Father of Spin, Edward L. Bernays and the Birth of Public Relations by Larry Tye, 1998
Sigmund Freud, Bernay’s uncle, had revolutionized the way the world thought about individual behavior. He used his uncle’s ideas in the commercial realm to predict, then adjust, the way people believed and behaved, without them realizing it. Bernays was able to transform attitudes toward group action. And just as Freud was rewarded with the title Father of Psychoanalysis, so Bernays became known around the world as the Father of Public Relations.
Bernays was the man who, more than any other, got women to smoke, put bacon and eggs on breakfast tables, Ivory in soap dishes, books in bookshelves and Calvin Coolidge back in the White House, and in 1954, he helped to topple Guatemala’s democratic government. He died in 1995 at age 103.
His story is about how public thought is routinely shaped or, some might say, manipulated by singular powers in our culture.
