Herbert Gans, leading sociologist and media analyst, dies at 97

Independent

22-04-2025

Herbert Gans, a groundbreaking sociologist and media analyst who advocated for greater diversity and public participation in everything from the suburbs and the arts to the voices that shape the news, died Monday at age 97.
His death was confirmed by his son, David Gans, who said he died at his Manhattan home after a lengthy illness.
Author of such influential works as 'The Urban Villagers' and 'The Levittowners,' Herbert Gans was a refugee from Nazi Germany who liked to say he viewed his adopted country through the eyes of an outsider. He called himself a 'participant-observer,' combining research and direct experience and lending crucial perspective on municipal planning, attitudes toward race and poverty, mass communication and cultural tastes.
A professor emeritus at Columbia University and former president of the American Sociological Association, he believed in making scholarly work accessible, and was a popular commentator and prolific essay writer. He served on the committee that prepared the Kerner Report, the 1968 government study that warned the country was 'moving toward two societies, one Black, one white — separate and unequal.' In 1964, he testified on behalf of Lenny Bruce when the comedian was on trial for obscenity.
Prolific writer and 'participant observer'
Gans wrote often about the local impact of government policy. In 'The Urban Villagers,' released in 1962, he chronicled (and lived in) a blue-collar Italian-American section of Boston's West End that would soon be torn down in favor of more expensive housing. The sociologist Nathan Glazer would praise the book's critique of 'urban renewal' and detailed portrait of those displaced for describing 'truthfully and without damaging preconceptions a part of American reality.'
'The Levittowners,' published in 1967, countered the prevalent feeling of the time that suburbs bred conformity and despair. Gans lived for two years in a New Jersey suburb designed by William Levitt, whose 'Levittowns' helped define the modern bedroom community. Gans didn't dispute that boredom and homogeneity existed in the suburbs, but concluded that most of the residents were satisfied; the suburbs were less likely to change the people who moved there than to provide what they had been looking for.
'I should like to emphasize once more that whatever its imperfections, Levittown is a good place to live,' Gans wrote. '(T)he most urgent priority is to make the benefits of suburban living available to the poor and nonwhite families, now condemned to slum ghettos, who want to give their children and themselves a better life beyond the city limits.'
Gans' 'Deciding What's News,' which came out in 1979, was a snapshot of the peak of print journalism and network power. Focusing on the evening broadcasts of NBC and CBS and the news magazines Time and Newsweek, he spent extensive time with reporters in the 1960s and '70s and noted what they covered, what they didn't cover and the thinking behind their choices, whether the pressures of executives, concerns about objectivity or changes in public concerns.
He found the news-gathering process to be honest and well intended. But Gans worried that organizations were more invested in stability and the status quo than in fully informing the public, with journalists drawing upon familiar sources in government and business and spending much of their private time with those of their social class. As a solution, Gans proposed 'Multiperspectivism,' allowing everyone from radical leftists to religious fundamentalists to express their views.
'For those who feel, as I do, that the interests of diverse groups have priority over the needs of nation and society, multiperspectival news and some decentralization of the national media are preferable,' he wrote. 'It would be a good deal more effective if it coincided with widespread public demand for greater popular representation in the economy and the polity.'
Gans' other books included 'Middle American Individualism,' 'The War Against the Poor' and 'People, Plans and Policies.' In 'Imagining America in 2033,' published in 2009, he outlined his hopes for a 'fairer economy, a more democratic polity, and institutions that cater to a greater extent to the people they are supposed to serve.'
A strong belief in the importance of diversity
Born in Cologne, Germany to middle-class Jewish parents, Gans and has family fled the Nazis in 1939, moving first to England and settling in Chicago in 1940. Gans became a naturalized citizen in 1945 and served in the Army in 1945-46. He had already liked reading sociology in high school and studied it as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, where he became close to such faculty members as the social scientist Martin Meyerson and David Reisman, the future author of 'The Lonely Crowd,' the classic portrait of social anxiety in 1950s America. Gans received a master's in sociology from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D., in 1957, from the University of Pennsylvania.
He taught at the University of Pennsylvania and Teachers College before joining Columbia in 1971 and remaining until 2007. He also worked in local government, as an assistant planner for the Chicago Housing Authority, and at the federal level with the predecessor to the Department of Housing and Urban Development. He was married twice, most recently to Louise Gruner.
Gans was a highly educated, liberal Democrat whose belief in diversity meant he resisted imposing his tastes, whether upon his neighbors in Levittown or upon his readers. In the 1974 book 'Popular Culture and High Culture,' he disputed the idea that so-called elite tastes were superior to those of the masses and criticized scholars who followed 'their own standard of the good life.'
He wrote, 'all people have a right to the culture they prefer, regardless of whether it is high or popular. The book is thus an argument for cultural democracy and an argument against the idea that only the cultural expert knows what is good for people and for society.'