protests, she informs watchers that she's to get off the internet, because she’s on her way to hand out fliers in the street.

In cases beyond Egypt, the use of social media has markedly negative impacts on radical organizing, as Evgeny Morozov has persuasively argued in the cases of China, where the authoritarian regime deploys a small army of internet users to post pro-government propaganda, or Iran, where the Ahmadinejad government used internet and mobile device records to track down dissidents after the 2009-2010 election protests.

The focus on technology in the international media may also misrepresent the character of liberation movements -- hiding, for example, the important role played by women in the Arab Spring. Robin Morgan argues in “Women of the Arab Spring,” her article in the most recent Ms. Magazine, that when the mainstream media talked blogs, Facebook and Twitter, they focused on Zeid Al Heni and Google employee Wael Ghonim, not Tunisian feminist blogger Lina Ben Mhenni or even Asmaa Mahfouz and her viral video blog. That the face of “Facebook Revolutions” tends to be male says more about our perceptions of technology than about the reality of who is using online tools for progressive change.

While social media undoubtedly shaped the unfolding of liberation struggles in the Middle East and North Africa, to say that these were Facebook or Twitter revolutions is misleading. The focus on technical aspects of the Arab Spring marginalizes and minimizes the role of traditional organizing and downplays the risks and commitments made by ordinary people who put themselves, embodied and in real time, on the line for freedom.

The most troubling aspect of the myopic focus on “Liberation Technology” is the suggestion that if you add internet, you can produce instant revolution.* We need better stories about the relationship between technology and social change. As I write in  Digital Dead End,

[W]e do not have many stories that show us how hard, and how rewarding, it is to actually forge and maintain alliances across difference...Easier just to posit some mythical “Movement Moment” when differences are put aside, to deify a superhuman charismatic leader who turns divisiveness into coalition, or to mourn the sacrificial lambs who become a rallying cry for unity. Easier to ignore or forget the day-to-day heroism of ordinary people coming together to transform their world...This unattainable myth misrepresents collective process; it is a pale imitation of what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called "the long and bitter, but beautiful struggle for a new world.” We should demand more.

In the book, I also describe a model of liberatory technology education my collaborators and I called "Popular Technology." Grounded in popular education, it focuses on resisting oppression, building coalition across difference, and fostering participatory decision-making. Fighting exploitation, imperialism and violence may sound so last century, but there simply is no tech-fix for justice. As Andrew Feenberg reminds us, technology is not a destiny; it is a site of struggle.

 

*See, for example, New York Times reporting on the US State Department's “Wi-Fi in a Box” project.

References:

Egypt: The First Internet Revolt?

Women of the Arab Spring

Andrew Feenberg, Critical Theory of Technology, Oxford UP: 1991.  

 

 

Atlantis' Last Flight

Nicholas de Monchaux, author of Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo, on today’s final flight for NASA’s Space Shuttle Program:

We should remember that the image of the shuttle lifting off for the last time is, at its core, a larger sunset—the last, fading glimpse of the intense pressures of Cold-War politics that led to the marvelous images, and intense sacrifice of the midcentury manned space program. Like tectonic forces, these pressures led to the creation of shining diamonds in the fabric of the century, but remained dark and terrible in their origin. The next generation of US Manned space exploration—already bubbling to the surface—is likely to be much less epic, but the deeply rewarding prospect of human space exploration will continue to fuel our ambitions, and imagination.

To hear more from Nicholas and to learn about the development of the spacesuit as we know it, be sure to check out his book and his Science Friday interview.

 

Uncle Sam's Reading List

To get into the Independence Day 2011 spirit, we picked 11 books with “America” or “American” in the title to kick off the holiday weekend. Happy Fourth of July!

  Inventing American History by William Hogeland

American public history—in magazines and books, television documentaries, and museums—tends to celebrate its subject at all costs, even to the point of denial and distortion. This does us a great disservice, argues William Hogeland.  Looking at details glossed over in three examples of public history—the Alexander Hamilton revival, tributes to Pete Seeger and William F. Buckley, and the Constitution Center in Philadelphia—Hogeland considers what we lose when history is written to conform to political aims.

Why America Is Not a New Rome by Vaclav Smil

America's post–Cold War strategic dominance and its pre-recession affluence inspired pundits to make celebratory comparisons to ancient Rome at its most powerful. Now, with America no longer perceived as invulnerable, engaged in protracted fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, and suffering the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, comparisons are to the bloated, decadent, ineffectual later Empire. In Why America Is Not a New Rome, Vaclav Smil looks at these comparisons in detail. He finds profound differences.

 

After America’s Midlife Crisis by Michael Gecan

Gecan reveals an urban landscape in which careerism, nepotism, and greed are the principal movers in policy, while the institutions that preserve and advance communities—schools, churches, affordable housing, recreational opportunities—have fallen prey to the indifference of pols and developers and the shortsightedness of technocrats and shows how local experiments can create vibrant institutions that truly serve their constituents.

 

America's Food : What You Don't Know About What You Eat by Harvey Blatt

We don't think much about how food gets to our tables, or what had to happen to fill our supermarket's produce section with perfectly round red tomatoes and its meat counter with slabs of beautifully marbled steak. We don't realize that the meat in one fast-food hamburger may come from many different cattle raised in several different countries. In fact, most of us have a fairly abstract understanding of what happens on a farm. In America's Food, Harvey Blatt gives us the specifics.

The Passionate Mistakes and Intricate Corruption of One Girl in America by Michelle Tea

The too-smart, caustic, and radiant narrator of Passionate Mistakes is, at twenty-seven, an ex-Goth, ex-drummer, ex-straight girl, ex-lesbian separatist vegan graduate of vocational high school in the working class town of Chelsea, Massachusetts. Written with lyrical precision and charm, the novel describes a journey with no final destination, a fast-paced and picaresque road trip that yields a redemptive vision of an America that has nothing left to offer its youth.

 

America Starts Here: Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler edited by Ian Berry and Bill Arning

During their decade-long collaboration (1985-1995), Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler produced some of the most influential conceptual art projects of the time. Among their witty and stimulating installations and outdoor projects was Camouflaged History, a house painted in a U.S. Army-designed camouflage pattern using 72 commercial paint colors included in the municipally-approved "authentic colors" of historic Charleston, South Carolina.  Ericson and Ziegler took the whole country as their working space; but rather than impose a conspicuous work of art upon a site or situation, they devised projects that altered sites subtly, creating a patchwork of poetic narratives and histories to be excavated.

 

Inequality in America: What Role for Human Capital Policies? by James J. Heckman and Alan B. Krueger

The surge of inequality in income and wealth in the United States over the past twenty-five years has reversed the steady progress toward greater equality that had been underway throughout most of the twentieth century. This economic development has defied historical patterns and surprised many economists, producing vigorous debate. Inequality in America: What Role for Human Capital Policies? examines the ways in which human capital policies can address this important problem.

 

America as Second Creation: Technology and Narratives of New Beginnings by David E. Nye

After 1776, the former American colonies began to reimagine themselves as a unified, self-created community. Technologies had an important role in the resulting national narratives, and a few technologies assumed particular prominence. Among these were the axe, the mill, the canal, the railroad, and the irrigation dam. In this book David Nye explores the stories that clustered around these technologies. In doing so, he rediscovers an American story of origins, with America conceived as a second creation built in harmony with God's first creation.

 

Henry Hobson Richardson and the Small Public Library in America: A Study in Typology by Kenneth A. Breisch

One natural outcome of the educational reform movement of the 1840s was the growth of the American public library. Some 450 public libraries were built in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The most important and influential architect of the era who built libraries was Henry Hobson Richardson, perhaps best known for his design of Boston's Trinity Church.

 

What Does the World Want from America?: International Perspectives on US Foreign Policy edited by Alexander T. J. Lennon

In What Does the World Want from America?, writers from twelve countries or regions (Brazil, China, the European Union, France, Germany, India, Iran, Israel, Japan, Russia, Singapore, and South Africa) answer the question, "In an ideal world, what role would you want the United States to perform with your country and region?" Four analysts from the United States then respond.

 

The Bauhaus and America: First Contacts, 1919-1936 by Margret Kentgens-Craig

Although the Bauhaus existed for a mere fourteen years and boasted fewer than 1,300 students, its influence is felt throughout the world in numerous buildings, artworks, objects, concepts, and curricula. After the Bauhaus's closing in 1933, many of its protagonists moved to the United States, where their acceptance had to be cultivated. Margret Kentgens-Craig shows that the fame of the Bauhaus in America was the result not only of the inherent qualities of its concepts and products, but also of a unique congruence of cultural supply and demand, of a consistent flow of information, and of fine-tuned marketing.