Propaganda- by Edward Bernays

[Spytheweb]

This is a book that the Nazis used to control their citizens behavior.

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, 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 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...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.

 

[Niederton]

Bernays wasn't a Nazi, he was a Jew. He was the self-declared father of Public Relations and a relative of Freud. Bernays was part of the machine that manipulated U.S. public opinion to get us into WWI. He did other great work like persuading women that smoking was cool, thereby opening up a huge new market.

 

[Niederton]

Edward L. Bernays

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, 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.

With these words, Edward Bernays (1891 - 1995) opened his 1928 book Propaganda. Rather than some conspiracy-toting potboiler, as you might be forgiven for imagining, this book was one of the foundational works for the discipline of Public Relations, and its author one of the more significant figures of his century. Often called "the Father of public relations", Bernays is widely believed to have created that discipline, at least in its modern form; a view which he himself did nothing to discourage.

At the very least he was an outstanding practitioner, who hit the scene at a time when the scale and techniques of PR were changing rapidly. Bernays claimed to have invented methods and attitudes which are landmarks in the evolution of PR, and it's a safe bet that ideas he invented or popularised have been extremely influential for the field, and therefore for the course of the twentieth century, in which Bernays-style PR played such a significant role.

Born in Vienna into the Freud family, Bernays was twice the nephew of his famous uncle Sigmund, since his father, Freud's brother in law through his wife, had married Freud's sister, Bernays' mother. Much is made (sometimes by Bernays himself) of the role in his work of his uncle's theories, but there seems to be little evidence of detailed psychoanalytic knowledge in his published output. The major influence seems to be his explicit recognition that we often make our buying and voting decisions based on irrational urgings situated within an unrevealed personal drama (what Freud would call the subconscious) rather than on sound commercial logic or informed empirical reasoning.

Bernays' picture of Hom Sap was elitist and hierarchical through and through, and his idea of a hidden government (a phrase he employs with sinister regularity) is based on the premise that, mostly, people are reactive dullards, dry sponges whose views will be coloured by their soaking up whatever ink the savvy few choose to squirt at them. Who require, in fact, to be shielded from the complexities of involvement in actual decision-making in the interests of a smoothly running society. He saw the world of public affairs as a sort of puppet show, run by the elite, which guided the pliable minds of the masses down the right paths.

http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1326843

 

[Niederton]

[How We Were Propagandized Into WWI]

Regimenting the public mind

Bernays was apparently keen to join up as a regular soldier but couldn't get through the physical, since he wore glasses and had flat feet. He sought other involvement, and finally got a place in the newly formed Committe on Public Information (CPI), sometimes known as the Creel committee. This was formed in 1917 by Woodrow Wilson to sell the war to the American public and to sell America's version of the war overseas. Since Bernays was later to credit his spell there with some influence on his subsequent career, it's worth examining its methods and scope.

The CPI was a virtual censorship committee, issuing "voluntary guidelines" for journalists (backed up by the threat of exclusion of their publications from official and unofficial briefings), and helping to squash the radical dissenting press, not least by helping to put the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918 into law; but that was only a tiny part of its activities.

As a producer of information, CPI operated on an industrial scale, following a threefold strategy:

1. saturate the information market

The CPI carefully analysed the routes via which the public absorbed information, and created 19 departments which were charged with the task of saturating each of these with pro-war material.

According to one source, just one of these departments, the Division of News, created over 6,000 separate press releases. These were to provide copy and ideas for up to 20,000 different columns a week. In other departments, orators, filmmakers, essayists, academics, novelists, photographers, cartoonists, illustrators, commercial artists, admen and pamphleteers were employed to lend their talents to the collective effort. Scholarly essays with titles like The German Whisper and Conquest and Kultur abounded. Films like The Kaiser: The Beast of Berlin and Wolves of Kultur were the order of the day. It became impossible to participate in the media or engage in society without getting a daily dose of CPI product. Soldiers were assigned duties as "four-minute men", to stand up in movie theatres, public meetings, etc., and give speeches in praise of government policy.

Bernays (1928) wrote:

They not only appealed to the individual by means of every approach, visual, graphic, and auditory to support the national endeavor, but they also secured the cooperation of the key men in every group, persons whose mere word carried authority to hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousands of followers. They thus automatically gained the support of fraternal, religious, commercial, patriotic, social and local groups whose members took their opinions from their accustomed leaders and spokesmen, or from the periodical publications which they were accustomed to read and believe.

2. use emotional agitation to bypass rational choice

The classic example being a poster showing an exaggeratedly threatening German soldier, and urging the viewer to "Beat Back The Hun With Liberty Bonds." The emotional arousal caused by the image is available for association with the desired action. Vacuous and emotional phrases, such as "Making the world safe for Democracy", framing vague, unarticulated political aspirations in an almost spiritual context, were carefully crafted and disseminated.

3. demonize the enemy

Bernays (1928):

At the same time, the manipulators of patriotic opinion made use of the mental clich?s and the emotional habits of the public to produce mass reactions against the alleged atrocities, the terror and the tyranny of the enemy.

Bernays, who served as director of the Latin American Division, later admitted that his colleagues in the CPI had invented atrocities by the Germans. Lies from previous wars were recycled, such as the story of a seven year old boy confronting enemy soldiers with his toy gun, and stranger tales (one apparently involved a tub full of eyeballs).

This technique has a sound basis in Freudian theory. The more the public project their inner demons onto the symbols of the enemy, the more, in fact, the enemy itself becomes a symbol for evil, the more emotional energy is available for more specific direction, as above.

Summing this up, in his 1951 Public Relations, Bernays would write that the CPI

bombarded the public unceasingly with enthusiastic reports of the nation's colossal war effort [...] Dissenting voices were stilled, either by agreement with the press or by the persuasive action of the agents of the Department of Justice.

Intellectual and emotional bombardment aroused Americans to a pitch of enthusiasm. The bombardment came at people from all sides - advertisements, news, volunteer speakers, posters, schools, theaters; millions of homes displayed service flags. The war aims and ideals were continually projected to the eyes and ears of the populace. These high-pressure methods were new at the time, but have become usual since then. [...]

The most fantastic atrocity stories were believed.

Being involved in all this must have considerably affected the young Bernays. In Propaganda he was to write: "It was, of course, the astounding success of propaganda during the war that opened the eyes of the intelligent few in all departments of life to the possibilities of regimenting the public mind. It was only natural, after the war ended, that intelligent persons should ask themselves whether it was not possible to apply a similar technique to the problems of peace."

 

[Niederton]

[How Edward Bernays Got American Women Hooked on Smoking]

Torches of freedom

1929 was a big year for Bernays. By the end of it he would have helped thousands of women to take up smoking, and staged what's been called the first global PR event of the century, and arguably the most successful.

Bernays' relations with American Tobacco and its president George Washington Hill had started in 1928, when he took on the job of promoting the Lucky Strike brand. Hill, spotting a gap in the market, asked Bernays specifically to encourage more women to smoke. Female smoking was bordering on taboo: in 1922, a woman was arrested for smoking in public in New York, and even in 1928 women smokers were generally disapproved, or stigmatized, but the times were changing.

Bernays' first campaign was focused on a supposed health benefit of smoking - with the slogan "Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet", he encouraged women to think of smoking as a way to keep a slim figure. But the market was slow to move.

In 1929, however, he caught the public imagination by hiring young models and debutantes to join the Easter Parades in New York and elsewhere, posing as suffragettes while lighting up cigarettes and wearing banners describing these as "torches of liberty".

Bernays had received advice from A.A. Brill, a psychoanalyst, that women tended to "regard cigarettes as symbols of freedom [...] Smoking is a sublimation of oral eroticism [...] The first women who smoked probably had an excess of masculine components and adopted the habit as a masculine act [...] Cigarettes, which are equated with men, become torches of freedom."

Bernays' piece of street theatre, which was extensively photographed and reported by the ever-cooperative press, who presented it as a straightforward political action by suffragettes, was an ingenious way of reinforcing these associations. Pages were filled with positive images of young fashionable, politically adventurous, freedom-loving, smoking women. It was undoubtedly a turning point in America's acceptance of female smoking. The campaign was successful enough that Bernays' services were retained, and he soon went on to aid American Tobacco in combatting the first stirrings of the anti-smoking health movement, by getting doctors and health workers to issue smoking-friendly pronouncements. In 1934 he devoted 6 months to making green the "in" colour of the fashion season, specifically so that women would buy the green-packeted Lucky Strikes to go with their green dresses, at which he also succeeded.