48 pages • 1 hour read
Edward BernaysPropaganda
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1928A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Herd Instinct
The fear of the irrational crowd was a persistent point of focus among intellectuals at the end of the 19th century. Gustave Le Bon’s classic text, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1895), was emblematic of these concerns and fueled an interest in crowd theory, group behavior, and herd instinct. Le Bon didn’t use the term “herd instinct,” but the term became associated with the negative connotations about crowd behavior. In these interpretations, the herd instinct is associated with irrationality, transgression, a lapse of moral discipline, civil disturbance, and savagery. There was a widespread belief that collective fear would trigger a herd instinct that would devolve into violence. Also, around the turn of the 20th century, there was an increasing interest in the masses and mass media. However, concerning mass culture, the public is distinguished from the crowd in the sense that the public is a massive dispersion of individuals who are connected and extended in space and time with shared information and ideas gleaned from various media. It has mental cohesion, whereas the crowd is a physical and local matter.
Social psychologist Graham Wallas analyzed the constant social interaction in mass society. He concluded that firsthand experience began to be replaced with newspapers and mass media that delivered stimuli in the form of symbols and images so that experience increasingly depended on imagination rather than observation. Wallas warned against assuming that our actions and decisions are part of a rational, intellectual process at all, and these ideas were also applied to the crowd. The herd experiences sentiments, impulses, and symbols, unlike an individual who is guided by thought toward action.
Following Émile Durkheim, Bernays recognized the whole to be greater than the sum of its parts. In other words, the collective mind doesn’t function like an aggregate of individual psyches. The mental characteristics of the group mind are very different and distinct from those of the individual. Bernays states that “Trotter and Le Bon concluded that the group mind does not think in the strict sense of the word. In place of thoughts it has impulses, habits and emotions” (50).
Trotter coined the phrase “herd instinct” to designate the psychological concept and theory located between the natural and human sciences. Trotter’s model is based on imitation, suggestion, altruism, and associations in life. His work was deliberately confrontational to the theories of Le Bon and other negative commentaries on crowds and mass culture. Trotter theorized that the suggestibility of the mob is merely an amplification of the herd dynamic that is a normal feature of the human mind. His theory differs from the conventional theorization that associates suggestibility with chaos and disorder. Trotter speaks of the sense of gregariousness that is a feature of the herd instinct. Suggestibility is another expression of this instinct.
The correlation between suggestibility and the irrational crowd fulfills some of the fantasies of the propagandist because this means the masses can be easily manipulated. The unconscious is seen as a source of repressed urges and impressions that can be manipulated without the subject being aware. Bernays was heavily invested in the idea that, gradually, over time, the subject's train of thought can be changed.
Propaganda
Bernays offers various definitions of propaganda throughout the book, and two of them are rather broad: “Social service, in fact, is identical with propaganda in many cases” (139), and “[t]here is no means of human communication which may not also be a means of deliberate propaganda, because propaganda is simply the establishing of reciprocal understanding between an individual and a group” (150).
Between the Napoleonic Wars to the beginning of World War I, there were few major wars, and thus, there were no grand occasions for propaganda. However, the burgeoning visual culture involving political cartoons and satirical drawings was seen more frequently during political campaigns. Historically, propaganda was associated with periods of violence and turmoil. It wasn’t until World War I that propaganda was employed so fulsomely as a weapon of modern warfare. The introduction of new forms of print media and communication at the end of the 19th century accompanied the beginning of mass culture, and governments were then able to disseminate information and recruit in a timely manner across continents.
World War I was the first time that propaganda was employed as an auxiliary weapon of war. When the US entered the war, Lippmann contacted President Wilson and suggested they pursue propaganda as a weapon and this suggestion materialized in the Committee on Public Information. The focus of the CPI was to support the US in the war and along the home front. It was in this organization that Lippmann met Bernays.
Muckraker
The term “muckraker” historically refers to journalists, writers, and reformers in the United States during the late 19th and early 20th centuries who fervently exposed social injustices, corruption, and abuses of power. The muckrakers played a significant role during the Progressive Era of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a period characterized by widespread social activism and political reform aimed at addressing the issues brought about by rapid industrialization and urbanization.
The origin of the term “muckraker” can be traced back to a speech by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1906. Roosevelt used the term, derived from John Bunyan’s 17th-century allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress, to describe journalists who focused on the “filth” and “muck” of society. Although Roosevelt’s use was intended to critique those who he felt were overly fixated on exposing scandal, the term was quickly embraced by the journalists it described as a badge of honor.
Muckrakers were instrumental in unveiling the dark side of the Gilded Age, an era marked by economic growth and class disparity. They targeted major societal issues, including poor working conditions, child labor, unsanitary conditions in the meatpacking industry, political corruption, and monopolistic practices of large corporations. Their efforts significantly influenced public opinion and catalyzed legislative reforms, leading to the enactment of laws aimed at improving public health, labor conditions, and corporate regulation. The muckrakers’ legacy endures as a testament to the power of investigative journalism and its capacity to instigate societal change. However, investigative journalism and propaganda create contradiction as evidenced in Bernays’s discussion of muckrakers in Propaganda.
