136 ChaPter 3
more profitably, to sell goods. He and his wife thus began doing work for a
large number of big companies, including the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, Procter
& Gamble, General Electric, General Motors, the United Fruit Company, Time
Magazine, and the CBS and NBC media networks, while also serving as the
personal publicists for media and political figures. Bernays’s efforts could be
ingenious.
One of his first clients was a hairnet company, Venida. After the Great War,
women began to wear their hair differently and quit wearing hairnets, causing
a big drop in sales for Venida. Bernays then convinced a labor “expert” to go
to labor commissioners all over America to make hairnets a public safety
issue—women would have to wear them for their own safety, so their hair
would not get caught in machinery, and for public hygiene, so hair would not
fall into food or other products. Venida rebounded. To promote Ivory Soap,
Bernays set up a national panel of artists to conduct soap-carving contests all
over the country. In general, advertising had to convince people that they had
a “need” for a particular product, so, using the type of psychological tech-
niques Bernays developed, they made people feel insecure—emphasizing body
odor or bad breath, for instance—or create new products and convince con-
sumer to buy them—like toothpaste, which replaced baking soda for dental
hygiene. For instance, in a well-known ad for Scot Tissue Towels, a sinister-
looking man, with a slight resemblance to Lenin, appeared with a text asking
“Is Your Washroom Breeding Bolsheviks?”—to make the point that disgrun-
tled workers, like those who did not have paper towels to use in a clean
bathroom, could cause labor trouble.
Bernays and others, like Donald Draper and the Mad Men of the 1950s and
1960s, were creating a cultural revolution. Celebrities like Babe Ruth received
large sums of money to advertise products, often food or cigarettes. In 1902
Uneeda Biscuits, owned by Nabisco, launched the first $1 million advertising
campaign; by 1914, American companies were spending $600 million on ads,
and by 1929 upwards of $3.5 billion, or about 3.5 percent of the Gross
National Product [GNP]—the market value of all the products and services
made in one year by the labor and property supplied by Americans—to push
their products. As noted above, Lucky Strikes implied that smoking its ciga-
rettes would make one sexually attractive. Perhaps in no area is the impact
of advertising as evident and strong as in the tobacco industry. Bernays
worked for Lucky Strike, owned by the American Tobacco Company, and