It would not be any exaggeration to say that Edward Bernays viewed his famous uncle Sigmund as a father figure. He visited him in Europe whenever he got the chance, showered him with gifts of cigars, and helped arrange for and publicize the translation of Freud’s Introductory Lectures in Psychoanalysis in the United States. From Freud’s perspective, these efforts came as welcome assistance at a time when postwar inflation had wiped him out financially, although the relationship was strained somewhat by young Edward’s eagerness to sacrifice intellectual rigor to the lowbrow demands of the publicity trade. When Bernays approached him with an offer from Cosmopolitan magazine to write an article titled “The Wife’s Mental Place in the Home,” Freud rebelled with a stinging letter of refusal. “The absolute submission of your editors to the rotten taste of an uncultivated public is the cause of the low level of American literature,” he wrote.
Occasional tensions notwithstanding, Bernays saw his association with Freud as a way to establish his own reputation as a thinker and theorist—a reputation that was further enhanced when Bernays authored several landmark books of his own, most notably Crystallizing Public Opinion, The Engineering of Consent, and Propaganda. “When a person would first meet Bernays,” notes PR industry historian Scott Cutlip, “it would not be long before Uncle Sigmund would be brought into the conversation. His relationship with Freud was always in the forefront of his thinking and his counseling.”22 In a profile written in 1958, author Irwin Ross observed that Bernays epitomized the PR industry’s “wistful yearnings for scholarly distinction” and “likes to think of himself as a kind of psychoanalyst to troubled corporations. He talks, of course, far more than a psychoanalyst. . . . The words tumble forth in an endless cascade, the polysyllables lulling the auditor’s critical faculties, the clods of jargon dropping like huge pillows which cushion the mind against anxiety. At times one only has a dim view of what Bernays is saying, but it sounds great. ‘I got so I could write the stuff myself,’ says Morris M. Lee, Jr. [a former Bernays employee], ‘but I could never understand it.’ ”23
People who knew Bernays are unanimous in describing him as a man with a huge ego and an incessant habit of self-promotion. His writings include a lengthy bibliography of his own work and public utterances, in which Ross notes that “even editorial notes accompanying his articles are immortalized. . . . Books which merely listed Bernays in their bibliographies are reciprocally listed in his; an author who included Bernays in her acknowledgments in turn finds her own work acknowledged; a book which ‘indirectly’ quoted Bernays is duly rescued from obscurity, as are novels in which Bernays is mentioned in passing.”24 Bernays also authored an 850-page book of memoirs, titled Biography of an Idea, and after reaching the age of 100, he began work on a second memoir, titled The First Hundred Years. Sometimes his ego interfered with his professional success. Many of his contemporaneous peers in the PR industry disliked him intensely, regarding him as a pushy braggart who was hurting the industry’s reputation with his frank talk about “propaganda” and “controlling and regimenting the masses.”
Bernays used Freudianism’s scientific claims as a sort of marketing hook with which to sell his services to anxious corporate executives. “The counsel on public relations,” he explained, “is what sociologists call a societal technician who is fitted by training and experience to evaluate the maladjustments and adjustments between his client and the publics upon whom the client is dependent for his socially sound activity.”25 In Propaganda, his most important book, he argued that the scientific manipulation of public opinion was necessary to overcome chaos and conflict in society. “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,” he wrote. “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. . . . In almost every act of our 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 . . . who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.”26
There was a striking paradox, however, in the way that Bernays went about trying to follow in the footsteps of Uncle Sigmund. Freud’s “talking cure” was designed to unearth his patients’ unconscious drives and hidden motives, in the belief that bringing them into conscious discourse would help people lead healthier lives. Bernays, by contrast, used psychological techniques to mask the motives of his clients, as part of a deliberate strategy aimed at keeping the public unconscious of the forces that were working to mold their minds.
Science and the “Intelligent Few”
It is no accident that Bernays developed his “science” of public relations in the 1920s—a decade that also saw the beginnings of mass production, mass communications, mass consumerism, and a belief in technological progress as a quasireligion. All of these trends shared a faith in the notion that society’s problems can be engineered away, that democracy is dangerous, and that important decisions should be left in the hands of experts. In addition to psychoanalytic theory, Bernays drew heavily from the ideas of nineteenth-century French social philosopher Gustave Le Bon, a vocal critic of democracy who fretted that “the divine right of the masses is about to replace the divine right of kings.” Stuart Ewen, a historian and author of PR: A Social History of Spin, notes that Le Bon feared “that the mob at any moment could seize society and destroy all he held sacred. Le Bon starts to examine the social psychology of the crowd. For him the crowd is not driven by rational argument, but by its spinal cord. It responds solely to emotional appeals and is incapable of thought or reason. Somebody interested in leading the crowd needs to appeal not to logic but to unconscious motivation.” For Bernays in particular, Ewen notes, Le Bon’s ideas “are applied to virtually everybody. Almost no one is seen as capable of rational thought. The most efficient way to win hearts and minds is through emotional appeals. By the 1920s, Le Bonian social psychology is used to design organizations that constantly take the temperature of public feelings. Survey research, polling and focus groups are all built around the science of how to lead the public mind.”27
Ewen interviewed Bernays near the end of his life and was struck by his “unabashedly hierarchical view of society. 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. . . . He expressed little respect for the average person’s ability to think out, understand, or act upon the world in which they live. . . . Throughout our conversation, Bernays conveyed his hallucination of democracy: a highly educated class of opinion-molding tacticians are continuously at work, analyzing the social terrain and adjusting the mental scenery from which the public mind, with its limited intellect, derives its opinions.”28
Expanding on Freud’s theories about the unconscious motives for human behavior, Bernays believed that people are not merely unconscious but herdlike in their thinking, “subject to the passions of the pack in [their] mob violence and the passions of the herd in [their] panics. . . . The average citizen is the world’s most efficient censor. His own mind is the greatest barrier between him and the facts. His own ‘logic-proof compartments, ’ his own absolutism, are the obstacles which prevent him from seeing in terms of experience and thought rather than in terms of group reaction.”29
Fortunately, Bernays added, being herdlike also made people “remarkably susceptible to leadership.”30 He saw public relations as an applied science, like engineering, through which society’
s leaders could bring order out of chaos and muddle. “If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind,” he argued, it would be possible to “control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing it. . . . Theory and practice have combined with sufficient success to permit us to know that in certain cases we can effect some change in public opinion with a fair degree of accuracy by operating a certain mechanism, just as the motorist can regulate the speed of his car by manipulating the flow of gasoline.”31
To exercise this type of control was not just an option, it was a duty: “It is certain that the power of public opinion is constantly increasing and will keep on increasing. It is equally certain that it is more and more being influenced, changed, stirred by impulses from below. . . . The duty of the higher strata of society—the cultivated, the learned, the expert, the intellectual—is therefore clear. They must inject moral and spiritual motives into public opinion.”32 A public relations counselor could accomplish this, Bernays said, because his special training and insight into human nature “permits him to step out of his own group to look at a particular problem with the eyes of an impartial observer and to utilize his knowledge of the individual and the group mind to project his clients’ point of view.”33
Of course, the mind of Edward Bernays had its own share of “logic-proof compartments.” To begin with, there is the obvious contradiction in his notion that a public relations consultant can simultaneously be both an “impartial observer” and a special pleader for his client.
The First Front Group
Bernays stumbled into public relations almost by accident. In 1913, while working as editor of the Medical Review of Reviews, a monthly magazine owned by a college acquaintance, he discovered that the then-famous actor Richard Bennett was interested in producing a play titled “Damaged Goods,” which Bernays described as “a propaganda play that fought for sex education.” It discussed sexual topics, such as prostitution, that were considered unusually frank for their day. Bennett was afraid that the play would be raided by police, and he hired Bernays to prevent this from happening. Rather than arguing for the play on its merits, Bernays cleverly organized a group that he called the “Medical Review of Reviews Sociological Fund,” inviting prominent doctors and members of the social elite to join. The organization’s avowed mission was to fight venereal disease through education. Its real purpose was to endorse “Damaged Goods,” and apparently the plan worked. The show went on as scheduled, with no interference from police.
“This was a pioneering move that is common today in the promotion of public causes—a prestigious sponsoring committee,” notes PR industry historian Scott Cutlip. “In retrospect, given the history of public relations, it might be termed the first effort to use the front or third party technique.” It was a technique that Bernays would return to time and again, calling it “the most useful method in a multiple society like ours to indicate the support of an idea of the many varied elements that make up our society. Opinion leaders and group leaders have an effect in a democracy and stand as symbols to their constituency.”34 He helped jump-start sales of bacon, a breakfast rarity until the 1920s, by enlisting a prominent doctor to solicit fellow doctors’ opinions on the salutary benefits of a hearty breakfast and by arranging to have famous figures photographed eating breakfasts of bacon and eggs. To sell bananas on behalf of the United Fruit Company, he launched the “celiac project,” republishing and disseminating a 20-year-old medical paper which found that eating bananas cured children with celiac disease, a disorder of the digestive system.35
“Mr. Bernays has . . . created more institutes, funds, institutions, and foundations than Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Filene together,” observed the Institute for Propaganda Analysis, a nonprofit educational organization that flourished in the years following World War I. “Typical of them was the Temperature Research Foundation. Its stated purpose was ‘to disseminate impartial, scientific information concerning the latest developments in temperature control as they affect the health, leisure, happiness, and economy of the American people.’ A minor purpose—so minor that rarely did Mr. Bernays remember even to mention it—was to boost the sales of Kelvinator refrigerators, air-condition units, and electric stoves.”36
The tobacco industry, another early Bernays client, also relied heavily on expert testimonials to tout its products, recruiting opera singers and doctors to claim that cigarettes soothed the throat and aided digestion. Advertisements of this type became so ubiquitous that Bernays spoofed one of his industry rivals by creating a front group called the “Tobacco Society for Voice Culture” which mockingly claimed that its mission was to “establish a home for singers and actors whose voices have cracked under the strain of their cigarette testimonials.”37
Light’s Golden Jubilee
Bernays sectioned his autobiography into five parts and gave the title “Fulfillment” to the third section, which covered the years from 1923 to 1929. Those were the years that marked the emergence of the fledgling public relations industry, as Bernays rose from obscurity to wealth and influence. By January of 1929, his clients included the New Jersey Bell Telephone Company, Procter & Gamble, Knox Gelatin, and the American Tobacco Company. “In a typical month, January, our clients paid us gross fees of $16,524.43, with profits of $11,868.78,” he said. “That was not considered bad for a 38-year-old, adventuring into an untried, unknown field.” In fact, it would not be considered a bad monthly income today, even without adjusting for inflation. “I was doing well,” he recalled, “but the profession of counsel on public relations lacked the respect that I felt it deserved. Our clients knew what we could do for them and respected our methods, but to many we were still sensation mongers and ballyhoo artists—a menace to the integrity of press and business alike.”38
The 1928 publication of his book Propaganda helped drum up new corporate clients but also prompted a flurry of criticism. Editor & Publisher magazine described Bernays as “the young Machiavelli of our times.” Another writer commented that “publicity agents for special and selfish causes inimical to the general interest and disturbing to the Commonwealth use just as much ingenuity and invention plus at least a fair measure of corruption.”39 Chafing at these criticisms, Bernays longed for the opportunity to stage “a dramatic event that would make others see us as we saw ourselves.”40
The opportunity he was looking for arrived in February 1929 with a visit from Napoleon Boynton, an executive with the General Electric company. Like Bernays, General Electric was having a few image problems and wanted his help. Long under congressional attack for monopolistic practices in lamp manufacture, GE wanted to stage a massive publicity stunt that would showcase the benefits that lightbulbs had brought to humanity. As it happened, the fiftieth anniversary of Thomas Edison’s invention of the lightbulb was fast approaching. What better way to polish the industry’s image than to honor Edison with an event that they would call “Light’s Golden Jubilee”? The Westinghouse Corporation, GE’s main competition in the electric light market, was also eager to jump on the promotional bandwagon.
“I recognized the potential professional significance of the assignment and plunged into the given task eagerly,” Bernays said. “The United States—and, for that matter, the world—was ripe for a new hero, and here was the 50th anniversary of one of the most significant and beneficial inventions of the age, and the inventor was still living.”41
Aged 82, enfeebled and recovering from a bout of pneumonia, Edison had retreated from his business activities and was devoting his final years to a quixotic and ultimately unsuccessful effort to develop a process that would derive rubber from milkweeds. Moreover, Edison’s feelings toward GE and Westinghouse were decidedly negative. In his own heyday as a businessman, he had viewed George Westinghouse as his archrival, calling him a “shyster” and “the enemy.” As for GE, it had once been Edison’s. Christened “the Edison General Electric Company,” it slipped from his control in an 1891 power grab by J. Pierpont Morg
an, who drove home the insult by stripping Edison’s name from the company as soon as he took possession. There was more than a little irony in the idea that these robber barons should now want to honor him in his old age.
The glue that held the plan together was Henry Ford, whose admiration and affection for Edison knew no bounds. Ford, moreover, had propaganda aspirations of his own. A few years earlier, his offhand remark that “history is more or less bunk” had won him a reputation as a scholarly cretin, a rich but crude mechanic with no understanding of tradition or culture. Ford’s response to his critics was to create some history of his own—not a written book of history, but history as inscribed in things—the gadgets and artifacts that he saw as the fundamental expressions of humanity’s progress. At his birthplace in Dearborn, Michigan, Ford was building an eight-acre industrial museum and stuffing it with plows, furniture, milk pails, butter churns, china sets, flintlock rifles, grandfather clocks, music boxes, steam engines, threshers, fire engines, a Model T—anything and everything that might preserve the memory of America’s mechanics, blacksmiths, and craftsmen. Once Ford learned of the plans to honor Edison, he realized that it would make a perfect capstone to his own monumental plans. Renaming his museum the Edison Institute of Technology, he created as its centerpiece a reverently reconstructed replica of the Menlo Park complex where Edison had done most of his inventing. He bought up every drill press, lathe, rusted machine, and empty chemical bottle that he could acquire from the now-decaying original Edison laboratory, disassembling whole buildings board by board and brick by brick and shipping them to Dearborn by rail for reassembly. He even transplanted some of the original trees and shrubbery. No expense was spared as he rebuilt Menlo Park right down to Edison’s old outhouse. To celebrate Light’s Golden Jubilee, he invited Edison to participate in a reenactment of the moment of creation of the electric light. The ceremony would be held in the rebuilt laboratory on October 21, 1929, exactly fifty years to the day from the date of Edison’s successful experiment.
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