Larry Tye: The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays and the Birth of Public Relations. 1998. Crown Publishers, New York. 320 pages, including 20 pages of notes and a 7-page bibliography Crown Publishers, ISBN 978-0-517-70435-6
Of the books I’ve read in recent years, this one perhaps had the biggest impact on me. The reasons are four: first, my career was mostly spent in public relations; second, I love history; third, I have read a number of Bernays’ books over the years, and enjoyed them all; fourth, the author has a splendid writing style, and wrote what I think will always be the authoritative work on this man.
Author
A journalist with the Boston Globe at time
of writing, Tye augmented his knowledge as a Nieman scholar at Harvard.
Book The book is superbly written, and has a lot of depth. According to the terms of Bernays’ will, on his death an enormous volume of his papers, campaign notes and other material became available to scholars.
Dubbed the “Prince of Puff” and the “Baron of Ballyhoo” by detractors
during his lifetime, Bernays died in 1995, 103 years old. During that long
life, he was one of the most influential publicists of the 20th
century. The nephew of Sigmund Freud, Bernays brought an astute grasp of human
behaviour to public relations. He opened his own PR firm in 1919 and launched
celebrated publicity campaigns for American Tobacco, Ivory Soap, the United
Fruit Company, the platforms of presidents from Calvin Coolidge to Ike
Eisenhower, and many, many more.
Tye attributes Bernay's success to a marketing
philosophy (termed the “Big Think”), which combined high-concept publicity
stunts, endorsements from doctors, national surveys and other forms of
publicity whose actual product endorsement was cleverly veiled. For example,
to promote Lucky Strike cigarettes among
women in an age in which women smoking in public was still a no-no, in 1928 he arranged for a parade of smoking
debutantes to march down New York’s Fifth Avenue. To market Ivory Soap, he
created a hugely popular national soap-sculpting contest. A domineering and
self-absorbed man, he never missed a chance to promote himself. In an era of
mass communications, he said, “modesty is a private virtue and a public
fault.”
Titled A Question of Paternity, Tye’s last
chapter brings an odd kind of balance to this superb book. In it, he discusses
other innovative PR guys and notes that Bernays was not the father of PR in
several senses. To some degree, Bernays eventually became a pariah in the
industry that he helped to create, because he overdid his claims.
Then he argues that in many senses Bernays was not the father of
spin at all. Perhaps “the true father was Aaron,” he speculates. “Back
in biblical days God annointed him spokesman for his brother Moses, charged
with explaining to the Hebrews why it was time to pack their bags and head
across the desert.” Alternatively, he suggests it could have been Julius
Caesar, Martin Luther, America’s Founding Fathers, or many others.