FROM THEATRICAL AGENT TO CREATOR OF MODERN PROPAGANDA

Bernays at 89

“We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes are formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.” Edward Bernays, Propaganda (1928)

(Edward Bernays is often called the father of public relations and propaganda. Most arrive at his life around WWI when he worked for the Committee for Public Information (CPI). But the path to the great propagandist was a rather unusual one. Below is created from a mixture of my thoughts and various articles on Bernays)

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Public relations and propaganda pioneer Edward Bernays (1891-1995) was born to Anna and Eli Bernays. Anna was Sigmund Freud’s sister and Eli was the brother of Freud’s wife, Martha. Born in Vienna, Austria in 1891, Edward Bernays was an infant when he immigrated to New York City with his parents in 1892. He grew up in the Bronx and graduated from Cornell University’s College of Agriculture in 1912 so he could work as a grain merchant like his father.  Instead, he wrote for National Nurseryman, a journal for growers of trees and shrubs.

Bernays in the early 1920s

He went on to work for the New York Produce Exchange, and then for the Louis Dreyfus Company, a merchant for agricultural goods. Through a contact with an old school friend, he got a job as editor of the Medical Review of Reviews and Dietetic and Hygienic Gazette, a publication that included expert opinions about health issues that was distributed free to physicians in the United States. While working there from 1912 to 1915, he published a favorable review of Damaged Goods, an English translation of Les Avariés by Eugène Brieux. Bernays’ positive review of this controversial play that dealt with venereal disease won him friends in the theater world.

His new connections in the theatre led to the next career for Bernays as a press agent for theater performers including Italian operatic tenor Enrico Caruso and the Ballets Russes, an influential French ballet company founded by Sergei Diaghilev that performed in Europe from 1909 to 1929.

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During World War I (1914-1918), Bernays worked on the Committee for Public Information (CPI) to popularize the war, persuading musicians to include positive songs about military service in their repertoire and enlisting companies to distribute literature about U.S. war aims abroad. He attended the Paris Peace Conference as a CPI employee, writing later that “Paris became a training school without instructors in the study of public opinion.”

After the war, he used the powers of persuasion that he had learned in the CPI in New York as Public Relations Counsel, a title he invented for himself. Having seen how effective propaganda could be during war, Bernays wondered whether it might prove equally useful during peacetime. 

One of Bernays’ most famous public opinion coups was his first campaign so-called the “torches of freedom” campaign. This involved Bernays’ efforts to convert women to smoking on behalf of the American Tobacco Company by portraying cigarettes as slimming, elegant and symbols of emancipation or “torches of freedom.”

In the year 1928, the American Tobacco Company appointed Edward Barney to promote and sell cigarettes to women. In those days, there were several challenges to getting women to smoke cigarettes given the social stigma attached to “smoking women.” Bernays’ client, George W. Hill, president of the American Tobacco Company, had asked him: “How can we get women to smoke on the street. They’re smoking indoors. But, damn it, if they spend half the time outdoors and we can get ’em to smoke outdoors, we’ll damn near double our female market. Do something. Act!”

In the background, the US was experiencing the winds of change with intense women liberation activism that started in 1920 demanding equal rights to women (among them, the right to vote). Edward Bernays sensed a golden opportunity to further his goals by riding on this new wave that was sweeping America.

The Torches of Freedom Campaing of 1929

In the Easter Parade of 1929, Barney smartly planted his secretary Helen who created quite a sensation by lighting a cigarette right in the middle of the 5th Avenue Street. Helen was followed by 10 other women in trendy outfits each carrying a cigarette and posing for the photographers (everything of course arranged by Bernays). The next day New York Times ran a story titled “Group of Girls Puff at Cigarettes as a Gesture of Freedom.” This campaign, which was called “Torches of Freedom,” and was one of the most successful campaigns in the history of a Tobacco company leading to an exponential growth in the sales of cigarettes (and also cases of lung cancer) in the years to come.

Ad for American Tobacco Company’s Lucky Strike in 1930

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Propaganda had acquired a negative connotation during the world war. So, Bernays promoted the new term with little negative connotation: public relations.

To understand public relations, it is important to compare it to advertising. Although both PR and advertising are forms of marketing, they are different in a key way: Advertising is a direct means of marketing, while public relations is an indirect one. Ads are intrusive and more focused on evoking a response, while PR is passive and with an emphasis on a brand’s narrative and reputation. Using media theorist Marshall McLuhan’s observation that “The medium is the message” one could observe that advertising is the “message” while public relations the “medium.” For McLuhan, the medium was more of an invisible environment containing the visible things of life.

Bernays wrote two influential books during his life: Crystalizing Public Opinion (1923) and Propaganda (1928). In Propaganda, he described the work of “invisible wirepullers” in the new profession he invented called public relations. Today, we call it propaganda. As he observed in Propaganda:

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes are formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.”

Sound familiar to our world today?

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NOTES

“What we’re dealing with is that people will believe me more if you call me doctor.”

Bernay’s most famous book Propaganda in PDF (1928)

Bernays at 102 in Cambridge, Massachusetts (one year before his death at 103)