Edward Bernays Inventing Public Relations
Yes, someone intvented PR!
Edward Bernays’ Green Campaign for Lucky Strike.
The women who smoked In the 1930s didn’t like the green color of the Lucky Strike packages. Edward Bernays set up a major campaign “to convince women that green was the new black.” With assistance from editors at Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, green began to dominate the fashion world. He came up with the “Green Ball” held in 1934 in New York, featuring some of the city’s most prominent socialites.” (read more neatorama.com)
Edward Bernays for Lucky Strike.
In the late 1920s, American Tobacco Company chairman George Washington Hill wanted to gain the female market for his Lucky Strike cigarettes; so he hired Edward Bernays. Bernays PR company came up in the with the idea to market cigarettes as ‘Torches of Freedom’ Bare in mind that in the 19th century smoking for women in public was not done at all.
During the New York Easter Parade in 1929, “a young woman named Bertha Hunt stepped out into the crowded fifth avenue and created a scandal by lightning a Lucky Strike cigarette. The incident was highlighted even more because the press had been informed in advance of Hunt’s course of actions, and had been provided with appropriate leaflets and pamphlets. What they did not know was that Hunt was Bernays’s secretary and that this was the first in a long line of events that was aimed at getting women to puff. Bernays proclaimed that smoking was a form of liberation for women, their chance to express their new found strength and freedom.” (read more yourstory.com) That worked well! Lucky Strike sold “40 billion cigarettes in 1930 compared to 14 billion just five years earlier” (read more) historyisnowmagazine.com
It’s things-from-the-past-you-should-see-week, an educational program at Mimi Berlin.
If you want more than images; read on….
Edward Bernays (1891-1995) is the nephew of Sigmund Freud and always has been influenced by his psychoanalytic work. Bernyas started his career in New York as a press agent for the theatre and the (Russian) ballet. At the end of the First World War he started working as a propagandist for America in the “Committee on Public Information”. After the war he carried on in the same line of work but in a different context. Bernays and, his soon to be wife, Doris Fleischman (1891–1980) opened a private consulting firm: Edward L. Bernays, Counsel on Public Relations. Among their first clients was the U.S. War Department, Procter & Gamble and Venida hairnets. You could say that his Uncle, Sigmund Freud also was a client. In the early 1920s he helped his uncle to translate and publize his works in America, Mr Freud then became well-known in America. By that time Mr Bernyas had published a number of books, the most important ones being ‘Crystallizing Public Opinion’ (1923) and “Propaganda” (1928), and held the first Public Relations course at the University of New York (1923),
Mr Bernays is called “the father of public relations” nowadays, not only because of the green, stylish Lucky Strike campaign, and many other product campaigns, but for the way he marketed these products. He manipulated people into buying what they did not need in a manner that was not done before: Edward Bernays was the nephew of (and very close to) Sigmund Freud. Like his uncle, he knew how the human brain could be worked, and so he did. For commercial benefits. He was the master of implementing stories in the brains of the masses in order to sell products; he was the puppet master and the spin doctor, Bernays would sell anything or anybody to everybody. Mr Bernays’ work in public relations and in plain propaganda is separated by a very thin line, or are they just the same thing, even today? It’s a funny feeling that this kind of commercial manipulation only exsist for a relatively short period of time, because we, in the rich parts of the world, don’t know how life is without the (silent screaming) manipulation of products. And people, opinions, beliefs etc. etc.
it’s interesting to know that Freud’s and Bernays’ legacy in PR also lingers on today in “Freud Communications“, the modern day British PR firm owned by Sigmund’s great-grandson; Matthew Freud.
“Mr Bernays work in public relations and in plain propaganda is separated by a very thin line”
It is said that “Bernays single-handedly toppled the popular Guatemalan government with one or two publicity stunts, playing on Cold War fears, and acting on behalf of a banana corporation.” (read more https://www.theguardian.com/education/2002/mar/10/medicalscience.highereducation) (That banana corporation is now known as Chiquita) “Bernays learned that the Nazis were using his work in 1933, from a foreign correspondent for Hearst newspapers. He later recounted in his 1965 autobiography: They were using my books as the basis for a destructive campaign against the Jews of Germany. This shocked me, but I knew any human activity can be used for social purposes or misused for antisocial ones.” Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2015-07-american-mindedward-bernays-birth.html#jCp (that work being (his first book ‘Crystallizing Public Opinion’ written in 1923)
(image) sources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays / http://www.edenscorner.com/#!american-genius/c75n / http://www.appliedartsmag.com/opinions_details/?id=206 / http://www.prospectmx.com/15-of-the-most-ingenious-marketing-campaigns/ http://buttes-chaumont.blogspot.nl/2013/06/lucky-people.html / http://www.historyisnowmagazine.com/blog/2015/4/6/just-how-did-tobacco-companies-advertise-cigarettes-to-women#.V58joY6CN-U= / https://yourstory.com/2014/08/torches-of-freedom/ http://prvisionaries.com/bernays/bernays_1915.html / http://www.apa.org/monitor/2009/12/consumer.aspx /https://www.britannica.com/biography/Edward-L-Bernays
There’s a letter out there, from Sigmund to Edward. It shows a time when Edward was desperate for work and scrambling to find money. I think that Sigmund’s rough dismissal of Edward at this sensitive moment in his young life is underrepresented as a driving force for the horrors that Bernays would eventually unleash.