Few developments from the Civil War to the present stand out so vividly or account for so much of the shape of modern America as the growth of the professions and the steady retreat of the layman before the ever-expanding claims of professional expertise.

Sitting atop a raised platform canopied in white, philanthropist Charles T. Yerkes sat blushing as eight hundred dignitaries greeted him with a standing ovation. William Rainey Harper, the president of the University of Chicago, praised his “sincerity and simplicity.” The head of the university board of trustees said that Yerkes had helped build a monument to spiritual values in a materialistic age, contributing “to the uplifting of men and upbuilding of character.”

The occasion was the dedication of Chicago’s new astronomical observatory on October 21, 1897, to which Yerkes had made a substantial financial contribution. When Yerkes himself rose to speak, his modestly phrased remarks hinted discreetly at the altruistic nature of his gift. “One reason why the science of astronomy has not more helpers,” he said, “is on account of its being entirely uncommercial. There is nothing of moneyed value to be gained by the devotee of astronomy; there is nothing that he can sell.”²

Nothing to sell, perhaps, but Yerkes was definitely trying to buy something—specifically, perfume for a bad reputation. Current flattery aside, he was one of the most hated men in the city, a robber baron who had spent time in prison for misappropriation of funds before developing a winning business strategy that he described as “buy old junk, fix it up a little, and unload it upon other fellows.” Yerkes had built an empire by controlling the city’s lucrative new electric streetcars, whose poorly strung power lines had killed or injured 382 people in 1895 alone. His crude attempts to bribe Illinois legislators had sparked a civic reform movement called the Citizens Independent Anti-Boodle League. The university officials and astronomers who courted his contribution understood full well, as did the rest of the city, that his investment in the observatory was a thinly disguised attempt to buy a new image. In retrospect, it is hard to say who was playing whom for a fool that day. After the day’s pageantry, the Chicago newspapers and the Anti-Boodle League returned to their attack. Yerkes was eventually driven from the city in disgrace and died a few years later in poverty and obscurity.

From the perspective of today, the most striking thing about Yerkes and his charitable gesture was its almost quaint ineffectuality. He may have been a scoundrel, but he was no PR man. In 1897, in fact, the term “public relations” had not yet been invented.

Contrary to Yerkes’s comment about its lack of helpers, astronomy was actually the most popular object of scientific philanthropy in nineteenth-century America. Civic groups went door-to-door collecting subscriptions to finance the construction of telescopes, with different cities vying for the honor of owning the instrument with the largest lens. As Yerkes observed during his brief moment of public approval, astronomy was an “entirely uncommercial” subject of study—literally, stargazing—and its noncommercial nature was precisely what explained its appeal. People turned to it the way they turned to art museums or great literature. They gazed into the heavens, pondered the mysteries of creation, and philosophized about the nature of the universe. Science and technology in those days were still seen as two very different things. The electric motors that drove Yerkes’s streetcars were technology in action—machines of brute force, the ultimate expressions of industrial power and Yankee ingenuity. “Science” was something else, something both finer and less practical—the work of eccentric scholars who scribbled notes in makeshift labs, dug up dinosaur bones and rock samples in remote lands, hatched new theories and tested them with whatever scant resources they could scrape together. Their quaint explorations were appreciated but not particularly revered, nor were they particularly well-funded. “American indifference to science and scientists was . . . the perfectly natural consequence of the fact that neither science nor science-oriented technology was a particularly conspicuous feature of nineteenth-century American life,” observes historian Howard Miller. “Not until the twentieth century would industrial, agricultural, and military technology force public recognition that research was a national resource. Until then scientists would in general remain, as one of them termed it, ‘inoffensive but curious and useless members of the social order.’ ”³

Thomas Alva Edison, the “wizard of Menlo Park,” was an inventor and tinkerer—a technological innovator, not a scientific researcher. His “invention factory” at Menlo Park, New Jersey, turned out literally hundreds of world-transforming gadgets—the typewriter, the phonograph, the lightbulb, the telegraph, storage batteries, electric meters and motors, moving pictures—yet in his entire career Edison made only one discovery that could be called “pure science”: the observation that heated metals in a vacuum emit electrons. Because this phenomenon had no utility for his purposes, he simply wrote it down in a notebook and forgot about it. His success as an inventor and businessman, however, made him a prototype for scientists to come. Automaker Henry Ford, a close friend and admirer, observed that Edison “definitely ended the distinction between the theoretical man of science and the practical man of science, so that today we think of scientific discoveries in connection with their possible present or future application to the needs of man. He took the old rule-of-thumb methods out of industry and substituted exact scientific knowledge, while on the other hand, he directed scientific research into useful channels.”⁴

“Useful channels,” in Edison’s eyes and certainly in Ford’s, were virtually synonymous with commercial viability. Their concept of science fit perfectly within the American pragmatic tradition, and it was a concept that certainly had its virtues. Its flaws were less immediately obvious.

Galileo vs. the Guardians

Historically, science has often allied itself with the political philosophy of democracy. To function freely, science depends upon the democratic values of free speech, thought, and association, and in fact the ancient Greek democracies were the first Western societies to produce a substantial scientific literature. The Dark Ages brought both a return to authoritarian governments and a suppression of scientific inquiry, which threatened the absolute dogmas handed down from King and Church. The Italian mathematician and astronomer Galileo Galilei has come to symbolize both scientific genius and the importance of intellectual freedom for his persistent efforts to prove that the earth travels around the sun. Condemned in 1633 as a heretic by the Roman Inquisition, Galileo spent the last eight years of his life under house arrest. Eventually, of course, his astronomical conclusions won unanimous acceptance, and today he is frequently cited as an example of steadfast scientific dissent in the face of repressive orthodoxy.

The philosophy of democracy has as its core doctrine the belief that “the people” are better qualified to make decisions that affect their lives than anyone else. It follows from this assumption that governments should be elected by the people and serve their interests. Other institutions, such as corporations, are permitted to pursue their private goal of making money, but their activities may be restricted if the public deems them harmful.

Throughout history, the alternatives to this democratic worldview have been variations on the theme of “guardianship”—the notion that people are not really able to make wise decisions and therefore need to be governed by someone who is smarter, better informed, more rational, or somehow better fit to rule. Plato thought that society should be governed by “philosopher-kings”—men who understood the “science of ruling” and possessed the ability to see beyond appearances and grasp the essential “forms” of true justice. Since this ability is assumed to be rare, it follows that letting “the people” govern will lead to chaos, anarchy, and bad policies. The notion that people need a guardian to govern on their behalf has been used as a rationale by authoritarian governments of all stripes, from the monarchies of Europe to the Marxist-Leninist states in China and Russia to the military regimes that have ruled by terror in places like Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Nigeria.

In reality, Plato’s “royal science” of governance is a chimera. Politics is more of an art than a science. It depends on moral propositions that cannot be reduced to mathematical or physical “scientific laws.” Should abortion be legal? Is it moral to build nuclear weapons? Should poor people have access to free medical care? These are only a few of the important questions that do not have scientific or technical answers.

In the struggle between democracy and guardianship, science has acquired a unique and often contradictory role. Heretic stargazers such as Galileo have led scientific rebellions against society’s guardians, but others have eagerly served the royal courts, sometimes even imagining that their specialized knowledge entitles them to become rulers themselves.

Sir Francis Bacon, who is widely regarded as the philosopher responsible for first codifying the modern scientific method, served as Lord Chancellor of England under King James the First. He was hardly an enemy of guardianship, but he recognized that the doctrines of his day, based on royal authority and religious tradition, had become stagnant. “The many surrender themselves to the leadership of one . . . and become incapable of adding anything new,” he wrote. “For when philosophy is severed from its roots in experience, whence it first sprouted and grew, it becomes a dead thing.” By contrast, he observed, the scientific method had shown its ability to “acquire new strength and capacities” by drawing upon “the talents of many individuals.”⁵ As an alternative to the concept of rule by philosopher-kings, he envisioned a utopian society run by a technical elite, which would draw upon the knowledge generated by science in order to govern in the interests of efficiency, order, and progress.

The Royal Society for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge, founded in 1660 as England’s official scientific society, drew much of its inspiration from Bacon’s belief that scientific knowledge should come from all quarters and walks of life. At the time of the society’s charter, two-thirds of its members were interested amateurs rather than full-time scientists. Rather than narrow specialists, scientists of the period were wide-ranging intellectuals interested in all of the ideas of the day, from physics to theology. They combined passion for knowledge with practical interests in commerce, agriculture, and industry. “We find noble rarities to be every day given in,” wrote Bishop Sprat, the first historian of the Society, “not only by the hands of the learned, but from the shops of mechanics, voyages of merchants, ploughs of husbandmen, gardens of gentlemen.”

Simultaneously, however, an unmistakable thread of elitism ran through the thinking of the scientific utopians. Bacon openly disdained the “innate depravity and malignant disposition of the common people” and viewed science as a way to teach “the peoples [to] take upon them the yoke of laws and submit to authority, and forget their ungovernable attitudes.” ⁶ Likewise, Sprat of the Royal Society saw particular value in the participation of its noble-born, amateur members—“gentlemen, free and unconfined . . . who by the freedom of their education, the plenty of their estates and the usual generosity of noble blood, may be well supposed to be most averse from sordid considerations.”⁷

In France the philosophes, whose thinking helped inspire the French Revolution, dreamed of doing to government what Sir Isaac Newton had done to the human understanding of mathematics and physics. They believed that once men grasped the underlying “fundamental laws” of human society, they would be able to operate the “world-machine” smoothly and efficiently for the betterment of all.⁸ This belief found realization in the Jacobin movement, whose goal, notes historian Lewis Coser, was “to make France over in the image of pure reason.” And yet it was precisely the intensity of the Jacobin commitment to “pure reason” and “obedience to the law of nature, which intends every man to be just,” that led to the French Terror and rule by guillotine. “As long as the demands of nature were violated, as long as there were corruption and rascals and lukewarm concern with public virtue, the purge must continue,” Coser observes. “In the pursuit of so exalted an aim, men invested with high purpose and morally invulnerable need feel no pity. Their opponents were not in error; they were in sin. They could therefore be exterminated in good conscience.”⁹

A great gulf obviously separated reality from revolutionary ideals, and yet the utopian vision of a world made perfect by reason proved too captivating to abandon. As the French Revolution gave way to disillusionment, philosopher Claude-Henri Saint-Simon became one of the most popular thinkers of the nineteenth century and has had a profound influence on later generations of thinkers. E. H. Carr has aptly described him as “the precursor of socialism, the precursor of the technocrats, and the precursor of totalitarianism.”¹⁰ Like Sir Francis Bacon, Saint-Simon believed that science and technology would “solve major social as well as technical problems.” In order for technical experts to run society, however, the “unenlightened masses” had to be controlled. This in turn implied a “need to abandon mass democracy and, in turn, politics.”¹¹ In their place, he proposed establishing a new science that would guide all of the others, which he called the “science of organization.”¹²

Saint-Simon’s ideas were promulgated further by his primary disciple, August Comte, who believed that politics should eventually become a form of “applied physics.” Their thinking was similar in many respects to the ideas of the Jacobins. The main difference was that the terrors and trials of revolution had taught Saint-Simon and Comte a certain hostility to politics and even to democracy itself, leading to a “deep-seated conviction that politicians should be replaced by scientific and technical elites. These ideas,” writes sociologist Frank Fischer, “occur again and again throughout technocratic writings. Only the historical circumstances change; the ideas themselves remain remarkably constant.”¹³

Science, far from being merely a way to study the physical world, had undergone a dramatic transformation. The hard science of physics, with its precise measurements and exact mechanical laws, had become a metaphor, a model of rationality and discipline that people attempted to imitate as they studied softer subjects such as biology, language, human behavior and even the behavior of entire societies. Somehow it didn’t seem to matter that none of these subjects lent themselves to precise measurements and predictions. Science had ceased to be merely a methodology and had become an ideology as well.

As an ideology, it lent itself to diverse and conflicting political uses. In England, the Utilitarians adopted an air of scientific rigor as they set out to collect data in support of abolishing the British Poor Law, the welfare system of the day. In its place, they imposed the more “efficient” (i.e., cheaper) workhouse system, whose vicious exploitation of the poor would later be depicted with heartrending detail in the novels of Charles Dickens. Somewhat later, the Fabian Socialists would pave the way for the British welfare state with similar assiduous compilations of meticulous, statistics-laden reports, through which they aimed to establish themselves as “unofficial expert ‘clerks’ to any decision-maker hampered by lack of expert advice.”¹⁴ The Utilitarian obsession with data collection also led to the compilation of the famous Victorian Blue Books, the densest collection of social statistics in human history, which in turn became the source from which Karl Marx drew all of the information he needed for his damning indictment of capitalism. The Marxist “science” of history and class struggle inspired the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, with its own belief in completely rational state power wielded by militant intellectuals. Like the Jacobins, the Bolsheviks believed that they were scientifically manipulating “objective laws of history” in order to create an ideal society. Once again, these ideals degenerated in practice into a new system of bureaucratic tyranny and repressive terror.

The “Science of Ruling” Comes to America

In the United States, the technocratic agenda found prominent expression in the Progressive movement that emerged in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Herbert Croly, the founder of The New Republic magazine, was deeply influenced by the philosophy of August Comte, as was Walter Lippmann. Meanwhile, on the conservative side of the political ledger, Frederick Taylor was developing his theories of “scientific management.” Using time and motion studies of workers, he sought to design factories and the work process in ways that would maximize productivity. His approach appealed not only to capitalists but to Russian revolutionary leader V. I. Lenin, who urged Soviet factories to “organize the study and teaching of the Taylor system,” which he called one of the “greatest scientific achievements in the field of analyzing mechanical motions during work, the elimination of superfluous and awkward motions, the elaboration of correct methods of work, the introduction of the best system of accounting and control.”¹⁵

“The functions of scientific management were twofold,” observes Fischer. “First, they were to enter the workplace to learn (through time and motion studies) what the workers already knew: how to plan and direct the details of the work process. Second, through managerial planning and analysis, Taylorites were to employ this newly gained knowledge to ‘efficiently’ redesign the production process under management control. . . . On the shop floor, the division of labor was increased by giving workers more specialized, less complex tasks. As a cost-saving device, it permitted the substitution of cheaper, less skilled workers for skilled workers. Work was less interesting and more repetitive for the worker, but it was more profitable for management. To foil resistance, Taylor’s strategy also introduced a number of technical changes. For example, work was designed to make the production process incomprehensible to workers. . . . As Taylor put it, ‘all possible brain work should be removed from the shop and centered in the planning or layout department.’ ”¹⁶

Not only were workers denied control over their own work processes, they were declared psychologically unfit for rational thought. Here, the impetus came from the much-cited “Hawthorne Studies,” which probably remain the most widely analyzed and discussed experiments in the history of the social sciences. Named after a Western Electric plant where the studies were conducted, the Hawthorne Studies were led by Harvard University professor Elton Mayo, who studied groups of women workers in an effort to determine what factors made them more productive. The Hawthorne Studies became influential not because of what they “proved,” but because Mayo’s conclusions found a ready audience in the business community. He claimed that there was a fundamental psychological difference between workers and management. Whereas management acts on the basis of logic and rationality, he said, workers are motivated by emotions. ¹⁷

The period between World Wars I and II came to be known as the “Age of the Machine.” It was during this period that mechanical technologies diffused throughout society. The automobile came into fashion. Machines became symbols of rationality, order, efficiency, power, and progress.¹⁸ A fledgling “technocracy movement” arose in the United States that saw “science banishing waste, unemployment, hunger, and insecurity of income forever . . . we see science replacing an economy of scarcity with an era of abundance . . . we see functional competence displacing grotesque and wasteful incompetence, facts displacing disorder, industrial planning displacing industrial chaos.”¹⁹ Sometimes calling itself “Technocracy, Inc.,” the movement exhibited protofascistic tendencies: “Organized around a rigid hierarchical structure, the members of technocracy featured gray uniforms with special insignias, drove a fleet of gray automobiles, and greeted one another with a special salute,” Fischer notes.²⁰

In the wake of the First World War, observed contemporary historian Frederick Lewis Allen, science was “the one great intellectual force which had not suffered disrepute. . . . The prestige of science was colossal. The man in the street and the woman in the kitchen, confronted on every hand with new machines and devices which they owed to the laboratory, were ready to believe that science could accomplish almost anything; and they were being deluged with scientific information and theory. The newspapers were giving columns of space to inform (or misinform) them of the latest discoveries; a new dictum from Albert Einstein was now front-page stuff even though practically nobody could understand it. Outlines of knowledge poured from the presses to tell people about the planetesimal hypothesis and the constitution of the atom, to describe for them in unwarranted detail the daily life of the cave-man, and to acquaint them with the electron, endocrines, hormones, vitamins, reflexes and psychoses.”²¹

The 1920s was also the period when the psychosexual theories of Sigmund Freud found a mass audience. “Psychology was king,” Allen observes. “Freud, Adler, Jung and Watson had their tens of thousands of votaries; intelligence-testers invaded the schools in quest of I.Q.’s; psychiatrists were installed in business houses to hire and fire employees and determine advertising policies.”

The Wizard of Spin

Freud exerted particular influence on Edward L. Bernays, the man who has come to be known as the “father of public relations.” For him, Freud was not just a towering intellect but a family member and personal mentor. Bernays was the son of Eli Bernays and Anna Freud Bernays, Sigmund’s sister. In fact, the Freuds and Bernayses got along so well that Sigmund himself ended up marrying Martha Bernays, Eli’s sister. What this meant for Edward Bernays is that he was not only Sigmund Freud’s nephew but a nephew twice over. Through Bernays, Freud’s influence on the fledgling public relations industry was enormous, and that legacy continues today in the most direct familial sense at Freud Communications, a high-powered British PR firm owned by Matthew Freud, Sigmund’s great-grandson. In addition to handling celebrities such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, Hugh Grant, and Pamela Anderson, Freud Communications has worked for companies such as Volvo and Pizza Hut, and also handled the PR for the 1995 launch of Pepsi’s redesigned soda pop cans.

It would not be any exaggeration to say that Edward Bernays viewed his famous uncle Sigmund as a father figure. He visited him in Europe whenever he got the chance, showered him with gifts of cigars, and helped arrange for and publicize the translation of Freud’s Introductory Lectures in Psychoanalysis in the United States. From Freud’s perspective, these efforts came as welcome assistance at a time when postwar inflation had wiped him out financially, although the relationship was strained somewhat by young Edward’s eagerness to sacrifice intellectual rigor to the lowbrow demands of the publicity trade. When Bernays approached him with an offer from Cosmopolitan magazine to write an article titled “The Wife’s Mental Place in the Home,” Freud rebelled with a stinging letter of refusal. “The absolute submission of your editors to the rotten taste of an uncultivated public is the cause of the low level of American literature,” he wrote.

Occasional tensions notwithstanding, Bernays saw his association with Freud as a way to establish his own reputation as a thinker and theorist—a reputation that was further enhanced when Bernays authored several landmark books of his own, most notably Crystallizing Public Opinion, The Engineering of Consent, and Propaganda. “When a person would first meet Bernays,” notes PR industry historian Scott Cutlip, “it would not be long before Uncle Sigmund would be brought into the conversation. His relationship with Freud was always in the forefront of his thinking and his counseling.”²² In a profile written in 1958, author Irwin Ross observed that Bernays epitomized the PR industry’s “wistful yearnings for scholarly distinction” and “likes to think of himself as a kind of psychoanalyst to troubled corporations. He talks, of course, far more than a psychoanalyst. . . . The words tumble forth in an endless cascade, the polysyllables lulling the auditor’s critical faculties, the clods of jargon dropping like huge pillows which cushion the mind against anxiety. At times one only has a dim view of what Bernays is saying, but it sounds great. ‘I got so I could write the stuff myself,’ says Morris M. Lee, Jr. [a former Bernays employee], ‘but I could never understand it.’ ”²³

People who knew Bernays are unanimous in describing him as a man with a huge ego and an incessant habit of self-promotion. His writings include a lengthy bibliography of his own work and public utterances, in which Ross notes that “even editorial notes accompanying his articles are immortalized. . . . Books which merely listed Bernays in their bibliographies are reciprocally listed in his; an author who included Bernays in her acknowledgments in turn finds her own work acknowledged; a book which ‘indirectly’ quoted Bernays is duly rescued from obscurity, as are novels in which Bernays is mentioned in passing.”²⁴ Bernays also authored an 850-page book of memoirs, titled Biography of an Idea, and after reaching the age of 100, he began work on a second memoir, titled The First Hundred Years. Sometimes his ego interfered with his professional success. Many of his contemporaneous peers in the PR industry disliked him intensely, regarding him as a pushy braggart who was hurting the industry’s reputation with his frank talk about “propaganda” and “controlling and regimenting the masses.”

Bernays used Freudianism’s scientific claims as a sort of marketing hook with which to sell his services to anxious corporate executives. “The counsel on public relations,” he explained, “is what sociologists call a societal technician who is fitted by training and experience to evaluate the maladjustments and adjustments between his client and the publics upon whom the client is dependent for his socially sound activity.”²⁵ In Propaganda, his most important book, he argued that the scientific manipulation of public opinion was necessary to overcome chaos and conflict in society. “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,” he wrote. “We are governed, our minds 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. . . . In almost every act of our 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 . . . who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.”²⁶

There was a striking paradox, however, in the way that Bernays went about trying to follow in the footsteps of Uncle Sigmund. Freud’s “talking cure” was designed to unearth his patients’ unconscious drives and hidden motives, in the belief that bringing them into conscious discourse would help people lead healthier lives. Bernays, by contrast, used psychological techniques to mask the motives of his clients, as part of a deliberate strategy aimed at keeping the public unconscious of the forces that were working to mold their minds.

Science and the “Intelligent Few”

It is no accident that Bernays developed his “science” of public relations in the 1920s—a decade that also saw the beginnings of mass production, mass communications, mass consumerism, and a belief in technological progress as a quasireligion. All of these trends shared a faith in the notion that society’s problems can be engineered away, that democracy is dangerous, and that important decisions should be left in the hands of experts. In addition to psychoanalytic theory, Bernays drew heavily from the ideas of nineteenth-century French social philosopher Gustave Le Bon, a vocal critic of democracy who fretted that “the divine right of the masses is about to replace the divine right of kings.” Stuart Ewen, a historian and author of PR: A Social History of Spin, notes that Le Bon feared “that the mob at any moment could seize society and destroy all he held sacred. Le Bon starts to examine the social psychology of the crowd. For him the crowd is not driven by rational argument, but by its spinal cord. It responds solely to emotional appeals and is incapable of thought or reason. Somebody interested in leading the crowd needs to appeal not to logic but to unconscious motivation.” For Bernays in particular, Ewen notes, Le Bon’s ideas “are applied to virtually everybody. Almost no one is seen as capable of rational thought. The most efficient way to win hearts and minds is through emotional appeals. By the 1920s, Le Bonian social psychology is used to design organizations that constantly take the temperature of public feelings. Survey research, polling and focus groups are all built around the science of how to lead the public mind.”²⁷

Ewen interviewed Bernays near the end of his life and was struck by his “unabashedly hierarchical view of society. Repeatedly, he maintained that, while most people respond to their world instinctively, without thought, there exist an ‘intelligent few’ who have been charged with the responsibility of contemplating and influencing the tide of history. . . . He expressed little respect for the average person’s ability to think out, understand, or act upon the world in which they live. . . . Throughout our conversation, Bernays conveyed his hallucination of democracy: a highly educated class of opinion-molding tacticians are continuously at work, analyzing the social terrain and adjusting the mental scenery from which the public mind, with its limited intellect, derives its opinions.”²⁸

Expanding on Freud’s theories about the unconscious motives for human behavior, Bernays believed that people are not merely unconscious but herdlike in their thinking, “subject to the passions of the pack in [their] mob violence and the passions of the herd in [their] panics. . . . The average citizen is the world’s most efficient censor. His own mind is the greatest barrier between him and the facts. His own ‘logic-proof compartments, ’ his own absolutism, are the obstacles which prevent him from seeing in terms of experience and thought rather than in terms of group reaction.”²⁹

Fortunately, Bernays added, being herdlike also made people “remarkably susceptible to leadership.”³⁰ He saw public relations as an applied science, like engineering, through which society’s leaders could bring order out of chaos and muddle. “If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind,” he argued, it would be possible to “control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing it. . . . Theory and practice have combined with sufficient success to permit us to know that in certain cases we can effect some change in public opinion with a fair degree of accuracy by operating a certain mechanism, just as the motorist can regulate the speed of his car by manipulating the flow of gasoline.”³¹

To exercise this type of control was not just an option, it was a duty: “It is certain that the power of public opinion is constantly increasing and will keep on increasing. It is equally certain that it is more and more being influenced, changed, stirred by impulses from below. . . . The duty of the higher strata of society—the cultivated, the learned, the expert, the intellectual—is therefore clear. They must inject moral and spiritual motives into public opinion.”³² A public relations counselor could accomplish this, Bernays said, because his special training and insight into human nature “permits him to step out of his own group to look at a particular problem with the eyes of an impartial observer and to utilize his knowledge of the individual and the group mind to project his clients’ point of view.”³³

Of course, the mind of Edward Bernays had its own share of “logic-proof compartments.” To begin with, there is the obvious contradiction in his notion that a public relations consultant can simultaneously be both an “impartial observer” and a special pleader for his client.

The First Front Group

Bernays stumbled into public relations almost by accident. In 1913, while working as editor of the Medical Review of Reviews, a monthly magazine owned by a college acquaintance, he discovered that the then-famous actor Richard Bennett was interested in producing a play titled “Damaged Goods,” which Bernays described as “a propaganda play that fought for sex education.” It discussed sexual topics, such as prostitution, that were considered unusually frank for their day. Bennett was afraid that the play would be raided by police, and he hired Bernays to prevent this from happening. Rather than arguing for the play on its merits, Bernays cleverly organized a group that he called the “Medical Review of Reviews Sociological Fund,” inviting prominent doctors and members of the social elite to join. The organization’s avowed mission was to fight venereal disease through education. Its real purpose was to endorse “Damaged Goods,” and apparently the plan worked. The show went on as scheduled, with no interference from police.

“This was a pioneering move that is common today in the promotion of public causes—a prestigious sponsoring committee,” notes PR industry historian Scott Cutlip. “In retrospect, given the history of public relations, it might be termed the first effort to use the front or third party technique.” It was a technique that Bernays would return to time and again, calling it “the most useful method in a multiple society like ours to indicate the support of an idea of the many varied elements that make up our society. Opinion leaders and group leaders have an effect in a democracy and stand as symbols to their constituency.”³⁴ He helped jump-start sales of bacon, a breakfast rarity until the 1920s, by enlisting a prominent doctor to solicit fellow doctors’ opinions on the salutary benefits of a hearty breakfast and by arranging to have famous figures photographed eating breakfasts of bacon and eggs. To sell bananas on behalf of the United Fruit Company, he launched the “celiac project,” republishing and disseminating a 20-year-old medical paper which found that eating bananas cured children with celiac disease, a disorder of the digestive system.³⁵

“Mr. Bernays has . . . created more institutes, funds, institutions, and foundations than Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Filene together,” observed the Institute for Propaganda Analysis, a nonprofit educational organization that flourished in the years following World War I. “Typical of them was the Temperature Research Foundation. Its stated purpose was ‘to disseminate impartial, scientific information concerning the latest developments in temperature control as they affect the health, leisure, happiness, and economy of the American people.’ A minor purpose—so minor that rarely did Mr. Bernays remember even to mention it—was to boost the sales of Kelvinator refrigerators, air-condition units, and electric stoves.”³⁶

The tobacco industry, another early Bernays client, also relied heavily on expert testimonials to tout its products, recruiting opera singers and doctors to claim that cigarettes soothed the throat and aided digestion. Advertisements of this type became so ubiquitous that Bernays spoofed one of his industry rivals by creating a front group called the “Tobacco Society for Voice Culture” which mockingly claimed that its mission was to “establish a home for singers and actors whose voices have cracked under the strain of their cigarette testimonials.”³⁷

Light’s Golden Jubilee

Bernays sectioned his autobiography into five parts and gave the title “Fulfillment” to the third section, which covered the years from 1923 to 1929. Those were the years that marked the emergence of the fledgling public relations industry, as Bernays rose from obscurity to wealth and influence. By January of 1929, his clients included the New Jersey Bell Telephone Company, Procter & Gamble, Knox Gelatin, and the American Tobacco Company. “In a typical month, January, our clients paid us gross fees of $16,524.43, with profits of $11,868.78,” he said. “That was not considered bad for a 38-year-old, adventuring into an untried, unknown field.” In fact, it would not be considered a bad monthly income today, even without adjusting for inflation. “I was doing well,” he recalled, “but the profession of counsel on public relations lacked the respect that I felt it deserved. Our clients knew what we could do for them and respected our methods, but to many we were still sensation mongers and ballyhoo artists—a menace to the integrity of press and business alike.”³⁸

The 1928 publication of his book Propaganda helped drum up new corporate clients but also prompted a flurry of criticism. Editor & Publisher magazine described Bernays as “the young Machiavelli of our times.” Another writer commented that “publicity agents for special and selfish causes inimical to the general interest and disturbing to the Commonwealth use just as much ingenuity and invention plus at least a fair measure of corruption.”³⁹ Chafing at these criticisms, Bernays longed for the opportunity to stage “a dramatic event that would make others see us as we saw ourselves.”⁴⁰

The opportunity he was looking for arrived in February 1929 with a visit from Napoleon Boynton, an executive with the General Electric company. Like Bernays, General Electric was having a few image problems and wanted his help. Long under congressional attack for monopolistic practices in lamp manufacture, GE wanted to stage a massive publicity stunt that would showcase the benefits that lightbulbs had brought to humanity. As it happened, the fiftieth anniversary of Thomas Edison’s invention of the lightbulb was fast approaching. What better way to polish the industry’s image than to honor Edison with an event that they would call “Light’s Golden Jubilee”? The Westinghouse Corporation, GE’s main competition in the electric light market, was also eager to jump on the promotional bandwagon.

“I recognized the potential professional significance of the assignment and plunged into the given task eagerly,” Bernays said. “The United States—and, for that matter, the world—was ripe for a new hero, and here was the 50th anniversary of one of the most significant and beneficial inventions of the age, and the inventor was still living.”⁴¹

Aged 82, enfeebled and recovering from a bout of pneumonia, Edison had retreated from his business activities and was devoting his final years to a quixotic and ultimately unsuccessful effort to develop a process that would derive rubber from milkweeds. Moreover, Edison’s feelings toward GE and Westinghouse were decidedly negative. In his own heyday as a businessman, he had viewed George Westinghouse as his archrival, calling him a “shyster” and “the enemy.” As for GE, it had once been Edison’s. Christened “the Edison General Electric Company,” it slipped from his control in an 1891 power grab by J. Pierpont Morgan, who drove home the insult by stripping Edison’s name from the company as soon as he took possession. There was more than a little irony in the idea that these robber barons should now want to honor him in his old age.

The glue that held the plan together was Henry Ford, whose admiration and affection for Edison knew no bounds. Ford, moreover, had propaganda aspirations of his own. A few years earlier, his offhand remark that “history is more or less bunk” had won him a reputation as a scholarly cretin, a rich but crude mechanic with no understanding of tradition or culture. Ford’s response to his critics was to create some history of his own—not a written book of history, but history as inscribed in things—the gadgets and artifacts that he saw as the fundamental expressions of humanity’s progress. At his birthplace in Dearborn, Michigan, Ford was building an eight-acre industrial museum and stuffing it with plows, furniture, milk pails, butter churns, china sets, flintlock rifles, grandfather clocks, music boxes, steam engines, threshers, fire engines, a Model T—anything and everything that might preserve the memory of America’s mechanics, blacksmiths, and craftsmen. Once Ford learned of the plans to honor Edison, he realized that it would make a perfect capstone to his own monumental plans. Renaming his museum the Edison Institute of Technology, he created as its centerpiece a reverently reconstructed replica of the Menlo Park complex where Edison had done most of his inventing. He bought up every drill press, lathe, rusted machine, and empty chemical bottle that he could acquire from the now-decaying original Edison laboratory, disassembling whole buildings board by board and brick by brick and shipping them to Dearborn by rail for reassembly. He even transplanted some of the original trees and shrubbery. No expense was spared as he rebuilt Menlo Park right down to Edison’s old outhouse. To celebrate Light’s Golden Jubilee, he invited Edison to participate in a reenactment of the moment of creation of the electric light. The ceremony would be held in the rebuilt laboratory on October 21, 1929, exactly fifty years to the day from the date of Edison’s successful experiment.

Bernays was now in a PR man’s hog heaven. His clients were competing with Henry Ford to see who could do the most to honor the old inventor’s legacy. Money was not an issue as he set out to put on a show unlike anything that Charles T. Yerkes could have imagined for his pathetic little telescope. It was a frenzy of activity that a Yale social psychologist would later call “one of the most astonishing pieces of propaganda ever engineered in this country during peacetime.” In the months leading up to the reenactment, plans went out to public utility companies, giving instructions for local tie-in activities. Luncheons were held for newspaper editors and movie newsreel executives. Scientific American, the Saturday Evening Post, and other magazines planned special issues celebrating Edison and his achievements. Talks were given to Lions, Kiwanis, and Rotary Clubs, to Boy and Girl Scouts, chambers of commerce, women’s clubs. Written tributes to Edison were collected from Albert Einstein, General John J. Pershing, Jane Addams, and Admiral Byrd. Bernays persuaded the postmaster general of the United States to issue a commemorative two-cent stamp in honor of the lightbulb. Songwriter George M. Cohan wrote a musical tribute. Costume competitions, fireworks, and pageants were held. “Light’s Golden Jubilee no longer depended on a press bureau,” Bernays recalled with jubilation of his own. “Everybody was joining the procession. From the grass roots to Broadway the spirit of ballyhoo took over. Mayors and Governors issued proclamations to celebrate Light’s Golden Jubilee. Universities offered lectures on Edison and the implications of his discovery. Education groups conducted essay contests. Librarians displayed books about Edison. Museum heads arranged exhibits that would illustrate the history of light.”⁴²

Even Bernays was astonished at the scale of the campaign and its success at captivating the country’s imagination. Of all the episodes in his career, he recounted this one most frequently in his later years. “I tried to look at it objectively,” he said. “Someone has an idea—Light’s Golden Jubilee—honoring a fine old man who has made significant contributions to American life. You realize that he can be made a myth, so you start myth-building. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say you help the myth to grow. The public, expressing its own unfulfilled aspirations, builds the myth until it becomes an overwhelming, meaningful reality. . . . Whether you accept the Freudian thesis or not, people want a father substitute. That is myth-building. Edison was an ideal subject—a great inventor symbolizing the scientific era of electronics to come.”⁴³

The timing helped as well to feed a spirit of enthusiasm. America was riding on an economic high as the stock market soared and everyone from elevator operators to the wealthiest families joined in the speculative mania. Everyone seemed to be rich and getting richer, with no end in sight. As the months ticked down toward October, the gains were especially phenomenal. The stock ticker (one of Edison’s first successful inventions) showed steady gains with no downturns at all, not even a lull or temporary setback. The Dow Jones Industrials went from 299.13 on April 9 to 381.17 on September 3. The price for a share of Westinghouse went from 151 to 286. General Electric went from 268 to 391.

The challenge as October 21 approached was deciding which dignitaries had to be excluded from the day’s events. Hundreds of notables attended, including President Herbert Hoover, Orville Wright, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Will Rogers, and Madame Curie. The honored guests arrived in Dearborn and were taken to the festivities aboard a replica of the Grand Trunk Railway train, on which Edison had worked in his boyhood as a “news butch,” selling sandwiches, newspapers, and other amenities to passengers. As part of the ceremony, a boy handed Edison a basket of similar merchandise that he was supposed to offer to President Hoover. But for Bernays, at least, the actual ritual was less satisfactory than its planners had imagined. “Edison, 82, enfeebled with age and sickness, took the basket, and offered his merchandise to President Hoover, crying, ‘Candy, apples, sandwiches and newspapers!’ in a valiant effort to reenact his boyhood sales pitch. It was embarrassing to all of us—a pathetic evocation of the past,” Bernays recalled.

There was in fact something a little sad and contradictory about the day’s festivities. “It became just a publicity thing, and we didn’t care for it,” Edison’s daughter Madeleine said later. His wife Mina also had “mixed feelings,” according to biographer Neil Baldwin. She “saw keenly the irony that corporate cosponsor General Electric was now making such a tremendous fuss over Edison, co-opting his presence as a symbol, especially considering the inauspicious circumstances under which her husband had long since parted with the company.”⁴⁴

Although Bernays doesn’t speak of it in his memoirs, he himself became the object of Ford’s animosity that day. An unabashed anti-Semite, Ford had disliked Bernays from the beginning and had only reluctantly allowed him to participate in arranging the Dearborn event. Ford took further offense at Bernays’s ceaseless efforts at self-promotion. According to another chronicler of Light’s Golden Jubilee, Bernays “as a matter of fact incurred Ford’s wrath after the dedicatory party arrived in Dearborn because he tried repeatedly to inject himself into the group picture with Hoover, Edison and the host. Ford took Fred Black aside and told him to ‘get Bernays the hell out of here or I’ll have Harry Bennett’s men throw him over the fence.’ Black told Bernays of the threat and he moved out of camera range.”⁴⁵

The capstone of the day was scheduled for 6:15 that evening. Following a candlelight dinner, “Edison, looking like a benevolent old wreck, walked with Ford and President Hoover to the transplanted Menlo Park laboratory and re-enacted the invention of the electric lamp,” Bernays recalled. The aging inventor demonstrated how he had made a carbonized thread and a vacuum globe, as radio announcer Graham McNamee dramatized each gesture for his listeners: “The lamp is now ready, as it was a half century ago! Will it light? Will it burn? Edison touches the wire . . . Ladies and gentlemen—it lights! Light’s Golden Jubilee has come to a triumphant climax!” The entire laboratory building was bathed in searchlights. A Ford-commissioned replica of the Liberty Bell pealed, sirens and whistles blew through the city of Detroit, and planes flew overhead.

Overcome by emotion, Edison faltered, sat down, and wept. His wife calmed him and gave him warm milk, which seemed to revive him. He was assisted to his seat of honor and listened as President Hoover gave yet another tributory speech. Edison managed to say a few words himself before turning white and slumping in his chair in an exhausted faint. His wife and Hoover’s physician helped him out of the room, laid him on a sofa, and administered drugs. It would take several days of recuperation at Ford’s home before he was well enough to travel home. It was the old man’s last public hurrah, and everyone knew it.⁴⁶

What they didn’t know was that the day’s festivities were in many ways Hoover’s last hurrah as well. Light’s Golden Jubilee was held on Monday, October 21, but three days later, darkness rather than light would prevail. The celebration of Edison and his creations has left a mark on the American imagination, but October 24, 1929, is by far the better-remembered date: Black Thursday—the day the stock market crashed.

The Experts Speak

One of the striking historical facts about the Great Depression is the complete failure of society’s economic and political experts to see it coming, or to deal with it sensibly once it arrived. Fourteen days before the crash, Irving Fisher had predicted, “In a few months I expect to see the stock market much higher than today.” Fisher, America’s most distinguished and famous professor of economics at Yale University, was so overconfident that he personally lost a fortune equivalent to $140 million in today’s dollars when the market collapsed. John Maynard Keynes, the most famous British economist, lost the equivalent of £1 million. The headline in the New York Journal on the day after Black Thursday was “Experts Predict Rising Market.” The Harvard Economic Society responded to the news by telling its subscribers, “A severe depression such as 1920-21 is outside the range of probability. We are not facing a protracted liquidation.”

As it became apparent that the Depression was more than a temporary downturn, President Hoover appointed Edward Bernays to his three-member Presidential Emergency Committee for Employment. “It was really a public relations committee,” Bernays recalled in his memoirs. Hoover’s refusal to countenance “socialist” ideas such as social security and public works programs left the committee with few options. “We encouraged various ways of spreading employment: through reduced daily and weekly schedules, shorter shifts, alternating shifts and rotation of days off. . . . We urged employers to find personnel willing to go on furlough without pay; to disclose duplication of wage earners in the same family, as a measure of spreading wages; to maintain lists for preferential employment and to determine the adequacy of part-time wages.” In the end, however, Bernays realized, “these efforts were all ineffective. Particularly unsound was the share-the-work idea, which put the onus of sacrifice on the shoulders of the wage earner instead of the employer.” Advertisers and businesses offered empty slogans such as “Be patriotic and spend money,” “Spend ten cents more each day and help drive hard times away,” or “Help the jobless by doing your Christmas shopping now.” As the economy careened into deeper and deeper trouble, newspapers resorted to desperate cheerleading. “Optimism Gains as U.S. Speeds Jobless Relief,” read one headline. “Hoover’s Drive to Aid Jobless Shows Results,” read another. “President Declares Voluntary Cooperation of Industry Will Solve Problem.”⁴⁷

In 1932, Bernays joined Hoover’s doomed campaign for reelection. He helped line up experts to sing Hoover’s praises, including a pair of Yale economists who predicted that the economy was now on a “sound foundation” and “the run of the dollar had been stopped.”⁴⁸ He formed a “Non-Partisan Fact-Finding Committee,” which issued a poll showing Hoover trouncing his opponent, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Outside the circle of businessmen and their sycophants, however, no one believed a word of it. The election of Roosevelt brought new experts into power, with new and grandiose ideas about what could and should be done to secure the general welfare. For Hoover and the old guard, it was the end of an era and everything that they believed in, but for Bernays and the propaganda industry, business was booming like never before.