Propaganda. Edward Bernays

Propaganda - Edward Bernays


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IV.

      As propaganda for its author’s services, Propaganda was no doubt successful, adding luster to Bernays’s reputation in the business world, and thereby winning him new clients. As propaganda for reclaiming “propaganda,” on the other hand, this book did not succeed; nor could any book—or, for that matter, any other sort of propaganda—possibly have made that controversial word uncontroversial again. By 1928, the word’s troubling connotations had not faded: on the contrary. Throughout the decade there had been a gradual, disorienting revelation of just how systematically, and how ingeniously, the Allied governments had fooled the peoples of two great democracies, Great Britain and, in particular, the USA. Once the thrill of victory had faded, and the troops came home (if they came home at all) disfigured or disabled, and the reasons for the war were now less clear than they had seemed, the sordid details of the propaganda drive against “the Hun” began to circulate, spread far and wide in a belated flood of memoirs, reminiscences, published diaries, after-dinner speeches and historical accounts.

      At first, the Allies’ fatal trickery was reported, and deplored, only in such liberal journals as the New Republic. By mid-decade, the dispiriting truth about the wartime propaganda was the subject of several highly damning exposés in the Saturday Evening Post, a rightist organ widely read. Throughout the press, “propaganda” was now commonly condemned; and, for the most part, not as some dark alien force, unleashed upon our virgin culture by the Prussians and/or Reds, but—far worse—by propagandists of our own. Now it came to light (and at times the charges were hysterically exaggerated) that various U.S. interests had colluded to mislead the people into a gratuitous slaughter overseas: pro-British economic interests (like the House of Morgan), weapons manufacturers and anti-leftist groups, as well as all those common hucksters drawn into the service of the government. From the Twenties up until the start of World War II, the word was even more pejorative, as it suggested not just lying, but betrayal.

      Mark Crispin Miller

      New York City

      July 2004

       NOTES


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