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

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

Thus Bernays’s position was eccentric, in the public eye, when this book of his came out in 1928. That same year saw the publication of another, very different book on propaganda: Falsehood in War-Time, by the British MP Arthur Ponsonby, is a straightforward catalogue of all the major falsehoods propagated by the Allied governments.¹⁷ Ponsonby refutes each lie, explaining also how and why it was devised and spread. That book created quite a furor on its publication in both Britain and America. Bernays’s cunning Propaganda failed to resonate as strongly as this other, blunter book, which seemed the ultimate summation of the case against the craft that Bernays tried, throughout his life, to justify.

The propagandist was no loser at his game, however. True, the word remained simplistically pejorative, and is so used today. Bernays’s sanguine view of propaganda, furthermore, and the sophistry he often used to make his arguments, put him on the weak side of debates in public, and earned him much contemptuous abuse from those appalled by the deceitfulness and tawdry aims of corporate propaganda. (There were many more such critics in the Twenties and the Thirties than there are today; and their critiques were publicly accessible—far more than they are today.) Given Bernays’s own priorities, however, such treatment was unlikely to have hurt him much. The audience that he most cared about, it seems, was not the public, and surely not those intellectuals who so despised his craft. He wrote for those who understood the value of that craft, and could afford to make it work for them.¹⁸ Even as the people, understandably, distrusted “propaganda” more and more, propaganda was becoming ever more pervasive, as its sponsors marveled at its victories. “In fact,” Bernays notes in this book, “its use is growing as its efficiency in gaining public support is recognized.” That propaganda easily seduces even those whom it most horrifies is a paradox that Bernays grasped completely; and it is one that we must try at last to understand, if we want to change the world that Edward Bernays, among others, made for us.

Mark Crispin Miller

New York City

July 2004