---
title: Edward Bernays, Propaganda (1928)
url: https://propagandaarchive.org/about/bernays-propaganda/
description: 'Edward Bernays''s Propaganda (1928) as a doctrine source: what it says, how it worked in practice, and the reception and criticism it drew.'
section: About and doctrine
---

![Illustration: a Cold War intelligence collage of a non-aligned-movement conference and a map spanning Latin America, Africa and Asia.](https://propagandaarchive.org/static/generated/detail/hero-cold-war-global-south.jpg)

[About](https://propagandaarchive.org/about/)

# Edward Bernays, Propaganda (1928)

In brief

A founding text of American public relations, written by a veteran of the U.S. wartime propaganda committee, which states openly that an "invisible government" of opinion managers shapes public taste and belief and presents this as a necessary part of democracy.

On this page

- [The source](https://propagandaarchive.org/about/bernays-propaganda/#the-source)
- [Context](https://propagandaarchive.org/about/bernays-propaganda/#context)
- [What it says](https://propagandaarchive.org/about/bernays-propaganda/#what-it-says)
- [How it worked in practice](https://propagandaarchive.org/about/bernays-propaganda/#how-it-worked-in-practice)
- [Techniques in this archive's taxonomy](https://propagandaarchive.org/about/bernays-propaganda/#techniques-in-this-archive-s-taxonomy)
- [Reception and criticism](https://propagandaarchive.org/about/bernays-propaganda/#reception-and-criticism)
- [Same-standard note](https://propagandaarchive.org/about/bernays-propaganda/#same-standard-note)
- [Sources](https://propagandaarchive.org/about/bernays-propaganda/#sources)

On this page

**In one line:** a founding text of American public relations, written by a veteran of the U.S. wartime propaganda committee, which states openly that an "invisible government" of opinion managers shapes public taste and belief and presents this as a necessary part of democracy.

## The source

- **Citation:** Edward L. Bernays, *Propaganda* (New York: Horace Liveright, 1928), eleven chapters from "Organizing Chaos" to "The Mechanics of Propaganda". Earlier book: Edward L. Bernays, *Crystallizing Public Opinion* (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1923). Later essay: Edward L. Bernays, "The Engineering of Consent", *Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science* 250 (March 1947): 113-120.
- **Author:** Edward L. Bernays (1891-1995), Vienna-born New York publicist and nephew of Sigmund Freud.
- **Language:** English.
- **Rights status on this archive:** *Crystallizing Public Opinion* (1923) and *Propaganda* (1928) were published in the US before 1931 and are in the public domain in the US; they are quoted below where the wording was checked. The 1947 essay and Bernays' memoir *Biography of an Idea* (1965) are in copyright and are summarised with short quotations only.

![black-and-white press photograph of Edward Bernays, a moustached man in a tweed suit holding papers, standing beside Doris E. Fleischman, who wears a cloche hat and looks up at him](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/images/torches-of-freedom-1929-bernays-fleischman.jpg)

*Edward L. Bernays and his wife and business partner Doris E. Fleischman, March 1923. Unknown press photographer. Wikimedia Commons, public domain (US, published before 1931).*

## Context

Bernays worked for the U.S. Committee on Public Information (CPI), the civilian propaganda agency George Creel ran during the First World War, and was part of the CPI group at the Paris Peace Conference in 1918-1919. After the war he opened an office in New York and called himself a "counsel on public relations", a title he explained in *Crystallizing Public Opinion*, which is often described as the first book on the field. His clients over the following decades included manufacturers, trade associations, the American Tobacco Company, and the United Fruit Company.

*Propaganda* was written when the word still had a neutral or positive sense in English and was losing it, in part because of postwar revelations about wartime atrocity stories (see [Arthur Ponsonby, Falsehood in War-Time (1928)](https://propagandaarchive.org/about/ponsonby-falsehood-in-war-time/)). Bernays set out to rehabilitate the word. The book draws on the crowd and group psychology of Gustave Le Bon, Wilfred Trotter and Graham Wallas, and on Walter Lippmann's *Public Opinion* (see [Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (1922)](https://propagandaarchive.org/about/lippmann-public-opinion/)).

![colour poster with the words 4 Minute Men, A Message from Washington, showing Independence Hall in Philadelphia and a figure in colonial dress speaking with a hand raised holding a megaphone; the foot reads Committee on Public Information](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/images/four-minute-men-message-from-washington-1917.jpg)

*"4 Minute Men: A Message from Washington", poster by H. Devitt Welsh, 1917, issued by the Committee on Public Information. Library of Congress, LC-DIG-ppmsca-53577. Public domain (US, published before 1931).*

## What it says

**The invisible government.** The book opens: "The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of." Bernays presents this as a fact about how a large society organises choice, not as a complaint.

**A definition of modern propaganda.** In chapter II, "The New Propaganda", he writes: "Modern propaganda is a consistent, enduring effort to create or shape events to influence the relations of the public to an enterprise, idea or group." The stress on creating events, rather than only issuing messages, is the book's distinctive idea. He also writes: "Propaganda is the executive arm of the invisible government."

**The group mind.** In chapter IV, "The Psychology of Public Relations", Bernays asks: "If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing it?" He answers that practice has shown it is possible "at least up to a certain point and within certain limits".

**Working through leaders.** Bernays writes that "If you can influence the leaders, either with or without their conscious cooperation, you automatically influence the group which they sway." Physicians, clergy, architects, editors and society figures are treated as channels to their followers.

**Creating circumstances rather than asking.** His example is the piano trade. Instead of urging people to buy pianos, the propagandist would persuade leading architects to design homes with a music room; others would copy them, and "the man or woman who has a music room would naturally think of buying a piano". Bernays contrasts the old salesmanship ("please buy a piano") with a new one in which the customer comes to feel the idea is their own.

**Engineering of consent.** In 1947 Bernays restated the programme under a new name, calling public relations an attempt "by information, persuasion and adjustment" to engineer public support, and writing that "The engineering of consent is the very essence of the democratic process, the freedom to persuade and suggest." He expanded the essay into an edited book, *The Engineering of Consent* (University of Oklahoma Press, 1955).

## How it worked in practice

- **Staff and method.** Bernays ran a private consultancy for commercial and institutional clients. *Propaganda* itself describes the method: study the group, enlist the leaders and experts it trusts, and create events that the press will report as news.
- **"Torches of Freedom", 1929.** For the American Tobacco Company, which wanted more women to smoke in public, Bernays took advice from the psychoanalyst A. A. Brill, who described cigarettes as "torches of freedom" for women. Bernays arranged for a group of young women to walk in New York's Easter Sunday parade on 31 March 1929 smoking cigarettes. His secretary, Bertha Hunt, recruited participants while presenting herself as acting for women's equality, and the client was not to be named. Press reports described the women and their "torches of freedom" without naming Bernays or American Tobacco. The sources are Bernays' memoir *Biography of an Idea* (1965) and Larry Tye's biography *The Father of Spin* (1998). Vanessa Murphree's review of the newspaper coverage finds that the event was staged as described but that the coverage was less extensive and less celebratory than Bernays later claimed, and calls the campaign's scale of success a Bernays-driven myth.
- **United Fruit and Guatemala, early 1950s.** United Fruit retained Bernays while Guatemala's elected government under Jacobo Árbenz carried out a land reform that expropriated uncultivated company land. According to Larry Tye and to Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer's *Bitter Fruit* (1982), Bernays organised press trips to Guatemala for American journalists, including from *The New York Times* and *Time*, and supplied material presenting the Árbenz government as a communist foothold in the Americas. The June 1954 overthrow of Árbenz was a covert operation run by the CIA; these sources describe Bernays' work as the US publicity campaign that preceded and accompanied it. Árbenz's government and its defenders described the reform as land redistribution, and the company and US officials described the government as communist-influenced; the archive records both positions.
- **Use abroad, by Bernays' own account.** In *Biography of an Idea* Bernays wrote that in 1933 the Hearst correspondent Karl von Wiegand told him Joseph Goebbels had *Crystallizing Public Opinion* in his library and was using it in the campaign against Germany's Jews. Bernays wrote: "This shocked me, but I knew any human activity can be used for social purposes or misused for antisocial ones." The anecdote rests on Bernays' account of von Wiegand's remark. See [Hitler, Goebbels and the Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda (1925-1945)](https://propagandaarchive.org/about/nazi-propaganda-ministry/).

![colour magazine advertisement headed An Ancient Prejudice Has Been Removed, showing a fist labelled American Intelligence breaking a chain, a Lucky Strike cigarette pack and the slogan It's toasted](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/images/torches-of-freedom-1929-lucky-strike-ad.png)

*American Tobacco Company advertisement for Lucky Strike cigarettes, Theatre Magazine, December 1929, the year of the Easter parade described above; the illustration is signed "Winsor McCay". Wikimedia Commons, public domain (US, published before 1931).*

## Techniques in this archive's taxonomy

- [Testimonial](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/testimonial/): Bernays states the principle directly: influence the leaders, "with or without their conscious cooperation", and the group follows. The music-room example routes a sales goal through the authority of architects.
- [Astroturfing](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/astroturf/): in the 1929 parade, recruited participants were presented as women acting on their own initiative, and the paying client was kept out of the story, as Bernays' memoir and Tye describe.
- [Transfer](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/transfer/): the "torches of freedom" label attached the prestige of women's emancipation to a cigarette maker's sales goal.

## Reception and criticism

- **The public relations profession** has long treated Bernays as a founder. James Grunig and Todd Hunt's *Managing Public Relations* (1984) places his approach in the "two-way asymmetric" model: research used to persuade publics toward the organisation's goals, which they contrast with a "two-way symmetric" model of mutual adjustment.
- **Scott Cutlip**, a historian of the profession who interviewed Bernays, draws on interviews with Bernays and on practitioners' papers for a detailed account of his career in *The Unseen Power* (1994).
- **Stuart Ewen**, in *PR! A Social History of Spin* (1996), opens with his interview with Bernays and describes what he calls Bernays' hierarchical view of society, reading the book as a case for managing the public from above.
- **Larry Tye**'s biography, titled *The Father of Spin*, documents the campaigns from Bernays' papers and interviews and is the main secondary source for the cases above.
- **Vanessa Murphree** argues that the best-known case study, the 1929 parade, is overstated in the literature because it relies on Bernays' own telling.
- **Structural critics of the news media**, such as Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, analyse from the outside the kind of corporate and government news management that Bernays described from the practitioner's side. See [Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent (1988)](https://propagandaarchive.org/about/herman-chomsky-propaganda-model/).

## Same-standard note

Staging an event and hiding who paid for it is scored the same way here whoever pays: a tobacco firm in 1929, a fruit company in the 1950s, or a government. A later documented parallel is the October 1990 testimony of a young woman identified only as "Nayirah" before the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, arranged with the firm Hill & Knowlton for Citizens for a Free Kuwait; she was later identified as the daughter of Kuwait's ambassador to the US (John R. MacArthur, *Second Front*, 1992). The differences matter: Bernays worked for private clients in a press where rivals and reporters could and sometimes did question his stunts, while the one-party press systems described on [Hitler, Goebbels and the Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda (1925-1945)](https://propagandaarchive.org/about/nazi-propaganda-ministry/) and [Lenin and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the agitprop model (1902-1991)](https://propagandaarchive.org/about/soviet-agitprop/) allowed no such reply.

## Sources

**Full text in this archive:** [*Propaganda* (1928), complete](https://propagandaarchive.org/library/bernays-propaganda/); the crowd psychology it draws on, [Le Bon, *The Crowd* (1896 translation)](https://propagandaarchive.org/library/lebon-the-crowd/).

1. Edward L. Bernays, *Propaganda* (New York: Horace Liveright, 1928), chs. I "Organizing Chaos", II "The New Propaganda", IV "The Psychology of Public Relations". Text: [historyisaweapon.org](http://www.historyisaweapon.org/defcon1/bernprop.html).
2. Edward L. Bernays, *Crystallizing Public Opinion* (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1923).
3. Edward L. Bernays, "The Engineering of Consent", *Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science* 250 (March 1947): 113-120. [SAGE](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/000271624725000116).
4. Edward L. Bernays (ed.), *The Engineering of Consent* (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1955).
5. Edward L. Bernays, *Biography of an Idea: Memoirs of Public Relations Counsel Edward L. Bernays* (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1965).
6. Larry Tye, *The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays and the Birth of Public Relations* (New York: Crown, 1998).
7. Larry Tye, "Watch Out for the Top Banana", *Cabinet* 23 (2006). [Cabinet](https://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/23/tye.php).
8. Vanessa Murphree, "Edward Bernays's 1929 'Torches of Freedom' March: Myths and Historical Significance", *American Journalism* 32:3 (2015): 258-281.
9. Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer, *Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala* (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1982; revised and expanded ed., Harvard University Press).
10. Scott M. Cutlip, *The Unseen Power: Public Relations, A History* (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1994).
11. Stuart Ewen, *PR! A Social History of Spin* (New York: Basic Books, 1996).
12. James E. Grunig and Todd Hunt, *Managing Public Relations* (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984).
13. John R. MacArthur, *Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War* (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992).