Propaganda. Edward Bernays

Polykoff, Does She…. Or Doesn’t She?: And How She Did It (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1975), p. 38.

14 On Bernays’s anti-tobacco lobbying efforts, see John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, Toxic Sludge Is Good for You: Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1995), p. 32.

15 And yet it was debated, once that mammoth propaganda campaign was exposed by the Federal Trade Commission in a harrowing report of many volumes. Several books were written on the scandal, which has evidently been forgotten. See, for example, Ernest Henry Gruening, The Public Pays: A Study of Power Propaganda (New York: The Vanguard Press, 1931), and Jack Levin, Power Ethics (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1931).

16 Bernays tells the story of his work on Guatemala in Biography of an Idea, pp. 744-75. For a clearer and more comprehensive treatment of the coup in Guatemala, and the role played in it by Bernays’s client, the United Fruit Company,, see Stephen C. Schlesinger, Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer, Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala, rev. ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999).

17 Arthur Ponsonby, Falsehood in Wartime: Propaganda Lies of the First World War (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1928).

18 It is notable that, within the confraternity of propagandists, propaganda was a word that could, apparently, sometimes be frankly used in its old, neutral sense—even in the Thirties, when U.S. anti-propaganda sentiment was at its height. In one advertising textbook, there is this statement on behalf of “educational pictures” (i.e. propaganda films): “In the field of propagandism there is hardly a more powerful method of arousing and controlling public opinion” (Carl Richard Greer, Advertising and Its Mechanical Reproduction [New York: Tudor Publishing, 1931], p. 68). Such casual professional use of the forbidden term is commonplace today within the U.S. intelligence community, notwithstanding the routine pejorative use of “propaganda” in the propaganda works deployed by that community.

       CHAPTER I

       ORGANIZING CHAOS

      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 molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society.

      Our invisible governors are, in many cases, unaware of the identity of their fellow members in the inner cabinet.

      They govern us by their qualities of natural leadership, their ability to supply needed ideas and by their key position in the social structure. Whatever attitude one chooses toward this condition, it remains a fact that in almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons—a trifling fraction of our hundred and twenty million—who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world.

      It is not usually realized how necessary these invisible governors are to the orderly functioning of our group life. In theory, every citizen may vote for whom he pleases. Our Constitution does not envisage political parties as part of the mechanism of government, and its framers seem not to have pictured to themselves the existence in our national politics of anything like the modern political machine. But the American voters soon found that without organization and direction their individual votes, cast, perhaps, for dozens of hundreds of candidates, would produce nothing but confusion. Invisible government, in the shape of rudimentary political parties, arose almost overnight. Ever since then we have agreed, for the sake of simplicity and practicality, that party machines should narrow down the field of choice to two candidates, or at most three or four.

      In theory, every citizen makes up his mind on public questions and matters of private conduct. In practice, if all men had to study for themselves the abstruse economic, political, and ethical data involved in every question, they would find it impossible to come to a conclusion without anything. We have voluntarily agreed to let an invisible government sift the data and high-spot the outstanding issue so that our field of choice shall be narrowed to practical proportions. From our leaders and the media they use to reach the public, we accept the evidence and the demarcation of issues bearing upon public question; from some ethical teacher, be it a minister, a favorite essayist, or merely prevailing opinion, we accept a standardized code of social conduct to which we conform most of the time.

      In theory, everybody buys the best and cheapest commodities offered him on the market. In practice, if everyone went around pricing, and chemically tasting before purchasing, the dozens of soaps or fabrics or brands of bread which are for sale, economic life would be hopelessly jammed. To avoid such confusion, society consents to have its choice narrowed to ideas and objects brought to it attention through propaganda of all kinds. There is consequently a vast and continuous effort going on to capture our minds in the interest of some policy or commodity or idea.

      It might be better to have, instead of propaganda and special pleading, committees of wise men who would choose our rulers, dictate our conduct, private and public, and decide upon the best types of clothes for us to wear and the best kinds of food for us to eat. But we have chosen the opposite method, that of open competition. We must find a way to make free competition function with reasonable smoothness. To achieve this society has consented to permit free competition to be organized by leadership and propaganda.

      Some of the phenomena of this process are criticized—the manipulation of news, the inflation of personality, and the general ballyhoo by which politicians and commercial products and social ideas are brought to the consciousness of the masses. The instruments by which public opinion is organized and focused may be misused. But such organization and focusing are necessary to orderly life.

      As civilization has become more complex, and as the need for invisible government has been increasingly demonstrated, the technical means have been invented and developed by which opinion may be regimented.

      With the printing press and the newspaper, the railroad, the telephone, telegraph, radio and airplanes, ideas can be spread rapidly and even instantaneously all over the whole of America.

      H. G. Wells senses the vast potentialities of these inventions when he writes in the New York Times:

      “Modern means of communication—the power afforded by print, telephone, wireless and so forth, of rapidly putting through directive strategic or technical conceptions to a great number of cooperating centers, of getting quick replies and effective discussion—have opened up a new world of political processes. Ideas and phrases can now be given an effectiveness greater than the effectiveness of any personality and stronger than any sectional interest. The common design can be documented and sustained against perversion and betrayal. It can be elaborated and developed steadily and widely without personal, local and sectional misunderstanding.”

      What Mr. Wells says of political processes is equally true of commercial and social processes and all manifestations of mass activity. The groupings and affiliations of society today are no longer subject to “local and sectional” limitations. When the Constitution was adopted, the unit of organization was the village community, which produced the greater part of its own necessary commodities and generated