
Already, he was using a variety of techniques that would become hallmarks of his later practice. Press agent Īfter his foray into the world of theater, Bernays worked as a creative press agent for various performers and performances. Rockefeller, Jr., Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt, Reverend John Haynes Holmes, and Anne Harriman Sands Rutherford Vanderbilt, wife of William Kissam Vanderbilt. The play controversially dealt with venereal disease and prostitution-Bernays called it "a propaganda play that fought for sex education." He created the " Medical Review of Reviews Sociological Fund Committee" and successfully solicited the support of such elite figures as John D.


After publishing a positive review of the play, Bernays and Robinson wrote to its lead actor, Richard Bennett: "The editors of the Medical Review of Reviews support your praiseworthy intention to fight sex-pruriency in the United States by producing Brieux's play Damaged Goods. Two months later they took up the cause of Damaged Goods, an English translation of Les Avariés by Eugène Brieux.
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They took editorial positions in favor of showers and against corsets, and distributed free copies to thousands of physicians across the country. Medical editor įollowing a meeting in New York with school friend Fred Robinson, Bernays became coeditor of Medical Review of Reviews and Dietetic and Hygienic Gazette in 1912. By December 1912, he had returned to New York. He went to Paris and worked for Louis Dreyfus and Company, reading grain cables. Then he worked at the New York City Produce Exchange, where his father was a grain exporter. Career Īfter graduating from Cornell, Bernays wrote for the National Nurseryman journal. By all accounts, Fleischman played a major though quiet role in the Bernays public relations business-including ghost-writing numerous memos and speeches, and publishing a newsletter. Later, however, she changed her mind and her name, becoming Doris Bernays. Fleischman was a member of the Lucy Stone League, a group which encouraged women to keep their names after marriage.

In 1912 he graduated from Cornell University with a degree in agriculture, but chose journalism as his first career. In 1892, his family moved to New York City, where Bernays attended DeWitt Clinton High School. After Ely Bernays started working as a grain exporter at the Manhattan Produce Exchange, he sent for his wife and children. The Bernays family moved from Vienna to the United States in the 1890s. His mother, Anna (1858-1955), was Sigmund Freud's sister, and his father Eli (1860-1921) was the brother of Freud's wife, Martha Bernays their grandfather, Isaac Bernays, was the chief rabbi of Hamburg and a relative of the poet Heinrich Heine. He does this by first providing an overview of the history of public relations, and then provides insight into its application.Įdward Bernays was born in Vienna to a Jewish family. Bernays later synthesized many of these ideas in his postwar book, Public Relations (1945), which outlines the science of managing information released to the public by an organization, in a manner most advantageous to the organization. Citing works of writers such as Gustave Le Bon, Wilfred Trotter, Walter Lippmann, and Sigmund Freud (his own double uncle), he described the masses as irrational and subject to herd instinct-and outlined how skilled practitioners could use crowd psychology and psychoanalysis to control them in desirable ways.

Of his many books, Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923) and Propaganda (1928) gained special attention as early efforts to define and theorize the field of public relations. He worked for dozens of major American corporations including Procter & Gamble and General Electric, and for government agencies, politicians, and non-profit organizations. His best-known campaigns include a 1929 effort to promote female smoking by branding cigarettes as feminist " Torches of Freedom", and his work for the United Fruit Company in the 1950s, connected with the CIA-orchestrated overthrow of the democratically elected Guatemalan government in 1954. He was the subject of a full-length biography by Larry Tye called The Father of Spin (1999) and later an award-winning 2002 documentary for the BBC by Adam Curtis called The Century of the Self. Bernays was named one of the 100 most influential Americans of the 20th century by Life. Edward Louis Bernays ( / b ɜːr ˈ n eɪ z/ bur- NAYZ, German: Novem− March 9, 1995) was an American theorist, considered a pioneer in the field of public relations and propaganda, and referred to in his obituary as "the father of public relations".
