Crystallizing Public Opinion

by Edward L. Bernays

For like causes we find great industries—motion pictures being one and organized baseball another—appointing as directors of their activities men prominent in public life, doing this to assure the public of the honest and social-minded conduct of their members. The Franklin Roosevelts are in this class, the Will Hayses and the Landises.

A striking example of this interaction is illustrated in what occurred at the Hague Conference a few years ago. The effect of the Hague Conference’s conduct upon the public was such that officials were forced to open the Conference doors to the representatives of newspapers. On June 16th, 1922, a note came from The Hague by the Associated Press that Foreign Minister Van Karnebeek of Holland capitulated to the world’s desire to be informed of what was going on by admitting correspondents. Early announcement that “the press cannot be admitted” was, according to the report, followed by anxious emissaries begging the journalists to have patience. Editorials printed in Holland pointed out that the best way to insure public coöperation was to take the public into its confidence. Minister van Karnebeek, who had been at Washington, was thoroughly awake to the invaluable service the press of the world rendered there. One editorial here pointed out that public statements “were used by the diplomats themselves as a happy means of testing popular opinion upon the various projects offered in council. How many ‘trial balloons’ were sent up in this fashion, nobody can recall. Nevertheless each delegation maintained clipping bureaus, which were brought up to date every morning and which gave the delegates accurate information as to the state of mind at home. Thus it came about that world opinion was ready and anxious to receive the finished work of the conference and that it was prompt to bring individual recalcitrant groups into line.”

Let me quote from the New York Evening Post of July, 1922, as to the important interaction of these forces: “The importance of the press in guiding public opinion and the coöperation between the members of the press and the men who express public opinion in action, which has grown up since the Peace Conference at Paris, were stressed by Lionel Curtis, who arrived on the Adriatic yesterday to attend the Institute of Politics, which opens on July 27 at Williamstown. ‘Perhaps for the first time in history,’ he said, ‘the men whose business it is to make public opinion were collected for some months under the same roof with the officials whose task in life is the actual conduct of foreign affairs. In the long run, foreign policy is determined by public opinion. It was impossible in Paris not to be impressed by the immense advantage of bringing into close contact the writers who, through the press, are making public opinion and the men who have to express their opinion in actual policy.’”

Harvard University, likewise, appreciating the power of public opinion over its own activities, has recently appointed a counsel on public relations to make its aims clear to the public.

The institutions which make public opinion conform to the demands of the public. The public responds to an equally large degree to these institutions. Such fights as that made by Collier’s Weekly for pure food control show this.

The Safety First movement, by its use of every form of appeal, from poster to circular, from lecture to law enforcement, from motion pictures to “safety weeks,” is bringing about a gradual change in the attitude of a safety-deserving public towards the taking of unnecessary risks.

The Rockefeller Foundation, confronted with the serious problem of the hookworm in the South and in other localities, has brought about a change in the habits of large sections of rural populations by analysis, investigation, applied medical principles, and public education.

The moulder of public opinion must enlist the established point of view. This is true of the press as well as of other forces. Mr. Mencken mixes cynicism and truth when he declares that the chief difficulty confronting a newspaper which tries to carry out independent and thoughtful policies “does not lie in the direction of the board of directors, but in the direction of the public which buys the paper.”[13]

The New York Tribune, as an example of editorial bravery, points out in an advertisement published May 23, 1922, that though “news knows no order in the making” and though “a newspaper must carry the news, both pleasant and unpleasant,” nevertheless, it is the duty of any newspaper to realize that there is a possibility of selective action, and that “in times of stress and bleak despair a newspaper has a hard and fast duty to perform in keeping up the morale of the community.”

Indeed, the instances are frequent and accessible to the recollection of any reader in which newspapers have consciously maintained a point of view toward which the public is either hostile or cold.