This much in Bernay’s argument was unexceptional. What was striking was the blunt language he used to describe what public relations professionals could offer, and the presumption of success. In Crystallizing Public Opinion, Bernays explained how “the natural inherent flexibility of individual human nature” made it possible for governments to “regiment the mind like the military regiments the body.” He opened a 1928 book, entitled Propaganda, by asserting that: “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.” Those responsible constituted “an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.” As a result, “we are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.” He argued for a strict ethical code for his profession, including that the needs of society as a whole come first. He insisted that the masses could not be made to act against their core interests and that political leaders were by far the most important influences when it came to creating “the established point of view.” Nonetheless, his formulations aggravated the sense of an affront to democracy. If, as Lippmann also appeared to be saying, opinions were shaped from the top down, this undermined the view that in democracies, power should come from the bottom up. The conclusion that Bernays drew from this was that by understanding the “mechanism and motives of the group mind” it might be possible “to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it.” This he thought could be done “at least up to a certain point and within certain limits.”40
Bernays as an advisor to governments, charities, and corporations was a natural strategist. He distinguished himself from advertising men, whom he portrayed as special pleaders seeking to get people to accept a particular commodity. His approach was more holistic (advising his clients on their complete relationship with their environment) and indirect (seeking to get people to view the world in different ways). In a later article with the provocative title “The Engineering of Consent,”41 he explicitly discussed the strategy of public relations. He also adopted the military metaphor. Having urged careful preparation in terms of available budget, clarity of objectives, and a survey of current thinking, attention must be given to the major themes, which he described as “ever present but intangible,” comparable to the “story line” in fiction, appealing to both the conscious and subconscious of the public. Then came the campaign: “The situation may call for a blitzkrieg or a continuing battle, a combination of both, or some other strategy.” An election might be close and need something quick. It would take longer to get people to think differently about a health issue. When it came to tactics, he emphasized that the aim was not simply to get an article into a newspaper or get a radio slot but “to create news,” by which he meant something that “juts out of the pattern of routine.” Events which made news could be communicated to “infinitely more people than those actually participating, and such events vividly dramatize ideas for those who do not witness the events.” His more famous campaigns were encouraging “bacon and eggs” for breakfast by getting leading physicians to endorse the need for a “hearty” breakfast, having famous figures from vaudeville meet with President Calvin Coolidge in an attempt to boost his image, and—notably—an imaginative stunt for the American Tobacco Company. He persuaded ten debutantes to light up with their cigarettes during the 1929 Easter Parade, thereby notionally striking a blow for feminism by undermining the taboo against women smoking in public. The cigarettes became “torches of freedom.”42
Bernays invited obvious criticisms: usurping the role of democracy by taking upon himself to shape peoples’ thoughts, encouraging mass effects rather than individual responsibility, and relying on cliché and emotional attitudes rather than intellectual challenge. Bernays argued that in an age of mass media, the techniques were unavoidable and propaganda was ubiquitous. People and groups had a right to promote their ideas and the competition in doing so was healthy for both democracy and capitalism. He also invited an exaggerated response, because of the exaggerated claims he made for his profession and his eager embrace of the mantle of propagandist.43 While after the Second World War this was a mantle few would accept, the issue of how political consciousness developed and could be influenced was well established. Bernays’s contribution was to demonstrate that the impulses need not only be to shape thinking about underlying political ideologies but also to frame more specific issues. During the course of the political struggles of the 1950s and 1960s over race and war, strategies came to focus increasingly on how to create the right impression.
The totalitarian ideologies of Communism and Nazism attempted to demonstrate in practice the suggestibility of the broad masses to political formulas devised by a privileged elite. They sought deliberately to insert coherent worldviews into the consciousness of whole populations and enforce their dictates, sliding over the evident anomalies and inconsistencies and gaps that developed with lived experience. Their success, moreover, owed much to the fearful consequences of any shows of dissent, doubt, or deviation from the party line. Once the coercive spell was broken, the underlying ideas struggled to survive on their own. Belief systems turned out to be more complex and varied and public opinion less malleable than the elite theorists had supposed. What Bernays was pointing to was something more subtle, at levels below grand ideological confrontations, where the attitudes involved were more specific and the behavioral consequences less demanding. Rather than words governing deeds, as anticipated by the ideologists, there was a close relationship between the two, and successful politicians and campaigners realized that this needed to be understood if even fleeting victories were to be achieved, never mind lasting change.
CHAPTER 23 The Power of Nonviolence
When evil men plot, good men must plan.
—Martin Luther King, Jr.
AN IMPROVED UNDERSTANDING of how to influence public opinion offered new opportunities for political strategy. Those who for reasons of ethics or prudence did not wish to resort to force could consider strategies based on creating persuasive impressions, moving opinion in their direction without coercion. The strength of these strategies, however, depended on the extent to which they were moving elites along with the public. Even if there were shifts among the public, what would be the mechanisms by which this would affect the policies of governments? Was it just a question of repackaging good ideas to ensure that they attracted attention, or would they still need some pressure behind them to achieve the desired response?
Many of these issues were addressed by the suffragette movement. The advance of democracy in Western capitalist states might have blunted the revolutionary ardor of the labor movement by offering constitutional means to redress grievances, but it also added to the sense of injustice felt by those denied democratic rights. The British Empire, with a liberal ideology at its beating heart but institutionalized suppression around its periphery, was rocked most by demands for political equality. Among these, including anti-colonial campaigns and agitation for Irish Home Rule, was a determined and eventually successful campaign by women demanding the right to vote. This campaign was unique because it posed a challenge not only to the political system but also to orthodox views of gender and the most basic of human relationships. The tactics adopted by the suffragette movement had a lasting impact not only as a means of gaining attention in the face of male condescension but also as a direct challenge to stereotypes of femininity, such as a supposed inability to develop and sustain a political argument. At the same time, part of the case was that women not only deserved equality but would bring special qualities to public life.
The campaign in Britain stretched from proposals to include women’s suffrage in the Reform Act of 1867 to the Equal Franchise Act of 1928. Female political rights extended slowly over this period, as women moved into philanthropic and civic affairs. There was dogged resistance to granting women the same rights as men, and it only broke under the wei
ght of the First World War. The suffragette campaign had many strands: some were prepared to work with the established political parties while others found this futile; some framed the issue narrowly in terms of political rights while others sought to address economic issues and challenge orthodox male expectations of a woman’s role. In terms of strategy, there was a constitutional wing—which worked through petitions, lobbying, and demonstrations—and a militant wing—the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), led by the redoubtable mother and daughter team of Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst. As to which had the most effect, or whether they detracted from or reinforced each other, opinions are still divided. The militants are now best remembered for the direct action: slashing paintings, arson, breaking windows, chaining themselves to railings, and prison hunger strikes. But they were only one part of a movement that was extremely varied in its forms and preoccupations.
The militancy developed as a result of progressive disillusion, first with the Liberal Party reluctance to honor its ideals, then with the lack of priority given to women by the labor movement, and a growing conviction that legislative routes were being exhausted. The core themes, however, were derived from classic liberal ideals: opposition to forms of arbitrary power that resulted in individuals having obligations but no rights. The rhetoric could be traced back to the French Revolution and then the Chartists, except that gender now displaced class. The militant tactics were justified on the basis, as Christabel Pankhurst put it, that “those who are outside the Constitution have no ordinary means of securing admission; and therefore they must try extraordinary means.” The techniques used by the WSPU helped them gain attention, although what might have worked most to their advantage was the opportunity as a result of being arrested to make their case in court and turn a defense against criminal charges into a political debate. In a jury trial in 1912, for example, Emmeline Pankhurst was able to present herself and her organization as smart, eloquent, capable, well organized, and not at all emotional or hysterical. In particular, she and other suffragettes were able to give their acts a compelling political rationale, which led in Emmeline’s case to the jury calling for leniency.
After this, the rhetoric became more extreme. Christabel Pankhurst even invoked terrorism. The “politically disinherited ones, whether they are men or whether they are women,” she insisted, “are obliged to challenge the physical force used by their tyrant to keep them in bondage.” While passive resistance was dismissed as subservient, active resistance was claimed as “grander and more purifying.” There were more attacks on property, though not on people. This led to concerns elsewhere in the movement that militancy rather than suffrage was becoming the issue. Supporters drifted away, and WSPU moved more underground. In the end, the war provided a useful pretext for ending the militancy without losing face. Indeed, while those on the nonviolent wing of the movement were antiwar, the Pankhursts became active in war work and were notable for strident anti-German, anti-pacifist, and later anti-Bolshevik rhetoric.1
The American suffragette movement, which achieved its goal in 1920, was far less militant. There was a close link with the progressive movement, which pushed to the fore the stresses of industrialization, such as poor women forced to work for meager wages while still caring for children. Although it did become more activist in the years before the First World War in response to the rather staid practice of the main association and contacts with the British movement, the preferred method in America was to show numerical strength through picketing, rallies, and parades. Quakerism, which had long allowed women a role—even as preachers—particularly influenced the movement. Quakers provided much of the early leadership and insistence on nonviolence. The American movement’s eventual success reflected a grasp of the basics of political organizing, with conventions, speaking tours, and full-time activists keeping the issue to the fore.2 One consequence of this was to open up the possibility of pacifism as the foundation for a successful political strategy and not just the assertion of a particular morality.
The term pacifist had come into use during the nineteenth century to refer to those who renounced all violence. They faced some standard challenges: how, defensively, would they cope with another’s aggression and then how, offensively, could they achieve change without violence. The most difficult charge was that by stressing peace more than injustice pacifists were bound to the status quo. By ruling out force on behalf of the disadvantaged, they would be stuck with existing hierarchies of power and left either playing down grievances or claiming their susceptibility to improbable remedies, such as appeals to love and to reason. The pacifists’ counter was that underdogs had most to lose when disputes became violent, and that once violence was used, even in the name of a good cause, it became less likely that something truly better would result from the struggle and that effective forms of nonviolent pressure could be devised.
The Impact of Gandhi
Pacifism was at its strongest after the First World War. This was largely because the slaughter on the Western Front had shaped popular attitudes on the futility and waste of war. It was also due to evidence of a pacifist effectively leading a movement for radical change as Mohandas Gandhi challenged British rule in India.
Gandhi’s thought was shaped by his experiences in South Africa and India. One influence was Henry David Thoreau of Concord, Massachusetts, whose opposition to slavery led him to refuse to “pay a tax to, or recognize the authority of, the state which buys and sells men, women, and children.” After six years of noncompliance, Thoreau was arrested and spent a night in jail, which resulted in his 1849 lecture on “The Relation of the Individual to the State.” Although his strategy went no further than arguing that if everybody followed his example slavery would be doomed, and in his time he was considered an isolated, eccentric figure, his lecture (published as “Civil Disobedience”) became the classic statement of the ethical case for refusing to accept unjust laws.3 Gandhi had read Thoreau as a young activist and later reported that it helped shape his thinking and was a point of contact with like-minded Americans.4
The link with Tolstoy was closer. In his autobiography, Gandhi described Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God Is Within You as having “overwhelmed” him. In 1908, Gandhi translated and circulated A Letter to a Hindu, which Tolstoy had written in response to a request from the editor of an Indian journal. It contained one point that Gandhi deemed unassailable. It was astonishing, Tolstoy had written, that “more than two hundred million people, highly gifted both physically and mentally, find themselves in the power of a small group of people quite alien to them in thought, and immeasurably inferior to them in religious morality.” From this he concluded that it was “clear that it is not the English who have enslaved the Indians, but the Indians who have enslaved themselves.” Instead of violent resistance Tolstoy urged nonparticipation “in the violent deeds of the administration, in the law courts, the collection of taxes, or above all in soldiering,” and love as “the only way to rescue humanity from all ills, and in it you too have the only method of saving your people from enslavement.”5
There were obvious similarities between the two men. Both sought to lead lives based on self-purification, love, and nonviolence. Both, despite their privileged births, sought to bring themselves closer to the poor, toiling masses. Their conspicuously ascetic ways of life gained them moral authority and an international audience. Gandhi also embraced the idea of self-perfection, but unlike Tolstoy he saw it not as an alternative to political activism but as an essential part. He had a canny understanding that his private spirituality not only protected him against the temptations of public life but added luster to his political claims. His genius was in his ability to use the teachings that guided his personal life as the foundations for a mass movement.
His philosophy of satyagraha, a word of his own devising, involved a combination of truth, love, and firmness. Those who embraced this philosophy had an inner strength giving them the courage and discipline to endure and overwhelm
those who relied on violent means. He argued the inseparability of ends and means: violent methods could not deliver a peaceful society.6 Prison should be embraced piously, assault cheerfully, and death peacefully. When he spoke he did so quietly, almost professorially, and never as a demagogue. All this was combined with a shrewd political sensibility. Gandhi had a gift for putting his opponents on the defensive, not only by claiming the moral high ground but also by identifying issues which were particularly awkward for the British.
In March 1930, he began a 240-mile march to the coast in order to demonstrate the injustice of the Raj both monopolizing salt production and then taxing it. The protest was not initially taken seriously but it gathered momentum, leading to Gandhi being jailed and not released until the next year. Though the campaign was unsuccessful in its immediate objective, Gandhi’s methods were now attracting notice and the authorities had to take note of the numbers prepared to align themselves with the protest. The extent and intensity of popular discontent impressed the British. They lacked a compelling response to Gandhi’s theatricality and moral advantage. William Wedgewood Benn, the secretary of state for India, observed in 1931 the similarities to the suffragettes, as well as the Irish and South African campaigns against British rule. “They are all aimed at rallying public sympathy as an ally. They strive to present to the Government the alternative of giving way or appearing in the role of oppressor … they first deliberately provoked severity and then complained to the world of it.” Earlier he had understood that the best way to deal with such a challenge was to deny the choice between concession and oppression, but denial was impossible. “They won’t let us leave them alone.” How preferable it would be to have “a straight fight with the revolver people, which is a much simpler and more satisfactory job to undertake.”7
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