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Title: Propaganda
Author: Edward L. Bernays
Release date: May 8, 2026 [eBook #78634]
Language: English
Original publication: New York, NY: Horace Liveright, Inc, 1928
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78634
Credits: Susan E., MWS and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PROPAGANDA ***
Propaganda
_BOOKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR_
CRYSTALLIZING PUBLIC OPINION
AN OUTLINE OF CAREERS
THE BROADWAY ANTHOLOGY (CO-AUTHOR)
PROPAGANDA
_By_
EDWARD L. BERNAYS
[Illustration]
_New York_
HORACE LIVERIGHT
1928
_Copyright · 1928 · by_
HORACE LIVERIGHT · INC
_Printed in the United States_
[Illustration]
_To My Wife_
DORIS E. FLEISCHMAN
Some of the ideas and some of the material in this book have been used
in articles written for _The Bookman_, _The Delineator_, _Advertising
and Selling_, _The Independent_, _The American Journal of Sociology_,
and other journals, to whom the author makes grateful acknowledgment.
CONTENTS
I. ORGANIZING CHAOS 9
II. THE NEW PROPAGANDA 19
III. THE NEW PROPAGANDISTS 32
IV. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PUBLIC RELATIONS 47
V. BUSINESS AND THE PUBLIC 62
VI. PROPAGANDA AND POLITICAL LEADERSHIP 92
VII. WOMEN’S ACTIVITIES AND PROPAGANDA 115
VIII. PROPAGANDA FOR EDUCATION 121
IX. PROPAGANDA IN SOCIAL SERVICE 135
X. ART AND SCIENCE 141
XI. THE MECHANICS OF PROPAGANDA 150
CHAPTER I
ORGANIZING CHAOS
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and
opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.
Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an
invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.
We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas
suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical
result of the way our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of
human beings must coöperate in this manner if they are to live together
as a smoothly functioning society.
Our invisible governors are, in many cases, unaware of the identity of
their fellow members in the inner cabinet.
They govern us by their qualities of natural leadership, their ability
to supply needed ideas and by their key position in the social
structure. Whatever attitude one chooses to take toward this condition,
it remains a fact that in almost every act of our daily lives, whether
in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our
ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number
of persons—a trifling fraction of our hundred and twenty million—who
understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It
is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness
old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world.
It is not usually realized how necessary these invisible governors
are to the orderly functioning of our group life. In theory, every
citizen may vote for whom he pleases. Our Constitution does not
envisage political parties as part of the mechanism of government,
and its framers seem not to have pictured to themselves the existence
in our national politics of anything like the modern political
machine. But the American voters soon found that without organization
and direction their individual votes, cast, perhaps, for dozens or
hundreds of candidates, would produce nothing but confusion. Invisible
government, in the shape of rudimentary political parties, arose almost
overnight. Ever since then we have agreed, for the sake of simplicity
and practicality, that party machines should narrow down the field of
choice to two candidates, or at most three or four.
In theory, every citizen makes up his mind on public questions and
matters of private conduct. In practice, if all men had to study
for themselves the abstruse economic, political, and ethical data
involved in every question, they would find it impossible to come
to a conclusion about anything. We have voluntarily agreed to let an
invisible government sift the data and high-spot the outstanding issues
so that our field of choice shall be narrowed to practical proportions.
From our leaders and the media they use to reach the public, we
accept the evidence and the demarcation of issues bearing upon public
questions; from some ethical teacher, be it a minister, a favorite
essayist, or merely prevailing opinion, we accept a standardized code
of social conduct to which we conform most of the time.
In theory, everybody buys the best and cheapest commodities offered
him on the market. In practice, if every one went around pricing, and
chemically testing before purchasing, the dozens of soaps or fabrics
or brands of bread which are for sale, economic life would become
hopelessly jammed. To avoid such confusion, society consents to have
its choice narrowed to ideas and objects brought to its attention
through propaganda of all kinds. There is consequently a vast and
continuous effort going on to capture our minds in the interest of some
policy or commodity or idea.
It might be better to have, instead of propaganda and special pleading,
committees of wise men who would choose our rulers, dictate our
conduct, private and public, and decide upon the best types of clothes
for us to wear and the best kinds of food for us to eat. But we have
chosen the opposite method, that of open competition. We must find a
way to make free competition function with reasonable smoothness. To
achieve this society has consented to permit free competition to be
organized by leadership and propaganda.
Some of the phenomena of this process are criticized—the manipulation
of news, the inflation of personality, and the general ballyhoo by
which politicians and commercial products and social ideas are brought
to the consciousness of the masses. The instruments by which public
opinion is organized and focused may be misused. But such organization
and focusing are necessary to orderly life.
As civilization has become more complex, and as the need for invisible
government has been increasingly demonstrated, the technical means have
been invented and developed by which opinion may be regimented.
With the printing press and the newspaper, the railroad, the telephone,
telegraph, radio and airplanes, ideas can be spread rapidly and even
instantaneously over the whole of America.
H. G. Wells senses the vast potentialities of these inventions when he
writes in the New York _Times_:
“Modern means of communication—the power afforded by print, telephone,
wireless and so forth, of rapidly putting through directive strategic
or technical conceptions to a great number of coöperating centers,
of getting quick replies and effective discussion—have opened up a
new world of political processes. Ideas and phrases can now be given
an effectiveness greater than the effectiveness of any personality
and stronger than any sectional interest. The common design can be
documented and sustained against perversion and betrayal. It can be
elaborated and developed steadily and widely without personal, local
and sectional misunderstanding.”
What Mr. Wells says of political processes is equally true of
commercial and social processes and all manifestations of mass
activity. The groupings and affiliations of society to-day are
no longer subject to “local and sectional” limitations. When the
Constitution was adopted, the unit of organization was the village
community, which produced the greater part of its own necessary
commodities and generated its group ideas and opinions by personal
contact and discussion directly among its citizens. But to-day, because
ideas can be instantaneously transmitted to any distance and to any
number of people, this geographical integration has been supplemented
by many other kinds of grouping, so that persons having the same ideas
and interests may be associated and regimented for common action even
though they live thousands of miles apart.
It is extremely difficult to realize how many and diverse are these
cleavages in our society. They may be social, political, economic,
racial, religious or ethical, with hundreds of subdivisions of each.
In the World Almanac, for example, the following groups are listed
under the A’s:
The League to Abolish Capital Punishment; Association to Abolish
War; American Institute of Accountants; Actors’ Equity Association;
Actuarial Association of America; International Advertising
Association; National Aeronautic Association; Albany Institute of
History and Art; Amen Corner; American Academy in Rome; American
Antiquarian Society; League for American Citizenship; American
Federation of Labor; Amorc (Rosicrucian Order); Andiron Club;
American-Irish Historical Association; Anti-Cigarette League;
Anti-Profanity League; Archeological Association of America; National
Archery Association; Arion Singing Society; American Astronomical
Association; Ayrshire Breeders’ Association; Aztec Club of 1847. There
are many more under the “A” section of this very limited list.
The American Newspaper Annual and Directory for 1928 lists 22,128
periodical publications in America. I have selected at random the N’s
published in Chicago. They are:
Narod (Bohemian daily newspaper); Narod-Polski (Polish monthly);
N.A.R.D. (pharmaceutical); National Corporation Reporter; National
Culinary Progress (for hotel chefs); National Dog Journal; National
Drug Clerk; National Engineer; National Grocer; National Hotel
Reporter; National Income Tax Magazine; National Jeweler; National
Journal of Chiropractic; National Live Stock Producer; National Miller;
National Nut News; National Poultry, Butter and Egg Bulletin; National
Provisioner (for meat packers); National Real Estate Journal; National
Retail Clothier; National Retail Lumber Dealer; National Safety News;
National Spiritualist; National Underwriter; The Nation’s Health;
Naujienos (Lithuanian daily newspaper); New Comer (Republican weekly
for Italians); Daily News; The New World (Catholic weekly); North
American Banker; North American Veterinarian.
The circulation of some of these publications is astonishing. The
National Live Stock Producer has a sworn circulation of 155,978; The
National Engineer, of 20,328; The New World, an estimated circulation
of 67,000. The greater number of the periodicals listed—chosen at
random from among 22,128—have a circulation in excess of 10,000.
The diversity of these publications is evident at a glance. Yet they
can only faintly suggest the multitude of cleavages which exist in
our society, and along which flow information and opinion carrying
authority to the individual groups.
Here are the conventions scheduled for Cleveland, Ohio, recorded in
a single recent issue of “World Convention Dates”—a fraction of the
5,500 conventions and rallies scheduled.
The Employing Photo-Engravers’ Association of America; The Outdoor
Writers’ Association; the Knights of St. John; the Walther League;
The National Knitted Outerwear Association; The Knights of St.
Joseph; The Royal Order of Sphinx; The Mortgage Bankers’ Association;
The International Association of Public Employment Officials; The
Kiwanis Clubs of Ohio; The American Photo-Engravers’ Association; The
Cleveland Auto Manufacturers Show; The American Society of Heating and
Ventilating Engineers.
Other conventions to be held in 1928 were those of:
The Association of Limb Manufacturers’ Associations; The National
Circus Fans’ Association of America; The American Naturopathic
Association; The American Trap Shooting Association; The Texas Folklore
Association; The Hotel Greeters; The Fox Breeders’ Association; The
Insecticide and Disinfectant Association; The National Association of
Egg Case and Egg Case Filler Manufacturers; The American Bottlers of
Carbonated Beverages; and The National Pickle Packers’ Association, not
to mention the Terrapin Derby—most of them with banquets and orations
attached.
If all these thousands of formal organizations and institutions
could be listed (and no complete list has ever been made), they
would still represent but a part of those existing less formally but
leading vigorous lives. Ideas are sifted and opinions stereotyped in
the neighborhood bridge club. Leaders assert their authority through
community drives and amateur theatricals. Thousands of women may
unconsciously belong to a sorority which follows the fashions set by a
single society leader.
“Life” satirically expresses this idea in the reply which it represents
an American as giving to the Britisher who praises this country for
having no upper and lower classes or castes:
“Yeah, all we have is the Four Hundred, the White-Collar Men,
Bootleggers, Wall Street Barons, Criminals, the D.A.R., the K.K.K.,
the Colonial Dames, the Masons, Kiwanis and Rotarians, the K. of C.,
the Elks, the Censors, the Cognoscenti, the Morons, Heroes like Lindy,
the W.C.T.U., Politicians, Menckenites, the Booboisie, Immigrants,
Broadcasters, and—the Rich and Poor.”
Yet it must be remembered that these thousands of groups interlace.
John Jones, besides being a Rotarian, is member of a church, of a
fraternal order, of a political party, of a charitable organization, of
a professional association, of a local chamber of commerce, of a league
for or against prohibition or of a society for or against lowering
the tariff, and of a golf club. The opinions which he receives as a
Rotarian, he will tend to disseminate in the other groups in which he
may have influence.
This invisible, intertwining structure of groupings and associations
is the mechanism by which democracy has organized its group mind and
simplified its mass thinking. To deplore the existence of such a
mechanism is to ask for a society such as never was and never will
be. To admit that it exists, but expect that it shall not be used, is
unreasonable.
Emil Ludwig represents Napoleon as “ever on the watch for indications
of public opinion; always listening to the voice of the people, a
voice which defies calculation. ‘Do you know,’ he said in those days,
‘what amazes me more than all else? The impotence of force to organize
anything.’”
It is the purpose of this book to explain the structure of the
mechanism which controls the public mind, and to tell how it is
manipulated by the special pleader who seeks to create public
acceptance for a particular idea or commodity. It will attempt at the
same time to find the due place in the modern democratic scheme for
this new propaganda and to suggest its gradually evolving code of
ethics and practice.
CHAPTER II
THE NEW PROPAGANDA
In the days when kings were kings, Louis XIV made his modest remark,
“L’Etat c’est moi.” He was nearly right.
But times have changed. The steam engine, the multiple press, and the
public school, that trio of the industrial revolution, have taken the
power away from kings and given it to the people. The people actually
gained power which the king lost. For economic power tends to draw
after it political power; and the history of the industrial revolution
shows how that power passed from the king and the aristocracy to the
bourgeoisie. Universal suffrage and universal schooling reënforced this
tendency, and at last even the bourgeoisie stood in fear of the common
people. For the masses promised to become king.
To-day, however, a reaction has set in. The minority has discovered a
powerful help in influencing majorities. It has been found possible
so to mold the mind of the masses that they will throw their newly
gained strength in the desired direction. In the present structure of
society, this practice is inevitable. Whatever of social importance is
done to-day, whether in politics, finance, manufacture, agriculture,
charity, education, or other fields, must be done with the help of
propaganda. Propaganda is the executive arm of the invisible government.
Universal literacy was supposed to educate the common man to control
his environment. Once he could read and write he would have a mind
fit to rule. So ran the democratic doctrine. But instead of a mind,
universal literacy has given him rubber stamps, rubber stamps inked
with advertising slogans, with editorials, with published scientific
data, with the trivialities of the tabloids and the platitudes of
history, but quite innocent of original thought. Each man’s rubber
stamps are the duplicates of millions of others, so that when those
millions are exposed to the same stimuli, all receive identical
imprints. It may seem an exaggeration to say that the American public
gets most of its ideas in this wholesale fashion. The mechanism by
which ideas are disseminated on a large scale is propaganda, in the
broad sense of an organized effort to spread a particular belief or
doctrine.
I am aware that the word “propaganda” carries to many minds an
unpleasant connotation. Yet whether, in any instance, propaganda
is good or bad depends upon the merit of the cause urged, and the
correctness of the information published.
In itself, the word “propaganda” has certain technical meanings
which, like most things in this world, are “neither good nor bad but
custom makes them so.” I find the word defined in Funk and Wagnalls’
Dictionary in four ways:
“1. A society of cardinals, the overseers of foreign missions; also the
College of the Propaganda at Rome founded by Pope Urban VIII in 1627
for the education of missionary priests; Sacred College _de Propaganda
Fide_.
“2. Hence, any institution or scheme for propagating a doctrine or
system.
“3. Effort directed systematically toward the gaining of public support
for an opinion or a course of action.
“4. The principles advanced by a propaganda.”
The _Scientific American_, in a recent issue, pleads for the
restoration to respectable usage of that “fine old word ‘propaganda.’”
“There is no word in the English language,” it says, “whose meaning has
been so sadly distorted as the word ‘propaganda.’ The change took place
mainly during the late war when the term took on a decidedly sinister
complexion.
“If you turn to the Standard Dictionary, you will find that the word
was applied to a congregation or society of cardinals for the care and
oversight of foreign missions which was instituted at Rome in the year
1627. It was applied also to the College of the Propaganda at Rome that
was founded by Pope Urban VIII, for the education of the missionary
priests. Hence, in later years the word came to be applied to any
institution or scheme for propagating a doctrine or system.
“Judged by this definition, we can see that in its true sense
propaganda is a perfectly legitimate form of human activity. Any
society, whether it be social, religious or political, which is
possessed of certain beliefs, and sets out to make them known, either
by the spoken or written words, is practicing propaganda.
“Truth is mighty and must prevail, and if any body of men believe that
they have discovered a valuable truth, it is not merely their privilege
but their duty to disseminate that truth. If they realize, as they
quickly must, that this spreading of the truth can be done upon a
large scale and effectively only by organized effort, they will make
use of the press and the platform as the best means to give it wide
circulation. Propaganda becomes vicious and reprehensive only when its
authors consciously and deliberately disseminate what they know to be
lies, or when they aim at effects which they know to be prejudicial to
the common good.
“‘Propaganda’ in its proper meaning is a perfectly wholesome word,
of honest parentage, and with an honorable history. The fact that it
should to-day be carrying a sinister meaning merely shows how much of
the child remains in the average adult. A group of citizens writes
and talks in favor of a certain course of action in some debatable
question, believing that it is promoting the best interest of the
community. Propaganda? Not a bit of it. Just a plain forceful statement
of truth. But let another group of citizens express opposing views, and
they are promptly labeled with the sinister name of propaganda....
“‘What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander,’ says a wise
old proverb. Let us make haste to put this fine old word back where
it belongs, and restore its dignified significance for the use of our
children and our children’s children.”
The extent to which propaganda shapes the progress of affairs about
us may surprise even well informed persons. Nevertheless, it is only
necessary to look under the surface of the newspaper for a hint as
to propaganda’s authority over public opinion. Page one of the New
York _Times_ on the day these paragraphs are written contains eight
important news stories. Four of them, or one-half, are propaganda. The
casual reader accepts them as accounts of spontaneous happenings. But
are they? Here are the headlines which announce them: “TWELVE NATIONS
WARN CHINA REAL REFORM MUST COME BEFORE THEY GIVE RELIEF,” “PRITCHETT
REPORTS ZIONISM WILL FAIL,” “REALTY MEN DEMAND A TRANSIT INQUIRY,” and
“OUR LIVING STANDARD HIGHEST IN HISTORY, SAYS HOOVER REPORT.”
Take them in order: the article on China explains the joint report
of the Commission on Extraterritoriality in China, presenting an
exposition of the Powers’ Stand in the Chinese muddle. What it says
is less important than what it is. It was “made public by the State
Department to-day” with the purpose of presenting to the American
public a picture of the State Department’s position. Its source gives
it authority, and the American public tends to accept and support the
State Department view.
The report of Dr. Pritchett, a trustee of the Carnegie Foundation for
International Peace, is an attempt to find the facts about this Jewish
colony in the midst of a restless Arab world. When Dr. Pritchett’s
survey convinced him that in the long run Zionism would “bring more
bitterness and more unhappiness both for the Jew and for the Arab,”
this point of view was broadcast with all the authority of the Carnegie
Foundation, so that the public would hear and believe. The statement
by the president of the Real Estate Board of New York, and Secretary
Hoover’s report, are similar attempts to influence the public toward an
opinion.
These examples are not given to create the impression that there
is anything sinister about propaganda. They are set down rather to
illustrate how conscious direction is given to events, and how the
men behind these events influence public opinion. As such they are
examples of modern propaganda. At this point we may attempt to define
propaganda.
Modern propaganda is a consistent, enduring effort to create or shape
events to influence the relations of the public to an enterprise, idea
or group.
This practice of creating circumstances and of creating pictures
in the minds of millions of persons is very common. Virtually no
important undertaking is now carried on without it, whether that
enterprise be building a cathedral, endowing a university, marketing a
moving picture, floating a large bond issue, or electing a president.
Sometimes the effect on the public is created by a professional
propagandist, sometimes by an amateur deputed for the job. The
important thing is that it is universal and continuous; and in its sum
total it is regimenting the public mind every bit as much as an army
regiments the bodies of its soldiers.
So vast are the numbers of minds which can be regimented, and so
tenacious are they when regimented, that a group at times offers an
irresistible pressure before which legislators, editors, and teachers
are helpless. The group will cling to its stereotype, as Walter
Lippmann calls it, making of those supposedly powerful beings, the
leaders of public opinion, mere bits of driftwood in the surf. When an
Imperial Wizard, sensing what is perhaps hunger for an ideal, offers
a picture of a nation all Nordic and nationalistic, the common man of
the older American stock, feeling himself elbowed out of his rightful
position and prosperity by the newer immigrant stocks, grasps the
picture which fits in so neatly with his prejudices, and makes it his
own. He buys the sheet and pillow-case costume, and bands with his
fellows by the thousand into a huge group powerful enough to swing
state elections and to throw a ponderous monkey wrench into a national
convention.
In our present social organization approval of the public is essential
to any large undertaking. Hence a laudable movement may be lost unless
it impresses itself on the public mind. Charity, as well as business,
and politics and literature, for that matter, have had to adopt
propaganda, for the public must be regimented into giving money just
as it must be regimented into tuberculosis prophylaxis. The Near East
Relief, the Association for the Improvement of the Condition of the
Poor of New York, and all the rest, have to work on public opinion just
as though they had tubes of tooth paste to sell. We are proud of our
diminishing infant death rate—and that too is the work of propaganda.
Propaganda does exist on all sides of us, and it does change our
mental pictures of the world. Even if this be unduly pessimistic—and
that remains to be proved—the opinion reflects a tendency that is
undoubtedly real. In fact, its use is growing as its efficiency in
gaining public support is recognized.
This then, evidently indicates the fact that any one with sufficient
influence can lead sections of the public at least for a time and for
a given purpose. Formerly the rulers were the leaders. They laid out
the course of history, by the simple process of doing what they wanted.
And if nowadays the successors of the rulers, those whose position
or ability gives them power, can no longer do what they want without
the approval of the masses, they find in propaganda a tool which is
increasingly powerful in gaining that approval. Therefore, propaganda
is here to stay.
It was, of course, the astounding success of propaganda during the
war that opened the eyes of the intelligent few in all departments
of life to the possibilities of regimenting the public mind. The
American government and numerous patriotic agencies developed a
technique which, to most persons accustomed to bidding for public
acceptance, was new. They not only appealed to the individual by
means of every approach—visual, graphic, and auditory—to support
the national endeavor, but they also secured the coöperation of the
key men in every group—persons whose mere word carried authority to
hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousands of followers. They thus
automatically gained the support of fraternal, religious, commercial,
patriotic, social and local groups whose members took their opinions
from their accustomed leaders and spokesmen, or from the periodical
publications which they were accustomed to read and believe. At the
same time, the manipulators of patriotic opinion made use of the
mental clichés and the emotional habits of the public to produce mass
reactions against the alleged atrocities, the terror and the tyranny of
the enemy. It was only natural, after the war ended, that intelligent
persons should ask themselves whether it was not possible to apply a
similar technique to the problems of peace.
As a matter of fact, the practice of propaganda since the war has
assumed very different forms from those prevalent twenty years ago.
This new technique may fairly be called the new propaganda.
It takes account not merely of the individual, nor even of the mass
mind alone, but also and especially of the anatomy of society, with its
interlocking group formations and loyalties. It sees the individual not
only as a cell in the social organism but as a cell organized into the
social unit. Touch a nerve at a sensitive spot and you get an automatic
response from certain specific members of the organism.
Business offers graphic examples of the effect that may be produced
upon the public by interested groups, such as textile manufacturers
losing their markets. This problem arose, not long ago, when the
velvet manufacturers were facing ruin because their product had long
been out of fashion. Analysis showed that it was impossible to revive
a velvet fashion within America. Anatomical hunt for the vital spot!
Paris! Obviously! But yes and no. Paris is the home of fashion.
Lyons is the home of silk. The attack had to be made at the source.
It was determined to substitute purpose for chance and to utilize the
regular sources for fashion distribution and to influence the public
from these sources. A velvet fashion service, openly supported by the
manufacturers, was organized. Its first function was to establish
contact with the Lyons manufactories and the Paris couturiers to
discover what they were doing, to encourage them to act on behalf of
velvet, and to help in the proper exploitation of their wares. An
intelligent Parisian was enlisted in the work. He visited Lanvin and
Worth, Agnès and Patou, and others and induced them to use velvet in
their gowns and hats. It was he who arranged for the distinguished
Countess This or Duchess That to wear the hat or the gown. And as for
the presentation of the idea to the public, the American buyer or the
American woman of fashion was simply shown the velvet creations in
the atelier of the dressmaker or the milliner. She bought the velvet
because she liked it and because it was in fashion.
The editors of the American magazines and fashion reporters of the
American newspapers, likewise subjected to the actual (although
created) circumstance, reflected it in their news, which, in turn,
subjected the buyer and the consumer here to the same influences. The
result was that what was at first a trickle of velvet became a flood.
A demand was slowly, but deliberately, created in Paris and America.
A big department store, aiming to be a style leader, advertised velvet
gowns and hats on the authority of the French couturiers, and quoted
original cables received from them. The echo of the new style note was
heard from hundreds of department stores throughout the country which
wanted to be style leaders too. Bulletins followed despatches. The mail
followed the cables. And the American woman traveler appeared before
the ship news photographers in velvet gown and hat.
The created circumstances had their effect. “Fickle fashion has veered
to velvet,” was one newspaper comment. And the industry in the United
States again kept thousands busy.
The new propaganda, having regard to the constitution of society as a
whole, not infrequently serves to focus and realize the desires of the
masses. A desire for a specific reform, however widespread, cannot be
translated into action until it is made articulate, and until it has
exerted sufficient pressure upon the proper law-making bodies. Millions
of housewives may feel that manufactured foods deleterious to health
should be prohibited. But there is little chance that their individual
desires will be translated into effective legal form unless their
half-expressed demand can be organized, made vocal, and concentrated
upon the state legislature or upon the Federal Congress in some mode
which will produce the results they desire. Whether they realize it or
not, they call upon propaganda to organize and effectuate their demand.
But clearly it is the intelligent minorities which need to make use of
propaganda continuously and systematically. In the active proselytizing
minorities in whom selfish interests and public interests coincide lie
the progress and development of America. Only through the active energy
of the intelligent few can the public at large become aware of and act
upon new ideas.
Small groups of persons can, and do, make the rest of us think what
they please about a given subject. But there are usually proponents
and opponents of every propaganda, both of whom are equally eager to
convince the majority.
CHAPTER III
THE NEW PROPAGANDISTS
Who are the men who, without our realizing it, give us our ideas,
tell us whom to admire and whom to despise, what to believe about the
ownership of public utilities, about the tariff, about the price of
rubber, about the Dawes Plan, about immigration; who tell us how our
houses should be designed, what furniture we should put into them,
what menus we should serve on our table, what kind of shirts we must
wear, what sports we should indulge in, what plays we should see, what
charities we should support, what pictures we should admire, what slang
we should affect, what jokes we should laugh at?
If we set out to make a list of the men and women who, because of
their position in public life, might fairly be called the molders of
public opinion, we could quickly arrive at an extended list of persons
mentioned in “Who’s Who.” It would obviously include, the President
of the United States and the members of his Cabinet; the Senators
and Representatives in Congress; the Governors of our forty-eight
states; the presidents of the chambers of commerce in our hundred
largest cities, the chairmen of the boards of directors of our hundred
or more largest industrial corporations, the president of many of
the labor unions affiliated in the American Federation of Labor, the
national president of each of the national professional and fraternal
organizations, the president of each of the racial or language
societies in the country, the hundred leading newspaper and magazine
editors, the fifty most popular authors, the presidents of the fifty
leading charitable organizations, the twenty leading theatrical or
cinema producers, the hundred recognized leaders of fashion, the most
popular and influential clergymen in the hundred leading cities, the
presidents of our colleges and universities and the foremost members of
their faculties, the most powerful financiers in Wall Street, the most
noted amateurs of sport, and so on.
Such a list would comprise several thousand persons. But it is well
known that many of these leaders are themselves led, sometimes by
persons whose names are known to few. Many a congressman, in framing
his platform, follows the suggestions of a district boss whom few
persons outside the political machine have ever heard of. Eloquent
divines may have great influence in their communities, but often take
their doctrines from a higher ecclesiastical authority. The presidents
of chambers of commerce mold the thought of local business men
concerning public issues, but the opinions which they promulgate are
usually derived from some national authority. A presidential candidate
may be “drafted” in response to “overwhelming popular demand,” but it
is well known that his name may be decided upon by half a dozen men
sitting around a table in a hotel room.
In some instances the power of invisible wire-pullers is flagrant. The
power of the invisible cabinet which deliberated at the poker table
in a certain little green house in Washington has become a national
legend. There was a period in which the major policies of the national
government were dictated by a single man, Mark Hanna. A Simmons may,
for a few years, succeed in marshaling millions of men on a platform of
intolerance and violence.
Such persons typify in the public mind the type of ruler associated
with the phrase invisible government. But we do not often stop to think
that there are dictators in other fields whose influence is just as
decisive as that of the politicians I have mentioned. An Irene Castle
can establish the fashion of short hair which dominates nine-tenths of
the women who make any pretense to being fashionable. Paris fashion
leaders set the mode of the short skirt, for wearing which, twenty
years ago, any woman would simply have been arrested and thrown into
jail by the New York police, and the entire women’s clothing industry,
capitalized at hundreds of millions of dollars, must be reorganized to
conform to their dictum.
There are invisible rulers who control the destinies of millions. It is
not generally realized to what extent the words and actions of our most
influential public men are dictated by shrewd persons operating behind
the scenes.
Nor, what is still more important, the extent to which our thoughts and
habits are modified by authorities.
In some departments of our daily life, in which we imagine ourselves
free agents, we are ruled by dictators exercising great power. A man
buying a suit of clothes imagines that he is choosing, according to his
taste and his personality, the kind of garment which he prefers. In
reality, he may be obeying the orders of an anonymous gentleman tailor
in London. This personage is the silent partner in a modest tailoring
establishment, which is patronized by gentlemen of fashion and princes
of the blood. He suggests to British noblemen and others a blue cloth
instead of gray, two buttons instead of three, or sleeves a quarter of
an inch narrower than last season. The distinguished customer approves
of the idea.
But how does this fact affect John Smith of Topeka?
The gentleman tailor is under contract with a certain large American
firm, which manufactures men’s suits, to send them instantly the
designs of the suits chosen by the leaders of London fashion. Upon
receiving the designs, with specifications as to color, weight and
texture, the firm immediately places an order with the cloth makers
for several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of cloth. The suits
made up according to the specifications are then advertised as the
latest fashion. The fashionable men in New York, Chicago, Boston
and Philadelphia wear them. And the Topeka man, recognizing this
leadership, does the same.
Women are just as subject to the commands of invisible government as
are men. A silk manufacturer, seeking a new market for its product,
suggested to a large manufacturer of shoes that women’s shoes should
be covered with silk to match their dresses. The idea was adopted and
systematically propagandized. A popular actress was persuaded to wear
the shoes. The fashion spread. The shoe firm was ready with the supply
to meet the created demand. And the silk company was ready with the
silk for more shoes.
The man who injected this idea into the shoe industry was ruling women
in one department of their social lives. Different men rule us in the
various departments of our lives. There may be one power behind the
throne in politics, another in the manipulation of the Federal discount
rate, and still another in the dictation of next season’s dances.
If there were a national invisible cabinet ruling our destinies (a
thing which is not impossible to conceive of) it would work through
certain group leaders on Tuesday for one purpose, and through an
entirely different set on Wednesday for another. The idea of invisible
government is relative. There may be a handful of men who control the
educational methods of the great majority of our schools. Yet from
another standpoint, every parent is a group leader with authority over
his or her children.
The invisible government tends to be concentrated in the hands of the
few because of the expense of manipulating the social machinery which
controls the opinions and habits of the masses. To advertise on a
scale which will reach fifty million persons is expensive. To reach
and persuade the group leaders who dictate the public’s thoughts and
actions is likewise expensive.
For this reason there is an increasing tendency to concentrate the
functions of propaganda in the hands of the propaganda specialist. This
specialist is more and more assuming a distinct place and function in
our national life.
New activities call for new nomenclature. The propagandist who
specializes in interpreting enterprises and ideas to the public, and in
interpreting the public to promulgators of new enterprises and ideas,
has come to be known by the name of “public relations counsel.”
The new profession of public relations has grown up because of the
increasing complexity of modern life and the consequent necessity for
making the actions of one part of the public understandable to other
sectors of the public. It is due, too, to the increasing dependence
of organized power of all sorts upon public opinion. Governments,
whether they are monarchical, constitutional, democratic or communist,
depend upon acquiescent public opinion for the success of their efforts
and, in fact, government is only government by virtue of public
acquiescence. Industries, public utilities, educational movements,
indeed all groups representing any concept or product, whether they are
majority or minority ideas, succeed only because of approving public
opinion. Public opinion is the unacknowledged partner in all broad
efforts.
The public relations counsel, then, is the agent who, working with
modern media of communication and the group formations of society,
brings an idea to the consciousness of the public. But he is a great
deal more than that. He is concerned with courses of action, doctrines,
systems and opinions, and the securing of public support for them.
He is also concerned with tangible things such as manufactured and
raw products. He is concerned with public utilities, with large trade
groups and associations representing entire industries.
He functions primarily as an adviser to his client, very much as a
lawyer does. A lawyer concentrates on the legal aspects of his client’s
business. A counsel on public relations concentrates on the public
contacts of his client’s business. Every phase of his client’s ideas,
products or activities which may affect the public or in which the
public may have an interest is part of his function.
For instance, in the specific problems of the manufacturer he examines
the product, the markets, the way in which the public reacts to the
product, the attitude of the employees to the public and towards the
product, and the coöperation of the distribution agencies.
The counsel on public relations, after he has examined all these and
other factors, endeavors to shape the actions of his client so that
they will gain the interest, the approval and the acceptance of the
public.
The means by which the public is apprised of the actions of his client
are as varied as the means of communication themselves, such as
conversation, letters, the stage, the motion picture, the radio, the
lecture platform, the magazine, the daily newspaper. The counsel on
public relations is not an advertising man but he advocates advertising
where that is indicated. Very often he is called in by an advertising
agency to supplement its work on behalf of a client. His work and that
of the advertising agency do not conflict with or duplicate each other.
His first efforts are, naturally, devoted to analyzing his client’s
problems and making sure that what he has to offer the public is
something which the public accepts or can be brought to accept. It
is futile to attempt to sell an idea or to prepare the ground for a
product that is basically unsound.
For example, an orphan asylum is worried by a falling off in
contributions and a puzzling attitude of indifference or hostility on
the part of the public. The counsel on public relations may discover
upon analysis that the public, alive to modern sociological trends,
subconsciously criticizes the institution because it is not organized
on the new “cottage plan.” He will advise modification of the client in
this respect. Or a railroad may be urged to put on a fast train for the
sake of the prestige which it will lend to the road’s name, and hence
to its stocks and bonds.
If the corset makers, for instance, wished to bring their product
into fashion again, he would unquestionably advise that the plan was
impossible, since women have definitely emancipated themselves from
the old-style corset. Yet his fashion advisers might report that women
might be persuaded to adopt a certain type of girdle which eliminated
the unhealthful features of the corset.
His next effort is to analyze his public. He studies the groups which
must be reached, and the leaders through whom he may approach these
groups. Social groups, economic groups, geographical groups, age
groups, doctrinal groups, language groups, cultural groups, all these
represent the divisions through which, on behalf of his client, he may
talk to the public.
Only after this double analysis has been made and the results collated,
has the time come for the next step, the formulation of policies
governing the general practice, procedure and habits of the client
in all those aspects in which he comes in contact with the public.
And only when these policies have been agreed upon is it time for the
fourth step.
The first recognition of the distinct functions of the public relations
counsel arose, perhaps, in the early years of the present century as
a result of the insurance scandals coincident with the muck-raking of
corporate finance in the popular magazines. The interests thus attacked
suddenly realized that they were completely out of touch with the
public they were professing to serve, and required expert advice to
show them how they could understand the public and interpret themselves
to it.
The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, prompted by the most
fundamental self-interest, initiated a conscious, directed effort
to change the attitude of the public toward insurance companies in
general, and toward itself in particular, to its profit and the
public’s benefit.
It tried to make a majority movement of itself by getting the public
to buy its policies. It reached the public at every point of its
corporate and separate existences. To communities it gave health
surveys and expert counsel. To individuals it gave health creeds and
advice. Even the building in which the corporation was located was
made a picturesque landmark to see and remember, in other words to
carry on the associative process. And so this company came to have a
broad general acceptance. The number and amount of its policies grew
constantly, as its broad contacts with society increased.
Within a decade, many large corporations were employing public
relations counsel under one title or another, for they had come to
recognize that they depended upon public good will for their continued
prosperity. It was no longer true that it was “none of the public’s
business” how the affairs of a corporation were managed. They were
obliged to convince the public that they were conforming to its demands
as to honesty and fairness. Thus a corporation might discover that
its labor policy was causing public resentment, and might introduce a
more enlightened policy solely for the sake of general good will. Or
a department store, hunting for the cause of diminishing sales, might
discover that its clerks had a reputation for bad manners, and initiate
formal instruction in courtesy and tact.
The public relations expert may be known as public relations director
or counsel. Often he is called secretary or vice-president or director.
Sometimes he is known as cabinet officer or commissioner. By whatever
title he may be called, his function is well defined and his advice
has definite bearing on the conduct of the group or individual with
whom he is working.
Many persons still believe that the public relations counsel is a
propagandist and nothing else. But, on the contrary, the stage at
which many suppose he starts his activities may actually be the
stage at which he ends them. After the public and the client are
thoroughly analyzed and policies have been formulated, his work may
be finished. In other cases the work of the public relations counsel
must be continuous to be effective. For in many instances only by
a careful system of constant, thorough and frank information will
the public understand and appreciate the value of what a merchant,
educator or statesman is doing. The counsel on public relations must
maintain constant vigilance, because inadequate information, or
false information from unknown sources, may have results of enormous
importance. A single false rumor at a critical moment may drive down
the price of a corporation’s stock, causing a loss of millions to
stockholders. An air of secrecy or mystery about a corporation’s
financial dealings may breed a general suspicion capable of acting as
an invisible drag on the company’s whole dealings with the public. The
counsel on public relations must be in a position to deal effectively
with rumors and suspicions, attempting to stop them at their source,
counteracting them promptly with correct or more complete information
through channels which will be most effective, or best of all
establishing such relations of confidence in the concern’s integrity
that rumors and suspicions will have no opportunity to take root.
His function may include the discovery of new markets, the existence of
which had been unsuspected.
If we accept public relations as a profession, we must also expect
it to have both ideals and ethics. The ideal of the profession is a
pragmatic one. It is to make the producer, whether that producer be a
legislature making laws or a manufacturer making a commercial product,
understand what the public wants and to make the public understand the
objectives of the producer. In relation to industry, the ideal of the
profession is to eliminate the waste and the friction that result when
industry does things or makes things which its public does not want,
or when the public does not understand what is being offered it. For
example, the telephone companies maintain extensive public relations
departments to explain what they are doing, so that energy may not be
burned up in the friction of misunderstanding. A detailed description,
for example, of the immense and scientific care which the company takes
to choose clearly understandable and distinguishable exchange names,
helps the public to appreciate the effort that is being made to give
good service, and stimulates it to coöperate by enunciating clearly.
It aims to bring about an understanding between educators and educated,
between government and people, between charitable institutions and
contributors, between nation and nation.
The profession of public relations counsel is developing for itself
an ethical code which compares favorably with that governing the
legal and medical professions. In part, this code is forced upon the
public relations counsel by the very conditions of his work. While
recognizing, just as the lawyer does, that every one has the right to
present his case in its best light, he nevertheless refuses a client
whom he believes to be dishonest, a product which he believes to be
fraudulent, or a cause which he believes to be antisocial. One reason
for this is that, even though a special pleader, he is not dissociated
from the client in the public’s mind. Another reason is that while
he is pleading before the court—the court of public opinion—he is at
the same time trying to affect that court’s judgments and actions. In
law, the judge and jury hold the deciding balance of power. In public
opinion, the public relations counsel is judge and jury, because
through his pleading of a case the public may accede to his opinion and
judgment.
He does not accept a client whose interests conflict with those of
another client. He does not accept a client whose case he believes to
be hopeless or whose product he believes to be unmarketable.
He should be candid in his dealings. It must be repeated that his
business is not to fool or hoodwink the public. If he were to get such
a reputation, his usefulness in his profession would be at an end. When
he is sending out propaganda material, it is clearly labeled as to
source. The editor knows from whom it comes and what its purpose is,
and accepts or rejects it on its merits as news.
CHAPTER IV
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PUBLIC RELATIONS
The systematic study of mass psychology revealed to students the
potentialities of invisible government of society by manipulation of
the motives which actuate man in the group. Trotter and Le Bon, who
approached the subject in a scientific manner, and Graham Wallas,
Walter Lippmann and others who continued with searching studies of
the group mind, established that the group has mental characteristics
distinct from those of the individual, and is motivated by impulses
and emotions which cannot be explained on the basis of what we know
of individual psychology. So the question naturally arose: If we
understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, is it not
possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will
without their knowing it?
The recent practice of propaganda has proved that it is possible, at
least up to a certain point and within certain limits. Mass psychology
is as yet far from being an exact science and the mysteries of human
motivation are by no means all revealed. But at least theory 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. Propaganda is not a science in the laboratory
sense, but it is no longer entirely the empirical affair that it was
before the advent of the study of mass psychology. It is now scientific
in the sense that it seeks to base its operations upon definite
knowledge drawn from direct observation of the group mind, and upon the
application of principles which have been demonstrated to be consistent
and relatively constant.
The modern propagandist studies systematically and objectively the
material with which he is working in the spirit of the laboratory. If
the matter in hand is a nation-wide sales campaign, he studies the
field by means of a clipping service, or of a corps of scouts, or by
personal study at a crucial spot. He determines, for example, which
features of a product are losing their public appeal, and in what new
direction the public taste is veering. He will not fail to investigate
to what extent it is the wife who has the final word in the choice of
her husband’s car, or of his suits and shirts.
Scientific accuracy of results is not to be expected, because many of
the elements of the situation must always be beyond his control. He may
know with a fair degree of certainty that under favorable circumstances
an international flight will produce a spirit of good will, making
possible even the consummation of political programs. But he cannot
be sure that some unexpected event will not overshadow this flight in
the public interest, or that some other aviator may not do something
more spectacular the day before. Even in his restricted field of public
psychology there must always be a wide margin of error. Propaganda,
like economics and sociology, can never be an exact science for the
reason that its subject-matter, like theirs, deals with human beings.
If you can influence the leaders, either with or without their
conscious coöperation, you automatically influence the group which they
sway. But men do not need to be actually gathered together in a public
meeting or in a street riot, to be subject to the influences of mass
psychology. Because man is by nature gregarious he feels himself to be
member of a herd, even when he is alone in his room with the curtains
drawn. His mind retains the patterns which have been stamped on it by
the group influences.
A man sits in his office deciding what stocks to buy. He imagines, no
doubt, that he is planning his purchases according to his own judgment.
In actual fact his judgment is a mélange of impressions stamped on his
mind by outside influences which unconsciously control his thought. He
buys a certain railroad stock because it was in the headlines yesterday
and hence is the one which comes most prominently to his mind;
because he has a pleasant recollection of a good dinner on one of its
fast trains; because it has a liberal labor policy, a reputation for
honesty; because he has been told that J. P. Morgan owns some of its
shares.
Trotter and Le Bon concluded that the group mind does not _think_ in
the strict sense of the word. In place of thoughts it has impulses,
habits and emotions. In making up its mind its first impulse is
usually to follow the example of a trusted leader. This is one of the
most firmly established principles of mass psychology. It operates in
establishing the rising or diminishing prestige of a summer resort, in
causing a run on a bank, or a panic on the stock exchange, in creating
a best seller, or a box-office success.
But when the example of the leader is not at hand and the herd must
think for itself, it does so by means of clichés, pat words or images
which stand for a whole group of ideas or experiences. Not many years
ago, it was only necessary to tag a political candidate with the word
interests to stampede millions of people into voting against him,
because anything associated with “the interests” seemed necessarily
corrupt. Recently the word Bolshevik has performed a similar service
for persons who wished to frighten the public away from a line of
action.
By playing upon an old cliché, or manipulating a new one, the
propagandist can sometimes swing a whole mass of group emotions. In
Great Britain, during the war, the evacuation hospitals came in for
a considerable amount of criticism because of the summary way in
which they handled their wounded. It was assumed by the public that a
hospital gives prolonged and conscientious attention to its patients.
When the name was changed to evacuation posts the critical reaction
vanished. No one expected more than an adequate emergency treatment
from an institution so named. The cliché hospital was indelibly
associated in the public mind with a certain picture. To persuade the
public to discriminate between one type of hospital and another, to
dissociate the cliché from the picture it evoked, would have been an
impossible task. Instead, a new cliché automatically conditioned the
public emotion toward these hospitals.
Men are rarely aware of the real reasons which motivate their actions.
A man may believe that he buys a motor car because, after careful study
of the technical features of all makes on the market, he has concluded
that this is the best. He is almost certainly fooling himself. He
bought it, perhaps, because a friend whose financial acumen he respects
bought one last week; or because his neighbors believed he was not able
to afford a car of that class; or because its colors are those of his
college fraternity.
It is chiefly the psychologists of the school of Freud who have
pointed out that many of man’s thoughts and actions are compensatory
substitutes for desires which he has been obliged to suppress. A thing
may be desired not for its intrinsic worth or usefulness, but because
he has unconsciously come to see in it a symbol of something else, the
desire for which he is ashamed to admit to himself. A man buying a car
may think he wants it for purposes of locomotion, whereas the fact may
be that he would really prefer not to be burdened with it, and would
rather walk for the sake of his health. He may really want it because
it is a symbol of social position, an evidence of his success in
business, or a means of pleasing his wife.
This general principle, that men are very largely actuated by motives
which they conceal from themselves, is as true of mass as of individual
psychology. It is evident that the successful propagandist must
understand the true motives and not be content to accept the reasons
which men give for what they do.
It is not sufficient to understand only the mechanical structure of
society, the groupings and cleavages and loyalties. An engineer may
know all about the cylinders and pistons of a locomotive, but unless
he knows how steam behaves under pressure he cannot make his engine
run. Human desires are the steam which makes the social machine work.
Only by understanding them can the propagandist control that vast,
loose-jointed mechanism which is modern society.
The old propagandist based his work on the mechanistic reaction
psychology then in vogue in our colleges. This assumed that the human
mind was merely an individual machine, a system of nerves and nerve
centers, reacting with mechanical regularity to stimuli, like a
helpless, will-less automaton. It was the special pleader’s function
to provide the stimulus which would cause the desired reaction in the
individual purchaser.
It was one of the doctrines of the reaction psychology that a certain
stimulus often repeated would create a habit, or that the mere
reiteration of an idea would create a conviction. Suppose the old type
of salesmanship, acting for a meat packer, was seeking to increase
the sale of bacon. It would reiterate innumerable times in full-page
advertisements: “Eat more bacon. Eat bacon because it is cheap, because
it is good, because it gives you reserve energy.”
The newer salesmanship, understanding the group structure of society
and the principles of mass psychology, would first ask: “Who is it that
influences the eating habits of the public?” The answer, obviously,
is: “The physicians.” The new salesman will then suggest to physicians
to say publicly that it is wholesome to eat bacon. He knows as a
mathematical certainty, that large numbers of persons will follow the
advice of their doctors, because he understands the psychological
relation of dependence of men upon their physicians.
The old-fashioned propagandist, using almost exclusively the appeal
of the printed word, tried to persuade the individual reader to buy a
definite article, immediately. This approach is exemplified in a type
of advertisement which used to be considered ideal from the point of
view of directness and effectiveness:
“YOU (perhaps with a finger pointing at the reader) _buy O’Leary’s
rubber heels_—NOW.”
The advertiser sought by means of reiteration and emphasis directed
upon the individual, to break down or penetrate sales resistance.
Although the appeal was aimed at fifty million persons, it was aimed at
each as an individual.
The new salesmanship has found it possible, by dealing with men in
the mass through their group formations, to set up psychological and
emotional currents which will work for him. Instead of assaulting
sales resistance by direct attack, he is interested in removing sales
resistance. He creates circumstances which will swing emotional
currents so as to make for purchaser demand.
If, for instance, I want to sell pianos, it is not sufficient to
blanket the country with a direct appeal, such as:
“YOU _buy a Mozart piano now. It is cheap. The best artists use it. It
will last for years._”
The claims may all be true, but they are in direct conflict with the
claims of other piano manufacturers, and in indirect competition with
the claims of a radio or a motor car, each competing for the consumer’s
dollar.
What are the true reasons why the purchaser is planning to spend his
money on a new car instead of on a new piano? Because he has decided
that he wants the commodity called locomotion more than he wants the
commodity called music? Not altogether. He buys a car, because it is at
the moment the group custom to buy cars.
The modern propagandist therefore sets to work to create circumstances
which will modify that custom. He appeals perhaps to the home instinct
which is fundamental. He will endeavor to develop public acceptance of
the idea of a music room in the home. This he may do, for example, by
organizing an exhibition of period music rooms designed by well known
decorators who themselves exert an influence on the buying groups. He
enhances the effectiveness and prestige of these rooms by putting in
them rare and valuable tapestries. Then, in order to create dramatic
interest in the exhibit, he stages an event or ceremony. To this
ceremony key people, persons known to influence the buying habits of
the public, such as a famous violinist, a popular artist, and a society
leader, are invited. These key persons affect other groups, lifting the
idea of the music room to a place in the public consciousness which
it did not have before. The juxtaposition of these leaders, and the
idea which they are dramatizing, are then projected to the wider public
through various publicity channels. Meanwhile, influential architects
have been persuaded to make the music room an integral architectural
part of their plans with perhaps a specially charming niche in one
corner for the piano. Less influential architects will as a matter of
course imitate what is done by the men whom they consider masters of
their profession. They in turn will implant the idea of the music room
in the mind of the general public.
The music room will be accepted because it has been made the thing. And
the man or woman who has a music room, or has arranged a corner of the
parlor as a musical corner, will naturally think of buying a piano. It
will come to him as his own idea.
Under the old salesmanship the manufacturer said to the prospective
purchaser, “Please buy a piano.” The new salesmanship has reversed
the process and caused the prospective purchaser to say to the
manufacturer, “Please sell me a piano.”
The value of the associative processes in propaganda is shown in
connection with a large real estate development. To emphasize that
Jackson Heights was socially desirable every attempt was made to
produce this associative process. A benefit performance of the Jitney
Players was staged for the benefit of earthquake victims of Japan,
under the auspices of Mrs. Astor and others. The social advantages of
the place were projected—a golf course was laid out and a clubhouse
planned. When the post office was opened, the public relations counsel
attempted to use it as a focus for national interest and discovered
that its opening fell coincident with a date important in the annals
of the American Postal Service. This was then made the basis of the
opening.
When an attempt was made to show the public the beauty of the
apartments, a competition was held among interior decorators for the
best furnished apartment in Jackson Heights. An important committee
of judges decided. This competition drew the approval of well known
authorities, as well as the interest of millions, who were made
cognizant of it through newspaper and magazine and other publicity,
with the effect of building up definitely the prestige of the
development.
One of the most effective methods is the utilization of the group
formation of modern society in order to spread ideas. An example of
this is the nation-wide competitions for sculpture in Ivory soap,
open to school children in certain age groups as well as professional
sculptors. A sculptor of national reputation found Ivory soap an
excellent medium for sculpture.
The Procter and Gamble Company offered a series of prizes for the best
sculpture in white soap. The contest was held under the auspices of the
Art Center in New York City, an organization of high standing in the
art world.
School superintendents and teachers throughout the country were glad
to encourage the movement as an educational aid for schools. Practice
among school children as part of their art courses was stimulated.
Contests were held between schools, between school districts and
between cities.
Ivory soap was adaptable for sculpturing in the homes because mothers
saved the shavings and the imperfect efforts for laundry purposes. The
work itself was clean.
The best pieces are selected from the local competitions for entry in
the national contest. This is held annually at an important art gallery
in New York, whose prestige with that of the distinguished judges,
establishes the contest as a serious art event.
In the first of these national competitions about 500 pieces of
sculpture were entered. In the third, 2,500. And in the fourth, more
than 4,000. If the carefully selected pieces were so numerous, it is
evident that a vast number were sculptured during the year, and that a
much greater number must have been made for practice purposes. The good
will was greatly enhanced by the fact that this soap had become not
merely the concern of the housewife but also a matter of personal and
intimate interest to her children.
A number of familiar psychological motives were set in motion in the
carrying out of this campaign. The esthetic, the competitive, the
gregarious (much of the sculpturing was done in school groups), the
snobbish (the impulse to follow the example of a recognized leader),
the exhibitionist, and—last but by no means least—the maternal.
All these motives and group habits were put in concerted motion by the
simple machinery of group leadership and authority. As if actuated by
the pressure of a button, people began working for the client for the
sake of the gratification obtained in the sculpture work itself.
This point is most important in successful propaganda work. The
leaders who lend their authority to any propaganda campaign will do so
only if it can be made to touch their own interests. There must be a
disinterested aspect of the propagandist’s activities. In other words,
it is one of the functions of the public relations counsel to discover
at what points his client’s interests coincide with those of other
individuals or groups.
In the case of the soap sculpture competition, the distinguished
artists and educators who sponsored the idea were glad to lend their
services and their names because the competitions really promoted an
interest which they had at heart—the cultivation of the esthetic
impulse among the younger generation.
Such coincidence and overlapping of interests is as infinite as the
interlacing of group formations themselves. For example, a railway
wishes to develop its business. The counsel on public relations makes
a survey to discover at what points its interests coincide with those
of its prospective customers. The company then establishes relations
with chambers of commerce along its right of way and assists them
in developing their communities. It helps them to secure new plants
and industries for the town. It facilitates business through the
dissemination of technical information. It is not merely a case of
bestowing favors in the hope of receiving favors; these activities of
the railroad, besides creating good will, actually promote growth on
its right of way. The interests of the railroad and the communities
through which it passes mutually interact and feed one another.
In the same way, a bank institutes an investment service for the
benefit of its customers in order that the latter may have more money
to deposit with the bank. Or a jewelry concern develops an insurance
department to insure the jewels it sells, in order to make the
purchaser feel greater security in buying jewels. Or a baking company
establishes an information service suggesting recipes for bread to
encourage new uses for bread in the home.
The ideas of the new propaganda are predicated on sound psychology
based on enlightened self-interest.
* * * * *
I have tried, in these chapters, to explain the place of propaganda
in modern American life and something of the methods by which it
operates—to tell the why, the what, the who and the how of the
invisible government which dictates our thoughts, directs our feelings
and controls our actions. In the following chapters I shall try to show
how propaganda functions in specific departments of group activity, to
suggest some of the further ways in which it may operate.
CHAPTER V
BUSINESS AND THE PUBLIC
The relationship between business and the public has become closer
in the past few decades. Business to-day is taking the public into
partnership. A number of causes, some economic, others due to the
growing public understanding of business and the public interest in
business, have produced this situation. Business realizes that its
relationship to the public is not confined to the manufacture and sale
of a given product, but includes at the same time the selling of itself
and of all those things for which it stands in the public mind.
Twenty or twenty-five years ago, business sought to run its own affairs
regardless of the public. The reaction was the muck-raking period, in
which a multitude of sins were, justly and unjustly, laid to the charge
of the interests. In the face of an aroused public conscience the large
corporations were obliged to renounce their contention that their
affairs were nobody’s business. If to-day big business were to seek to
throttle the public, a new reaction similar to that of twenty years
ago would take place and the public would rise and try to throttle big
business with restrictive laws. Business is conscious of the public’s
conscience. This consciousness has led to a healthy coöperation.
Another cause for the increasing relationship is undoubtedly to be
found in the various phenomena growing out of mass production. Mass
production is only profitable if its rhythm can be maintained—that
is, if it can continue to sell its product in steady or increasing
quantity. The result is that while, under the handicraft or small-unit
system of production that was typical a century ago, demand created the
supply, to-day supply must actively seek to create its corresponding
demand. A single factory, potentially capable of supplying a whole
continent with its particular product, cannot afford to wait until the
public asks for its product; it must maintain constant touch, through
advertising and propaganda, with the vast public in order to assure
itself the continuous demand which alone will make its costly plant
profitable. This entails a vastly more complex system of distribution
than formerly. To make customers is the new problem. One must
understand not only his own business—the manufacture of a particular
product—but also the structure, the personality, the prejudices, of a
potentially universal public.
Still another reason is to be found in the improvements in the
technique of advertising—as regards both the size of the public which
can be reached by the printed word, and the methods of appeal. The
growth of newspapers and magazines having a circulation of millions
of copies, and the art of the modern advertising expert in making the
printed message attractive and persuasive, have placed the business man
in a personal relation with a vast and diversified public.
Another modern phenomenon, which influences the general policy of
big business, is the new competition between certain firms and the
remainder of the industry, to which they belong. Another kind of
competition is between whole industries, in their struggle for a share
of the consumer’s dollar. When, for example, a soap manufacturer claims
that his product will preserve youth, he is obviously attempting to
change the public’s mode of thinking about soap in general—a thing of
grave importance to the whole industry. Or when the metal furniture
industry seeks to convince the public that it is more desirable to
spend its money for metal furniture than for wood furniture, it is
clearly seeking to alter the taste and standards of a whole generation.
In either case, business is seeking to inject itself into the lives and
customs of millions of persons.
Even in a basic sense, business is becoming dependent on public
opinion. With the increasing volume and wider diffusion of wealth in
America, thousands of persons now invest in industrial stocks. New
stock or bond flotations, upon which an expanding business must depend
for its success, can be effected only if the concern has understood how
to gain the confidence and good will of the general public. Business
must express itself and its entire corporate existence so that the
public will understand and accept it. It must dramatize its personality
and interpret its objectives in every particular in which it comes into
contact with the community (or the nation) of which it is a part.
An oil corporation which truly understands its many-sided relation
to the public, will offer that public not only good oil but a sound
labor policy. A bank will seek to show not only that its management
is sound and conservative, but also that its officers are honorable
both in their public and in their private life. A store specializing
in fashionable men’s clothing will express in its architecture the
authenticity of the goods it offers. A bakery will seek to impress the
public with the hygienic care observed in its manufacturing process,
not only by wrapping its loaves in dust-proof paper and throwing its
factory open to public inspection, but also by the cleanliness and
attractiveness of its delivery wagons. A construction firm will take
care that the public knows not only that its buildings are durable
and safe, but also that its employees, when injured at work, are
compensated. At whatever point a business enterprise impinges on the
public consciousness, it must seek to give its public relations the
particular character which will conform to the objectives which it is
pursuing.
Just as the production manager must be familiar with every element
and detail concerning the materials with which he is working, so the
man in charge of a firm’s public relations must be familiar with the
structure, the prejudices, and the whims of the general public, and
must handle his problems with the utmost care. The public has its own
standards and demands and habits. You may modify them, but you dare
not run counter to them. You cannot persuade a whole generation of
women to wear long skirts, but you may, by working through leaders of
fashion, persuade them to wear evening dresses which are long in back.
The public is not an amorphous mass which can be molded at will, or
dictated to. Both business and the public have their own personalities
which must somehow be brought into friendly agreement. Conflict and
suspicion are injurious to both. Modern business must study on what
terms the partnership can be made amicable and mutually beneficial. It
must explain itself, its aims, its objectives, to the public in terms
which the public can understand and is willing to accept.
Business does not willingly accept dictation from the public. It should
not expect that it can dictate to the public. While the public should
appreciate the great economic benefits which business offers, thanks
to mass production and scientific marketing, business should also
appreciate that the public is becoming increasingly discriminative in
its standards and should seek to understand its demands and meet them.
The relationship between business and the public can be healthy only if
it is the relationship of give and take.
It is this condition and necessity which has created the need for a
specialized field of public relations. Business now calls in the public
relations counsel to advise it, to interpret its purpose to the public,
and to suggest those modifications which may make it conform to the
public demand.
The modifications then recommended to make the business conform to
its objectives and to the public demand, may concern the broadest
matters of policy or the apparently most trivial details of execution.
It might in one case be necessary to transform entirely the lines of
goods sold to conform to changing public demands. In another case the
trouble may be found to lie in such small matters as the dress of the
clerks. A jewelry store may complain that its patronage is shrinking
upwards because of its reputation for carrying high-priced goods; in
this case the public relations counsel might suggest the featuring
of medium-priced goods, even at a loss, not because the firm desires
a large medium-price trade as such, but because out of a hundred
medium-price customers acquired to-day a certain percentage will be
well-to-do ten years from now. A department store which is seeking to
gather in the high-class trade may be urged to employ college graduates
as clerks or to engage well known modern artists to design show-windows
or special exhibits. A bank may be urged to open a Fifth Avenue
branch, not because the actual business done on Fifth Avenue warrants
the expense, but because a beautiful Fifth Avenue office correctly
expresses the kind of appeal which it wishes to make to future
depositors; and, viewed in this way, it may be as important that the
doorman be polite, or that the floors be kept clean, as that the branch
manager be an able financier. Yet the beneficial effect of this branch
may be canceled, if the wife of the president is involved in a scandal.
Big business studies every move which may express its true personality.
It seeks to tell the public, in all appropriate ways,—by the direct
advertising message and by the subtlest esthetic suggestion—the quality
of the goods or services which it has to offer. A store which seeks a
large sales volume in cheap goods will preach prices day in and day
out, concentrating its whole appeal on the ways in which it can save
money for its clients. But a store seeking a high margin of profit on
individual sales would try to associate itself with the distinguished
and the elegant, whether by an exhibition of old masters or through the
social activities of the owner’s wife.
The public relations activities of a business cannot be a protective
coloring to hide its real aims. It is bad business as well as bad
morals to feature exclusively a few high-class articles, when the main
stock is of medium grade or cheap, for the general impression given
is a false one. A sound public relations policy will not attempt to
stampede the public with exaggerated claims and false pretenses, but
to interpret the individual business vividly and truly through every
avenue that leads to public opinion. The New York Central Railroad has
for decades sought to appeal to the public not only on the basis of the
speed and safety of its trains, but also on the basis of their elegance
and comfort. It is appropriate that the corporation should have been
personified to the general public in the person of so suave and
ingratiating a gentleman as Chauncey M. Depew—an ideal window dressing
for such an enterprise.
While the concrete recommendations of the public relations counsel may
vary infinitely according to individual circumstances, his general plan
of work may be reduced to two types, which I might term continuous
interpretation and dramatization by high-spotting. The two may be
alternative or may be pursued concurrently.
Continuous interpretation is achieved by trying to control every
approach to the public mind in such a manner that the public receives
the desired impression, often without being conscious of it.
High-spotting, on the other hand, vividly seizes the attention of the
public and fixes it upon some detail or aspect which is typical of the
entire enterprise. When a real estate corporation which is erecting
a tall office building makes it ten feet taller than the highest
sky-scraper in existence, that is dramatization.
Which method is indicated, or whether both be indicated concurrently,
can be determined only after a full study of objectives and specific
possibilities.
Another interesting case of focusing public attention on the virtues
of a product was shown in the case of gelatine. Its advantages in
increasing the digestibility and nutritional value of milk were proven
in the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research. The suggestion was
made and carried out that to further this knowledge, gelatine be used
by certain hospitals and school systems, to be tested out there. The
favorable results of such tests were then projected to other leaders in
the field with the result that they followed that group leadership and
utilized gelatine for the scientific purposes which had been proven to
be sound at the research institution. The idea carried momentum.
The tendency of big business is to get bigger. Through mergers and
monopolies it is constantly increasing the number of persons with whom
it is in direct contact. All this has intensified and multiplied the
public relationships of business.
The responsibilities are of many kinds. There is a responsibility
to the stockholders—numbering perhaps five persons or five hundred
thousand—who have entrusted their money to the concern and have the
right to know how the money is being used. A concern which is fully
aware of its responsibility toward its stockholders, will furnish them
with frequent letters urging them to use the product in which their
money is invested, and use their influence to promote its sale. It has
a responsibility toward the dealer which it may express by inviting
him, at its expense, to visit the home factory. It has a responsibility
toward the industry as a whole which should restrain it from making
exaggerated and unfair selling claims. It has a responsibility toward
the retailer, and will see to it that its salesmen express the quality
of the product which they have to sell. There is a responsibility
toward the consumer, who is impressed by a clean and well managed
factory, open to his inspection. And the general public, apart from its
function as potential consumer, is influenced in its attitude toward
the concern by what it knows of that concern’s financial dealings,
its labor policy, even by the livableness of the houses in which its
employees dwell. There is no detail too trivial to influence the public
in a favorable or unfavorable sense. The personality of the president
may be a matter of importance, for he perhaps dramatizes the whole
concern to the public mind. It may be very important to what charities
he contributes, in what civic societies he holds office. If he is a
leader in his industry, the public may demand that he be a leader in
his community.
The business man has become a responsible member of the social group.
It is not a question of ballyhoo, of creating a picturesque fiction for
public consumption. It is merely a question of finding the appropriate
modes of expressing the personality that is to be dramatized. Some
businessmen can be their own best public relations counsel. But in the
majority of cases knowledge of the public mind and of the ways in which
it will react to an appeal, is a specialized function which must be
undertaken by the professional expert.
Big business, I believe, is realizing this more and more. It is
increasingly availing itself of the services of the specialist in
public relations (whatever may be the title accorded him). And it is
my conviction that as big business becomes bigger the need for expert
manipulation of its innumerable contacts with the public will become
greater.
One reason why the public relations of a business are frequently
placed in the hands of an outside expert, instead of being confided
to an officer of the company, is the fact that the correct approach
to a problem may be indirect. For example, when the luggage industry
attempted to solve some of its problems by a public relations policy,
it was realized that the attitude of railroads, of steamship companies,
and of foreign government-owned railroads was an important factor in
the handling of luggage.
If a railroad and a baggage man, for their own interest, can be
educated to handle baggage with more facility and promptness, with
less damage to the baggage, and less inconvenience to the passenger; if
the steamship company lets down, in its own interests, its restrictions
on luggage; if the foreign government eases up on its baggage costs and
transportation in order to further tourist travel; then the luggage
manufacturers will profit.
The problem then, to increase the sale of their luggage, was to have
these and other forces come over to their point of view. Hence the
public relations campaign was directed not to the public, who were the
ultimate consumers, but to these other elements.
Also, if the luggage manufacturer can educate the general public on
what to wear on trips and when to wear it, he may be increasing the
sale of men’s and women’s clothing, but he will, at the same time, be
increasing the sale of his luggage.
Propaganda, since it goes to basic causes, can very often be most
effective through the manner of its introduction. A campaign against
unhealthy cosmetics might be waged by fighting for a return to the
wash-cloth and soap—a fight that very logically might be taken up by
health officials all over the country, who would urge the return to the
salutary and helpful wash-cloth and soap, instead of cosmetics.
The development of public opinion for a cause or line of socially
constructive action may very often be the result of a desire on the
part of the propagandist to meet successfully his own problem which
the socially constructive cause would further. And by doing so he is
actually fulfilling a social purpose in the broadest sense.
The soundness of a public relations policy was likewise shown in the
case of a shoe manufacturer who made service shoes for patrolmen,
firemen, letter carriers, and men in similar occupations. He realized
that if he could make acceptable the idea that men in such work ought
to be well-shod, he would sell more shoes and at the same time further
the efficiency of the men.
He organized, as part of his business, a foot protection bureau. This
bureau disseminated scientifically accurate information on the proper
care of the feet, principles which the manufacturer had incorporated in
the construction of the shoes. The result was that civic bodies, police
chiefs, fire chiefs, and others interested in the welfare and comfort
of their men, furthered the ideas his product stood for and the product
itself, with the consequent effect that more of his shoes were sold
more easily.
The application of this principle of a common denominator of interest
between the object that is sold and the public good will can be carried
to infinite degrees.
“It matters not how much capital you may have, how fair the rates may
be, how favorable the conditions of service, if you haven’t behind
you a sympathetic public opinion, you are bound to fail.” This is
the opinion of Samuel Insull, one of the foremost traction magnates
of the country. And the late Judge Gary, of the United States Steel
Corporation, expressed the same idea when he said: “Once you have
the good will of the general public, you can go ahead in the work of
constructive expansion. Too often many try to discount this vague and
intangible element. That way lies destruction.”
Public opinion is no longer inclined to be unfavorable to the large
business merger. It resents the censorship of business by the Federal
Trade Commission. It has broken down the anti-trust laws where it
thinks they hinder economic development. It backs great trusts and
mergers which it excoriated a decade ago. The government now permits
large aggregations of producing and distributing units, as evidenced
by mergers among railroads and other public utilities, because
representative government reflects public opinion. Public opinion
itself fosters the growth of mammoth industrial enterprises. In the
opinion of millions of small investors, mergers and trusts are friendly
giants and not ogres, because of the economies, mainly due to quantity
production, which they have effected, and can pass on to the consumer.
This result has been, to a great extent, obtained by a deliberate use
of propaganda in its broadest sense. It was obtained not only by
modifying the opinion of the public, as the governments modified and
marshaled the opinion of their publics during the war, but often by
modifying the business concern itself. A cement company may work with
road commissions gratuitously to maintain testing laboratories in order
to insure the best-quality roads to the public. A gas company maintains
a free school of cookery.
But it would be rash and unreasonable to take it for granted that
because public opinion has come over to the side of big business, it
will always remain there. Only recently, Prof. W. Z. Ripley of Harvard
University, one of the foremost national authorities on business
organization and practice, exposed certain aspects of big business
which tended to undermine public confidence in large corporations.
He pointed out that the stockholders’ supposed voting power is often
illusory; that annual financial statements are sometimes so brief and
summary that to the man in the street they are downright misleading;
that the extension of the system of non-voting shares often places the
effective control of corporations and their finances in the hands of
a small clique of stockholders; and that some corporations refuse to
give out sufficient information to permit the public to know the true
condition of the concern.
Furthermore, no matter how favorably disposed the public may be toward
big business in general, the utilities are always fair game for public
discontent and need to maintain good will with the greatest care and
watchfulness. These and other corporations of a semi-public character
will always have to face a demand for government or municipal ownership
if such attacks as those of Professor Ripley are continued and are, in
the public’s opinion, justified, unless conditions are changed and care
is taken to maintain the contact with the public at all points of their
corporate existence.
The public relations counsel should anticipate such trends of public
opinion and advise on how to avert them, either by convincing the
public that its fears or prejudices are unjustified, or in certain
cases by modifying the action of the client to the extent necessary
to remove the cause of complaint. In such a case public opinion might
be surveyed and the points of irreducible opposition discovered. The
aspects of the situation which are susceptible of logical explanation;
to what extent the criticism or prejudice is a habitual emotional
reaction and what factors are dominated by accepted clichés, might be
disclosed. In each instance he would advise some action or modification
of policy calculated to make the readjustment.
While government ownership is in most instances only varyingly a remote
possibility, public ownership of big business through the increasing
popular investment in stocks and bonds, is becoming more and more a
fact. The importance of public relations from this standpoint is to be
judged by the fact that practically all prosperous corporations expect
at some time to enlarge operations, and will need to float new stock or
bond issues. The success of such issues depends upon the general record
of the concern in the business world, and also upon the good will which
it has been able to create in the general public. When the Victor
Talking Machine Company was recently offered to the public, millions of
dollars’ worth of stock were sold overnight. On the other hand, there
are certain companies which, although they are financially sound and
commercially prosperous, would be unable to float a large stock issue,
because public opinion is not conscious of them, or has some unanalyzed
prejudice against them.
To such an extent is the successful floating of stocks and bonds
dependent upon the public favor that the success of a new merger
may stand or fall upon the public acceptance which is created for
it. A merger may bring into existence huge new resources, and these
resources, perhaps amounting to millions of dollars in a single
operation, can often fairly be said to have been created by the expert
manipulation of public opinion. It must be repeated that I am not
speaking of artificial value given to a stock by dishonest propaganda
or stock manipulation, but of the real economic values which are
created when genuine public acceptance is gained for an industrial
enterprise and becomes a real partner in it.
The growth of big business is so rapid that in some lines ownership is
more international than national. It is necessary to reach ever larger
groups of people if modern industry and commerce are to be financed.
Americans have purchased billions of dollars of foreign industrial
securities since the war, and Europeans own, it is estimated, between
one and two billion dollars’ worth of ours. In each case public
acceptance must be obtained for the issue and the enterprise behind it.
Public loans, state or municipal, to foreign countries depend upon the
good will which those countries have been able to create for themselves
here. An attempted issue by an east European country is now faring
badly largely because of unfavorable public reaction to the behavior of
members of its ruling family. But other countries have no difficulty
in placing any issue because the public is already convinced of the
prosperity of these nations and the stability of their governments.
The new technique of public relations counsel is serving a very useful
purpose in business by acting as a complement to legitimate advertisers
and advertising in helping to break down unfair competitive exaggerated
and overemphatic advertising by reaching the public with the truth
through other channels than advertising. Where two competitors in a
field are fighting each other with this type of advertising, they are
undermining that particular industry to a point where the public may
lose confidence in the whole industry. The only way to combat such
unethical methods, is for ethical members of the industry to use the
weapon of propaganda in order to bring out the basic truths of the
situation.
Take the case of tooth paste, for instance. Here is a highly
competitive field in which the preponderance of public acceptance of
one product over another can very legitimately rest in inherent values.
However, what has happened in this field?
One or two of the large manufacturers have asserted advantages for
their tooth pastes which no single tooth paste discovered up to the
present time can possibly have. The competing manufacturer is put in
the position either of overemphasizing an already exaggerated emphasis
or of letting the overemphasis of his competitor take away his markets.
He turns to the weapon of propaganda which can effectively, through
various channels of approach to the public—the dental clinics, the
schools, the women’s clubs, the medical colleges, the dental press and
even the daily press—bring to the public the truth of what a tooth
paste can do. This will, of course, have its effect in making the
honestly advertised tooth paste get to its real public.
Propaganda is potent in meeting unethical or unfair advertising.
Effective advertising has become more costly than ever before.
Years ago, when the country was smaller and there was no tremendous
advertising machinery, it was comparatively easy to get country-wide
recognition for a product. A corps of traveling salesmen might persuade
the retailers, with a few cigars and a repertory of funny stories, to
display and recommend their article on a nation-wide scale. To-day, a
small industry is swamped unless it can find appropriate and relatively
inexpensive means of making known the special virtues of its product,
while larger industries have sought to overcome the difficulty by
coöperative advertising, in which associations of industries compete
with other associations.
Mass advertising has produced new kinds of competition. Competition
between rival products in the same line is, of course, as old as
economic life itself. In recent years much has been said of the new
competition, we have discussed it in a previous chapter, between
one group of products and another. Stone competes against wood for
building; linoleum against carpets; oranges against apples; tin against
asbestos for roofing.
This type of competition has been humorously illustrated by Mr.
O. H. Cheney, Vice-President of the American Exchange and Irving
Trust Company of New York, in a speech before the Chicago Business
Secretaries Forum.
“Do you represent the millinery trades?” said Mr. Cheney. “The man at
your side may serve the fur industry, and by promoting the style of big
fur collars on women’s coats he is ruining the hat business by forcing
women to wear small and inexpensive hats. You may be interested in
the ankles of the fair sex—I mean, you may represent the silk hosiery
industry. You have two brave rivals who are ready to fight to the
death—to spend millions in the fight—for the glory of those ankles—the
leather industry, which has suffered from the low-shoe vogue, and the
fabrics manufacturers, who yearn for the good old days when skirts were
skirts.
“If you represent the plumbing and heating business, you are the mortal
enemy of the textile industry, because warmer homes mean lighter
clothes. If you represent the printers, how can you shake hands with
the radio equipment man?...
“These are really only obvious forms of what I have called the new
competition. The old competition was that between the members of
each trade organization. One phase of the new competition is that
between the trade associations themselves—between you gentlemen who
represent those industries. Inter-commodity competition is the new
competition between products used alternatively for the same purpose.
Inter-industrial competition is the new competition between apparently
unrelated industries which affect each other or between such industries
as compete for the consumer’s dollar—and that means practically all
industries....
“Inter-commodity competition is, of course, the most spectacular of
all. It is the one which seems most of all to have caught the business
imagination of the country. More and more business men are beginning
to appreciate what inter-commodity competition means to them. More
and more they are calling upon their trade associations to help
them—because inter-commodity competition cannot be fought single-handed.
“Take the great war on the dining-room table, for instance. Three times
a day practically every dining-room table in the country is the scene
of a fierce battle in the new competition. Shall we have prunes for
breakfast? No, cry the embattled orange-growers and the massed legions
of pineapple canners. Shall we eat sauerkraut? Why not eat green
olives? is the answer of the Spaniards. Eat macaroni as a change from
potatoes, says one advertiser—and will the potato growers take this
challenge lying down?
“The doctors and dietitians tell us that a normal hard-working man
needs only about two or three thousand calories of food a day. A
banker, I suppose, needs a little less. But what am I to do? The fruit
growers, the wheat raisers, the meat packers, the milk producers, the
fishermen—all want me to eat more of their products—and are spending
millions of dollars a year to convince me. Am I to eat to the point
of exhaustion, or am I to obey the doctor and let the farmer and the
food packer and the retailer go broke! Am I to balance my diet in
proportion to the advertising appropriations of the various producers?
Or am I to balance my diet scientifically and let those who overproduce
go bankrupt? The new competition is probably keenest in the food
industries because there we have a very real limitation on what we can
consume—in spite of higher incomes and higher living standards, we
cannot eat more than we can eat.”
I believe that competition in the future will not be only an
advertising competition between individual products or between big
associations, but that it will in addition be a competition of
propaganda. The business man and advertising man is realizing that he
must not discard entirely the methods of Barnum in reaching the public.
An example in the annals of George Harrison Phelps, of the successful
utilization of this type of appeal was the nation-wide hook-up which
announced the launching of the Dodge Victory Six car.
Millions of people, it is estimated, listened in to this program
broadcast over 47 stations. The expense was more than $60,000. The
arrangements involved an additional telephonic hook-up of 20,000 miles
of wire, and included transmission from Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit,
New Orleans, and New York. Al Jolson did his bit from New Orleans, Will
Rogers from Beverly Hills, Fred and Dorothy Stone from Chicago, and
Paul Whiteman from New York, at an aggregate artists’ fee of $25,000.
And there was included a four-minute address by the president of Dodge
Brothers announcing the new car, which gave him access in four minutes
to an estimated audience of thirty million Americans, the largest
number, unquestionably, ever to concentrate their attention on a given
commercial product at a given moment. It was a sugar-coated sales
message.
Modern sales technicians will object: “What you say of this method of
appeal is true. But it increases the cost of getting the manufacturer’s
message across. The modern tendency has been to reduce this cost (for
example, the elimination of premiums) and concentrate on getting full
efficiency from the advertising expenditure. If you hire a Galli-Curci
to sing for bacon you increase the cost of the bacon by the amount of
her very large fee. Her voice adds nothing to the product but it adds
to its cost.”
Undoubtedly. But all modes of sales appeal require the spending of
money to make the appeal attractive. The advertiser in print adds
to the cost of his message by the use of pictures or by the cost of
getting distinguished endorsements.
There is another kind of difficulty, created in the process of big
business getting bigger, which calls for new modes of establishing
contact with the public. Quantity production offers a standardized
product the cost of which tends to diminish with the quantity sold.
If low price is the only basis of competition with rival products,
similarly produced, there ensues a cut-throat competition which can
end only by taking all the profit and incentive out of the industry.
The logical way out of this dilemma is for the manufacturer to develop
some sales appeal other than mere cheapness, to give the product, in
the public mind, some other attraction, some idea that will modify the
product slightly, some element of originality that will distinguish it
from products in the same line. Thus, a manufacturer of typewriters
paints his machines in cheerful hues. These special types of appeal can
be popularized by the manipulation of the principles familiar to the
propagandist—the principles of gregariousness, obedience to authority,
emulation, and the like. A minor element can be made to assume economic
importance by being established in the public mind as a matter of
style. Mass production can be split up. Big business will still leave
room for small business. Next to a huge department store there may be
located a tiny specialty shop which makes a very good living.
The problem of bringing large hats back into fashion was undertaken
by a propagandist. The millinery industry two years ago was menaced
by the prevalence of the simple felt hat which was crowding out the
manufacture of all other kinds of hats and hat ornaments. It was found
that hats could roughly be classified in six types. It was found too
that four groups might help to change hat fashions: the society leader,
the style expert, the fashion editor and writer, the artist who might
give artistic approval to the styles, and beautiful mannequins. The
problem, then, was to bring these groups together before an audience of
hat buyers.
A committee of prominent artists was organized to choose the most
beautiful girls in New York to wear, in a series of tableaux, the most
beautiful hats in the style classifications, at a fashion fête at a
leading hotel.
A committee was formed of distinguished American women who, on the
basis of their interest in the development of an American industry,
were willing to add the authority of their names to the idea. A
style committee was formed of editors of fashion magazines and other
prominent fashion authorities who were willing to support the idea. The
girls in their lovely hats and costumes paraded on the running-board
before an audience of the entire trade.
The news of the event affected the buying habits not only of the
onlookers, but also of the women throughout the country. The story
of the event was flashed to the consumer by her newspaper as well as
by the advertisements of her favorite store. Broadsides went to the
millinery buyer from the manufacturer. One manufacturer stated that
whereas before the show he had not sold any large trimmed hats, after
it he had sold thousands.
Often the public relations counsel is called in to handle an emergency
situation. A false rumor, for instance, may occasion an enormous loss
in prestige and money if not handled promptly and effectively.
An incident such as the one described in the New York _American_ of
Friday, May 21, 1926, shows what the lack of proper technical handling
of public relations might result in.
$1,000,000 LOST BY FALSE RUMOR ON HUDSON STOCK
Hudson Motor Company stock fluctuated widely around noon yesterday and
losses estimated at $500,000 to $1,000,000 were suffered as a result
of the widespread flotation of false news regarding dividend action.
The directors met in Detroit at 12:30, New York time, to act on a
dividend. Almost immediately a false report that only the regular
dividend had been declared was circulated.
At 12:46 the Dow, Jones & Co. ticker service received the report from
the Stock Exchange firm and its publication resulted in further drop
in the stock.
Shortly after 1 o’clock the ticker services received official
news that the dividend had been increased and a 20 per cent stock
distribution authorized. They rushed the correct news out on their
tickers and Hudson stock immediately jumped more than 6 points.
A clipping from the _Journal of Commerce_ of April 4, 1925, is
reproduced here as an interesting example of a method to counteract a
false rumor:
BEECH-NUT HEAD HOME TOWN GUEST
Bartlett Arkell Signally Honored by Communities of Mohawk Valley
(_Special to The Journal of Commerce_)
CANAJOHARIE, N. Y., April 3.—To-day was ‘Beech-Nut Day’ in this town;
in fact, for the whole Mohawk Valley. Business men and practically the
whole community of this region joined in a personal testimonial to
Bartlett Arkell of New York City, president of the Beech-Nut Packing
Company of this city, in honor of his firm refusal to consider selling
his company to other financial interests to move elsewhere.
When Mr. Arkell publicly denied recent rumors that he was to sell his
company to the Postum Cereal Company for $17,000,000, which would
have resulted in taking the industry from its birthplace, he did so
in terms conspicuously loyal to his boyhood home, which he has built
up into a prosperous industrial community through thirty years’
management of his Beech-Nut Company.
He absolutely controls the business and flatly stated that he would
never sell it during his lifetime ‘to any one at any price,’ since it
would be disloyal to his friends and fellow workers. And the whole
Mohawk Valley spontaneously decided that such spirit deserved public
recognition. Hence, to-day’s festivities.
More than 3,000 people participated, headed by a committee comprising
W. J. Roser, chairman; B. F. Spraker, H. V. Bush, B. F. Diefendorf and
J. H. Cook. They were backed by the Canajoharie and the Mohawk Valley
Chambers of Business Men’s Associations.
Of course, every one realized after this that there was no truth in the
rumor that the Beech-Nut Company was in the market. A denial would not
have carried as much conviction.
Amusement, too, is a business—one of the largest in America. It was
the amusement business—first the circus and the medicine show, then
the theater—which taught the rudiments of advertising to industry and
commerce. The latter adopted the ballyhoo of the show business. But
under the stress of practical experience it adapted and refined these
crude advertising methods to the precise ends it sought to obtain. The
theater has, in its turn, learned from business, and has refined its
publicity methods to the point where the old stentorian methods are in
the discard.
The modern publicity director of a theater syndicate or a motion
picture trust is a business man, responsible for the security of tens
or hundreds of millions of dollars of invested capital. He cannot
afford to be a stunt artist or a free-lance adventurer in publicity.
He must know his public accurately and modify its thoughts and actions
by means of the methods which the amusement world has learned from its
old pupil, big business. As public knowledge increases and public taste
improves, business must be ready to meet them halfway.
Modern business must have its finger continuously on the public pulse.
It must understand the changes in the public mind and be prepared to
interpret itself fairly and eloquently to changing opinion.
CHAPTER VI
PROPAGANDA AND POLITICAL LEADERSHIP
The great political problem in our modern democracy is how to induce
our leaders to lead. The dogma that the voice of the people is the
voice of God tends to make elected persons the will-less servants of
their constituents. This is undoubtedly part cause of the political
sterility of which certain American critics constantly complain.
No serious sociologist any longer believes that the voice of the people
expresses any divine or specially wise and lofty idea. The voice of
the people expresses the mind of the people, and that mind is made up
for it by the group leaders in whom it believes and by those persons
who understand the manipulation of public opinion. It is composed
of inherited prejudices and symbols and clichés and verbal formulas
supplied to them by the leaders.
Fortunately, the sincere and gifted politician is able, by the
instrument of propaganda, to mold and form the will of the people.
Disraeli cynically expressed the dilemma, when he said: “I _must_
follow the people. Am I not their leader?” He might have added: “I
_must_ lead the people. Am I not their servant?”
Unfortunately, the methods of our contemporary politicians, in dealing
with the public, are as archaic and ineffective as the advertising
methods of business in 1900 would be to-day. While politics was the
first important department of American life to use propaganda on a
large scale, it has been the slowest in modifying its propaganda
methods to meet the changed conditions of the public mind. American
business first learned from politics the methods of appealing to the
broad public. But it continually improved those methods in the course
of its competitive struggle, while politics clung to the old formulas.
The political apathy of the average voter, of which we hear so much,
is undoubtedly due to the fact that the politician does not know how
to meet the conditions of the public mind. He cannot dramatize himself
and his platform in terms which have real meaning to the public. Acting
on the fallacy that the leader must slavishly follow, he deprives his
campaign of all dramatic interest. An automaton cannot arouse the
public interest. A leader, a fighter, a dictator, can. But, given our
present political conditions under which every office seeker must cater
to the vote of the masses, the only means by which the born leader can
lead is the expert use of propaganda.
Whether in the problem of getting elected to office or in the problem
of interpreting and popularizing new issues, or in the problem of
making the day-to-day administration of public affairs a vital part of
the community life, the use of propaganda, carefully adjusted to the
mentality of the masses, is an essential adjunct of political life.
The successful business man to-day apes the politician. He has adopted
the glitter and the ballyhoo of the campaign. He has set up all the
side shows. He has annual dinners that are a compendium of speeches,
flags, bombast, stateliness, pseudo-democracy slightly tinged with
paternalism. On occasion he doles out honors to employees, much as the
republic of classic times rewarded its worthy citizens.
But these are merely the side shows, the drums, of big business, by
which it builds up an image of public service, and of honorary service.
This is but one of the methods by which business stimulates loyal
enthusiasms on the part of directors, the workers, the stockholders and
the consumer public. It is one of the methods by which big business
performs its function of making and selling products to the public. The
real work and campaign of business consists of intensive study of the
public, the manufacture of products based on this study, and exhaustive
use of every means of reaching the public.
Political campaigns to-day are all side shows, all honors, all bombast,
glitter, and speeches. These are for the most part unrelated to the
main business of studying the public scientifically, of supplying the
public with party, candidate, platform, and performance, and selling
the public these ideas and products.
Politics was the first big business in America. Therefore there is a
good deal of irony in the fact that business has learned everything
that politics has had to teach, but that politics has failed to learn
very much from business methods of mass distribution of ideas and
products.
Emily Newell Blair has recounted in the _Independent_ a typical
instance of the waste of effort and money in a political campaign, a
week’s speaking tour in which she herself took part. She estimates that
on a five-day trip covering nearly a thousand miles she and the United
States Senator with whom she was making political speeches addressed
no more than 1,105 persons whose votes might conceivably have been
changed as a result of their efforts. The cost of this appeal to these
voters she estimates (calculating the value of the time spent on a very
moderate basis) as $15.27 for each vote which might have been changed
as a result of the campaign.
This, she says, was a “drive for votes, just as an Ivory Soap
advertising campaign is a drive for sales.” But, she asks, “what would
a company executive say to a sales manager who sent a high-priced
speaker to describe his product to less than 1,200 people at a cost of
$15.27 for each possible buyer?” She finds it “amazing that the very
men who make their millions out of cleverly devised drives for soap
and bonds and cars will turn around and give large contributions to
be expended for vote-getting in an utterly inefficient and antiquated
fashion.”
It is, indeed, incomprehensible that politicians do not make use of
the elaborate business methods that industry has built up. Because a
politician knows political strategy, can develop campaign issues, can
devise strong planks for platforms and envisage broad policies, it does
not follow that he can be given the responsibility of selling ideas to
a public as large as that of the United States.
The politician understands the public. He knows what the public wants
and what the public will accept. But the politician is not necessarily
a general sales manager, a public relations counsel, or a man who knows
how to secure mass distribution of ideas.
Obviously, an occasional political leader may be capable of combining
every feature of leadership, just as in business there are certain
brilliant industrial leaders who are financiers, factory directors,
engineers, sales managers and public relations counsel all rolled into
one.
Big business is conducted on the principle that it must prepare its
policies carefully, and that in selling an idea to the large buying
public of America, it must proceed according to broad plans. The
political strategist must do likewise. The entire campaign should be
worked out according to broad basic plans. Platforms, planks, pledges,
budgets, activities, personalities, must be as carefully studied,
apportioned and used as they are when big business desires to get what
it wants from the public.
The first step in a political campaign is to determine on the
objectives, and to express them exceedingly well in the current
form—that is, as a platform. In devising the platform the leader should
be sure that it is an honest platform. Campaign pledges and promises
should not be lightly considered by the public, and they ought to carry
something of the guarantee principle and money-back policy that an
honorable business institution carries with the sale of its goods. The
public has lost faith in campaign promotion work. It does not say that
politicians are dishonorable, but it does say that campaign pledges are
written on the sand. Here then is one fact of public opinion of which
the party that wishes to be successful might well take cognizance.
To aid in the preparation of the platform there should be made as
nearly scientific an analysis as possible of the public and of the
needs of the public. A survey of public desires and demands would
come to the aid of the political strategist whose business it is to
make a proposed plan of the activities of the parties and its elected
officials during the coming terms of office.
A big business that wants to sell a product to the public surveys and
analyzes its market before it takes a single step either to make or
to sell the product. If one section of the community is absolutely
sold to the idea of this product, no money is wasted in re-selling
it to it. If, on the other hand, another section of the public is
irrevocably committed to another product, no money is wasted on a
lost cause. Very often the analysis is the cause of basic changes and
improvements in the product itself, as well as an index of how it is
to be presented. So carefully is this analysis of markets and sales
made that when a company makes out its sales budget for the year, it
subdivides the circulations of the various magazines and newspapers it
uses in advertising and calculates with a fair degree of accuracy how
many times a section of that population is subjected to the appeal of
the company. It knows approximately to what extent a national campaign
duplicates and repeats the emphasis of a local campaign of selling.
As in the business field, the expenses of the political campaign should
be budgeted. A large business to-day knows exactly how much money it
is going to spend on propaganda during the next year or years. It
knows that a certain percentage of its gross receipts will be given
over to advertising—newspaper, magazine, outdoor and poster; a certain
percentage to circularization and sales promotion—such as house organs
and dealer aids; and a certain percentage must go to the supervising
salesmen who travel around the country to infuse extra stimulus in the
local sales campaign.
A political campaign should be similarly budgeted. The first question
which should be decided is the amount of money that should be raised
for the campaign. This decision can be reached by a careful analysis
of campaign costs. There is enough precedent in business procedure to
enable experts to work this out accurately. Then the second question of
importance is the manner in which money should be raised.
It is obvious that politics would gain much in prestige if the
money-raising campaign were conducted candidly and publicly, like the
campaigns for the war funds. Charity drives might be made excellent
models for political funds drives. The elimination of the little black
bag element in politics would raise the entire prestige of politics in
America, and the public interest would be infinitely greater if the
actual participation occurred earlier and more constructively in the
campaign.
Again, as in the business field, there should be a clear decision as
to how the money is to be spent. This should be done according to the
most careful and exact budgeting, wherein every step in the campaign is
given its proportionate importance, and the funds allotted accordingly.
Advertising in newspapers and periodicals, posters and street banners,
the exploitation of personalities in motion pictures, in speeches and
lectures and meetings, spectacular events and all forms of propaganda
should be considered proportionately according to the budget, and
should always be coördinated with the whole plan. Certain expenditures
may be warranted if they represent a small proportion of the budget and
may be totally unwarranted if they make up a large proportion of the
budget.
In the same way the emotions by which the public is appealed to may be
made part of the broad plan of the campaign. Unrelated emotions become
maudlin and sentimental too easily, are often costly, and too often
waste effort because the idea is not part of the conscious and coherent
whole.
Big business has realized that it must use as many of the basic
emotions as possible. The politician, however, has used the emotions
aroused by words almost exclusively.
To appeal to the emotions of the public in a political campaign is
sound—in fact it is an indispensable part of the campaign. But the
emotional content must—
(a) coincide in every way with the broad basic plans of the campaign
and all its minor details;
(b) be adapted to the many groups of the public at which it is to be
aimed; and
(c) conform to the media of the distribution of ideas.
The emotions of oratory have been worn down through long years of
overuse. Parades, mass meetings, and the like are successful when the
public has a frenzied emotional interest in the event. The candidate
who takes babies on his lap, and has his photograph taken, is doing a
wise thing emotionally, if this act epitomizes a definite plank in his
platform. Kissing babies, if it is worth anything, must be used as a
symbol for a baby policy and it must be synchronized with a plank in
the platform. But the haphazard staging of emotional events without
regard to their value as part of the whole campaign, is a waste of
effort, just as it would be a waste of effort for the manufacturer of
hockey skates to advertise a picture of a church surrounded by spring
foliage. It is true that the church appeals to our religious impulses
and that everybody loves the spring, but these impulses do not help to
sell the idea that hockey skates are amusing, helpful, or increase the
general enjoyment of life for the buyer.
Present-day politics places emphasis on personality. An entire party,
a platform, an international policy is sold to the public, or is
not sold, on the basis of the intangible element of personality. A
charming candidate is the alchemist’s secret that can transmute a
prosaic platform into the gold of votes. Helpful as is a candidate who
for some reason has caught the imagination of the country, the party
and its aims are certainly more important than the personality of the
candidate. Not personality, but the ability of the candidate to carry
out the party’s program adequately, and the program itself should
be emphasized in a sound campaign plan. Even Henry Ford, the most
picturesque personality in business in America to-day, has become known
through his product, and not his product through him.
It is essential for the campaign manager to educate the emotions
in terms of groups. The public is not made up merely of Democrats
and Republicans. People to-day are largely uninterested in politics
and their interest in the issues of the campaign must be secured by
coördinating it with their personal interests. The public is made up of
interlocking groups—economic, social, religious, educational, cultural,
racial, collegiate, local, sports, and hundreds of others.
When President Coolidge invited actors for breakfast, he did so because
he realized not only that actors were a group, but that audiences, the
large group of people who like amusements, who like people who amuse
them, and who like people who can be amused, ought to be aligned with
him.
The Shepard-Towner Maternity Bill was passed because the people who
fought to secure its passage realized that mothers made up a group,
that educators made up a group, that physicians made up a group, that
all these groups in turn influence other groups, and that taken all
together these groups were sufficiently strong and numerous to impress
Congress with the fact that the people at large wanted this bill to be
made part of the national law.
The political campaign having defined its broad objects and its
basic plans, having defined the group appeal which it must use, must
carefully allocate to each of the media at hand the work which it can
do with maximum efficiency.
The media through which a political campaign may be brought home to the
public are numerous and fairly well defined. Events and activities must
be created in order to put ideas into circulation, in these channels,
which are as varied as the means of human communication. Every object
which presents pictures or words that the public can see, everything
that presents intelligible sounds, can be utilized in one way or
another.
At present, the political campaigner uses for the greatest part the
radio, the press, the banquet hall, the mass meeting, the lecture
platform, and the stump generally as a means for furthering his ideas.
But this is only a small part of what may be done. Actually there
are infinitely more varied events that can be created to dramatize
the campaign, and to make people talk of it. Exhibitions, contests,
institutes of politics, the coöperation of educational institutions,
the dramatic coöperation of groups which hitherto have not been drawn
into active politics, and many others may be made the vehicle for the
presentation of ideas to the public.
But whatever is done must be synchronized accurately with all other
forms of appeal to the public. News reaches the public through the
printed word—books, magazines, letters, posters, circulars and
banners, newspapers; through pictures—photographs and motion pictures;
through the ear—lectures, speeches, band music, radio, campaign songs.
All these must be employed by the political party if it is to succeed.
One method of appeal is merely one method of appeal and in this age
wherein a thousand movements and ideas are competing for public
attention, one dare not put all one’s eggs into one basket.
It is understood that the methods of propaganda can be effective only
with the voter who makes up his own mind on the basis of his group
prejudices and desires. Where specific allegiances and loyalties exist,
as in the case of boss leadership, these loyalties will operate to
nullify the free will of the voter. In this close relation between the
boss and his constituents lies, of course, the strength of his position
in politics.
It is not necessary for the politician to be the slave of the public’s
group prejudices, if he can learn how to mold the mind of the voters
in conformity with his own ideas of public welfare and public service.
The important thing for the statesman of our age is not so much to
know how to please the public, but to know how to sway the public. In
theory, this education might be done by means of learned pamphlets
explaining the intricacies of public questions. In actual fact, it
can be done only by meeting the conditions of the public mind, by
creating circumstances which set up trains of thought, by dramatizing
personalities, by establishing contact with the group leaders who
control the opinions of their publics.
But campaigning is only an incident in political life. The process of
government is continuous. And the expert use of propaganda is more
useful and fundamental, although less striking, as an aid to democratic
administration, than as an aid to vote getting.
Good government can be sold to a community just as any other commodity
can be sold. I often wonder whether the politicians of the future, who
are responsible for maintaining the prestige and effectiveness of their
party, will not endeavor to train politicians who are at the same time
propagandists. I talked recently with George Olvany. He said that a
certain number of Princeton men were joining Tammany Hall. If I were in
his place I should have taken some of my brightest young men and set
them to work for Broadway theatrical productions or apprenticed them as
assistants to professional propagandists before recruiting them to the
service of the party.
One reason, perhaps, why the politician to-day is slow to take up
methods which are a commonplace in business life is that he has such
ready entry to the media of communication on which his power depends.
The newspaper man looks to him for news. And by his power of giving or
withholding information the politician can often effectively censor
political news. But being dependent, every day of the year and for
year after year, upon certain politicians for news, the newspaper
reporters are obliged to work in harmony with their news sources.
The political leader must be a creator of circumstances, not only a
creature of mechanical processes of stereotyping and rubber stamping.
Let us suppose that he is campaigning on a low-tariff platform. He may
use the modern mechanism of the radio to spread his views, but he will
almost certainly use the psychological method of approach which was old
in Andrew Jackson’s day, and which business has largely discarded. He
will say over the radio: “Vote for me and low tariff, because the high
tariff increases the cost of the things you buy.” He may, it is true,
have the great advantage of being able to speak by radio directly to
fifty million listeners. But he is making an old-fashioned approach. He
is arguing with them. He is assaulting, single-handed, the resistance
of inertia.
If he were a propagandist, on the other hand, although he would still
use the radio, he would use it as one instrument of a well-planned
strategy. Since he is campaigning on the issue of a low tariff, he not
merely would tell people that the high tariff increases the cost of
the things they buy, but would create circumstances which would make
his contention dramatic and self-evident. He would perhaps stage a
low-tariff exhibition simultaneously in twenty cities, with exhibits
illustrating the additional cost due to the tariff in force. He would
see that these exhibitions were ceremoniously inaugurated by prominent
men and women who were interested in a low tariff apart from any
interest in his personal political fortunes. He would have groups,
whose interests were especially affected by the high cost of living,
institute an agitation for lower schedules. He would dramatize the
issue, perhaps by having prominent men boycott woolen clothes, and go
to important functions in cotton suits, until the wool schedule was
reduced. He might get the opinion of social workers as to whether the
high cost of wool endangers the health of the poor in winter.
In whatever ways he dramatized the issue, the attention of the
public would be attracted to the question before he addressed them
personally. Then, when he spoke to his millions of listeners on the
radio, he would not be seeking to force an argument down the throats
of a public thinking of other things and annoyed by another demand on
its attention; on the contrary, he would be answering the spontaneous
questions and expressing the emotional demands of a public already
keyed to a certain pitch of interest in the subject.
The importance of taking the entire world public into consideration
before planning an important event is shown by the wise action of
Thomas Masaryk, then Provisional President, now President of the
Republic of Czecho-Slovakia.
Czecho-Slovakia officially became a free state on Monday, October 28,
1918, instead of Sunday, October 27, 1918, because Professor Masaryk
realized that the people of the world would receive more information
and would be more receptive to the announcement of the republic’s
freedom on a Monday morning than on a Sunday, because the press would
have more space to devote to it on Monday morning.
Discussing the matter with me before he made the announcement,
Professor Masaryk said, “I would be making history for the cables if I
changed the date of Czecho-Slovakia’s birth as a free nation.” Cables
make history and so the date was changed.
This incident illustrates the importance of technique in the new
propaganda.
It will be objected, of course, that propaganda will tend to defeat
itself as its mechanism becomes obvious to the public. My opinion is
that it will not. The only propaganda which will ever tend to weaken
itself as the world becomes more sophisticated and intelligent, is
propaganda that is untrue or unsocial.
Again, the objection is raised that propaganda is utilized to
manufacture our leading political personalities. It is asked whether,
in fact, the leader makes propaganda, or whether propaganda makes the
leader. There is a widespread impression that a good press agent can
puff up a nobody into a great man.
The answer is the same as that made to the old query as to whether
the newspaper makes public opinion or whether public opinion makes the
newspaper. There has to be fertile ground for the leader and the idea
to fall on. But the leader also has to have some vital seed to sow. To
use another figure, a mutual need has to exist before either can become
positively effective. Propaganda is of no use to the politician unless
he has something to say which the public, consciously or unconsciously,
wants to hear.
But even supposing that a certain propaganda is untrue or dishonest,
we cannot on that account reject the methods of propaganda as such.
For propaganda in some form will always be used where leaders need to
appeal to their constituencies.
The criticism is often made that propaganda tends to make the President
of the United States so important that he becomes not the President but
the embodiment of the idea of hero worship, not to say deity worship. I
quite agree that this is so, but how are you going to stop a condition
which very accurately reflects the desires of a certain part of the
public? The American people rightly senses the enormous importance of
the executive’s office. If the public tends to make of the President a
heroic symbol of that power, that is not the fault of propaganda but
lies in the very nature of the office and its relation to the people.
This condition, despite its somewhat irrational puffing up of the man
to fit the office, is perhaps still more sound than a condition in
which the man utilizes no propaganda, or a propaganda not adapted to
its proper end. Note the example of the Prince of Wales. This young
man reaped bales of clippings and little additional glory from his
American visit, merely because he was poorly advised. To the American
public he became a well dressed, charming, sport-loving, dancing,
perhaps frivolous youth. Nothing was done to add dignity and prestige
to this impression until towards the end of his stay he made a trip
in the subway of New York. This sole venture into democracy and the
serious business of living as evidenced in the daily habits of workers,
aroused new interest in the Prince. Had he been properly advised he
would have augmented this somewhat by such serious studies of American
life as were made by another prince, Gustave of Sweden. As a result of
the lack of well directed propaganda, the Prince of Wales became in the
eyes of the American people, not the thing which he constitutionally
is, a symbol of the unity of the British Empire, but part and parcel
of sporting Long Island and dancing beauties of the ballroom. Great
Britain lost an invaluable opportunity to increase the good will and
understanding between the two countries when it failed to understand
the importance of correct public relations counsel for His Royal
Highness.
The public actions of America’s chief executive are, if one chooses to
put it that way, stage-managed. But they are chosen to represent and
dramatize the man in his function as representative of the people. A
political practice which has its roots in the tendency of the popular
leader to follow oftener than he leads is the technique of the trial
balloon which he uses in order to maintain, as he believes, his contact
with the public. The politician, of course, has his ear to the ground.
It might be called the clinical ear. It touches the ground and hears
the disturbances of the political universe.
But he often does not know what the disturbances mean, whether they
are superficial, or fundamental. So he sends up his balloon. He may
send out an anonymous interview through the press. He then waits
for reverberations to come from the public—a public which expresses
itself in mass meetings, or resolutions, or telegrams, or even such
obvious manifestations as editorials in the partisan or nonpartisan
press. On the basis of these repercussions he then publicly adopts his
original tentative policy, or rejects it, or modifies it to conform
to the sum of public opinion which has reached him. This method is
modeled on the peace feelers which were used during the war to sound
out the disposition of the enemy to make peace or to test any one of
a dozen other popular tendencies. It is the method commonly used by a
politician before committing himself to legislation of any kind, and by
a government before committing itself on foreign or domestic policies.
It is a method which has little justification. If a politician is a
real leader he will be able, by the skillful use of propaganda, to lead
the people, instead of following the people by means of the clumsy
instrument of trial and error.
The propagandist’s approach is the exact opposite of that of the
politician just described. The whole basis of successful propaganda is
to have an objective and then to endeavor to arrive at it through an
exact knowledge of the public and modifying circumstances to manipulate
and sway that public.
“The function of a statesman,” says George Bernard Shaw, “is to express
the will of the people in the way of a scientist.”
The political leader of to-day should be a leader as finely versed
in the technique of propaganda as in political economy and civics.
If he remains merely the reflection of the average intelligence of
his community, he might as well go out of politics. If one is dealing
with a democracy in which the herd and the group follow those whom
they recognize as leaders, why should not the young men training for
leadership be trained in its technique as well as in its idealism?
“When the interval between the intellectual classes and the practical
classes is too great,” says the historian Buckle, “the former will
possess no influence, the latter will reap no benefits.”
Propaganda bridges this interval in our modern complex civilization.
Only through the wise use of propaganda will our government, considered
as the continuous administrative organ of the people, be able to
maintain that intimate relationship with the public which is necessary
in a democracy.
As David Lawrence pointed out in a recent speech, there is need for an
intelligent interpretative bureau for our government in Washington.
There is, it is true, a Division of Current Information in the
Department of State, which at first was headed by a trained newspaper
man. But later this position began to be filled by men from the
diplomatic service, men who had very little knowledge of the public.
While some of these diplomats have done very well, Mr. Lawrence
asserted that in the long run the country would be benefited if the
functions of this office were in the hands of a different type of
person.
There should, I believe, be an Assistant Secretary of State who is
familiar with the problem of dispensing information to the press—some
one upon whom the Secretary of State can call for consultation and who
has sufficient authority to persuade the Secretary of State to make
public that which, for insufficient reason, is suppressed.
The function of the propagandist is much broader in scope than that
of a mere dispenser of information to the press. The United States
Government should create a Secretary of Public Relations as member
of the President’s Cabinet. The function of this official should be
correctly to interpret America’s aims and ideals throughout the world,
and to keep the citizens of this country in touch with governmental
activities and the reasons which prompt them. He would, in short,
interpret the people to the government and the government to the people.
Such an official would be neither a propagandist nor a press agent,
in the ordinary understanding of those terms. He would be, rather, a
trained technician who would be helpful in analyzing public thought
and public trends, in order to keep the government informed about
the public, and the people informed about the government. America’s
relations with South America and with Europe would be greatly improved
under such circumstances. Ours must be a leadership democracy
administered by the intelligent minority who know how to regiment and
guide the masses.
Is this government by propaganda? Call it, if you prefer, government
by education. But education, in the academic sense of the word, is
not sufficient. It must be enlightened expert propaganda through the
creation of circumstances, through the high-spotting of significant
events, and the dramatization of important issues. The statesman of the
future will thus be enabled to focus the public mind on crucial points
of policy, and regiment a vast, heterogeneous mass of voters to clear
understanding and intelligent action.
CHAPTER VII
WOMEN’S ACTIVITIES AND PROPAGANDA
Women in contemporary America have achieved a legal equality with men.
This does not mean that their activities are identical with those of
men. Women in the mass still have special interests and activities in
addition to their economic pursuits and vocational interests.
Women’s most obvious influence is exerted when they are organized and
armed with the weapon of propaganda. So organized and armed they have
made their influence felt on city councils, state legislatures, and
national congresses, upon executives, upon political campaigns and upon
public opinion generally, both local and national.
In politics, the American women to-day occupy a much more important
position, from the standpoint of their influence, in their organized
groups than from the standpoint of the leadership they have acquired
in actual political positions or in actual office holding. The
professional woman politician has had, up to the present, not much
influence, nor do women generally regard her as being the most
important element in question. Ma Ferguson, after all, was simply a
woman in the home, a catspaw for a deposed husband; Nellie Ross, the
former Governor of Wyoming, is from all accounts hardly a leader of
statesmanship or public opinion.
If the suffrage campaign did nothing more, it showed the possibilities
of propaganda to achieve certain ends. This propaganda to-day is
being utilized by women to achieve their programs in Washington and
in the states. In Washington they are organized as the Legislative
Committee of Fourteen Women’s Organizations, including the League of
Women Voters, the Young Women’s Christian Association, the Woman’s
Christian Temperance Union, the Federation of Women’s Clubs, etc. These
organizations map out a legislative program and then use the modern
technique of propaganda to make this legislative program actually
pass into the law of the land. Their accomplishments in the field
are various. They can justifiably take the credit for much welfare
legislation. The eight-hour day for women is theirs. Undoubtedly
prohibition and its enforcement are theirs, if they can be considered
an accomplishment. So is the Shepard-Towner Bill which stipulates
support by the central government of maternity welfare in the state
governments. This bill would not have passed had it not been for the
political prescience and sagacity of women like Mrs. Vanderlip and Mrs.
Mitchell.
The Federal measures endorsed at the first convention of the National
League of Women Voters typify social welfare activities of women’s
organizations. These covered such broad interests as child welfare,
education, the home and high prices, women in gainful occupations,
public health and morals, independent citizenship for married women,
and others.
To propagandize these principles, the National League of Women Voters
has published all types of literature, such as bulletins, calendars,
election information, has held a correspondence course on government
and conducted demonstration classes and citizenship schools.
Possibly the effectiveness of women’s organizations in American
politics to-day is due to two things: first, the training of a
professional class of executive secretaries or legislative secretaries
during the suffrage campaigns, where every device known to the
propagandist had to be used to regiment a recalcitrant majority;
secondly, the routing over into peace-time activities of the many
prominent women who were in the suffrage campaigns and who also devoted
themselves to the important drives and mass influence movements during
the war. Such women as Mrs. Frank Vanderlip, Alice Ames Winter, Mrs.
Henry Moskowitz, Mrs. Florence Kelley, Mrs. John Blair, Mrs. O. H. P.
Belmont, Doris Stevens, Alice Paul come to mind.
If I have seemed to concentrate on the accomplishments of women in
politics, it is because they afford a particularly striking example
of intelligent use of the new propaganda to secure attention and
acceptance of minority ideas. It is perhaps curiously appropriate
that the latest recruits to the political arena should recognize and
make use of the newest weapons of persuasion to offset any lack of
experience with what is somewhat euphemistically termed practical
politics. As an example of this new technique: Some years ago, the
Consumers’ Committee of Women, fighting the “American valuation”
tariff, rented an empty store on Fifty-seventh Street in New York and
set up an exhibit of merchandise tagging each item with the current
price and the price it would cost if the tariff went through. Hundreds
of visitors to this shop rallied to the cause of the committee.
But there are also non-political fields in which women can make and
have made their influence felt for social ends, and in which they have
utilized the principle of group leadership in attaining the desired
objectives.
In the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, there are 13,000 clubs.
Broadly classified, they include civic and city clubs, mothers’ and
homemakers’ clubs, cultural clubs devoted to art, music or literature,
business and professional women’s clubs, and general women’s clubs,
which may embrace either civic or community phases, or combine some of
the other activities listed.
The woman’s club is generally effective on behalf of health education;
in furthering appreciation of the fine arts; in sponsoring legislation
that affects the welfare of women and children; in playground
development and park improvement; in raising standards of social or
political morality; in homemaking and home economics, education and the
like. In these fields, the woman’s club concerns itself with efforts
that are not ordinarily covered by existing agencies, and often both
initiates and helps to further movements for the good of the community.
A club interested principally in homemaking and the practical arts can
sponsor a cooking school for young brides and others. An example of the
keen interest of women in this field of education is the cooking school
recently conducted by the New York _Herald Tribune_, which held its
classes in Carnegie Hall, seating almost 3,000 persons. For the several
days of the cooking school, the hall was filled to capacity, rivaling
the drawing power of a McCormack or a Paderewski, and refuting most
dramatically the idea that women in large cities are not interested in
housewifery.
A movement for the serving of milk in public schools, or the
establishment of a baby health station at the department of health will
be an effort close to the heart of a club devoted to the interest of
mothers and child welfare.
A music club can broaden its sphere and be of service to the community
by coöperating with the local radio station in arranging better musical
programs. Fighting bad music can be as militant a campaign and marshal
as varied resources as any political battle.
An art club can be active in securing loan exhibitions for its city. It
can also arrange travelling exhibits of the art work of its members or
show the art work of schools or universities.
A literary club may step out of its charmed circle of lectures and
literary lions and take a definite part in the educational life of the
community. It can sponsor, for instance, a competition in the public
schools for the best essay on the history of the city, or on the life
of its most famous son.
Over and above the particular object for which the woman’s club may
have been constituted, it commonly stands ready to initiate or help
any movement which has for its object a distinct public good in the
community. More important, it constitutes an organized channel through
which women can make themselves felt as a definite part of public
opinion.
Just as women supplement men in private life, so they will supplement
men in public life by concentrating their organized efforts on those
objects which men are likely to ignore. There is a tremendous field for
women as active protagonists of new ideas and new methods of political
and social housekeeping. When organized and conscious of their power
to influence their surroundings, women can use their newly acquired
freedom in a great many ways to mold the world into a better place to
live in.
CHAPTER VIII
PROPAGANDA FOR EDUCATION
Education is not securing its proper share of public interest. The
public school system, materially and financially, is being adequately
supported. There is marked eagerness for a college education, and a
vague aspiration for culture, expressed in innumerable courses and
lectures. The public is not cognizant of the real value of education,
and does not realize that education as a social force is not receiving
the kind of attention it has the right to expect in a democracy.
It is felt, for example, that education is entitled to more space in
the newspapers; that well informed discussion of education hardly
exists; that unless such an issue as the Gary School system is created,
or outside of an occasional discussion, such as that aroused over
Harvard’s decision to establish a school of business, education does
not attract the active interest of the public.
There are a number of reasons for this condition. First of all, there
is the fact that the educator has been trained to stimulate to thought
the individual students in his classroom, but has not been trained as
an educator at large of the public.
In a democracy an educator should, in addition to his academic duties,
bear a definite and wholesome relation to the general public. This
public does not come within the immediate scope of his academic
duties. But in a sense he depends upon it for his living, for the
moral support, and the general cultural tone upon which his work must
be based. In the field of education, we find what we have found in
politics and other fields—that the evolution of the practitioner of
the profession has not kept pace with the social evolution around
him, and is out of gear with the instruments for the dissemination of
ideas which modern society has developed. If this be true, then the
training of the educators in this respect should begin in the normal
schools, with the addition to their curricula of whatever is necessary
to broaden their viewpoint. The public cannot understand unless the
teacher understands the relationship between the general public and the
academic idea.
The normal school should provide for the training of the educator to
make him realize that his is a two-fold job: education as a teacher and
education as a propagandist.
A second reason for the present remoteness of education from the
thoughts and interests of the public is to be found in the mental
attitude of the pedagogue—whether primary school teacher or college
professor—toward the world outside the school. This is a difficult
psychological problem. The teacher finds himself in a world in which
the emphasis is put on those objective goals and those objective
attainments which are prized by our American society. He himself is
but moderately or poorly paid. Judging himself by the standards in
common acceptance, he cannot but feel a sense of inferiority because
he finds himself continually being compared, in the minds of his own
pupils, with the successful business man and the successful leader in
the outside world. Thus the educator becomes repressed and suppressed
in our civilization. As things stand, this condition cannot be changed
from the outside unless the general public alters its standards of
achievement, which it is not likely to do soon.
Yet it can be changed by the teaching profession itself, if it becomes
conscious not only of its individualistic relation to the pupil,
but also of its social relation to the general public. The teaching
profession, as such, has the right to carry on a very definite
propaganda with a view to enlightening the public and asserting its
intimate relation to the society which it serves. In addition to
conducting a propaganda on behalf of its individual members, education
must also raise the general appreciation of the teaching profession.
Unless the profession can raise itself by its own bootstraps, it will
fast lose the power of recruiting outstanding talent for itself.
Propaganda cannot change all that is at present unsatisfactory in the
educational situation. There are factors, such as low pay and the lack
of adequate provision for superannuated teachers, which definitely
affect the status of the profession. It is possible, by means of an
intelligent appeal predicated upon the actual present composition of
the public mind, to modify the general attitude toward the teaching
profession. Such a changed attitude will begin by expressing itself in
an insistence on the idea of more adequate salaries for the profession.
There are various ways in which academic organizations in America
handle their financial problems. One type of college or university
depends, for its monetary support, upon grants from the state
legislatures. Another depends upon private endowment. There are other
types of educational institutions, such as the sectarian, but the two
chief types include by far the greater number of our institutions of
higher learning.
The state university is supported by grants from the people of the
state, voted by the state legislature. In theory, the degree of
support which the university receives is dependent upon the degree of
acceptance accorded it by the voters. The state university prospers
according to the extent to which it can sell itself to the people of
the state.
The state university is therefore in an unfortunate position unless its
president happens to be a man of outstanding merit as a propagandist
and a dramatizer of educational issues. Yet if this is the case—if
the university shapes its whole policy toward gaining the support of
the state legislature—its educational function may suffer. It may be
tempted to base its whole appeal to the public on its public service,
real or supposed, and permit the education of its individual students
to take care of itself. It may attempt to educate the people of the
state at the expense of its own pupils. This may generate a number of
evils, to the extent of making the university a political instrument, a
mere tool of the political group in power. If the president dominates
both the public and the professional politician, this may lead to a
situation in which the personality of the president outweighs the true
function of the institution.
The endowed college or university has a problem quite as perplexing.
The endowed college is dependent upon the support, usually, of key
men in industry whose social and economic objectives are concrete
and limited, and therefore often at variance with the pursuit of
abstract knowledge. The successful business man criticizes the
great universities for being too academic, but seldom for being
too practical. One might imagine that the key men who support our
universities would like them to specialize in schools of applied
science, of practical salesmanship or of industrial efficiency. And it
may well be, in many instances, that the demands which the potential
endowers of our universities make upon these institutions are flatly
in contradiction to the interests of scholarship and general culture.
We have, therefore, the anomalous situation of the college seeking
to carry on a propaganda in favor of scholarship among people who
are quite out of sympathy with the aims to which they are asked to
subscribe their money. Men who, by the commonly accepted standards,
are failures or very moderate successes in our American world (the
pedagogues) seek to convince the outstanding successes (the business
men) that they should give their money to ideals which they do not
pursue. Men who, through a sense of inferiority, despise money, seek to
win the good will of men who love money.
It seems possible that the future status of the endowed college will
depend upon a balancing of these forces, both the academic and the
endowed elements obtaining in effect due consideration.
The college must win public support. If the potential donor is
apathetic, enthusiastic public approval must be obtained to convince
him. If he seeks unduly to influence the educational policy of the
institution, public opinion must support the college in the continuance
of its proper functions. If either factor dominates unduly, we are
likely to find a demagoguery or a snobbishness aiming to please one
group or the other.
There is still another potential solution of the problem. It is
possible that through an educational propaganda aiming to develop
greater social consciousness on the part of the people of the country,
there may be awakened in the minds of men of affairs, as a class,
social consciousness which will produce more minds of the type of
Julius Rosenwald, V. Everitt Macy, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., the late
Willard Straight.
Many colleges have already developed intelligent propaganda in order
to bring them into active and continuous relation with the general
public. A definite technique has been developed in their relation to
the community in the form of college news bureaus. These bureaus have
formed an intercollegiate association whose members meet once a year
to discuss their problems. These problems include the education of
the alumnus and his effect upon the general public and upon specific
groups, the education of the future student to the choice of the
particular college, the maintenance of an _esprit de corps_ so that
the athletic prowess of the college will not be placed first, the
development of some familiarity with the research work done in the
college in order to attract the attention of those who may be able to
lend aid, the development of an understanding of the aims and the work
of the institution in order to attract special endowments for specified
purposes.
Some seventy-five of these bureaus are now affiliated with the
American Association of College News Bureaus, including those of Yale,
Wellesley, Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, Western Reserve, Tufts and
California. A bi-monthly news letter is published, bringing to members
the news of their profession. The Association endeavors to uphold the
ethical standards of the profession and aims to work in harmony with
the press.
The National Education Association and other societies are carrying on
a definite propaganda to promote the larger purposes of educational
endeavor. One of the aims of such propaganda is of course improvement
in the prestige and material position of the teachers themselves. An
occasional McAndrew case calls the attention of the public to the fact
that in some schools the teacher is far from enjoying full academic
freedom, while in certain communities the choice of teachers is based
upon political or sectarian considerations rather than upon real
ability. If such issues were made, by means of propaganda, to become
a matter of public concern on a truly national scale, there would
doubtless be a general tendency to improvement.
The concrete problems of colleges are more varied and puzzling than one
might suppose. The pharmaceutical college of a university is concerned
because the drug store is no longer merely a drug store, but primarily
a soda fountain, a lunch counter, a book-shop, a retailer of all
sorts of general merchandise from society stationery to spare radio
parts. The college realizes the economic utility of the lunch counter
feature to the practicing druggist, yet it feels that the ancient and
honorable art of compounding specifics is being degraded.
Cornell University discovers that endowments are rare. Why? Because the
people think that the University is a state institution and therefore
publicly supported.
Many of our leading universities rightly feel that the results of their
scholarly researches should not only be presented to libraries and
learned publications, but should also, where practicable and useful,
be given to the public in the dramatic form which the public can
understand. Harvard is but one example.
“Not long ago,” says Charles A. Merrill in _Personality_, “a certain
Harvard professor vaulted into the newspaper headlines. There were
several days when one could hardly pick up a paper in any of the larger
cities without finding his name bracketed with his achievement.
“The professor, who was back from a trip to Yucatan in the interests of
science, had solved the mystery of the Venus calendar of the ancient
Mayas. He had discovered the key to the puzzle of how the Mayas kept
tab on the flight of time. Checking the Mayan record of celestial
events against the known astronomical facts, he had found a perfect
correlation between the time count of these Central American Indians
and the true positions of the planet Venus in the sixth century B.C. A
civilization which flourished in the Western Hemisphere twenty-five
centuries ago was demonstrated to have attained heights hitherto
unappreciated by the modern world.
“How the professor’s discovery happened to be chronicled in the popular
press is, also, in retrospect, a matter of interest.... If left to his
own devices, he might never have appeared in print, except perhaps in
some technical publication, and his remarks there would have been no
more intelligible to the average man or woman than if they had been
inscribed in Mayan hieroglyphics.
“Popularization of this message from antiquity was due to the
initiative of a young man named James W. D. Seymour....
“It may surprise and shock some people,” Mr. Merrill adds, “to be told
that the oldest and most dignified seats of learning in America now
hire press agents, just as railroad companies, fraternal organizations,
moving picture producers and political parties retain them. It is
nevertheless a fact....
“... there is hardly a college or university in the country which does
not, with the approval of the governing body and the faculty, maintain
a publicity office, with a director and a staff of assistants, for the
purpose of establishing friendly relations with the newspapers, and
through the newspapers, with the public....
“This enterprise breaks sharply with tradition. In the older seats
of learning it is a recent innovation. It violates the fundamental
article in the creed of the old academic societies. Cloistered
seclusion used to be considered the first essential of scholarship. The
college was anxious to preserve its aloofness from the world....
“The colleges used to resent outside interest in their affairs. They
might, somewhat reluctantly and contemptuously, admit reporters to
their Commencement Day exercises, but no further would they go....
“To-day, if a newspaper reporter wants to interview a Harvard
professor, he has merely to telephone the Secretary for Information to
the University. Officially, Harvard still shies away from the title
‘Director of Publicity.’ Informally, however, the secretary with the
long title is the publicity man. He is an important official to-day at
Harvard.”
It may be a new idea that the president of a university will concern
himself with the kind of mental picture his institution produces on
the public mind. Yet it is part of the president’s work to see that
his university takes its proper place in the community and therefore
also in the community mind, and produces the results desired, both in a
cultural and in a financial sense.
If his institution does not produce the mental picture which it should,
one of two things may be wrong: Either the media of communication with
the public may be wrong or unbalanced; or his institution may be at
fault. The public is getting an oblique impression of the university,
in which case the impression should be modified; or it may be that the
public is getting a _correct_ impression, in which case, very possibly,
the work of the university itself should be modified. For both
possibilities lie within the province of the public relations counsel.
Columbia University recently instituted a _Casa Italiana_, which was
solemnly inaugurated in the presence of representatives of the Italian
government, to emphasize its high standing in Latin studies and the
Romance languages. Years ago Harvard founded the Germanic Museum, which
was ceremoniously opened by Prince Henry of Prussia.
Many colleges maintain extension courses which bring their work to the
knowledge of a broad public. It is of course proper that such courses
should be made known to the general public. But, to take another
example, if they have been badly planned, from the point of view of
public relations, if they are unduly scholastic and detached, their
effect may be the opposite of favorable. In such a case, it is not the
work of the public relations counsel to urge that the courses be made
better known, but to urge that they first be modified to conform to the
impression which the college wishes to create, where that is compatible
with the university’s scholastic ideals.
Again, it may be the general opinion that the work of a certain
institution is 80 per cent postgraduate research, an opinion which
may tend to alienate public interest. This opinion may be true or it
may be false. If it is false, it should be corrected by high-spotting
undergraduate activities.
If, on the other hand, it is true that 80 per cent of the work is
postgraduate research, the most should be made of that fact. It should
be the concern of the president to make known the discoveries which
are of possible public interest. A university expedition into Biblical
lands may be uninteresting as a purely scholastic undertaking, but if
it contributes light on some Biblical assertion it will immediately
arouse the interest of large masses of the population. The zoölogical
department may be hunting for some strange bacillus which has no known
relation to any human disease, but the fact that it is chasing bacilli
is in itself capable of dramatic presentation to the public.
Many universities now gladly lend members of their faculties to assist
in investigations of public interest. Thus Cornell lent Professor
Wilcox to aid the government in the preparation of the national census.
Professor Irving Fisher of Yale has been called in to advise on
currency matters.
In the ethical sense, propaganda bears the same relation to education
as to business or politics. It may be abused. It may be used to
overadvertise an institution and to create in the public mind
artificial values. There can be no absolute guarantee against its
misuse.
CHAPTER IX
PROPAGANDA IN SOCIAL SERVICE
The public relations counsel is necessary to social work. And since
social service, by its very nature, can continue only by means of the
voluntary support of the wealthy, it is obliged to use propaganda
continually. The leaders in social service were among the first
consciously to utilize propaganda in its modern sense.
The great enemy of any attempt to change men’s habits is inertia.
Civilization is limited by inertia.
Our attitude toward social relations, toward economics, toward
national and international politics, continues past attitudes and
strengthens them under the force of tradition. Comstock drops his
mantle of proselytizing morality on the willing shoulders of a Sumner;
Penrose drops his mantle on Butler; Carnegie his on Schwab, and so _ad
infinitum_. Opposing this traditional acceptance of existing ideas
is an active public opinion that has been directed consciously into
movements against inertia. Public opinion was made or changed formerly
by tribal chiefs, by kings, by religious leaders. To-day the privilege
of attempting to sway public opinion is every one’s. It is one of the
manifestations of democracy that any one may try to convince others
and to assume leadership on behalf of his own thesis.
New ideas, new precedents, are continually striving for a place in the
scheme of things.
The social settlement, the organized campaigns against tuberculosis
and cancer, the various research activities aiming directly at
the elimination of social diseases and maladjustments—a multitude
of altruistic activities which could be catalogued only in a book
of many pages—have need of knowledge of the public mind and mass
psychology if they are to achieve their aims. The literature on social
service publicity is so extensive, and the underlying principles so
fundamental, that only one example is necessary here to illustrate the
technique of social service propaganda.
A social service organization undertook to fight lynching, Jim Crowism
and the civil discriminations against the Negro below the Mason and
Dixon line.
The National Association for the Advancement of the Colored People had
the fight in hand. As a matter of technique they decided to dramatize
the year’s campaign in an annual convention which would concentrate
attention on the problem.
Should it be held in the North, South, West or East? Since the purpose
was to affect the entire country, the association was advised to
hold it in the South. For, said the propagandist, a point of view on
a southern question, emanating from a southern center, would have
greater authority than the same point of view issuing from any other
locality, particularly when that point of View was at odds with the
traditional southern point of view. Atlanta was chosen.
The third step was to surround the conference with people who were
stereotypes for ideas that carried weight all over the country. The
support of leaders of diversified groups was sought. Telegrams and
letters were dispatched to leaders of religious, political, social
and educational groups, asking for their point of view on the purpose
of the conference. But in addition to these group leaders of national
standing it was particularly important from the technical standpoint to
secure the opinions of group leaders of the South, even from Atlanta
itself, to emphasize the purposes of the conference to the entire
public. There was one group in Atlanta which could be approached. A
group of ministers had been bold enough to come out for a greater
interracial amity. This group was approached and agreed to coöperate in
the conference.
The event ran off as scheduled. The program itself followed the general
scheme. Negroes and white men from the South, on the same platform,
expressed the same point of view.
A dramatic element was spot-lighted here and there. A national leader
from Massachusetts agreed in principle and in practice with a Baptist
preacher from the South.
If the radio had been in effect, the whole country might have heard and
been moved by the speeches and the principles expressed.
But the public read the words and the ideas in the press of the
country. For the event had been created of such important component
parts as to awaken interest throughout the country and to gain support
for its ideas even in the South.
The editorials in the southern press, reflecting the public opinion of
their communities, showed that the subject had become one of interest
to the editors because of the participation by southern leaders.
The event naturally gave the Association itself substantial weapons
with which to appeal to an increasingly wider circle. Further publicity
was attained by mailing reports, letters, and other propaganda to
selected groups of the public.
As for the practical results, the immediate one was a change in the
minds of many southern editors who realized that the question at issue
was not only an emotional one, but also a discussable one; and this
point of view was immediately reflected to their readers. Further
results are hard to measure with a slide-rule. The conference had its
definite effect in building up the racial consciousness and solidarity
of the Negroes. The decline in lynching is very probably a result of
this and other efforts of the Association.
Many churches have made paid advertising and organized propaganda part
of their regular activities. They have developed church advertising
committees, which make use of the newspaper and the billboard, as well
as of the pamphlet. Many denominations maintain their own periodicals.
The Methodist Board of Publication and Information systematically gives
announcements and releases to the press and the magazines.
But in a broader sense the very activities of social service are
propaganda activities. A campaign for the preservation of the teeth
seeks to alter people’s habits in the direction of more frequent
brushing of teeth. A campaign for better parks seeks to alter people’s
opinion in regard to the desirability of taxing themselves for the
purchase of park facilities. A campaign against tuberculosis is an
attempt to convince everybody that tuberculosis can be cured, that
persons with certain symptoms should immediately go to the doctor, and
the like. A campaign to lower the infant mortality rate is an effort to
alter the habits of mothers in regard to feeding, bathing and caring
for their babies. Social service, in fact, is identical with propaganda
in many cases.
Even those aspects of social service which are governmental and
administrative, rather than charitable and spontaneous, depend on wise
propaganda for their effectiveness. Professor Harry Elmer Barnes, in
his book, “The Evolution of Modern Penology in Pennsylvania,” states
that improvements in penological administration in that state are
hampered by political influences. The legislature must be persuaded to
permit the utilization of the best methods of scientific penology, and
for this there is necessary the development of an enlightened public
opinion. “Until such a situation has been brought about,” Mr. Barnes
states, “progress in penology is doomed to be sporadic, local, and
generally ineffective. The solution of prison problems, then, seems to
be fundamentally a problem of conscientious and scientific publicity.”
Social progress is simply the progressive education and enlightenment
of the public mind in regard to its immediate and distant social
problems.
CHAPTER X
ART AND SCIENCE
In the education of the American public toward greater art
appreciation, propaganda plays an important part. When art galleries
seek to launch the canvases of an artist they should create public
acceptance for his works. To increase public appreciation a deliberate
propagandizing effort must be made.
In art as in politics the minority rules, but it can rule only by going
out to meet the public on its own ground, by understanding the anatomy
of public opinion and utilizing it.
In applied and commercial art, propaganda makes greater opportunities
for the artist than ever before. This arises from the fact that mass
production reaches an impasse when it competes on a price basis
only. It must, therefore, in a large number of fields create a field
of competition based on esthetic values. Business of many types
capitalizes the esthetic sense to increase markets and profits. Which
is only another way of saying that the artist has the opportunity of
collaborating with industry in such a way as to improve the public
taste, injecting beautiful instead of ugly motifs into the articles
of common use, and, furthermore, securing recognition and money for
himself.
Propaganda can play a part in pointing out what is and what is not
beautiful, and business can definitely help in this way to raise the
level of American culture. In this process propaganda will naturally
make use of the authority of group leaders whose taste and opinion are
recognized.
The public must be interested by means of associational values and
dramatic incidents. New inspiration, which to the artist may be a very
technical and abstract kind of beauty, must be made vital to the public
by association with values which it recognizes and responds to.
For instance, in the manufacture of American silk, markets are
developed by going to Paris for inspiration. Paris can give American
silk a stamp of authority which will aid it to achieve definite
position in the United States. The French Minister of Fine Arts may be
induced to lend his authority to the process.
The following clipping from the New York _Times_ of February 16, 1925,
tells the story:
“Copyright, 1925, by THE NEW YORK TIMES COMPANY—Special Cable to THE
NEW YORK TIMES.
“PARIS, Feb. 15.—For the first time in history, American art materials
are to be exhibited in the Decorative Arts Section of the Louvre
Museum.
“The exposition opening on May 26th with the Minister of Fine Arts,
Paul Léon, acting as patron, will include silks from Cheney Brothers,
South Manchester and New York, the designs of which were based on the
inspiration of Edgar Brandt, famous French iron worker, the modern
Bellini, who makes wonderful art works from iron.
“M. Brandt designed and made the monumental iron doors of the Verdun
war memorial. He has been asked to assist and participate in this
exposition, which will show France the accomplishments of American
industrial art.
“Thirty designs inspired by Edgar Brandt’s work are embodied in 2,500
yards of printed silks, tinsels and cut velvets in a hundred colors....
“These ‘prints ferronnières’ are the first textiles to show the
influence of the modern master, M. Brandt. The silken fabrics possess
a striking composition, showing characteristic Brandt motifs which
were embodied in the tracery of large designs by the Cheney artists
who succeeded in translating the iron into silk, a task which might
appear almost impossible. The strength and brilliancy of the original
design is enhanced by the beauty and warmth of color.”
The result of this ceremony was that prominent department stores in
New York, Chicago and other cities asked to have this exhibition.
They tried to mold the public taste in conformity with the idea which
had the approval of Paris. The silks of Cheney Brothers—a commercial
product produced in quantity—gained a place in public esteem by being
associated with the work of a recognized artist and with a great art
museum.
The same can be said of almost any commercial product susceptible
of beautiful design. There are few products in daily use, whether
furniture, clothes, lamps, posters, commercial labels, book jackets,
pocketbooks or bathtubs which are not subject to the laws of good taste.
In America, whole departments of production are being changed through
propaganda to fill an economic as well as an esthetic need. Manufacture
is being modified to conform to the economic need to satisfy the public
demand for more beauty. A piano manufacturer recently engaged artists
to design modernist pianos. This was not done because there existed
a widespread demand for modernist pianos. Indeed, the manufacturer
probably expected to sell few. But in order to draw attention to pianos
one must have something more than a piano. People at tea parties will
not talk about pianos; but they may talk about the new modernist piano.
When Secretary Hoover, three years ago, was asked to appoint a
commission to the Paris Exposition of Decorative Arts, he did so.
As Associate Commissioner I assisted in the organizing of the group
of important business leaders in the industrial art field who went
to Paris as delegates to visit and report on the Exposition. The
propaganda carried on for the aims and purposes of the Commission
undoubtedly had a widespread effect on the attitude of Americans
towards art in industry; it was only a few years later that the modern
art movement penetrated all fields of industry.
Department stores took it up. R. H. Macy & Company held an
Art-in-Trades Exposition, in which the Metropolitan Museum of Art
collaborated as adviser. Lord & Taylor sponsored a Modern Arts
Exposition, with foreign exhibitors. These stores, coming closely in
touch with the life of the people, performed a propagandizing function
in bringing to the people the best in art as it related to these
industries. The Museum at the same time was alive to the importance of
making contact with the public mind, by utilizing the department store
to increase art appreciation.
Of all art institutions the museum suffers most from the lack of
effective propaganda. Most present-day museums have the reputation
of being morgues or sanctuaries, whereas they should be leaders and
teachers in the esthetic life of the community. They have little vital
relation to life.
The treasures of beauty in a museum need to be interpreted to the
public, and this requires a propagandist. The housewife in a Bronx
apartment doubtless feels little interest in an ancient Greek vase in
the Metropolitan Museum. Yet an artist working with a pottery firm
may adapt the design of this vase to a set of china and this china,
priced low through quantity production, may find its way to that Bronx
apartment, developing unconsciously, through its fine line and color,
an appreciation of beauty.
Some American museums feel this responsibility. The Metropolitan Museum
of Art of New York rightly prides itself on its million and a quarter
of Visitors in the year 1926; on its efforts to dramatize and make
visual the civilizations which its various departments reveal; on its
special lectures, its story hours, its loan collections of prints and
photographs and lantern slides, its facilities offered to commercial
firms in the field of applied art, on the outside lecturers who are
invited to lecture in its auditorium and on the lectures given by
its staff to outside organizations; and on the free chamber concerts
given in the museum under the direction of David Mannes, which tend to
dramatize the museum as a home of beauty. Yet that is not the whole of
the problem.
It is not merely a question of making people come to the museum. It is
also a question of making the museum, and the beauty which it houses,
go to the people.
The museum’s accomplishments should not be evaluated merely in terms of
the number of visitors. Its function is not merely to receive visitors,
but to project itself and what it stands for in the community which it
serves.
The museum can stand in its community for a definite esthetic standard
which can, by the help of intelligent propaganda, permeate the daily
lives of all its neighbors. Why should not a museum establish a
museum council of art, to establish standards in home decoration, in
architecture, and in commercial production? or a research board for
applied arts? Why should not the museum, instead of merely preserving
the art treasures which it possesses, quicken their meaning in terms
which the general public understands?
A recent annual report of an art museum in one of the large cities of
the United States, says:
“An underlying characteristic of an Art Museum like ours must be its
attitude of conservatism, for after all its first duty is to treasure
the great achievements of men in the arts and sciences.”
Is that true? Is not another important duty to interpret the models of
beauty which it possesses?
If the duty of the museum is to be active it must study how best to
make its message intelligible to the community which it serves. It
must boldly assume esthetic leadership.
As in art, so in science, both pure and applied. Pure science was once
guarded and fostered by learned societies and scientific associations.
Now pure science finds support and encouragement also in industry. Many
of the laboratories in which abstract research is being pursued are now
connected with some large corporation, which is quite willing to devote
hundreds of thousands of dollars to scientific study, for the sake of
one golden invention or discovery which may emerge from it.
Big business of course gains heavily when the invention emerges.
But at that very moment it assumes the responsibility of placing
the new invention at the service of the public. It assumes also the
responsibility of interpreting its meaning to the public.
The industrial interests can furnish to the schools, the colleges and
the postgraduate university courses the exact truth concerning the
scientific progress of our age. They not only can do so; they are
under obligation to do so. Propaganda as an instrument of commercial
competition has opened opportunities to the inventor and given great
stimulus to the research scientist. In the last five or ten years, the
successes of some of the larger corporations have been so outstanding
that the whole field of science has received a tremendous impetus.
The American Telephone and Telegraph Company, the Western Electric
Company, the General Electric Company, the Westinghouse Electric
Company and others have realized the importance of scientific research.
They have also understood that their ideas must be made intelligible
to the public to be fully successful. Television, broadcasting, loud
speakers are utilized as propaganda aids.
Propaganda assists in marketing new inventions. Propaganda, by
repeatedly interpreting new scientific ideas and inventions to the
public, has made the public more receptive. Propaganda is accustoming
the public to change and progress.
CHAPTER XI
THE MECHANICS OF PROPAGANDA
The media by which special pleaders transmit their messages to the
public through propaganda include all the means by which people
to-day transmit their ideas to one another. There is no means of
human communication which may not also be a means of deliberate
propaganda, because propaganda is simply the establishing of reciprocal
understanding between an individual and a group.
The important point to the propagandist is that the relative value
of the various instruments of propaganda, and their relation to the
masses, are constantly changing. If he is to get full reach for his
message he must take advantage of these shifts of value the instant
they occur. Fifty years ago, the public meeting was a propaganda
instrument par excellence. To-day it is difficult to get more than
a handful of people to attend a public meeting unless extraordinary
attractions are part of the program. The automobile takes them away
from home, the radio keeps them in the home, the successive daily
editions of the newspaper bring information to them in office or
subway, and also they are sick of the ballyhoo of the rally.
Instead there are numerous other media of communication, some new,
others old but so transformed that they have become virtually new.
The newspaper, of course, remains always a primary medium for the
transmission of opinions and ideas—in other words, for propaganda.
It was not many years ago that newspaper editors resented what they
called “the use of the news columns for propaganda purposes.” Some
editors would even kill a good story if they imagined its publication
might benefit any one. This point of view is now largely abandoned.
To-day the leading editorial offices take the view that the real
criterion governing the publication or non-publication of matter which
comes to the desk is its news value. The newspaper cannot assume, nor
is it its function to assume, the responsibility of guaranteeing that
what it publishes will not work out to somebody’s interest. There is
hardly a single item in any daily paper, the publication of which does
not, or might not, profit or injure somebody. That is the nature of
news. What the newspaper does strive for is that the news which it
publishes shall be accurate, and (since it must select from the mass of
news material available) that it shall be of interest and importance to
large groups of its readers.
In its editorial columns the newspaper is a personality, commenting
upon things and events from its individual point of view. But in
its news columns the typical modern American newspaper attempts to
reproduce, with due regard to news interest, the outstanding events and
opinions of the day.
It does not ask whether a given item is propaganda or not. What is
important is that it be news. And in the selection of news the editor
is usually entirely independent. In the New York _Times_—to take an
outstanding example—news is printed because of its news value and
for no other reason. The _Times_ editors determine with complete
independence what is and what is not news. They brook no censorship.
They are not influenced by any external pressure nor swayed by any
values of expediency or opportunism. The conscientious editor on every
newspaper realizes that his obligation to the public is news. The fact
of its accomplishment makes it news.
If the public relations counsel can breathe the breath of life into an
idea and make it take its place among other ideas and events, it will
receive the public attention it merits. There can be no question of
his “contaminating news at its source.” He creates some of the day’s
events, which must compete in the editorial office with other events.
Often the events which he creates may be specially acceptable to a
newspaper’s public and he may create them with that public in mind.
If important things of life to-day consist of transatlantic radiophone
talks arranged by commercial telephone companies; if they consist of
inventions that will be commercially advantageous to the men who
market them; if they consist of Henry Fords with epoch-making cars—then
all this is news. The so-called flow of propaganda into the newspaper
offices of the country may, simply at the editor’s discretion, find its
way to the waste basket.
The source of the news offered to the editor should always be clearly
stated and the facts accurately presented.
The situation of the magazines at the present moment, from the
propagandist’s point of view, is different from that of the daily
newspapers. The average magazine assumes no obligation, as the
newspaper does, to reflect the current news. It selects its material
deliberately, in accordance with a continuous policy. It is not,
like the newspaper, an organ of public opinion, but tends rather to
become a propagandist organ, propagandizing for a particular idea,
whether it be good housekeeping, or smart apparel, or beauty in home
decoration, or debunking public opinion, or general enlightenment or
liberalism or amusement. One magazine may aim to sell health; another,
English gardens; another, fashionable men’s wear; another, Nietzschean
philosophy.
In all departments in which the various magazines specialize, the
public relations counsel may play an important part. For he may,
because of his client’s interest, assist them to create the events
which further their propaganda. A bank, in order to emphasize the
importance of its women’s department, may arrange to supply a leading
women’s magazine with a series of articles and advice on investments
written by the woman expert in charge of this department. The women’s
magazine in turn will utilize this new feature as a means of building
additional prestige and circulation.
The lecture, once a powerful means of influencing public opinion, has
changed its value. The lecture itself may be only a symbol, a ceremony;
its importance, for propaganda purposes, lies in the fact that it was
delivered. Professor So-and-So, expounding an epoch-making invention,
may speak to five hundred persons, or only fifty. His lecture, if it
is important, will be broadcast; reports of it will appear in the
newspapers; discussion will be stimulated. The real value of the
lecture, from the propaganda point of view, is in its repercussion to
the general public.
The radio is at present one of the most important tools of the
propagandist. Its future development is uncertain.
It may compete with the newspaper as an advertising medium. Its
ability to reach millions of persons simultaneously naturally appeals
to the advertiser. And since the average advertiser has a limited
appropriation for advertising, money spent on the radio will tend to
be withdrawn from the newspaper.
To what extent is the publisher alive to this new phenomenon? It is
bound to come close to American journalism and publishing. Newspapers
have recognized the advertising potentialities of the companies that
manufacture radio apparatus, and of radio stores, large and small;
and newspapers have accorded to the radio in their news and feature
columns an importance relative to the increasing attention given by
the public to radio. At the same time, certain newspapers have bought
radio stations and linked them up with their news and entertainment
distribution facilities, supplying these two features over the air to
the public.
It is possible that newspaper chains will sell schedules of advertising
space on the air and on paper. Newspaper chains will possibly contract
with advertisers for circulation on paper and over the air. There are,
at present, publishers who sell space in the air and in their columns,
but they regard the two as separate ventures.
Large groups, political, racial, sectarian, economic or professional,
are tending to control stations to propagandize their points of view.
Or is it conceivable that America may adopt the English licensing
system under which the listener, instead of the advertiser, pays?
Whether the present system is changed, the advertiser—and
propagandist—must necessarily adapt himself to it. Whether, in the
future, air space will be sold openly as such, or whether the message
will reach the public in the form of straight entertainment and news,
or as special programs for particular groups, the propagandist must be
prepared to meet the conditions and utilize them.
The American motion picture is the greatest unconscious carrier of
propaganda in the world to-day. It is a great distributor for ideas and
opinions.
The motion picture can standardize the ideas and habits of a nation.
Because pictures are made to meet market demands, they reflect,
emphasize and even exaggerate broad popular tendencies, rather than
stimulate new ideas and opinions. The motion picture avails itself only
of ideas and facts which are in vogue. As the newspaper seeks to purvey
news, it seeks to purvey entertainment.
Another instrument of propaganda is the personality. Has the device
of the exploited personality been pushed too far? President Coolidge
photographed on his vacation in full Indian regalia in company with
full-blooded chiefs, was the climax of a greatly over-reported
vacation. Obviously a public personality can be made absurd by misuse
of the very mechanism which helped create it.
Yet the vivid dramatization of personality will always remain one of
the functions of the public relations counsel. The public instinctively
demands a personality to typify a conspicuous corporation or
enterprise.
There is a story that a great financier discharged a partner because he
had divorced his wife.
“But what,” asked the partner, “have my private affairs to do with the
banking business?”
“If you are not capable of managing your own wife,” was the reply, “the
people will certainly believe that you are not capable of managing
their money.”
The propagandist must treat personality as he would treat any other
objective fact within his province.
A personality may create circumstances, as Lindbergh created good will
between the United States and Mexico. Events may create a personality,
as the Cuban War created the political figure of Roosevelt. It is
often difficult to say which creates the other. Once a public figure
has decided what ends he wishes to achieve, he must regard himself
objectively and present an outward picture of himself which is
consistent with his real character and his aims.
There are a multitude of other avenues of approach to the public mind,
some old, some new as television. No attempt will be made to discuss
each one separately. The school may disseminate information concerning
scientific facts. The fact that a commercial concern may eventually
profit from a widespread understanding of its activities because of
this does not condemn the dissemination of such information, provided
that the subject merits study on the part of the students. If a baking
corporation contributes pictures and charts to a school to show how
bread is made, these propaganda activities, if they are accurate and
candid, are in no way reprehensible, provided the school authorities
accept or reject such offers carefully on their educational merits.
It may be that a new product will be announced to the public by means
of a motion picture of a parade taking place a thousand miles away. Or
the manufacturer of a new jitney airplane may personally appear and
speak in a million homes through radio and television. The man who
would most effectively transmit his message to the public must be alert
to make use of all the means of propaganda.
Undoubtedly the public is becoming aware of the methods which are
being used to mold its opinions and habits. If the public is better
informed about the processes of its own life, it will be so much the
more receptive to reasonable appeals to its own interests. No matter
how sophisticated, how cynical the public may become about publicity
methods, it must respond to the basic appeals, because it will always
need food, crave amusement, long for beauty, respond to leadership.
If the public becomes more intelligent in its commercial demands,
commercial firms will meet the new standards. If it becomes weary
of the old methods used to persuade it to accept a given idea or
commodity, its leaders will present their appeals more intelligently.
Propaganda will never die out. Intelligent men must realize that
propaganda is the modern instrument by which they can fight for
productive ends and help to bring order out of chaos.
THE END
Transcriber’s Notes:
Variations in spelling and hyphenation are retained.
Perceived typographical errors have been changed.
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