“Public opinion wins wars.” - Dwight D. Eisenhower
In a packed New York City theater, to the thunder of applause, Eddie Bernays white-washed the reputation of an American oligarch. And he even made him a little bit richer. By teaming up with business magnate John D. Rockefeller, Eddie had successfully pulled off the most controversial theatrical production of 1913. And it catapulted him into fame.
It was a play called Damaged Goods, a story about a man with syphilis who marries then fathers a syphilitic child. It was wildly successful in Europe, and American actors tried bringing it State-side. They were unsuccessful, because in America, even mentioning the subject of STDs was deeply taboo. It was proving impossible to raise enough funds for the play, and financiers were scared off by the potential for a major scandal.
But Eddie Bernays saw an opportunity. The scandal would be, in fact, the point. In a flash of psychological insight, Eddie realized that people would want to see the play no matter which side of the debate they fell on. People might rail against the downfall of civilized society, they might write newspapers and politicians voicing outrage that such a play would even be allowed, but they would still pay for a ticket like everyone else. The more they protested, the more they gifted Eddie free marketing.
Eddie would monetize both sides of the controversy.
He volunteered to help bring Damaged Goods to New York, enlisting so many of the city’s notables, including not only Rockefeller but also the likes of Vanderbilt and Roosevelt, that no one—not even the censors—could question the respectability of the play.
The play would serve a double purpose. It would not only be profitable, it would bolster the image of everyone involved. People like Rockefeller could appear as a philanthropist with genuine social concerns. He made sure to voice his support for the increase in public awareness of STDs, explaining to journalists that this was one of the most significant issues facing American society.
At the turn of the 20th century, worker movements and socialist enclaves had already started popping up across the world, as the dust settled from the industrial revolution. They had widespread influence, and the public eye began looking askance at the barons and oligarchs who clearly influenced society for personal gain. Few men symbolized this better than John D. Rockefeller, and Damaged Goods seemed like a promising way to taper class-resentment and endear a handful of the elite to the masses.
It was a success. The production went off without a hitch, and in the end it was even widely hailed as a valuable contribution to public awareness.
Eddie learned a lesson that he would remember for the rest of his life: if you have a pulse on the culture wars, social causes could be highly lucrative. And in a society with a bottomless capacity for controversy, from women’s rights to racism to smoking, it would cause Eddie to rightfully observe, "there were no limits to what we could accomplish.”
Still basking in the victory of Damaged Goods, Eddie decided it was time to pay a visit to his wealthy uncle in Austria, a world famous psychologist, to probe his mind about new possibilities taking shape in his imagination. Like, for instance, how emotions could be used to influence people to do more than just pay for a theater ticket. His uncle would be an invaluable resource to him, because he was Sigmund Freud.
They spent many hours wandering the gardens of Vienna, Bernays absorbing Freud’s monologues about the domination of irrational instincts in the human psyche, the herd-like nature of the crowd, and the slavery of the individual to it. He told Bernays that crowds demand not truth, but illusions. That a group is an obedient herd, which could never live without a master. And that this should encourage the masses to take to the streets and together demand social change for the good of all. But, of course, never for profit or petty political victories. He gave his nephew a copy of his “Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis” which Eddie cherished. When he returned to America, it would be his manual for unlocking the power of the masses.
When he returned, it soon became clear that Eddie did not share his uncle's high ideals. He would indeed send people into the streets, but only on the condition that it was profitable. Eddie would unveil some of the most successful advertising campaigns in history. The cigarette empire Lucky Strike made a fortune from his “Torches of Freedom” campaign, which convinced women that cigarettes symbolized liberation from men, and made them slimmer (despite privately forbidding his own wife from smoking). He single-handedly convinced America that the quintessential American breakfast was bacon and eggs. He was privately consulted by both Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover during their presidential campaigns.
But Eddie’s crowning achievement - his most audacious and influential crusade - would be at the service of President Woodrow Wilson.
He would persuade young men to take up arms and kill Germans.
Despite mountains of ammunition and oceans of blood, World War I was shaping up to be a stalemate at the beginning of 1917. The Western front had petrified into a winding maze of trenches and barbed wire. Millions had already died, and neither side had anything to show for it.
It was the bloodiest conflict in human history, and rapidly descended into a war of attrition. At some point the grim truth became undeniable; there would be no victors. The last men standing would be nothing more than emaciated, shell-shocked survivors.
In France and England, reality was sinking in. Despite a propaganda campaign that peppered newspapers and magazines with images of valiant soldiers and tales of heroism and bravery, it was becoming difficult to conceal the truth. The Allies were, in fact, trapped in a strategic quagmire with no end in sight.
Clearly, someone was going to need an overwhelming advantage to make any sort of progress. Both sides experimented with rudimentary versions of tanks, aircraft, and poison gas to break the deadlock. But even these new technologies weren’t going to give them enough of an edge. The Allied strategists had determined the surest path to victory included a fresh supply of thousands of young, healthy soldiers. If they could throw more bodies at the Germans than they could afford to throw back, they might have a fighting chance. They needed the Americans.
But Americans had favored neutrality in the European conflict. They re-elected President Woodrow Wilson in 1916 explicitly because he “kept us out of the war”. Pacifist movements were strong in the States, boasting notable figures like Henry Ford and Jane Addams. American socialists convincingly argued that getting involved would only mean workers killing each other in the interests of their bosses.
But not all Americans were peace doves. Ever since the 1915 sinking of the American passenger liner Lusitania by German U-boats, there was a constant effort to tilt American opinion in favor of the Allies. The “Preparedness” movement emerged, arguing that America needed to immediately build up its Navy and ground forces. It urged universal military training for all fighting age American men. Everyone understood the implication of such actions: The US would join the fight, sooner or later.
The movement played on the image of the masculine ideal. Incompetent men were caught off-guard, and weak men trembled in the face of glorious combat. But real patriots were both ready and willing to die for their wives, their children, and their country at a moment’s notice.
To firmly impress upon the public the frightening danger posed by Germany, far across the Atlantic, the movement literally painted images of what might happen, should the German Hun tragically succeed.
The Preparedness movement would soon be vindicated by the bombshell revelation of the infamous Zimmermann telegram.
To the bafflement of the German Foreign Secretary Arthur Zimmermann, a secret cable between him and the German ambassador to Mexico was published in American newspapers. The telegram contained plans to tell the Mexican government that, in the event that America entered the war on the side of the Allies, the Germans would help return the territory Mexico lost in their recent war with America, if they would ally themselves with Germany.
It was later revealed that British military intelligence had intercepted this telegram and delivered it personally to Woodrow Wilson; they had quietly tapped undersea communication cables connecting America to Europe and easily decoded Zimmermann’s message.
It set off a firestorm across the mainstream American media. Calls for immediate declarations of war sounded on all sides. Some, however, voiced their doubts. Not only was the telegram remarkably timed and exceedingly convenient for those who had been trying to coax America into the war all along, the German proposition was clearly conditional. America had not yet joined the war, and both sides of the conflict were constantly planning for all possible eventualities. Of course Germany would prepare for an American intervention.
Zimmermann confirmed the authenticity of the telegram, but repeated that his offer was completely conditional on America taking sides against Germany, saying “My instructions were to be carried out only after the United States declared war and a state of war supervened. I believe the instructions were absolutely loyal as regards the United States.”
That distinction would prove to be either too subtle or too irrelevant for American media. Antiwar voices would be shouted down and ignored in the wake of the event. Wilson, citing both the telegram and the practice of unrestricted submarine warfare which had sunk the Lusitania, announced that America had ample reason to join the Allied forces. On April 6th 1917, only a week after Zimmermann confirmed the telegram’s authenticity, America declared war on Germany.
However, Wilson knew this revelation wouldn’t be enough to stamp out the pacifism which still lingered in the air. America wasn’t yet fully convinced that it must spill German blood.
The public needed personal, emotional reasons for going to war. They needed to be utterly convinced of the justness of the American cause. And they would be. Because, for the incredible task of reshaping public opinion all at once, Wilson would turn to a cast of renowned psychologists, journalists, publishers, and politicians headed by the journalist George Creel. They would wage a massive operation in the press and the movies, on street corners and in the airwaves, to win over the American heart for the war. This group would call themselves the Committee on Public Information, or the CPI. And one of its most prominent members would be our old friend, Eddie Bernays.
The CPI immediately seized control of the public’s attention. Anything which influenced American minds was a target. The media, the stage, magazines - entertainment of all kinds - was all of deep interest to and influenced by Bernays and his team.
All flavors of news media and entertainment would fall into lockstep agreement on the most critical points: The Allied cause was just, and the Germans deserved violent retribution.
The CPI would seize the film industry, helping Wilson construct images of heroic soldiers and their devoted wives and children back home. Radios buzzed with patriotic tunes exalting the strength and courage of our boys “over there.” Public spaces were plastered with images depicting American soldiers as god-like and Germans as beasts.
Nearly overnight, media corporations across the country were mobilized into one massive propaganda machine that was literally impossible to escape. Everywhere you looked, you saw some message urging you to do something - anything - for the war effort. The entire media bore the fingerprints of Eddie Bernays and the CPI. The Council on Foreign Relations would later describe it as “perhaps the most effective job of large-scale war propaganda which the world had ever witnessed.”
However, despite the many successes of this advanced propaganda machine, the efforts of the CPI still weren’t enough to achieve the complete control of public opinion which Wilson desired. So, he took the next logical step by criminalizing all anti-war speech with the Espionage and Sedition Acts. This resulted in the arrest and prosecution of more than 2,000 Americans, some of whom were sentenced to 20 years in prison for sedition.
In one remarkable example a film called The Spirit of ‘76, about the American Revolution, was legally banned. It’s crime was the negative portrayal of the British (now military allies) as hostile aggressors to the American revolutionaries. This was the truth, of course, but the writer Robert Goldstein was sent to federal prison for 3 years for allegedly violating the Espionage Act with film. The Spirit of ‘76 was destroyed and all copies have since been lost. This happened, no less, while Wilson openly praised the white-supremacist film, The Birth of a Nation, which later inspired generations of KKK members.
The Wilson Administration, in the end, would emerge the victor of two separate wars. He conquered American pacifism, and defeated the hated Germans. In merely a few months after the Americans arrived on the Western front in 1918, the Germans were repelled and forced to surrender. The Allies got the bodies they needed, and they could now declare the world forever safe from the evils of war.
Wilson’s tactics for manufacturing consent would soon be deployed not only in the next world war, but in every subsequent administration that would rely on public support for, or at least a passive indifference to, foreign military operations.
The techniques of mass manipulation would evolve. Thousands of soldiers on both sides of WWII would fall victim to “black propaganda”, a tactic of psychological warfare which disguises propaganda’s origins, confusing and disorientating the enemy. And back home, Hollywood would emerge as a propaganda factory.
The Cold War would be, in many ways, a propaganda war; Operation Mockingbird was a secret CIA project to manipulate the news media for propaganda purposes, and Operation Northwoods was the CIA plan to literally attack American citizens and blame it on the Soviets to convince Americans they must invade Cuba. American federal agents created COINTELPRO, which infiltrated antiwar and politically subversive groups in order to manipulate and discredit them from within.
And today, from movies to sports to video games - even art - every branch of the entertainment industry is tied to the Pentagon. It’s all too obvious that the propaganda war never really ended; echoes of the days of Wilson and his heavy-handed war for public opinion.
Until he died, Bernays was proud of his work during the service of president Wilson. He believed that modern society was built on the intelligent, coordinated influence of the masses. To accomplish anything in society, be it good or evil, we are forced to reconcile with this reality. In his mind, it was an unavoidable consequence of a societal structure built on the will of the people: democracy.
In his book Propaganda, he wrote: “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...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.”
Walter Lippman, who had also contributed to Wilson’s CPI, was so deeply concerned about the dissemination of these tactics to the general public that he published an objection to what he considered to be Eddie’s recklessness. Lippman warned that, in the wrong hands, these tactics could disrupt and deceive society at a massive scale.
And this might be the real tragedy of Eddie Bernays. Because, even if he had heeded Lippman’s warning, it likely would have been too late. By then he had already won admirers in the very country he eviscerated with his propaganda campaign in World War I. Since the moment America declared war on Germany, both Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Hitler were intently studying the tactics of Allied propaganda.
Goebbels would become the chief propagandist for the Nazi party, and he was so enthralled by Bernays, who was a Jew, that he offered him a job making pro-Nazi propaganda in the early days of the Second Wold War. Bernays declined, but it ultimately wouldn’t matter. He had already spread his ideas across the world, and they would be mastered by the most blood-thirsty military force on Earth.
Nevertheless, Eddie Bernays would forever be recognized for his achievements in mass manipulation and depart this world having claimed for himself an increasingly inauspicious title: The Father of Propaganda.
Trevor, this awesome! Who are you?