--- title: Torches of Freedom:the 1929 Easter Parade cigarette march url: https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/torches-of-freedom-1929/ description: on Easter Sunday 1929 a small group of young women lit cigarettes on Fifth Avenue as a gesture for "equality of the sexes"; newspapers reported it as a… section: Case studies --- ![Illustration: an interwar radio-and-newsreel intelligence collage with a 1930s map of Europe and propaganda poster proofs.](https://propagandaarchive.org/static/generated/detail/hero-interwar.jpg) [Case studies](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/) # Torches of Freedom:the 1929 Easter Parade cigarette march At a glance On Easter Sunday 1929 a small group of young women lit cigarettes on Fifth Avenue as a gesture for "equality of the sexes"… - **When:** March 31, 1929 - **Actor:** Edward L. Bernays, public-relations counsel, for the American Tobacco Company… - **Target:** American women, especially young middle- and upper-class women… - **Confidence:** **high** Multiple independent open sources, low disagreement about the facts - **Techniques:** [Astroturfing](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/astroturf/) [Narrative laundering](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/narrative-laundering/) [Transfer](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/transfer/) [Glittering generalities](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/glittering-generalities/) Full details - **Actor:** Edward L. Bernays, public-relations counsel, for the American Tobacco Company (president George Washington Hill), makers of Lucky Strike - **Target:** American women, especially young middle- and upper-class women; newspaper editors and readers as the channel On this page - [What happened](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/torches-of-freedom-1929/#what-happened) - [How it works](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/torches-of-freedom-1929/#how-it-works) - [Then and now](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/torches-of-freedom-1929/#then-and-now) - [Positions on the record](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/torches-of-freedom-1929/#positions-on-the-record) - [Same-method test](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/torches-of-freedom-1929/#same-method-test) - [How to spot it](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/torches-of-freedom-1929/#how-to-spot-it) - [Images](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/torches-of-freedom-1929/#images) - [Sources](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/torches-of-freedom-1929/#sources) On this page **In one line:** on Easter Sunday 1929 a small group of young women lit cigarettes on Fifth Avenue as a gesture for "equality of the sexes"; newspapers reported it as a women's protest, and the public-relations counsel who organised it for the maker of Lucky Strike later described in his memoir how he had recruited them. ![Diagram: the American Tobacco Company hires Bernays; a psychoanalyst supplies the phrase "torches of freedom"; a telegram signed by Bernays's secretary recruits debutantes; the women smoke in the Easter Parade; newspapers report a feminist gesture without naming the sponsor](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/images/torches-of-freedom-1929-diagram.svg) ## What happened - **1928.** George Washington Hill, president of the American Tobacco Company, wants to widen cigarette sales to women, and retains Edward L. Bernays as public-relations counsel (Tye 1998; Murphree 2015). Bernays had published *Propaganda* the same year. - **1928 to 1929.** Lucky Strike advertising runs the slogan "Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet", pitching cigarettes as an alternative to sweets for weight control. Stanford's tobacco-advertising archive describes it as the slogan of Hill and the advertising man Albert Lasker. Bernays's part, as later accounts describe it, was supporting publicity on the theme of slimness, such as supplying experts and photographs to fashion editors. - **Early 1929.** By Bernays's own account, he asks the psychoanalyst A. A. Brill why women want to smoke. Brill's answer, as Bernays recorded it, included "Some women regard cigarettes as symbols of freedom" and "Cigarettes, which are equated with men, become torches of freedom." - **Before Easter 1929.** A telegram signed by Bertha Hunt, Bernays's secretary, goes to a list of about thirty debutantes that, by Bernays's account as later retold, came from a friend at *Vogue*. It reads in part: "IN THE INTERESTS OF EQUALITY OF THE SEXES AND TO FIGHT ANOTHER SEX TABOO I AND OTHER YOUNG WOMEN WILL LIGHT ANOTHER TORCH OF FREEDOM BY SMOKING CIGARETTES WHILE STROLLING ON FIFTH AVENUE EASTER SUNDAY." The telegram names no brand, no Bernays and no American Tobacco Company. The feminist Ruth Hale, who had co-founded the Lucy Stone League with Doris Fleischman, Bernays's wife and business partner, publicly endorses the gesture. Later accounts say Bernays arranged this. - **31 March 1929 (Easter Sunday).** A small group of young women, commonly put at about ten and led by Bertha Hunt, light cigarettes while walking in the Easter Parade on Fifth Avenue, New York. - **1 April 1929.** *The New York Times* runs the story under the headline "Group of Girls Puff at Cigarettes as a Gesture of 'Freedom'". Newspapers across the country carry it. Murphree (2015), who surveyed the coverage, reports that the press accounts did not name Bernays or the American Tobacco Company. - **25 October 1934.** A separate Bernays project for Lucky Strike: a "Green Ball" at the Waldorf-Astoria, hosted by Narcissa Cox Vanderlip, part of a campaign to make green, the colour of the Lucky Strike pack, fashionable for women (SAGE *Encyclopedia of Public Relations*; Tye 1998). - **1965.** Bernays publishes his memoir, *Biography of an Idea*, which tells the story of the march and the telegram. - **9 March 1995.** Bernays dies aged 103. ![Edward L. Bernays and Doris E. Fleischman, New York, March 1923](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/images/torches-of-freedom-1929-bernays-fleischman.jpg) *Edward L. Bernays and Doris E. Fleischman, his wife and business partner and a co-founder of the Lucy Stone League with Ruth Hale, photographed in March 1923. Public domain (published in the US before 1931), via Wikimedia Commons.* ## How it works - [Astroturfing](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/astroturf/): the marchers were real women, but the group was assembled by a paid adviser to a cigarette company and presented as a spontaneous act of young women making a point about equality. The recruiting telegram came in the name of a private person, Bernays's secretary, not in the name of the sponsor. This is the central move, and the actor's own memoir documents it. - [Narrative laundering](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/narrative-laundering/): a sales goal for one brand reached the public as a news item about women's rights. Murphree (2015) reports that the press accounts did not name Bernays or American Tobacco, so readers saw the message on the news page with its origin removed. She also reports that some papers suspected a publicity stunt, so the laundering was not complete. - [Transfer](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/transfer/): the event borrowed the standing of the women's-rights cause, nine years after the Nineteenth Amendment, and attached it to the act of smoking in public. The endorsement of Ruth Hale, a known feminist, carried that cause's credibility. The phrase "torch of freedom" carries its own imagery of liberty; its documented source is Brill's remark as Bernays recorded it. - [Glittering generalities](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/glittering-generalities/): "freedom", "equality of the sexes" and "torch of freedom" stood in for any claim about the product. The telegram asks the reader to agree with a value, not to assess a cigarette. ![Lucky Strike advertisement, December 1929: a fist labelled American Intelligence breaks a chain under the headline An Ancient Prejudice Has Been Removed](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/images/torches-of-freedom-1929-lucky-strike-ad.png) *"An Ancient Prejudice Has Been Removed": a Lucky Strike advertisement in* Theatre Magazine*, December 1929 (vol. 49, p. 82), illustrated by Winsor McCay. A fist marked "American Intelligence" breaks a chain, and the copy says toasting "has destroyed that ancient prejudice against cigarette smoking by men and by women", ending "No Throat Irritation - No Cough." The same year as the march, the brand used the language of a broken taboo in its own signed advertising. Unlike the march, the ad carries the sponsor's name. Public domain (published in the US in 1929).* ## Then and now In March 2016 the U.S. Federal Trade Commission settled charges against the retailer Lord & Taylor. The FTC said the company paid 50 fashion "influencers" between $1,000 and $4,000 each, and gave each the same dress, to post Instagram photos of themselves wearing it, without disclosing the payment. The FTC charged that the posts were presented as the independent choices of impartial people when they were part of an advertising campaign. The settlement barred Lord & Taylor from presenting paid ads as coming from an independent source and required its influencers to disclose payment. The shared method is a sponsor arranging for apparently independent people to be seen using a product, with the sponsor out of view. The differences are real. In 2016 the FTC treated the omission as deceptive; the sources used here record no regulatory action over the 1929 event. The 1929 event reached readers through newspaper editors, who chose how to report it; the 2016 posts went straight to followers. The 1929 product was a cigarette; the 2016 product was a dress. The scale of the 1929 event was one afternoon and a few women; its reputation grew later, largely through Bernays's own retelling (Murphree 2015). The industry's later public-relations history is on this archive's record separately: [A Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/frank-statement-1954/) shows the 1954 industry response to cancer research, and [The tobacco industry's smoking-and-health doubt campaign, 1953 to 1998](https://propagandaarchive.org/case-studies/tobacco-doubt-campaign/) follows that thread. ## Positions on the record - **Bernays's stated position.** In *Biography of an Idea* (1965) he presents the march as a demonstration that "age-old customs, I learned, could be broken down by a dramatic appeal, disseminated by the network of media", and writes that "the taboo was not destroyed completely. But a beginning had been made, one I regret today." Secondary sources also report that in later life he said he would have refused the account had he known the health risks, and that he supported anti-smoking work. This page has not verified that second statement against a primary source. - **The women's-rights reading.** The telegram and Ruth Hale's endorsement framed public smoking as a claim to equal treatment, and some 1929 newspapers reported it in those terms (Murphree 2015). Amos and Haglund (2000) place the march within the longer history of cigarette marketing to women, in which smoking was linked with women's emancipation. - **The overstated-impact reading.** Murphree (2015) argues that the careful staging is accurately described, but that the idea that the press "fell for" the event in a significant way, and that it changed women's smoking by itself, is a myth that Bernays helped create. Topic (2021) examines how the *New York Times* covered the debate over women smoking from 1870 to 1929, before the march. - **The later health record.** The 1964 report of the U.S. Surgeon General's Advisory Committee concluded that cigarette smoking causes lung cancer in men. This page does not rule on what Bernays or Hill knew about health risks in 1929. - **This archive's reading.** **Documented** by the actor's own account and confirmed by later research: the event was organised for a cigarette company, the recruiting telegram went out in Bernays's secretary's name without the sponsor's, the phrase came from Brill as Bernays recorded it, and the press reported the march without naming the sponsor. **Not shown** by the sources used here: that this one event measurably raised smoking among women, and whether the marchers were paid. ## Same-method test The same score applies to any actor who assembles a crowd and presents it as spontaneous. Two documented cases from outside consumer marketing: ![Miners for Trump rally poster promoted by the Internet Research Agency, 2016](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/images/miners-for-trump-ira-2016.png) *['Miners for Trump' rally poster (Internet Research Agency)](https://propagandaarchive.org/collection/miners-for-trump-ira-2016/), a rally poster promoted in 2016 by the Internet Research Agency through accounts posing as American activists. Public domain (U.S. government work).* - **A Russian influence operation, 2016.** The Senate Intelligence Committee's report describes how the Internet Research Agency's "Heart of Texas" page called a rally to "stop the Islamization of Texas" at a Houston Islamic centre on 21 May 2016, while its "United Muslims of America" page called a counter-rally at the same time and place. The committee put the operation's cost at $200. Real Texans turned up on both sides without knowing who had called them. - **A U.S. military operation, 2003.** A U.S. Army study of the Iraq invasion, reported by the *Los Angeles Times* in July 2004, found that a Marine colonel decided to pull down the Saddam Hussein statue in Firdos Square on 9 April 2003. The newspaper reported, citing the study, that an Army psychological operations team "made it appear to be a spontaneous Iraqi undertaking." Iraqis did take part; the study's point was the staging of the scene. In each case the tag is [Astroturfing](https://propagandaarchive.org/techniques/astroturf/), whatever the cause, country or sector. ## How to spot it - Ask who called the gathering. A message sent in the name of a private person, with no organisation behind it, is a reason to look for the organiser. - Check whether a news report about a "spontaneous" gesture names anyone who benefits from it commercially or politically. - When a product is tied to a value word ("freedom", "equality"), separate the value from the claim about the product and ask whether any claim about the product remains. - Treat an organiser's later account of their own success as evidence of method, not of effect. Murphree's re-reading of the 1929 coverage shows how the two can differ. ## Images | Image | Source | Licence | | --- | --- | --- | | Mechanism diagram (above) | Drawn for FRAME from the sourced facts on this page (`make_diagrams.py`) | CC BY 4.0, FRAME | | Edward L. Bernays and Doris E. Fleischman (1923) | [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Edward_Bernays_and_Doris_E._Fleischman.jpg) | Public domain (PD-US-expired) | | Lucky Strike advertisement, *Theatre Magazine*, December 1929 | [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lucky_Strike_%27prejudice%27_ad_from_Theatre_Magazine,_December_1929.png) | Public domain (PD-US-expired) | | *Miners for Trump* rally poster (2016) | FRAME gallery, from Wikimedia Commons (Special Counsel's report, Vol. I, p. 31) | Public domain (U.S. government work) | ### Image gaps - **Photographs of the 31 March 1929 march.** Press photos exist and are widely reproduced, but no copy with a clear public-domain or open-licence record was found on Wikimedia Commons or loc.gov. US works published before 1931 are public domain, so **this gap can be filled** if a dated 1929 newspaper printing is located. - **The 1 April 1929 *New York Times* page.** Public domain in the US as a 1929 publication, but no scan was reachable from the environment used to build this page. **This gap can be filled.** - **Bernays's telegram and papers.** The Library of Congress holds Bernays's papers and photographs from about 1930, but lists their rights status as "not evaluated", so none is used here. ## Sources - Edward L. Bernays, *Biography of an Idea: Memoirs of Public Relations Counsel Edward L. Bernays* (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1965). Quoted passages as given in the [University of Ottawa exhibit "American Women in Tobacco Advertisements 1929-1939"](https://omeka.uottawa.ca/jmccutcheon/exhibits/show/american-women-in-tobacco-adve/torches-of-freedom-campaign). - Larry Tye, [*The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays and the Birth of Public Relations*](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780517704356) (New York: Crown, 1998). - Amanda Amos and Margaretha Haglund, ["From social taboo to 'torch of freedom': the marketing of cigarettes to women"](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1748294), *Tobacco Control* 9, no. 1 (2000): 3-8, [doi:10.1136/tc.9.1.3](https://doi.org/10.1136/tc.9.1.3). - Vanessa Murphree, ["Edward Bernays's 1929 'Torches of Freedom' March: Myths and Historical Significance"](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08821127.2015.1064681), *American Journalism* 32, no. 3 (2015): 258-281. See also her [2013 American Historical Association paper on the newspaper coverage](https://aha.confex.com/aha/2013/webprogram/Paper11811.html). - Martina Topic, ["An analysis of the smoking debate ahead of Bernays' 'Torches of Freedom' campaign through the lens of the New York Times coverage (1870-1929)"](https://eprints.leedsbeckett.ac.uk/id/eprint/8058/1/AnAnalysisOfTheSmokingDebateAheadOfBernaysTorchesOfFreedomCampaignThroughTheLensOfTheNewYorkTimesCoverageAM-TOPIC.pdf) (2021). - [Stanford Research into the Impact of Tobacco Advertising: "Instead of a Sweet" collection item](https://tobacco.stanford.edu/cigarette/img1093/). - [SAGE *Encyclopedia of Public Relations*: "Lucky Strike Green Campaign"](https://sk.sagepub.com/ency/edvol/publicrelations/chpt/lucky-strike-green-campaign). - [Washington Post obituary, 10 March 1995: "Public Relations Pioneer Edward L. Bernays Dies"](https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/1995/03/10/public-relations-pioneer-edward-l-bernays-dies/985793a8-4bb2-4a98-b54f-7efdf892f5f6/). - [FTC press release, 15 March 2016: Lord & Taylor settles FTC charges](https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2016/03/lord-taylor-settles-ftc-charges-it-deceived-consumers-through-paid-article-online-fashion-magazine); [FTC case page](https://www.ftc.gov/legal-library/browse/cases-proceedings/152-3181-c4576-lord-taylor-llc-matter). - [Dallas Morning News, 8 October 2019: Senate Intelligence report on the 2016 Houston rallies](https://www.dallasnews.com/news/politics/2019/10/08/russian-trolls-orchestrated-2016-clash-houston-islamic-center-senate-intel-report-says/); [Texas Tribune, 1 November 2017](https://www.texastribune.org/2017/11/01/russian-facebook-page-organized-protest-texas-different-russian-page-l/). - [NPR, 9 April 2008: the Firdos Square statue and the Army study first reported by the *Los Angeles Times*](https://npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89489923); [FAIR, *Extra!*, 2004](https://fair.org/extra/war8217s-iconic-image-a-psyops-creation/). - [NLM Profiles in Science: the 1964 Report on Smoking and Health](https://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/spotlight/nn/feature/smoking).