by Allan Brandt
For Bernays, expertise was but a commodity for the PR expert to purchase and exploit. His efforts on behalf of recruiting women smokers provided a laboratory for his theory.
In 1929, Hill sought even more aggressive interventions in the market. As Bernays recounted, “Hill called me in. ‘How can we get women to smoke on the street? They’re smoking indoors. But damn it, if they spend half the time outdoors and we can get ’em to smoke outdoors, we’ll damn near double our female market. Do something. Act!’”54 So Bernays set out to identify and destroy the taboos associated with public smoking for women. He enlisted the advice of noted New York psychoanalyst A. A. Brill, who explained, “Some women regard cigarettes as symbols of freedom. Smoking is a sublimation of oral eroticism; holding a cigarette in the mouth excites the oral zone. It is perfectly normal for women to want to smoke cigarettes.”55 As Freud’s nephew, Bernays was sympathetic to the notion that such insight could be used to modify patterns of consumption and the use of cigarettes. As Brill suggested, “Today the emancipation of women has suppressed many of their feminine desires. More women now do the same work as men do. Many women bear no children; those who do bear have fewer children. Feminine traits are masked. Cigarettes, which are equated with men, become torches of freedom.”56
Bernays seized on this notion of “torches of freedom” as his weapon against the traditional taboos against women smoking in public. In a publicity stunt of genuine historical significance, he recruited debutantes to march in the 1929 New York City Easter parade brandishing their “torches of freedom.” The staging of the event was carefully thought out, as Bernays’s notes reveal:OBJECT
To increase the consumption of cigarettes by women and to gain publicity for Lucky Strikes. Specifically, pictures of women smoking to appear in papers on Easter Monday and in newsreels. In reading matter, stories that for the first time women have smoked openly on the street. These will take care of themselves, as legitimate news, if the staging is rightly done.
The women would be carefully chosen: “Discretion must be used in their selection . . . while they should be good looking, they should not look too model-y.” Bernays called for a meeting with the women on Good Friday when they could be “given their final instructions” and “furnished with Lucky Strikes.” He even went so far as to provide his own photographer “to guard against the possibility that the news photographers do not get good pictures.”57
In planning and organizing this event, Bernays remained behind the scenes, following a central tenet of his approach to public relations. For a man of his colossal ego, this, no doubt, must have been quite a struggle.
Nonetheless, he eagerly arranged this event, fed news to the media, and conducted surveys, all of which maintained his own and his clients’ anonymity. Invitations to march in the Easter Parade came from feminist Ruth Hale:Women!
Light another torch of freedom!
Fight another sex taboo!
The young women marched down Fifth Avenue puffing Lucky Strikes, effectively uniting the symbol of the emancipated flapper with that of the committed suffragist. Newspapers widely reported their exploit, touching off a national debate.58 Bernays eagerly expected protests: “These should be watched for and answered in the same papers.” The stunt reinvigorated the controversies of the past decade and used them to advance Bernays’s marketing campaign. While women’s clubs decried the fall of the proscription on public smoking, feminists hailed the change in social convention. Reports of women smoking “on the street” came from cities and towns across the nation. “Age-old customs, I learned,” wrote Bernays, “could be broken down by a dramatic appeal, disseminated by the network of media.”59 He prized the fact that he had “secretly” instigated news and controversy on behalf of his client’s marketing interests.
In 1934, Bernays intervened once again in American Tobacco’s efforts to promote smoking among women. Apparently concerned that women shunned Luckies because the green packaging clashed with current fashions, Hill urged Bernays to change the fashion. Bernays wrote, “That was the beginning of a fascinating six-month activity for me—to make green the fashionable color.”60 He developed an eclectic and far-reaching strategy, sponsoring fund-raising balls in which invitees agreed to wear green gowns, and a “Green Fashion Fall” luncheon to promote the color within the fashion industry, at which experts discussed the artistic and psychological meaning of green. Bernays later explained, “I had wondered at the alacrity with which scientists, academicians and professional men participated in events of this kind. I learned they welcomed the opportunity to discuss their favorite subject and enjoyed the resultant publicity. In an age of communication, their own effectiveness often depended on public visibility.”61 The consumer age was predicated, Bernays discovered, on providing a forum for voices that would do an industry’s bidding.
Bernays understood early on that these new cultural media were not like advertising, in which interest is overtly and even crudely on display. He preferred the implicit qualities of other cultural forces. For example, Bernays quickly realized the importance of encouraging the use of cigarettes in film. Long before “product placement” became a core element of marketing (widely deployed by the tobacco and other industries), Bernays recognized the power of film to shape consumer expectations. In an anonymous essay prepared for directors and producers, Bernays reviewed the range of dramatic meanings the cigarette could convey. “Cigarettes have become chief actors in the silent drama or the talkie, for a great deal can be said with a cigarette which would ordinarily require a great many words to express,” he noted.62
There is many a psychological need for a cigarette in the movies. The bashful hero lights a cigarette, the better to gain a hold of himself in this trying interview with his future father-in-law. The villain smokes hasty puffs to hide his nervousness or to ease his conscience. But perhaps the most dramatic scenes are those where the cigarette is not smoked. How much can be expressed by the habitual smoker, when he is too perturbed to smoke! The gambler in the Casino, who has staked his last thousand on one card, and has lost—his cigarette falls unlighted from his trembling hands, and tells us worlds of chagrin. The deceived husband, deserted by the heartless wife, reaches for a cigarette, but lets the package drop, to signify his utter loss, his absolute defeat. The enraged crook, who feels that his pal has double-crossed him, viciously crumbles his cigarette in his fingers, as if it were the body and soul of his once trusted comrade, on whom he is wreaking vengeance. . . .
Everything from the gayest comedy, to the most sinister tragedy can be expressed by a cigarette, in the hands or mouth of a skillful actor.
By the 1930s, the cigarette, with Bernays’s help, became an important prop in movies, used to invest characters and scenes with a range of meanings. 63 Even a cursory review of the great films of the 1930s and 1940s confirms just how central the cigarette had become in the social idioms of everyday life. Films both reflected and reified cultural norms at the same time that they created styles and fads.
At mid-century, Atlantic Monthly catalogued the wide range of affect and emotion that could be served on screen or stage by the cigarette as a prop. The litany closely resembled what Bernays offered nearly two decades earlier. Cigarettes could easily demonstrate self-confidence or shyness, anxiety or surprise. To demonstrate anxiety, the authors suggested, “Take quick and frequent puffs at cigarette, while moving briskly round stage or set. Discard a half-finished cigarette and straightaway light another.” To reveal “acute distress” actors were advised to “crush out a half-smoked cigarette with awful finality.” Shyness could be portrayed by fumbling with a cigarette and matches. Finally, “passion in the raw” could be exhibited as follows: “Put two cigarettes in mouth at same time. Light both, then, with possessive air, hand one of them to adored.” This was exactly how Paul Heinreid, in the 1942 blockbuster Now Voyager, “consummated” his romance with Bette Davis.64 And, of course, couples calmly smoking in bed had become a surefire indicator of just-finished se
x.
Still, to suggest that George Washington Hill and Edward Bernays were solely and wickedly responsible for turning women into smokers would be to misrepresent the history of the era. Given the range of economic and social forces eroding prohibitions on female smoking, as well as the remarkable rise of cigarette consumption in the first decades of the twentieth century, it was inevitable that women would be tapped as an important constituency for the product. Hill and Bernays—and their competition—shaped and promoted the cigarette’s status as the symbol of the independent feminist and the bold, glamorous flapper. The cigarette revealed the power of the technique of investing a commodity with cultural meaning in order to motivate consumption. It was this ability to recognize, shape—and exploit—cultural change that lay at the heart of successful consumer motivation.
As a master of mass motivation Bernays understood that it was crucially important for the individual to fully believe in his or her own free choice and agency. This may be why he regarded advertising with some skepticism. In its overtly mass appeal, it could erode the confidence of what he called “consent,” the belief in reflective and rational individual choice. A phrase he coined, “engineering of consent,” brilliantly captures the stance of public relations toward the consumer culture. With the term engineering Bernays specified the instrumental precision with which he aspired to operate; in consent he implied that, ultimately, individual autonomy persisted despite the power of corporate manipulation. “Engineering of consent” was sharply ironic. It suggested that the illusion of agency was a critical component of the consumer culture and a central element of the promotion of cigarette smoking.
Raymond Loewy’s redesign of the Lucky Strike package for Hill illustrates a complementary element to the rise of national advertising and public relations. The field of industrial design ranged from the architecture of machinery and objects to the development of logos and corporate symbols. The cigarette—in this case, its packaging—reflected the importance of design in organizing the new consumer consciousness and in constructing the meaning of products. A few years after Hill and Bernays worked to popularize the green in Lucky Strike packaging, Hill tried a new tack. He turned to Loewy, an acclaimed designer known for eviscerating Victorian sensibilities with a new aesthetic of spare, clean designs that connoted efficiency and modernity. Loewy had transformed the look of everything from Coca-Cola bottles to the Shell Oil logo to Studebaker cars.
In 1941, still concerned that green—despite Bernays’s efforts—alienated women, Hill hired Loewy to reconfigure the package of Lucky Strikes. According to Loewy, the two men bet $50,000 on the effectiveness of the new design, a bet that Loewy reportedly collected. He later explained that any change in the design of an established product was risky. “It must not destroy the identity of the package established at the cost of millions of dollars, as in the case of Luckies.”65 Loewy made the package white, believing that this change would convey “freshness of content and immaculate manufacturing.” 66 His other major intervention was to place the dominant red target on both sides of the package. In the past, the target had appeared only on the front; now both sides became the front. As Loewy explained, “Thus, a package lying flat on a desk, a wrapper discarded, would inevitably display the brand name . . . the Lucky Strike target has been displayed twenty-five billion times at no additional cost to the American Tobacco Company.” It was one thing, however, to redesign the package and quite another to rationalize it to the consumer. Hill would never admit his package needed “freshening.” World War II presented an opportunity to explain the change in the Lucky Strike package in terms of patriotism and morale. American Tobacco claimed that the green dye used was now required by the War Office for camouflage. The marketing shift was announced with the slogan, “Lucky Strike Green Has Gone to War.”
Hill had successfully engaged three giant figures in the establishment of twentieth-century consumer culture: Lasker, Bernays, and Loewy. In these three individuals and their work on behalf of Lucky Strikes, we may see the core elements of the cigarette’s rise to prominence. A relatively undifferentiated product, it traded on identities fashioned not through any intrinsic qualities but through advertising, public relations, and design. With these techniques, the rise of the cigarette closely followed the articulation of a mass consumption culture.
Aggressive tactics, clever ad copy and packaging, and innovations in marketing were in no way limited to Hill and American Tobacco. The intense competition among the Big Three—Lucky Strike, Chesterfield, and Camel—elicited the creative and combative energies of a burgeoning advertising industry. By the early 1930s, the major tobacco companies had all enlisted professional marketing experts and were spending unprecedented sums on advertising.
At first, R.J. Reynolds continued to rely on traditional slogans to promote Camel: “No Better Cigarette Is Made.” But as Lucky Strike sales soared from 1927 to 1931, its success came at the expense of Camel, whose sales fell from 45 percent of the national market to 28 percent. In March 1930, Reynolds retaliated, investing $300,000 in newspaper ads in that month alone, attempting to take Hill on directly: “Turning the light of Truth on false and misleading statements in recent cigarette advertising.”67 Hill apparently responded, “If you throw a stone into a pack of dogs, you can tell which one is hit by the way he barks.”68
Feeling a need to find a new, more effective approach, in 1931 Reynolds dismissed N.W. Ayer, its advertising agency since the inception of Camel, and eventually turned to William C. Esty, who devised what he called a campaign of “whizz and whoozle.” 69 Fortune magazine explained this operation as “the whatever-it-takes in an advertising plug. The thing with power to transform wheel horses into sprinters, loaders into spendthrifts, and sales curves into rockets.”70 Esty went head-to-head with Hill’s Lucky Strike bluster. The slogan “It’s Fun to Be Fooled” draped ridicule on Hill’s pseudo-scientific claims for “toasting” by subtly exposing it as a chicanery. Esty’s copy then turned back to the theme of “costlier tobaccos,” music to the ears of R.J. Reynolds’s executives. By winning the Reynolds account, Esty established himself as a major presence in what had quickly become a major industry all by itself. In his first five years of service to R.J. Reynolds, his firm’s standard 15 percent of advertising expenditures netted $9.8 million.71
Reynolds was concerned that Camel had become known as “a truck-driver’s cigarette,” in large measure because the company had failed to aggressively solicit the growing middle-class women’s market. Esty suggested modifying the pack. Bowman Gray and his fellow executives at Reynolds quickly rejected this proposal as sacrilege, so Esty instead developed a series of campaigns that successfully touched a nerve in American culture. Taking a page out of Lasker and Hill’s playbook, Esty aggressively sought testimonials from prominent society figures, sports heroes, and stars of stage and screen. These he adroitly combined with “man on the street” testimonials and cartoons. This interplay of the famous and the mundane struck a powerful chord in the midst of the Great Depression. No matter one’s financial status, cigarette brands could be shared.
National brands marked yet another critical aspect of the full-scale emergence of the consumer culture: namely, the democratization of goods. In the depths of the Great Depression, cigarettes were held out as a truly national product, one that crossed the wide boundaries of class, gender, race, and ethnicity. Unlike many other products whose sales were limited to particular social strata, the cigarette was seen by industry and advertisers alike as a symbol of “choice” for all. If the United States was hardly a class-less society, at least national brands appealed across such distinctions.72 Cigarettes—relatively inexpensive and increasingly ubiquitous—symbolized the democracy of the marketplace, the notion that luxury and leisure would be accessible across the boundaries of ethnicity and class. “The price of one’s favorite brand,” wrote the American Mercury in 1925, “is no longer an indication of the means at one’s command or the circle in which one moves. More often
than otherwise, the banker and his bootblack agree in their preferences. The cigarette, in truth, has become the most democratic commodity in common use.”73 Here was a product and a behavior with genuinely mass appeal, through which the distance between Hoboken and Hollywood could be easily traversed.
At the height of the Great Depression, advertisements pictured America’s social elites ensconced in the most expensive restaurants smoking popular brands. Rather than creating the association, for example, of Camels with “the rich,” such ads were a source of popular identification; any woman could smoke the same brand as Mrs. William Hollingsworth, pictured at the Victor Hugo Restaurant in Beverly Hills, California. The appeal of such ads depended on an industry strategy of unifying the cigarette market around a few national brands. This was not entirely voluntary: attempts to develop a high-end luxury market segment had generally failed or had mixed results. Smoking was decidedly independent of status, and brands became a source of commonality in the face of material disparity. According to a survey reported in Fortune in 1936, among both whites and African-Americans regular smoking had risen to well over 40 percent of the population.74