women to buy and smoke cigarettes through logical arguments, Bernays saw
it as an emotional and cultural issue. If he wanted women to smoke, then he
had to appeal not to their thoughts but to their values. He needed to appeal to
women’s identities.
To accomplish this, Bernays hired a group of women and got them into
the Easter Sunday Parade in New York City. Today, big holiday parades are
cheesy things you let drone on over the television while you fall asleep on the
couch. But back in those days, parades were big social events, kind of like the
Super Bowl or something.
As Bernays planned it, at the appropriate moment, these women would all
stop and light up cigarettes at the same time. He hired photographers to take
flattering photos of the smoking women, which he then passed out to all the
major national newspapers. He told the reporters that these ladies were not
just lighting cigarettes, they were lighting “torches of freedom,”
demonstrating their ability to assert their independence and be their own
women.
It was all #FakeNews, of course, but Bernays staged it as a political
protest. He knew this would trigger the appropriate emotions in women across
the country. Feminists had won women the right to vote only nine years
earlier. Women were now working outside the home and becoming more
integral to the country’s economic life. They were asserting themselves by
cutting their hair short and wearing racier clothing. This generation of women
saw themselves as the first generation that could behave independently of a
man. And many of them felt very strongly about this. If Bernays could just
hitch his “smoking equals freedom” message onto the women’s liberation
movement . . . well, tobacco sales would double and he’d be a rich man.
It worked. Women started smoking, and ever since, we’ve had equal-
opportunity lung cancer.
Bernays went on to pull off these kinds of cultural coups regularly
throughout the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s. He completely revolutionized the
marketing industry and invented the field of public relations in the process.
Paying sexy celebrities to use your product? That was Bernays’s idea.
Creating fake news articles that are actually subtle advertisements for a
company? All him. Staging controversial public events as a means to draw
attention and notoriety for a client? Bernays. Pretty much every form of
marketing and publicity we’re subjected to today began with Bernays.
But here’s something else interesting about Bernays: he was Sigmund
Freud’s nephew.
Freud was infamous because he was the first modern thinker to argue that