[The]
American business community was also very impressed with the propaganda
effort. They had a problem at that time. The country was becoming
formally more democratic. A lot more people were able to vote and that
sort of thing. The country was becoming wealthier and more people could
participate and a lot of new immigrants were coming in, and so on. So
what do you do? It's going to be harder to run things as a private
club. Therefore, obviously, you have to control what people think. There
had been public relation specialists but there was never a public
relations industry. There was a guy hired to make Rockefeller's image
look prettier and that sort of thing. But this huge public relations
industry, which is a U.S. invention and a monstrous industry, came out
of the first World War. The leading figures were people in the Creel
Commission. In fact, the main one, Edward Bernays, comes right out of
the Creel Commission. He has a book that came out right afterwards
called Propaganda. The term "propaganda," incidentally, did not have
negative connotations in those days. It was during the second World War
that the term became taboo because it was connected with Germany, and
all those bad things. But in this period, the term propaganda just meant
information or something like that. So he wrote a book called
Propaganda around 1925, and it starts off by saying he is applying the
lessons of the first World War. The propaganda system of the first World
War and this commission that he was part of showed, he says, it is
possible to "regiment the public mind every bit as much as an army
regiments their bodies." These new techniques of regimentation of minds,
he said, had to be used by the intelligent minorities in order to make
sure that the slobs stay on the right course. We can do it now because
we have these new techniques. This is the main manual of the
public relations industry. Bernays is kind of the guru. He was an
authentic Roosevelt/Kennedy liberal. He also engineered the public
relations effort behind the U.S.-backed coup which overthrew the
democratic government of Guatemala. His major coup, the one that
really propelled him into fame in the late 1920s, was getting women to
smoke. Women didn't smoke in those days and he ran huge campaigns for
Chesterfield. You know all the techniques—models and movie stars with
cigarettes coming out of their mouths and that kind of thing. He got
enormous praise for that. So he became a leading figure of the industry,
and his book was the real manual.
—Noam Chomsky (From Chomsky's "What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream": a talk at Z Media Institute, June 1997)
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