Crystallizing Public Opinion
To My Wife
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION by Stuart Ewen
Foreword
PART I—SCOPE AND FUNCTIONS
I. The Scope of the Public Relations Counsel
II. The Public Relations Counsel; The Increased and Increasing Importance of the Profession
III. The Function of a Special Pleader
PART II—THE GROUP AND HERD
I. What Constitutes Public Opinion?
II. Is Public Opinion Stubborn or Malleable
III. The Interaction of Public Opinion with The Forces that Help Make It
IV. The Power of Interacting Forces that Go to Make up Public Opinion
V. An Understanding of the Fundamentals of Public Motivation is Necessary to the Work of the Public Relations Counsel
VI. The Group and Herd Are the Basic Mechanisms of Public Change
VII. The Application of These Principles
PART III—TECHNIQUE AND METHOD
I. The Public Can be Reached Only Through Established Mediums of Communication
II. The Interlappling Group Formations of Society, the Continuous Shifting of Groups, Changing Conditions and the Flexibility of Human Nature are All Aids to the Counsel on Public Relations
III. An Outlining of Methods Practicable in Modifying the Point of View Of a Group
PART IV—ETHICAL RELATIONS
I. A Consideration of the Press and Other Mediums of Communication in Their Relation to the Public Relations Counsel
II. His Obligation to the Public as a Special Pleader
About the Author
INTRODUCTION
I first learned of Edward Bernays in the late 1960s, while I was a graduate student in history beginning to investigate the social roots of American consumer culture. As I read through his writings, I started to grasp his largely unknown influence on the contours of contemporary life. While his life story stood, for the most part, in the shadows of American history, this was “the invisible wire puller” who had devised many of the powerful ways that the tools of mass persuasion would shape the terrain of American society from the early twentieth century onward.1
Beginning his career in the early 1900s, Bernays would soon become one of the most influential pioneers of American public relations, a person whose worldly activities, though not widely known, left a deep mark on the configuration of our world.
Today all of this has changed. Due to a growing interest in the historical relationship between media, culture and society in the modern age, the name of Edward Bernays has become more and more familiar. Since the 1970s, an increasing number of books and films have appeared, and this once covert PR operative has been transformed into an historical figure of controversy and renown.2
Born in Vienna in 1891, Bernays was the double nephew of Sigmund Freud. His mother was Freud’s elder sister, Anna; his father Ely was Freud’s wife’s (Martha Bernays Freud) brother. His family background impressed him with the enormous power of intellectual life and accustomed him to the privileges and creature comforts of bourgeois existence.
Bernays was also a farsighted architect of modern propaganda techniques who, dramatically, from the early 1920s—when Crystallizing Public Opinion first appeared—helped to consolidate a fateful marriage between theories of mass and individual psychology and the designs of corporate and political persuasion.
During the First World War, Bernays served as a foot soldier for the U.S. Committee on Public Information (CPI)—the vast American propaganda machine mobilized in 1917 to package, advertise and sell the war as one that would “Make the World Safe for Democracy.” The CPI would become the source from which marketing strategies for subsequent wars—including the spurious and deadly adventure in Iraq—would flow.
In the twenties, Bernays fathered the link between corporate sales campaigns and popular social causes, when—while working for the American Tobacco Company—he persuaded women’s rights marchers in New York City to hold up Lucky Strike cigarettes as symbolic “Torches of Freedom.” In October of 1929, Bernays also originated the now familiar “global media event,” when he dreamed up “Light’s Golden Jubilee,” a world-wide celebratory spectacle honoring the fiftieth anniversary of the electric light bulb, sponsored—behind the scenes—by the General Electric Corporation.
Bernays’s influence would continue to hold sway well into the post–World War II era. To put it simply, Bernays’s career—more than that of any other individual—roughed out what have become the strategies and practices of public relations in the United States and, increasingly, on a global scale.
Alongside the numerous, well-documented campaigns he directed—including one for the United Fruit Company which led to the 1954 CIA-engineered coup that overthrew the democratically elected president of Guatemala—Bernays wrote prolifically.3 His books, Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923), Propaganda (1928), and his seminal 1947 article, “The Engineering of Consent,” are among the most significant documents in the history of what one scholar has termed, “the compliance professions,” those groups and often clandestine organizations that exist to manufacture public thought, opinion and behavior on behalf of political and corporate clients.4
Propaganda, and “The Engineering of Consent,” were the self-confident and unabashed writings of a man who was already established as the foremost figure in the public relations fraternity. Both are filled with bold and hyperbolic proclamations, exemplified by the opening paragraph in Propaganda.
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.5
In 1923, however, Bernays urgently believed that a case for the practices of public relations in a democratic society still needed to be made. Crystallizing Public Opinion was his presentation of this case, a straightforward manifesto providing a measured and studious argument for the importance of a new profession, which he dubbed “the public relations counsel.” Much as legal counsels advise and defend clients in the realm of law—the public relations counsel, as Bernays described him—it was always a he—provided expertise to clients on ways to effectively mold public opinion on behalf of their interests. The rise of this new profession, he contended, had already begun to alter the social landscape.
No single profession … within the last ten years has extended its field of usefulness more remarkably and touched upon intimate and important aspects of the everyday life of the world more significantly than the profession of public relations counsel.
Bernays’s insistence on the importance of defining public relations as a respectable profession was founded on his belief that many people looked upon the practices of publicity with disdain. In this book, Bernays sought to redeem the reputation of public relations and situate it as the intrinsic outcome of a serious intellectual tradition. In naming the book, he drew upon the language of science. “Crystallization,” in the field of physical chemistry, describes the process by which an amorphous entity—a gas or suspension in fluid form—is transformed into a solid coherent mass. For Bernays, “crystallizing public opinion” was about taking an “ill-defined, mercurial and changeable group of individual judgments” and transforming them into a cohesive and manageable form.
In the book, Bernays portrayed the public relations practitioner as an instrumental social scientist, a resolute student of human motivation. “His text books for this study are the facts of life,” he claimed, the “mental equipment of the average individual.”
The public relations counsel, he argued, specialized in understanding the public mind and knowing how to create those circumstances that would gain public attention to consolidate public opinion. A pivotal aspect of the PR counsel’s “wide range of instruments and techniques,” as Bernays described them, was an intimate knowledge of those “mediums … through which public attention is reached and influenced.… the channels of thought and communication.” In addition to his discussions of newspapers, magazines and the recent development of broadcast radio, Bernays’s description of those “channels of thought and communication” included word-of-mouth networks and the role played by individuals whose opinions influence the outlooks of others—teachers, business leaders, the clergy, etc.
If understanding the dynamics of public opinion was one of his specialties, so too was a comprehension of the railroad tracks along which ideas and opinions travel. An early look at his flair for unseen engineering is found in the work he did in 1913 to foster the success of a controversial play, entitled “Damaged Goods,” which dealt with the controversial topic of syphilis. This was a time, Bernays wrote in the book that follows, when sexual matters of any kind were not considered appropriate for public discussion. As Bernays noted, “Anthony Comstock, who headed the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, had already closed other shows that he thought too daring.”
In order to bypass such Victorian prudery, Bernays created a new organization and enlisted the public support of “men and women whose good faith was beyond question and would be responsive to our cause.” Turning “Damaged Goods” into a dramatic brief on behalf of public health these men and women—who included John D. Rockefeller, Jr.; Simon Flexner, the head of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research; Rose Pastor Stokes, an eminent social worker, and Mrs. William K. Vanderbilt, among others—transformed a potential failure into a major success that eventually gained national press when performed at the White House for President Woodrow Wilson and his high profile guests. In handling publicity for the play, Bernays displayed an uncommon genius social engineering that would define his career and would sharpen the focus of public relations thinking from then on.
Beyond his discussion of the “Damaged Goods” campaign, and other vivid case studies, Crystallizing Public Opinion was Bernays’s response to changes that had taken place in American society in the decades preceding its publication. Bernays wrote of the extent to which upper class Americans who had formerly “stood aloof from the general public and were able to say ‘The public be damned,’” had come to recognize that such open contempt wasn’t playing well in Peoria, or anywhere else. Social unrest, and widespread anti-business activism were its most visible consequences. “The willingness to spend thousands of dollars in obtaining professional advice on how best to present one’s views or products to a public is based on this fact.”
As this book clearly reveals, Bernays was building on ideas that had been percolating in Europe and the United States for several decades. Unlike his later writings, which paid lip service to his intellectual forebears, in Crystallizing Public Opinion, Bernays built his arguments on a foundation of ideas culled from a variety of prominent commentators on politics, society and the dynamics of psychic life. Their presence is manifest throughout the book.
Of course there was his uncle, Sigmund Freud, whose theories regarding the unconscious, the power of symbols, and the subterranean meaning of dreams had gained currency in the United States by the 1920s. But in reading Bernays’s book, it is evident that other thinkers were also extremely important to his worldview.
Though his name does not appear in Crystallizing Public Opinion, perhaps the most influential precursor to Bernays’s writings and approach—whom he named in later writings—was the French sociologist, Gustave Le Bon, who in 1895 published The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind.
Le Bon’s book was translated into nineteen languages within a year, and soon gained a wide readership among Western elites. It inspired the creation of what would become the rapidly growing field of Social Psychology, a field that continues to prosper. Le Bon was less concerned with public opinion than he was with the rapid growth of democratic movements, and the threat they posed to the established hierarchies of power. In his book, he proposed to offer a diagnostic anatomy of the mind of the masses, believing that a “knowledge of the psychology of crowds is today the last resource of the statesman.…”
In The Crowd Le Bon provided a preliminary handbook for people interested in “managing the human climate,” offering advice on the usefulness of images and theatrics as tools of persuasion, and making continual reference to the unconscious powers of suggestion. While Le Bon’s book offered little in the way of practical advice, his general estimation of the popular mind—that it was driven not by reason, but by illogical and primitive instinctive forces—would profoundly influence subsequent engineers of consent for decades to come. “Crowds have always undergone the influence of illusions,” he wrote, “Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master. Whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.” For Le Bon, to exert control over the social order in a democratic age a “small intellectual aristocracy,” adept in the application of mass psychology, was essential.
Following Le Bon, a growing number of Western thinkers began to wrestle with the mechanisms that generated mass perception. Le Bon’s close friend, Gabriel Tarde, wrote of the extent to which newspapers, and other early mass media, contributed to a kind of groupthink. Tarde suggested in 1898 that “the public” was the “social group of the future,” and that its private thoughts and discussions were but a product of the public power of the press, and international news services, which were providing an increasingly homogenized picture of reality.
The press unifies and invigorates conversations … every morning the papers give their public the conversations of the day … This increasing similarity of simultaneous conversations in an ever more vast geographic domain is one of the most important characteristics of our time.
Evoking a metaphor inspired by the recent invention of the phonograph, Tarde argued, “the conversations of individuals … are forced to follow the groove of their borrowed thoughts. One pen suffices to set off a million tongues.” This perspective, as you will find in Crystallizing Public Opinion, infused Bernays’s understanding of how the public relations counsel does his work, particularly in his analysis of the social and personal channels of communication.
Others whose work influenced Bernays included the British political scientist, Graham Wallas, whose 1908 book, Human Nature in Politics, maintained that “the empirical art of politics” was not based on fact-based appeals to reason. Instead, he asserted, it “consists largely in the creation of opinion, by the deliberate exploitation of subconscious, non-rational inference.”
In Crystallizing Public Opinion, Bernays repeatedly cites a 1916 book, The Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War. Written by the British surgeon and social psychologist Wilfred Trotter (whom Bernays erroneously refers to as William Trotter), who maintained:
No understanding of the causes of stability and instability in human society is possible until the undiminished vigour of instincts in man is fully recognized.
Of particular interest to Trotter, and to Bernays, was the “herd instinct,” the unceasing need to gain the approval and camaraderie of the social group. The individual Trotter wrote, is “more sensitive to the voice of the herd than to any other influence. It can inhibit or stimulate his thought and conduct.
It is the source of his moral codes, of the sanctions of his ethics and philosophy. It can endow him with energy, courage, and endurance, and can as easily take these away.
For Edward Bernays, these early writings, and others cited in this book, provided a psychic architecture that a public relations practitioner needed to understand in great depth. Without a thorough comprehension of the unconscious and instinctual triggers that stimulate human behavior, he would argue throughout his long career, the work of the “public relations counsel” would be impossible.
In many ways, the experience of the First World War challenged many mainstream intellectuals’ faith in the possibility of direct democracy. The propaganda efforts of the CPI reinforced a growing belief that ordinary men and women were incapable of rational thought. For democracy to work effectively, public opinion needed to be guided by what historian Robert Westbrook has characterized as “enlightened and responsible elites.”
More than any other individual, the prominent and powerful journalist, writer, and confidant of Presidents—Walter Lippmann—propagated this idea. A former socialist, Lippmann had moved, even before the war, to the conviction that popular sovereignty was impossible in the “Great Society,” his catchphrase for the modern world. As the United States entered “The Great War” in 1917, Lippmann played a pivotal role in convincing President Woodrow Wilson to deploy a vast propaganda bureau designed to deflect widespread skepticism and bring public opinion on board.
After the war, Lippmann held fast to the idea that the American people were incapable of self-rule. For democracy to work, the machinery of the public mind needed to be understood and managed by an educated elite. This idea was central to Lippmann’s pivotal book, Public Opinion, whose influence is evident in the title, and throughout the pages, of Bernays’s Crystallizing Public Opinion, which appeared the following year.
Lippmann’s Public Opinion remains one of the most important books of the twentieth century. Its diagnosis of “the public mind,” along with its ideas about how leaders can manage it, remains the most articulate statement regarding the exercise of power in the United States on to the present, and underlined the critical importance of what Lippmann termed “the manufacture of consent.”
Two of Lippmann’s ideas were particularly significant as Bernays crafted the job of the “public relations counsel.” The first of these was Lippmann’s argument that people’s view of reality was guided by the “pictures in their heads.” Living within the cocoons of their personal lives, and with minimal direct access to the outer world, most people’s sense of reality was shaped by what he termed “pseudo-environments.” While this meant that ordinary citizens were not able to intelligently comprehend the real issues of their world, their reliance on pseudo-environments provided educated elites with a powerful tool for effective leadership.
“The new psychology … the study of dreams, fantasies and rationalizations, has thrown light on how the pseudo-environment is put together,” he wrote. If patterns of perception could be unearthed, if scientists could uncover the “habits” of people’s eyes, they might also learn to engineer “pseudo-environments” which could persuade people to see their “larger political environment … more successfully.” Perception management, he contended, would defend democracy from the prospect of capricious authoritarianism.
Though it is itself an irrational force, the power of public opinion might be placed at the disposal of those who stood for workable law as against brute assertion.
A second idea that stands conspicuously within Bernays’ thinking, was Lippmann’s introduction of the modern usage of the word stereotype. Prior to the twenties, stereotype was a term relating to the printing trades, but Lippmann redefined it, describing stereotypes as a “repertory of fixed impressions” that “we carry around in our heads,” rigid mental templates that frame individual experience in an increasingly anonymous world.
For Lippmann, stereotypes did not emanate from the individual, but were an inexorable by-product of their surrounding culture, a perceptual reflex that imposed itself between people’s eyes and the world they believed they were seeing.
For the most part we do not first see, and then define, we define first and then see. In the great blooming, buzzing confusion of the outer world we pick out what our culture has already defined for us, and we tend to perceive that which we have picked out in the form stereotyped for us by our culture.
Ensemble, Lippmann argued, stereotypes constituted a coherent—if inaccurate—worldview. Unconsciously, but aggressively, people relied on them for a sense of where they belong in the world.
These preconceptions, unless education has made us acutely aware, governs deeply the whole process of perception. They mark out certain objects as familiar or strange, emphasizing the difference, so that slightly familiar is seen as very familiar, and the somewhat strange is sharply alien.
As central components of people’s mental equipment, Lippmann described stereotypes as the “foundations” of their “universe.”
They are an ordered, more or less consistent picture of the world … They may not be a complete picture … but they are a picture of a possible world to which we are adapted. In that world people and things have their well-known places, and do certain expected things. We feel at home there. We fit in. We are members. We know the way around. There we find the charm of the familiar, the normal, the dependable; its grooves and shapes are where we are accustomed to find them … It fits as snugly as an old shoe.
Given the comfort that this “repertory of stereotypes” affords us, he concluded,
…[A]ny disturbance of the stereotypes seems like an attack on the foundations of the universe. It is an attack on the foundations of our universe, and, where big things are at stake, we do not readily admit that there is any difference between our universe and the universe.
As Bernays was writing Crystallizing Public Opinion, the logic of Lippmann’s book infused his mind and his argument. “The public relations counsel creates new stereotypes,” he wrote, building these stereotypes out of a keen understanding of the “fundamental instincts in the people he is trying to reach.”
The public relations specialist’s goal was to create “a compact, vivid simplification of complicated issues.” This idea drew upon Lippmann’s theories about the anatomy of public opinion, along with the conclusions of a battery of social psychologists that preceded him.
Describing the peculiar aptitude of the public relations counsel, Bernays maintained “it is his capacity for crystallizing the obscure tendencies of the public mind before they have reached definite expression, which makes him so valuable.”
His ability to create those symbols to which the public is ready to respond; his ability to know and to analyze those reactions which the public is ready to give; his ability to find those stereotypes, individual and community, which will bring favorable responses; his ability to speak the language of his audience and to receive from it a favorable reception are his contributions. The appeal to the instincts and the universal desires is the basic method through which he produces his results.
In light of this kind of professionalized necromancy, Bernays was careful to insert the notion that the “public relations counsel” must closely adhere to ethical standards. Manipulating mass perception is always a dodgy exercise, but without a backbone of ethics, even Bernays was aware that it could be used towards dangerous ends.
There is one danger in the use of stereotypes by the public relations counsel. That … demagogues in every field of social relationship can take advantage of the public.
At the end of the day, the counsel’s intellectual arsenal had one primary purpose: the manufacture of news. “The public relations counsel must not only supply news—he must create news.”
This didn’t happen by dropping off press releases at newspaper or other media offices. It came instead from an educated ability to understand “what news actually is”—what it looks and tastes like—and the capacity to orchestrate occurrences that will attract news coverage and be viewed by the public as current events.
The public relations counsel must lift startling facts from his whole subject and present them as news. He must isolate ideas and develop them into events so that they can be more readily understood and so they can claim attention as news.
Throughout Crystallizing, Bernays cited numerous examples drawn from his own practice, to exemplify this process in vivid. This is key to the durable relevance of this book: its effective, if somewhat disturbing, amalgamation of contemporary theory with what have become standard practices.
In recent times, the persistent belief that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States, and therefore was ineligible to become President, offers a prime example of the extent to which the assertion of “startling facts” can become and remain news for years—even when empirical evidence demonstrates that these facts are wholly fictitious. As Lippmann wrote, people will vehemently cling to the stereotypes that comprise the foundation of their universe, even when they are patently erroneous.
In writing the introduction to Edward Bernays’s Crystallizing Public Opinion, I would be remiss not to mention my lengthy personal encounter with Bernays, twenty years after I had first encountered his writings. It was remarkable.
In two of my earliest books, Captains of Consciousness (1976) and All Consuming Images (1988) Bernays had appeared as a central character, an eloquent and influential ideologue of American consumer culture, and a founding father in the field of public relations.
Both times my encounters with Bernays were like those that usually take place between historians and the “historical figures” that they write about. They were exchanges between old documents and the inquiring mind of a reader and interpreter.
When, in 1990, as I commenced work on PR! A Social History of Spin (1996), I assumed, reasonably, that Bernays was long gone. The picturesque record that he had left behind was as close as I was likely to get to him. Soon, however, I stumbled onto the fact that my reasonable assumption was incorrect. In a conversation with a neighbor of mine named Richard Weiner—who was himself a prominent member of the public relations fraternity, and remains a prolific author on communications issues—I learned that Bernays was, in fact, still alive approaching his hundredth birthday. In fact he resided in Cambridge, Massachusetts, only a short walk from the Widener Library at Harvard where I had first discovered some of his writings more than twenty years earlier.
When he heard about the book I was working on, Weiner instructed me: “If you are going to do this book, you’ve got to talk to Eddie Bernays.” I was astonished and delighted to hear Bernays referred to in the present tense; I was also amused to hear him referred to as “Eddie.” Behind the aura of an historical figure, stood a guy called Eddie. I obtained Bernays’ telephone number and set out to arrange an interview.
An exploratory call to Bernays reached an answering machine. A woman’s voice, official in tone, informed me that I had reached the offices of “Dr. Edward L. Bernays,” and that “Dr. Bernays” was currently unavailable. I was instructed to leave a message. For a man of almost 100, Bernays was still communicating an air of business-as-usual. I told the machine:
My name is Stuart Ewen. I am an historian, a writer. I’m currently working on a book on the social history of public relations. I would very much like to come to Cambridge, to visit with “Dr. Bernays” in order to conduct an oral history interview. I left my phone number, and indicated that, should I not hear back from him shortly, I would call again. Two days later, I received a phone call at home from Edward Bernays.
It felt weird, like a dream. Given my experience tracking his historical footprints, it was like talking—via dixie cups and a string—with a piece of history. His voice was soft, a bit hoarse, the voice of an elderly man, to be sure, but he also sounded deft and business-like.
He asked me about myself, my background, where I taught, about the book I was writing. I told him that I was a cultural historian, with a particular interest in the ways that the mass media have crisscrossed with the experiences of twentieth century American life. I told him that I knew a great deal about him, his life and contributions, and added that I had recently published a book exploring the influence of commercial imagery on the contours of American society. Without missing a beat Edward Bernays retorted, scrappily, “Of course, you know, we don’t deal in images.… We deal in reality.”
My fascinating encounter with Edward L. Bernays had begun. I had already been offered a lesson from the master. Ideally, the job of public relations is not simply one of disseminating favorable images and impressions for a client. For Bernays and, as I would learn, for many others in the field, the goal was far more ambitious than that. Public relations was about fashioning and projecting credible renditions of reality itself.
Rather than pursue the interview by telephone—I wanted to meet him, face-to-face—I arranged to visit Edward Bernays at his home, on Columbus Day of 1990. In the weeks preceding our scheduled meeting, I re-familiarized myself with some of his writings, including Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923); Propaganda (1928); “The Engineering of Consent” (1947); and his 1965 autobiography, Biography of an Idea: Memoirs of Public Relations Counsel Edward L. Bernays.
Bernays, meanwhile, sought to put his own spin on the forthcoming interview. He sent me a photocopy of a biographical piece about him that had appeared recently in a special issue of LIFE magazine, listing the 100 most influential Americans of the twentieth century.