Crystallizing Public Opinion

Bernays also originated the now familiar “global media event,” when he dreamed up “Light’s Golden Jubilee,” a world-wide celebratory spectacle honoring the fiftieth anniversary of the electric light bulb, sponsored—behind the scenes—by the General Electric Corporation.

twenties, Bernays fathered the link between corporate sales campaigns and popular social causes, when—while working for the American Tobacco Company—he persuaded women’s rights marchers in New York City to hold up Lucky Strike cigarettes as symbolic “Torches of Freedom.” In October of 1929

served as a foot soldier for the U.S. Committee on Public Information (CPI)—the vast American propaganda machine mobilized in 1917 to package, advertise and sell the war as one that would “Make the World Safe for Democracy.”

1891, Bernays was the double nephew of Sigmund Freud. His mother was Freud’s elder sister, Anna; his father Ely was Freud’s wife’s (Martha Bernays Freud) brother. His family background impressed him with the enormous power of intellectual life and accustomed him to the privileges and creature comforts of bourgeois existence.

of Edward Bernays has become more and more familiar. Since the 1970s, an increasing number of books and films have appeared, and this once covert PR operative has been transformed into an historical figure of controversy and renown

Beginning his career in the early 1900s, Bernays would soon become one of the most influential pioneers of American public relations, a person whose worldly activities, though not widely known, left a deep mark on the configuration of our world.

the most part, in the shadows of American history, this was “the invisible wire puller” who had devised many of the powerful ways that the tools of mass persuasion would shape the terrain of American society from the early twentieth century onward.

in order to create and crystallize the impression

in analyzing the restaurant service of a prominent hotel, he discovers that its menu is built on the desires of the average eater and that a large group of people with children desire special foods for them. He may then advise his client to institute a children’s diet service.
This was done specifically with the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, which instituted special menus for children.

He found that the chief cause for lack of interest in New York was the belief that New York was “cold and inhospitable.”