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 &amp; 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 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 &amp; 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&amp;pg=PA185&amp;lpg=PA185&amp;dq=professional+poisoners+of+the+public+mind,+exploiters+of+foolishness,+fanaticism,+and+self-interest+%2B+felix+frankfurter&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=fKEUuS-08x&amp;sig=WaFO7n6JcvPVsXn1-Tu4AFR0aVM&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=QPmbVfP_FMrFggSOqqK4DQ&amp;ved=0CCIQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&amp;q=professional%20poisoners%20of%20the%20public%20mind%2C%20exploiters%20of%20foolishness%2C%20fanaticism%2C%20and%20self-interest%20%2B%20felix%20frankfurter&amp;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.

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

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

Close your eyes and imagine what it was like to be a teenager in the 1920s.

There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the information by which to detect lies

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.