Today in Labor History November 22, 1891: Dr. Edward L. Bernays was born in Vienna, Austria. Bernays, a nephew of Freud, is considered by many to be father of public relations. He is credited with getting millions of women to start smoking with his “Torches of Freedom” cigarette ad campaign that equated smoking with feminism, and with women’s liberation and independence. He also worked to legitimize the CIA/United Fruit overthrow of the democratically-elected Arbenz government in Guatemalan, becoming the primary supplier of information for the international newswires, like Associated Press, United Press International, and the International News Service. He described the masses as irrational and subject to herd instinct and wrote books on how to harness this to maximize profits. In the 1930s, his critics compared him to Goebbels and Hitler, and Goebbels did, indeed, read and utilize Bernays’s books to inform his propaganda campaigns. Bernays was even offered a job by the Nazis, which he reportedly turned down. He also supposedly turned down propaganda job offers from the the Spanish fascist dictator, Francisco, Franco and the brutal Somoza family, in Nicaragua.
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