Learning Unit 4:

Historical Development

Historical Overview

Part I

The Ancient World

One of the most frequent clichés that the researcher in the field of strategic communication has to face is that the subject is an American phenomenon. It is true, indeed, that this professional field has reached in this country an unusual relevance in the different areas of public communication – and that the way communication is now managed in the rest of the world follows in many cases the model and the trends established in the United States. Everything that this country generates and develops has a strong repercussion worldwide, and strategic communication is not an exception to this rule. However, it would be a gross simplification to limit the study of strategic communication history to whatever happened and was created in the United States.

Effective communication strategies have been applied for centuries. Already in ancient Greece, the philosophical group of the sophists put their wisdom on communication processes at disposal of those Athenian citizens who were interested in participating in the public discussion of issues related to the POLIS, the Greek model of city-state.

The sophists helped them manage their public image or bolster political ambitions. The sophists aided their contemporary Athenians to generate arguments in order to support a specific position in any given issue. They wrote speeches and gave advice to individuals about how to present themselves – or the cause that they stood for– in public.

The Greek sophists had much in common with our contemporary communication or PR consultants. One of those shared characteristics – not the less important – was the high fee they charged for their services. Some of the sophists were paid 1,000 Drachma (the Greek currency at that time) for a single course. The average salary for a worker was, at that time, 1 Drachma a day.

Another characteristic that the sophists shared with their contemporary counterparts is the moral flexibility. The sophists thought that in moral issues, any position could be defended with efficacy if the right arguments were provided. Most of the sophists were not native Athenians. They arrived at this city attracted by its cultural splendor after having wandered for years through practically all the known world at that time. In their wandering they observed that moral standards changed from place to place. As a consequence, the sophists developed a strong moral relativism that also characterizes many modern communication professionals.

Protagoras (485-411 B.C.), one of the most important names of the sophist philosophical school, revealed the relationship between language and moral. He described the words as filters through which we perceive the reality, but that also separate us from that reality. Words, as filters, are not neutral at all. Quite the reverse, they determine the way we perceive objects, people, or actions. Our judgment on moral issues may vary depending on the words used to frame them.

The Greek sophists were thrilled at the discovery of the power of language to determine the perception of the reality. They thought, with candid arrogance, to have discovered the ultimate weapon to control the will of the citizenship.

Gorgias (485-380 B.C.), in the middle of his communication ecstasy, even affirmed that, with the mere use of language, he was able to make people slaves. He attributed to the speech a kind of magic power and compared its effects on the soul to the “power of drugs over the nature of bodies” (Gorgias. (2001). ‘Encomium of Helen’).

Plato (427-347 B.C.), who was born in Athens, loathed the sophists and their wisdom, which was becoming more and more popular. First of all, the fact that they charged money for their knowledge irritated him. To sell knowledge represented for him the worst form of prostitution. Then, he resolutely rejected their moral flexibility, which denied the existence of ultimate moral principles. Plato’s attacks against the sophists sound pretty much like the current ones used by some scholars and intellectuals against the professionals of public communication. The contemporary discussion focuses, as it happened at Plato’s time, on the ethical limits of the power that communication might generate.

In addition to his ethical reflections on the use of communication by the sophists, Plato cooled down the enthusiasm of the sophists with regard to the power of language and communication to control the broad mass of people. Plato reproached the sophists for arrogance, which he thought came from their ignorance. Plato realized that it is a sheer illusion to believe that power might allow you to control public opinion. Reversing Gorgia’s conviction, Plato concluded that it is not just impossible to control the people by means of words, but that those who want to achieve the form of power the sophists were interested in will always end up indulging the demands and expectation of public opinion. Never will power be reached without the support of people. And never will the social body give power to those who oppose its core values.

You can find a series of historical case studies in this learning unit. The common denominator of all those cases is the fact that to be successful strategic communicators need to adapt to the characteristics of their target audience.

In the cases selected, what was at stake was the economic, social, or political power of the actors involved (individuals, corporations, institutions or states). Power means in practice the ability and capacity to act in the respective fields (politics, society, or corporative world). Strategic Communication reveals itself as a specific form of public discourse with the aim of acquiring, increasing or protecting economic, social, or political power. Thus, communication is the means to achieve a power that, as Platon suggested 2,300 years ago, will always flow from opinion.

The ability to act sinks dramatically when the moral authority has vanished. And this moral authority can only be achieved if the actors in the process of communication speak and act in the same wavelength as the anonymous mass of citizens that form the public opinion.

Given this broad definition of Strategic Communication, it is easy to understand why this specific communication dynamic cannot be regarded as an American invention, even if the term was create in the United States. Every social system will generate a public eye that will scrutinize the words and behavior of all the actors involved in the process of public communication. The more relevance the public debate has in a political system, the more urgent the management of communication between those individuals or institutions involved in the political discourse and their publics will become. And always when the thinkers reflect on the nature of political power, they have to discuss in detail the relationship between power and communication.

The Renaissance

During the European Renaissance, Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466-1536) and Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527), wrote some books that could be regarded as actual strategic communication treatises. The Prince (1532) and The Education of the Christian Prince, (1516) contain many elements that Edward L. Bernays could have introduced in his groundbreaking books. Both authors, who are today considered antagonists, describe in those works an archetype, the prince, and discussed in detail how this figure must deal with different groups that constituted his publics (the plain people, the church, the military, etc).

Both Erasmus and Machiavelli observed the paradox that was first systematically studied by Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) in his book On Rhetoric, the first systematic treatise on persuasive communication: The surest way to induce cooperation in the members of the public is to adapt the discourse to the characteristics of this public, to adopt both its values and the linguistic means to articulate them. Aristotle’s On Rhetoric should be on the bedside table of every professional communicator.

That the best way to enhance the efficiency of persuasive messages is to construct a common ground with the audience remains an axiom in contemporary public relations.

The most effective message will be the one that responds to the wishes, priorities, expectations, values, or anxieties of the audience. This public relations wisdom confirms Plato’s idea that those who want to achieve public relevance will have to subordinate their public discourse in any or other way to this social-psychological phenomenon that we call in this course public opinion.

All the cases in the learning unit are constructed on the basis of a similar contents structure. The case study starts with the definition of a problem in a specific historical context. The reference to the historical context is absolutely necessary to understand the public opinion state at the time and in the place where the case takes place. Once the problem has been stated, it is necessary to define the publics which constitute the target audience of the communications endeavors. The definition of these target audiences will also help understand the nature and form of the messages created to achieve the strategic goals, as well as the channels used to deliver those messages to the specific target audiences. Some cases, such as the study of the Nazi propaganda, will offer us the perfect opportunity to continue the ethical reflection on the relationship between power and communication initiated by Plato in his controversy with the sophists.

In the next steps of this historical overview, you will become familiar with the work of some pioneers. To understand the current state of the art in the professional world of communication, we need to know the works and endeavors of Ivy Lee and Edward Bernays.

Historical Overview

Part II

James Grunig, American Scholar in the field of strategic communication and mass media effects, summarizes in forth sentences the historical development in the professional field of public relations:

the public be fooled,

the public be damned,

the public be informed, and

the public be understood.

These four historical steps correspond to four different forms of understanding and practicing public relations. Public Relations is, as must be clear after the first weeks of this course, the professional management of communication to achieve strategic goals. Grunig’s historical framework will help us understand how the field of strategic communication has been evolving throughout the last two centuries. We will also learn some names, historical figures connected to every stage in the historical development. Their work will help us better understand the way strategic communication was managed at different times and in different contexts.

The Public Be Fooled

The phrase, the public be fooled, was coined by historian Eric Goldman in his book “Two-Way Street”, to describe the modus operandi of PR pioneers.

In the first decades of the 19^th Century, American magnates started to hire “press agents” in order to feed the press with stories about their companies. That was the origin of the Penny Press, which flooded the country with cheap newspapers, they cost only one cent of dollar, that were in constant need of news for their public. A lot of newspapers appeared and a group of intelligent and audacious people realized that they could reach huge audiences with the new Media.

It was a symbiotic relationship. On the one hand, the large corporations found a channel for practically free publicity. On the other hand, the newspapers gather material to fill their pages. Of course, the press agents used this venue to present the clients in the most favorable way.

They did not have any scruples, though.

The information they sent to the press was frequently distorted and embellished. The common understanding among those pioneers was that the public was stupid, and they acted in consequence. Of course, the poor reputation of the communication business nowadays is, in part, the result of the lack of any moral standards in the origins of the profession.

The name we will associate to this early stage is Phineas T. Barnum (1810-1891)

Barnum is the creator of the Barnum Circus, later known as Barnum and Bailey. Still, he is known today not for his circus, but for the extravagant communication techniques he used to promote it. As it was common in his time, he did not hesitate to cheat the public to make his show more attractive.

One of the most popular figures in Barnum’s circus was Joice Heth, the oldest woman in the world. She was presented as a 161 woman. Barnum claimed she had nursed George Washington. When Heth died in 1836, the autopsy revealed that se could not have been older than 80 years.

Barnum was also an early master of what historian Daniel Boorstin would call later pseudo-events, synthetic events staged with the only purposed of being reported and reproduced by mass media. Barnum staged with only this purpose the marriage of Tom Thumb, one of the midgets in this troop, and a popular attraction of his show. The marriage of the two midgets created a huge media uproar, which contributed to bring more people to the circus.

Barnum was the first one quoted saying:

“I don’t care if the newspapers attack me as long as they spell my name correctly.”

The idea that there is no such a thing as bad publicity is a myth, as we will learn in this course. Still, Barnum can be regarded as a visionary because he realized and exploited the power of mass communication as the most effective channel for persuasive messages.

The Public Be Damned

The sentence, The Public Be Damned, was the response of Cornelius Vanderbilt, railroad tycoon and one of the richest men of his time, to the growing pressure of public opinion. Warned by his advisors about the necessity of keeping in good terms with the public, the big man expressed his contempt with the now famous phrase:

The Public Be Damned.

He did not think the public could claim its right to be informed or enlightened. Still, American society was changing, and a very important factor in this change was the influence of mass communication.

Magnates, such as Vanderbilt himself or John Rockefeller, had been for years the favorite prey of a group of journalist and intellectuals socially engagé and morally indignant: the muckrakers.

The term was used for the first time by Teddy Roosevelt in 1906. The intense journalistic activity of the muckrakers in many ways left its mark on the American society at the turn of the 20^th century. They made the public aware of social inequities and discriminations and galvanized the large American middle class, which constituted their natural readership. Their way to understand journalism was militant, radical, combative and uncompromising. With unusual aggressiveness, the muckrakers denounced governmental and corporative corruption.

In their view, such corruption was becoming endemic and threatened to destroy the American political and social system. Upton Sinclair, together with Ida Tarbell the most relevant writer of the muckrakers, describes the process with following words:

“See, we are just like Rome. Our legislators are corrupt: our politicians are unprincipled; our rich men are ambitious and unscrupulous. Our Newspapers have been purchased and gagged; our colleagues have been bribed; our churches have been cowed. Our masses are sinking into degradation and misery; our ruling classes are becoming wanton and cynical.”

The activity of the muckrakers made clear the importance of public support also in the private corporate world. The public became aware of its power. The effect of muckraking journalism opened the eyes of the corporate giants, who realized that their success – not less than the political success – rested on public opinion. With no favorable and friendly environment, any company, even the apparently most powerful, could fail. The omnipresent and almighty public opinion also decides the fate of big business.

Muckraking journalism was a warning signal that the press had become one more of the powers that be. The awareness of this power was further reason why the practice of professional communication exploded in the first years of the 20^th century.

In this toughest stage of historical development, strategic communicators had mostly to fight against the attacks of the muckraking press.

The Public Be Informed

In the first decades of the 20^th Century, Corporations had already learned the lesson and started to develop effective strategies to keep the public informed about their activities and policies.

Those years were decisive in the foundation of this professional field. The first practitioners came from the press. The first professional communicators had all been working as journalists before becoming corporate journalists and image manufacturers. Before Edward L. Bernays coined the term “public relations counsel”, they were known as press agents.

The most relevant of those early press agents was, no doubt, Ivy Ledbetter Lee.

Lee was probably not the first individual who sensed that economic success depends on a good relationship with public opinion, but he was the first who systematically applied this certitude to the management of organizations.

Lee was born on July 6^th 1877, in Cedartown, Georgia. He grew up in a cultivated environment, in which sophisticated intellectual disputes were frequent. His father was a Protestant circuit preacher who especially enjoyed getting involved in scholarly debates on the evolution theory. His mother was an autodidactic intellectual. Although she married at the age of 13, she reached a notable intellectual stature. Above all after her husband’s death, Lee’s mother traveled frequently through different states and achieved a certain reputation as lecturer.

Ivy Lee graduated with honors from High School in St. Louis, where he also was the leader of the Debate Society. In 1894, Lee enrolled in Emory College, where he discovered his journalistic vocation. For the two years he spent at Emory, he worked as editor of the college department of the Atlanta Constitution.

In 1894, Lee transferred to Princeton University, where he continued developing his journalistic skills. He wrote for the daily Princetonian and was the editor of the Alumni Princetonian. Future president of the US Woodrow Wilson was one of the fellow students and friends of Ivy Lee at Princeton. His journalistic activity and, above all, his ability in public debate gave Lee visibility during this time. His academic records, however, were never outstanding.

After graduating at Princeton, Lee rushed into the world of journalism. He wrote articles for Associated Press, Philadelphia Press, and Chicago Record, and finally worked as reporter for the New York Journal. When he left this Journal, Lee wrote for the New York Times and New York World, where he obtained solid knowledge of economy and the mysteries of Wall Street.

In 1903, tired of the journalistic activity, Lee left the New York World and discovered his real passion. Two days after he left the World, he became involved in a campaign in favor of Mayor Seth Low, who, by the way, was not reelected. Lee’s early acquaintances would reappear later in his life. Low chaired the committee commissioned by Wilson to reach a settlement between the Colorado coal operators and the miners in 1915.

After this first experience, and while working for the Democratic National Committee, Lee met George Parker, who was in charge of publicity at the committee. Parker hired Lee, but very soon, convinced of the potential and the talent of his pupil, proposed the two start a publicity agency together. Thus, “Parker and Lee” was born. This agency was not the first one, but unquestionably was the one that shaped the development of the public relations professional field. According to Scott Cutlip, Parker and Lee represented two radically different ways to conceive the publicist activity. Parker was the traditional press agent, a mere middleman between organizations and the press. Lee brought into the profession an unusual sophistication. More than just to transmit information to the press, the press agent had to use information to mold the perception of the public. Lee himself explained it this way:

“When I started this business, it seemed to me there were two courses open to me. I could tell my clients what they wanted me to tell them. That, of course, would please them. But it would never get me very far. The other course was to tell them what I thought irrespective of their opinion. If my judgment was right, they would come to respect it. If I were wrong, I’d soon find it out. In either case, I’d eventually find my level.”

The agency presented itself as news source characterized by three values: “Accuracy, Authenticity, and Interest”. In fact, they fabricated ideal portraits of the corporate leaders who hired them.

In 1906, the anthracite coal operators consortium hired Parker & Lee to publicize and support its arguments during a long-standing conflict with the union, as well as to condemn the strike in front of the public. Working on this assignment, Ivy Lee created a small art piece: his declaration of principles. Just for this short statement, which was sent out and published in different newspapers, Ivy L. Lee could claim a unique place in the history of strategic communication. The New York Times would refer to the declaration some years later as “something new to the business of publicity”.

This is not a secret bureau. All our work is done in the open. We aim to supply news. This is not an advertising agency; if you think any of our matter ought properly to go to your business office, do not use it. Our matter is accurate. Further details on any subject treated will be supplied promptly, and any editor will be assisted most cheerfully in verifying directly any statement of fact … In brief, our plan is, frankly and openly, on behalf of business concerns and public institutions, to supply to the press and public of the United States prompt and accurate information concerning subjects which it is of value and interest to the public to know about.

The declaration of principles is the first attempt to create a code of ethical standards for the communication practice. It was issued not just as a mission statement for the Parker & Lee agency. The document had more pretensions. In those few sentences, Lee explained what and how professional communication ought to be. Precursory in the declaration was not as much the ethical reflection, as the vision of the role of honesty in the process of constructing corporate identity. The old corporative communication strategy that treated the public as annoyance to be loathed would end up, in Lee’s vision, damaging any company’s bottom line.

Lee carried to an extreme his policy of transparency when he was working for the Pennsylvania Railroad. After an accident in which several passengers died, Lee not just gave the journalists the information about the details and casualties, but also gave the journalists access to the fateful site. This way to manage a crisis, which now is recommended in every Crisis Management textbook, was at that point rather bold.

Ivy Lee, who sold himself as a man of deep culture, was, according to Stuart Ewen, more interested in collecting books than in reading them. He seems to have been familiar with the theories of Gustave Le Bon, the French author and pioneer in the field of social-psychology. Le Bon emphasizes in his work the cognitive limitations of “the crowd”. This shapeless phenomenon is unable to elaborate complex ideas or to distinguish between the objective and the subjective. The crowd, according to Le Bon, acts on the basis of “images”, and these images are the result of the reduction of the natural complexity of things. The images that set the crowd in motion condense certain aspects of reality, but they are not the reality. Still, those images fill the popular mind with “illusions”, and these illusions constitute the inner world of the crowd. Le Bon’s illusions forms the reality inside our mind that later Walter Lippmann would call pseudo-environment. The art of controlling the crowd, which was what most intrigued Lee, was based, according to Le Bon, in the ability to generate illusions through the use of symbols to which certain values or strong emotions are attached in the crowd’s mind.

The last years of Ivy Lee’s professional activity were stained by scandals. The public distrust against Lee intensified again when the press disclosed that he had been working for the Soviet government. Supposedly, Lee was involved in the production and distribution of a series of pamphlets to improve the image of the Soviet Union among the American Public.

The mistrust became hatred when the public knew that Lee had been advising the very German NAZI party on the possibility of winning over US public opinion. In order to preserve the secret of this consulting job, Lee used as a front the US division of the German Company IG Farben. Lee was called to testify in front of the House on Un-American Activities in 1934 because of this affair. He never admitted having distributed NAZI propaganda in the USA, but he could not deny having advised the German government on how to improve its relations to the US. To this end, Lee met several times with Adolph Hitler, his propaganda minister Joseph Goebbles and other NAZI officials.

Lee never made a public statement in connection with this affaire. We will never know if it was because he had nothing to say or because he thought that the fight was not worth it. Lee died a few months later, in November 1934, of a fulminant brain tumor.

In his final assignment, Ivy Lee transgressed the informative transparency that he honored in his declaration of principles. This fact, by the way, does not reduce the value of the declaration, or of the principles established in the historical document, which still represents an ethical landmark in the practice of strategic communication. Only because of this declaration, Ivy L. Lee would deserve to go down into history as one of the fathers of the profession. Albert Oeckl, German scholar in communication, considered the declaration the birth of the professional field.

Lee acknowledged the importance of the public in the American political system. The public perception of a company was, in his vision, the conditio sine qua non for its financial survival. Lee realized that the relationship with the anonymous but omnipresent public was the main weakness of the capital.

The press was at the turn to the 20^th century the only mass medium. Lee’s experience as a journalist soon persuaded him of the key role of the press to achieve his goals. The press would eventually become the main channel to transmit messages to the public. Lee knew first hand the news values, what really makes news, as well as the preferences, trends, vices and inclinations of the newspaper editors. The press might shape the way we comprehend reality through its selection power. What does not appear in the media will never enter our awareness. Therefore, most of Lee’s publicity endeavors were aimed to control the information that was going to appear in the press.

There are several instances of Lee’s ambiguous approach to his profession. Repeatedly, Lee expressed his faith in an enlightened public opinion. He stated that “the American people, intelligent, just and generous to a cause that appeals to them, want facts and figures.”

With such statements, Lee obviously wanted to flatter the public. Still, he frequently did not treat the public as an intelligent entity.

His strategy rather followed what Petty and Cacioppo designated as peripheral route to persuasion. He was using a special type of heuristic, the satisfied-ego heuristic.

When Lee exalted the intelligence of his audiences, he expected that the mere exaltation would be enough to avoid a critical analysis of the delivered information. He was using a special type of heuristic, the satisfied-ego heuristic. Such an attempt to mislead the public would be in contradiction with the explicit praise of its intelligence.

Emphasizing that the public would not be influenced by means of easy emotional artifices, Lee expected that they would never question the facts he released, either. Yet, Lee was neither rigorous with the information he delivered to the public, nor scrupulous with the fashion it was delivered. The appeal to the intelligence of the public loses credibility when those who expressed it are, at the same time, trying to deceive the public.

When Lee stressed the importance of informative transparency, he was more interested in the credibility that flows from the transparency than in the honest dealing with information itself. When he appealed to the intelligence of the public, he was counting on the effect of the mere cajolement to neutralize criticism. Ivy Lee, a man with a complex and sophisticated mind, lent his complexity and sophistication to the practice of strategic communication. Many business- and statesmen were captivated by this new approach to the world of communication. Lee’s legacy is an unknown depth that makes this profession one of the columns of modern society, which is extraordinarily complex, too.

The Public Be Understood

In the next historical stage, communication professionals started to study their target audiences. They realized that the more they knew about them, the better they understood their publics, the more effectively they could establish relationships with them.

James Grunig called this new communication approach Scientific Persuasion.

And this basically means that the communication professionals apply behavioral and social sciences in order to more effectively persuade individuals or Mass Audiences.

Research became the key moment in every communication campaign. It was necessary to gather information about the target audience before the campaign started.

There are two forms of research: formative and evaluative.

Formative research is used to obtain information about our target audience. This will allow us to better defined our public and more effectively tailor our messages to the factual characteristics of our target audience.

Evaluative research is done at the end of the campaign in order to find out to which extent the campaign was successful. To assess the effectiveness of persuasive messages, the researcher measures whether there was a significant change in the attitudes or behaviors of the target audience.

The practice of professional communication as scientific persuasion was first introduced by Edward L. Bernays.

Bernays is without doubt the most important name in the history of strategic communication. Born in Vienna on November 22, 1981, psychoanalysis ran in his blood, so to speak. Bernays was the double nephew of the father of this scientific discipline, Sigmund Freud. Bernays’s mother was the sister of the famous psychiatrist, and Freud’s wife was the sister of Bernays’s father. He was familiar with his uncle’s theories about the effect of the subconscious as a hidden source of human motivation. And such theories deeply determined his approach to public relations.

In his book Crystallizing Public Opinion, he defined professional communication as applied social sciences. Public Relations was, in his opinion, a systematic form of scientific persuasion. Bernays was the first person who delivered a lecture on public relations at academic level. It happened at the University of New York, and the title of the lecture was “On the principles, practices and Ethics of the new profession of public relations”.

He started working for show business. The first American tour of the worldwide celebrated tenor Enrico Caruso was organized by Bernays, as well as a turbulent campaign to make the American public familiar with the Russian National Ballet and its most refulgent star, the dancer Valery Nijinski. His very first job as a publicist gives us a clear idea of Bernays’s methods and mental structures. He helped promote a Broadway show based on a French play written by the naturalistic author Eugène Brieux. Damaged Goods, the title of the play, was about a man who suffered syphilis and, in spite of his illness, got married and became father of a child who inherited the disease. Syphilis, as well as the rest of sexually transmitted diseases, represented another taboo because they were associated with indecent life styles. Bernays sensed that in order to be successful, he would have to dissipate the shadow of the social ban on this topic. The promotion campaign did not focus as much on the play or the author, as on the necessity of public enlightenment in this controversial topic. Bernays emphasized the urgency of educating the public in order to control the individual and social damage such diseases were generating.

The campaign, as well as the show, were very successful. A key element of this success was Bernays’s ability to get the endorsement of the most important names of the social, political and industrial life at the time. Among others, he persuaded John D. Rockefeller Jr., Mrs. William K. Vanderbilt Sr., Mr. and Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt and Dr. William Jay Schieffelin to sign up on the Fund Committee created on the occasion of the première. The social function of the play was more stressed than its artistic merit. This case also serves as an example of the symbiosis between strategic communication and society, because even if the final intention of the campaign was to promote a play, the positive effect on society is indisputable. To fight against that irrational taboo might in fact have contributed to control the devastating effects of syphilis. Still, the campaign represents another excellent example of the moral ambiguity that characterizes Bernays’s work. Behind the façade of social enlightenment, Bernays was actually ensuring the financial success of his product, in the case the theatrical show.

During World War I, Bernays joined the Committee for Public Information directed by George Creel. He was even one of the members of the committee who was selected to handle press relations on behalf of the U.S. mission during the Paris Peace Conference at the end of the war. Bernays had the opportunity to discover some of the dangers of the profession. The committee was subject to bitter criticism when the Congress accused its members of trying to hamper the activities of the press.

Bernays was for many years – he died in 1995, at the age of 103 – a constant, but not always visible, presence in American life. Bernays advised the moguls of financial America, as well as relevant figures in the political arena during more than six decades, but often he was behind the scenes, trying to shape the way people thought and felt.

His most significant contribution to the history of strategic communication was, no doubt, the Torches of Freedom campaign.

On March 3^rd, 1929, during the New Yorker 5^th Avenue Easter Sunday Parade, a number of young and attractive women strolled through the street ostentatiously smoking cigarettes. Those women were offending an unwritten law: Smoking in public settings was a behavior still prohibited for women in the second decade of the 20^th century. Such behavior, those women knew, was going to be perceived as scandalous.

Of course, this manifestation was a sensation in New York. The feminist leader Ruth Hale had called the women to join this special demonstration. The women smoking resolutely in New York monopolized the attention of the press. Pictures and stories related to the event, as well as reactions in favor and against were published in the most important newspapers of the US. Also the European Press echoed the event and the ardent discussion aroused by it. The event, as reported by the press, had all the appearance of spontaneity. Yet, the spontaneity was just this: appearance.

The mastermind behind the scenes was Edward L. Bernays, great wizard of publicity events. Bernays had never been especially interested in the emancipation of women until that moment. It was one of his jobs that moved him to approach this pressure group. His job, the great passion of his life, was at that specific moment of his life to sell cigarettes, Lucky Strikes cigarettes – to be exact.

Bernays realized that the market segment of female smokers offered huge development potential. Still, to be able to exploit this segment, it was necessary to fight against a taboo. One of the motivating forces behind collective behavior is imitation. People tend to imitate behaviors and ideas that others adopt or express in public, above all if the individuals who express those ideas or adopt such behaviors enjoy certain social prominence. Imitation is unlikely to happen, if not impossible, when any taboo prevents us from performing certain acts in public. And the idea of women smoking in public settings represented a taboo deeply rooted in the American frame of mind at that time.

Bernays knew that he would have to change the way people felt, but his goal was not to achieve this change. The change in the public mind was just a means, a necessary step to promote a product. In order to influence the public opinion, Bernays used a technique that would shape the modern conception of public relation: the creation of pseudo-events. The term pseudo-event was created in 1961 by the historian Daniel J. Boorstin to designate those publicity actions designed and staged for the only purpose of being reported in the media. Bernays realized the necessity of mass media in order to reach his natural audiences. But he did not just act as a transmitter of information. Bernays created events that the press would transform in news and present them to the public from the point of view of the creator of the event. Thus, Bernays raised the profession of strategic communication to the category of “social engineering”.

Bernays’s idea of using the women’s emancipation movement to increase cigarettes sales originated from a conversation with the psychoanalyst Dr. Abraham Brill. Brill’s specialty was the mental mechanism that generates inhibition. Dr. Brill, who had been a disciple of Sigmund Freud, made Bernays understand that the social ban on women who smoked in public would damage the cause of the American Tobacco Company for two reasons. First of all, the taboo hinders the visibility of the behavior and will make impossible any snow-ball effect. Second, many women had internalized that smoking – not just in public – was a dishonest or indecent act for women and transferred the ban to their private spheres. The metaphor used to promote the Easter Parade action also emerged from Brill’s head. In one of his conversations with Bernays, Brill uttered the thought that cigarettes were unconsciously associated to the superior role of men in society. Therefore, when a woman decides to light a cigarette, she was at the same time lighting a “torch of freedom”.

Bernays’s figure has been losing prestige with the passing of time. Although his importance in the American history of the 20^th century is undeniable, every story or anecdote that has to do with him has the unpleasant flavor of manipulation. The book written by his official biographer, Larry Tye, who had access for the first time to the documents Bernays donated to the Library of Congress, greatly contributed to establish the black legend. Tye portrayed Bernays as an incorrigible manipulator. Other authors have also emphasized Bernays’s ridiculous eagerness to achieve public recognition. Even at the time of his most frenetic professional activity, Bernays must have been subject to mockery among publicity and media fellows because of this urge.

In the 1960s, when the harmful effects of tobacco were too obvious to be denied, Bernays became involved in anti-tobacco campaigns. He used his old methods of mass persuasion to combat the habit he had helped thrive. He was again a precursor, for he joined the anti-tobacco crusade when it was still starting. This is perhaps the most admirable trait of Bernays’s personality. He was not able to control public opinion, as he often praised himself of, but he had the fine instinct to recognize trends, even when they were in embryonic state, and exploit them for his own interests. In this regard, nobody has ever matched Edward L. Bernays.

Conclusion

In this leaning unit, you can read in depth case studies on the Torches of Freedom campaign and Ivy Lee’s publicity work for the Rockefeller family during the Ludlow Massacres.

Our next lecture will focus on the ideal of the Two-Way Symmetrical communication. This construct was developed by James Grunig in order to fight the pejorative connotation that terms like propaganda or public relations have been gaining through the history of the 20^th Century. We will discuss to which extent the ideal of the Two Way Symmetrical communication correspond to the actual professional practice in strategic communication.

The Two-Way Symmetrical Communication Ideal

The historical development of the field of strategic communication, we could learn this in the two first lectures of this learning unit, justifies a certain mistrust against professional communicators. We understand now why the word propaganda has such pejorative connotations, or the actual meaning behind the term “Spin Doctor”.

Strategic communication scholars tried hard to fight that negative public perception of the professional field.

Grunig and Todd Hunt, created the ideal of Two-Way symmetric communication as a response to the general climate of mistrust against the profession. The concept appeared for the first time in their 1984 classic Managing Public Relations, and was further developed by the same authors and may other scholars in a plethora of books and journal articles.

The final purpose in the two-way symmetric communication model is not persuasion, but mutual understanding between organizations or between an organization and its publics. Communication professionals are not only concerned with the benefits for theier organizations, but pursue the public interest as well.

There is a balance between both parts in the process of communication. The roles of sender and receiver are not rigidly fixed. The model contemplates two different groups of communicators with the ability to generate messages that will contribute to a better understanding between the parts involved.

Grunig and Hunt designed this model as ideal, i.e. they did not describe what strtategic communication actually is, but what it should be. As it was made clear in the first learning module of this course, it is rather utopian to think that the PR practitioner is mostly concerned with the public interest.

In spite of this, both authors believe we can find actual examples of this concept in the professional field of strategic communication (around 15% in regulated business and agencies).

The name James Grunig associates to this PR model is the one of his mentor Scott Cutlip. Cutlip was the first full time PR scholar in this country. He wrote key books on PR theory and history and a plethora of articles about different aspect of the PR practice. Scott Cutlip was also the first author who did public relations for the public relations professional field, i.e. he always tried hard to present PR in the best possible light. Some of his most relevant works are:

Effective Public Relations
Pubic Relations History
The Unseen Power
Fundraising in the United states

Symmetric versus Asymmetric Communication

The main characteristics of the asymmetric model are according to Grunig and Hunt:

Internal Orientation: The members of the organization act as its advocates. They never contemplate the organization as outsiders.
The system is closed: Information flows from the organization but never in the organization. (Grunig and Hunt used the system theory to explain their models. For both authors, organizations are complete systems that interact with other systems. Systems are open if information may get into them).
Efficiency: Efficiency (for example low costs) is more important than innovations.
Elitism: The organization management thinks that they know more and better than the Public – or the different Publics.
Conservatism: Change is unwanted; every kind of transformation looks suspicious in this model. The organization wants to maintain its status quo, and the social status quo as well.
Tradition: Tradition gives stability to the organization and helps it keep the corporate identity.
Centralization of Authority: Power should be concentrated in the hands of a small group of top managers.

In Opposition to this static concept, Grunig and Hunt developed the symmetric communication model, that should be considered a normative model, i.e. the two-way symmetric model does not describe strategic communication as it in fact is, but rather as it should be.

The characteristics of the symmetric Model are:

Communication leads onto understanding and agreement: Main goal of every process of communication is to reach understanding between people, organizations or the different publics. Persuasion is not contemplated as a legitimate goal.
Interdependence: Systems depend on other system and on their particular environment(s).
Systems are open: They constantly exchange information with other systems.
Equality: every individual should be treated equally. The contribution of every individual in the organization (and outside the organization) will help reach the common goals.
Innovation: New ideas are emphasized. Innovation becomes more important than Tradition.
Decentralization of management: Manager’s function is not to command, but to coordinate.
Responsibility: Individuals and organizations must assume the responsibility of their decisions and acts.
Solution of conflicts: Communication helps solve and also avoid conflicts, better than the use of force.
Interest Group Liberalism: a new political concept in which the public is not considered just a passive part in the process of communication.

Obviously, the symmetrical communication is presented in the most favorable way. The question remains whether this model is only an ideal or a feasible and applicable concept in the field of strategic communication.