_________
Selling smoke
To get women to buy cigarettes, PR pioneer Edward L. Bernays tried
everything from parades to media blitzes to a lavish ball.
By Larry Tye, Globe Staff
For more on Larry Tye's book, The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays
and the Birth of Public Relations, visit the website at
http://www.cyber-innovations.com/fatherofspin/tye.htm
Tobacco tycoons in the United States scored nearly as stunning a
triumph as US troops during World War I. When the United States joined
the battle, cigarettes were considered unsavory, if not unmanly; most
men preferred cigars, pipes, or chewing tobacco. But cigarettes proved
more convenient in the trenches, new blended tobaccos produced a
milder product, and Uncle Sam began putting cigarettes in soldiers'
rations, with the result that many doughboys changed their smoking
habits. Cigarettes were manly things now, the stuff of warriors. And
as their use soared, so did profits. All of which convinced cigarette
makers that the time was ripe to open a second front, this time
targeting females.
In 1928, just as they were beginning that push, Edward L. Bernays
started working for George Washington Hill, the president of the
American Tobacco Co., which made America's fastest-growing cigarette
brand, Lucky Strike. Hill, Bernays later recalled, ''became obsessed
by the prospect of winning over the large potential female market for
Luckies. 'If I can crack that market, I'll get more than my share of
it,' he said to me one day. 'It will be like opening a new gold mine
right in our front yard.'''
The quickest way to rally women to his cause, the tobacco man
believed, was to zero in on their waistlines. His theory was simple:
Slimness was coming into vogue, and cigarettes could be sold as a
fat-free way to satisfy hunger. He'd already settled on a slogan -
''Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet'' - and to bring it to life, he
turned to Bernays.
It was a wise choice. Bernays didn't invent fashions like the quest
for a svelte figure, but at 36 he was already becoming the
acknowledged master of accentuating such trends and capitalizing on
them. He was the man who, more than any other, put bacon and eggs on
breakfast tables, Ivory in soap dishes, and books on bookshelves, and
kept Calvin Coolidge in the White House. His tactics differed in each
case, but his philosophy remained constant. Hired to sell a product,
service, or candidate, he instead sold whole new ways of behaving
that, over time, reaped huge rewards for his clients. In so doing,
Bernays almost singlehandedly fashioned the art of what has come to be
called public relations. And if he sometimes took credit for creating
a bit more than he actually did, he is nonetheless widely recognized
as the man who fathered the science of spin.
At no time was Bernays's skill at reshaping reality clearer than
during his eight-year association with the tobacco tycoon Hill, a
relationship that budding PR men even today revisit as evidence of
their enormous power to influence not only what people buy and how
they cast their ballots but even what they believe.
Bernays launched his campaign against sweets with his tried-and-true
tactic of enlisting ''experts,'' in this case persuading Nickolas
Muray, a photographer friend, to ask other artists to sing the praises
of the slim. Magazines and newspapers were furnished with the latest
findings on the get-thin trend: photo after photo of slender Parisian
models in haute couture dresses or medical testimonials warning that
sweets caused tooth decay. Bernays even persuaded dancing-school
entrepreneur Arthur Murray to sign a letter testifying that ''Dancers
today, when tempted to overindulge at the punch bowl or the buffet,
reach for a cigarette instead.''
Not content to rely on the press or on the influence of experts,
Bernays also worked directly to change the way people ate. Hotels were
urged to add cigarettes to their dessert lists, while the Bernays
office widely distributed a series of menus designed to ''save you
from the dangers of overeating.'' They suggested a sensible mix of
vegetables, meats, and carbohydrates, followed by the advice to
''reach for a cigarette instead of dessert.''
The sugar companies and other industries weren't amused. Hill got
angry letters from cocoa brokers and peanut-butter makers, from the
manufacturers of salted nuts and candy, including one who charged that
American Tobacco's attacks were ''unfair, unsportsmanlike and
absolutely avaricious.'' And US Senator Reed Smoot, of Utah, a big
sugar-beet state, struck back from the Senate floor, calling the
tobacco-company campaign an ''orgy of buncombe, quackery, and
downright falsehood and fraud.''
Bernays responded by casting the controversy in the favorable glow of
what he called the ''new competition.'' He realized that controversy
breeds press coverage, which almost always was good for his client.
All this seemed to delight Hill, who wrote to Bernays, ''I think the
record shows that we have 'shut them up' pretty well.''
Hill loved the way Bernays used the anti-sweets campaign to promote
Luckies, but that only whetted his appetite to crack the female
market. Though the share of cigarettes consumed by women more than
doubled from 1923 to 1929, it was still just 12 percent. So, early in
1929, Hill summoned Bernays and demanded: ''How can we get women to
smoke on the street? They're smoking indoors. But, damn it, if they
spend half the time outdoors and we can get 'em to smoke outdoors,
we'll damn near double our female market. Do something. Act.''
Bernays understood that they were up against a social taboo that cast
doubt on the character of women who smoked, but he wasn't sure how
this stricture could be overcome. So he got Hill to pay for a
consultation with Dr. A.A. Brill, a psychoanalyst and a disciple of
Bernays's uncle, Dr. Sigmund Freud.
''It's perfectly normal for women to want to smoke cigarettes,'' Brill
advised. ''The emancipation of women has suppressed many of their
feminine desires. More women now do the same work as men do. ...
Cigarettes, which are equated with men, become torches of freedom.''
That rang a bell for Bernays. Why not organize a parade of prominent
women lighting their ''torches of freedom''? And do it on Easter
Sunday, on Fifth Avenue, America's most prestigious promenade?
He gathered a list of 30 debutantes from a friend at Vogue magazine,
then sent each of them a telegram signed by his secretary, Bertha
Hunt. ''In the interests of equality of the sexes and to fight another
sex taboo,'' the dispatch explained, ''I and other young women will
light another torch of freedom by smoking cigarettes while strolling
on Fifth Avenue Easter Sunday.''
The script for the parade was outlined in a memo from Bernays's
office. The object, it explained, would be to generate ''stories that
for the first time women have smoked openly on the streets. These will
take care of themselves, as legitimate news, if the staging is rightly
done. Undoubtedly after the stories and pictures have appeared, there
will be protests from nonsmokers and believers in 'Heaven, home and
mother.' These should be watched for and answered in the same
papers.''
What kind of marchers would be best? ''Because it should appear as
news with no division of the publicity, actresses should be definitely
out. ... Of course,'' the memo advised, the debutantes ''are not to
smoke simply as they come down the church steps. They are to join in
the Easter parade, puffing away.''
The actual march went off more smoothly than even its scriptwriters
imagined. Ten young women turned out, marching down Fifth Avenue with
their lighted ''torches of freedom,'' and the newspapers loved it.
Photographs showed elegant ladies, with floppy hats and fur-trimmed
coats, cigarettes held self-consciously by their sides, as they
paraded down the wide boulevard. Dispatches ran the next day,
generally on Page 1, in papers from Fremont, Nebraska, to Portland,
Oregon, to Albuquerque, New Mexico. During the following days, women
were reported to be taking to the streets, cigarettes in hand, in
Boston and Detroit, Wheeling, West Virginia, and San Francisco.
Women's clubs, meanwhile, were enraged about these forward females,
and for weeks afterward, editorial writers churned out withering
prose, pro and con.
The uproar he had touched off proved enlightening to Bernays.
''Age-old customs, I learned, could be broken down by a dramatic
appeal, disseminated by the network of media,'' he wrote in his
memoirs. ''Of course the taboo was not destroyed completely. But a
beginning had been made.''
The Torches of Freedom campaign remains a classic in the world of
public relations, one still cited in classrooms and boardrooms. Yet
there's another, more troubling side to the story of Bernays's bid to
get women smoking, one not discussed in his 849-page autobiography and
never mentioned in his countless tellings and retellings of the
American Tobacco tale over the subsequent 66 years.
For starters, Bernays almost always concealed the fact that American
Tobacco was behind his motives. Discerning readers might have
suspected that a commercial interest had prompted the campaign, but it
would have taken a detective to pinpoint the company. To be fair,
there's disagreement in the public relations community even today
about the propriety of masking a client's identity, and there was far
less consensus when Bernays was working for American Tobacco. Yet, in
many an interview, Bernays maintained that his own standards were
beyond reproach, such as when he told a public relations historian in
1959 that whenever his firm enlisted experts, ''we did it in an open
and overt way.''
If he began by disguising his role in the battle to get women smoking,
Bernays more than made up for that in later years. The parade story in
particular became part of his repertoire on the speaking circuit and
in the scores of interviews he granted before his death, in 1995. With
each retelling, the tale got more colorful and his claims more
sweeping. In his 1965 memoirs, for instance, Bernays discussed the
slow process of breaking down conventions, like the taboo against
women smoking. By 1971 he was telling an oral historian at Columbia
University that ''overnight the taboo was broken by one overt act.''
Beyond his apparent embellishment, however, is the more vexing
question of how much he knew back then about the risks of smoking. His
papers and those of American Tobacco make clear that company
executives were beginning to sense how hazardous tobacco products
could be, and that Bernays was becoming their point man in deflating
those dangers. And even as he was peddling cigarettes to American
women, he was doing all he could to persuade his wife, Doris, to give
up her pack-a-day habit.
''He used to hide my mother's cigarettes and make us hide the
cigarettes. He didn't think they were good for Mother,'' remembers his
elder daughter, also named Doris. Anne, his younger daughter, recalls
hat when her father found a pack of her mother's Parliaments, ''he'd
pull them all out and just snap them like bones, just snap them in
half and throw them in the toilet. He hated her smoking.''
Whatever his attitude at home, at work Bernays had to serve the
swashbuckling Hill. And in 1934, Hill was worried about new surveys
showing that many women wouldn't smoke Luckies because the package,
green with a red bull's-eye, clashed with their favorite clothing.
''What do you suggest?'' Bernays remembered Hill asking. The PR man
replied, ''Change the Lucky package to a neutral color that will match
anything they wear.'' That was all Hill needed to set him off: ''I've
spent millions of dollars advertising the package. Now you ask me to
change it. That's lousy advice.''
At which point Bernays offered advice that kicked off a campaign
almost as legendary as the Torches of Freedom parade. ''If you won't
change the color of the package,'' he reasoned, ''change the color of
fashion - to green.''
Change an entire nation's taste in colors? This was an idea so
egocentric and eccentric that few PR practitioners then or now would
have suggested it, and fewer still would have any notion how to make
it work. But Bernays's specialty was determining why the public
preferred certain things, then reengineering those preferences to
coincide with his clients' needs, and he set off on his six-month task
with supreme confidence.
First, he analyzed the color itself. A book entitled The Language of
Color told him that green was an ''emblem of hope, victory, and
plenty'' and ''symbolical of solitude and peace'' - upbeat themes to
build on. Even more encouraging were statistics showing that green
already made up about 20 percent of the current lines being turned out
by French fashion houses.
What Bernays needed was a big event to light up the world of fashion.
He settled on a Green Ball, to be held at the stately Waldorf-Astoria
and attended by New York's leading debutantes, with proceeds going to
some deserving charity. And he found the ideal hostess: Mrs. Frank A.
Vanderlip, chairwoman of the Women's Infirmary of New York and wife of
the former chairman of the National City Bank.
All Mrs. Vanderlip needed to know, Bernays decided, was that proceeds
would buy milk for undernourished kids, furnish clothing to cardiac
patients, and support other projects at the infirmary. ''I
explained,'' he wrote later, ''that a nameless sponsor would defray
the costs up to $25,000; our client would donate our services to
promote the ball; the color green would be the ball's motif and the
obligatory color of all the gowns worn at the ball.''
The fashion and accessories industries were his next targets. A Green
Ball would require not just green gowns but also, Bernays insisted,
green gloves and green shoes, green handkerchiefs, and, yes, green
jewelry. He began by approaching the Onondaga Silk Co., filling in its
president, Philip Vogelman, on plans for the ball and suggesting that
he could be at the leading edge of the move to green - if he moved
fast.
Vogelman signed up, and he invited fashion editors to the Waldorf for
a Green Fashions Fall Luncheon with, of course, green-tinted menus
featuring green beans, asparagus-tip salad, broiled French lamb chops
with haricots verts and olivette potatoes, pistachio mousse glace,
green mints, and creme de menthe. The head of the Hunter College art
department gave a talk, ''Green in the Work of Great Artists,'' and a
psychologist spoke on the psychological implications of green. The
press took note, with the New York Sun declaring, ''It Looks Like a
Green Winter.''
But what if the new green clothing clashed with people's decor? A
Color Fashion Bureau, under the auspices of Onondaga Silk, was there
with advice, sending 1,500 letters on the up-and-coming color to
interior decorators, home-furnishings buyers, art-industry groups, and
clubwomen. The bureau also sent 5,000 announcements to department
stores and merchandise managers.
By now, the bandwagon seemed to be rolling on its own. Mrs. Vanderlip
enlisted for her invitation committee luminaries like Mrs. James
Roosevelt, Mrs. Walter Chrysler, Mrs. Irving Berlin, and Mrs. Averell
Harriman. Altman's and Bonwit Teller filled their Fifth Avenue windows
with green gowns, suits, and accessories, and Vogue ran two pages of
sketches of the green dresses to be brought to New York from Paris.
Bernays was particularly delighted when the ''unsuspecting opposition
gave us a boost: the November magazine advertisements for Camel
cigarettes showed a girl wearing a green dress with red trimmings, the
colors of the Lucky Strike package. The advertising agency had chosen
green because it was now the fashionable color.''
The lesson, Bernays wrote years afterward, is that ''emphasis by
repetition gains acceptance for an idea, particularly if the
repetition comes from different sources.''
The Green Ball came off as planned, maybe better. It was a ''gay,
vivid night, something to remember,'' Vogue reported. In the same
issue: ''We thought the lovely ladies who were all done up in green to
take part in the pageant of paintings looked unusually lovely.'' And
then this: ''The Waldorf did the graceful thing, as usual, and put a
flourishing finish on The Green Ball last week by setting a
Continental boite de nuit. They called it the Casino Vert and carried
out the colour motif of the ball by flooding the crystal chandeliers
and the mirrored walls with a green-blue light.''
But did Hill, who attended the ball, think it and the accompanying
campaign benefited him and Lucky Strike?
Bernays said the tobacco tycoon seldom offered praise, and in the case
of The Green Ball, ''I don't recall bothering to check Hill's
reaction.'' Still, he added, ''the color green was so omnipresent that
he could not escape it. ... [The ball] firmly established green's
predominance.''
Other, more neutral observers disagree over the success of the green
campaign. Edwin P. Hoyt, in his book The Supersalesmen, says the whole
episode was a great example of the ''phenomenal mistakes'' that Hill
made during his career. ''He wanted to establish green that year as
the color for women's fashions. He failed dismally.'' But 16 years
later, author Robert Sobel reached a decidedly different conclusion:
''Green did become the 'in color' that year. Hill was pleased. Bernays
received a bonus.''
*****************
Wade T. Smith
morbius@channel1.com | "There ain't nothin' you
wade_smith@harvard.edu | shouldn't do to a god."
******* http://www.channel1.com/users/morbius/ *******