A History of Marketing / Episode 5
This week, my guest is author Larry Tye, who is best known for his biographies of iconic figures of American history. Tye's book "The Father of Spin" is the definitive biography of Edward L. Bernays, who is often called "The Father of Public Relations."
This excerpt from The Father of Spin provides a glimpse at the historic life of Bernays:
”Edward Bernays almost single-handedly fashioned the craft that has come to be called public relations. Bernays was the man who, more than any other, got women to smoke cigarettes, put bacon and eggs on the breakfast table, Ivory in soap dishes, books in bookshelves, and Calvin Coolidge back in the White House. Although most Americans have never heard of Edward Bernays, he nevertheless had a profound impact on everything from the products they purchased to the places they visited and the foods they ate for breakfast.”
Larry Tye is a New York Times best-selling author who penned biographies of Bobby Kennedy, Joe McCarthy, Satchel Paige, and Superman. His latest book, The Jazzmen: How Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie Transformed America, was published in 2024 to great reviews.
Larry joined me for a deep dive into his book, The Father of Spin, which is an excellent biography of Edward Bernays.
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In this conversation, we explore the amazing life of Bernays, including:
Eddie’s close relationship with his uncle, Sigmund Freud and how psychoanalysis influenced his PR campaigns
Marketing cigarettes to women under the guise of a feminist movement
His propaganda campaign against the government of Guatemala on behalf of his client, the United Fruit Company, leading to a military coup backed by the CIA
And much more!
Read the interview transcript, enhanced with links, images, and videos:
Note: This text is from a recorded conversation transcribed with AI. I have read it to check for mistakes, but it is possible that there are errors that I missed. I’ve also added images and helpful links in the transcript.
Introduction to Edward L. Bernays
Andrew Mitrak: Larry, thank you so much for joining us.
Larry Tye: Great to be with you, Andrew.
Andrew Mitrak: Today, we're going to travel back in time to your first book, The Father of Spin, which you published in 1998. It's the definitive biography of Edward L. Bernays, a truly fascinating man who's often called the father of public relations. I knew a little bit about the story of Bernays prior to reading your book and prior to doing this podcast. He's one of the reasons why I actually wanted to start this because this is a story that is not very well known today. So, how would you describe Bernays to someone who's never heard of him before?
Larry Tye: He was a guy who took his uncle Sigmund Freud's ideas on why people behave the way they do and used it to try to transform that behavior on behalf of clients who ranged from American Presidents to the biggest corporations in the world to foreign leaders. He was somebody who developed all the skills of the art and the science of public relations in a way that reflected the best and the worst of that profession.
Andrew Mitrak: That's right. You really packed a lot in there. So we'll, of course, talk about his uncle Sigmund Freud and some of the best and the worst of his career as well. And so for you personally, prior to writing this book, you were a reporter working for the Boston Globe, and this was your first full-length book. Why Bernays? Of all the things you could have chosen to spend, I'm sure, years on to write your first book, why did you choose Eddie Bernays?
Larry Tye: So, I could give you the high-minded answer, which was that as a journalist, I was always fascinated by public relations. At times in my life as a journalist, I would depend on PR people on a deadline to get me to the right sources and to get my story completed, and at times I spent running away from PR people. So I was trying to understand the two ends of that profession. That would be the high-minded answer.
The truthful answer is that I was doing this incredible year-long fellowship called the Nieman, which is where 12 American and 12 overseas journalists are invited to spend a year at Harvard doing essentially anything they want. And at the end of that year, we were all in panic mode. And the panic was because we had been told for a year that we were Cinderella, and we were about to be going back to work and becoming char ladies again. And so we all wanted to try to figure out a way of making that magical year go on.
I was at one of the things that we learned to do pretty well during that Nieman year, which was go to cocktail parties. And I was at a cocktail party at my creative writing teacher's home. And the creative writing teacher was a woman named Anne Bernays, and her husband was a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer named Justin Kaplan. A couple beers into that evening, I heard Justin say if his father-in-law wasn't his father-in-law, he would be writing his biography. And I wanted to know something about who his father-in-law was. And the next morning, I was at the doorstep of 102-year-old Edward Bernays.
He was taking me on a tour of his house, and I was contemplating the notion of being his biographer, only partly because I thought he was a fascinating character, but more because I thought writing a book would be a way of my getting to take another special year off doing what I wanted to do. And about three months after that visit to Edward Bernays, I had signed up a book agent, and my book agent was in the process of signing up a publisher, and I was on my way to getting another year off.
Meeting 102-year-old Edward Bernays
Andrew Mitrak: Well, let's jump to this about your encounter with Bernays. As I was researching Edward Bernays and in your book, I was looking at YouTube videos of him, which are amazing. They're preserved, recorded in the late '80s, so not quite at 102 years old, but pretty close. And you can even watch him on the David Letterman show, which is just wild. It feels like an anachronism. Eddie Bernays started his career before World War I. He worked with Thomas Edison and Calvin Coolidge, and here he is with David Letterman, a TV personality that I know and enjoy today. You met Edward Bernays at the end of his life. What was that like? What were your takeaways of him? What impression did he leave on you?
Larry Tye: There are two things I was struck by. One was how we went into his study, what his grandchildren called his ego room, and he showed me pictures of him, as you say, with Thomas Alva Edison, with Henry Ford, with President Calvin Coolidge. It was Eddie Bernays and everybody famous that he had known and worked for and helped influence. And I thought that was unusual. I thought that PR people were supposed to stay in the background, and the idea that the pictures were all with Eddie Bernays in them suggested the unusual kind of PR guy that he was, who was somebody who believed, and maybe rightfully believed, that his story was as important as these titans of industry and American Presidents.
The other thing that struck me about him was that age 102, knowing that his potential biographer was coming to visit him, he had put on his best suit and his tie and was looking absolutely perfect, except when I looked down at his feet, and he hadn't quite at age 102 been able to pull it all together, and he had two different color socks on. And I thought that was a reflection of the fact that he was showing a little bit of vulnerability to the fact that he was that old, but that he also had been waiting his entire life, had been waiting 102 years essentially, for somebody to come along and tell his story, and he wanted to make sure that he got it right, or that I got it right, and that I saw all the things that made him special. And he told me amazing stories, but I realized partway through the interview that it was like I was clicking button number three, and that was Eddie Bernays and Thomas Edison. He had told these stories so many times that it dawned on me that I was getting a partly rote version of the story, and I tried my hardest during that time with him to get him off message and relaxing a bit and telling a story in a way that seemed original rather than version number 75 of the same story.
Andrew Mitrak: I suppose that speaks both to his discipline as a PR person, sticking to the same story, but also his habit of being a self-promoter, of having spent, you know, decades telling these stories and using these to promote himself.
The "Professional Nephew": How Bernays Applied Freud's Theories to Public Relations
Andrew Mitrak: You already brought up his uncle, Sigmund Freud, and I think that's probably a good place to start as we get into his biography. You write, and I quote,
"Bernays had strong familial ties to the venerated psychologist. His mother was Freud's sister, and his father's sister was Freud's wife."
And I had to reread this a few times to make sure that there was nothing incestuous going on here, but it is totally fine. It's thinking of him as being sort of Freud's nephew in two different ways. Can you share more about his relationship with Freud?
Larry Tye: He was, as you point out, a double nephew, either through his mother or through his father, whichever he was choosing to point to. He had an especially close relationship to Sigmund Freud, and when he was a kid, he loved going to Vienna and doing long walks in the mountains with Uncle Siggy, as he called him. But it was a special relationship in a number of ways. One was that Sigmund Freud was partly in Eddie Bernays' debt, that when the Nazis were closing in on Sigmund Freud in the era of Adolf Hitler, it was Eddie Bernays who got his works translated into English and earned enough money through that translation from the publisher that he could help Freud escape the Germans' closing vice and make his way to England.
But Bernays also shocked his uncle. His uncle was a very buttoned-down, Viennese, old-world character, and Eddie Bernays wanted to translate Freud's ideas, his complicated ideas on psychotherapy, into little ditties that he could sell to American men and women in a way that would make him a mass-marketed commodity, and Freud was shocked by that. So he was grateful, he was shocked. It was a classic reaction to Eddie Bernays. It was a reaction to the good and the bad of who Eddie Bernays was, and in the end, what mattered was Bernays helped Freud stay alive, and everybody appreciated that.
Andrew Mitrak: Well, one of the things you write is that Bernays dropped Sigmund Freud's name so much that Variety dubbed him a "professional nephew" and that Eddie borrowed his uncle's insights into symbols and other forces that motivate people, using them as building blocks for the art and science of public relations. So what were some of the top lessons from psychology that Bernays brought to his work?
Larry Tye: Bernays was essentially a professional nephew. In the first five minutes that you met him, he would manage to drop Sigmund Freud's name and lots of other names. He really did study more than anybody had ever done the psychology of people's behaviors in a way of trying to understand how to shift them. Let me give you a concrete example.
Torches of Freedom: How Bernays Got Women to Smoke Cigarettes by Exploiting Feminism
Larry Tye: When he, in one of his most famous campaigns, he was representing the biggest manufacturer of cigarettes in America, the American Tobacco Company. And American Tobacco had done a great job through its publicity of addicting a generation of American men to smoking cigarettes, but there was the other half of the American population, women, and it was considered a social taboo. It was unladylike for women to pick up a cigarette. And Eddie Bernays wanted to change that.
So he went to a disciple of Uncle Sigmund's, a guy named Dr. A.A. Brill, and he said, "What do cigarettes represent to women in America?" And Brill talked about this taboo, the idea that that women weren't considered elegant and ladylike if they picked up a cigarette. So Eddie Bernays set off to change that, and he did that by orchestrating a march down Fifth Avenue, America's premier boulevard, on Easter Sunday, a holiday that represented religious freedom.
And he had these very elegant debutantes pull out cigarettes as they were marching, and he had ensured that photographers would be there waiting, knowing something magnificent was about to happen. And so in newspapers all across the world the day after Easter Sunday, there were pictures of these elegant women elegantly lighting up their cigarettes. And he wanted in one quick, staged event to transform the image of what cigarettes were. Instead of being something that was unladylike, he wanted it to be the symbol of elegance, and it worked. It worked enough that women slowly started coming around and buying American Tobacco products, and especially their number one selling cigarette, Lucky Strike. And lighting up cigarettes became, instead of a taboo for women, it became a sign of liberation. And there was actually a whole brand of cigarettes, Virginia Slims, that developed this theme of women being liberated by lighting up their slim cigarettes and looking elegant the way Bernays wanted them to.
“Big Think” & Horizontal Thinking: Bernays' Indirect Approach to Public Relations
Andrew Mitrak: This is a really great example of what you call the "big think" and the indirect approach that Bernays takes, and that he's hitching private interests to public ones. Instead of at the start just saying these cigarettes taste great or they're relaxing and they look good for women, he starts with a more indirect approach of tying it to women's liberation and women's rights, and it's a torch of freedom. Can you speak to this strategy of “big think” and this indirect approach that Bernays took to his work?
Larry Tye: So you're exactly right, first of all, about cigarettes, and it became known as the Torches of Freedom Campaign. But there was another element to it that also became classic Eddie Bernays, which is nobody was supposed to know that those women were recruited by Bernays, that it was supposed to be seen as an ad hoc, an ad-libbed, a spontaneous lighting up of cigarettes, and instead, it was all concocted by Eddie Bernays. He was a hidden hand, and he wanted to keep his hands hidden in this case.
But it was an approach that I call horizontal thinking. Let's take another example. When he went to work for the biggest book publishers in America, it was everybody from Random House to Simon & Schuster, to all the big publishers. And Eddie Bernays said, "You have to get out of your conventional thinking of how to sell more books." Conventional thinking would have been you lower the price a bit, and you have a bunch of ads, and that's a way to get Americans to buy more books. And that was what I call vertical thinking. One step leads logically to the next. Horizontal thinking, of the way that Eddie Bernays looked at a campaign like that, was to get people to re-envision the product itself.
And so what he did was he went to the leading home builders and designers in America with a very simple question. He said, "Are books important to American civilization?" Now, I'm not sure what American civilization even means, but the idea of books being important to something as high-minded as civilization was a no-brainer, and all these architects and home builders said, "Of course, books are important to American civilization." And Eddie Bernays took the results of his survey and went around to builders and designers who hadn't been part of his survey and said, "You can strike a blow for American civilization if the next home that you build or apartment that you design, you include built-in bookshelves."
It was something that hadn't been standard in any homes, and now we know that homes of a certain era all included built-in bookshelves, and that became part of what was in people's homes. And you're not going to fill a bookshelf with cereal boxes or with cigarettes. You're going to put books into a bookshelf.
Bernays figured if he could have books as part of the decoration, as part of the fabric of houses, you were going to sell more books because people wanted to buy the books to put in the bookshelves to show the world how literate they were. And when you go to people's homes, one of the standard things that I do when I go into somebody's home is I look at the books that are in their living room bookshelf, and I'm intrigued by what they're reading, and Eddie Bernays understood that that would happen.
And it worked brilliantly for publishers. Suddenly, they were not just selling books with the conventional and the old-hat method of putting them on a discount because that discount at some point would have to go away, or they wouldn't make money, that it became part of American homes to sell more books. And that was horizontal thinking, and it was big-think thinking, and it was Eddie Bernays' thinking that transformed the profession of public relations. He called himself the father, but if father means the first, he wasn't the first, but he was the most artful and the most scientific and the most successful.
Andrew Mitrak: I have a home that was built back then, and I have built-in bookshelves. So I wonder, “Was that some of Eddie's influence there?”
Larry Tye: So you have bookshelves, and what do you have in your bookshelves?
Andrew Mitrak: Well, at a time, I had books. But now I have toddlers, so now it's a random collection of some of their toys and things that we have. We've kind of given up on having a nice, presentable home. But yes – before kids, it was books.
For Better and For Worse: Addressing the Morality Behind Bernays PR Campaigns
Andrew Mitrak: Comparing, contrasting this versus the Torches of Freedom example – there was sort of using his powers for good – reading – and bad – cigarettes. These are just so illustrative of how he's using some of the same techniques for his clients regardless of the morality behind it.
Larry Tye: That is true. Eddie Bernays was value-neutral, the same way public relations as a profession is. It can be used to promote the best causes in the world or the most insidious causes in the world. And one of the things that happened as a result of his campaign to addict women to the same vice that men had been addicted to, of cigarettes, what happened was that women's lung cancer rates caught up to men's rates. And he knew the health risk in a way that very few people in America did back then. He had access to the biggest cigarette company in America and to all of their health studies. And at home, he was telling his daughters to take their mother's cigarettes and break them, as he said, "like brittle bones," and flush them down the toilet. And he was doing that at the same time he was trying to sell this bad habit to women all across the world.
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, this is where it's hard to overlook Bernays' cynicism or maybe hypocrisy. So he knew as early as 1930 that what he was promoting as a form of women's liberation had this horrible health effect. Did Bernays in his life ever acknowledge this hypocrisy?
Larry Tye: He said later in life that he hadn't known. If he had known how dangerous cigarettes were to women and men, he would never have promoted them. But we now know, because of the papers that Eddie Bernays left behind, his own papers, that he absolutely knew about the health risks. And what he tried to do as a mea culpa later in life is this guy who had represented American Tobacco Company was suddenly representing the American Lung Association in trying to wean people off the very habit that he had created for them. And so the good news is that he did good in later life in trying to end the addiction. The bad news is that he created it in the first place, and he later lied about it.
The All-American Breakfast: How Bernays Made Bacon and Eggs a Staple
Andrew Mitrak: Before we kind of get to some of his later-in-life work, there are so many other examples of his indirect approach and some of his other greatest hits. One of the things you write is that when he was, quote,
"Hired to sell a product or service, he instead sold new ways of behaving, which appeared obscure but over time reaped huge rewards for his clients and redefined the very texture of American life."
And we've talked about bookshelves as texture, of course, smoking, kind of bad texture. Are there some of the other examples of his applications of this that come to mind?
Larry Tye: One of my favorites is when he went to work for the Beech-Nut Packing Company, and that was the big bacon maker. And he wanted to change the way people thought not just about bacon but about eating. And so what he did was he again took his technique of going out with a very simple question to a lot of eminent people. And the simple question was, "Is a hearty breakfast a good thing for people to eat?" Now, who knew what a hearty breakfast meant? But the very word "hearty" suggests that it's healthy, it's a robust meal to start your day. And he went out to leading health authorities, and he asked them, "Do you endorse a hearty breakfast?" And they all said yes. And he took that back and said, "A hearty breakfast is a bacon and eggs breakfast." And he gave the definition to what "hearty" was, which was a definition he had never told the doctors who he was surveying.
And the ultimate, as we know now, artery-clogging breakfast of a bacon and eggs breakfast had not been an all-American breakfast. In fact, much of America was dashing off to work, even in those days in the '30s and '40s and '50s, dashing off to work, downing a cup of coffee and maybe a slice of bread and a glass of orange juice if they had a little bit of extra time.
But Eddie Bernays said, "No, we want to have an all-American breakfast, the ultimate hearty breakfast." And now we know when you go into, when you're with your kids and you're taking them out for breakfast, everybody goes in and orders at their favorite diner or wherever their breakfast joint is, a bacon and eggs breakfast when they have time to do it. And we don't look at the fact that it's unhealthy.
We look at the fact that that somehow has a certain symbolism. It's a warmth, it's comfort food. Instead of again taking the conventional, the vertical approach of just trying to have publicity around people buying bacon, he changed the whole way we looked at what bacon was all about. And it was not just Beech-Nut, but all the bacon makers were selling more bacon because that was part of what Americans were eating more of for their all-American breakfast.
Andrew Mitrak: So instead of saying Beech-Nut bacon is the best, he never even attached his client's name to the promotion. It was more about growing the entire category or inventing this new category of a hearty breakfast, which, by the way, my client defines or meets the definition in the way that I define it, and that leads to their success.
Larry Tye: Yes, exactly that.
Marketing to Children: The Ivory Soap Campaign
Andrew Mitrak: We've talked about bookshelves, bacon. There's another B for Bernays, which is bath soap, which I thought was also a really clever use for that. Could you tell a story of how he managed to market and change opinions about bath soap?
Larry Tye: He was working for Procter & Gamble, which made the number one selling soap in the country. I don't know if it is anymore, but it was then, and it was Ivory Soap. And he decided that he looked at the behavior of American women, who were the ultimate shoppers back then, and he said, "How do they decide what soap to buy?" And one way was they took their kids often to the grocery store with them, and if kids picked out a particular kind of soap, that was the soap that they bought. He started thinking, "What is the way that I can get kids, who never think about the brand of product they're buying, how can I get them interested in something as prosaic as the kind of soap that their mothers buy?"
And he created this series of contests that became this thing, it was the ultimate fad in America, where there was a soap carving contest, and kids could win prizes, and it was sponsored by the biggest manufacturer in the country of household products, Procter & Gamble. And kids were rewarded with prizes that became a big thing in their school and in their after-school programs if they could carve Ivory Soap into the best-looking sculptures. And he didn't care about kids carving soap. He cared about kids wanting Ivory Soap because that was the soap that became the standard of eligibility for that contest. And suddenly, kids were going to the grocery store with their moms and saying, "We want Ivory Soap because that's what we can carve into something that can win us a prize." And Eddie Bernays again realized it wasn't just going to the women who were paying for the soap. It was going to the kids. If a mother saw that their kid wanted a particular kind of soap and might stay clean because of that, they were willing to buy any soap that the kid suggested, and the kid suggested Ivory.
Andrew Mitrak: At first, I thought this was an example of one of the more positive impacts of Bernays' work. You know, what's better than using soap? But as you mentioned that, I thought about it, and maybe this introduced an idea of marketing to children, which opens its own set of moral quandaries. And now we see toys that families don't need or high-sugar breakfast cereals being marketed towards kids, and them asking their parents for that. So maybe he has his fingerprints on that as well.
Larry Tye: He does. He has his fingerprints on just about everything that we are sold, on whether it is good or bad.
Behind the Scenes and in the Spotlight: Bernays' Passion for Self-Promotion
Andrew Mitrak: One of the many things that makes Bernays unique is that while most publicity people worked behind the scenes, he actively boosted his reputation. He wrote, quote, "In an era of mass communication, modesty is a private virtue and a public fault," end quote. And he wrote books around this. He wrote Crystallizing Public Opinion. He wrote a book called Propaganda. And while most people in his field were called press agents or publicity men. It sounds like he coined the term "public relations" and gave himself this title of "public relations counselor." So how did Eddie's peers or others in the industry or even his clients react to his habit of injecting himself into the story and being such a self-promoter?
Larry Tye: They thought he was shameless, and he was shameless. He actually wrote a book called Biography of an Idea, and what that was, it was probably the worst-selling book in the history of publishing. It was an entire book devoted to everywhere that Eddie Bernays had been quoted. He wanted to make sure that the world didn't miss a single smart thing or unsmart thing that he had ever said. So parts of the book were just about him being quoted in newspapers and in books and in magazines. And what he was really writing it for was an audience of one, and the one was the person that had ended up being me, as the first case who was going to write his biography. So he didn't want to trust that I was going to realize all the brilliant things he had said. He wanted to make sure that they were there and handed to me on this platter.
And the way his fellow practitioners back then, and there weren't many of them back then, and the way practitioners today look at him is, on the one hand, he's the most studied PR guy in courses on PR or marketing or advertising. And on the other hand, he's the one that everybody has a smile on their face when they talk about because they all realize that he is the one who convinced us that he was the father of public relations. Anytime you saw him quoted, including in his New York Times full-page obituary, he was referred to as the father. But as we were discussing, if father means first, there were people, including the famous Ivy Lee, who was hired by J.D. Rockefeller, there were people who came before him. But nobody wrote as much about the profession. Nobody mixed as artfully as Bernays did the art and the science of the profession. And nobody ensured that their name was out there in as many public forums as Eddie Bernays did.
And it was exactly the kind of thing. One of my best guides when I was writing the book was a man named Harold Burson, and he was one of the named people on what was at the time the biggest PR firm in the world, called Burson-Marsteller. And Harold Burson thought that Eddie Bernays was brilliant, but he thought that he was doing exactly the wrong thing. Burson believed, like most PR people, that their hand, they were being well-paid to be in the background, and it was the clients who wanted to be on center stage. And Eddie Bernays thought that he could have it both ways. He could be there alongside his client, and he could be seen as a genius. And Eddie Bernays also did something that public relations people are grateful to him for, which was he said, "The only way that you will get people like the President or like the heads of big companies to take us seriously is if we charge a fee that is equal to the salary that they're making." And so he ensured that PR people, nobody knew what they should be paying them, and he ensured that they made fat paychecks.
Doris Fleischman’s Role in the Bernays PR Empire
Andrew Mitrak: I'm sure his peers and colleagues appreciated that. One of the people, as he was self-promoting, somebody who he overlooked was his wife, Doris Fleischman, who sounds like she was really a big contributor behind the scenes to his work and was really a remarkable figure in her own right. Can you share who Doris was and what her role was in building the Bernays public relations empire?
Larry Tye: Her role was absolutely essential. The more eloquent that something that Bernays said was, the more likely it had been coined by Doris because she was at least as smart as he was. She was more articulate than he was, and she was more realistic on what could actually work. But it was partly the era, and that was an era where women weren't as involved in the professional world, and there was incredible gender bias back then.
And so Eddie Bernays did a whole lot to promote Doris's ideas but not to promote Doris. And we see when she left her papers to a library at Harvard University, we can see her genius, and there's been a wonderful biography written about Doris. And her daughters, their daughters were big on telling me just the very important role that Doris played, and they were always upset that their father never gave her the credit that she deserved.
But when they were married, he booked a room at the Waldorf-Astoria, this elegant old hotel in New York, and he promised her that he would be low-key about the wedding, and they were married at City Hall. But when they signed in on their wedding night at the Waldorf, he knew, because he had worked for the Waldorf, that if he had an unusual way of signing in, that this could become a news event. And the unusual way was signing in with his name and with her maiden name, and nobody did that in those days. Women changed their name, and she kept her name of Doris Fleischman. And having created that policy for the Waldorf, he knew that it would become a headline in the next day's papers, that a man and woman signed in with their names before they were married as their names after they were married, and their wedding became big news.
Andrew Mitrak: He never misses an opportunity. One of the other amazing facts about Doris, or just a really quirky fact, is that she was the first woman issued an American passport who was married but had her maiden name on it, which seems like just a family full of firsts and milestones there.
United Fruit Company vs. the Government of Guatemala: the Ultimate Public Relations Coup
Andrew Mitrak: The final story we'll cover of Bernays' career is maybe even a wilder and potentially darker story than his work with American Tobacco, and it's all about bananas. Could you just share what this story in this chapter of Bernays' career is about?
Larry Tye: This goes back to an era in American foreign policy where there were things that we knew, we referred to in that time as banana republics, and they were called banana republics, they were in Latin America, and they were called banana republics because the big fruit companies, like United Fruit that Eddie Bernays worked for, actually seemed to almost own these countries. They owned a huge chunk of the land. They were the biggest employer, and they could dictate the policy, the domestic and foreign policy of many of these countries. But something happened in one of these banana republics in Guatemala in the 1950s, and that is they elected a leftist as their leader. And United Fruit Company worried that he would expropriate their lands, and so they hired, they brought in their PR guy, Eddie Bernays, to try to do something about it.
And Eddie Bernays, who showed that he could affect people's behavior and what they bought, also showed through this campaign that he could elect, he could affect the behavior of America's foreign policy. He put out all kinds of propaganda suggesting this was a threat to American values by having this leftist government there. He encouraged the American government to go in quietly and try to undermine, in a way that nobody would know was the American government doing this, this leftist government.
And it was essentially testing out a policy that we would use later in Cuba when we went in and staged the Bay of Pigs invasion and tried to depose Fidel Castro, only in this case, it worked, and the leftist leader was tossed out of office in a totally undemocratic way. He had been elected democratically, and the free will of the people of Guatemala was undermined by Eddie Bernays, by the United Fruit Company, and by the Eisenhower administration. And it showed that there were no limits. Borders were no limit to what Eddie Bernays could do on behalf of whatever client he happened to represent. And in this case, it was fruit companies who exerted the kind of power that we disparaged by inventing this term "banana republics," but was actually what happened in these countries, not just in Latin America, but all across the world.
Andrew Mitrak: We have limited time together, but we could spend probably hours just talking about this story alone with United Fruit Company, which is, of course, now known as Chiquita Banana, and Samuel Zemurray, who's known as Sam the Banana Man, and this fascinating array of characters.
Bernays: The Unreliable Narrator and Verifying the Facts
As we wrap up on some of our look back on Bernays' work and his contributions to public relations, I kind of want to talk about Bernays as the unreliable narrator. Your book is The Father of Spin, and of course, he stretched the truth about his, for his clients, but he also embellished his own story. And in your book, you often tell the story from Bernays' perspective, but then you find accounts from others that typically cast some reasons to doubt some of the more self-aggrandizing claims. And we're sort of led to think that the truth is a little blurry. It's maybe directionally right, but in Bernays' case, a little less, "Hey, we did this parade, and suddenly women start smoking," or, "I do a propaganda campaign, and soon a democratically elected government in Guatemala is overthrown the next day." What he actually did is just a little unclear. How much do you really trust Bernays, or what sort of doubts do you have about his own biography?
Larry Tye: That's a great question, and I would compare my answer to an answer that I give about Satchel Paige. I wrote a biography on this extraordinary pitcher, maybe the greatest pitcher in the history of baseball, Satchel Paige, only back when he was pitching, he was, it was in the era of Jim Crow segregation, racial segregation in America, and he was pitching for teams in what was known as the Negro Leagues. And there were no journalists or statisticians out there for every game to record the stats. And so Satchel gave us what he said was the likely statistic on everything from how many shutouts and no-hitters to how many games he played, and they seemed totally inconceivable. And I thought, " this guy is inventing things." But the closer I looked at his stats, while I'm convinced that he embellished a lot of his life stories, the closer I looked, I thought he actually may have understated because he pitched for so long, you know, a career that lasted 40 years, and he pitched probably in front of more people than anybody has ever played baseball in the history of the world.
And I came away with the same impression about Eddie Bernays. I knew he embellished. He left out things like his hidden hand with things like the Torches of Freedom Campaign. He left out what he knew about the health effects of smoking in those early days, and he gave himself a more central role in things than he might have deserved in lots of his campaigns. But on the other hand, when I started looking at other things Eddie Bernays said, we all know about the UPS, the United Parcel Service delivery trucks that are in our neighborhoods, and those trucks are painted brown.
Eddie Bernays told us that he was the one who had convinced UPS to paint those trucks brown because they were a neighbor, the color of trees and a friendly color, and it made just the UPS trucks feel more part of our neighborhood. And I went to the people at UPS and said, "Did Eddie Bernays do this? I can't believe that he's the one who did this." And they said, "He absolutely did it."
I went to the woman who was the key figure behind the Multiple Sclerosis Society, this horrible disease of multiple sclerosis, and I said, "Eddie Bernays is the one who said that multiple sclerosis was too much of a mouthful, and he said you want to call it MS. Did Eddie Bernays, couldn't have been the one who shortened it to MS?" And she said, "He absolutely was the one." So at the moment that I started doubting whether he could have done all he claimed he did, I found that he did more than I had thought that he had done and every bit of what he claimed on some things.
And that was the perfect way of seeding just the right amount of doubt. The doubt was no longer in my mind whether he did it. The doubt was he must have done it because he did all these other things. And Eddie Bernays knew that if we knew that he had done big things in some arenas, we would start believing that he had done all the big things he had claimed in every arena, and that wasn't true.
Andrew Mitrak: His fingerprints really are everywhere, from UPS to MS and a whole bunch of other places.
Spin in Politics and Media: Bernays' Influence Today
Well, I want to talk about Bernays' relevance today. At the time you published this book, you cited that there were 125,000 PR professionals, and I checked LinkedIn before this interview, and if I looked at public people with public relations or media relations titles, it's close to 400,000 people, and that grows to well into the millions if you include people with more broad but related titles like communications or social media. And it seems like Bernays is more relevant than ever. And I guess my question for you is, why don't you think he's better known? Is it time for a movie or a miniseries to be made or an updated version of your book or anything that could get this story out there even more?
Larry Tye: Eddie Bernays, while he was very much tuned in with whatever the cutting-edge forms of communication were, in this era of social media and when we have all the kinds of marketing and sales approaches via social media, Eddie Bernays would be dazzled and delighted. And I think while I wouldn't be self-serving enough to say that people ought to go out and buy my book, I think that what they ought to do is Eddie Bernays left behind a cache of papers that nobody in the field had ever dreamed of leaving behind because people didn't want us to see their fingerprints all over the campaigns that they had orchestrated. And he left behind these papers in a way that we can unspin not just Eddie Bernays' life but the way the profession works by looking at him.
Whether or not he was the father, he was the most dazzling figure in the history of public relations, and he lets us see its influence. And I think the only way we're going to unspin our world, and the only way that you as a young father can go to the store and be sure that you're getting products not because somebody has some insidious way convinced you you ought to be buying these but because these are the products that make sense, is by unspinning our world of PR and of influencers. And one way to do that is to go back to the beginning and use Eddie Bernays' career as a way of doing that.
Andrew Mitrak: Well, I know you said you weren't self-serving enough to promote your book, but I'll do it for you. It is a really delightful read. I think anybody working in public relations or marketing, or just wants to be aware of the media and some of the influences behind it, or just wants a good story. I read through it and just completely enjoyed it.
And you were speaking to some of the spin we see today, and one of my last questions for you as we wrap up is, are there any specific examples of publicity campaigns or media spin that you've seen recently or within the last few years that feel especially Bernaysian to you?
Larry Tye: Yes, so we're having this conversation just weeks after the last presidential election, and I saw both sides trying to spin the heck out of us in that campaign. And the scary thing to me is not that PR people and the spinmeisters that the campaigns hired were doing that, but when the conventional media starts doing that and starts, it used to be that we could turn on a Walter Cronkite and know that that was an objective look at the news. And now, whatever channel we turn on is giving us a particular angle on it. And I'm not sure who's going to do the unspinning today, but we used to depend on journalists to do that, and they're not as dependable as they were, or when they are dependable, we don't trust them and assume that they're undependable.
Andrew Mitrak: One of Bernays' quotes, I might get this slightly off, but it's in the book, is that “the best way to fight propaganda is more propaganda” which feels very self-serving for a propagandist to say, and I hope there's a solution other than that.
Larry Tye: I think that the “propaganda,” to him, was not a dirty word. More of the kind of propaganda or the kind of half-truths is not the way we get to the truth. We get to the truth by having something called the truth that we can trust rather than propaganda.
Andrew Mitrak: On a lighter note, one of the things that came to my mind of something that seems Bernaysian is this idea of superfoods, that I find myself eating foods like kale or quinoa, and I'm like, "Superfoods, that feels like a Bernaysian spin." And I looked this up, and it wasn't Bernays, but it did originate from the United Fruit Company.
Larry Tye: That’s wonderful.
Andrew Mitrak: It's a small world. These folks, they planted these seeds that are still having these impacts on us today. Well, I want to thank you so much for your time, Larry. This is such a delightful interview. What's the best way for listeners to learn more about you and support your work?
Larry Tye: So the easy way is to go to larrytye.com. My website has the nine books I've done, the tenth that I'm working on. And Andrew, it was a blast being on with you today. Thank you.
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