Introduction

On March 3rd, 1929, during the New Yorker 5th 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, for smoking in public settings was a behavior still prohibited for women in the second decade of the 20th 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 (Tye, 1998). 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 United States. 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 cigarettes those women were smoking during the Easter Sunday 1929 happened to be Lucky Strikes.

Lighting Torches of Freedom – Public Perception

Most articles that circulated in connection with the manifestation pointed out the audacity of those young women, for they were using the cigarettes to protest against their social status. They felt subordinated to men and did not feel comfortable in the inferior role. Unanimously, the press presented the episode as a new achievement in the process of emancipation of women. Numerous editorials and columns discussed the actual meaning and possible consequences of this gesture: women smoking in public. Thus, the issue clambered to top of the public agenda.

For conservative groups, the act was regarded as provocation. This public behavior offended not just the established social values, but also the “intrinsic” feminine values. On the other extreme of the opinion spectrum, many groups of radical feminists adopted the same behavior to protest against the subordinated position of women: thousands of women started to smoke cigarettes in public all over the country (Tye, 1998). In most of the reports on the New Yorker Easter Parade, appeared the phrase “Torches of Freedom” to metaphorically depict the role of cigarettes in the female emancipation struggles. One of the women who participated in the action, a certain Bertha Hunt, made the following statement to some astonished members of the press:

I hope that we have started something and that these torches of freedom … will smash the discriminatory taboo on cigarettes for women and that our sex will go on breaking down all discriminations. (Tye, 1998, p.30)

Miss Hunt, apart from her militant activity, happened to work as a secretary for a certain Edward L. Bernays.

The Easter Sunday Parade in New York became the favorite issue for the American public opinion. The traditional values safeguarded by public opinion were called into question. By smoking in public, the women were expressing their desire to escape the cave they thought society kept them in and become visible in public spaces. Smoking in public became a new cause to win, a new battle front for the emancipation movement.

Public opinion works, as Walter Lippmann realized, on the basis of symbols “which assemble emotions after they have been detached from their ideas” (Lippmann, 1925, p.48). Controversial issues arouse intense disputes in public opinion that go deep into feelings but remain superficial as in regards to ideas. When those women appeared smoking on 5th Avenue, they were challenging public opinion. And this always has consequences.

Public opinion was for the first time connected to social control by the American sociologist Edward A. Ross. According to Ross, the main effect of public opinion is to give cohesion to society. And this cohesion is the result of the reppression of individuals – and individuality – in favor of the group. Public opinion protects established ideas exerting pressure on those individuals who dissent from them. This pressure results in isolation, which is the traditional punishment of public opinion and the fate of most individuals who defy its unwritten laws. In progressive steps, the society parts with the dissenting element until “the dead member drops from the social body” (Ross, 1969, p.62).

In spite of being a conservative power that preserves a determined status quo, public opinion is constantly changing. This may appear paradoxical, or even contradictory, because, according to Ross, the main effect of public opinion is to immunize society against new ideas. The German scholar and pollster Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann lights up the paradox. Those who challenge public opinion run the risk of becoming its victim. Their fate might be the social death Ross described. Still, they may also instigate social dynamics that could cause a swift change in public opinion. This is the effect of avant-gardes at any time, in any society. Defying behavior can trigger imitation waves that might transform the values, the habits and the language – the three fields of influence of public opinion – of society.

The women who appeared smoking during the Easter Parade were defying public opinion. And as a consequence, they were also challenging the value system and the fundamentals of the American social architecture.

Torches of Freedom – A Second Look

Most of those women did in fact gain consciousness of the symbolic value of their gesture. They very likely knew that they were defying some form of establishment. They never suspected, however, that the manifestation had an instrumental value as well. Nothing was spontaneous in the Easter Parade, and there was more than freedom and emancipation at stake.

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.

Perfectly aware of the power of taboos to abort social dynamics, Edward L. Bernays decided to fight against it. To this end, he joined a social stream that had been shaking the American public opinion since the start of the 19th century: the activism in favor of the emancipation of women. Besides, the place for the demonstration was especially appropriate. New York was the center of emancipation activism in the first decades of the 20th century. It was in New York, in 1848, where the first Women’s Rights Convention was celebrated. In 1929, the emancipating movement had already progressed a big deal. Nine years before, in 1920, the 19th amendment granted women the right to vote (Winning the Vote). However, vestiges of a patriarchal culture that placed women in the social background still remained.

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 (Boorstin, 1961). Bernays, as Lee did, 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. He did not invent the pseudo-event, but was the first publicity agent who systematically made of pseudo-events the key element of his communication campaigns. Thus, Bernays raised the profession of public relations to the category of “social engineering”.

Bernays’s idea of using the woman’s emancipation movement to increase cigarettes sales originated from a conversation with the psychoanalyst Dr. A.A. Brill. Brill’s specialty was the mental mechanisms that generate 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, Bernay’s employer, 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” (Tye, 1998, p.29).

Bernays organized the campaign with extreme care and the highest precision. The public had to perceive the event as a spontaneous action against a social prejudice, the prejudice “that the cigarette is suitable for the home, the restaurant, the taxicab, the theater lobby but never, no, never for the sidewalk” (Tye, 1998, p.29).

Bernays tried to make sure that the event could not be traced back to himself or the American Tobacco Company. This was his main concern, but he also carefully planned every detail. For instance, some of the women participating in the event were instructed to light the cigarettes after leaving the church. Bernays wanted to transmit the idea that smoking was a pleasure that also decent and religious women could enjoy. It was necessary, in his view, to fight against the stereotype of vicious, immoral, or indecent women with cigarettes in their hands. To create the effect of spontaneity, no celebrities were used for the Easter Parade action. The selection of the women was also highly elaborate. Bernays contacted Vogue debutants that were attractive enough to draw the attention of the public, but avoided, on the other hand, the use of spectacular models. Too sophisticated women might have hurt the appearance of normality, attractive normality – he wanted to create. In order to emphasize their respectability, some women were walking arm-in-arm with their husbands. Of course, Bernays had made sure that professional photographers would be present in strategic places in order to feed the press with the necessary photos of the staged event (Tye, 1998). Another important part of the planning was to create and polish arguments against the critiques that the event would no doubt stir up.

Social Engineering

Bernays’s connection with psychoanalysis preceded his relationship with Dr. Brill, though. Actually, psychoanalysis ran in Bernays’s blood, so to speak. He 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.

If Ivy L. Lee set the basis for the professional activity of public relations, Edward L. Bernays used the profession as application fields of scientific disciplines that dealt with individual or social behavior. In his book Crystallizing Public Opinion, he defined the profession as applied social sciences (Bernays, 1923). Public Relations was, in his opinion, a systematic form of scientific persuasion (Grunig, 1984). Bernays was the first person who delivered a lecture on public relations at the university, too. It happened in New York 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”. The first book ever written on the subject public relations, “Crystallizing Public Opinion”, was also Bernays’s work. Pioneering in the field of public relations was likewise the agency he founded with his wife Doris Fleishmann.

There are hundreds of anecdotes about the fashion in which Bernays achieved his goals. He started working for show business. The first American tour of the worldwide celebrated tenor Enrico Caruso was organized by him, 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 necessity of educating the public in order to control the individual and social damage these kinds of diseases were generating. The campaign, as well as the show, were very successful, indeed. 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 (Tye, 1998). The social function of the play was more stressed than its artistic merit. This case also serves as an example of the symbiosis between public relations 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 in particular and public relations in general. Behind the façade of social enlightenment, Bernays was actually ensuring the financial success of his product, in this case the theatrical show.

In another job for the American Tobacco Company and Lucky Strikes, Bernays demonstrated his ability to influence the American habits of life. The executives of the company blame the color of the packet, green at that time, for the difficulties to establish the brand into the female market. The color, they thought, would never fit their clothing conventions. Bernays’s solution was more radical than the ideas of his bosses. He did not the change the color of the package, but tried to make green fashionable (Bernays, 1965). He dedicated all his energy and enthusiasm, which could be overwhelming, to this end. The result of his thoughts was a Green Ball he organized at the Waldorf Astoria to raise money for some charity purpose. Bernays ensured the attendance of the most glamorous debutants in New York by persuading Mrs. Frank A. Vanderbilt to act as hostess. His next move was to warn the fashion industry about the green avalanche that the ball would generate, to make sure that they would be able to satisfy the demand for green clothes and accessories. The press reacted as Bernays expected. The New York Sun stated in one of its headlines: “It Looks Like a Green Winter”, as did the Post, which predicted a “Green Autumn” (Tye, 1998, p.39). The climax of Bernays’s efforts was, paradoxically, an advertisement of the rival company CAMEL: “The November magazine advertisements for CAMEL cigarettes showed a girl wearing a green dress with red trimmings, the colors of Lucky Strikes package. The advertising agency had chosen green because it was now the fashionable color” (Bernays, 1965, p.394).

Crystallizing Public Opinion was not the only book written by Bernays. Actually, and given his busy agenda, he was a relatively prolific author. He wrote a plethora of articles and books trying to promote and explain his profession. Who expects to find intellectual depth or original thoughts in his writings will most likely become disappointed. Many of his ideas are inspired by the works of the French pioneers in the field of social-psychology Gustave Le Bon and Gabriel Tarde. Even clearer is the influence of Walter Lippmann. Crystallizing Public Opinion appeared just one year after Lippmann published his landmark Public Opinion (1922). Bernays’s next important book, Propaganda (1928), appeared just a couple of years after Walter Lippmann published the sequel of Public Opinion: The Phantom Public (1925). In his books, Bernays tries to apply the ideas and theories of those authors to the public relations practice, frequently without proper quotes. Examples of his own professional experience are used to illustrate those theories and ideas. Bernays was never an exceptional writer, and his thinking lacks intellectual ambition. Yet, his books are lively and very entertaining. Maybe due to his particular talents and limitations as a writer, Bernays’s most interesting book is his Biography of an Idea: Memoirs of the Public Relations Counsel Edward L. Bernays (1965).

When he was still starting his career, Bernays joined the Committee for Public Information during World War I, 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 PR profession. For the committee was subject to bitter criticism when the Congress accused its members of trying to hamper the activities of the press (Tye, 1998).

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. One of his events brought Bernays’s name to the spotlight, though: The Golden Jubilee of the Electric Light.

Originally planned to honor the inventor of the electric bulb, Thomas A. Edison, the Golden Jubilee of the electric bulb became a macro-event of never-seen dimensions. Initially, Henry Ford and the General Electric competed for the right to organize the event. Ford’s position prevailed because he was an admirer of Edison and had enormous interest in honoring his idol (Tye, 1998). Very soon, Edwar L. Bernays stepped on board and started being the visible hand at work. In an apparently spontaneous way, newspaper articles about the inventor and his invention succeeded each other during the months previous to the celebration. The key event of the Light’s Golden Jubilee happened on October 21, 1929. Thomas Edison arrived at Dearborn (Michigan) train station, where an enthusiastic crowd was awaiting him. To reproduce the historic moment in which electricity was used for the first time to generate light, Henry Ford let moved Edison’s original laboratory in New Jersey to Dearborn. In a dramatic narration, the experiment was reenacted and radio broadcasted for the whole country. Everybody was supposed to participate in the homage. People all over the country were asked to turn on the light at the same time to make visible the relevance of Edison’s discovery (Ewen, 1996, p.217). The action, coordinated by the radio broadcast, was spectacular. U.S. President Herbert Hoover, as well as the most important names of finance, industry and science attended the banquet in honor of Henry Ford’s special guest. John D. Rockefeller Jr., Will Rogers, J. P. Morgan Jr., Owen D. Young, Adolph Ochs, Orville Wright, or Marie Curie were some of the names gathered to show Edison their respect. Of course, Bernays did not miss the climax of what he himself considered to be his “greatest triumph” (Tye, 1998, p.67). In fact, his presence during the celebration was so pushing that he ended up irritating the host, Henry Ford. Fed up with Bernays’s urge to appear in every photo group, Ford told his own PR adviser Fred Black “to get Bernays the hell out of here or I’ll have Harry Bennett’s men [Ford bodyguard] throw him over the fence” (Lewis, 1976, p.225). The threat, according to the graphic testimonies of the event, was effective.

The question nobody could answer at that time was: Who is Bernays actually working for? It was obvious that someone was paying him, but nobody seemed to know – or to care – who. The answer is that Bernays organized the whole Light’s Golden Jubilee on General Electric’s behalf. He was working for this company and for the National Electric Light Association (NELA) (Ewen, 1996). This association, which was created in 1904 to purportedly help small electric companies to fight against General Electric, had become in 1929 a secret holding in the hands of this company. Through the NELA, according to Nye, General Electric was able to control the totality of the electricity market (Nye, 1985). Again we can recognize the proverbial ambiguity of our spin master. Behind the noble intention of honoring the great inventor, there were unmentioned interests of private parts Bernays was working for.

History tends to be harsh with Edward L. Bernays. PR scholars reproach him, for instance, for having incited the American public to smoke in spite of having serious suspicions, even at that time, of the harmful effects of this habit on the smoker’s health. The fact that he was involved in the coup d’état against the democratically elected government of Guatemala in 1954 while doing PR for the United Fruit Company also damaged his name. Now this name is almost synonymous with manipulation. In the historic memory, what remains are Bernays’s constant attempts to shape the perceptions of the public and influence its habits always in favor of those people or companies that were paying him.

The Way to Subconscious

The most interesting aspect of Bernays’s campaigns is that they were never based on specific products or services. Bernays was not the first publicity man who had the idea of staging events to attract the attention of the public. However, most of them had been promotional events focused on a product, a service, or even an individual. Bernays looked away from the direct promotion and rather directed his efforts to affect the public mind. Perhaps intuitively, Bernays recognized the old axiom formulated by the sophist in ancient Geek, the first masters on persuasion. Aristotle wrote in his Rhetoric, following the sophistic wisdom, that persuasion is only possible when the audience is put into the right frame of mind (Aristotle, 1325b). And the surest way to achieve this goal, according to him, depends on the ability of the communicator to connect with the PATHOS of the audience. Much more effective than complex argumentation based on logical or rational processes, which demand deep elaboration of ideas, are simple but powerful appeals to the emotions. And this old axiom is all the more certain, the larger and more anonymous the audiences are.

From psychoanalysis, Bernays learned the importance of subconscious in the individual behavior. Our subconscious, according to this theory, becomes manifest in form of impulses that generate desires, and these desires determine the way we act. Only the desires enter into our conscious world, but seldom the roots of the desire. Subconscious impulses could lead to psycho- or socio-pathological behaviors over which the individual had little or no control. The objective of psychoanalytical therapy is to bring to light the subconscious roots of those behaviors to be able to correct them. Freud assumed that the individual, once aware of such hidden motivational forces, should be able to escape their overwhelming power.

Bernays discussed with Dr. A. A. Brill all possible subconscious aspects that could be related to the act of smoking. In his memoirs, Bernays reports that their first psychoanalytical interpretation was that “smoking is a sublimation of oral eroticism; holding a cigarette in the mouth excites the oral zone” (Bernays, 1965, p.377). However, this idea did not bring them too far.

It was Brill, as already mentioned, who gave Bernays the clue for the final campaign. According to the disciple of Freud, there are subconscious associations of smoking to social roles. Smoking was regarded as a masculine act, and as such, it became a symbol of the power structures in a patriarchal society. Brill even suggested that the first woman who smoked probably had “an excess of masculine components and adopted the habit as a masculine act” (Bernays, 1965, p.380). The tobacco habit was at that time inseparable from the idea of masculinity. The taboo of women smoking in public was another consequence of a patriarchal system that pushed women into the social background. The emancipation movement activists had been fighting for decades against the social prejudices that deterred women’s emancipation from subordinate roles. Paradoxically, Brill and Bernays did not regard the emancipation movement as a fight against the social and political status quo, but as treason to the idea of femininity in itself:

But today the emancipation of women has suppressed many of their feminine desires. More women do the same work as men do. Many women bear no children; those who do bear have fewer children. Feminine traits are masked. (Bernays, 1965, p.386)

The feminist fight for emancipation was, first of all, a symbolic battle. Cigarettes proved to be one of those symbols monopolized by the patriarchy. When women decided to smoke in public settings, they were appropriating a symbol that belonged to the dominant male sphere, and challenging a given status quo. Thus, the cigarettes “become torches of freedom” (Bernays, 1965, p.386).

As it is common to all campaigns designed by Bernays, the main focus was not on the product, the brand or the packet, but on the people’s mind. The secret mechanisms of the public mind were his true passion. Bernays was aware that, when turned into a part of the mass, individuals are subject to social pressures that might mould their cognitive processes. The subjection of individual thinking to group pressure originates very special dynamics, which is the reason why we can talk about group or mass psychology. Bernays conceived his campaign as an attempt to struggle against one of those social dynamics: the prejudice against women who smoked in public. For this act was associated to a licentious, scarcely decorous life style that placed women at the edge of marginality and made her unfit for the sanctuary of family.

The cigarette, when hanging on female lips, was a highly negative symbol. Bernays’s intention was to convert it into a positive one. The negative connotations associated to the symbol, such as marginality and indecency, had to be replaced by the beautiful idea of freedom. Women smoking in public would have had to be regarded as free spirits fighting for their freedom and the freedom of other women.

Bernays’s strategies to set up and develop campaigns anticipated, because of their complexity, modern public relations. They integrated different elements at different levels and different channels to reach target audiences. Bernays was a pioneer, for example, in the use of the so-called grassroots actions, and his “torches of Freedom” campaign is the best example of it. As already mentioned, Bernays carefully avoided that the action during the Easter Sunday Parade could be linked to himself or to the company he was working for. Her secretary, Berta Hunt, sent the letters to the Vogue debutants without mentioning her relationship to Bernays or the true nature of the act (Tye, 1998). The public had to perceive the demonstration as part of a process that could not be stopped.

Bernays was aware of the power of source credibility in persuasive communication, and understood the mechanisms to achieve it. First of all, he persuaded the feminist leader Ruth Hale to support the action. Then, further third party endorsement was also ensured, which would persuade the public that there was no self-interest involved. Many organizations well known in the city for their support to the emancipation cause were contacted to this end. Those organizations would eventually help him face the controversy that the event was going to generate. He never doubted that a hectic public debate would follow the demonstration. Thus, he was very well prepared for the rhetorical battle. He sharpened, polished and enhanced all his arguments and made sure that they were delivered by the right source. Bernays even fed the controversy, for he was sure that cigarettes would be in the minds and the conversations of the American people as long as the public debate was alive.

Bernays was never enthusiastic about advertising, which made him, again, a visionary. He realized that this communication method would end up losing its credibility because the public would mistrust the information that appeared in a space that a company had paid for. His public relations efforts were much more effective because the articles about his pseudo-events appeared in the press, frequently in the front page, as news; and as such they were perceived by the audiences. In addition, it was very cheap, because they did not have to buy advertising space. Nowadays, the ability to generate events that attract the attention of the press and guarantee press coverage is one of the pillars of public relations. The urge of many contemporary PR practitioners to obtain free space or time has also become the most common source of moroseness for editors of all different media around the world.

Ethical Considerations

Ivy L. Lee and Edward L. Bernays, the two most important names in the history of public relations, had little in common with regard to their work methods and, above all, their personalities. Yet, there is something that brings them together: the ambiguity inherent to their public relations endeavors.

This characteristic ambiguity is also the reason why we now question the ethical legitimacy of their public relations stunts, and as a result of all the contemporary PR activity. Frequently, Lee’s and Bernays’s ardent adhesion to moral causes hid utilitarian intentions. Both realized that public opinion, as John Locke (1690/1959) stated four centuries ago, works on the basis of moral categories. Public opinion decides what will be considered morally right and morally wrong, what will be regarded as vice or virtue at any given time and in any particular society. Therefore, when dealing with public opinion, it is necessary to create simple messages with unambiguous moral interpretations, which does not mean that the whole PR communication strategy is equally unambiguous.

Bernays perfectly managed this technique in his campaign “torches of Freedom”. The symbol used for the campaign was simple, direct and did not require a deep intellectual effort. The ideas linked to that symbol, the cigarette, were effervescing, for the emancipation movement was making rapid progress. As stated by the Communication Professor Michael Schudson, Bernays never introduced or lead the change, but simply hit the wave of progressive ideas regarding the role of women (Tye, 1998, p.34). The suffragists had achieved their greatest victory four years before: the right to vote. The emancipation of women was, already in the second decade of the 20th century, unstoppable in the Western civilization.

If we define manipulation as an action aimed to persuade individuals or groups but that tries to disguise the real persuasive intention, then we have to label Bernays as manipulator, and his Torches of Freedom campaign as mass manipulation. Secrecy, always a substantial part of Bernays’s professional activity, was especially relevant in this campaign. If the real intentions of the event had been publicized – to sell cigarettes – it would have been difficult to convince the debutants to appear smoking on 5th avenue, or the leading feminists and third party organizations to support the action. Besides, nobody would have taken the public demonstration seriously, as nobody takes seriously today the anti-tobacco campaign organized by the Tobacco Industry.

Bernays took care that the public could never suspect the involvement of the American Tobacco Company in the preparation of the event. The letters he sent to individuals and organizations asking for support came from “seemingly independent experts” (Tye, 1998, p.31). The letters were signed by the already mentioned Bertha Hunts, Bernays’s secretary, who played a very active role during the development and the implementation of the campaign. Her relationship to Bernays was never referred to. In the press coverage of the Easter Sunday Parade, according to Tye (1998), the names of Bernays, Lucky Strikes or the American Tobacco Company never showed up.

Neither did the Vogue debutants who were asked to demonstratively smoke in the New York streets know that they were serving the interests of the American tobacco industry. In the letters they received, the actual sponsors of the event were not mentioned either. Bernays – or Bertha Hunt – suggested to the young women in those letters to themselves send letters to the newspapers to inform the press what they were going to do the Easter Sunday parade on 5th Avenue (Moyers, 1983).

Another ethical issue has been the question of whether Bernays was aware of the harmful effects of tobacco on health. In the documents Bernays left to the Library of Congress, it seems to be clear that the American Tobacco Company had asked Bernays to get familiar with scientific studies about those effects. Apparently, his mission was to keep back the outcomes of those studies in case they indeed confirmed the negative effects, or to trivialize them if they did not. (Edward L. Bernays). Still, this ethical persecution seems obviously an exaggeration that goes along with the contemporary anti-tobacco inquisition in the American public discourse. It is futile, and perhaps hypocritical, too, to blame Bernays for the tobacco addiction of his contemporaries or for the deaths that may have resulted from this habit.

In his private life, Bernays was never in favor of tobacco. He never smoked and had a long-lasting battle with his wife, Doris Fleishmann, who was a strongly addicted smoker. Bernays’s daughter Anne gave witness of how her father taught them to tear apart the cigarettes of their mother if they found any of her packets (Tye, 1998).

Conclusions

The legend is still standing. In 1994, the German newspaper “Süddeutsche Zeitung” published an article about the manifestation of the Easter Sunday Parade of 1929. The article portrayed it as an important milestone in the fight for the emancipation of women (Avenarius, 2000). In many historical books and studies, Bernays’s activity has been analyzed, studied and also criticized. But it is the legend that remains in the public consciousness. And from this legend, Bernays’s hand in the creation of the event completely disappeared.

This fact is the best example of Bernays’s talent for social engineering. During more than six decades, Bernays tirelessly tried to influence the public mind. He never was interested in changing its character or nature, though. Although he may occasionally have claimed it, his goal was never to educate or enlighten public opinion. Bernays used his knowledge of the inner structures of public mind to smoothly introduce products, habits, ideas, individuals or organizations into the people’s awareness. The secret of his success was not the ability to transform the way people thought, but to adopt the way people thought to promote his own interest.

We saw in the last lecture how Ivy L. Lee started the modern development of public relations with his instrumental use of news. Lee’s main concern was to control the flow of information, to feed the press with the news that will reach through this channel to its target audience. Bernays was bolder and more ambitious than Lee. He was not a distributor or administrator, but a systematic creator of news. This approach opened a new era for the public relations practice. The goal of communication campaigns would be in the future to organize any kind of events that would appear in the media as news.

Bernays himself cultivated the illusion that he was able to control the masses. He thought that a few of ideas about the mechanisms that control our subconscious could be enough to achieve this ambitious goal. In Propaganda (1928), Bernays expressed this illusion with following words:

If we understand the mechanisms and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing it. (Benays, 1928, p.47)

This perhaps exaggerated confidence in the power of public relations worked most effectively as self-promotion. Even the National-Socialist German Party took interest in Bernays’s work. Something remarkable, indeed, given the Jewish roots of the PR counsel.

Yet, his ambition to control public opinion seems naïve today. It is not possible to transform the character or nature of public opinion, as it is impossible to educate or enlighten it. The professional communicator can of course attempt to influence the contents of public opinion at a specific time and in a particular subject. But if this is the goal, then it is necessary to adopt the language of public opinion, and to adapt their own discourse to its values, beliefs and intellectual level. And this exctaly is what Bernays did. He did not fight the irrational social dynamic of fashion that determines what is in and out, what we are going to like or dislike; that sets rules on the way we dress and the way we think, and stigmatizes those who dress or think in a different way. Still, he was able to make a certain color fashionable. It is possible to affect contents, directions or biases of public opinion, but it is not possible to change HOW the public thinks, i. e. the mechanisms that govern the mental processes of public opinion.

Public opinion will always end up forcing its own norms and punishing those who do not accept them. This idea is not new, though. It goes back over 2,400 years. In the introduction to this learning module I have already mentioned Plato, who realized that those who try to gain the favor of public opinion will always end up becoming slaves of it. And of this immutable wisdom, he tried to persuade the sophist masters, who were precursors of public relations and had the illusion, as Bernays did, of being able to make, just with the use of language, men to slaves (Gorgias, 2001).

Bernays’s figure has been losing prestige with the passing of time. Although his importance in the American history of the 20th 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, usually enchanted with himself. 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 (Stauber & Rampton, 1999).

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.

References:

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