vealed the irrationality of racial and ethnic prejudice.

Four separate questionnaires measured anti-Semitism, ethnocentrism in general, political and economic conservatism, and "authoritarianism." The last of these questionnaires, the famous F (fascism) scale, attempted to overcome certain difficulties that arose in the earlier stages of research. From the beginning, the investigators had introduced their questionnaires to subjects as a "public opinion inventory—not as a study of prejudice." Hoping to "prevent undue alarm," especially among conservative respondents, they included instructions that misrepresented the purpose of their research. "There are no 'right' or 'wrong' answers. The best answer is your personal opinion. " ^* This deception, however, did not altogether succeed in penetrating the "pseudodemocratic facade" that concealed "potentially antidemocratic" personality traits. Nor was it always possible, on the scales measuring anti-Semitism and ethnocentrism, to construct questions that would be "appealing and 'easy to fall for' "—that would "express subtle hostility without seeming to offend the democratic values which most prejudiced people feel they must maintain." Even the conservatism scale, designed to reveal the "psychological affinity between conservatism and ethnocentrism," produced correlations that "did not approach being high enough." The conservatism scale, moreover, was "too explicitly ideological," consisting of items that "might be too readily associated with prejudice in some logical or automatic way." The F scale, a measure of psychological "tendencies" that reflected "deeper, often unconscious forces," allegedly confirmed the hypothesis that "prefascist tendencies" had their roots in a personality structure characterized by aggressiveness, destructive cynicism, moral rigidity, intolerance of ambiguity, punitiveness, ego weakness, "failure in superego internalization," sadomasochism, and a "preoccupation with the more primitive aspects of

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Adorno et al. approached their subjects in the same spirit in which Thurman Arnold thought enlightened administrators should approach the general public—with every intention to deceive. The backwardness of American political culture, as liberals and radicals saw it, required such a strategy. Those who sought to "educate" the public could never avow their real intentions. Thus C. L. R. James saw Martin Luther King as a "Marxist-Leninist" forced to preach a milder message, a sentimental Christian message of brotherly love, from his pulpit.

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