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COMM 3100 Module 5: Modernity and the Secret History of Public Relations

Hello and welcome to another episode of Communication 3100: Persuasion and Propaganda.

I’m Professor Phil Gordon, the Real Dr. Phil.

Our subject today is modernity and the early history of American Public Relations.

You can say that three developments of the modern period, the printing press, the steam engine, and universal education, intersected and accidentally conspired to unleash the greatest force on earth, greater than any weapon, greater even than a nuclear weapon—that is the power of crystalized public opinion. Virtually everyone reading the same story at the same time about something going on, and getting pissed off about it, is, in fact, the greatest type of power.  No matter who or what you are, you cannot exercise influence in the modern world when all of public opinion is against you. Conversely, when it’s with you, nothing can stop you.

Our focus in this episode is how people and organizations with elite power understood and responded to the force of public opinion as both a problem to solve and an opportunity to exploit in the early twentieth century.

The readings and viewings that go along with this episode are the selections from Stuart Ewen’s “PR! A Social History of Spin,” Susan Collins’ “Propaganda Studies,” and the BBC documentary, “The Century of the Self.”

It is no coincidence that the word “propaganda” gained its contemporary pejorative connotations in the early twentieth century. That was the moment weaponized persuasion emerged as a new sort of pyscho/social problem and caught the attention of the first American communication scholars as discussed in the reading by Susan Collins. It coincides with the moment that the changes associated with “modernity,” which had been building for a long time, coalesced and consolidated into a new sort of social formation, with new organizations of power, new ways of exercising power, and new ways of challenging power.

Let’s take a minute and think about that word: modernity.  It can refer to a period of history and it can mean the associated technological, social, and cultural changes that went along with it. The early modern period is generally ascribed to begin in the 1500s, not coincidentally just in the aftermath of the invention and adoption of the first technology of mass production, which was also the first technology of mass communication, the printing press.

The printing press broke the Catholic Church’s monopoly on the written word. Before the printing press, books were hand-copied manuscripts, mostly in Latin, accessible only through years of training and submission to Catholic discipline. The printing press allowed for books to be produced on mass scales in vernacular languages that people actually spoke, and thus helped create the conditions for the emergence of modern nation-states organized around linguistic communities. The printing press facilitated the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment, the American Revolution and the scientific revolution.  In the 1800s, the early modern period gave way to the classical modern period, and the scientific revolution gave birth to the industrial revolution and all the changes that went along with it.

It is tempting to think that there has never been a period when the human social world has changed so much in such a short amount of time as the one we are living through today.

Take a minute to imagine, though, what it must have been like, what changes you would have seen, if you were born in 1880, by your 40th birthday. You would have seen cars replace horses, electric lights and telephones put into houses, the invention of airplanes, the creation of megalopolis cities with factories and skyscrapers, and a world war that tore most of it down.

That was a period when the industrial revolution finished changing the way we create the things we need: food, clothing, housing, and all our stuff. By 1920, electrified, fossil fuel-driven industrialization revolutionized manufacturing. The methods of production changed from handmade artisan production of unique and relatively rare goods circulated in community markets of regional economies, to the mass production of standardized goods with interchangeable parts created on assembly-lines with interchangeable workers circulated in anonymous markets of national and international economies.

That was a period of mass migration. Millions moved. In the American context, people moved from rural areas to the new manufacturing centers. Immigrants, displaced from war, flocked to the United States. The cities grew skyward. People lived crowded, difficult lives in these new concrete jungles. We would find 1920 lawless and dangerous in many ways. It was the wild frontier days of industrial capitalism, before the victories of organized labor unions, before occupational safety and health regulations, before minimum wage, before 40-hour work weeks, before child labor laws, before worker’s compensation and health insurance.

That was a period of the rise of a new power elite, the robber barons, the new class of wealthy capitalists who dominated publishing, oil, steel, railroads, and the other new centers of profit and influence. If you were a captain of industry around the turn of the twentieth century, you faced two new sorts of problems.

First, understand, in the days before mass production, a manufacturing business was limited by how much its labor force could physically produce. If you were handmaking chairs, how many could you make in a week? Five? Ten? If you worked extra hard, maybe you could make six, or eleven. But after Henry Ford’s rationalized, assembly line style of mass production, you could make 100 chairs a week. Or a thousand. Or ten thousand. Your limit was no longer the problem of how many chairs you could make. Your limit became a problem of how many chairs you could sell. How many chairs will people buy? That is your problem—the problem of need, demand, and desire. How could you convince people that they need to buy more stuff? That is the first problem that gave rise to modern public relations.

The second problem was defensive. Popular magazines, most famously McLure’s, started publishing “muckraking” articles, meaning long-form, investigative news stories about the systematic and unfair exploitation of people by the new industries that arose and dominated the social landscape. Child labor, unsanitary and unsafe meat handling, the regular and systematic bribery of politicians, and the anti-competitive monopolization of the oil industry by John Rockefeller and his Standard Oil Company, were among the subjects of these articles. Muckraking journalism gave rise to a political movement known as progressivism. The progressives were known for breaking up monopolies and creating laws and regulations to help working people, such as minimum wage, child labor laws, occupational safety and health regulations, and ultimately social security and Medicare.

McLure’s investigative series on the business practices of the Standard Oil Company, written by Ida Tarbell, ran every month for two years. By the time it was over, John D. Rockefeller was not only the wealthiest man in America, he was also the most despised. That series demonstrated how the new interstate and international oil business developed and exercised unfair market power, inhibited free competition, and manipulated local governments. It exposed how power worked and made John D. the walking embodiment of greed and inhumane exploitation.

Rockefeller took it on the chin until 1914, when he was implicated in the mass murder of 14 striking miners and their families in Ludlow, Colorado. He hired Ivy Lee, one the first professional public relations workers to help. Lee’s agency’s motto was “Accuracy, Authenticity, Interest,” and he described their business plan as, “frankly and openly on behalf of business concerns and public institutions, to supply the press and the public of the United States prompt and accurate information concerning subjects which it is of value and interest to the public to know about.”

Lee’s method involved muddying the waters and flooding opinion leaders with “news bulletins” about the case designed to smear the massacred workers and raise doubts about what really happened. The bulletins reprinted articles from newspapers owned by the mining companies without attributing their sources, and invented bogus stories that the massacre was actually organized by the mining union itself, which sent the killers in to make the mining business look bad as a false flag sort of operation.

Lee also focused on creating a positive image for Rockefeller in the press by engaging in newsworthy charity-giving in the form of helping hospitals, libraries, and orphanages. Despite the cost of this giving, the positive press it generated proved invaluable over time in mitigating the damage done to his public reputation.

The story about John D. Rockefeller and Ivy Lee is in the readings by Stuart Ewen, as well as his discussion of another early and influential public relations worker, Edward Bernays. Bernays lived to be 104 years old and Ewen tells the story of interviewing him before he passed. His story is also told with some wonderful archival footage, and an interview with him, in the BBC documentary The Century of the Self I am asking you to watch with this module.

Bernays was the nephew of Sigmund Freud and was close with his uncle, who lived in Vienna.  Bernays found success young as press agent in NYC. Among his clients was the opera singer Enrico Caruso. He was recruited by George Creel of the Wilson administration’s Committee on Public Information (the CPI) also known as the Creel Committee. Created by executive order, the mandate of the Creel Committee was to create propaganda to support America’s entry into the first World War, a move Wilson had campaigned against during the run-up to his election.

The CPI produced the largest and most effective propaganda campaign the world had ever seen. It was an international, multi-media, multi-pronged mix of censorship and information, with twenty bureaus, including ones that specialized in print news, Hollywood, and grassroots organizing and speaking. Their goal was to reach every American multiple times through news stories, bulletins, magazine and poster illustrations, movies, and local “four minute man” speakers in their areas. They also came up with the key slogan, “making the world safe for democracy,” in part to appeal to the self-interest and altruism of the public (the idea that the war will make them safe and benefit others, too), and in part to disguise the fact that the war was also being fought in the interest of preserving an old imperialist, colonialist world order.

This is the third vector we can identify in tracing the emergence of organized propaganda in the modern American context—the effort of the United States government to convince people of the most difficult thing possible to convince them—to voluntarily risk their lives or the lives of their loved ones and go to war.

After the war, Bernays decided to try to put what he learned about influencing public opinion in the war effort into effect for private businesses. By that point, German propaganda had sullied the connotations of the word “propaganda,” and it was Bernays who coined the term Counselor of Public Relations, to describe his services.

The Century of the Self documentary goes into some detail on one of his first adventures. He was approached by the American Tobacco Association with a problem: there was a taboo against women smoking cigarettes in public, and the tobacco industry felt like it was missing half its potential market. It’s important to note that evidence in the form of internal documents leaked to CBS’s 60 Minutes in the 1980s showed that the tobacco industry knew its products were addictive and carcinogenic since the early days of the big companies, who worked for decades, behind the scenes, on the problem of making them more addictive through chemical additives while simultaneously denying their addictive and deadly qualities in public.

Here’s a general rule for COMM 3100: The things most worth looking at as examples of propaganda are the ones that do the most harm!

What I’m saying is, motivated by the cold calculus of the profit motive, American tobacco companies, all of them, collectively, an entire industry, in pursuit of profit, were not satisfied only addicting and sickening only half the population of the United States when the whole other half also had money to spend.

Could Bernays help break the culture’s strong taboo against women smoking?

Bernays was greatly influenced by the work of his Uncle Sigmund, who posited that human behavior was often the product, not of rational Aristotelian decision-making, but of unconscious, irrational, primitive desires that drive people in ways they do not perceive and cannot control.

Bernays wanted to tap into those unconscious drives. He commissioned a psychoanalyst to write a report on the meaning of cigarettes to women.  He concluded, in a very Freudian way, that worked perfectly in the moment, that a cigarette, in the nineteen teens, represented a phallus, which is often interpreted as meaning a penis, but that is not quite right. It is more accurate to say that a phallus is a symbol of male power (which is often, but not always, a penis), of which women are envious as something they lack.

The nineteen teens were also the time when suffragettes and women’s health advocates were marching and conducting acts of civil disobedience and street theater, such as chaining themselves to buildings while they distributed health pamphlets considered “obscene” by the authorities, and arrested in front of journalists ready to snap dramatic photos of the incidents and paste them across the next day’s papers.

Bernays cynically triangulated those vectors and came up with one of the most infamous and effective publicity stunts in history. He arranged for a group of New York high society debutantes, the aspirational figures of young women across the country, to make a show of smoking cigarettes while marching in the annual NYC Easter Parade. At a point on the parade route pre-arranged by Bernays, and loaded with news photographers, the debutantes paused, and pulled out the cigarettes they had been carrying. On cue, they lit them up, with people preplaced in the crowd around them holding protest signs with the words “torches of freedom” emblazoned across them. The news photographers got their pictures.

The next day, all across America, in the context of similar images of women marching and demonstrating for the rights to vote and to get information about birth control, the newspapers were filled with images of glamorous young women defiantly smoking, in public, in front of crowds of people.

Of course, the shape of the cigarette, and the prohibition against smoking it made it a perfect symbol of a power in society women wanted lacked.  The image of debs smoking in front of a crowd associated it with the women’s empowerment movements for voting and birth control. In one day, the taboo was broken and it became hip and empowering for women to smoke in America.

Can you imagine how many women became addicted to cigarettes and died of their use over the decades due to that clever ploy? I can tell you that Bernays admitted, in his old age, that he felt bad about that one.

But generally, guys like Bernays and Lee believed in what they were doing.  They felt that, in the age of mass communication, mass production, and ever-increasing masses of population, the social order needed men like them to keep things in line and operating smoothly. They promoted the idea that the mob should not rule. In recruiting him as a client, Ivy Lee reportedly told Rockefeller, “you thought you operated a private business, but the crowd is in the saddle.” You could call an attitude like theirs technocratic—it is the idea that the experts should run things and the ignorant should not be allowed to disrupt the social order. Technocrats worry about the crowd, the mob, the masses taking over and creating chaos.

Looked at another way, you could say that they worry about too much democracy. The crowd, the mob, and the masses do not exist. What exists are people and the public trying to have free and open communication about what is really going on.

In that smoking example, even though it is almost one hundred years old, you can see many propaganda techniques common today: there is a staged event—it isn’t real, organic, or spontaneous. But it is planned to look like those things in order to interrupt the continuity of everyday life with a newsworthy happening reverse-engineered to attract the attention of the news.  Getting into the news, looking like news, just the happening of the day, unfiltered, is part of the process. Hiding your interests, doing one thing (trying to get women to smoke) while pretending to do another thing (staging a political protest for women’s empowerment), hiding your agent (Eddie Bernays lurking invisibly behind the scene—pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!), using the credibility of the news to get people to believe a story written in your interests as if it wasn’t, are exactly the techniques of propaganda we see repeated for decades after.

Okay, this has been a long dive and I hope you have enjoyed it. Remember, as students responsible for your own educations, you need to schedule time to watch the videos, do the readings, write your notes, and do your writing assignments. And watch out for examples of propaganda around you. Don’t hide from scary truths! Always take the red pill!

This is Professor Phil Gordon, the real Dr. Phil, closing out another episode of UVU’s Communication 3100: Persuasion and Propaganda. Get on those readings and I will see you in the next episode!