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This article returns to the key episodes in communications’ constitution as an academic discipline in the United States, holding that the conjunctural conditions linked to World War Two marked both the social conditions of the field’s institutionalization as well as the epistemological orientation of a then-new discipline. Certain work undertaken by members of the first Chicago School led to defining communications as the sharing of experience and process of creating social links between members of a democratic community, but the particular conditions and constraints of the militarized 1940's oriented research towards positivist approaches marked by a behaviorist epistemology and quantitative methodologies. A paradigm of communication as persuasion thus gained a significant foothold in this fiels of study.