The Torch of Freedom
Bernays was seized with the idea that the hidden forces acting within individuals, and more important, within crowds of them, could be hijacked.
Again from Simon Winchester's excellent book Knowing What We Know.
Edward Louis Bernays was the son of an Austrian grain merchant and Sigmund Freud's sister. The family moved from Vienna to New York at the end of the nineteenth century. Initially, the young man seemed likely to follow the same kind of agricultural leanings as his father, but he soon found his way into writing—first about the farming business, then in journalism more generally, and later, after taking long and regular walking holidays with his uncle in the Viennese Alps, into considering the human condition more seriously, wondering in particular about "the behavior of crowds." Sigmund Freud was at this very time developing his early ideas about the deeper and potentially more dangerous hidden psychic depths of seemingly ordinary men and women, and Bernays was absorbing it all, hungrily. . . .
Crystallizing Public Opinion was the title of one of Bernays's postwar books; The Engineering of Consent was another . . . Edward Bernays was the man who replaced the everyday American's pervasive feeling of need for the much more positive notion of want. . . .
His uncle had written further on the mysteries of psychoanalysis, and Bernays was seized with the idea that the hidden forces acting within individuals, and more important, within crowds of them, could be hijacked—though he never used the word—to sell goods and services. The idea that people would buy things simply based on the information they might be presented with about various products was, he judged, impossibly naive. He would devise one particular experiment that, if it succeeded, would bring him fame and fortune. He would try to see if he could persuade American women to smoke. . . .
At New York's Easter Day celebrations on March 31, 1929, he arranged for a dozen pretty debutantes to join the famous Fifth Avenue parade and to secrete [sic] packs of cigarettes deep within their skirts. As they passed St. Patrick's Cathedral, each had been instructed to part her dress to reveal a Lucky Strike pack strapped like a garter to her thigh, to withdraw a cigarette, light up, and ostentatiously smoke in front of the crowds. If asked—as a New York Times reporter did, and wrote accordingly—each woman was to describe her cigarette as a "torch of freedom." As the Times put it, these "torches" were now "lighting the way to the day when women would smoke on the street as casually as men". . . .
From that point on until the fashion for smoking more generally began to wane after 1964, women smoked very nearly as much as men—and brands like Lucky Strike and Pall Mall, and then in time varieties that had been engineered specially for women, like Virginia Slims—created vast profits for the tobacco industry. Edward Bernays remains a hero in tobacco boardrooms to this day. As, by association, does his uncle and Alpine walking partner, Sigmund Freud.
