A Misleader Snapshot
I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.— John Cage
Edward L. Bernays is the most famous person you’ve never heard of. If you were wondering why, he was remarkably effective because no one knew who he was. Yet:
• PBS counted him as one of eight Americans who most influenced the twentieth century.
• Time dubbed him U.S. Publicist Number One.
• Life listed him among the twentieth century’s 100 most influential people.
• Advertising and Selling described him as one of the most unusual men to ever live.
• Literary Digest called him a super-salesman without portfolio.
Ultimately, PR Watch said it best: “It is impossible to fundamentally grasp the social, political, economic and cultural developments of the past 100 years without some understanding of Bernays and his professional heirs in the public relations industry.”
This account of Bernays’ professional life identifies and explains the overarching strategy he used to accomplish many of his extraordinary public relations feats. Here is the short form of his tripartite strategy:
Intensify: Reframe the issues. Engage emotions. Take the offensive. Diminish the opposition’s authority. Undermine their moral credibility. Frame the opposition brand as radical, anti-science, isolated, hypocritical.
Convert: Use internet, mobile, TV, radio, and newspaper. Break through the 24/7 news cycle. Target the public, media, legislators. Fabricate front groups. Incorporate shell companies. Employ opposition research. Create attack ads. Build cloaked websites. Position your brand as moderate, factual, mainstream, sincere.
Negate: Diminish the opposition’s ability to operate. Create doubt. Use sarcasm, humor, fear and rumor. Make it personal. Compromise opposition messengers. Make it nasty. Counter celebrity marketing. Destroy the opposition’s brand.
One of Bernays’ earliest triumphs was forming a prestigious sponsoring committee to promote Damaged Goods, a frank play about venereal disease. Now a common public relations technique, this was a pioneering move in 1913. Bernays used his strategy, which was based on early psychological warfare, to explain how well-known and well-heeled sponsors can influence public opinion: “Their participation intensifies favorable opinion, sways the undecided and negates the opposition.”
Bernays was part of Woodrow Wilson’s Committee on Public Information (CPI), America’s first official effort to influence public opinion using propaganda. His service between 1917 and 1919 gave him a firsthand opportunity to see classic psychological warfare strategy applied on a massive scale in America and around the world.
At the end of World War I, he became aware of how the CPI propaganda had worked. “When I came back from the war,” Bernays recalled, “I recognized consciously what we had done to make the world ‘safe for democracy’ in intensifying the attitude of our own people in support of our war aims and ideals, in winning over the neutrals and in deflating enemy morale.”
The enthusiastic crowds greeting Woodrow Wilson’s motorcade on the streets of Paris at the Peace Conference in January of 1919 offered Bernays another insight: wartime propaganda could entice the masses to follow the will of an enlightened few in times of peace. “My uncle expressed this very well,” said Bernays, referring to his famous uncle Sigmund Freud. “People need sacred dances. Public relations counsels should be trained to call the tunes.”
In 1923, Bernays wrote the first book to define and explain public relations. Harold Burson, founding chairman of Burson-Marsteller, has said Crystallizing Public Opinion should be mandatory reading for all practitioners because, “Bernays, in effect, documented the methodology of practicing public relations. Written almost a century ago, it has as much validity today as when it first appeared.”
Bernays began his career in public relations as an unabashed propagandist. He spent a good bit of his time attempting to portray propaganda as wholesome, honest, and honorable. According to Bernays, public relations came of age roughly between 1929 and 1941. During that period, he said, propaganda and public relations were interchangeable terms.
That changed once Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels and the Nazis indelibly tarnished propaganda’s already tarnished image. Sheldon Whitehouse, a former prosecutor and U.S. senator, described Bernays’ change of heart in very clear terms: “After the Nazis gave the word ‘propaganda’ a bad name, Bernays gave a new name to his chosen field: ‘public relations.’”
Bernays’ renaming and reframing was itself a brilliant propaganda manipulation that positioned him as a principal thought leader in a rapidly emerging profession, distanced what he was doing from publicists, flacks, and carnival barkers, and made propaganda an irrelevant and almost quaint word.
Several other publicity pioneers, including P. T. Barnum, Ivy Ledbetter Lee, Henry C. Rogers, Benjamin Sonnenberg, Carl Byoir, Bruce Barton, or the U.K.’s Basil Clarke might be tapped as “fathers” of public relations. Bernays, however, clearly staked a far better claim to the title by tirelessly promoting himself, the profession, and his role as founding father.
Harold Lasswell, a professor of law at Yale and political science at Chicago University, concluded that American scholars and society were in Bernays’ debt for his many published works on propaganda and public relations: “It is rare that the man who has such a formative influence on an institution is sufficiently articulate, detached and willing to contribute significantly to its written history.”
While many scholars have observed that Bernays was adept at indirection, they have not pointed out the fact that indirection is a critical element of effective propaganda, public relations, and psychological warfare. Mass media scholar Daniel Lerner made the importance of this connection clear in a discussion of psychological warfare when he said that “The techniques of indirection were recommended in every case.”
A pivotal moment in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s 1939 classic The Wizard of Oz is a perfect allegory for Bernays, who maintained his good intentions, yet was constantly performing indirect sleights of hand designed to mislead, or shall we say, lead people where he wanted them to go. In the film, when Judy Garland’s cairn terrier Toto pulls back a curtain to reveal a frumpy middle-aged man, the unmasked wizard timidly says he is not a bad person, just a humbug.
Humbug or not, Bernays was remarkably candid about what he did and how he did it, more so than any public relations practitioner before or since. He opened a usually closed door to the inner workings of an industry we rarely see, writing with uncommon clarity and a bit of humbug about how propaganda and public relations work.
Bernays’ career touched many key topics of the twentieth century: propaganda, psychoanalysis, public relations, the presidency, the press, national security, ethics, health care reform, democracy and capitalism, to name a few. The last two of these topics are particularly troublesome given Bernays’ vision of corporate propaganda in service of democracy and capitalism — which some have described as taking the risk out of democracy and others have decried as totalitarian democracy.
Judge Learned Hand once described public relations as “a black art.” Bernays and his heirs have shown the world that this black art can regiment the public mind by exploiting emotion, influencing followers, employing mental clichés, and gaining trust. Bernays initially called propaganda and public relations “the engineering of consent.” He and they are the reason we are drowning in fake news, alternative facts, and propaganda intended to engineer our consent.
Bernays took America into Orwellian territory, in which language is used to represent the opposite of what it means. His legacy is something of a mysterious and magical grand illusion. Like a good stage magician, he knew that effective illusions require a consciously managed stage and audience. Eric Mead, a professional magician, explained how an effective illusion is created: “The most important skill of good magic is not sleight of hand or misdirection. It is the ability to lie convincingly.”
Stripped of their glamorous spin to remind us that he was selling cigarettes, light bulbs, and beer, Bernays’ creative sales campaigns are the things of which public relations textbooks are made. One of the first spin doctors to realize politicians could be sold like any other commodity, propaganda tactics he laid out during his career have proven themselves effective for many politicians, including our first social media president.
The sweeping social, political, and economic effects of the industry Bernays fathered continue to influence the century unfolding before us: “Whereas propaganda may have come of age in the twentieth century, its refinement, its efforts to use information to maintain and build social cohesion and control defines the twenty-first century.”
Edward L. Bernays — the most famous person you’ve never heard of — unleashed a revolutionary idea at least the equal of Freud’s psychoanalysis, Marx’s communism, or Darwin’s evolution.
He called it public relations.