both involved in the Committee on Public Information (CPI, or, sometimes, the "Creel Committee") which was designed to bolster support for US involvement in WWI.
A bit of background on the CPI:
1. saturate the information market The CPI carefully analysed the routes via which the public absorbed information, and created 19 departments which were charged with the task of saturating each of these with pro-war material.
According to one source, just one of these departments, the Division of News, created over 6,000 separate press releases. These were to provide copy and ideas for up to 20,000 different columns a week. In other departments, orators, filmmakers, essayists, academics, novelists, photographers, cartoonists, illustrators, commercial artists, admen and pamphleteers were employed to lend their talents to the collective effort. Scholarly essays with titles like
The German Whisper and
Conquest and Kultur abounded. Films like
The Kaiser: The Beast of Berlin and
Wolves of Kultur were the order of the day. It became impossible to participate in the media or engage in society without getting a daily dose of CPI product. Soldiers were assigned duties as "four-minute men", to stand up in movie theatres, public meetings, etc., and give speeches in praise of government policy.
Bernays (1928) wrote:
They not only appealed to the individual by means of every approach, visual, graphic, and auditory to support the national endeavor, but they also secured the cooperation of the key men in every group, persons whose mere word carried authority to hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousands of followers. They thus automatically gained the support of fraternal, religious, commercial, patriotic, social and local groups whose members took their opinions from their accustomed leaders and spokesmen, or from the periodical publications which they were accustomed to read and believe.
2. use emotional agitation to bypass rational choice The classic example being a poster showing an exaggeratedly threatening German soldier, and urging the viewer to "Beat Back The Hun With Liberty Bonds." The emotional arousal caused by the image is available for association with the desired action. Vacuous and emotional phrases, such as "Making the world safe for Democracy", framing vague, unarticulated political aspirations in an almost spiritual context, were carefully crafted and disseminated.
3. demonize the enemy Bernays (1928):
At the same time, the manipulators of patriotic opinion made use of the mental clichés and the emotional habits of the public to produce mass reactions against the alleged atrocities, the terror and the tyranny of the enemy.
Bernays, who served as director of the Latin American Division, later admitted that his colleagues in the CPI had invented atrocities by the Germans. Lies from previous wars were recycled, such as the story of a seven year old boy confronting enemy soldiers with his toy gun, and stranger tales (one apparently involved a tub full of eyeballs).
This technique has a sound basis in Freudian theory. The more the public project their inner demons onto the symbols of the enemy, the more, in fact, the enemy itself becomes a symbol for evil, the more emotional energy is available for more specific direction, as above.
Summing this up, in his 1951 Public Relations, Bernays would write that the CPI
bombarded the public unceasingly with enthusiastic reports of the nation's colossal war effort [...] Dissenting voices were stilled, either by agreement with the press or by the persuasive action of the agents of the Department of Justice.
Intellectual and emotional bombardment aroused Americans to a pitch of enthusiasm. The bombardment came at people from all sides - advertisements, news, volunteer speakers, posters, schools, theaters; millions of homes displayed service flags. The war aims and ideals were continually projected to the eyes and ears of the populace. These high-pressure methods were new at the time, but have become usual since then. [...]
The most fantastic atrocity stories were believed.
Bernays and Lippman both went on to successful careers in civil PR, and wrote books on their methods that ended up on Goebbels' shelves:
It seems Bernays' writings and Bernays-style PR played a large part in defining the realities of Nazi Germany, too: according to Bernays' autobiography Biography of an Idea, he was informed by Hans Weigand, respected foreign correspondent, that Nazi propaganda maestro, Joseph Goebbels "was using my book Crystallizing Public Opinion as a basis for his destructive campaign against the Jews of Germany"; and Bernays' peer in the PR world, Ivey Lee, opted to go to work on the German side, where it seems the techniques employed to demonize Jews in the eyes of German nationals would have been familiar to any CPI alumnus.
( Quotes from my Bernays bio at
http://www.everything2.com/?node=edward+l.+bernays )
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