“Human Nature in Action”: Harold Lasswell, NBC Radio, and the Psychotherapy Program for the American Masses

In 1939 and 1940, the renowned political scientist Harold Lasswell wrote and hosted over 40 episodes of a radio show, Human Nature in Action , for the National Broadcasting Corporation. The program was meant to adjust listeners to the experience of psychological insecurities generated by American life—insecurities Lasswell believed would engender political unrest if not properly managed. In uncovering the archives of the show, which have gone almost entirely unexamined to date, this article not only explains why one of the most famous political scientists of the mid-twentieth century believed the American public needed to be subjected to such a program of mass psychotherapy and why the nation’s largest broadcaster agreed to support it. It also invites reconsideration of the ways in which popular political commentary today—even when it represents otherwise diverse ideological perspectives—remains attached to Lasswellian narratives of anxiety as dangerous to a “healthy” democratic polity.