Showing posts with label Propaganda. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Propaganda. Show all posts

Marketing is Propaganda - The Master of Freudian Persuasion

Marketing is Propaganda

Propaganda is a Latin word meaning 'to spread' - essentially - 'to propagate'. In 1622, it was originally used to describe the mission of a new administrative body in the Catholic Church called the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide (Congregation for Propagating the Faith). Its activity was aimed at "propagating" the Catholic faith in non-Catholic countries.

Until the 20th Century, its meaning was largely apolitical and amoral. But thanks to Edward Bernays, the power of persuasion became an essential tool in promoting acceptance of WWI.  As Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Bernays had the benefit of insider insights about exploiting human proclivities. WWI was not a popular cause in the US so a government agency called the Committee on Public Information hired Bernays to sway public opinion to support it. 

Referring to his work as “psychological warfare”, Bernays’s WWI propaganda campaign was successful beyond expectation. So, after the war he turned that success into a new field of marketing called Public Relations, focused on producing a pivotal psychological impact. He outlined the methods behind propaganda in his aptly named book, "Propaganda", which is still the foundational textbook of Public Relations.

Though Bernays was a professed Democrat and described his wife as a “feminist”,  he represented clients with any political and/or economic objective. His most cited persuasion campaign is the American Tobacco Company’s effort to increase its customer base by getting women to smoke. 

Its first series of ads used doctors to promote the idea that smoking could replace eating in an effort to stay thin.  Then Bernays succeeded in making lasting cultural change with “Torches of Freedom”, a staged event where a large group of influential Feminist debutantes in the NYC 1929 Easter parade smoked cigarettes along the route. 

Introduced in the 1970's as a "support statement" for Women's Lib, Virginia Slims cigarettes are an obvious example of "propaganda's" enduring power to both shape and capitalize upon social trends. 



So, with that background in mind, here are the opening and defining paragraphs of Propaganda.



ORGANIZING CHAOS

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 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 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 - 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.

It is not usually realized how necessary these invisible governors are to the orderly functioning of our group life. In theory, every citizen may vote for whom he pleases. Our Constitution does not envisage political parties as part of the mechanism of government, and its framers seem not to have pictured to themselves the existence in our national politics of anything like the modern political machine. But the American voters soon found that without organization and direction their individual votes, cast, perhaps, for dozens of hundreds of candidates, would produce nothing but confusion. Invisible government, in the shape of rudimentary political parties, arose almost overnight. Ever since then we have agreed, for the sake of simplicity and practicality, that party machines should narrow down the field of choice to two candidates, or at most three or four.

In theory, every citizen makes up his mind on public questions and matters of private conduct. In practice, if all men had to study for themselves the abstruse economic, political, and ethical data involved in every question, they would find it impossible to come to a conclusion without anything. We have voluntarily agreed to let an invisible government sift the data and high-spot the outstanding issue so that our field of choice shall be narrowed to practical proportions. From our leaders and the media they use to reach the public, we accept the evidence and the demarcation of issues bearing upon public question; from some ethical teacher, be it a minister, a favorite essayist, or merely prevailing opinion, we accept a standardized code of social conduct to which we conform most of the time. 

In theory, everybody buys the best and cheapest commodities offered him on the market. In practice, if everyone went around pricing, and chemically tasting before purchasing, the dozens of soaps or fabrics or brands of bread which are for sale, economic life would be hopelessly jammed. To avoid such confusion, society consents to have its choice narrowed to ideas and objects brought to its attention through propaganda of all kinds. There is consequently a vast and continuous effort going on to capture our minds in the interest of some policy or commodity or idea.

It might be better to have, instead of propaganda and special pleading, committees of wise men who would choose our rulers, dictate our conduct, private and public, and decide upon the best types of clothes for us to wear and the best kinds of food for us to eat. But we have chosen the opposite method, that of open competition. We must find a way to make free competition function with reasonable smoothness. To achieve this society has consented to permit free competition to be organized by leadership and propaganda.

Some of the phenomena of this process are criticized- the manipulation of news, the inflation of personality, and the general ballyhoo by which politicians and commercial products and social ideas are brought to the consciousness of the masses. The instruments by which public opinion is organized and focused may be misused. But such organization and focusing are necessary to orderly life. 

As civilization has become more complex, and as the need for invisible government has been increasingly demonstrated, the technical means have been invented and developed by which opinion may be regimented.

With the printing press and the newspaper, the railroad, the telephone, telegraph, radio and airplanes, ideas can be spread rapidly and even instantaneously all over the whole of America.

H.G. Wells senses the vast potentialities of these inventions when he writes in the New York Times:
"Modern means of communication - the power afforded by print, telephone, wireless and so forth, of rapidly putting through directive strategic or technical conceptions to a great number of cooperating centers, of getting quick replies and effective discussion - have opened up a new world of political processes. Ideas and phrases can now be given an effectiveness greater than the effectiveness of any personality and stronger than any sectional interest. The common design can be documented and sustained against perversion and betrayal. It can be elaborated and developed steadily and widely without personal, local and sectional misunderstanding."

What Mr. Wells says of political processes is equally true of commercial and social processes and all manifestations of mass activity. The groupings and affiliations of society today are no longer subject to "local and sectional" limitations. When the Constitution was adopted, the unit of organization was the village community, which produced the greater part of its own necessary commodities and generated its group ideas and opinions by personal contact and discussion among its citizens. But today, because ideas can be instantaneously transmitted to any distance and to any number of people, this geographical integration has been supplemented by many other kinds of grouping, so that persons having the same ideas and interests may be associated and regimented for common action even though they live thousands of miles apart.

It is extremely difficult to realize how many and diverse are these cleavages in our society. They may be social, political, economical, racial, religious or ethical, with hundreds of subdivisions of each.


Fake News is Not New

Yes, Virginia. There is a Santa Claus.

...Or is there?



In 1897, Virginia O’Hanlon wrote this letter to the New York Sun newspaper.

Dear Editor.
I am eight years old.
Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus.
Papa says, “If you see it in the Sun, it’s so.”
Please tell me the truth, is there a Santa Claus?

Before reviewing the Sun’s iconic response, let’s examine the newspaper’s history and ask why Virginia’s Papa seemed to trust it so much.

The first edition of the NY Sun came out in 1833. For a time, it was the most successful newspaper in America, even winning two Pultizer prizes before closing in 1950.

Paving the way to that success was a series of articles it ran in 1835 called GREAT ASTRONOMICAL DISCOVERIES. Now known as the “Great Moon Hoax” the paper reported on the discovery of fantastic life forms on the Moon thanks to a "an immense telescope of an entirely new principle". The series described a Moon covered with trees, oceans, and beaches along with an odd variety of animals including a Vespertilio-homo which translated from Latin as bat-man.

After six installments, the series ended when the Sun reported that the telescope was destroyed in a fire caused by its powerful lens.

The GREAT ASTRONOMICAL DISCOVERIES stories boosted the Sun’s circulation and established its success and credibility. Presses had to run ten hours a day to supply the demand for papers. Readers waited outside the Sun offices for copies. Far from suspecting a fake, rival papers congratulated the Sun and some even pirated the stories. Even after the hoax was accidentally exposed, the Sun never issued a retraction and did not lose circulation. Many years later, people like Virginia’s Papa were still convinced that, “if you see it in the Sun, it’s so.”

Let’s return to Virginia’s letter and its specific request : Please tell me the truth.

What the Sun actually gave her was a classic “Red Herring”, something that misleads or distracts from the relevant issue at hand.

In his still celebrated reply, Francis Pharcellus Church, evades her direct question with a bombast of distractions better suited to marketing than the pursuit of truth.

VIRGINIA, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.


Yes, VIRGINIA, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no VIRGINIAS. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished...


The NY Sun achieved its initial success by promoting fantasy fiction as scientific fact. In Virginia’s case, it responded to reality-based inquiry with a sentimental cautionary fable. Fake News is not New and might best be called Make News. Why dig for Truth when Make News is a ready made Gold Mine?

So, to all the curious Virginias and Virgils out there, know that there are often many answers to a question. For the benefit of yourself and others, consider more than just a single source of authority when you’re searching for the truth.

Public Opinion - Extracts: The Making of a Common Will

Walter Lippmann published Public Opinion in 1922. Following is a short extract describing the role of leadership in creating public acceptance. The entire book is available online for free through Project Gutenburg.


The established leaders of any organization have great natural advantages. They are believed to have better sources of information. The books and papers are in their offices. They took part in the important conferences. They met the important people. They have responsibility. It is, therefore, easier for them to secure attention and to speak in a convincing tone. But also they have a very great deal of control over the access to the facts.
Every official is in some degree a censor. And since no one can suppress information, either by concealing it or forgetting to mention it, without some notion of what he wishes the public to know, every leader is in some degree a propagandist. 

Strategically placed, and compelled often to choose even at the best between the equally cogent though conflicting ideals of safety for the institution, and candor to his public, the official finds himself deciding more and more consciously what facts, in what setting, in what guise he shall permit the public to know. 

That the manufacture of consent is capable of great refinements no one, I think, denies. The process by which public opinions arise is certainly no less intricate than it has appeared in these pages, and the opportunities for manipulation open to anyone who understands the process are plain enough. 

The creation of consent is not a new art. It is a very old one which was supposed to have died out with the appearance of democracy. But it has not died out. 

It has, in fact, improved enormously in technic, because it is now based on analysis rather than on rule of thumb. And so, as a result of psychological research, coupled with the modern means of communication, the practice of democracy has turned a corner. A revolution is taking place, infinitely more significant than any shifting of economic power. 

Within the life of the generation now in control of affairs, persuasion has become a self-conscious art and a regular organ of popular government. None of us begins to understand the consequences, but it is no daring prophecy to say that the knowledge of how to create consent will alter every political calculation and modify every political premise. 

Under the impact of propaganda, not necessarily in the sinister meaning of the word alone, the old constants of our thinking have become variables. It is no longer possible, for example, to believe in the original dogma of democracy; that the knowledge needed for the management of human affairs comes up spontaneously from the human heart. Where we act on that theory we expose ourselves to self-deception, and to forms of persuasion that we cannot verify. 

It has been demonstrated that we cannot rely upon intuition, conscience, or the accidents of casual opinion if we are to deal with the world beyond our reach.


Public Opinion - Extracts: The Enlisting of Interest

Walter Lippmann published Public Opinion in 1922. Following is a short extract describing how to engage and hold public attention. The entire book is available online for free through Project Gutenburg.


When public affairs are popularized in speeches, headlines, plays, moving pictures, cartoons, novels, statues or paintings, their transformation into a human interest requires first abstraction from the original, and then animation of what has been abstracted.
 
We cannot be much interested in, or much moved by, the things we do not see. Of public affairs each of us sees very little, and therefore, they remain dull and unappetizing, until somebody, with the makings of an artist, has translated them into a moving picture. Thus the abstraction, imposed upon our knowledge of reality by all the limitations of our access and of our prejudices, is compensated. 

Not being omnipresent and omniscient we cannot see much of what we have to think and talk about. Being flesh and blood we will not feed on words and names and gray theory. Being artists of a sort we paint pictures, stage dramas and draw cartoons out of the abstractions.
...

A “clear” thinker is almost always a good visualizer. But for that same reason, because he is “cinematographic,” he is often by that much external and insensitive. 

For the people who have intuition, which is probably another name for musical or muscular perception, often appreciate the quality of an event and the inwardness of an act far better than the visualizer. They have more understanding when the crucial element is a desire that is never crudely overt, and appears on the surface only in a veiled gesture, or in a rhythm of speech. 
...

Nevertheless, though they have often a peculiar justice, intuitions remain highly private and largely incommunicable. But social intercourse depends on communication, and while a person can often steer his own life with the utmost grace by virtue of his intuitions, he usually has great difficulty in making them real to others. When he talks about them they sound like a sheaf of mist. For while intuition does give a fairer perception of human feeling, the reason with its spatial and tactile prejudice can do little with that perception. 

Therefore, where action depends on whether a number of people are of one mind, it is probably true that in the first instance no idea is lucid for practical decision until it has visual or tactile value. But it is also true, that no visual idea is significant to us until it has enveloped some stress of our own personality. Until it releases or resists, depresses or enhances, some craving of our own, it remains one of the objects which do not matter. 




Pictures have always been the surest way of conveying an idea, and next in order, words that call up pictures in memory. But the idea conveyed is not fully our own until we have identified ourselves with some aspect of the picture. The identification, or what Vernon Lee has called empathy, may be almost infinitely subtle and symbolic. The mimicry may be performed without our being aware of it, and sometimes in a way that would horrify those sections of our personality which support our self-respect.

In sophisticated people the participation may not be in the fate of the hero, but in the fate of the whole idea to which both hero and villain are essential. But these are refinements. In popular representation the handles for identification are almost always marked. You know who the hero is at once. And no work promises to be easily popular where the marking is not definite and the choice clear. But that is not enough. 

The audience must have something to do, and the contemplation of the true, the good and the beautiful is not something to do. In order not to sit inertly in the presence of the picture, and this applies as much to newspaper stories as to fiction and the cinema, the audience must be exercised by the image. 

Now there are two forms of exercise which far transcend all others, both as to ease with which they are aroused, and eagerness with which stimuli for them are sought. They are sexual passion and fighting, and the two have so many associations with each other, blend into each other so intimately, that a fight about sex outranks every other theme in the breadth of its appeal. There is none so engrossing or so careless of all distinctions of culture and frontiers. 

The sexual motif figures hardly at all in American political imagery. Except in certain minor ecstasies of war, in an occasional scandal,...to speak of it at all would seem far-fetched...But the fighting motif appears at every turn. Politics is interesting when there is a fight, or as we say, an issue. And in order to make politics popular, issues have to be found, even when in truth and justice, there are none,--none, in the sense that the differences of judgment, or principle, or fact, do not call for the enlistment of pugnacity. 

[Footnote: Cf. Frances Taylor Patterson, Cinema Craftsmanship, pp. 31-32. “III. If the plot lacks suspense: 1. Add an antagonist, 2. Add an obstacle, 3. Add a problem, 4. Emphasize one of the questions in the minds of the spectator.,..”]

But where pugnacity is not enlisted, those of us who are not directly involved find it hard to keep up our interest. For those who are involved the absorption may be real enough to hold them even when no issue is involved. They may be exercised by sheer joy in activity, or by subtle rivalry or invention. 

But for those to whom the whole problem is external and distant, these other faculties do not easily come into play. In order that the faint image of the affair shall mean something to them, they must be allowed to exercise the love of struggle, suspense, and victory. 
...

In order then that the distant situation shall not be a gray flicker on the edge of attention, it should be capable of translation into pictures in which the opportunity for identification is recognizable. Unless that happens it will interest only a few for a little while. It will belong to the sights seen but not felt, to the sensations that beat on our sense organs, and are not acknowledged. 

We have to take sides. We have to be able to take sides. In the recesses of our being we must step out of the audience on to the stage, and wrestle as the hero for the victory of good over evil. We must breathe into the allegory the breath of our life. 


Propaganda: Extracts - Introduction

Propaganda by Edward Bernays

Propaganda is a Latin word meaning 'to spread' or 'to propagate'. In 1622, it was originally used to describe the mission of a new administrative body in the Catholic Church called the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide (Congregation for Propagating the Faith). Its activity was aimed at "propagating" the Catholic faith in non-Catholic countries.

Until the 20th Century, its meaning was largely apolitical and amoral. But thanks to Edward Bernays the power of persuasion became an essential tool in persuading Americans to become involved in WWI.  Then, after the war, he re-purposed that success into developing a new field of marketing goods and concepts. He outlined the methods behind propaganda in what became the textbook for the practice, aptly named "Propaganda".

Following are excerpts from Mark Crispin Miller's Introduction in the 2005 edition. They explain the derivation and evolution of the concept.



(Promotional text on back cover)
Originally published in 1928, this manual of mass manipulation provides a detailed examination of how public discourse and opinion are shaped and controlled in politics, business, art, education and science. 

In a world dominated by political spin and media manipulation, Propaganda is an essential read for all who wish to understand how power is used by the ruling elite of our society.

About the Author
The nephew of Sigmund Freud, Edward Bernays (1891-1995) pioneered the scientific technique of shaping and manipulating public opinion, which he called "engineering of consent." 

During World War I, he was an integral part - along with Walter Lippmann - of the U.S. Committee on Public Information (CPI), a powerful propaganda machine that advertised and sold the war to the American people as one that would "Make the World Safe for Democracy." The marketing strategies for all future wars would be based on the CPI model.

Over the next half century, Bernays, combining the techniques he had learned in the CPI with the ideas of Lippmann and Freud, fashioned a career as an outspoken proponent of propaganda for political and corporate manipulation of the population, earning the moniker "father of public relations." 

Among his powerful clients were President Calvin Coolidge, Procter & Gamble, CBS, the American Tobacco Company and General Electric. In addition, his propaganda campaign for the United Fruit Company in the early 195Os led directly to the CIA's overthrow of the elected government of Guatemala.
 

(Front cover text detail)
Only through the active energy of the intelligent few can the public at large become aware of and act upon new ideas.

Propaganda bears the same relation to education as to business or politics. It may be abused. It may be used to over-advertise an institution and to create in the public mind artificial values. There can be no absolute guarantee against its misuse.

A presidential candidate may be "drafted" in response to "overwhelming popular demand," but it is well-known that his name may be decided upon by half a dozen men sitting around a table in a hotel room.

Governments, whether they ore monarchical, constitutional, democratic or communist, depend upon acquiescent public opinion for the success of their efforts and, in fact, government is government only by virtue of public acquiescence.

As civilization hos become more complex, and of the need for invisible government has been increasingly demonstrated, the technical means have been invented and developed by which opinion may be regimented.

Nowadays the successors of the rulers, those whose position or ability gives them power, can no longer do what they want without the approval of the masses, they find in propaganda a tool which is increasingly powerful in gaining that approval.

Democracy is administered by the intelligent minority who know how to regiment and guide the mosses.

An entire party, a platform, on international policy is sold to the public, or is not sold, on the basis of the intangible element of personality.




INTRODUCTION by Mark Crispin Miller

Prior to World War One, the word propaganda was little-used in English, except by certain social activists, and close observers of the Vatican; and, back then, propaganda tended not to be the damning term we throw around today. The word had been coined in 1622, when Pope Gregory XV, frightened by the global spread of Protestantism, urgently proposed an addition to the Roman curia. 

The Office for the Propagation of the Faith (Congregatio de propaganda fide) would supervise the Church's missionary effort in the New World and elsewhere: "They are to take account of and to deal with each and every concern for the spread of the faith throughout the world." 

Far from denoting lies, half- truths, selective history or any of the other tricks that we associate with "propaganda" now, that word meant, at first, the total opposite of such deception. Of "the sheep now wretchedly straying" the world over, Gregory wrote:

Especially it is to be desired that, inspired by divine grace, they should cease to wander amidst heresies through the unhappy pastures of infidelity, drinking deadly and poisonous water, but be placed in the pasture of the true faith, that they may be gathered together in saving doctrine, and be led to the spring of the water of life.

The word seems to have retained its strongly Catholic aura well into the 19th century; and, often, when the user stressed that Roman origin, the word would be pejorative.

"Derived from this celebrated society [the Congregatio de propaganda fide], the name propaganda applied in modern political language as a term of reproach to secret associations for the spread of opinion and principle which are viewed by most governments with horror and aversion," writes the British chemist William Thomas Brande in 1842. However, while the word then could be used to make a sinister impression, it did not automatically evoke subversive falsehood, as it has since the 1920s.

In his English Traits (1856), for instance, Emerson uses propagandist as an adjective not at all suggestive of the stealthy spread of some pernicious creed or notion. He describes the British a "still aggressive and propagandist, enlarging the dominion of their art and liberty" - a passage that associates propaganda not with alien subversion but the most enlightened rule:

Their laws are hospitable, and slavery does not exist under them. What oppression exists is incidental and temporary; their success is not hidden or fortunate, but they have maintained constancy and self-equality for many ages.

Prior to the war, the word’s derogatory use was far less common than its neutral denotation. Here for example, is the calm (and accurate) definition given in the Oxford English Dictionary:

''Any association, systematic scheme, or concerted movement for the propagation of a particular doctrine or practice."

Thus was propaganda generally perceived not a an instrument for striking "horror and aversion" in the souls of government officials, but as an enterprise whose consequences might seem horrid - or innocuous, or even beneficial, depending on its authors and their aim (and the perceiver's point of view). 

A campaign to improve public health through vaccination, sanitary cooking or the placement of spittoons was, or is, no less a propaganda drive than any anti-clerical or socialist or nativist crusade. Evidently this fact was apparent to those few who used the word - which did not become a synonym for big black lies until the Allies made the word familiar to the masses of Great Britain and America. Until then, propaganda was a term so unimportant that there is no definition for it in the great 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica (which does include a short entry for propagate).



The war had a complex effect on the repute of propaganda. Although the practice had, albeit unnamed, been variously used by governments for centuries (Napoleon was especially incisive on the subject, as well as an inspired practitioner), it was not until 1915 that governments first systematically deployed the entire range of modern media to rouse their populations to fanatical assent. 

Here was an extraordinary state accomplishment: mass enthusiasm at the prospect of a global brawl that otherwise would mystify those very masses, and that shattered most of those who actually took part in it. The Anglo - American drive to demonize "the Hun,” and to cast the war as a transcendent clash between Atlantic “civilization" and Prussian "barbarism," made so powerful an impression on so many that the worlds of government and business were forever changed.

Now "public opinion" stood out as a force that must be managed, and not through clever guesswork but by experts trained to do that all-important job. Thus the war improved the status of those working in the field of public suasion. Formerly, the lords of industry and commerce had often seen the advertising agent as a charlatan, associated with the tawdry bunkum used to peddle patent medicines and cigarettes, and trying to sell a service that any boss with half a brain could surely manage on his own.

The nascent field of public relations also had been disesteemed by those atop the social pyramid, who saw that sort of work as necessary only on the vaudeville circuit and on Broadway. The great Allied campaign to celebrate (or sell) Democracy, etc., was a venture so successful, and, it seemed, so noble, that it suddenly legitimized such propagandists, who, once the war had ended, went right to work massaging or exciting various publics on behalf of entities like General Motors, Procter & Gamble, John D. Rockefeller, General Electric.

And so, from the signing of the Versailles Treaty to the Crash of 1929, there was high excitement in the booming field of peace-time propaganda. That reborn generation of admen and publicists, no longer common hucksters but professionals, sold their talents to Big Business through a long barrage of books, essays, speeches and events extolling the miraculous effects of advertising and/or publicity - i.e., propaganda, as the proponents of the craft, and their corporate clients, often kept referring to it, quietly.

According to the propagandists' evangelical self-salesmanship (many of them were in fact the son of ministers), their revolutionary "science" would do far more than make some people richer. Just as during the war, propaganda would at once exalt the nation and advance the civilizing process, teaching immigrants and other folk of modest means how to transform themselves, through smart consumption, into happy and presentable Americans. 

Throughout the Twenties, as propaganda's earnest advocates devoutly pushed that faux-progressive line, "propaganda" seemed - at least to those who peddled it - a wondrous new progressive force, capable of brightening every life and every home. That quasi-religious pitch was memorably made in book like Earnest Elmo Calkins's Business the Civilizer (1928), Bruce Barton's best-selling parable The Man Nobody Knows (1925), and, less distinctively, in countless other works of what we might call propaganda propaganda. 

Like its wartime prototype, the post-war propaganda drive was an immense success, as it persuaded not just businessmen but journalists and politicians that "the manufacture of consent," in Walter Lippmann's famous phrase, was a necessity throughout the public sphere.

And yet, for all its honking boosterism, that sales campaign was oddly hobbled from the start, because the product's very name had come into the news, and into common conversation, as a dirty word. Ironically, the same great war drive that had made that alien term "propaganda" commonplace had also made the neutral term pejorative. At the very moment of the propagandists' triumph as professionals, in other words, to be referred to as a "propagandist" was an insult. 

This was no accident, but a paradoxical result of the war propagandists' winning enterprise: for the propagandists had themselves besmirched the word by using it always and only in dark reference to the enemy. "We did not call it propaganda, for that word, in German hands, had come to be associated with deceit and corruption," writes George Creel, director of the U.S. Office of War Information, in How We Advertised America (1920). 

The Germans having trashed the word, Creel claims, the Americans never used it to refer to their own output, but - rightly - favored other, more exalted term instead: "Our effort was educational and informative throughout, for we had such confidence in our case as to feel that no other argument was needed than the simple, straightforward presentation of facts".

That passage is itself, of course, a stunning bit of propaganda, as it bluntly reconfirms the Manichaean plot that Creel & Co. had hammered home throughout the war: Germans always lie, Americans always tell the truth. How the German propaganda "had come to be associated with deceit and corruption" is a question Creel would rather not address, preferring instead to bury it in that sly (if sly it was) passive construction. 

There is much to say about Creel's obfuscation, or evasion, of the fact that his own propagandists had "associated" German propaganda with "corruption" and "deceit"-- and did so just as Creel does in that passage. At this point, however, our main concern is not propaganda's crucial self-effacement, but the darkening effect of Allied propaganda on the elusive word itself.

In World War One it was the propaganda of our side that first made "propaganda" so opprobrious a term. Fouled by close association with "the Hun," the word did not regain its innocence - not even when the Allied propaganda used to tar "the Hun" had been belatedly exposed to the American and British people. 

Indeed, as they learned more and more about the outright lies, exaggerations and half-truths used on them by their own governments, both populations came, understandably, to see “propaganda” as a weapon even more perfidious than they had thought when they had not perceived themselves as its real target. Thus did the word's demonic implications only harden through the Twenties, in spite of certain random efforts to redeem it.



Edward Bernays's Propaganda (1928) was the most ambitious of such efforts. Through meticulous descriptions of a broad variety of post-war propaganda drives - all of them ingenious, apparently benign in purpose and honest in their execution - Bernays attempts to rid the word of its bad smell. His motivation would appear to be twofold. 

Bernays always deemed himself to be both "a truth-seeker and a propagandist for propaganda," as he put it in another apologia in 1929. On the one hand, then, his interest would be purely scientific; and so his effort to redeem the word is based to some extent on intellectual necessity, there being no adequate substitute for propaganda. In this Bernays was right (and never quite gave up his preference for that word over all the euphemisms). His wish to reclaim the appropriate term bespeaks a serious commitment to precision; Bernays was not one to hype anything -- not his clients' wares, and not his craft.

In Propaganda, as in all his writings, there is none of the utopian grandiosity that marks so many of the decade's other pro-commercial homilies. Bernays's tone is managerial, not millenarian, nor does he promise that his methodology will turn this world into a modern paradise. His vision seems quite modest. 

The world informed by "public relations" will be but "a smoothly functioning society," where all of us are guided imperceptibly throughout our lives by a benign elite of rational manipulators. Bernays derived this vision from the writings of his intellectual hero, Walter Lippmann, whose classic Public Opinion had appeared in 1922.

From his observations on the Allied propaganda drives' immense success (and his own stint as a U.S. war propagandist), and from his readings of Gustave Le Bon, Graham Wallas and John Dewey, among others, Lippmann had arrived at the bleak view that "the democratic El Dorado" is impossible in modern mass society, whose members - by and large incapable of lucid thought or clear perception, driven by herd instincts and mere prejudice, and frequently disoriented by external stimuli - were not equipped to make decisions or engage in rational discourse. "Democracy therefore requires a supra-governmental body of detached professionals to sift the data, think things through, and keep the national enterprise from blowing up or crashing to a halt".

Although mankind surely can be taught to think, that educative process will be long and slow. In the meantime, the major issues must be framed, the crucial choices made, by "the responsible administrator." "It is on the men inside, working under conditions that are sound, that the daily administration of society must rest."

While Lippmann's argument is freighted with complexities and tinged with the melancholy of a disillusioned socialist, Bernays's adaptation of it is both simple and enthusiastic: “We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of." 

These "invisible governors” are a heroic elite, who coolly keep it all together, thereby "organizing chaos," as God did in the Beginning. "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." While Lippmann is meticulous-indeed, at times near-Proustian-in demonstrating how and why most people have such trouble thinking straight, Bernays takes all that for granted as “a fact." 

It is a sort of managerial aristocracy that quietly determines what we buy and how we vote and what we deem as good or bad. "They govern us," the author writes, "by their qualities of natural leadership, their ability to supply needed ideas and by their key position in the social structure."

Public Opinion - Extracts: Symbols as Communication

Walter Lippmann published Public Opinion in 1922. Following is a short extract describing the nature of symbols in communicating ideas.  The entire book is available online for free through Project Gutenburg.


The symbols of public opinion, in times of moderate security, are subject to check and comparison and argument. 

They come and go, coalesce and are forgotten, never organizing perfectly the emotion of the whole group. There is, after all, just one human activity left in which whole populations accomplish the union sacrée.
It occurs in those middle phases of a war when fear, pugnacity, and hatred have secured complete dominion of the spirit, either to crush every other instinct or to enlist it, and before weariness is felt. 

At almost all other times, and even in war when it is deadlocked, a sufficiently greater range of feelings is aroused to establish conflict, choice, hesitation, and compromise. The symbolism of public opinion usually bears, as we shall see, the marks of this balancing of interest. 

Think, for example, of how rapidly, after the armistice, the precarious and by no means successfully established symbol of Allied Unity disappeared, how it was followed almost immediately by the breakdown of each nation’s symbolic picture of the other: Britain the Defender of Public Law, France watching at the Frontier of Freedom, America the Crusader. 

And think then of how within each nation the symbolic picture of itself frayed out, as party and class conflict and personal ambition began to stir postponed issues. 

And then of how the symbolic pictures of the leaders gave way, as one by one, Wilson, Clemenceau, Lloyd George, ceased to be the incarnation of human hope, and became merely the negotiators and administrators for a disillusioned world. 

Whether we regret this as one of the soft evils of peace or applaud it as a return to sanity is obviously no matter here. Our first concern with fictions and symbols is to forget their value to the existing social order, and to think of them simply as an important part of the machinery of human communication. 

Now in any society that is not completely self-contained in its interests and so small that everyone can know all about everything that happens, ideas deal with events that are out of sight and hard to grasp. 

Miss Sherwin of Gopher Prairie, is aware that a war is raging in France and tries to conceive it. 

She has never been to France, and certainly she has never been along what is now the battlefront. 

Pictures of French and German soldiers she has seen, but it is impossible for her to imagine three million men.

No one, in fact, can imagine them, and the professionals do not try. They think of them as, say, two hundred divisions.

But Miss Sherwin has no access to the order of battle maps, and so if she is to think about the war, she fastens upon Joffre and the Kaiser as if they were engaged in a personal duel.

Perhaps if you could see what she sees with her mind’s eye, the image in its composition might be not unlike an Eighteenth Century engraving of a great soldier. He stands there boldly unruffled and more than life size, with a shadowy army of tiny little figures winding off into the landscape behind.

Nor it seems are great men oblivious to these expectations.

M. de Pierrefeu tells of a photographer’s visit to Joffre.

The General was in his “middle class office, before the worktable without papers, where he sat down to write his signature.

Suddenly it was noticed that there were no maps on the walls.

But since according to popular ideas it is not possible to think of a general without maps, a few were placed in position for the picture, and removed soon afterwards.”