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. 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 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 pioneer in the field of public relations and propaganda, referred to in his obituary as "the father of public relations".