Propaganda

by Edward L Bernays

  It is understood that the methods of propaganda can be effective only with the voter who makes up his own mind on the basis of his group prejudices and desires. Where specific allegiances and loyalties exist, as in the case of boss leadership, these loyalties will operate to nullify the free will of the voter. In this close relation between the boss and his constituents lies, of course, the strength of his position in politics.

  It is not necessary for the politician to be the slave of the public’s group prejudices, if he can learn how to mold the mind of the voters in conformity with his own ideas of public welfare and public service. The important thing for the statesman of our age is not so much to know how to please the public, but to know how to sway the public. In theory, this education might be done by means of learned pamphlets explaining the intricacies of public questions. In actual fact, it can be done only by meeting the conditions of the public mind, by creating circumstances which set up trains of thought, by dramatizing personalities, by establishing contact with the group leaders who control the opinions of their publics.

  But campaigning is only an incident in political life. The process of government is continuous. And the expert use of propaganda is more useful and fundamental, although less striking, as an aid to democratic administration, than as an aid to vote getting.

  Good government can be sold to a community just as any other commodity can be sold. I often wonder whether the politicians of the future, who are responsible for maintaining the prestige and effectiveness of their party, will not endeavor to train politicians who are at the same time propagandists. I talked recently with George Olvany. He said that a certain number of Princeton men were joining Tammany Hall. If I were in his place I should have taken some of my brightest young men and set them to work for Broadway theatrical productions or apprenticed them as assistants to professional propagandists before recruiting them to the service of the party.

  One reason, perhaps, why the politician to-​day is slow to take up methods which are a commonplace in business life is that he has such ready entry to the media of communication on which his power depends.

  The newspaper man looks to him for news. And by his power of giving or withholding information the politician can often effectively censor political news. But being dependent, every day of the year and for year after year, upon certain politicians for news, the newspaper reporters are obliged to work in harmony with their news sources.

  The political leader must be a creator of circumstances, not only a creature of mechanical processes of stereotyping and rubber stamping.

  Let us suppose that he is campaigning on a lowtariff platform. He may use the modern mechanism of the radio to spread his views, but he will almost certainly use the psychological method of approach which was old in Andrew Jackson’s day, and which business has largely discarded. He will say over the radio: “Vote for me and low tariff, because the high tariff increases the cost of the things you buy.” He may, it is true, have the great advantage of being able to speak by radio directly to fifty million listeners. But he is making an old-​fashioned approach. He is arguing with them. He is assaulting, single-​handed, the resistance of inertia.

  If he were a propagandist, on the other hand, although he would still use the radio, he would use it as one instrument of a well-​planned strategy. Since he is campaigning on the issue of a low tariff, he not merely would tell people that the high tariff increases the cost of the things they buy, but would create circumstances which would make his contention dramatic and self-​evident. He would perhaps stage a low-​tariff exhibition simultaneously in twenty cities, with exhibits illustrating the additional cost due to the tariff in force. He would see that these exhibitions were ceremoniously inaugurated by prominent men and women who were interested in a low tariff apart from any interest in his personal political fortunes. He would have groups, whose interests were especially affected by the high cost of living, institute an agitation for lower schedules. He would dramatize the issue, perhaps by having prominent men boycott woolen clothes, and go to important functions in cotton suits, until the wool schedule was reduced. He might get the opinion of social workers as to whether the high cost of wool endangers the health of the poor in winter.

  In whatever ways he dramatized the issue, the attention of the public would be attracted to the question before he addressed them personally. Then, when he spoke to his millions of listeners on the radio, he would not be seeking to force an argument down the throats of a public thinking of other things and annoyed by another demand on its attention; on the contrary, he would be answering the spontaneous questions and expressing the emotional demands of a public already keyed to a certain pitch of interest in the subject.

  The importance of taking the entire world public into consideration before planning an important event is shown by the wise action of Thomas Masaryk, then Provisional President, now President of the Republic of Czecho-​Slovakia.

  Czecho-​Slovakia officially became a free state on Monday, October 28, 1918, instead of Sunday, October 27, 1918, because Professor Masaryk realized that the people of the world would receive more information and would be more receptive to, the announcement of the republic’s freedom on a Monday morning than on a Sunday, because the press would have more space to devote to it on Monday morning.

  Discussing the matter with me before he made the announcement, Professor Masaryk said, “I would be making history for the cables if I changed the date of Czecho-Slovakia’s birth as a free nation.” Cables make history and so the date was changed.

  This incident illustrates the importance of technique in the new propaganda.

  It will be objected, of course, that propaganda will tend to defeat itself as its mechanism becomes obvious to the public. My opinion is that it will not. The only propaganda which will ever tend to weaken itself as the world becomes more sophisticated and intelligent, is propaganda that is untrue or unsocial.

  Again, the objection is raised that propaganda is utilized to manufacture our leading political personalities. It is asked whether, in fact, the leader makes propaganda, or whether propaganda makes the leader. There is a widespread impression that a good press agent can puff up a nobody into a great man.

  The answer is the same as that made to the old query as to whether the newspaper makes public opinion or whether public opinion makes the newspaper. There has to be fertile ground for the leader and the idea to fall on. But the leader also has to have some vital seed to sow. To use another figure, a mutual need has to exist before either can become positively effective. Propaganda is of no use to the politician unless he has something to say which the public, consciously or unconsciously, wants to hear.

  But even supposing that a certain propaganda is untrue or dishonest, we cannot on that account reject the methods of propaganda as such. For propaganda in some form will always be used where leaders need to appeal to their constituencies.

  The criticism is often made that propaganda tends to make the President of the United States so important that he becomes not the President but the embodiment of the idea of hero worship, not to say deity worship. I quite agree that this is so, but how are you going to stop a condition which very accurately reflects the desires of a certain part of the public? The American people rightly senses the enormous importance of the executive’s office. If the public tends to make of the President a heroic symbol of that power, that is not the fault of propaganda but lies in the very nature of the office and its relation to the people.

  This condition, despite its somewhat irrational puffing up of the man to fit the office, is perhaps still more sound than a condition in which the man utilizes no propaganda, or a propaganda not adapted to its proper end. Note the example of the Prince of Wales. This young man reaped bales of clippings and little additional glory from his American visit, merely because he was poorly advised. To the American public he became a well dressed, charming, sportloving, dancing, perhaps frivolous youth. Nothing was done to add dignity and presti
ge to this impression until towards the end of his stay he made a trip in the subway of New York. This sole venture into democracy and the serious business of living as evidenced in the daily habits of workers, aroused new interest in the Prince. Had he been properly advised he would have augmented this somewhat by such serious studies of American life as were made by another prince, Gustave of Sweden. As a result of the lack of well directed propaganda, the Prince of Wales became in the eyes of the American people, not the thing which he constitutionally is, a symbol of the unity of the British Empire, but part and parcel of sporting Long Island and dancing beauties of the ballroom. Great Britain lost an invaluable opportunity to increase the good will and understanding between the two countries when it failed to understand the importance of correct public relations counsel for His Royal Highness.

  The public actions of America’s chief executive are, if one chooses to put it that way, stage-​managed. But they are chosen to represent and dramatize the man in his function as representative of the people. A political practice which has its roots in the tendency of the popular leader to follow oftener than he leads is the technique of the trial balloon which he uses in order to maintain, as he believes, his contact with the public. The politician, of course, has his ear to the ground. It might be called the clinical ear. It touches the ground and hears the disturbances of the political universe.

  But he often does not know what the disturbances mean, whether they are superficial, or fundamental. So he sends up his balloon. He may send out an anonymous interview through the press. He then waits for reverberations to come from the public-a public which expresses itself in mass meetings, or resolutions, or telegrams, or even such obvious manifestations as editorials in the partisan or nonpartisan press. On the basis of these repercussions he then publicly adopts his original tentative policy, or rejects it, or modifies it to conform to the sum of public opinion which has reached him. This method is modeled on the peace feelers which were used during the war to sound out the disposition of the enemy to make peace or to test any one of a dozen other popular tendencies. It is the method commonly used by a politician before committing himself to legislation of any kind, and by a government before committing itself on foreign or domestic policies.

  It is a method which has little justification. If a politician is a real leader he will be able, by the skillful use of propaganda, to lead the people, instead of following the people by means of the clumsy instrument of trial and error.

  The propagandist’s approach is the exact opposite of that of the politician just described. The whole basis of successful propaganda is to have an objective and then to endeavor to arrive at it through an exact knowledge of the public and modifying circumstances to manipulate and sway that public.

  “The function of a statesman,” says George Bernard Shaw, “is to express the will of the people in the way of a scientist.”

  The political leader of to-​day should be a leader as finely versed in the technique of propaganda as in political economy and civics. If he remains merely the reflection of the average intelligence of his community, he might as well go out of politics. If one is dealing with a democracy in which the herd and the group follow those whom they recognize as leaders, why should not the young men training for leadership be trained in its technique as well as in its idealism?

  “When the interval between the intellectual classes and the practical classes is too great,” says the historian Buckle, “the former will possess no influence, the latter will reap no benefits.”

  Propaganda bridges this interval in our modern complex civilization.

  Only through the wise use of propaganda will our government, considered as the continuous administrative organ of the people, be able to maintain that intimate relationship with the public which is necessary in a democracy.

  As David Lawrence pointed out in a recent speech, there is need for an intelligent interpretative bureau for our government in Washington. There is, it is true, a Division of Current Information in the Department of State, which at first was headed by a trained newspaper man. But later this position began to be filled by men from the diplomatic service, men who had very little knowledge of the public. While some of these diplomats have done very well, Mr. Lawrence asserted that in the long run the country would be benefited if the functions of this office were in the hands of a different type of person.

  There should, I believe, be an Assistant Secretary of State who is familiar with the problem of dispensing information to the press-some one upon whom the Secretary of State can call for consultation and who has sufficient authority to persuade the Secretary of State to make public that which, for insufficient reason, is suppressed.

  The function of the propagandist is much broader in scope than that of a mere dispenser of information to the press. The United States Government should create a Secretary of Public Relations as member of the President’s Cabinet. The function of this official should be correctly to interpret America’s aims and ideals throughout the world, and to keep the citizens of this country in touch with governmental activities and the reasons which prompt them. He would, in short, interpret the people to the government and the government to the people.

  Such an official would be neither a propagandist nor a press agent, in the ordinary understanding of those terms. He would be, rather, a trained technician who would be helpful in analyzing public thought and public trends, in order to keep the government informed about the public, and the people informed about the government. America’s relations with South America and with Europe would be greatly improved under such circumstances. Ours must be a leadership democracy administered by the intelligent minority who know how to regiment and guide the masses.

  Is this government by propaganda? Call it, if you prefer, government by education. But education, in the academic sense of the word, is not sufficient. It must be enlightened expert propaganda through the creation of circumstances, through the high-​spotting of significant events, and the dramatization of important issues. The statesman of the future will thus be enabled to focus the public mind on crucial points of policy, and regiment a vast, heterogeneous mass of voters to clear understanding and intelligent action.

  CHAPTER VII – WOMEN’S ACTIVITIES AND PROPAGANDA

  WOMEN in contemporary America have achieved a legal equality with men. This does not mean that their activities are identical with those of men. Women in the mass still have special interests and activities in addition to their economic pursuits and vocational interests.

  Women’s most obvious influence is exerted when they are organized and armed with the weapon of propaganda. So organized and armed they have made their influence felt on city councils, state legislatures, and national congresses, upon executives, upon political campaigns and upon public opinion generally, both local and national.

  In politics, the American women to-​day occupy a much more important position, from the standpoint of their influence, in their organized groups than from the standpoint of the leadership they have acquired in actual political positions or in actual office holding. The professional woman politician has had, up to the present, not much influence, nor do women generally regard her as being the most important element in question. Ma Ferguson, after all, was simply a woman in the home, a catspaw for a deposed husband; Nellie Ross, the former Governor of Wyoming, is from all accounts hardly a leader of statesmanship or public opinion.

  If the suffrage campaign did nothing more, it showed the possibilities of propaganda to achieve certain ends. This propaganda to-​day is being utilized by women to achieve their programs in Washington and in the states. In Washington they are organized as the Legislative Committee of Fourteen Women’s Organizations, including the League of Women Voters, the Young Women’s Christian Association, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, the Federation of Women’s Clubs, etc. These organizations map out a legislative program and then use the modern technique of propaganda to make this legislative program actually pass i
nto the law of the land. Their accomplishments in the field are various. They can justifiably take the credit for much welfare legislation. The eight-​hour day for women is theirs. Undoubtedly prohibition and its enforcement are theirs, if they can be considered an accomplishment. So is the Shepard-​Towner Bill which stipulates support by the central government of maternity welfare in the state governments. This bill would not have passed had it not been for the political prescience and sagacity of women like Mrs. Vanderlip and Mrs. Mitchell.

  The Federal measures endorsed at the first convention of the National League of Women Voters typify social welfare activities of women’s organizations. These covered such broad interests as child welfare, education, the home and high prices, women in gainful occupations, public health and morals, independent citizenship for married women, and others.