The year was 1928 and the United States had a lot of problems.
One was a lack of women’s rights. Another, one seemingly more pressing to the American Tobacco Company, was that women were not smoking. The American Tobacco Company was only able to tap into half of the American market. Not wanting to be seen as “unwomanly,” women in the U.S. chose not to smoke. To the American Tobacco Company, it seemed that traditional gender roles could be an impediment on the revenue. George Washington Hill, the president of the American Tobacco Company, set out to double his company’s market and did so by employing Edward Bernays, the man who was testing out a new industry that we now know as public relations.
The public relations industry has evolved into a multibillion dollar industry in the United States. The tobacco industry has continued using the art of public relations to go from the co-opting of first wave feminism to targeting the LGBTQ+ community of today as a new profitable market.
Bernays saw a creative opportunity to use the growing rebellion of the first wave feminist movement of the 1920s to the company’s advantage by creating the Torches of Freedom Campaign.
The plan was simple: Bernay’s employed his secretary, who brought along other women, to smoke a Lucky Strike cigarette, the company owned by the American Tobacco Company, during the Easter Parade on March 31, 1929. The press was alerted that a group of women would be smoking cigarettes during the parade, and the next day The New York Times published a story titled, “Group of Girls Puff at Cigarettes as a Gesture of ‘Freedom’”.
Under the guise of supporting feminism and women’s liberation, Bernays created a socially scandalous event that encouraged women to smoke cigarettes. Cigarettes became a form of rebellion in women’s minds, and they were more than happy to rebel against a social structure that sought to hold them back. For the American Tobacco Company, sales doubled for the American Tobacco Company from 1923 to 1929. For women, not much could be said about how smoking cigarettes contributed to their liberation.
The tobacco industry has benefited much from Edward Bernays’ art of public relations. Today, Big Tobacco, quite similar to the American Tobacco Company co-opting the feminist movement in 1928, has used tactics of public relations to target the LGBTQ+ demographic in their pursuit of profit.
In 2000, documents from R.J Reynolds leaked to the press detailed what they titled “Project SCUM” or Project SubCulture Urban Marketing, an advertising campaign targeting young gay men and the homeless in San Francisco.
The campaign aimed at the LGBTQ+ community has proven to be effective over the years. 1 in 4 queer adults smoke, compared to 1 in 6 straight adults. Queer individuals are twice as likely to start smoking before the age of 13 than their straight counterparts.
A group that is already oppressed is being targeted with a product that kills. The LGBTQ+ community has much higher rates of anxiety and depression, which are higher predictors of tobacco use, while tobacco simultaneously increases these mental conditions. Just as the Torches of Freedom Campaign of 1928 by the American Tobacco Company, smoking by the queer community has been seen as a part of counterculture. For many young individuals who feel exiled from society, smoking has been sold to them as a means of self-empowerment in a packaged form of rebellion.
Edward Bernays, prior to his 1928 cigarette campaign, was employed at the Committee on Public Information, the Federal Government’s propaganda organization tasked with motivating Americans to support joining World War 1. After the war ended he realized, “if you could use propaganda for war, you could certainly use it for peace.” Bernays stated that the Germans gave “propaganda” a bad name during the 1930s, so he couldn’t use that term. Instead, he created the title”public relations”.
Bernays utilization of public relations on the American public would be motivated by his uncle Sigmund Freud’s theory of the “group mind”. The Freudian group mind is the idea that groups are composed of the unconscious life of each member. The group cannot be understood without understanding the other members of the group and that the individual cannot be separated from the group that they are a part of. The overwhelming success of propaganda, and therefore public relations, is predicated on this freudian idea.
During Edward Bernays’ time at the Committee on Public Information, he worked with Walter Lippmann, an American journalist who created the concept of the “Cold War” in reference to US and Soviet Union global tensions, and who also coined the term “stereotype”. He is most noted for his critique of democracy and the media. In his book, The Phantom Public, published in the 1920s, he states that “The public must be put in its place so that each of us may live free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd.”.
What Walter Lippmann was referring to as the “bewildered herd” was the ordinary person participating in democracy and therefore the decision making regarding society and people. Lippmann believed that “the masses” were incapable or unwilling, or both, of making the proper decisions for society. Therefore, the masses are not to be active participants in the democratic process, they are meant to be spectators and let a small group of “educated” and “capable” men make the decisions for society.
Bernay’s looked up to Lippmann and his ideas regarding the public and their opinion. In his 1928 book Propaganda, he states in direct alignment with the ideas expressed by Walter Lippmann,”The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”
Bernays makes clear in Propaganda that, “mass production is profitable only if its rhythm can be maintained. Business cannot afford to wait until the public asks for its product. It must maintain constant touch, through advertising and propaganda… to assure itself the continuous demand which alone will make its costly plant profitable.” Our desires must be created for us, we do not have enough on our own to drive the profit economy.
Introductory economic courses in college teach students that consumers are rational, making the best decisions based on what is important to them. But if you have ever been sold anything, you are well aware that the advertisements are not treating their audiences as rational consumers, rather they target your heart.