Edward L. Bernays

Edward Louis Bernays ( bur-NAYZ, German: [bɛʁˈnaɪs]; November 22, 1891 − March 9, 1995) was an American pioneer in the field of public relations and propaganda, and referred to in his obituary as "the father of public relations". His best-known campaigns include a 1929 effort to promote female smoking by branding cigarettes as feminist "Torches of Freedom", and his work for the United Fruit Company in the 1950s, connected with the CIA-orchestrated overthrow of the democratically elected Guatemalan government in 1954. He worked for dozens of major American corporations, including Procter & Gamble and General Electric, and for government agencies, politicians, and nonprofit organizations.

Of his many books, Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923) and Propaganda (1928) gained special attention as early efforts to define and theorize the field of public relations. Citing works of writers such as Gustave Le Bon, Wilfred Trotter, Walter Lippmann, and Sigmund Freud (his own double uncle), he described the masses as irrational and subject to herd instinct—and he outlined how skilled practitioners could use crowd psychology and psychoanalysis to control them in desired ways. Bernays later synthesized many of these ideas in his postwar book, Public Relations (1945), which outlines the science of managing information released to the public by an organization, in a manner most advantageous to the organization. He does this by first providing an overview of the history of public relations, and then provides insight into its application.

Bernays was named one of the 100 most influential Americans of the twentieth century by Life. He was the subject of a full-length biography by Larry Tye entitled The Father of Spin (1999) and later an award-winning 2002 documentary for the BBC by Adam Curtis entitled The Century of the Self. Bernays, Edward. Biography of an Idea: Memoirs of Public Relations Counsel Edward L. Bernays New York: Simon and Schuster, 1965.

Cutlip, Scott M. The Unseen Power: Public Relations. A History. Hove, UK: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1994. ISBN 0-8058-1465-5

Ewen, Stuart. PR! A Social History of Spin. New York: Basic Books (Perseus), 1996. ISBN 0-465-06179-6

Marks, Barry Alan. "The Idea of Propaganda in America." PhD dissertation accepted at the University of Minnesota, 1957.

Olasky, Marvin. "Reception of Edward Bernays' Doctrine of 'Manipulating Public Opinion". Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, 6 August 1984; (ERIC).

Olasky, Marvin. "Bringing 'Order Out of Chaos": Edward Bernays and the Salvation of Society Through Public Relations". Journalism History, 12(1), Spring 1985.

Rampton, Sheldon, and John Stauber. Trust Us, We're Experts! How Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles With Your Future. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 2001. ISBN 1-58542-059-X

Tye, Larry. The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays and the Birth of Public Relations. New York: Crown, 1998. ISBN 0-8050-6789-2