Edward L  Bernays interview, 1986 10 23
Channel: greedy first algorithm last
Date: 2022-04-17

Why Americans are too stupid to be allowed any power in Politics.
That made Bernays uniquely influential is that in addition to practising public relations, he published his thinking about it. Crystallizing Public Opinion, published in 1923, was not only his first book, it was the first-known book focused on public relations. In time, it became THE de facto public relations textbook and was repeatedly reprinted and remained in use well into the 1960s.

As a sidelight to this book's eventual recognition as a textbook, it's relevant to note that Bernays was the first person to ever teach a college course in public relations. He did so at the invitation of New York University.

Ironically, instead of creating a universally more favourable perception of public relations, Bernays' books often triggered suspicion of the field and outrage over some of its methods. The problem with Crystallizing Public Opinion wasn't Bernays' notion of a two-way street. It was how he defined public relations. The catchphrase he developed in that book, and never gave up despite recurring criticism, was: "Public relations is the engineering of consent." Yes, it's catchy and easy to remember, but, as authors David Haberman and Harry Dolphin pointed out in their 1988 textbook Public Relations: The Necessary Art, Bernays' "choice of words in defining public relations as the engineering of consent was an easy target for critics" because it sounded so manipulative, mechanical, and ominous.
So, instead of creating a more favourable public perception of the field, Bernays' first book sparked suspicion and fear of manipulation. In reality, it was probably more widely talked about than it was actually read but, either way, it prompted a lot of discussion, both within and outside of the public relations community.

Bernays' next book, Propaganda in 1928, brought even more and worse backlash. It continued to use the phrase "engineering of consent" and, even worse, used the terms "propaganda" and "public relations" almost interchangeably. That, according to PR scholar Scott Cutlip's The Unseen Power: Public Relations A History , "set back his (Bernays') effort to clarify the function of public relations and ... handed the infant field's critics a club with which to bludgeon it." (p. 182) And, bludgeon the profession they did.

At least part of the reason for such negative reactions was bad timing. Before World War I, the term and concepts of "propaganda" had had widespread and honorable usage in European and English-speaking countries for centuries. They were used in both religious and civic contexts, for example: the Roman Catholic Church's Society for the Propagation of the Faith and the common political use of "propaganda" as a synonym for "patriotic messages" in the political arena. But, the war changed all that, especially in the United States. People who had opposed U.S. entry into the war, claimed that U.S. and British propagandists had dragged America into the war against the wishes of most Americans. And, once we were in it, many other people were appalled by the extreme, sometimes gross and racist, and definitely hard-core and aggressive propaganda they saw issued by both sides during the war. The term "propaganda" itself took on incredibly negative connotations that only grew worse in later decades with increased exposure to the propaganda of Russian Communists and, still later, of the Nazi Party. Bernays had simply picked the wrong time to use the word "propaganda" as the title of a book.

Not learning from these early mistakes, Bernays repeated them and once again waved a red flag in front of his critics by publishing a 1955 book titled The Engineering of Consent. Beyond its really troublesome title, a lot of this book and some of his others, including Public Relations (1952) and The Later Years: Public Relations Insights, 1956-1968 (1986) presented old and recycled material rather than fresh ideas.