BOOKS

...The P.R...

...For a book that bills itself a "social history of spin," PR...

...Bernays's theory was designed to create an equal and opposite corporate myth— that public opinion could be manufactured for a price, bought and sold like any other commodity...

...firms have found it marvelouslv useful over the years as a tool for marketing their services to anxious corporate executives...

...might have included, for example, the story of Elizabeth Tyler and Edward Young Clark ("Atlanta's P.T...

...exploited first by progressive reformers, then by corporate and government propagandists with the goal of managing an increasingly restive public...

...It is surprising, for example, that PR...

...the P.R...

...Aside from Bernays, leading figures like Hill & Knowlton or Carl Byoir & Associates make only fleeting appearances...

...The fifty pages or so that Ewen devotes to an idealized portrait of Franklin Delano Roosevelt could have been better spent delving into some of the fascinating details of the P.R...

...Ivv Lee's German involvement is of particular importance for a history of P.R...

...And when company thugs killed fourteen striking workers at the infamous Ludlow Massacre, Lee "frankly and openly" circulated the false claim that the workers had died in a self-inflicted accident...

...The book literally begins and ends with Bernays, opening with Ewen's first-person and rather star-struck account of the day he actually met the man, and concluding with Bernays's death at the age of 103 "as this book neared completion...

...textbooks: "All our work is done in the open...

...The people who do receive sustained treatment are bridge figures—people from outside the P.R...

...Stories like this would have helped liven up the book, which will undoubtedly interest academics but will have a hard time appealing to a broader audience...

...industry to manipulate the public...

...by Sheldon Rampton Stuart Ewen, a professor of media studies and chair of the Department of Communications at Hunter College in New York, has earned a deserved reputation as one of the country's most astute leftist chroniclers of advertising and the mass media...

...Ewen gives short shrift to Lee, and devotes a good portion of PR...

...Bernavs outlived Lee and...

...Barnum...

...This assertion is rarely aired in public, but P.R...

...In practice...

...Ewen notes in passing that Standard and Farben had "a series of patent and process-exchange agreements" that "persisted even after the United States had entered the war...

...Somewhere around page 215, PR...

...industry...

...Lee also recommended interpreting the Nazi rearmament program as a plea for "equality of rights" among nations and an effort at "preventing for all time the return of the Communist peril...

...industry whose efforts to mold public opinion inspired or goaded corporate America to gin up its own propaganda mills...

...efforts to mobilize the public in support of World War I. Creel's Committee on Public Information served as a training ground for many of the P.R...

...in keeping with his aspiration to serve as a role model for the profession, stole the honor through decades of incessant self-promotion...

...Colombia, Guatemala, Kuwait, and Nigeria...

...although Ivy Lee properly deserves the title...

...Disclosure of his work prompted a 1934 story in the New York Mirror headlined rockefeller aide Nazi mastermind, and Lee's obituary in the Jewish Daily Forward described him as "an agent of the Nazi government"—a judgment later echoed by the Nuremberg Tribunal...

...Bernays was shunned by his peers in part because they considered him a pushy braggart and in part because his books contributed to P.R.'s bad reputation...

...makes no mention of Ivy Lee's simultaneous P.R...

...Ewen argues, was "defined increasingly by its vulnerable condition of isolation and spectatorship...

...The maker of Lucky brand cigarettes, for example, fired him after he spent $30,000 organizing a "green fashions ball" in the hope that it would stimulate women across the country to color-coordinate with Lucky's green packaging...

...industry...

...He fails, however, to mention that Bernays was a controversial and frequently disliked figure within the P.R...

...We aim to supply news...

...detours into a long discourse on the New Deal that reads more like hagiography than historiography...

...In between, Ewen traces an intellectual thread beginning with William James and the American tradition of philosophical pragmatism, winding through the progressive era and its belief in engineered solutions to social problems, and incorporating French social philosopher Gustave Le Bon's fear that "the divine right of the masses is about to replace the divine right of kings...

...From his leftist perspective, Ewen easily debunks Lee's mythology, and he properly deplores the elitism in Bernays...

...His mother was Freud's sister...

...Readers of mass-circulation newspapers and magazines were witnesses to society, no longer within the public square, but from the sanctuary of their parlors...

...Farben, during the period of Nazi ascendancy—a particularly puzzling omission in light of the book's claim that it is "based on unexplored and often confidential sources from . . . Standard Oil and other major institutions...

...This is scary stuff, and required reading if you want to understand what motivates U.S...

...offers an incomplete "social history of spin," in part because it ends around the year 1950, and in part because it focuses more on the theory of P.R...

...Finally, the book ignores another fascinating aspect of the "social history" of P.R.—its origins in the rough-and-tumble, Barnum-and-Bailey world of circus hawkers and publicists...

...businesses to spend more than $10 billion a year on P.R...

...of course, calculated bullshit...

...FARA is widely flouted, but it offers an interesting example of a strategy that uses democratic institutions to limit the ability of the P.R...

...In books entitled Crystallizing Public Opinion, The Engineering of Consent, and Propaganda, Bernays defined public relations as an "applied social science" that society's masters could use to manage the human herd...

...But it should be read for what it is—marketing hype, using reverent technocratic imagery to package Bernays's services to his corporate clients as the latest shiny new must-have gizmo...

...T]heory and practice have combined with sufficient success to permit us to know that in certain cases we can effect some change in public opinion with a fair degree of accuracy by operating a certain mechanism, just as the motorist can regulate the speed of his car by manipulating the flow of gasoline...

...They come in different flavors, but can be boiled down into two mutually contradictory propositions—one designed for public consumption, the other for presentation to the industry's private clients: • The public rationale: "We always tell our clients that honesty is the best policy," a theme most famously articulated by early P.R...

...than its actual practice...

...frequently quoted in P.R...

...because it foreshadows the subsequent growth of a dictators' lobby in Washington, which hustles on behalf of gross human-rights violators such as Indonesia...

...industry is to construct ideologies, it should come as no surprise that the industry has produced an unusually rich catalogue of self-serving rationalizations...

...In fact...

...industry has struggled mightily to overcome its unsavory beginning, but even today the industry is rife with practitioners who brag among themselves about exploits that would make most people blush with shame...

...Its chief theoretician was P.R...

...industry...

...work for Standard Oil and for the notorious German chemical cartel, I.G...

...whose Southern Publicity Association launched the "disgraceful albeit successful public-relations campaign that gave birth to the modern Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s," according to Scott Cutlip, who devotes a chapter to the topic in The Unseen Power, his 1994 history of the P.R...

...Ewen is at his best in a fascinating chapter he devotes to George Creel, a reform-minded progressive who later directed U.S...

...which in theory is supposed to provide a mechanism for identifying propagandists engaged in work for foreign countries on U.S...

...Lee's work included meeting with Hitler himself, and advising Farben to arrange prominent media placement for German General Joaquim von Ribben-trop...

...These include Edward Bellamy, Walter Lippmann, John Dewey, Jacob Riis, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt...

...A Social History of Spin is his most ambitious undertaking...

...offers surprisingly few details about the other personalities and inner workings of the P.R...

...counselor Edward Bernays, widely regarded today as "the father of public relations...

...Unfortunately, Ewen's discussion of these bridge figures rambles...

...If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind," he argued, it is possible to "control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing it...

...Channels of Desire and Captains of Consciousness, are classics in the field...

...The private pitch: "Public opinion must be scientifically engineered from above in order to control the rabble...

...industry's early leaders, perfecting some of the techniques of mass manipulation that are commonplace today—mass distribution of news releases, sentimental appeals through advertising and motion pictures, targeted recruitment of local "opinion leaders...

...practitioner Ivy Lee in a 1906 "statement of principles...

...Bernays combined Le Bon's fear of the masses with the theories of Freud and others regarding the subconscious, irrational motivations of human behavior...

...A social history that explored this face of P.R...

...to tracing the theoretical lineage of Bernays's more Machiavellian position...

...industry's own history...

...his father was Freud's wife's brother...

...Unfortunately, PR...

...and even some of the tricks employed today in corporate America's "as-troturf" version of so-called grassroots organizing...

...Its ability to dominate the public agenda stems more from its boundless corporate resources than from the mechanistic certainty of its methods...

...His hooks...

...describes the rise of the mass media and its role in creating a "virtual public" that...

...is natural, honorable, and honest—part of the "two-way-street" process of democratic communications between businesses and their "publics...

...These newspapers and magazines became "modern pipelines of persuasion...

...is as notable for its failures as for its successes...

...These influences culminate with Bernays, who happened to be a double nephew of Sigmund Freud...

...In fact, P.R...

...Lee's "statement of principles" was designed to create the public myth that P.R...

...Moreover, the scandal surrounding Lee's activities led Congress to pass the Foreign Agents Registration Act...

...Our plan is, frankly and openly, on behalf of business concerns and public institutions, to supply the press and the public of the United States prompt and accurate information concerning subjects which it is of value and interest to the public to know about...

...Since the purpose of Sheldon Rampton is the co-author, with John Stauber, of "Toxic Sludge Is Good for You: Lies, Damn Lies, and the Public Relations Industry...

...In addition, his theories of mass psychology sometimes inspired bizarre schemes that led clients to write him off as a harebrained eccentric...

...This brief comment doesn't tell the best part of the story...

...soil...

...The book chronicles the ideologies the industry itself has put forward to describe its role in the world...

...None of this negates the fact that Bernays was a significant contributor to the evolution of P.R., but a more balanced appraisal would have shown the limitations of his notion that corporations can "scientifically" manipulate the public...

...These pious sentiments are...

...In the service of his clients, which included the Rockefeller empire, Lee didn't hesitate to label Mother Jones "a prostitute and the keeper of a house of prostitution...