Alfred J. De Grazia, Jr

Alfred J. De Grazia, Jr
Personal details
Born	29 December 1919
Died	13 July 2014
Nativity	United States
Military service
Allegiance	United States
Branch	United States Army
ASN	01043313
Rank	Captain

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Alfred J. de Grazia Jr. (29 December 1919–13 July 2014) was a United States Army officer and Ritchie Boy who served in psychological warfare, including with the 1st Mobile Radio Broadcasting Company.

Biography

De Grazia attended the University of Chicago, receiving an A.B. There in 1939, attended law school at Columbia University from 1940 to 1941, and in 1948 earned a Ph.D. In political science from the University of Chicago. And August Heckscher in the New York Herald Tribune said it was "A sober scholarly volume, authoritative in its field." Charles E. Merriam, founder of the behavioristic approach in political science, wrote: "All scholars in the field of political science and particularly those in the area of representation are under lasting obligation to the writer of this volume for a learned and helpful treatment of one of the major problems of our times. The book will enrich the literature on this very important subject."

In World War II, de Grazia served in the United States Army, rising from private to captain. He specialized in mechanized warfare, intelligence and psychological warfare. He received training in this then new field in Washington D.C. And the newly established Camp Ritchie in Maryland. He served with the 3rd, 5th and 7th Armies and as a liaison officer with the British 8th Army. He took part in six campaigns, from North Africa to Italy (Battle of Monte Cassino) to France and Germany.

De Grazia co-authored a report on psychological warfare for the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force. By the end of the war, he was Commanding Officer of the Psychological Warfare Propaganda Team attached to the headquarters of the 7th Army. Scott Turow cites the letters as being among the sources for his 2005 novel Ordinary Heroes

De Grazia wrote manuals of psychological warfare for the CIA for the Korean War and organized and investigated psychological operations for the United States Department of Defense during the Vietnam War. His reports on psychological operations, now largely declassified, include Target Analysis and Media in Propaganda to Audiences Abroad (1952), Elites Analysis (1955), as well as Psychological Operations in Vietnam (1968). On October 31, 2014, he was posthumously designated a Distinguished Member of the Regiment of Psychological Operations of the Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. He is also a posthumous recipient of the Robert A. McClure Medal for Exemplary Service in Psychological Operations.

De Grazia was an assistant professor of political science at the University of Minnesota from 1948 to 1950 before joining the political science faculty of Brown University as an associate professor. One reviewer of it wrote: "Mr. De Grazia has undertaken to dissect the whole body of political science... He achieves his purpose with unfailing clarity, and his readers will learn from him the range, the goals, and the techniques of the study of politics..."

In 1955, he failed to receive academic tenure at Stanford after conducting a study of "the origins and present restrictions on the political activities of workers" for a foundation. He left the institution in 1957. From 1959 to 1983, he was a tenured professor of government and social theory at New York University.

In 1957 de Grazia founded PROD: Political Research: Organization and Design, which was described as "probably...the authentic spokesman for the newest currents among the avant-garde of political behavior". It was later renamed The American Behavioral Scientist, an academic journal devoted to the Chicago school of behaviorist sociology. In 1965, he began the Universal Reference System, the first computerized reference system in the social sciences.

De Grazia was a staunch supporter of the power of Congress against the encroachments of the presidency, which he called the "Executive Force" According to Raymond Tatalovich and Steven Schier:

The American Enterprise Institute published several of his books on the subject, including Congress and the Presidency: their Role in Modern Times, a debate with Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., who defended the case for a strong presidency.

In the early 1970s, de Grazia founded the "University of the New World" in Haute-Nendaz Switzerland, as an unstructured alternative to American universities. He invited Beat author William S. Burroughs to teach at it. In his biography of Burroughs, Ted Morgan described the students that it attracted as "drifters and dropouts on the international hippie circuit"; he suggested that this resulted in a culture clash with the "prim Swiss", and that the university lacked adequate facilities or a sound business model.

In 2002, de Grazia was appointed visiting professor in the Department of Mathematics, Statistics, Computing and Applications of the University of Bergamo in Italy. He had previously been a visiting lecturer at the University of Rome, the University of Bombay, the University of Istanbul, and the University of Gothenburg in Sweden.

Alfred de Grazia was married to Jill Oppenheim (d. 1996) from 1942 to 1971, to Nina Mavridis from 1972 to 1973,

He had seven children with Jill Oppenheim. One of them, Carl, a musician, died in 2000. One of his daughters, Victoria de Grazia, a Professor of Contemporary History at Columbia University, is a member of the American Academy.

The entire WWII correspondence between Alfred de Grazia and Jill Oppenheim, comprising about a thousand letters dated from February 1942 to September 1945, survived and was published and placed online, edited by Ami Hueber de Grazia.

At Camp Ritchie and in Washington he worked with psychological-warfare officers forming the 1st Mobile Radio Broadcasting Company (1st MRBC), including Martin Herz and later colleagues such as Hans Habe. In A Taste of War (chapter 5, “A Spy Camp Near Washington”), de Grazia describes OSS liaison work, Italian-language preparation for the unit, and the company’s embarkation toward the Mediterranean theater in May 1943.

Research notes

• Propaganda Officer
• Transferred to PWB 10/44

Gallery

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Technical record

Field	Imported value
MRBC1	1
row_source	demographics

Sources

• Dan Gross research archive (miscellaneous timeline-adjacent documents; not uploaded): ALFRED DE GRAZIA - A TASTE OF WAR.doc
• Alfred de Grazia, A Taste of War, chapter 5 “A Spy Camp Near Washington”
• Alfred de Grazia, A Taste of War, chapter 5 “A Spy Camp Near Washington” (grazian-archive.com)
• Wikipedia: Alfred de Grazia
• Camp Ritchie Museum, Inc. (The Ritchie History Museum), Classes 1–31 roster data
• Dan Gross research spreadsheets, including original Excel timeline/roster work, combined with other research and records
• NARA World War II Army enlistment records (where a NARA ASN is present)
• 1940 U.S. Census (where a census match is present)