Bernays was now in a PR man’s hog heaven. His clients were competing with Henry Ford to see who could do the most to honor the old inventor’s legacy. Money was not an issue as he set out to put on a show unlike anything that Charles T. Yerkes could have imagined for his pathetic little telescope. It was a frenzy of activity that a Yale social psychologist would later call “one of the most astonishing pieces of propaganda ever engineered in this country during peacetime.” In the months leading up to the reenactment, plans went out to public utility companies, giving instructions for local tie-in activities. Luncheons were held for newspaper editors and movie newsreel executives. Scientific American, the Saturday Evening Post, and other magazines planned special issues celebrating Edison and his achievements. Talks were given to Lions, Kiwanis, and Rotary Clubs, to Boy and Girl Scouts, chambers of commerce, women’s clubs. Written tributes to Edison were collected from Albert Einstein, General John J. Pershing, Jane Addams, and Admiral Byrd. Bernays persuaded the postmaster general of the United States to issue a commemorative two-cent stamp in honor of the lightbulb. Songwriter George M. Cohan wrote a musical tribute. Costume competitions, fireworks, and pageants were held. “Light’s Golden Jubilee no longer depended on a press bureau,” Bernays recalled with jubilation of his own. “Everybody was joining the procession. From the grass roots to Broadway the spirit of ballyhoo took over. Mayors and Governors issued proclamations to celebrate Light’s Golden Jubilee. Universities offered lectures on Edison and the implications of his discovery. Education groups conducted essay contests. Librarians displayed books about Edison. Museum heads arranged exhibits that would illustrate the history of light.”42
Even Bernays was astonished at the scale of the campaign and its success at captivating the country’s imagination. Of all the episodes in his career, he recounted this one most frequently in his later years. “I tried to look at it objectively,” he said. “Someone has an idea—Light’s Golden Jubilee—honoring a fine old man who has made significant contributions to American life. You realize that he can be made a myth, so you start myth-building. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say you help the myth to grow. The public, expressing its own unfulfilled aspirations, builds the myth until it becomes an overwhelming, meaningful reality. . . . Whether you accept the Freudian thesis or not, people want a father substitute. That is myth-building. Edison was an ideal subject—a great inventor symbolizing the scientific era of electronics to come.”43
The timing helped as well to feed a spirit of enthusiasm. America was riding on an economic high as the stock market soared and everyone from elevator operators to the wealthiest families joined in the speculative mania. Everyone seemed to be rich and getting richer, with no end in sight. As the months ticked down toward October, the gains were especially phenomenal. The stock ticker (one of Edison’s first successful inventions) showed steady gains with no downturns at all, not even a lull or temporary setback. The Dow Jones Industrials went from 299.13 on April 9 to 381.17 on September 3. The price for a share of Westinghouse went from 151 to 286. General Electric went from 268 to 391.
The challenge as October 21 approached was deciding which dignitaries had to be excluded from the day’s events. Hundreds of notables attended, including President Herbert Hoover, Orville Wright, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Will Rogers, and Madame Curie. The honored guests arrived in Dearborn and were taken to the festivities aboard a replica of the Grand Trunk Railway train, on which Edison had worked in his boyhood as a “news butch,” selling sandwiches, newspapers, and other amenities to passengers. As part of the ceremony, a boy handed Edison a basket of similar merchandise that he was supposed to offer to President Hoover. But for Bernays, at least, the actual ritual was less satisfactory than its planners had imagined. “Edison, 82, enfeebled with age and sickness, took the basket, and offered his merchandise to President Hoover, crying, ‘Candy, apples, sandwiches and newspapers!’ in a valiant effort to reenact his boyhood sales pitch. It was embarrassing to all of us—a pathetic evocation of the past,” Bernays recalled.
There was in fact something a little sad and contradictory about the day’s festivities. “It became just a publicity thing, and we didn’t care for it,” Edison’s daughter Madeleine said later. His wife Mina also had “mixed feelings,” according to biographer Neil Baldwin. She “saw keenly the irony that corporate cosponsor General Electric was now making such a tremendous fuss over Edison, co-opting his presence as a symbol, especially considering the inauspicious circumstances under which her husband had long since parted with the company.”44
Although Bernays doesn’t speak of it in his memoirs, he himself became the object of Ford’s animosity that day. An unabashed anti-Semite, Ford had disliked Bernays from the beginning and had only reluctantly allowed him to participate in arranging the Dearborn event. Ford took further offense at Bernays’s ceaseless efforts at self-promotion. According to another chronicler of Light’s Golden Jubilee, Bernays “as a matter of fact incurred Ford’s wrath after the dedicatory party arrived in Dearborn because he tried repeatedly to inject himself into the group picture with Hoover, Edison and the host. Ford took Fred Black aside and told him to ‘get Bernays the hell out of here or I’ll have Harry Bennett’s men throw him over the fence.’ Black told Bernays of the threat and he moved out of camera range.”45
The capstone of the day was scheduled for 6:15 that evening. Following a candlelight dinner, “Edison, looking like a benevolent old wreck, walked with Ford and President Hoover to the transplanted Menlo Park laboratory and re-enacted the invention of the electric lamp,” Bernays recalled. The aging inventor demonstrated how he had made a carbonized thread and a vacuum globe, as radio announcer Graham McNamee dramatized each gesture for his listeners: “The lamp is now ready, as it was a half century ago! Will it light? Will it burn? Edison touches the wire . . . Ladies and gentlemen—it lights! Light’s Golden Jubilee has come to a triumphant climax!” The entire laboratory building was bathed in searchlights. A Ford-commissioned replica of the Liberty Bell pealed, sirens and whistles blew through the city of Detroit, and planes flew overhead.
Overcome by emotion, Edison faltered, sat down, and wept. His wife calmed him and gave him warm milk, which seemed to revive him. He was assisted to his seat of honor and listened as President Hoover gave yet another tributory speech. Edison managed to say a few words himself before turning white and slumping in his chair in an exhausted faint. His wife and Hoover’s physician helped him out of the room, laid him on a sofa, and administered drugs. It would take several days of recuperation at Ford’s home before he was well enough to travel home. It was the old man’s last public hurrah, and everyone knew it.46
What they didn’t know was that the day’s festivities were in many ways Hoover’s last hurrah as well. Light’s Golden Jubilee was held on Monday, October 21, but three days later, darkness rather than light would prevail. The celebration of Edison and his creations has left a mark on the American imagination, but October 24, 1929, is by far the better-remembered date: Black Thursday—the day the stock market crashed.
The Experts Speak
One of the striking historical facts about the Great Depression is the complete failure of society’s economic and political experts to see it coming, or to deal with it sensibly once it arrived. Fourteen days before the crash, Irving Fisher had predicted, “In a few months I expect to see the stock market much higher than today.” Fisher, America’s most distinguished and famous professor of economics at Yale University, was so overconfident that he personally lost a fortune equivalent to $140 million in today’s dollars when the market collapsed. John Maynard Keynes, the most famous British economist, lost the equivalent of £1 million. The headline in the New York Journal on the day after Black Thursday was “Experts Predict Rising Market.” The Harvard Economic Society responded to the news by telling its subscribers, “A severe depression such as 1920-21 is outside the range of probability. We are not facing a protracted liquidation.”
As it be
came apparent that the Depression was more than a temporary downturn, President Hoover appointed Edward Bernays to his three-member Presidential Emergency Committee for Employment. “It was really a public relations committee,” Bernays recalled in his memoirs. Hoover’s refusal to countenance “socialist” ideas such as social security and public works programs left the committee with few options. “We encouraged various ways of spreading employment: through reduced daily and weekly schedules, shorter shifts, alternating shifts and rotation of days off. . . . We urged employers to find personnel willing to go on furlough without pay; to disclose duplication of wage earners in the same family, as a measure of spreading wages; to maintain lists for preferential employment and to determine the adequacy of part-time wages.” In the end, however, Bernays realized, “these efforts were all ineffective. Particularly unsound was the share-the-work idea, which put the onus of sacrifice on the shoulders of the wage earner instead of the employer.” Advertisers and businesses offered empty slogans such as “Be patriotic and spend money,” “Spend ten cents more each day and help drive hard times away,” or “Help the jobless by doing your Christmas shopping now.” As the economy careened into deeper and deeper trouble, newspapers resorted to desperate cheerleading. “Optimism Gains as U.S. Speeds Jobless Relief,” read one headline. “Hoover’s Drive to Aid Jobless Shows Results,” read another. “President Declares Voluntary Cooperation of Industry Will Solve Problem.”47
In 1932, Bernays joined Hoover’s doomed campaign for reelection. He helped line up experts to sing Hoover’s praises, including a pair of Yale economists who predicted that the economy was now on a “sound foundation” and “the run of the dollar had been stopped.”48 He formed a “Non-Partisan Fact-Finding Committee,” which issued a poll showing Hoover trouncing his opponent, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Outside the circle of businessmen and their sycophants, however, no one believed a word of it. The election of Roosevelt brought new experts into power, with new and grandiose ideas about what could and should be done to secure the general welfare. For Hoover and the old guard, it was the end of an era and everything that they believed in, but for Bernays and the propaganda industry, business was booming like never before.
3
Deciding What You’ll Swallow
Everything is possible but nothing is real.
—song lyric by Living Colour
In 1992, the food industry’s International Food Information Council (IFIC) retained Dr. G. Clotaire Rapaille, “an international market research expert,” to research “how Americans relate to food biotechnology and genetic engineering.” IFIC, a PR lobby for the use of biotechnology in agriculture, wanted to know how it could overcome consumer apprehensions about the new technology. A “core team” was assembled to aid in the research, consisting of representatives from the Monsanto Agricultural Company, NutraSweet, Kraft General Foods, Ajinomoto, DuPont, and Calgene. Other research sponsors included Frito-Lay, Coca-Cola, Nestlé, Procter & Gamble, and the M&M/Mars candy company. The goal of the research team was to “develop actionable strategies, messages, and language that will express information positively about the process and products—without stirring fears or negative connotations.” 1
Dr. Rapaille is a Jungian psychologist who uses a technique he calls “Archetype Studies,” which claims to delve into the “primordial cause for . . . opinions, attitudes or motivations.” As his report to IFIC explained, “For each element in the world, there is a first meaningful experience called the Imprinting Moment. The Archetype is the pattern which underlies this Imprinting Moment. The Archetype is completely preordained by the culture, and it is common to everyone in a given culture. . . . The Archetype is the Logic of Emotion that forms the Collective Unconscious.” Discover these Archetypes, Rapaille’s theory promised, and “you can ‘read’ the consumers like a book, and you can understand their unconscious ‘logic.’ ”2
Rapaille’s process for uncovering Archetypes was similar in most respects to what another advertising or PR person might term a “focus group,” but Dr. Rapaille liked to refer to them as “Imprinting Groups.” Each group consisted of 20 to 30 everyday Americans, which Rapaille’s team of “Archetypologists” led through a series of “relaxation exercises and visualization” aimed at eliciting their innermost feelings about biotechnology.3
The result of these exercises, the team concluded, was that the biotech industry stood at a crossroads. “In one case, we have tremendous public support—we can be viewed as farmers bringing new varieties and improved foods to consumers. But if we do not position ourselves and our products correctly, we can just as easily be viewed in the same class as Hitler and Frankenstein.” The difference depended on which “imprint” provided the Archetype for public perception of the new foods. And the public would choose its Archetype based largely on the food industry’s choice of words.4
“In communicating about food biotechnology and genetic engineering, we now know a variety of ‘trigger’ words that will help consumers view these products in the same vein as farming, hybrids, and the natural order, rather than as Frankenfoods,” the study concluded. In the category of “words to use,” Rapaille suggested terms such as beauty, bounty, children, choices, cross-breeding, diversity, earth, farmer, flowers, fruits, future generations, hard work, heritage, improved, organic, purity, quality, soil, tradition, and wholesome. “Words to lose” included: biotechnology, chemical, DNA, economic, experiments, industry, laboratory, machines, manipulate, money, pesticides, profit, radiation, safety, and scientists.5
In a memo accompanying the completed study, IFIC’s Libby Mikesell and Tom Stenzel summarized the lessons learned. “The technology in biotechnology has ‘scary’ overtones in connection with life in any form. . . . Biotechnology may not be the optimal term to use in our discussions,” they wrote. “Clotaire recommends that we ‘sandwich’ the word genetic between other words that create an association with tradition and nature. Some possible terms he suggested were ‘biogenetic gardening,’ ‘natural genetics’ or ‘natural genetic gardening.’ He composed this sentence as an example of how to use the terms: New genetic discoveries allow us to be successful gardeners of the 21st century and to accomplish cross-breeding at a highly sophisticated level, fulfilling a vision of the gardeners of the 19th century.”6
It is worth noting that many of the terms in Rapaille’s list of “words to lose” are straightforward characterizations of the actual scientific process used in developing genetically engineered foods, while many of the “words to use” are vague, pleasant-sounding euphemisms designed to obscure the details about everything that is new and unique about the process. Dr. Rapaille has a Ph.D. from the Sorbonne, but his analytical method does not necessarily require one. William Lutz, a professor at Rutgers University and author of the book Doublespeak, has catalogued numerous similar examples of industry and government linguistic coinage, many of which originated with people who lacked any background whatsoever in Jungian Archetypology. The Reagan administration, for example, invented the phrase “revenue enhancements” as a substitute for “taxes.” Gambling casinos prefer to call themselves the “gaming industry.” Corporations refer to failed business ventures as “nonperforming assets.” The military refers to civilian deaths as “collateral damage,” bombs as “vertically deployed antipersonnel devices,” and killing the enemy as “servicing the target.”
It is also worth noting the irony in IFIC’s choice of someone like Rapaille to help design its strategy for defending biotechnology. Whatever dangers biotechnology may or may not present to the public, it is undeniably an example of modern science in action. When talking among themselves, biotech’s promoters frequently invoke the name of science, characterizing their opponents as irrational, fear-driven technophobes. “We all are frustrated by the public’s emotional response to scientific, factual issues,” stated the IFIC report. Yet Rapaille’s advice to IFIC was not only calculated to evoke an emotional response and to avoid any mention of science, his very methodolo
gy for arriving at his analysis is at best a parody of the scientific method. In its relentless effort to probe the supposedly irrational mind of the public, it is a modern-day example of the legacy of Edward Bernays and his famous uncle, Sigmund Freud.
Hard Science and Liquid Truth
The power that science wields in modern society is a reflection of its ability to create knowledge that is as close to infallible as any product of human endeavor. Reasonable people may disagree in their opinions about Shakespeare or religion, but they do not disagree with the laws of thermodynamics. This is because the theories of science, especially the hard sciences, have been developed through methodologies that require verification by multiple, independent researchers using clearly defined, replicable experiments. If the experiments do not bear out a hypothesis, the hypothesis must be rejected or modified.
The very prestige that science enjoys, however, has also given rise to a variety of scientific pretenders—disciplines such as phrenology or eugenics that merely claim to be scientific. The renowned philosopher of science Karl Popper gave a great deal of consideration to this problem and coined the term “pseudoscience” to help separate the wheat from the chaff. The difference between science and pseudoscience, he concluded, is that genuinely scientific theories are “falsifiable”—that is, they are formulated in such a way that if they are wrong, they can be proven false through experiments. By contrast, pseudosciences are formulated so vaguely that they can never be proven or disproven. “The difference between a science and a pseudoscience is that scientific statements can be proved wrong and pseudoscientific statements cannot,” says Robert Youngson in his book Scientific Blunders: A Brief History of How Wrong Scientists Can Sometimes Be. “By this criterion you will find that a surprising number of seemingly scientific assertions—perhaps even many in which you devoutly believe—are complete nonsense. Rather surprisingly this is not to assert that all pseudoscientific claims are untrue. Some of them may be true, but you can never know this, so they are not entitled to claim the cast-iron assurance and reliance that you can have, and place, in scientific facts.”7
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