13: Roaring Twenties

a thriving father and uncle Sigi (Sigmund Freud).

“Torch of Freedom” parade. Think about it — nowadays, feminist movements can be built in no less attractive light, and in essence to propagate something hidden, as deep as the participation of Bernays in the parade

Bernays took advantage of this period, taking full control of his knowledge of psychology and communication skills.

Edward Bernays is a person who is barely disccussed, but he is worth knowing.

modern cigarettes that will kill hundreds of thousands of people a year later

Group of Girls Puff at Cigarettes as a Gesture of “Freedom”’, read the front page of the <em>New York Times</em> on April 1st, 1929. It was no April Fools’ joke; rather, this spectacle of liberated, smoking women was one of Bernays’ most celebrated publicity stunts.

To get young feminists to light up cigarettes – torches of freedom – in public as an act of emancipation during New York’s Easter Parade. This, he believed, would make its way into the nation’s newspapers.

Bernays’ secretary

She had to pass herself off as a women’s rights advocate and drum up comrades-in-arms for the ‘feminist torches of freedom campaign’; no inference to American Tobacco was to be permitted.

In the interests of equality of the sexes and to fight another sex taboo I and other young women will light another torch of freedom by smoking cigarettes while strolling on Fifth Avenue Easter Sunday.’ These were the first lines of the telegram – signed by Bertha Hunt – which was sent to selected American debutantes.

When a reporter from the <em>New York World</em> approached Hunt to ask how she had arrived at the idea of a women’s smoking march, she answered that ‘she first got the idea for this campaign when a man with her in the street asked her to extinguish her cigaret [sic] as it embarrassed him. “I talked it over with my friends, and we decided it was high time something was done about the situation”.’

processed the findings of the blossoming psychological disciplines by coming up with new methods of manipulating the public.

Larry Tye described thus: ‘He generated events, the events generated news, and the news generated a demand for whatever he happened to be selling.’

He himself labelled it as the ‘creation of circumstances’, the staging of apparently spontaneous events to influence people’s behaviour, according to the wishes of the clients.

(employing a third, opinion-leading party as the mouthpiece for the client’s interests) using a PR tactic which at that time was novel but has since become common. He began to field ‘front groups’, that is, seemingly independent organisations which profess to support concerns of the common good: the Committee for the Study and Promotion of the Sanitary Dispensing of Foods and Drink; the Radio Institute of the Audible Arts; the Temperature Research Foundation; the Middle America Information Bureau – all seemingly innocuous associations that were, in reality, set up by Bernays solely for PR purposes.

‘We must shift America from a needs to a desires culture’, he wrote in 1927 in the <em>Harvard Business Review</em>. ‘People must be trained to desire, to want new things even before the old have been entirely consumed.’

‘If this [propaganda] can be used for war, it can be used for peace.’

He was considered vain, obtrusive and arrogant. It was said that he referred to his secretaries as ‘Little Miss Nitwits’ and that the word ‘failure’ was missing from his vocabulary (despite numerous setbacks

965 autobiography: ‘This shocked me, but I knew any human activity can be used for social purposes or misused for antisocial ones.’ Bernays frequently produced campaigns for charities free of charge, for example, that of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society. Bernays’ first piece of advice to Sylvia Lawry, the then chairperson was that: ‘The name Multiple Sclerosis is too difficult for the public. Shorten it to the initials MS.’ It was a recommendation the wisdom of which remains true to this day.

manufacturing of public approval

<p>In October 1990 on Capitol Hill, a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl named ‘Nayirah’ stated in a public hearing of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus that, while volunteering in a Kuwaiti hospital, she saw Iraqi soldiers take babies out of their incubators, leaving them ‘on the cold floor to die’. More than 700 TV stations broadcast the appearance of ‘Nurse Nayirah’, which shocked the US public and finally convinced it to take military action against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.</p> <p>Three months later Operation Desert Storm began. There was only one problem: the incubator story was not true and the 15-year-old ‘nurse’ turned out to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the US. This, however, did not come out until after the war was over when, in January 1992, it became known that the New York PR firm, Hill and Knowlton, was behind the story. Hill and Knowlton’s client was the front group Citizens for a Free Kuwait, an organisation funded by the Kuwaiti government in exile. It wanted to convince the US public to strike against Iraq and did so. This was what was meant by the ‘engineering of consent’.&nbsp;</p>

The essence of reality itself had begun to alter: what is an authentic event and what is merely an apparently authentic one? What is information and what is manipulation disguised as information?

‘If anything, the 21st century has witnessed the encroachment of Bernays’ ideas into every crevice of our lives’, concludes the historian Stuart Ewen in his introduction to Bernays’ classic text <em>Crystallizing Public Opinion</em>.

In October of 1929, Bernays also originated the now familiar "global media event," when he dreamed up "Light's Golden Jubilee," a worldwide celebratory spectacle commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the electric light bulb, sponsored-behind-the-scenes-by the General Electric Corporation.

Eddie Bernays

Public relations was about fashioning and projecting credible renditions of reality itself.

twentieth century preoccupation: the systematic molding of public opinion.

Repeatedly, he maintained that, while most people respond to their world instinctively, without thought, there exist an "intelligent few" who have been charged with the responsibility of contemplating and influencing the tide of history.

"just interrupt...the continuity of life in some way to bring about the [media] response.

t Josef Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, kept a copy of his 1923 groundbreaking book, <em>“Crystallizing Public Opinion,”</em> on his desk.

He recruited a willing editor from <em>House &amp; Garden</em> magazine to create menus suggesting cigarettes instead of dessert, and persuaded dance instructor Arthur Murray to say that women should smoke rather than overeat and embarrass themselves on the dance floor.

Years later, when research linking smoking to cancer was finally revealed, Bernays turned around and worked to have cigarette commercials banned from television. In 1972, Bernays told the <em>Boston Globe</em> that when he’d work for American Tobacco, “no one had yet discovered that cigarettes caused cancer.

werful their profession could be in shaping America’s economic, political, and cultural life. At work, he thought bigger and bolder than anyone had before.”

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 formed, and our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of…. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind.

Bernays was also Freud’s nephew twice over. His mother was Freud’s sister Anna, and his father, Ely Bernays, was the brother of Freud’s wife Martha.

Bernays later graduated from Cornell with a degree in agriculture. But instead of farming, he chose a career in journalism, eventually helping the <a href="https://theconversation.com/wilsons-long-shadow-over-obamas-white-house-33819">Woodrow Wilson</a> Administration promote the idea that US efforts in World War I were intended to bring democracy to Europe.

Yet propaganda had acquired a somewhat pejorative connotation (which would be further magnified during World War II), so Bernays promoted the term “public relations.”

He provided leaders the means to “control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it.” To do so, it was necessary to appeal not to the rational part of the mind, but the unconscious.

General Electric, Procter &amp; Gamble, and the American Tobacco Company, to media outlets like CBS and even politicians such as Calvin Coolidge. To counteract President Coolidge’s stiff image, Bernays organized “pancake breakfasts” and White House concerts with Al Jolson and other Broadway performers. With Bernays’ help, Coolidge won the 1924 election.

Bernays staged a demonstration at the 1929 Easter parade, having fashionable young women flaunt their “torches of freedom.”

Lucky Strikes by convincing women that the forest green hue of the cigarette pack was among the most fashionable of colors

soothing to the throat and slimming to the waistline.

When would find a pack of her Parliaments in their home, he would snap every one of them in half and throw them in the toilet. While promoting cigarettes as soothing and slimming, Bernays, it seems, was aware of some of the early studies linking smoking to cancer.

To convince kids that bathing could be fun, he sponsored soap sculpture competitions and floating contests. These were designed to prove that Ivory bars were more buoyant than competing products.

For Dixie cups, Bernays launched a campaign to scare people into thinking that only disposable cups were sanitary. As part of this campaign, he founded the Committee for the Study and Promotion of the Sanitary Dispensing of Food and Drink.

In the 1920s, Joseph Goebbels became an avid admirer of Bernays and his writings – despite the fact that Bernays was a Jew. When Goebbels became the minister of propaganda for the Third Reich, he sought to exploit Bernays’ ideas to the fullest extent possible. For example, he created a “Fuhrer cult” around Adolph Hitler.

Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter to warn President Franklin Roosevelt against allowing Bernays to play a leadership role in World War II, <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=pTr8AQAAQBAJ&amp;pg=PA185&amp;lpg=PA185&amp;dq=professional+poisoners+of+the+public+mind,+exploiters+of+foolishness,+fanaticism,+and+self-interest+%2B+felix+frankfurter&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=fKEUuS-08x&amp;sig=WaFO7n6JcvPVsXn1-Tu4AFR0aVM&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=QPmbVfP_FMrFggSOqqK4DQ&amp;ved=0CCIQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&amp;q=professional%20poisoners%20of%20the%20public%20mind%2C%20exploiters%20of%20foolishness%2C%20fanaticism%2C%20and%20self-interest%20%2B%20felix%20frankfurter&amp;f=false" data-evernote-id="665" class="js-evernote-checked">describing him</a> and his colleagues as “professional poisoners of the public mind, exploiters of foolishness, fanaticism, and self-interest.

There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the information by which to detect lies