Public relations was born at the beginning of the 1920s at the hands of Edward Bernays and his interpretation of propaganda towards a business, commercial approach, from which the Me consumerist (Bernays, E. 2008: 50). While the term propaganda during the first half of the 20th century it had a warmongering connotation, (Bernays, E. 2015) the term “public relations” it was a new concept, practically aseptic, uncontaminated. What made public relations possible?
The main cause is the birth of the mass society. In turn, the mass society is born from the advances promoted during the industrial revolutions, since it is during this period when great projects are carried out, such as the public school, the establishment of large rotary presses, the railways or the steam engines ( Bernays, E. 2008: 17). But, dowhatWho controls mass society?
The power relationships in mass society they are by definition conflictive (Castells, M. 2008: 2), since the interests of a large number of social actors converge in them. It is within this context in which public relations are born as a determining element for the domination of the mass as a whole.
In this article we are going to talk about the origins of public relations through the history of Edward Bernays, and how his model was exported to the world in different ways, and with different results.
The idea of Edward Bernays
The story begins with the young American Edward Bernaysa nephew of Sigmund Freud who was directing his career towards communication when the United States entered the First World War in 1917 (Fernández Torró, A. 2016: 29).
The Wilson administration created a committee to get citizens to support American entry into the conflict. The person in charge of carrying out this maneuver was the journalist george creel (Fernández Torró, A. 2016: 29). He ensured that the entry of the United States into the Great War was not seen as an American imperialist interest; but he had placed President Woodrow Wilson as an International Defender of Democracy and, therefore, as a symbol of the restoration of peace in Europe (Curtis, A. 2002).
Edward Bernays was on the same committee, an example of his work is that was chosen to accompany the president to the Paris peace summit in 1919. It was there, during the Versailles negotiations, that Bernays saw first-hand the importance of propaganda (Curtis, A. 2002).
Having already demonstrated the importance of advertising, Edward Bernays oriented his career towards the commercial, locating a small headquarters (Curtis, A. 2002) in New York. To carry out his new business project, Bernays carefully studied the contributions of his uncle, Sigmund Freud.
Freud put on the table a theory that was especially uncomfortable and difficult to digest for European society at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. through the works The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) Y totem and taboo (1913) among others, proposes a journey into the unconscious part of the human mind. According to your Dream interpretation, dreams involve the realization of the hidden secrets of the subconscious. These desires cannot always be realized in reality, since there are moral laws that deny them (Freud, S. 2019: 576).
This theory is complemented by the work totem and taboo (1913), where he breaks down the taboo until he identifies it with the forbidden. In an origin the taboo would have to do with a supposed demon punishing bad acts, later, it began to be prohibited by tradition, by custom or even by law, and the demon would become consciousness (Freud, S. 2012: 16).
“The belief, inherent in the primitive taboo, in a demonic power hidden in certain objects and that punishes their use or simply contact with them, bewitching the culprit, is, in effect, nothing but objectified fear” (Freud, S. 2012: 16).
This investigation of the unconscious would come to the conclusion that human beings live dominated by hidden forces that are repressed but that exist and are shown through the unconscious.
But What would happen if someone could control or direct the unconscious towards a certain thought or social behavior? That is what Edward Bernays intends to do.
The How It is a very different task, quite complex. He also explains:
“It is above all the psychologists of the school of Freud who have pointed out that the vast majority of man’s thoughts and actions are compensatory substitutes for desires that he has been forced to suppress. We may desire something not because of its intrinsic value or usefulness but because we have unconsciously come to see in that object the symbol of something else, the mere desire of which we would be ashamed to confess.” (Bernays, E. 2008: 67).
The Bernays method revolutionized the social conception of advertising and public relations. Freud’s young nephew used the irrational element and unconscious studied by his uncle to create a new type of advertising that seeks to satisfy people’s internal desires, instead of serving a specific utility or need (Fernández Torró, A. 2016: 30). Edward Bernays alluded to the “I Consumer” to dominate the masses. And it worked (Curtis, A. 2002).
“Freud was interested in revealing the hidden forces that move people, to help get to know the subconscious and the motivations; Bernays discovers a great purpose, and that is to take advantage of hidden motivations to know the interests and to be able to persuade the public. So he took advantage of the knowledge passed down from his uncle in the field of social sciences and psychology to apply it to campaigns and messages that could change people’s perceptions and encourage certain behaviors ” (Fernández Torró, A. 2016; 30).
Startup. The Torches of Liberty by Edward Bernays
Once Bernays established his headquarters in New York, many companies turned to his cabinet for help. One of the most notorious cases was that of the American Tobacco Companywho hired Bernays with the goal of inducing young American women to smoke Lucky Strike so that the company could double its clientele (Amos, A. and Haglund, M. 2000: 3).
The campaign, named “Torches of freedom” (Amos, A. and Haglund, M. 2000:3) consisted of a whole sociological maneuver whose objective was to change the social conception of women smokers. The woman would no longer be socially reviled for smoking, the taboo would be broken and the cigarette would begin to be seen as a symbol of power; therefore, the woman would see herself as an empowered woman. To do this, Bernays hired a group of young women to attend a massive demonstration and smoke publicly; the press, also under orders from Bernays, titled the article about these women “this is the torch of freedom” (Fernández Torró, A. 2016: 31).
In this way, the women associated the cigarette with the power represented in the torch of the Statue of Liberty, a national symbol, and began to smoke. Because they saw themselves as good and because, in some way, they believed they were challenging traditional masculine power. From that moment on, the woman smoker began to be something socially accepted and acceptable, and, little by little, it became normal (Amos, A. and Haglund, M. 2000: 3-4).
The great triumph of Bernays as a publicist is that he manages to introduce the working class into the consumerist world (Curtis, A. 2002). To do this, his sales strategy will be oriented not around the satisfaction of a need, but around the desire. He alludes to desire Freudian to stimulate the market; It’s not that women need to smoke, it’s that they want to. Somehow consumerism is made the escape route from the irrationalas dreams once were for Freud.
Public relations enters the White House
During the Roaring ’20s, public relations experienced its heyday. Bernays’ work was not only focused on helping large companies and multinationals, but he was also a determining figure in the politics of his time; first of all, with President Calvin Coolidge (Bernays, E. 1891: 118) and later with the president Herbert Hoover.
Bernays was hired before the 1924 presidential election (Bernays, E. 1891: 118) to improve the image of Coolidge, who was branded as boring and austere. Bernays launched the campaign Breakfast with Coolidge (Bernays, E. 2015).
In this case, the program consisted of inviting great actresses and public figures to the White House with the aim of being photographed by the press; the basis of the idea was to relate the president to something socially desired, symbols of warmth, leisure, or extroversion (Bernays, E. 2015).
The status of the United States as a recent world superpower, added to its renewed economic prominence, allowed the presidential cabinets of the 1920s, with special prominence of the government of Hooverwould support the model of Edward Bernays around a democratic republic based on mass consumerism and in the well-being of companies (Bernays, E. 2015).
The most reliable proof of this consolidated relationship between the president and by extension the government and the interests of the companies, embodied in the figure of Bernays, can be found in a massive event convened in October 1929 by Bernays to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the invention of the light bulb and the welfare of American companies (Curtis, A. 2002).
system gaps
internal fracture
However, the system collapses with the great Crash of 29. All the trust that Americans had placed in consumerism collapses from one day to the next. Added to this economic crisis is the existential crisis that is evident in The malaise of the culture (1930)the work of Sigmund Freud in which the contradictions of modern society are explained.
Freud believed that the aggressive impulses of the human being were so great that ultimately society, culture, should try to curb these instincts primitives (Freud, S. 2017: 65).
“The existence of this aggressiveness that we can detect in ourselves and rightly suppose in the other is the factor that disturbs our relationship with others and forces culture to unfold. Due to this primary reciprocal hostility between menthe cultural society lives under the constant threat of disintegration (…) culture must be mobilized to put barriers to aggressive instincts of human beings, restrain their externalizations by means of psychic formations of reaction” (Freud, S. 2017: 65).
The external fracture
The crisis of 1929 produced a wave of disappointment around the idea of democracy, and everything that had to do with it, including public relations. In those first moments of the 1930s, a totalitarian current began to emerge in Germany that would receive the name of Nazism.
While democracy maintained the idea…