What I learned from reading The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays and the Birth of Public Relations by Larry Tye.
Edward Bernays almost single handedly fashioned the craft that has come to be called public relations.
He is widely recognized as the man who fathered the science of spin.
Bernays was the man who got women to smoke cigarettes and who put bacon and eggs on the breakfast table, books in bookshelves, and Calvin Coolidge back in the White House.
Although most Americans had never heard of Edward Bernays, he nonetheless had a profound impact on everything from the products they purchased to the places they visited to the foods they ate for breakfast.
In doing so, Bernays demonstrated to an entire generation of PR men and women the enormous power that lay within their grasp.
If housewives could be guided in their selection of soap, so could husbands in their choice of a car.
And voters in their selection of candidates and candidates in their political posturing.
Indeed, the very substance of american thought was mere clay to be molded by the savvy public relations practitioner.
The techniques he developed fast became staples of political campaigns and image making in general.
That is why it's essential to understand Edward Bernays.
This book uses Bernays life as a prism to understand the evolution of the craft of public relations and how it came to play such a critical and sometimes insidious role in american life.
He made that exploration possible and actually encouraged it by leaving to the Library of Congress more than 800 boxes of personal and professional papers that detailed cases he'd worked on and tactics and strategies that he employed.
Over a career that spanned eight decades, Bernay saved every scrap of paper he sent out or took in and provided them to be made public after his death.
In doing so, he lets us see just how policies were made and how in many cases they were founded on deception.
This volume seeks to unmask the man himself.
Bernays was able to accomplish all he did in part because of dogged determination combined with an inventiveness that set him apart from his contemporaries and make his ideas as relevant in the 1990s when there's 125,000 PR practitioners in America as they were in the 1920s when he and a handful of others got things going.
His spirit was electric and his enthusiasm was so infectious that many who had heard a single speech decades before or studied with him for one semester could recite his every phrase years later.
Bernays was also a bundle of contradictions.
He rode roughshod over his young staffers even as he preached the virtues of tolerance and democracy.
He promoted cigarettes which he suspected were deadly.