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.”
Although purporting vaguely to be one of “us,” it soon becomes quite clear that Bernays sees himself as an exemplar of that elevated supervisory network, just as he sees his own profession as the most important one up there. Thus Bernays proceeds as both “a truth-seeker and a propagandist for propaganda”; for while he did believe wholeheartedly in his hierarchical conception of “democracy” (and so went on believing through the many further decades of his life, as Stewart Ewen tells us),10 Propaganda is primarily a sales pitch, not an exercise in social theory. In other words, while Propaganda is by no means an exhaustive treatment of its subject, the book is edifying for its own propaganda tactics, and for the light it sheds obliquely on the hidden zeal with which most winning propagandists do their work, however “scientific” and detached they may appear to be (even to themselves).
Apparently a cool defense of propaganda and its salutary influence on mass society, this book is an extended ad for “public relations” as Bernays himself had learned to practice it with rare intelligence and skill. By 1928, he had become the leading figure in his ever-growing field. Not only had he managed to legitimize his craft (“Counsel on Public Relations” always was his pointed self-description), but his own shop was bustling. His services were therefore not available to everyone; Propaganda is aimed mainly at Bernays’s potential corporate clientele. And yet the author variously masks that plutocratic bias. At the outset, his seductive use of “us” implies that he, like most of us, is just a fuddled propaganda, and not himself the ablest of “invisible governors.” In Chapter I, he further mystifies the status of his usual customers by casting “propaganda” as a sort of populist endeavor, and not as an expensive game that is played best by those who have the most to spend on it. Bernays does this by compiling ostentatiously “inclusive” lists of what he represents as common propaganda sources: catalogues, primarily, of modest civic and professional associations and publications (the Arion Singing Society, the National Nut News), with few, if any, blue-chip outfits mentioned. And perhaps Bernays was also disingenuous in filling out the volume with its late, brief chapters on how propaganda can serve education, social service, “art and science”—little forays into social and/or cultural concern, intended, seemingly, to make the book seem something other than an essay on how business stands to benefit immensely from the author’s sort of expertise. All such quasi-democratic touches notwithstanding, Propaganda mainly tells us that Bernays’s true métier was to help giant players with their various sales and image problems.
At that sort of effort he was in a class all by himself; Ivy Lee was the only other P.R. man of comparable renown, and his accomplishments were nowhere near as many or as dazzling as the ones described in Propaganda, not to mention all the others that the author managed after 1928. The book is most instructive when it tells us how and why Bernays did what he did for his (mostly) corporate clients. There are many such revealing moments here—for every case of winning propaganda cited in the book was actually Bernays’s own handiwork. (The casual reader sees no egotism in such self-promotion, as Bernays discreetly slips into the passive voice each time he tells us what “was done” or “shown” or “proven” with extraordinary deftness.) He had no equal as a propaganda strategist. Always thinking far ahead, his aim was not to urge the buyer to demand the product now, but to transform the buyer’s very world, so that the product must appear to be desirable as if without the prod of salesmanship. What is the prevailing custom, and how might that be changed to make this thing or that appear to recommend itself to people? “The modern propagandist … sets to work to create circumstances which will modify that custom.” Bernays sold Mozart pianos, for example, not just by hyping the pianos. Rather, he sought carefully “to develop public acceptance of the idea of a music room in the home”—selling the pianos indirectly, through various suggestive trends and enterprises that make it de rigeur to have the proper space for a piano.
The music room will be accepted because it has been made the thing. And the man or woman who has a music room, or has arranged a corner of the parlor as a musical corner, will naturally think of buying a piano. It will come to him as his own idea.
III.
Propaganda, and Bernays himself throughout his long career, sold something more than all the goods and services his clients offered, and also something more than propaganda as a necessary tool for businessmen and politicians. Bernays sold the myth of propaganda as a wholly rational endeavor, carried out methodically by careful experts skilled enough to lead “public opinion.” Consistently he casts himself as a supreme manipulator, mastering the responses of a pliable, receptive population. “Conscious and intelligent manipulation,” “invisible governors,” “they who pull the wires which control the public mind,” “shrewd persons operating behind the scenes,” “dictators exercising great power,” and, below them, people working “as if actuated by the touch of a button”—these are but a few expressions of the icy scientistic paradigm that evidently drove his propaganda practice, and that colored all his thinking on the subject. The propagandist rules. The propagandized do whatever he would have them do, exactly as he tells them to, and without knowing it.
Derived from the positivism of the 19th century (and indirectly bolstered by the work of Bernays’s uncle, Sigmund Freud), this neo-Baconian conception of the propagandist’s power was surely not Bernays’s invention. That cool and manly image was a commonplace from the Twenties through the Cold War, as was the obverse image of “the crowd” as female in its feverish responsiveness. Why was this tableau of domination so pervasive? For self-conscious “professionals” such as Bernays, expert detachment was, of course, a point of pride—and a strong selling-point, as that hard attitude provided tacit reassurance to potential clients that the propagandist worked not just by instinct or mood, but as impartially, and, if need be, ruthlessly, as any doctor or attorney. He could work others up without getting all worked up himself (or “going native,” as, say, officials in the U.S. State empathizing with the foreign populace that he was sent to dupe).
The myth of the detached manipulator and compliant crowd has, since the Twenties, also been abundantly re-echoed by academic students of mass suasion. “Convictions in a demagogue are a weakness and may prove a very serious injury,” asserted social psychologist Frederick C. Venn in 1928. “They are the last infirmity of some otherwise very splendid demagogues.”11 So it still is, often, with intellectual studies of successful rabble rousers—the analyst projecting his own rationality onto the firebrand in question, as if assuring us that he is too intelligent and self-possessed to fall for that spellbinder who excites the vulgar herd. Indeed, the same myth of the unmoved mover has been amply reconfirmed by some of history’s most effective agitators: Hitler liked to cast himself as a detached appraiser of his own frenzies at the podium, and Goebbels too believed himself to be completely cold inside, even as his oratory thrilled the crowd.
There is no way to confirm this notion that the propagandist is essentially above the fray that he creates. While it surely points us toward some truths about the way that demagogues and other propagandists operate, the notion is unlikely on its face. From what we know about the most ferocious demagogues of yesteryear, successful mass incitement does tend to bespeak, and seemingly requires, a fiery core of radical commitment, even if the agitator consciously distorts his facts or trots out this or that rhetorical device. Hitler, Goebbels, Mussolini, Father Coughlin, Joe McCarthy, Gerald L.K. Smith, and many others were fanatical
