Edward Bernays

Edward Bernays, 1917

Edward Louis Bernays (born November 22, 1891 in Vienna , † March 9, 1995 in New York ) is, along with Ivy Lee and others, the founder of the modern theory of propaganda, which he later renamed Public Relations . As Public Relations Counselor , he was also in charge of the practical implementation of his findings in sometimes spectacular campaigns of psychological warfare , political propaganda and commercial advertising .

Life

Family tree of Edward Bernays

Edward Bernays was a nephew of Sigmund Freud and a great-grandson of the Hamburg rabbi Isaak Bernays . His mother was Freud's sister Anna, his father Ely Bernays was the brother of Freud's wife Martha .

The Vienna-based parents emigrated to the USA shortly after Edward was born. In 1892 the family moved to New York City, where he attended DeWitt Clinton High School. In 1912 he graduated from Cornell University with a degree in agricultural science but began a career in journalism.

In 1922 Bernays married his girlfriend Doris Fleischman, whom he had known from his youth and who later worked in his first company. A year earlier, she had joined the Lucy Stone League , an American women's rights organization that campaigned to allow women after marriage to keep their maiden name. On her wedding night in New York's Waldorf-Astoria , Doris Fleischman Bernays signed her maiden name. The US State Department issued her first wife three years later with a passport based solely on her maiden name.

Bernays' work

Theoretical foundations

Bernays was a pioneer in the application of research results from the still young psychology and social sciences in applied public relations . His success in public relations helped popularize Freud's psychoanalysis in the United States of America . The Freudian conception of man is fundamental to Bernays' work and argumentation: Man is an irrational being, motivated by unconscious instinctual impulses, who necessarily needs cultural taming and control. This is especially true of the psychology of the crowd . On this basis, he developed campaigns to influence opinion on the basis of the then current knowledge of mass psychology. Bernays argued:

"If we understand the mechanism and the motives of groupthink, it will be possible to control the masses according to our will, without their knowledge."

He referred to this science-based technique of forming opinions as engineering of consent (analogously: technique for producing consent and consensus ). Bernay's best-known book Propaganda (1928) begins in the first chapter Organizing Chaos with the "brutally frank" words:

“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.

We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society.

Our invisible governors are, in many cases, unaware of the identity of their fellow members in the inner cabinet.

They govern us by their qualities of natural leadership, their ability to supply needed ideas and by their key position in the social structure. Whatever attitude one chooses to take toward this condition, it remains a fact that in almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons - a trifling fraction of our hundred and twenty million - who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world. "

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“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Whoever manipulates the unseen social mechanisms forms an invisible government, which is the real ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds shaped, our tastes educated, our ideas mostly suggested by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way our democratic society is organized. Large numbers of people have to cooperate in this way if they are to live together in a well-balanced society. In almost every act of our life, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social behavior and our ethical thinking, we are dominated by a relatively small number of people who understand the mental processes and behavioral patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the strings that control public thinking. "

Development of a PR campaign

Bernays developed an eight-point plan for carrying out a PR campaign, which is often used as the basis for many PR campaigns worldwide and can also serve as a basis for the work of non-profit organizations:

1. Define your objectives - Define your goals.
2. Conduct research - conduct research.
3. Modify your objectives based on that research - Modify your objectives based on that research .
4. Set a strategy - set a strategy .
5. Establish themes, symbols, and appeals - Create themes, symbols, and incentives.
6. Create an organization to execute your strategy - Create an organization to execute your strategy .
7. Decide on timing and tactics - Decide on the schedule and tactics.
8. Carry out your plans - carry out your plans .

One of his preferred techniques for manipulating public opinion was the indirect use of prominent third parties: "If you can influence the group leaders, either with or without their conscious cooperation, you automatically influence their group".

Practical work

Edward Bernays (3rd from left) in 1917 at the opening of the Liberty Bond outlet at Aeolian Hall, New York

War propaganda

Bernays supported the American government under Wilson in the Committee on Public Information (CPI) during World War I in their efforts to obtain public approval for the USA to enter the war. He put his campaign in the war year 1917 under the slogan : "Make the world safe for democracy."

Bernays worked for the Bureau of Latin-American Affairs in New York. With Lieutenant F. E. Ackerman, he focused on finding support in Latin America for the US through American companies based there. He referred to this activity as " psychological warfare ".

After the war ended, Bernays was part of a sixteen-person working group that worked for the CPI at the Paris Peace Conference . A scandal arose when he used the word propaganda in a press release that the "stated aim of the working group sent was to 'interpret the work of the Paris Peace Conference in order to spread American successes and ideals through worldwide propaganda.'"

Transfer to politics and advertising

In the post-war years he tried to make use of the effectiveness of propaganda as a means of controlling the buying behavior and political opinion-forming of a mass democracy in times of peace.

“There was one basic lesson I learned in the CPI — that efforts comparable to those applied by the CPI to affect the attitudes of the enemy, of neutrals, and people of this country could be applied with equal facility to peacetime pursuits. In other words, what could be done for a nation at war could be done for organizations and people in a nation at peace. "

“There was a basic lesson I had learned in the CPI - ventures similar to those used to influence the attitudes of opponents, neutrals, and people of their own country could be used with equal ease for peacetime goals. In other words, what could be done for the nation in war could also be done for organizations and people in the nation in peace. "

In order to avoid the burdensome term propaganda , he renamed his concept Public Relations . Bernays worked for a wide variety of commercial companies, but also for charitable associations. Clients were u. a. US President Calvin Coolidge , Procter & Gamble , CBS , British American Tobacco , United Fruit , General Electric and Dodge Motors. From the 1920s he worked for the American tobacco industry for a few years , including the American Tobacco Company (ATC).

The fundamental problem facing industry in the post-war years was stagnation in demand. You only bought what you needed: goods that were advertised using rational criteria such as usefulness and quality. When the market was saturated, business stagnated. So you had to get people to buy things that they didn't need that way. Bernays' strategy aimed to change the mentality of the potential buyers who should buy the goods because of their symbolic character; Bernays' consumer buys things for self-expression and self-expression: "Express yourself" should become the decisive maxim of the purchase decision, the advertising appeals to the irrational desires of customers.

Increase in sales of cigarettes

Cigarette advertising for Lucky Strike

When the American Tobacco Company asked him to increase sales of their Lucky Strike cigarettes, Bernays asked Abraham Brill , his uncle's leading student in New York, about the symbolic added value of the cigarette for the female unconscious. He confirmed the phallic symbolic character of the cigarette as a sign of male power and pointed to Freud's penis envy as an unconscious motivation of women when dealing with cigarettes. In fact, smoking in public in particular by women was taboo at the time .

Bernays tried to make smoking acceptable and attractive to women as well. Among other things, he influenced the fashion industry to make the typical green shade of Lucky Strike packs the color of the season. He publicly commissioned a group of women and asked them to dress up as suffragettes for the 1929 Easter parade . The women marched through New York's Fifth Avenue. When newspaper reporters photographed them, they lit cigarettes and proclaimed them as “torches of freedom”. The advertising strategy aimed to establish cigarettes as a symbol of female emancipation and to break women's resistance to smoking. A few decades later (in the 1960s) he worked for the anti-smoking campaign.

Increase in book sales

In the 1930s, Bernays worked for a number of large publishing houses . In addition to his tactic of getting well-respected people to support the importance of books for civilization, he came up with the idea of ​​getting furniture manufacturers to increase the number of bookshelves in living room furniture. His simple theory was: “Where there are bookshelves, there will also be books.” Bernays acted in a similar way when he worked for Mack Trucks and the American truck industry from 1949 . In order to be able to prevail against the railway companies, Bernays had devised an indirect and far-sighted plan, of which he first had to convince his client. In the end, Bernays not only won Mack Trucks' approval, but also led the US Congress to invest billions of dollars in expanding the highway system in the 1950s .

Fluoridation of drinking water

Bernays helped the Aluminum Company of America ( Alcoa ) and other associations convince the American public that fluoridation of drinking water was harmless and beneficial to health. This was achieved through a media campaign by the Association of Dentists.

multiple sclerosis

Bernays also worked for the American Society for Multiple Sclerosis . He found that the name of the disease was too complicated "to be digested by most Americans." He spontaneously shortened the name to "MS". Sometimes his campaigns were so complex that he lost track of himself; sometimes - as in the case of "MS" - they were actually very simple.

Influence on Joseph Goebbels

Bernays claimed in his autobiography that Joseph Goebbels used his book Crystallizing Public Opinion to develop anti-Jewish propaganda in Nazi Germany . Bernays, himself a Jew , heard about it from Karl von Wiegand , Germany reporter for the American Hearst newspapers . He visited Goebbels and took him on a tour of his library . Bernays commented on this in his 1965 autobiography :

“I knew that any human activity can be used for social purposes or misused for antisocial ones. Obviously the attack on the Jews of Germany was no emotional outburst of the Nazis, but a deliberate, planned campaign. "

“I knew that any human activity could be used for social purposes or be asocially abused. Obviously the attack against the Jews of Germany was not an emotional outbreak by the Nazis, but a well-considered, planned campaign. "

Political propaganda

Election campaigns

In 1924, Bernays supported Calvin Coolidge in an image campaign. Entertainers such as Al Jolson , John Drew, Raymond Hitchcock and the Dolly Sisters were invited to the White House to perform a vaudeville . This was spread by the press.

Herbert Hoover allowed himself to be convinced by Bernays in 1932 to portray himself as an invincible leader and to create disagreement among his opponents.

Bernays advised William O'Dwyer on demographic data. For example, he should win Irish voters through his actions against the Italian Mafia, convince the Italians by reforming the police department. He should appear to the Jews as a determined opponent of the Nazis.

Coup in Guatemala

As early as 1944, Sam Zemurray hired Edward Bernays for psychological warfare against the democratic and social reforms in Guatemala and its president Arbenz , which restricted the position of the United Fruit Company . Bernays convinced Arthur Hays Sulzberger to send journalists to Guatemala at United Fruit's expense, whose series reports motivated other media to write similar reports.

The influence of Bernays and Zemurray on the history of Guatemala in the middle of the 20th century is illustrated in the historical novel Harte Jahre by Mario Vargas Llosa , which will be published in German in 2020 .

Works

• Crystallizing Public Opinion . Boni and Liveright, New York 1923; New edition: Kessinger, New York 2004, ISBN 1-4179-1508-0 .
• The Verdict of Public Opinion on Propaganda (Based on the article A public relations counsel states his views), 1927 by Universal Trade Press Syndicate.
• To Outline of Careers. 1927 (editor; contribution).
• Propaganda . Horace Liveright, New York 1928. New edition: Ig Publishing, Brooklyn NY 2005, ISBN 0-9703125-9-8 ; German first edition: translated by Patrick Schnur. orange-press, Freiburg im Breisgau 2007, ISBN 978-3-936086-35-5 .
• Universities - pathfinders in Public Opinion, a Survey. 1937 (with Doris Fleischman).
• Private Interest and Public Responsibility. Cooper Union, 1939.
• Speak up for Democracy. 1940.
• Democratic Leadership in Total War. Presented at Cleveland College of Western Reserve University, under the auspices of the Journalism Department. Foreword. 1943.
• The Postwar Responsibility of the American Press. Reprinted from Journalism quarterly. Vol. XXI, No. June 2, 1944.
• Take Your Place at the Peace Table. Gerent press, 1945.
• [Pamphlets] Issued in the Public Interest by Edward L. Bernays and Doris Fleischman Bernays, published 1945.
• Human Relations, the Way to Labor-Management Adjustments… Pennsylvania State College, 1946 (Paper presented at the twenty-third annual Industrial Conference conducted by the School of Engineering of the Pennsylvania State College).
• Public relations . 1952.
• The Engineering of Consent (Editor; first chapter by Bernays). First edition 1955; 1969 University of Oklahoma Press.
• Biography of an Idea: Memoirs of Public Relations Counsel Edward L. Bernays. Simon and Schuster, New York 1965; German: biography of an idea. The high school of PR. Life memories. Translated by Ulf Pacher, edited by Carl Hundhausen. Econ, Düsseldorf / Vienna 1967.
• The Future of Public Relations. Reprint of a talk, delivered at the Rotary Club Of New York, February 10, 1972.

See also

• Consumerism

literature

• Doris Fleischman: A Wife Is Many Women. Autobiographical account by Edward L. Bernays' wife. Crown Publishers, New York [1955].
• Scott Cutlip: The Unseen Power: Public Relations: A History. Erlbaum, Hillsdale NJ 1994, ISBN 0-8058-1464-7 .
• Stuart Ewen: PR! A Social History of Spin. Basic Boosk, New York 1996, ISBN 0-465-06168-0 ( preview in Google Book Search).
• National Public Radio historical report on Bernays (includes Bernays' interview recordings; npr.org ).
• John Stauber , Sheldon Rampton: Toxic waste makes you slim. Media professionals, spin doctors, PR wizards. The truth about the public relations industry. orange-press, Freiburg i. Br. 2006, ISBN 3-936086-28-1 .
• Larry Tye: The Father of Spin. Edward L. Bernays and the Birth of Public Relations. Crown, New York 1998, ISBN 0-517-70435-8 ( preview in Google Book Search).
• Al Gore : The Assault on Reason. Penguin Press, New York 2007, p. 94 ( preview in the Google book search; German: attack on reason. Riemann, Munich 2007).
• Dirk Schäfer: The Birth of PR - The Beginning of Doctor Spin. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung . 28/29 July 2007, weekend supplement, p. VI ( sueddeutsche.de [accessed on December 18, 2013]).

Documentation

• The Century of the Self (England, 2002), 4-part BBC documentary by Adam Curtis
• Edward Bernays and the Science of Opinion (France, 2017) by Jimmy Leipold for Arte .

Web links

Commons : Edward Bernays  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

• Short biography and reviews of works by Edward Bernays at perlentaucher.de
• Literature by and about Edward Bernays in the catalog of the German National Library
• Philipp Schnee: PR inventor Bernays. The man with conviction. Series one day . In: spiegel.de, September 30, 2009; with photo gallery; accessed on October 21, 2014
• Edward Bernays at Encyclopædia Britannica

Individual evidence

1. ↑ See the notes of the Freud biographer Ernest Jones .
2. ↑ Edward Bernays . Nndb.com. Retrieved February 12, 2010.
3. ↑ Philipp Schnee, DER SPIEGEL: PR inventor Bernays - DER SPIEGEL - history. Retrieved April 9, 2020 . 
4. ↑ https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.275553/page/n7/mode/2up
5. ↑ Tye, p. 100 ( preview in Google Book Search).
6. ↑ Tye (1998), p. 18. “Finally given his chance to serve, Eddie recruited Ford, International Harvester, and scores of other American firms to distribute literature on US war aims to foreign contacts and post US propaganda on the windows of 650 American offices overseas. He distributed postcards to Italian soldiers at the front so they could boost morale at home, and he planted propaganda behind the German lines to sow dissent. He organized rallies at Carnegie Hall featuring freedom fighters from Poland, Czechoslovakia, and other states that were anxious to break free of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And to counter German propaganda he had American propaganda printed in Spanish and Portuguese and inserted into export journals sent across Latin America. In short, he helped win America over to an unpopular war using precisely the techniques he'd used to promote Daddy Long Legs and the Ballet Russe. "
7. ↑ James R. Mock: The Creel Committee in Latin America. In: The Hispanic American Historical Review. 22 (2), May 1942, p. 276. “Another section of the New York office, however, was especially concerned with publicity channels and publicity for the nations south of us. This was the division known as the Bureau of Latin-American Affairs, with Edward L. Bernays and Lieutenant FE Ackerman playing possibly the leading roles. That organization appealed especially to American firms doing business in Latin America, and secured their cooperation. In addition to means already cited, this section utilized various kinds of educators, especially as a medium of distributing pamphlets. "
8. ↑ Ewen (1996), pp. 162-163. “During the war years, Bernays joined the army of publicists rallied under the banner of the CPI and concentrated on propaganda efforts aimed at Latin American business interests. Within this vast campaign of 'psychological warfare', as he described it, Bernays — like others of his generation — began to develop an expanded sense of publicity and its practical uses. ”
9. ^ Alan Axelrod: Selling the Great War: The Making of American Propaganda. Palgrave Macmillan (St. Martin's Press), New York 2009, ISBN 978-0-230-60503-9 , p. 200 ( preview in Google Book Search).
10. ^ Tye (1998), p. 19.
11. ↑ Cutlip (1994), p. 165. “Bernays' release announced that the Official Press Mission to the Peace Conference was leaving the next day for Paris and instead of the narrow technical press support mission Creel had defined for the group, Bernays inserted this sentence: 'The announced object of the expedition is to interpret the work of the Peace Conference by keeping up a worldwide propaganda to disseminate American accomplishments and ideals.' Two days later, the New York World headlined the story: 'TO INTERPRET AMERICAN IDEALS.' George Creel was furious; already in a battle with Congress, Creel knew that this would add fat to the fire. He disavowed the story. Nonetheless, it hastened the demise of the CPI. "
12. ↑ Cutlip (1994), p. 168.
13. ^ Adam Curtis: The Century of the Self. BBC documentary, 2002.
14. ^ Gore, p. 94.
15. ↑ #Moneypulation (7/10). Lucky Strike. In: arte.tv, accessed on September 26, 2019.
16. ↑ Murray N. Rothbard: Fluoridation Revisited ( Memento of March 13, 2014 in the Internet Archive ). The Rothbard-Rockwell Report, January 1993.
17. ↑ Tye, pp. 52–53: “Sometimes his campaigns involved strategies so complex and oblique that even he had trouble following the script, which often involved front groups, letter writing campaigns, and alliance after alliance; at other times his tactics were artfully simple, like reducing a name to its initials. "
18. ↑ Marc Tribelhorn: Master of Manipulation - how Edward Bernays changed our consumer culture with sophisticated PR work . In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung . ( nzz.ch [accessed on March 8, 2019]).
19. ^ Tye, p. 111.
20. ↑ Tye (1998), pp. 77-79. See also Breakfast With Coolidge. Typescript, February 8, 1962 ( memory.loc.gov ).
21. ↑ Tye (1988), pp. 79-80.
22. ↑ Tye (1998), pp. 81-83.
23. ↑ Christian Schmidt-Häuer: USA: The United Fruit Doctrine . In: The time . November 13, 2008, ISSN  0044-2070 ( zeit.de [accessed September 15, 2019]).
24. ↑ broadcast page on arte.de .