Propaganda

Table of Contents

Copyright

A Note From AIOS

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AIOS eBooks

Copyright © 2021 AIOS Publishing LLC

Cecilia Clarke, Editor

eBook ISBN: 9781944855-54-3

Publication date: March 23, 2021

A NOTE FROM AIOS PUBLISHING

This digital version of Propaganda has been reproduced from Edward Bernays’s original 1928 book. We have edited the original book for easier reading and comprehension.

We invite you to read our other ebooks, all available on Amazon.com and wherever ebooks are sold. Please view the last chapter of this book for details: AIOS eBooks.

1

ORGANIZING CHAOS

We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society.

Our invisible governors are, in many cases, unaware of the identity of their fellow members in the inner cabinet. They govern us by their qualities of natural leadership, their ability to supply needed ideas and by their key position in the social structure.

Whatever attitude one chooses to take toward this condition, it remains a fact that in almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons—a trifling fraction of our hundred and twenty million—who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world.

It is not usually realized how necessary these invisible governors are to the orderly functioning of our group life. In theory, every citizen may vote for whom he pleases. Our Constitution does not envisage political parties as part of the mechanism of government, and its framers seem not to have pictured to themselves the existence in our national politics of anything like the modern political machine.

The American voters soon found that without organization and direction their individual votes, cast, perhaps, for dozens or hundreds of candidates, would produce nothing but confusion. Invisible government, in the shape of rudimentary political parties, arose almost overnight. Ever since then we have agreed, for the sake of simplicity and practicality, that party machines should narrow down the field of choice to two candidates, or at most three or four.

In theory, every citizen makes up his mind on public questions and matters of private conduct. In practice, if all men had to study for themselves the abstruse economic, political, and ethical data involved in every question, they would find it impossible to come to a conclusion about anything.

We have voluntarily agreed to let an invisible government sift the data and high-spot the outstanding issues so that our field of choice shall be narrowed to practical proportions. From our leaders and the media they use to reach the public, we accept the evidence and the demarcation of issues bearing upon public questions; from some ethical teacher, be it a minister, favorite essayist, or merely prevailing opinion, we accept a standardized code of social conduct to which we conform most of the time.

In theory, everybody buys the best and cheapest commodities offered him on the market. In practice, if everyone went around pricing, and chemically testing before purchasing, the dozens of soaps or fabrics or brands of bread which are for sale, economic life would become hopelessly jammed. To avoid such confusion, society consents to have its choice narrowed to ideas and objects brought to its attention through propaganda of all kinds.

There is consequently a vast and continuous effort going on to capture our minds in the interest of some policy or commodity or idea. It might be better to have, instead of propaganda and special pleading, committees of wise men who would choose our rulers, dictate our conduct, private and public, and decide upon the best types of clothes for us to wear and the best kinds of food for us to eat. But we have chosen the opposite method, that of open competition. We must find a way to make free competition function with reasonable smoothness.

To achieve this society has consented to permit free competition to be organized by leadership and propaganda. Some of the phenomena of this process are criticized—the manipulation of news, the inflation of personality, and the general ballyhoo by which politicians and commercial products and social ideas are brought to the consciousness of the masses. The instruments by which public opinion is organized and focused may be misused. But such organization and focusing are necessary to orderly life.

As civilization has become more complex, and as the need for invisible government has been increasingly demonstrated, the technical means have been invented and developed by which opinion may be regimented.

With the printing press and the newspaper, the railroad, the telephone, telegraph, radio and airplanes, ideas can be spread rapidly and even instantaneously over the whole of America.

H. G. Wells senses the vast potentialities of these inventions when he writes in the New York Times:

"Modern means of communication—the power afforded by print, telephone, wireless and so forth, of rapidly putting through directive strategic or technical conceptions to a great number of cooperating centers, of getting quick replies and effective discussion—have opened up a new world of political processes.

"Ideas and phrases can now be given an effectiveness greater than the effectiveness of any personality and stronger than any sectional interest. The common design can be documented and sustained against perversion and betrayal.

It can be elaborated and developed steadily and widely without personal, local and sectional misunderstanding.

What Mr. Wells says of political processes is equally true of commercial and social processes and all manifestations of mass activity. The groupings and affiliations of society today are no longer subject to local and sectional limitations.

When the Constitution was adopted, the unit of organization was the village community, which produced the greater part of its own necessary commodities and generated its group ideas and opinions by personal contact and discussion directly among its citizens. But today, because ideas can be instantaneously transmitted to any distance and to any number of people, this geographical integration has been supplemented by many other kinds of grouping, so that persons having the same ideas and interests may be associated and regimented for common action even though they live thousands of miles apart.

It is extremely difficult to realize how many and diverse are these divisions in our society. They may be social, political, economic, racial, religious or ethical, with hundreds of subdivisions of each. In the World Almanac, for example, the following groups are listed under the A’s. There are many more groups under this section. This is only a very limited list:

The League to Abolish Capital Punishment

Association to Abolish War

American Institute of Accountants

Actors’ Equity Association

Actuarial Association of America

International Advertising Association

National Aeronautic Association

Albany Institute of History and Art

Amen Corner

American Academy in Rome

American Antiquarian Society

League for American Citizenship

American Federation of Labor

Amorc (Rosicrucian Order)

Andiron Club

American-Irish Historical Association

Anti-Cigarette League

Anti-Profanity League

Archeological Association of America

National Archery Association

Arion Singing Society

American Astronomical Association

Ayrshire Breeders’ Association

Aztec Club of 1847

The American Newspaper Annual and Directory for 1928 lists 22,128 periodical publications in America. I have selected at random the N’s published in Chicago. They are:

Narod (Bohemian daily newspaper)

Narod-Polski (Polish monthly)

N.A.R.D. (pharmaceutical)

National Corporation Reporter

National Culinary Progress (for hotel chefs)

National Dog Journal

National Drug Clerk

National Engineer

National Grocer

National Hotel Reporter

National Income Tax Magazine

National Jeweler

National Journal of Chiropractic

National Live Stock Producer

National Miller

National Nut News

National Poultry, Butter and Egg Bulletin

National Provisioner (for meat packers)

National Real Estate Journal

National Retail Clothier

National Retail Lumber Dealer

National Safety News

National Spiritualist

National Underwriter

The Nation’s Health

Naujienos (Lithuanian daily newspaper)

New Comer (Republican weekly for Italians)

Daily News

The New World (Catholic weekly)

North American Banker

North American Veterinarian

The circulation of some of these publications is astonishing. The National Live Stock Producer has a sworn circulation of 155,978; The National Engineer, of 20,328; The New World, an estimated circulation of 67,000. The greater number of the periodicals listed—chosen at random from among 22,128—have a circulation in excess of 10,000.

The diversity of these publications is evident at a glance. Yet they can only faintly suggest the multitude of cleavages which exist in our society, and along which flow information and opinion carrying authority to the individual groups.

Here are the conventions scheduled for Cleveland, Ohio, recorded in a single recent issue of World Convention Dates, a fraction of the 5,500 conventions and rallies scheduled:

The Employing Photo-Engravers’ Association of America

The Outdoor Writers’ Association

The Knights of St. John

The Walther League

The National Knitted Outerwear Association

The Knights of St. Joseph

The Royal Order of Sphinx

The Mortgage Bankers’ Association

The International Association of Public Employment Officials

The Kiwanis Clubs of Ohio

The American Photo-Engravers’ Association

The Cleveland Auto Manufacturers Show

The American Society of Heating and Ventilating Engineers

Other conventions in 1928:

The Association of Limb Manufacturers’ Associations

The National Circus Fans’ Association of America

The American Naturopathic Association

The American Trap Shooting Association

The Texas Folklore Association

The Hotel Greeters

The Fox Breeders’ Association

The Insecticide and Disinfectant Association

The National Association of Egg Case and Egg Case Filler

Manufacturers

The American Bottlers of Carbonated Beverages

The National Pickle Packers’ Association, not to mention the Terrapin Derby—most of them with banquets and orations attached.

If all these thousands of formal