Propaganda. Edward Bernays

way entail the maddening of multitudes. Admakers—researchers, creative directors, copywriters, art directors, photographers—labor gradually toward mass reactions that, in general, are not explosive and immediate but incremental, individual, dispersed, half-conscious. As this book demonstrates, the public relations expert likewise seeks to make a gradual impression, after long research and sober planning. In the hearts of such methodical manipulators there would seem to be no streak of mad commitment, as their enterprise is not infuriating and millennial but businesslike, mundane and rational.

And yet those who do such work are also prone to lose touch with reality; for in their universe the truth is ultimately what the client wants the world to think is true. Whatever cause they serve or goods they sell, effective propagandists must believe in it—or at least momentarily believe that they believe in it. Even he or she who propagates commodities must be to some extent a true believer. “To advertise a product you must believe in it. To convince you must be convinced yourself,” observes Marcel Bleustein-Blanchet, longtime head of Publicis, the giant French ad agency.¹²“I guess I really believe all those schmaltzy things I say in the ads. It seems to have nothing to do with the hardheaded strategies I can work out for marketing products” admits Shirley Polykoff, Clairol’s legendary adwoman (“Does she…. Or doesn’t she? Only her hairdresser knows for sure!”).¹³

      And even in the magisterial Bernays we note the tendency to let his clients’ needs dictate “the truth.” Such is the major occupational hazard facing all full-time propagandists—even this most cautious and painstaking of professionals, whose celebrated title, “Counsel on Public Relations,” implied not just a heightened status but a certain lawyerly impartiality. Bernays invented the authoritative-seeming “sponsoring committee” as a way to hype his client’s wares. (He first used this now-venerable gimmick in early 1913, assembling a “committee” of physicians to approve the Broadway production of Eugene Brieux’s play Damaged Goods, which dealt forthrightly with the issue of venereal disease.) A few years later he used that device again, to sell the American people on the “hearty breakfast” of fried eggs served on strips of bacon. Whereas “the old type of salesmanship” would merely place a lot of ads exhorting everyone to eat more bacon, “because it is good, because it gives you energy,” etc., Bernays’s approach, as ever, was more “scientific”:

      The newer salesmanship, understanding the group structure of society and the principles of mass psychology, would first ask, “Who is it that influences the eating habits of the public?” The answer, obviously, is: “The physicians.” The new salesman will then suggest to physicians to say publicly that it is wholesome to eat bacon. He knows as a mathematical certainty, that large numbers of persons will follow the advice of their doctors, because he understands the psychological relation of dependence of men upon their physicians.

This was all very well; and yet the impressive scientism of Bernays’s way of selling bacon contradicts the inconvenient scientific fact that eating bacon has turned out to be not “wholesome” after all, what with its high fat content and cholesterol. Certainly this risk was not yet clear to the American medical establishment when, in the mid-Twenties, Bernays pitched the “hearty breakfast” for the Beechnut Packing Company. It is significant, however, that, in his universe, it is the preeminent consensus that determines what is “true.” This is not to fault him for relying on the doctors of his day, nor to suggest that he would have tried to underplay the risks of fatty food if he had known about them. Indeed, Bernays was, in this regard, exceptionally ethical. Once the toxic side effects of smoking had become impossible to talk away, Bernays not only gave up working for tobacco companies, but became a vocal critic of tobacco, lobbying staunchly (and unsuccessfully) to get the Public Relations Society of America to enjoin its members not to work in any way to spread the habit.¹⁴

      Bernays can only be applauded for his scrupulous position, which reflected his lifelong commitment to a stringent code of ethics for all p.r. specialists. But the issue here is not so much ethical as epistemological. In a world under the influence of propaganda experts, how does a costly truth get out into the world as truth? When is an idea no longer just a crackpot theory, a paranoid delusion of the left or right, but something that must be, and finally is, accepted? Bernays’s eventual stand on cigarettes was admirable indeed, especially considering his own prodigious work, from the mid-Thirties, for George Washington Hill’s American Tobacco Company. (The propagandist helped Hill sell a lot of Lucky Strikes.) The risks of smoking were, however, evident before the antismoking propaganda started picking up momentum in the Fifties. As early as 1941, the independent journalist George Seldes was intrepidly reporting on the pertinent medical discoveries in his tiny muckraking journal, In Fact. With the exception of the Reader’s Digest, no other American news source, print or broadcast, dared even to hint at what tobacco scientists were finding out—an advertising-induced blackout that persisted, by and large, until the Seventies. Such was the clout of the tobacco companies, which used Bernays’s sort of propaganda genius to keep most people blithely unaware of what they were inhaling.

      Although Bernays did see the light about tobacco, then, and did the honorable thing, the fact is that corporate propaganda squelches inconvenient journalistic enterprise, so that early warnings fail to resonate, and growing ills receive no mass attention. As with the risks of smoking, so it has been, until very recently, with global warming, and so it is today with the carcinogenicity of cell phones, and the toxic side effects of fluoride, just to name a few underreported threats to public health. In all such cases, the investigative journalist is the propagandist’s natural enemy, as the former serves the public interest, while the latter tends to work against it.

      Thus Bernays expresses here a hostile view of muckraking journalism, which would always becloud the sunny view that he was hired to propagate. That that view might be false, or incomplete, is a possibility that just does not come up in Propaganda. “Big business studies every move which may express its true personality,” the author writes, implying clearly that the corporate personality is always somehow likeable, attractive and benign—a notion as unsound as any Ptolemaic theorem or medieval superstition. Concerning cigarettes, the counter-propaganda finally overwhelmed the pro-tobacco propaganda that had long prevented any public talk about the actual effects of smoking. Other of Bernays’s campaigns were likewise meant to preempt all discussion, if not all conception, of some rational alternatives to the established ways of doing business.

In 1929, for instance, Bernays mounted “Light’s Golden Jubilee.” This grand occasion, featuring a much hyped joint appearance of Thomas Edison and Henry Ford, was ostensibly an earnest and spontaneous celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of Edison’s invention of the light bulb. In fact, the “Jubilee” was but a stroke of propaganda on behalf of General Electric and its National Electric Light Association (NELA), which was the secret means of GE’s stranglehold on America’s electric power. From 1919 until 1934, NELA carried out the largest peacetime propaganda drive in U.S. history, intended to discourage public ownership of the utilities. That private capital should wield complete control over the nation’s power supply was a notion evidently not to be debated.¹⁵

Similarly, in 1953 Bernays helped put across the myth that Guatemala was at risk of communist subversion—a serviceable legend that the propagandist actually believed, as he makes clear in his memoirs.¹⁶ Bernays was then employed by the United Fruit Company, at whose behest the Eisenhower administration used the CIA to overthrow the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz. Thus was Guatemala forced to start its gruesome modern history as a quasifascist oligarchy. From that point on, the bananas and pineapples would continue to be safely picked by inexpensive native labor under careful watch, with all the profits flowing north. The possibility of some other, less explosive, noncolonial arrangement was clearly not to be imagined by Bernays, just as United Fruit could not imagine it; and so it never could become a public issue