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 sons 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 folks 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 books 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.4
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.5 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 terms 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.”6
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.
II.
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 1929.7 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).8 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 LeBon, 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.”9
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
