Jewish Mafia: Eddie Bernays, Sigmund Freud’s Publicist

How the advertising industry became one of the most profitable industries in the world by using theories and techniques of psychoanalysis — an art and science that emerged at about the same time as the modern ad industry itself — techniques that still drive the industry’s fundamental task and raison d’etre: the creation of new desires.Show more

This will be a visual journey through 19th and 20th century advertising, but to keep us focused, I’m going to stick with ads for one kind of product that was sold and marketed everywhere, bought by everyone, both then and today: soap.

THE EARLIEST AMERICAN PRINT ADS

So let’s start with the earliest American print ads of the 1800s. They worked in a way that would perhaps seem too blunt today; they were totally unsubtle. Just look at this ad for Simpson Iodine Soap.
Good for insect bites and…false teeth?

These earliest ads took this straight-forwardly rational approach of using — or at least seeming to use — simple information to persuade people to make a conscious, reasoned choice to buy a product, and they did this by convincing the viewer that the product would meet some specific need they had, and that it was a good value for the money.

This Lifebuoy ad is a prime example:

Notice the strategy:

“You need soap. This is even better than “regular” soap, and it’s not expensive!” You’d be a fool not to buy, right?

At the time, the print advertisement wouldn’t have even been a genre of media that the public recognized. And since “advertisement” wasn’t yet a category of media that most people had in their heads, the ads probably seemed to readers like another piece of writing in whatever pamphlet or publication they appeared in. Now, looking at them, they’re pretty similar to a recent advertising trend — the the faux-journalistic “native advertisements”, “sponsored content”, and “advertorials” that crop up in print today. (Like this New York Times “article”, which is actually a paid advertisement for Orange Is The New Black.)

Ads at the time often looked more like public service announcements:
A PSA-style advert for Proctor and Gamble

Or like profiles of a company written by the publication:
This ad covers the history of the company and pretends to do a fair comparison of its product to competitors’.

Or like expert testimonials, like this Trefosa soap ad featuring a doctor figure lauding the health and hygienic benefits of the product:
“Trefosa”?

THE IDEOLOGY OF A NEW PROFESSION

Since there was not yet an advertising industry, there weren’t any professional ad designers, and so the early ones were drafted by corporate managers, people who had no special training in the principles or methods of consumer persuasion, since no one had at that point ever really studied those topics. The basic philosophy that guided those early manager-advertisers was rooted in the “common sense” conception of how the market and human psychology worked. That is, the belief was that consumers were just regular ol’ rational people with practical needs, and every purchase was motivated by the same two conditions:

The thing being purchased clearly satisfied some practical need.
The benefit buying the product outweighed the cost of paying for it.

Advertising was simple. Businesses simply needed to convince consumers that their product would do something useful for a fair price, and they would buy it. It would be irrational for them not to buy such a product as long as they could afford it. Because it was such simple business, even the largest companies budgeted very little for advertising, and the work of designing and placing ads was just left to lower level business managers.

This success of this straight-forward, commonsense advertising strategy is hard to gauge, given the lack of solid data about ad circulation and product performances. But if the growth rate of the ad industry is any indication, companies generally found ads to be a good investment, and soon the initial handful of New York “ad men” multiplied and divided. And soon they began creating a totally new kind of company, whose product was the ad itself. Marketing had become its own industry.

The early days of the marketing industry were a kind of wild west, with companies competing with one another and experimenting wildly with different approaches to making advertising imagery.

SHATTERING THE IMAGE OF MAN AND THE IDEOLOGY OF THE MARKET

This was a period marked by massive, and totally unanticipated political, ideological, and economic shifts that were taking place all over the world. No one’s beliefs were shaken more than the economists and businessmen. For, evidence was continually mounting against the ideological foundation of Western capitalism: the belief that humans were predictably rational, and that people’s choices — to spend money, or vote, or do anything else — were the product of their consciously weighing costs and benefits, and then choosing reasonably. Events like First World War, the collapse of the American economy, and the ensuing Great Depression were the products of a kind of mass irrationality so powerful and catastrophic that were impossible to explain as the results of collective behavior of rational individuals, and so this image of man was shattered.

It was becoming clear that there were other motivating forces — forces that operate beneath our conscious, rational thoughts — that were responsible for driving humans by the millions to behave so contrary to economists’ idea of the “rational consumer”.

And so, just as economists and philosophers and social scientists had begun to suspect there were forces driving human action that their disciplines simply could not explain, another very different discipline was being born — one that could describe and explain the non-rational forces that drive human action.

This discipline was being developed by a young Austrian doctor named Sigmund Freud, who called his method “Psychoanalysis”.

PSYCHOANALYSIS, HUMAN NATURE, & CAPITALISM

Psychoanalysis recognized that we are driven not only by reason, but just as often by swarms of desires, emotions, fantasies, and insecurities that operate behind the veil of conscious rationality.

As the ideas of psychoanalysis spread beyond the medical and academic communities, the concept of unconscious, irrational (or a-rational) drives soon gained the interest of corporations, who were eager to find ways to harness them to promote products.

Just as this new corporate interest was gaining momentum, its reigns were grasped by a cunning young New York consultant named Eddie Bernays. Bernays, who would eventually become known as a father of modern advertising, had a keen awareness of our non-rational drives. And so he should, for that interest had been nurtured in him during youth spent in Europe near his uncle, Sigmund Freud.

Bernays’ client list is a roster of the most profitable ventures in American history, among them the American Tobacco Company, Proctor and Gamble, Cartier, as well as political clients like Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover.

His campaigns convinced American women to adopt the then exclusively-masculine habit of smoking, prompted the CIA overthrow of Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, and made bacon and eggs the signature American breakfast.

SELLING TO THE SUBCONSCIOUS

Bernays clearly knew how to sway the public. He and the advertisers who quickly adopted his approach completely quit talking about practical value in their adverts.

Instead, they started portraying products as symbols of satisfaction for our unconscious desires and fantasies.

Car advertisements ignored facts about excellent gas mileage and reliability to focus on artfully presenting the car as a symbol of sexual virility, or freedom from the slavery of work and family life. Coke was no longer a tasty beverage good for quenching thirst, but became The Real Thing that we have been longing for, the satisfaction to our need to experience authenticity.

This new advertising strategy was given even more momentum because it seemed like the perfect solution to a growing fear that had gripped economists and businessmen, and it was the supreme capitalist nightmare: If human needs were stable, well-defined, and satiable, it seemed inevitable that an efficient market was headed toward a day when, at least in the case of many products, everyone would have bought all that they needed, and production would simply stop.

The burden of finding a way of fending off this capitalist nightmare lay on the shoulders of advertisers, who would use their newly acquired psychoanalytic skills to cleverly manipulate the public’s desires so that even if the day came when we had bought all we needed, we would still go on buying other things simply because we wanted them.

This strategy is perfectly summarized by Lehman Brothers executive Paul Mazur, in a 1927 piece he wrote for the Harvard Business Review. In it, Mazur counsels his fellow marketers and ad men:

“We must shift America from a needs, to a desires culture. People must be trained to desire, to want new things even before the old had been entirely consumed. We must shape a new mentality in America. Man’s desires must overshadow his needs.” (emphasis mine)

In order for the market to keep churning out goods that would satisfy public desires, Mazur says, the market must not only create new products, it must generate in the public new desires as well.

Mazur struck a similar tone a year later when he reflected that “Human nature very conveniently presents a variety of strings upon which an appreciative sales manager can play fortissimo”. What might these strings be? Mazur identifies a few: “threats, beauty, sparkle” and “fear…”.

THE NEW ADVERTISEMENTS

The advertising industry proved a faithful disciple of both Bernays and Mazur. Advertisements grew more imaginative and psychoanalytically sophisticated in the way they pulled the strings of our sub-conscious to generate desires that outstripped our needs.

So now consider the clear difference in tone, style, substance, and message between the soap ads below. The first pair are pre-Bernays advertisements, while the second pair reflect the new ideology of the industry. Both pairs are from the same two companies.
An early ad for Pears’ soap. ca. early 19th cen.
A very early ad for Woodbury’s facial soap. ca. early 19th cen.

The first pair lauds the soap’s objective qualities (e.g. it floats, or has antiseptic properties, or it is modestly priced), and implies that we should purchase their product because it will satisfy a clear need we have (to wash our hands and bodies).
A post-Bernays ad for Woodbury’s facial soap.
A a post-Bernays ad for Pears’ soap.

This second pair is much different, a product of the new philosophy championed by the ideological influence of people like Bernays and Mazur. Notice how they avoid mentioning the product’s actual qualities altogether, and instead present the product — soap! — as a symbol of sexual fulfillment, or a solution to one’s insecurity or longing for love.

Advertisers were becoming adept at identifying and exploiting our deepest desires and fears, the ones we hide and suppress in our everyday lives, the ones we push below the threshold of conscious thought.

MINING THE INEXHAUSTIBLE WELL OF THE UNCONSCIOUS

What this all meant is that our sub-conscious desires and fears were an inexhaustible machine for generating consumption, if only the advertiser could find a way to present the product as a symbol of our fulfillment. It didn’t matter how unrelated the product was to the actual concern, because the ads worked below the level of conscious reason.

Advertisers honed in on a deep emotional concern — in this case, the female viewer’s fear of spousal abandonment — and simply presented their product as a means of fending off that fear. Never mind that a mere moment of rational thought made it clear how preposterous the basic suggestion was — that switching soap brands could save a marriage. It simply did not matter. If advertisers could understand an unconscious desire or fear, they could exploit it. And the better they understood it, the more effectively they could leverage it to generate sales.

It’s not clear how common this fear of abandonment was among wives who would have viewed these ads, but in her book Marriage, A History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage, sociologist Stephanie Coontz offers five significant reasons why many women of the time would have feared abandonment:

Losing her marriage meant losing all economic stability.
Until as late as the 1950s, four-fifths of Americans felt that singleness was a sign that a person was “sick, neurotic, or immoral”, an attitude that intensified the stigma borne by the divorcee.
A divorced woman had generally poor prospects of remarriage.
The ability to dissolve a marriage lay almost entirely with the husband up to the early to mid 19th century, and a woman’s power to resist being divorced was very weak, making marital abandonment a uniquely female fear.
The popular attitudes toward male and female infidelity were generally forgiving toward the man, yet tended to demonize the woman.

Consider how someone in the position Coontz describes would have experienced ads like these:

Palmolive, turning fear and insecurity into gold.
“His eyes don’t stray….” by Palmolive.

Warning — to careless youth — to discouraged age — to women fo all ages who know…but too often forget, the lure of a soft, seductive skin.

Don’t ignore it! Never forget it! Remember — there is a simple, easy way to guard the inviting skin of youth…to win back the charm that you may think you are losing as you grow older.

WHY YOU WEAR DEODORANT

This style of predatory psychoanalytic advertisement preyed upon the viewer’s deep, irrational insecurities by conjuring paranoid images of what others might actually be thinking, or even saying about her behind her back.

This eventually crystallized into a distinct genre called “Whisper Copy” — ads whose “copy “ (i.e. text) advertised products through images of whispered gossip about the viewer.

No doubt, there were ads crafted to exploit every conceivable insecurity, in a process of trial and error to discover which of the public’s insecurities leveraged most profit. As it turns out, women’s fear that others were offended by their body odor was a gold mine — albeit one that took some initial digging to develop. The result though was a conclusion obvious to the viewer: If you want to keep a man, you’d better not smell.

And this is a perfect example of how marketer’s achieves Mazur’s goal of creating entirely new desires that would drive use to consume beyond our needs.

There is little evidence that body odor was a serious social concern for many prior to its exploitation through whisper copy. The first mass market deodorant, Odorono, was an abject market failure until it was rebranded as a curative for “excessive perspiration” rather than body odor, and a 1919 survey found that while nearly every woman knew effective deodorants were widely available, about 70% of them simply “felt they had no need” for the product.

Body odor was a small realization of the economic nightmare mentioned above — a point at which the public overwhelmingly felt that their needs had been fully satisfied, and so the market had nothing left to offer them.

But advertisers saved the day, achieving Mazur’s goal of creating new desires by using Bernays’ method of exploiting consumers’ sub-conscious feelings, in this case, by preying again on a woman’s fear of being alone. Here is the text from an ad from the period, for Mum deodorant:
Mum deodorant whisper copy.

Wake up, Mary! It’s a grand old world, and you’re missing it!
You’re a pretty girl, Mary, and you’re smart about most things. But you’re just a bit stupid about yourself.
You love a good time — but you seldom have one. Evening after evening you sit at home alone…
There are so many pretty Marys in the world who never seem to sense the real reason for their aloneness.
In this smart modern age, it’s against the code for a girl (or a man, either) to carry the repellent odor of underarm perspiration on clothing and person.
It’s a fault which never fails to carry its own punishment — unpopularity. And justly. For it is a fault which can be corrected in just half a minute — with Mum!

It is tempting to conclude that campaigns like this one are what transformed deodorant from a product the vast majority of the public felt they had no need for, into a product that most of us use every single day.

The truth, however, is that the ads did not change the product at all. They changed the public — from one that felt just fine without the product, to one that feared going a day without it. And they did this by exploiting individuals’ fear of rejection, and framing the product as the means of avoiding humiliation, rejection, and loneliness — all of the contents of our mind that lay below a surface first penetrated by Sigmund Freud, the Jacques Cousteau of the mind.

A NEW ALCHEMY: REMAKING REALITY IN THE IMAGE OF THE AD

The human unconscious remains to this day the advertiser’s most powerful tool, for it fulfill’s Mazur’s command: that the market cultivate entirely new desires and attitudes in the public, attitudes that may not even have existed in the first place.

This has a bizarre effect though. Advertisements can create a kind of feedback loop through which social attitudes and feelings that are represented as reality in the advert can actually become real.

For example, by presenting a scene where body odor is a topic of gossip, viewers are invited to reproduce the scene itself, and they’re invited to adopt the attitudes of those pictured. This circle of influence by which something depicted as real actually breaks through and becomes real is a process philosopher René Girard calls mimesis.
Mum produced some of the first ads that invented the concept of “body odor”.

Just look at how another deodorant advertisement of the time pivots from the female consumer to the male viewer, not to convince him to buy, but to invite him to feel disgust toward the odor of a woman’s body:
This one’s really worth a whole read.

“Remember, men avoid girls who offend!…”

“Never again for me, Tom! Janet’s a peach of a girl and a swell dancer, but some things get a man down. Too bad somebody doesn’t tip her off. Other girls know how to avoid underarm odor.”

This is the supreme danger presented by an advertising industry that operates in this way. And it is my fundamental criticism of the industry.

Corporations will undoubtedly choose to run ads that invite us to adopt new attitudes, beliefs, and values because they will generate consumption and profit, regardless of whether these new attitudes align with our best interests. It is not merely a matter of whether corporations will choose to be ethical or not. This is a matter of survival, because corporations depends on their ability to continuously mold the psychology of the public, to keep our desires and attitudes shifting so that we keep consuming, to make sure we feel perpetual need, and to make us believe that products — in reality totally mundane things — are what will satisfy deep desires, or protect us from deep fears, but these fears and desires are very often created by ad media to sell the product in the first place.
“Beautiful But Dumb”, an ad for something called Liquid Odorono.

CONCLUSION: READING ADVERTISEMENTS AS PROPAGANDA IN THE WAR TO CONTROL OUR UNCONSCIOUS

It is this power, to shape the consumer, that fueled the growth from a handful of hapless ad-writers into an industry that can spend half a trillion dollars a year manipulating the public’s psychology, very often against our own interests. And while I’ve focused here on the ads produced by the adolescent ad industry, it’s not hard to see how this same strategy has been refined to produce many of the advertisements we encounter today. I leave it to you, for now, to see beyond their surface of the thousand or so ads you see every day. Perhaps a sequel to this article will appear at some point, focusing on modern ad imagery.

In any case, I don’t mean to suggest we should dismantle the industry. There is no hope of toppling the trillion-dollar behemoth today, and perhaps there are good reasons we would not want to. What I want is to encourage us all to take a very critical stance toward advertising images, to pay attention to the values and attitudes they present, and they way they use those to pry into the deeper parts of our selves, where they can play upon our fears and fantasies. Because the fact is that, right now, advertisers are seeking out even more effective ways to exploit our deepest psychological vulnerabilities (what are called “pain points” in modern marketing lingo).

The benefit of shaping our view of the world and ourselves, for the corporations, is clear: monetary profit. But, to see the world through the lenses advertisers push on us, the cost to us is not merely monetary. We don’t just end up spending money on things we never needed and only want because we’ve been manipulated. We often pay an even greater cost, because in shifting our view of ourselves and our world, we often give up valuable or intimate pieces of our own unique way of experiencing the world.

Like, for instance, the belief that body odor can be kind of sexy.

His wife Doris Elsa Fleischman Bernays, Writer, Public Relations First, And Feminist, 1891 – 198

Bernays wasa jewish embassador..... the documentary left Woodrow Wilson was responsible for the #FederalReserve act out but here he is:

https://rumble.com/v2qua3l-the-jewish-are-behind-the-federal-reserve-act-the-jewry-exposed.html

Doris Elsa Fleischman Bernays, July 18, 1891 – July 10, 1980, was a writer, public relations executive, and feminist activist.

Fleischman was a member of the Lucy Stone League, a group that encouraged women to keep their names after marriage.

She was the first married woman to be issued a United States passport in her maiden name, Doris Fleischman, in 1925.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/early-facebook-investor-likens-sites-techniques-to-nazi-propaganda/

Personal life

Doris Fleischman was born to a Jewish family in Harlem, New York, on July 18, 1891, the daughter of attorney Samuel Fleischman and Harriet Rosenthal Fleischman.

She was one of three children and was the niece of neurologist Sigmund Freud through her marriage to Edward L. Bernays.

Education

Fleischman attended Hunter Normal School before graduating from Horace Mann School in 1909. She went on to study philosophy, psychology, and English at Barnard College and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1913.

While attending Barnard, Fleischman enjoyed painting and singing and earned varsity letters in a multitude of activities, including softball, basketball, and tennis. She also studied music and psychiatry and considered pursuing each as a career path.

In 1917, Fleischman marched in the first Women’s Peace Parade in Harlem, New York. At this time, she also became an active advocate in the Women’s Suffrage Movement.

In 1917, Fleischman marched in the first Women’s Peace Parade in Harlem, New York. At this time, she also became an active advocate in the Women’s Suffrage Movement.

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/07/05/hitlers-ideologues-us-racism-bore-fruit-mein-kampf

Adult life

In 1919, she was hired as a writer by childhood friend Edward L. Bernays. They married in 1922 at City Hall. Immediately after the wedding, she signed into the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel using her maiden name.

This was considered extremely unusual and the story made headlines the next morning.

She also traveled to Europe, and before doing so, had a passport issued to her under her maiden name. She was the first American woman to do so.

She also traveled to Europe, and before doing so, had a passport issued to her under her maiden name. She was the first American woman to do so.

Fleischman later became an active member in the Lucy Stone League, which empowered women and urged them to keep their maiden names after marriage.

Fleischman and Bernays became parents to daughter Doris in 1929 and Anne in 1930.

In 1962, Bernays and Fleischman left their home 303 West 107th Street (near West End Avenue) in Harlem, New York to move to Cambridge, Massachusetts.

In 1962, Bernays and Fleischman left their home 303 West 107th Street (near West End Avenue) in Harlem, New York to move to Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Fleischman died of a stroke in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on July 10, 1980.

Career and publications

…she was the first woman to report on a boxing match.

After graduating from Barnard, Fleischman wrote for the women’s page at the New York Tribune in 1913 before being promoted to assistant Sunday editor, where she was the first woman to report on a boxing match.

During her time at the New York Tribune, she used her writing to empower women.

Some of the topics she addressed on the women’s page included cooking, fashion, women at home, women in the workplace, women at war, and efforts in the Feminist Movement and Women’s Suffrage Movement.

She left the New York Tribune in 1916. In 1919, she was the first hire by Edward L. Bernays as a staff writer in the firm known as Edward L. Bernays, Council on Public Relations. Some of her duties included drafting articles and news releases.

Fleischman and Bernays also worked together on campaigns to promote anything from oil sales to presidential candidates. After her marriage to Bernays in 1922, Fleischman became an equal partner within the firm.

In 1946, she became the vice president of the newly created Edward L. Bernays Foundation. Among her accomplishments were an internal client publication Contact (which explained the nature and value of public relations to clients) and securing press coverage for the NAACP convention in Atlanta.

This convention in particular was extremely important, as it was the first to ever be held below the Mason-Dixon line.

This convention in particular was extremely important, as it was the first to ever be held below the Mason-Dixon line.

At the conference, Fleischman experienced discrimination and threats of violence based on her gender but continued to work to have southern press agencies cover the conference, a difficult feat at the time.

She also proved herself by going on to work with important clients like Dwight D. Eisenhower, Sigmund Freud, Jane Addams, Irene Castle, Theodore Roosevelt, and Thomas A. Edison.

In 1927, Fleischman joined the Woman Pays Club. This club was created by a group of women in 1919 with the purpose of mocking a well-known men’s club in New York.

The members of the Woman Pays Club typically met biweekly and had guests come to speak about fighting prejudice against women.

Around this time, Fleischman took her passion for feminism and wrote about women’s issues for national publications and had numerous published articles in magazines like Ladies’ Home Journal and American Mercury.

In addition to articles and columns written for larger publications, she also worked on her own books and journals.

In 1928, she published “An Outline of Careers for Women: A Practical Guide to Achievement,” which detailed career options available for young women and encouraged them to pursue them.

She wrote a chapter for Fred J. Ringel’s book, America as Americans See It, and described women’s work both in and out of the domestic setting.

In 1939, she addressed the importance of women in domestic work at a conference on women’s work in the home.

Starting with her essay “Notes of a Retiring Feminist,” published in the American Mercury in 1949, she began to use her married name Doris Fleischman Bernays professionally.

In 1950, Fleischman was contacted by Ruth Hale, founder of the Lucy Stone League, to help revive her organization which had been inactive for almost two decades following its founding in 1921.

Upon the revival of the League, Fleischman served as its vice president and worked with other women who were pioneers in their fields such as Jane Grant, Doris Stevens, Anna M. Kross, and Fannie Hurst.

Together, they worked to conduct research about women’s pay and women’s position in the American economy.

In 1952, Fleischman was invited by the director of the Women’s Bureau of the U.S. Department of Labor to attend a conference on pay equity and women in the workplace. Later that year, she resigned from her position in the Lucy Stone League.

Around this time, Fleischman also began searching for publishers to print a book she had been working on for over three years which detailed the struggles women face in the domestic and professional settings.

After being rejected by multiple publishers over the course of two years, Flesichman finally had success with Crown Publishing Company.

In 1955, she published her memoir, A Wife Is Many Women, under her married name.

Fleischman moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts with her husband in 1962 so that he could finish writing his book and they could retire together.

However, these retirement plans did not last, and Fleischman and Bernays continued to work after they sold their New York office to establish a new public relations business in Cambridge.

Upon the establishment of their new “public relations counsel,” as Bernays called it, they gained many new clients including the U.S. Department of Commerce; the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare; the West Valley Community College; and the Massachusetts Law Association.

In 1971, Fleischman joined Theta Sigma Phi, the Association for Women in Communications. As an older member, she was enthusiastic about helping students in the organizations, and she gave them advice and helped them land jobs in the field.

Theta Sigma Phi awarded her their highest honor, the National Headliner Award, in 1972.

Fleischman worked with her husband’s agency and Women In Communications, Inc. to develop two competitions that took place in 1974 and 1977.

These competitions consisted of submissions by organizations and individuals and sought out the best plans for solutions in pay equity and justice for women in the workplace and the home.

Winners received scholarship money to continue research in hopes of making these plans become reality. The Chicago Chapter of Public Relations Society of America recognized Fleischman’s work and presented her with a leadership award in 1976.

Towards the end of her career, Fleischman wrote many book reviews for the Worcester Sunday Telegram in Cambridge.

With the help of her husband, she also self-published 22 of her own poems in a book called Progression in 1977.

Death

She died on July 10, 1980, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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How Eddie Bernays got you to buy books, wear hairnets, and eat bacon for breakfast

One could argue that the birth of modern public relations is really the story of bacon and eggs. Prior to the 1920s, breakfast was toast and a cup of coffee.
When a company called Beech-Nut Packing wanted to boost its bacon sales, they called PR man Edwards Bernays.

Bernays didn't place ads in magazines or post billboards with catchy slogans. Instead, he commissioned a research study on the eating habits of Americans. A doctor concluded that, because the body loses energy during the night, a robust breakfast is healthier than a light one. Bernays saw to it that thousands of physicians got the report, along with a publicity packet touting bacon and eggs as a hearty way to start the day. Pretty soon, doctors were recommending it to their patients, and the all-American breakfast was born.

Syphilis and Propaganda

Edwards Bernays was born in Vienna to Jewish parents and immigrated to the United States with his family when he was an infant. The elder Bernays had been a wealthy farmer, and he hoped his son would follow in his footsteps. So, he enrolled young Eddie in Cornell's esteemed College of Agriculture. Eddie complied, albeit unwillingly.

A child of the Manhattan brownstone, he'd grown accustomed to the bustling pace of the big city. Upon receiving his degree in 1912, the only thing Eddie seemed certain of was that farm life was not for him. And that's when fate intervened.

One day while boarding the Ninth Avenue trolley on Manhattan, Eddie crossed paths with an old friend named Fred Robinson.

Robinson offered Bernays a job managing two monthly journals, the Medical Review of Reviews and the Dietetic and Hygienic Gazette. Eddie accepted, although he knew little about publishing or medicine. Fortunately, none of that mattered a few months later, when he used the journals to publish a review of the play Damaged Goods. That may not sound like a big deal, but Damaged Goods was about a man who had syphilis.

Sex was such a taboo subject at the time that New York censors had previously shut down George Bernard Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession because it dealt with prostitution. Regardless, Eddie published a rave review and even offered to help produce the show. But the real trick was convincing censors to look the other way.

Employing a technique that would later become one of his trademarks, Eddie created a "third party authority" called the Sociological Fund Committee.

It was a fake organization tailor-made to legitimize the play as a crusade against the prevailing attitude of "sex-pruriency." After lobbying prominent society figures, Eddie had supporters like John D. Rockefeller and Franklin Roosevelt on his side. Although critics lampooned the play, Bernays made syphilis a cause célèbre, and turned the production into a huge financial success.

Id, Ego, and Super-Uncle

The future looked bright for Bernays the Producer, but then fate stepped in again with the outbreak of World War I. Eddie tried to enlist, but was turned away due to flat feet and poor vision. Undeterred, he set his sights on the Committee on Public Information -the propaganda machine responsible for Uncle Sam's "I Want You" recruitment poster. There, as co-head of the Latin American section, Bernays honed his manipulative propaganda skills.

Although the agency's propaganda helped America win the war, its methods were sharply criticized by members of Congress, who suspected the CPI of censoring the media. The organization was dismantled, the profession of public relations came under heavy scrutiny, and Bernays was left severely disillusioned.

Salvation came in the form of Sigmund Freud, Bernays' famous uncle. In 1919, Eddie translated a series of Freud's lectured into English, and the work brought the psychiatrist widespread attention in America. Despite being derided by some critics as a "professional nephew," Eddie largely benefitted from having a famous uncle. Freud's theories on human behavior ignited a new fire in Bernays. He realized that if propaganda could be used to manipulate Americans during times of war, it could also be used in times of peace to influence trends, habits, and -most importantly- consumer spending.

Bookshelves, Hairnets, and Children Who Love to Wash Their Hands

Buoyed by Freud's success, Bernays embarked upon a series of campaigns that secured him as the master of marketing. When a group of major book publishers asked him to bolster sales, he proclaimed, "Where there are bookshelves, there will be books." Bernays then convinced architects, construction companies, and interior designers to install bookshelves in new homes. The scheme paid off, and the book business skyrocketed.

In another campaign, Bernays helped a company named Venida salvage lagging hairnet sales. Short hairstyles were in, thanks to dancehall icon Irene Castle. And without long locks, women had no need for hairnets. Bernays created a new market, repurposing the beauty accessory as safety gear. He asked experts to issue reports explaining the hazards of hair falling into food or getting caught in machinery. Soon, Venida hairnets became essential for all restaurant and factory workers.

His genius didn't stop there, either. When client Proctor & Gamble approached Bernays in the 1920s to help make its soap more appealing to children, Eddie promised that "Children, the enemies of soap, would be conditioned to enjoy using Ivory." And just like Pavlov and his dogs, Eddie trained America's youth to associate soap with fun. He created the National Soap Sculpture Contest, complete with heavily publicized cash prizes. A sweeping success, it became an annual tradition that kept children whittling away at Ivory for the next 38 years.

Torches of Freedom

Not all of Bernays' campaigns were so wholesome. One of his most well-known, if not controversial, projects was for Lucky Strike cigarettes. In the late 1920s, American Tobacco Company chairman George Washington Hill charged Bernays' PR firm with acquiring a new market for its cigarettes -women. In Eddie's words, "Hill become obsessed with the prospect of winning over the largest potential female market for Luckies. 'If I can crack that market.' he said to me one day, "it will be like opening a new goldmine right in our front yard.'"

For the campaign, Bernays enlisted the help of his wife, fellow marketing genius Doris Fleischman. First, they worked to brand cigarettes as an alternative to candy. When that didn't work, they tried to convince women that green -the official color of Luckies- was the new black. With assistance from editors at Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, green began to dominate the fashion world. The duo even orchestrated a "Green Ball" in New York, featuring some of the city's most prominent socialites. Although Lucky Strikes' sales climbed, it wasn't enough. Bernays and Fleischman realized that true success would require overcoming a major taboo. In society's eyes, women still weren't allowed to smoke in public. Armed with the knowledge that many women smoked in private, they staged an event that captivated the nation.

On Easter Sunday in 1929, a group of ten women strolled down Fifth Avenue in full view of church-going families (as well as conveniently-placed photographers) flaunting lit cigarettes, which they called their "Torches of Freedom." The news story caught fire, and controversy raged between women's groups on both sides of the issue. Around the nation, copycat "Torches of Freedom" sparked up, and millions of dollars poured into the coffers of American Tobacco.

Smoke and Mirrors

Unfortunately, the tobacco campaign backfired on Bernays. His wife Doris joined the legions of female smokers and became a lifelong tobacco user, despite protests from Eddie and their children.

Overcome with guilt, Bernays launched a radical plan in 1964 to eradicate smoking from society. Wielding medical research on the harmful effects of tobacco, he campaigned to convince America that smoking was an "antisocial action which no self-respecting person carries on in the presence of others." His efforts led to a ban on cigarette advertising from radio and television, which dealt a major blow to companies he once served.

Eddie felt guilty about other things, too. In the early 1950s, the United Fruit Company enlisted his help in Guatemala. The company was trying to hold onto the land leased to them by the government -land that national officials wanted to reclaim for the Guatemalan people. Bernays responded by waging a propaganda war that made president Jacobo Arbenz out to be a Communist. The claim was categorically untrue, but McCarthy-era politicos seized the rhetoric and rallied for war against the tiny nation. Bernays enlisted the CIA's help and orchestrated an elaborate liberation campaign to replace the democratically-elected president with a United Fruit Company puppet. The resulting Banana Republic lasted for decades.

Bernays must have felt his greatest moment of self-doubt in 1933 when foreign correspondent Karl von Weigand contacted him upon his return from Nazi Germany. During an interview with Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's devoted friend and minister of propaganda, von Weigand had noticed a familiar book sitting prominently on Goebbels' desk; it was Bernays' seminal work Crystallizing Public Opinion. Ironically, Eddie was Jewish.

The Sultan of Spin

Bernays formally retired in the early 1960s, but he kept working as a consultant until he was 100 years old. In 1990, he was voted to LIFE magazine's list of the 100 Most Influential People of the 20th Century. Bernays died on March 9, 1995 in Cambridge, Mass. at the age of 103.

Through his long and storied career, it's estimated that Bernays had 435 clients, not to mention countless disciples. His exhaustive list of clients included General Motors, the NAACP, the Multiple Sclerosis Society, and CBS, as well as famed individuals like playwright Eugene O'Neill, painter Georgia O'Keefe, and presidents Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover.

Despite his controversial campaigns, Bernays always demanded that PR professional adhere to a strict moral code. He believed the field should be licensed, like that of lawyers or doctors, so that only qualified professionals could practice. After all, he -more than anyone- understood that with the power of public persuasion came great responsibilities.

This Day in Jewish History The 'Father of Public Relations’ Dies

Edward Bernays got thousands of doctors to recommend Americans to start the day with bacon and eggs. That was just one of his stunts.

On March 9, 1995, Edward Bernays, the man widely viewed as holder of the dubious title “father of public relations” in America, died at the age of 103. Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud through both his mother and father, employed scientific methodology to achieve what he called the “engineering of consent” – persuading people through indirect means to believe in something they didn’t yet know was good for them.
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The dispute between Philipp Lenard and Albert Einstein sheds considerable light on the power of nonscientific concerns to sway scientists. NASA via Wikimedia

Scientists are not always as scientific as many suppose. Recent well-publicized cases of scientific fraud prove that scientists can be as susceptible to the allures of wealth, power and fame as politicians, the group that enjoys the lowest public trust.

Glaring recent cases have included falsified results in the development of an HIV vaccine and new techniques for producing stem cells.

Such breaches prove that scientists do not always base their work strictly on rigorous experimentation, data collection and analysis, and hypothesis testing. In fact, scientists frequently disagree with one another, both as individuals and as representatives of competing schools of thought. Some of these debates rage on for years.

Superstring theory, sometimes called the “theory of everything,” has been a topic of vigorous contention for over 30 years.

In some cases, personalities, prejudices and petty jealousies enter the picture. Consider, for example, one of the great disputes of 20th-century physics, the long-running feud between two world-renowned physicists.

The antagonism between Philipp Lenard and Albert Einstein sheds considerable light on the power of nonscientific concerns to sway scientists.

Philipp Lenard (1862-1947) was a German experimental physicist who advanced the study of X-ray tubes, the photoelectric effect and atomic theory.

His results led him to propose (correctly) that most of the atom is composed of empty space. Lenard was a genius, operating with a deep conviction that only careful experimentation could advance the understanding of the structure of the universe. Lenard received the Nobel Prize in physics in 1905 for his work on cathode rays.

Don’t let yourself be misled. Understand issues with help from experts

Albert Einstein (1879-1955), who needs little introduction, was a Swiss theoretical physicist who developed the theories of special relativity, general relativity, mass-energy equivalence (E = mc2), and the photoelectric effect – the latter relying on key experimental results furnished by the work of Lenard.

Amazingly, Einstein made many of his seminal contributions not like Lenard, while running a laboratory at a prestigious university, but while working as a low-level Swiss patent clerk. Einstein won the Nobel prize in physics in 1921 for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect.

Initially, the relationship between Lenard and Einstein seems to have been cordial. Their correspondence suggests that each held the other in high admiration. When Einstein published his quantum theory explaining the photoelectric effect, Lenard wrote to him, “Nothing can make me happier than a thinker of great depth and scope deriving some pleasure from my work.” Einstein, in turn, referred to Lenard as “a great master and genius.”

But as detailed in a recent book, The Man Who Stalked Einstein, their relationship soon deteriorated. In a letter to a friend a few years later, Einstein expressed a quite different view of Lenard, who was then regarded by many as the most celebrated physicist in Germany:

His theories on the ether seem to me almost infantile, and some of his investigations border on the ludicrous. I am very sorry that you must waste your time with such stupidities.

Lenard, meanwhile, was soon swept along in a wave of German nationalism that accompanied World War I. He became increasingly convinced of the existence of a distinctively German physics that needed to be defended against the plagiarized or frankly fabricated work emanating from other countries. Lenard also became more and more mired in anti-Semitism, accusing the “Jewish press” of, among other things, promoting Einstein’s dangerous work on relativity.

In 1920, just a year before Einstein won the Nobel Prize, the debate between Lenard and Einstein erupted into a duel of words at a major German research conference.

Lenard argued that Einstein’s hyper-theoretical and hyper-mathematical approach to physics was exerting a pernicious influence in the field. The time had come, he argued, to restore experimentalism to its proper place. He also launched a malicious attack on Einstein, making little attempt to conceal his antipathy toward Jews.

Lenard’s attacks on Einstein became increasingly vitriolic. He compared theoretical physicists to Cubist painters, who in his view were “unable to paint decently.” He lamented the fact that a “Jewish spirit” had come to rule over physics. Of Einstein himself, whose ideas had been accepted by many of the most prominent physicists around the world, Lenard opined, “Just because a goat is born in a stable does not make him a noble thoroughbred.”

Einstein initially attempted to respond to Lenard’s attacks on his theory of relativity with humor:

“When you are courting a nice girl, an hour seems like a second, but when you sit on a red-hot cinder, a second seems like an hour. That’s relativity.”

Later, he abandoned all pretense of patience and tolerance, labeling Lenard “a really twisted fellow” who must continue “to do business with the monster until he bites the dust.”

WC Roentgen, 1906. Wellcome Images, CC BY

Lenard’s conviction that science, “like everything else man produces,” was somehow grounded in bloodlines led him to become one of the early adherents of National Socialism. Unlike many German scientists who regarded Adolf Hitler with disdain, Lenard was one of his most fervent supporters, and became the regime’s number one physics authority. Ironically, the National Socialists’ disdain for “Jewish physics” was one of the main reasons they did not develop nuclear weapons.

Lenard directed his invective at other scientists. He grew extremely resentful of the credit accorded to Wilhelm Roentgen, who received the first Nobel Prize in physics for the discovery of the X-ray, despite the fact that Roentgen was German and a non-Jew. Lenard wrote that he, not Roentgen, was the “mother of the X-rays,” since he had invented the apparatus used to produce them. He likened Roentgen’s role to that of a “midwife” who merely assists with the birth.

Lenard eventually became “Chief of Aryan Physics” under the Nazi regime. In 1933 he published a book called Great Men in Science, which omitted all mention of Einstein, Roentgen and such other notable 20th-century scientists as Marie Curie. When World War II ended, Lenard’s prominent role in the Nazi regime led to his arrest, but he was quite advanced in years. Instead of being sentenced to prison, he was sent to live in a small German village, where he died at age 83.

The story of Philipp Lenard reminds us that even scientists of the very highest caliber sometimes think, speak and act in utterly unscientific ways, swayed by prejudices that have no scientific basis. They are human beings too, and members of the general public need to be careful to distinguish between a scientist whose arguments are based in evidence and one whose pronouncements stem from other, less reliable sources of conviction.

Edward Bernays was a member of this massive Jesuit machine. His uncle, Sigmund Freud, was a master Jesuit manipulator who influenced Bernays in countless ways. Freud was thought to have brought out and fully developed the narcissist in Bernays, who was known to all as a "braggart."

Main contributions of the Jews to the modern world (19th, 20th and 21st centuries).

It is well known that Western Civilization is based on the union of two intertwined pillars, the Greco-Latin and Judeo-Christian. In turn, the Hebrew people, People of the Book, who have bequeathed us the Bible and the Kabbalah, among other wonders, arise from the confluence of various civilizations, beginning with Sumeria (in Mesopotamia) and Egypt.

The novel approach of this museum content, undoubtedly revealing, is not to analyze the Jewish people in terms of their religious Judaism – the creator of monotheism – and enormous historical relevance (something that develops in the first seven parts of the museum), but relying on personalities of Jewish origin as individuals, men and women whose enormous contributions to the world today have served to transform our societies and our lives.

Science and humanities, philosophy, literature, cinema, art and culture, political movements, commerce and economics, business and finance, sport, journalism, media, marketing and advertising, inventions, high technology, the Internet, etc. Jews have been ubiquitous in all areas of humanity since they achieved their legal emancipation, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. To the abilities and talents of people of Jewish origin we owe a debt of gratitude.

To the abilities and talents of the Jewish we owe, among thousands of ideas and things in all areas of our daily life, the weekly day of rest – initially a Saturday or Sabbat –, –the ten commandments– including the most sacred: thou will not kill – the end of human sacrifices (Abraham and Isaac, Genesis 22), the invention of cement more than nine thousand years ago (in Jericho, the oldest city in the world), exchange papers (Chinese medieval Jews), money in bills since the XVIII century and also bearer checks, vaccines and medical advances of all kinds,

such as various treatments in the fight against cancer, hepatitis or AIDS (Gertrude B. Elion, Bruce Beutler, Ralph Marvin Steinman), the first treatment against leukemia, modern immunology (Paul Ehrlich), the first effective medicinal treatment for syphilis, the discovery of vitamins (Kazimierz Funk), cholesterol (Konrad Emil Bloch), blood groups (Karl Landsteiner), arsphenamine (Salvarsa), the structure of DNA (Rosalind Franklin), antibiotics, polio vaccines (Jonas Salk), oral contraceptive pills (Gregory Pincus), quantum physics (Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Wolfgang Ernst Pauli, John von Neumann), the first Big Bang Theory (Alexandre Friedmann), topology and topography (Solomon Lefschetz, Felix Hausdorff), psychology and psychoanalysis (Viena Psychoanalytic Society: Freud, Alfred Adler, Karl Abraham, Sándor Ferenczi, Wilhelm Reich, Sabina Spielrein), sociology and modern anthropology (Claude Levi-Strauss), statistics, cybernetics (Norbert Wiener), neurology and neurophysiology (Otto Loewi, Abraham Low, Rita Levi-Montalcini, Karl Pribram), the initial development of nanotechnology (Richard Feynman), plastic surgery and rhinoplasty (Irving B. Goldman), the first immunosuppressive agent to transplant organs…

Also inventions like the gasoline fueled car (Sigfried Marcus), or the first carburetor of gasoline and diesel engines, aspirin (something Bayer has not yet recognized) by Arthur Eichengrün, the first recording electricity consumption meter (Hermann Aron), first field-effect transistor and electrolytic capacitor (Julius Edgar Lilienfeld), the match (Sansone Valobra), artificial cardiac pacemaker and cardiac defibrillator (Paul Zoll), calculators, ballpoint pens (László Bíró), tomato consumption (John de Sequeyra: Dr. Siccary), ammonia synthesis –essential for the creation of fertilizers–, color photography (Gabriel Lippmann), instant photography, flash (Morris Schwartz) and Polaroid camera, color slides, the film industry and studios in Hollywood (Universal, Paramount, MGM, T.C.Fox, Warner Bros.), radio and television in the United States and Canada (David Sarnoff: RCA and RKO founder), musical records (Peter Carl Goldman), phonograph or record player (Emile Berliner), American record industry, color film and sound film, American newspapers and publishing companies (New York Times, Condé Nast, Random House, Hollywood Reporter, Rolling Stone…), preservation and distribution of yogurt, shopping carts (Sylvan Goldman), first supermarkets and malls, lipstick (Maurice Levy), condoms (Julius Schmit), diamond industry, nuclear power, radar (Heinrich Hertz) and weather radar (David Atlas), zeppelin (David Schwarz), the creation of the first reactors for NASA rockets (Theodore von Kármán), the first supersonic flights developed by NATO, the spread spectrum patent that allows wireless telecommunications (Hedy Lamarr), walkie-talkie (Alfred J. Gross), remote control (Robert Adler), pacemaker, first laser (Gordon Gould), nuclear magnetic resonance (Isidor Asaac Rabi), LED technology (Zhores Alfiorov), Duracell batteries (Samuel Ruben), the first videotape (Charles Ginsburg), the first videogames and game consoles (Ralph H. Baer), the USB memory or pendrive (Dov Moran, of the Israeli company SanDisk), the beginning of quantum computing, microprocessors that prevent electronic and computer equipment from overheating and burning out, Internet protocols and World Wide Web (Bob Kahn), many technology companies like Google (owner of Youtube), founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Facebook (Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz), WhatsApp (Jan Koum), Oracle (Larry Ellison), PayPal (Max Levchin, Dan Schulman), Dell, Android mobile system (Andy Rubin), SalesForce (Marc Benioff), Tinder, Getty Images (co-founder Jonathan Klein), TripAdvisor (Stephen Kaufer), BitTorrent protocol (Bram Cohen), the term “computer virus”, marketing as an academic discipline (Philip Kotler), first theory of public relations and propaganda (Edward Bernays), ecology and environmental activism (Irving and Dorothy Stowe, Greenpeace founders), American feminism (Emma Goldman, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem), the origins of hundreds of brands, some as well-known as the cream Nivea (Oscar Troplowitz), Levi’s jeans (Levi Strauss), the first Mercedes-Benz cars (Mercédès Jelllinek, daughter of automobile entrepreneur Emil Jellinek), the Heineken beer yeast formula (Hartog Elion), the origin of companies such as Phillips (Benjamin Frederik Phillips, cousin o Karl Marx), Citröen (André Gustave Citröen), clothing brands, cosmetics companies and fashion retailers like Max Factor, Estée Lauder, Revlon, Fabergé (Samuel Rubin), Helena Rubinstein, Bobbi Brown, Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein, Guess (Paul Marciano), Gap (Don and Doris Fisher), Michael Kors, Marc Jacobs, Donna Karan, Stuart Weitzman, Mango (Andic family), Pronovias (Palatchi family), food brands like Danone/Dannon (Carasso family, Isaac Carasso and his son Daniel), Starbucks coffeehouse chains (Howard Schultz), ice cream Häagen-Dazs (Reuben and Rose Mattus), Dunkin’ Donuts (William Rosenberg), toys companys (Hasbro –Hassenfeld Brothers–, Mattel –Elliot and Ruth Handler–, Toys “R” Us –Charles Lazarus–),the Big Four advertising agencies (WPP, Omnicom, Publicis, Interpublic), or distribution companies such as Sears, Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s, Khol’s, Marks & Spencer, John Lewis, etc.

In short, Jewish talents gave a boost to the global art market (Solomon Guggenheim, Paul Rosenberg, Alfred Lindon, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Leo Castelli), linguistics (Émile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss, Roman Jakobson), modern philosophy (Edmund Husserl, Wittgenstein, Bergson, Levinas, Popper, Lévi-Strauss, Cassirer, Hannah Arendt, Derrida, Simone Weil, Walter Benjamin, Adorno, Marcuse, Martin Buber, Erich Fromm, Isaiah Berlin, Gershom Scholem, Raymond Aron, Zygmunt Bauman, Edgar Morin), modern literature (Proust, Kafka, Bruno Schulz, Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth, Ana Frank, Iréne Némirovsky, Elie Wiesel, Asimov, Perec, Koestler, Arthur Miller, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Paul Auster…), great photographers (Andre Kertész, Man Ray, Alfred Stieglitz, Robert Capa and Magnum Photos, Richard Avedon, Annie Leibovitz), the great ballet dancers (Ida Rubinstein, Maya Plisétskaya, Alicia Markova), film directors (Eisenstein, Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, Wyler, Cukor, Kubrick, Lumet, Polanski, Woody Allen, Spielberg, Coen brothers… more than three hundred great filmmakers), Classic music (Felix Mendelssohn, Johann Strauss, Mahler, Schönberg, Gerswin, Copland, Rubinstein, Leonard Bernstein, violinists Jascha Heifetz and Yehudi Menuhin) and pop music (Bod Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Lou Reed, Mark Knopfler, Neil Diamond, Simon & Garfunkel, Lenny Kravitz, Amy Winehouse, Billy Joel, Serge Gainsbourg, Marc Bolan from T. Rex, The Ramones, Beck, Adam Levine from Maroon 5), the invention of Esperanto (L.L. Zamenhof),

hundreds of Nobel Prizes, the creation of the Pulitzer Prizes and the Pritzker ((Nobel prizes of architecture, Pritzker family), the invention of UNICEF (Ludwik Rajchman), the NBA league (Maurice Podoloff) and American Hockey League (AHL), and even the comic superheroes of Marvel (Stan Lee), DC and others (Superman, Batman, Spiderman, X-Men), and of course the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 (written by René Cassin).

From Abraham to Moses, from Jesus Christ (Yehoshua) to Maimonides and Spinoza, from Marx to Freud, from Kafka to Einstein, Jews have almost always been great subjects of history. The Jewish Museum of Spain explains how, when and why.

https://rossall.org.uk/robert-hamilton-bernays-2/
Robert Hamilton Bernays (1902-1945) Rossallian

Amazing Alumni, From the Headmaster

Robert Hamilton Bernays

During the first half of the twentieth century, England’s leading independent schools tended to specialise in producing brilliant all-rounders who lived their lives at a feverish pace. All too often, such individuals were plunged into the maelstrom of war and destined to die tragically young. One thinks of the journalist and foreign correspondent Philip Pembroke Stephens, who studied Roman Dutch law at Cambridge before embarking upon a career that took in the movies, foreign diplomacy and journalism. At the age of just thirty four, he was felled by a sniper’s bullet during the Japanese invasion of Shanghai. Philip had ascended a water tower to gain a better view of the invading army. John Simpson writes at length about Stephen’s remarkable life in ‘Unreliable Sources’ and notes that he worked for the League of Nations, travelled to Spain to report on the Civil War, was expelled from Nazi Germany in 1934 for attempting to alert the world to the dangers of fascism, before immersing himself in the Italo-Abyssinian War. He was something of a star and he was so highly valued by the Daily Telegraph that they chartered a plane to fly him to China.

In many ways Robert Hamilton Bernays’ life mirrored that of Philip Pembroke Stephens. The Bernays family were of German Jewish origin and they were dazzlingly successful in a variety of different areas including commerce, politics, public relations, military service and the arts. The son of a clergyman, Robert was distantly related to the Freuds and he was a cousin of Edward Bernays who is considered the ‘father of public relations’ and he was a world expert on propaganda. In the late Twenties, Bernays was best known for his campaign to market cigarettes to women by labelling them ‘torches of freedom’. In 1954, he worked with the CIA to overthrow the democratically elected government of Guatemala. Brilliant, cynical and well-connected, Edward was recently named one of the hundred most influential Americans of the twentieth century.

Robert Bernays attended Rossall School between 1916 and 1921 before going up to Worcester College Oxford. A keen rower, he was elected President of the Worcester College Junior Common Room before going on to become President of the Oxford Union. Past holders of that post include Herbert Asquith, Michael Foot, William Gladstone, William Hague, Boris Johnson and Harold Macmillan and Gyles Brandeth.

Robert left Oxford to become a journalist for the Daily News. He remained with the paper until it was taken over by a competitor in 1930 and, at that point, he was made redundant. The following year he stood as a Liberal candidate in the constituency of Bristol North. Elected with a majority of 13,214, Robert became Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Health in the National Government of 1931 led by Ramsay MacDonald. Later on, he would serve as the Parliamentary Secretary to both the Minister of Health and, in 1939, to the Minister of Transport.

Throughout the 1930s, Robert was a fierce critic of Nazism and he was considered something of an expert on Germany. Robert’s 1934 book ‘Special Correspondent’ is a lively travelogue and details his experiences travelling throughout Germany. Although he witnessed Hitler in his role as demagogue, he failed to secure the personal interview that he so desperately desired. This was because Ernst Hanfstaengl, Hitler’s Foreign Press Bureau chief, realised that he was closely associated with the leader of the Liberal Party, Sir Herbert Samuel, who was himself Jewish.

At a time when many of his contemporaries were prepared to give Hitler and the Nazi Party the benefit of the doubt, Robert saw behind the facade of good order, smart uniforms and the veneer of legality. When he visited Breslau Concentration Camp, he conceded that, ‘We had seen no actual evidence of cruelty, and yet we had the haunting sensation of the nameless evils in that camp. Later on during that trip he attended an exhibition which ‘rammed home an ugly message about racial purity with pictures of disfigured Jewish and mixed-race children’. As early as 1933, Robert referred to Germany as an ‘armed camp’ and yet like the prophet Cassandra, nobody listened to his dire warnings.

There has been much speculation about Robert’s sexuality and he was reputedly linked to a scandal involving William Lygon, 7th Earl Beauchamp, who was forced into exile. The Diaries of Chips Channon contain some scurrilous references to Robert’s personal proclivities and the Labour MP Chris Bryant includes Robert in his book ‘Glamour Boys’.

This book explores the role of a group of parliamentary rebels, many of whom were gay, who consistently denounced Nazism. After the Night of the Long Knives in 1934, it was perfectly clear to this group that no minorities were to be safe from Nazism. Bryant argues that those who were prepared to speak out demonstrated great courage – especially given that they were despised by the likes of Chamberlain and those committed to a policy of appeasement.

All too often, these politicians had their sexuality weaponised against them. The propagation of vicious rumours and the constant risk of personal exposure was intrusive, personally degrading and demonstrably unkind. It was indicative of a public sphere that was both censorious and intoler

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