Long ago – almost one hundred years ago – the United States was a very different place. Over 100,000 men were dead from a European war most Americans wanted nothing to do with, and a consumerist frenzy was on the rise. Women began to smoke cigarettes to symbolize their freedom from the yoke of male rulership, calling the death sticks “liberty torches.” Even the American diet was changing; a “hearty” meal of bacon and eggs became the new norm for the Yankee breakfast. So what do all of these changes have in common? The answer is one man: Edward Louis Bernays.
Edward, born in 1891, was the son of Ely and Anna Bernays, two New Yorkers freshly emigrated from Austria. The Bernays family had rather notable connections back in their homeland: Ely’s sister was the wife of world-renowned psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, and Anna was Freud’s sister. Throughout his life, Edward would consult his uncle in Vienna on matters concerning the human mind.
During the First World War, Edward volunteered to work on the US Government’s Committee on Public Information (CPI), headed-up by George Creel. The goal of the Committee was to essentially “sell” the war to the American public. An unprecedented propaganda effort thus swept the United States, going so far as to depict the German nation as a gigantic, fanged gorilla clutching the fair maiden of western society. The CPI used fear mixed with patriotism to convince Americans that this foreign war was not only just, but that it was necessary.
Bernays proved himself as a propagandist under Creel, and was invited to accompany President Woodrow Wilson to Paris for the 1919 Peace Talks. His experience during the war had shown him the malleability of the “public mind,” and upon leaving Paris he decided that “if you could use propaganda for war, you could certainly use it for peace.” [COTS, 8:05-8:39]
Because the word “propaganda” had gotten a bad wrap during the war, being associated with the “vile” Germans, Bernays constructed a new, more palatable term for his line of work: public relations. As an expert public relations counsel, Bernays doubled the consumer market for the American Tobacco Company by convincing women that smoking would liberate them from their masculine oppressors; he convinced Americans that a big breakfast of chicken fetus and pig stomach was the healthy choice while working for Beechnut Packing Company; while working for General Electric, he put on a six month long celebration commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the light bulb, culminating in the dedication of the Edison Institute of Technology by President Hoover himself. Mr. Bernays certainly knew how to influence people.
In 1928, Bernays wrote a book – a manual of sorts – aptly entitled Propaganda. In it, he laid out the specific techniques the propagandist (or “public relations counsel”) could use to carefully and deliberately guide the masses. Bernays’ utopian outlook is made clear in this book, in which he argues, says commentator Mark Crispin Miller, that
The world informed by ‘public relations’ will be but ‘a smoothly functioning society,’ where all of us are guided imperceptibly throughout our lives by a benign elite of rational manipulators. [Bernays, 16]
Propaganda is the language of utopianism. For this reason, I will begin this site’s coverage of propaganda with a chapter-by-chapter analysis of Bernays’ book.
“Chapter 2: The New Propaganda”
“Chapter 3: The New Propagandists”
Referenced:
- “The Century of the Self – Part 1: ‘Happiness Machines.'” YouTube, uploaded by JustAdamCurtis, www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnPmg0R1M04.
- Bernays, Edward L. Propaganda. IG, 2004.
