While no single man can take full credit for the rise of American advertising, Edward Bernays certainly deserves more than most. Known today as the father of public relations, Bernays was responsible for campaigns that changed the lives and minds of the American citizen forever, having a hand in everything from political leaders to smoking culture and what Americans ate for their breakfast. He was a self-proclaimed master of propaganda, and while others thought it a dirty word, Bernays recognized its power and the effective moral benefits it brought to society. A deeply controversial individual, Bernays himself boasted that Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels read his books and used his techniques.
His methods blurred the lines between effective advertising and outright brainwashing. But to understand American branding and consumer culture today, the impact made by Bernays and his methods and philosophy cannot go unrecognized. Born in 1891 in Vienna, Austria, to American parents, Edward Louis Bernays was the nephew of the great Sigmund Freud.
But he didn't stay in Austria long, moving to America when he was young and gaining an education in agriculture. Despite this, he had no passion for the industry and chose journalism as his first career. His first exposure to the powers of spin came in 1912, when he became co-editor of the Medical Review of Reviews.
Writing a review for a controversial play, Bernays described it positively as a propaganda play that fought for sex education and began to see how effective such strategies could be. His talents began to shine when he lobbied support for the play and its message from the likes of John D. Rockefeller Jr. and Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. Staying in theatre, he began to work as a creative press agent for plays and performers, leaning on controversy and emotive issues to help promote plays, on one occasion using a sexually suggestive photograph of the star, while in another, promoting a play in line with an orphan charity.
Bernays was developing the skills that would soon come to define his career, and caught the attention of the Committee on Public Information as the US joined the First World War in 1917. This is where Bernays would find his true calling. During his time working for the CPI, Bernays worked to build support for the war in the American population, and would later describe what he did as psychological warfare. In 1919, he used the term propaganda in a press release to describe the function of the CPI, and this uncomfortable word and connotations resulted in the demise of the organization.
But the lessons Bernays learned would stay with him. Seeing how effective propaganda could be during wartime, Bernays began to realize the same methods could be used in peace. Psychological warfare, he believed, could be waged on the American population to much benefit to the individual and the organization. And so began his career as a public relations consultant.
Bernays incorporated his Uncle Sigmund's psychoanalytic theory to help define his early techniques. He recognized that people were motivated by other desires, that the population had a herd mentality, and that their opinion was something that could easily be manipulated. In the 1920s, Bernays was hired by the Beech Nut Packing Company to help them improve their sales in bacon. The problem, Bernays quickly realized, wasn't in the product or price, but in the American mindset. At the time, a light breakfast was considered the healthiest way to start the day.
Bernays sought to overcome this by approaching around 5,000 physicians and having them sign a statement that a hearty breakfast of bacon and eggs was far healthier. He had this published nationally, and when the American population read the report, the sales of bacon shot up, and what is today considered the all-American breakfast was born. But Binet's mastery wasn't just able to increase sales.
He also has a hand in politics. In 1924, he worked with President Calvin Coolidge, altering his stuffy public image and leading him to re-election in what is considered one of the first publicity stunts on an American presidential campaign. He was then approached by Lucky Strike's cigarettes. They had two problems when they hired Bernays in 1927, both linked to women.
Firstly, sales of cigarettes in women were low, not helped by the taboo of women smoking in public. Secondly, their green packaging was considered an unfashionable colour. Changing the packaging would have been too expensive. So instead, Bernays convinced fashion designers to include the Lucky Strike's shade of green in that season's designs. and held a green ball at a fancy hotel, where the most fashionable and famous members of society attended, all dressed in the colour, and had the whole event photographed and printed nationwide.
Suddenly, the colour green wasn't so unattractive anymore. For the far deeper issue of taboo, Bernays leaned heavily into women's liberation, acknowledging that cigarettes had long been associated with men, and creating the link between equality and public smoking. He marketed cigarettes as torches of freedom, and at demonstrations, he hired women to wield their cigarettes and had them photographed and printed in the news. Women across the country followed suit, and sales skyrocketed. But arguably, Bernays'most controversial campaign was while working for the United Fruit Company.
Hired in the early 1940s, it started innocently enough by linking bananas to good health and helping boost sales. Bernays recognized early the need to promote a positive spin on the growing countries in Central America. That changed when the Guatemalan dictatorship was toppled by a coup d'état in 1945 and a new democratically appointed president was elected.
This should have been seen as a positive change, but the United Fruit Company had long exploited the Guatemalan workers with low wages, agreed under the previous government, and this change saw their profits drop as workers went on strike. Bernays had the revolution portrayed in a communist light in the national media, of which he was the primary supplier of information. In Guatemala, the UFC were linked to the old regime, but in America, Bernays portrayed the UFC as a victim of the communist menace, spreading misinformation and lobbying the US government.
This eventually resulted in a further coup in 1954, assisted by the US intelligence agency, and a return to the old ways of oppression for the Guatemalan workers and high profits for the UFC. While he also worked for non-profit organizations and reportedly turned down offers from people and organizations he didn't want to be associated with, such as the Nazi Party, Francisco Franco, and Richard Nixon, amongst others, Bernays was a man who often saw past the moral obstructions of his work. The term public relations is preferred as a glossier name for what Bernays did, but the man himself did not shy away from the reality.
He believed in propaganda as a power of good, and argued that people would be manipulated one way or the other, So it was the duty of a good propagandist to ensure the correct ideals were promoted in society, which he called the engineering of consent. And without it, a democratic society would fall apart. His most famous book, called Propaganda, published in 1928, became a bible to public relations and advertising companies across the country and abroad, with many of his techniques being used by the Nazi party after he turned them down.
But By the mid-40s, following the events of the Second World War, public relations became the term of choice in the industry. And much of his later books, essays, and articles reflect this. He lived a long life, dying in 1995, aged 103 years old, with the American nation changed forever. Bernays virtually invented the idea of public relations.
Before his methods became popular, products were simply advertised in the hopes to appeal to a demographic. But what Bernays introduced was the idea of creating a want or a need in the consumer's mind, targeting their deepest desires, altering trends and public perception, and telling people what they wanted, needed, and believed. One of the most significant Americans of the last century, he remains little known outside the public relations world. But his reputation remains a result of his own personal public relations campaign to portray himself as America's number one publicist.
While Bernays wasn't concerned about the moral dilemma behind his work, deeming it essential to a democratic society's success, today he can be seen as both a pioneer and a brainwasher. But it is hard to consider the world of marketing, public relations and political campaigns without the use of techniques created and promoted by Bernays. The man who brainwashed America, in his belief, for the greater good.
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