Crystallizing Public Opinion by Edward Bernays (1923)
In this book, Bernays describes a new industry, possible with the knowledge and technology of the 1920s, public relations.
How to Control What People Do | Propaganda - EDWARD BERNAYS | Animated Book Summary - YouTube
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Edward Bernays, Father of Public Relations and Propaganda
Edward Bernays, 'Father of Public Relations' And Leader in Opinion Making, Dies at 103
Several of the societal changes that Mr. Bernays espoused for clients have had long-lasting effects. For instance, he was instrumental in making it acceptable for women to smoke in public, sponsoring, on behalf of the American Tobacco Company's Lucky
Strike cigarettes, demonstrations in which debutantes gathered on street corners to light up. The cigarettes were even called "torches of freedom."
But in an interview in 1991, when he turned 100, he said: "Public relations today is horrible. Any dope, any nitwit, any idiot can call him or herself a public relations practitioner." He said he was still consulting with clients and regarded
public relations loftily as a "social sci
Edward Bernays, often called the 'father of public relations,' who orchestrated the commercialization of a culture, was Freud's
nephew and a self-conscious popularizer of his thought."
<p>Born on Nov. 22, 1891, Mr. Bernays was one of five children of Ely Bernays and Anna Freud Bernays. The family moved in 1892 to the United States, and in 1912 Mr. Bernays graduated from Cornell University. After doing United States Government war propaganda
work in World War I, Mr. Bernays realized that, as he put it in the 1991 interview, "if this could be used for war, it can be used for peace."</p>
<p>
And so he opened his office with his wife-to-be and in a short time accumulated an impressive array of clients, among them the Hotel Association of New York City; the Waldorf-Astoria; Procter & Gamble Company; the Celanese Corporation; Continental
Baking Company; General Electric Company; General Motors Corporation; Philco; United Fruit Company; Westinghouse Electric Corporation; Time Inc.; CBS, and NBC. He also handled publicity for Clare Boothe Luce and Samuel Goldwyn.</p>
The manipulation of the American mind: Edward Bernays and the birth of public relations
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, and our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of…. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind.
Bernays was also Freud’s nephew twice over. His mother was Freud’s sister Anna, and his father, Ely Bernays, was the brother of Freud’s wife Martha.
Bernays later graduated from Cornell with a degree in agriculture. But instead of farming, he chose a career in journalism, eventually helping the <a href="https://theconversation.com/wilsons-long-shadow-over-obamas-white-house-33819">Woodrow Wilson</a> Administration promote the idea that US efforts in World War I were intended to bring democracy to Europe.
Yet propaganda had acquired a somewhat pejorative connotation (which would be further magnified during World War II), so Bernays promoted the term “public relations.”
He provided leaders the means to “control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it.” To do so, it was necessary to appeal not to the rational part of the mind, but the unconscious.
General Electric, Procter & Gamble, and the American Tobacco Company, to media outlets like CBS and even politicians such as Calvin Coolidge. To counteract President Coolidge’s stiff image, Bernays organized “pancake breakfasts” and White House concerts with Al Jolson and other Broadway performers. With Bernays’ help, Coolidge won the 1924 election.
Bernays staged a demonstration at the 1929 Easter parade, having fashionable young women flaunt their “torches of freedom.”
Lucky Strikes by convincing women that the forest green hue of the cigarette pack was among the most fashionable of colors
soothing to the throat and slimming to the waistline.
When would find a pack of her Parliaments in their home, he would snap every one of them in half and throw them in the toilet. While promoting cigarettes as soothing and slimming, Bernays, it seems, was aware of some of the early studies linking smoking to cancer.
To convince kids that bathing could be fun, he sponsored soap sculpture competitions and floating contests. These were designed to prove that Ivory bars were more buoyant than competing products.
For Dixie cups, Bernays launched a campaign to scare people into thinking that only disposable cups were sanitary. As part of this campaign, he founded the Committee for the Study and Promotion of the Sanitary Dispensing of Food and Drink.
In the 1920s, Joseph Goebbels became an avid admirer of Bernays and his writings – despite the fact that Bernays was a Jew. When Goebbels became the minister of propaganda for the Third Reich, he sought to exploit Bernays’ ideas to the fullest extent possible. For example, he created a “Fuhrer cult” around Adolph Hitler.
Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter to warn President Franklin Roosevelt against allowing Bernays to play a leadership role in World War II, <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=pTr8AQAAQBAJ&pg=PA185&lpg=PA185&dq=professional+poisoners+of+the+public+mind,+exploiters+of+foolishness,+fanaticism,+and+self-interest+%2B+felix+frankfurter&source=bl&ots=fKEUuS-08x&sig=WaFO7n6JcvPVsXn1-Tu4AFR0aVM&hl=en&sa=X&ei=QPmbVfP_FMrFggSOqqK4DQ&ved=0CCIQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=professional%20poisoners%20of%20the%20public%20mind%2C%20exploiters%20of%20foolishness%2C%20fanaticism%2C%20and%20self-interest%20%2B%20felix%20frankfurter&f=false" data-evernote-id="665" class="js-evernote-checked">describing him</a> and his colleagues as “professional poisoners of the public mind, exploiters of foolishness, fanaticism, and self-interest.
The birth of manipulation with Edward Bernays | by Cvi Dichevska | Medium
a thriving father and uncle Sigi (Sigmund Freud).
“Torch of Freedom” parade. Think about it — nowadays, feminist movements can be built in no less attractive light, and in essence to propagate something hidden, as deep as the participation of Bernays in the parade
Bernays took advantage of this period, taking full control of his knowledge of psychology and communication skills.
Edward Bernays is a person who is barely disccussed, but he is worth knowing.
modern cigarettes that will kill hundreds of thousands of people a year later
E.H. Danner Museum of Telephony
Pictures of phones through the years and statistics on the penetration of phones into the American market
The Straw Hat Riots of 1922: The bad kind of New York fashion week - The Bowery Boys: New York City History
Teachers looking for the unusual and unbelievable to show students that history in fact is harder to believe than fiction, the story of the Straw Hat Riots of 1922 is just what they need.
The Crisis - July 1922
The Crisis was the official magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. It was founded in 1910 by W. E. B. Du Bois and others and provides an insight into issues confronted by African Americans in the early 1920s. Teachers can have students just look through the magazine and share what they see, or search for more information on the advertisements. For example, the Bordentown School is advertised in this issue. Look also for Du Bois's comments about Abraham Lincoln in this issue
Oklahoma Will Require Schools to Teach 1921 Tulsa Massacre
Great example of how history changes over time. For decades students went through their entire K-12 Social Studies classes in Oklahoma never hearing about the 1921 Massacre - now all of them will. The state of Oklahoma just answered the question - what do American have to understand about their past to make sense of their present?
American History Through an African American Lens — LGBTQ African Americans of the Harlem Renaissance
Copy of Unit 7_Stimulus Based MC_Final - Google Docs
Article Review 492- "From Isolationism to Neutrality: a New Framework for Understanding American Political Culture, 1919-1941" | H-Diplo | H-Net
"Isolationist" is the comprehensive and unchallenged characterization of American foreign policy in the 1920s and 30s in the taught narrative canon - historians think otherwise. The short article uncovers the pernicious side-effect of teaching the myth. although it does not intend to. Students are being taught that foreign policy is interventionist or isolationist - the world doesn't work that way
Blower proceeds in two steps. She first offers a sweeping criticism of the notion of isolationism and its opposite term internationalism (and of related binaries, such as anti-interventionism vs. interventionism, or unilateralism vs. multilateralism) as a way of making sense of American foreign policy disputes in the 1920s and 1930s. Americans, she concludes, had strong and complex views on foreign affairs; the key question they were engaging, often in a highly emotional (if not “shrill” and “hyperbolic”) manner, was not “will the United States play a role but what role will it play
Stanford Research into the Impact of Tobacco Advertising
Smoking among women increased by more than 300% in the 1920s, and much of this was the result of deliberate advertising, linking smoking to weight loss and even women's liberation.
1920s The New Era | The American Yawp Primary Document Reader
Primary document collection with excellent introduction paragraph that captures a general understand the 1920s. That paragraph alone is worth the click.
Ellen Welles Page, “A Flapper’s Appeal to Parents” (1922) | The American Yawp Reader
Ellen Welles Page, a self-described “semi-flapper,” attempted to explain the appeal of the flapper and pled with America’s mothers and fathers not to reflexively judge their flapper daughters. Outlook Magazine, 1922
The Rise of the Flapper - Sociological Images
A Dazzling Film About Youth in the Early 20th Century
"Matt Wolf "
Close your eyes and imagine what it was like to be a teenager in the 1920s.
The Roaring Twenties
A collaboration between Emily Thompson of Princeton University and Scott Mahoy of the University of Southern California collaboration between Emily Thompson of Princeton University and Scott Mahoy of the University of Southern California—compiles audio files and written noise complaints from 1920s New York City to capture the utter cacophony its residents experienced. Arranged by sound type, geography and timeline, this database is a new type of documentary and experiential history—recreating what the Roaring Twenties sounded like.
Peaches Browning - Alchetron, The Free Social Encyclopedia
"Reds" & "Americans," America in the 1920s, Primary Sources for Teachers, America in Class, National Humanities Center
Documents presented and described - easy to pick and choose. Questions/answers and lesson ideas included
National Film Preservation Foundation: Uncle Sam and the Bolsheviki-I.W.W. Rat (ca. 1919)
30 second video can be shown to students as one of the first animated political cartoons they will come across in US History. It can be incorporated into a intolerance/Palmer raid 20s lesson - will students notice the producer's name at at the end - why would Ford produce this film? What does the IWW on the rat stand for?
Steampunk Tendencies on Twitter: "100 years of Fashion...and Dance! https://t.co/cTMxqehbbX" / Twitter
Does Jazz put Sin in Syncopation?
From Ladies Home Journal,
Walter Lippmann on the Basic Problem of Democracy - The Atlantic
November 1919 essay that in some way sounds like it could have been written today
There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the information by which to detect lies
Who’s Afraid of the Jazz Monsters? | History Today
Jazz references in US History II lessons should not only celebrate jazz, but complete the contextual landscape of ints reception in the general public
Moral panic in 1920s’ America was expressed in headlines such as one from the <em>Kansas City Kansan </em>of 16 January 1922 that trumpeted the perils of ‘Vampires, Jazz, Joyrides [and] Turkish Immorality’.
Other, more heavy-handed public rhetoric framed 1920s’ jazz not merely as a source of disquiet, but of terror.
Liberty and the news by Walter Lippmann, 1920, (Book)
. As our political discourse is increasingly dominated by sources who care nothing for truth or credibility, we come closer and closer to the situation that Walter Lippmann warned about a century ago, in his seminal “Liberty and the News.” “Men who have lost their grip upon the relevant facts of their environment are the inevitable victims of agitation and propaganda.
Liberty and the news by Walter Lippmann, 1920 (Book)
The media environment of the 21st century was predicted about 100 years earlier in this book by Walter Lippmann. Teachers can take the passage at page 54 (and perhaps others) to share with students as a way to seek to understand the role or propaganda and access to information and how both shape politics.
W-L High School Arlington Virginia : Yearbook 1927
Do the descriptions of the 1920s hold true when we look through a Virginia high school yearbook from 1927? Why not have students check? Look at the descriptions of the students, their nicknames, the clubs, etc.
Bruce Barton, The Man Nobody Knows: A Discovery of the Real Jesus, 1925
At 6 pages this is a lot for teachers to assign to students, but it would be difficult to stop a students from reading it if they were told it exists. Americans in the 1920s so enamoured of advertising, propaganda and public relations that Bruce Barton described Jesus as the best businessman ever.