#256 Edward L. Bernays (Public Relations, Advertising, & Persuasion)

**David Senra** (0:00)
Edward Bernays almost single-handily fashioned the craft that has come to be called public relations. He is widely recognized as the man who fathered the science of spin.
Bernays was the man who got women to smoke cigarettes and who put bacon and eggs on the breakfast table, books in bookshelves, and Calvin Coolidge back in the White House.
Although most Americans had never heard of Edward Bernays, he nonetheless had a profound impact on everything from the products they purchased to the places they visited to the foods they ate for breakfast.
In doing so, Bernays demonstrated to an entire generation of PR men and women, the enormous power that lay within their grasp. If housewives could be guided in their selection of soap, so could husbands in their choice of a car and voters in their selection of candidates and candidates in their political posturing. Indeed, the very substance of American thought was mere clay to be molded by the savvy public relations practitioner. The techniques he developed fast became staples of political campaigns and image making in general. That is why it's essential to understand Edward Bernays.
This book uses Bernays' life as a prism to understand the evolution of the craft of public relations and how it came to play such a critical and sometimes insidious role in American life.
He made that exploration possible and actually encouraged it by leaving to the Library of Congress more than 800 boxes of personal and professional papers that detailed cases he worked on and tactics and strategies that he employed over a career that spanned eight decades.
Bernays saved every scrap of paper he sent out or took in and provided them to be made public after his death.
In doing so, he lets us see just how policies were made and how in many cases they were founded on deception.
This volume seeks to unmask the man himself.
Bernays was able to accomplish all he did in part because of dogged determination combined with an inventiveness that set him apart from his contemporaries and make his ideas as relevant in the 1990s when there's 125,000 PR practitioners in America as they were in the 1920s, when he and a handful of others got things going.
His spirit was electric and his enthusiasm was so infectious that many who had heard a single speech decades before or studied with him for one semester could recite his every phrase years later. Bernays was also a bundle of contradictions. He rode roughshod over his young staffers, even as he preached the virtues of tolerance and democracy. He promoted cigarettes, which he suspected were deadly. At the same time, he was promoting national health insurance.
He espoused women's rights, but often treated his female employees and his wife like indentured servants. And he continually capitalized on the fact that he had outlived all of his contemporaries. He died in 1995 at age 103 To advance his contention that he, more than they, deserved to be called the Prince of Publicity.
Although he was a small man, his claims were as huge as his dreams.
It was those claims that first drew me to Bernays.
My suspicion that he was a fascinating character, possibly an epic one, grew during my year as a fellow at Harvard, when I got to know his daughter Anne and her husband.
I met Bernays only once, a year before he died, when he was a very, very old man.
He was sitting in the library of his home, and he told one story after another in rote fashion, as if they had been pre-recorded.
And then he told him again.
That was an excerpt from the book that we talked to you about today, which is The Father of Spin, Edward L. Bernays, and the Birth of Public Relations, and it was written by Larry Tye.
I wanted to read this book now because last week on episode 255, when I was studying the life of Sam Zimurri, in the book The Fish that Eat the Whale, Bernays is a character that pops up later in Sam Zimurri's career. Zimurri actually hires Bernays when he's the president of the whale, which is the United Fruit. And Bernays' job was to get the US government involved and the CIA specifically, so they could overthrow what turned out to be a hostile government of Guatemala that was threatening to take away assets of the United Fruit Company. And so in that book, The Fish That Ate the Whale, they also talked about how Bernays used this idea over and over again. He used indirection, unconventional thinking, and his main thesis is, hey, you need to tie your private interest to a public cause for companies as a way to help them sell more products. And one example that jumped out to me is he was hired by a bunch of publishers. I think this is in the 1940s, 1950s, they were concerned about a drop in book sales. And so his point was like, you don't run ads saying, hey, buy more books. The indirect route is a lot more effective. If you want to sell more books, you convince the real estate developers building houses and apartments to have built in bookshelves. And his point was if where there is bookshelves, there will be books.