We didn’t used to be so obsessed with creativity. The word “creativity,” Franklin reports, “has only been a regular part of our vocabulary since the middle of the twentieth century.” The first usage Franklin can find dates back only to 1875, and the earliest dictionary definition came as late as 1966. Before 1940, the preferred term was creativeness, but even that word lacked much cultural currency. Creative as an adjective, Franklin explains, used to be a term neither of praise nor criticism; “generative” would be a decent contemporary synonym. “If you had told someone in 1900 that they were ‘creative,’” Franklin writes, “they would likely have responded, ‘creative of what?’” In the 1940s, when Joseph Schumpeter wrote of “creative destruction,” he wasn’t flattering capitalists (as today is often supposed) by comparing them to paradigm-changing genius scientists or artists. He was merely saying that new stuff smashed up old stuff.
Like tract housing, rock and roll, and the Pill, the cult of creativity was a post–World War II phenomenon, driven “by a concern not for art per se but for inventiveness in science, technology, consumer products, and advertising.” This was the era of David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd (1950) and William Whyte’s The Organization Man (1956). White-collar jobs were displacing blue-collar jobs (the former exceeded the latter for the first time in 1956), and corporate conformity risked deadening American capitalism. “How may we rescue talented individuals,” asked a 1961 Rockefeller Brothers Fund report, “from the lowered aspirations, the boredom, and the habits of mediocrity so often induced by life in a large and complex organization?”
Creativity was corporate America’s answer. “Unlike genius,” Franklin writes, “creativity could be said to exist in everyone, and in that sense was both more democratic and (more importantly, perhaps) more useful for managers overseeing scores or hundreds of thousands of employees.”
The newly created National Science Foundation poured a fortune into research on the nature of creativity. So did the Pentagon, spurred on by Sputnik, and the major philanthropies. Test subjects were handed a brick and asked to enumerate different uses for it. Or they were given a word and asked to identify anagrams. Or they were given an illustration and asked to tell a story that corresponded to it. Their scores on such tests would then be compared to their IQ tests to establish whether creativity could be identified as something distinct from mere intelligence. No one thought to ask whether either test truly measured what it purported to identify. A psychologist named Ellis Paul Torrance developed a Torrance Test for Creative Thinking for measuring creativity. This was used widely in schools from the 1960s through the 1980s until a longitudinal study demonstrated that it didn’t work.