Crystallizing Public Opinion

by Edward L. Bernays

Mr. Child discusses in that article the right of the critic to say uncomplimentary things about matters of public interest. He points out the legal basis for the right to criticize plays and novels. Then he adds, “A vastly more important and interesting theory, and one which must arise from the present state and tendency of industrial conditions, is whether the acts of men in commercial activity may ever become so prominent and so far reaching in their effect that they compel a universal public interest and that public comment is impliedly invited by reason of their conspicuous and semi-public nature. It may be said that at no time have private industries become of such startling interest to the community at large as at present in the United States.” How far present-day tendencies have borne out Mr. Child’s expectation of a growing and accepted public interest in important industrial enterprises, the reader can judge for himself.

With regard to the second tendency—the increased readiness of the public to expect information about and to be heard on matters of political and social interest—Ray Stannard Baker’s description of the American journalist at the Peace Conference of Versailles gives an excellent picture. Mr. Baker tells what a shock American newspaper men gave Old World diplomats because at the Paris conference they “had come, not begging, but demanding. They sat at every doorway,” says Mr. Baker. “They looked over every shoulder. They wanted every resolution and report and wanted it immediately. I shall never forget the delegation of American newspaper men, led by John Nevin, I saw come striding through that Holy of Holies, the French Foreign Office, demanding that they be admitted to the first general session of the Peace Conference. They horrified the upholders of the old methods, they desperately offended the ancient conventions, they were as rough and direct as democracy itself.”

And I shall never forget the same feeling brought home to me, when Herbert Bayard Swope of the New York World, in the press room at the Crillon Hotel in Paris, led the discussion of the newspaper representatives who forced the conference to regard public opinion and admit newspaper men, and give out communiques daily.

That the pressure of the public for admittance to the mysteries of foreign affairs is being felt by the nations of the world may be seen from the following dispatch published in the New York Herald under the date line of the New York Herald Bureau, Paris, January 17, 1922: “The success of Lord Riddell in getting publicity for British opinion during the Washington conference, while the French viewpoint was not stressed, may result in the appointment by the Poincaré Government of a real propaganda agent to meet the foreign newspaper men. The Eclair to-day calls on the new premier to ‘find his own Lord Riddell in the French diplomatic and parliamentary world, who can give the world the French interpretation.’” Walter Lippmann of the New York World in his volume “Public Opinion” declares that “the significant revolution of modern times is not industrial or economic or political, but the revolution which is taking place in the art of creating consent among the governed.” He goes on: “Within the life of the new generation now in control of affairs, persuasion has become a self-conscious art and a regular organ of popular government. None of us begins to understand the consequences, but it is no daring prophecy to say that the knowledge of how to create consent will alter every political premise. Under the impact of propaganda, not necessarily in the sinister meaning of the word alone, the only constants of our thinking have become variables. It is no longer possible, for example, to believe in the cardinal dogma of democracy, that the knowledge needed for the management of human affairs comes up spontaneously from the human heart. Where we act on that theory we expose ourselves to self-deception and to forms of persuasion that we cannot verify. It has been demonstrated that we cannot rely upon intuition, conscience, or the accidents of casual opinion if we are to deal with the world beyond our reach.”[2]

In domestic affairs the importance of public opinion not only in political decisions but in the daily industrial life of the nation may be seen from numerous incidents. In the New York Times of Friday, May 20, 1922, I find almost a column article with the heading “Hoover Prescribes Publicity for Coal.” Among the improvements in the coal industry generally, which Mr. Hoover, according to the dispatch, anticipates from widespread, accurate and informative publicity about the industry itself, are the stimulation of industrial consumers to more regular demands, the ability to forecast more reliably the volume of demand, the ability of the consumer to “form some judgment as to the prices he should pay for coal,” and the tendency to hold down over-expansion in the industry by publication of the ratio of production to capacity. Mr. Hoover concludes that really informative publicity “would protect the great majority of operators from the criticism that can only be properly leveled at the minority.” Not so many years ago neither the majority nor the minority in the coal industry would have concerned itself about public criticism of the industry.

From coal to jewelry seems rather a long step, and yet in The Jeweler’s Circular, a trade magazine, I find much comment upon the National Jewelers’ Publicity Association. This association began with the simple commercial ambition of acquainting the public with “the value of jewelry merchandise for gift purposes”; now it finds itself engaged in eliminating from the public mind in general, and from the minds of legislators in particular, the impression that “the jewelry business is absolutely useless and that any money spent in a jewelry store is thrown away.”

Not so long ago it would scarcely have occurred to any one in the jewelry industry that there was any importance to be attached to the opinion of the public on the essential or non-essential character of the jewelry industry. To-day, on the other hand, jewelers find it a profitable investment to bring before the people the fact that table silver is an essential in modern life, and that without watches “the business and industries of the nations would be a sad chaos.” With all the other competing interests in the world to-day, the question as to whether the public considers the business of manufacturing and selling jewelry essential or non-essential is a matter of the first importance to the industry.

The best examples, of course, of the increasing importance of public opinion to industries which until recently scarcely concerned themselves with the existence or non-existence of a public opinion about them, are those industries which are charged with a public interest.

In a long article about the attitude of the public towards the railroads, the Railway Age reaches the conclusion that the most important problem which American railroads must solve is “the problem of selling themselves to the public.” Some public utilities maintain public relations departments, whose function it is to interpret the organizations to the public, as much as to interpret the public to them. The significant thing, however, is not the accepted importance of public opinion in this or the other individual industry, but the fact that public opinion is becoming cumulatively more and more articulate and therefore more important to industrial life as a whole.

The New York Central Railroad, for example, maintains a Public Relations Department under Pitt Hand, whose function it is to make it clear to the public that the railroad is functioning efficiently to serve the public in every possible way. This department studies the public and tries to discover where the railroad’s service can be mended or improved, or when wrong or harmful impressions upon the public mind may be corrected.