Case Study 2.1: Edward Bernays and the "Torches of Freedom" (1929)

Background

In 1929, women smoking cigarettes in public was widely considered scandalous. The social taboo was strong enough that tobacco companies — despite recognizing women as a largely untapped market — had struggled to break through it with conventional advertising. Cigarette sales to women were a fraction of what they might be. American Tobacco Company's president, George Washington Hill, wanted to change this. He hired Edward Bernays.

Bernays, at this point in his career, was already one of the most sophisticated practitioners of mass persuasion in American history. He had written two books on the subject — Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923) and Propaganda (1928) — and had conducted campaigns for dozens of major corporations and government agencies. His nephew-of-Freud status gave him access to psychoanalytic thinking, and he used it to develop an approach to persuasion that was, by the standards of the time, startlingly sophisticated.

His approach to the Hill problem began with a question: why did women refrain from smoking in public? Conventional advertising logic would have said the answer was taste — create advertisements showing women who smoke as attractive and modern. But Bernays suspected the real barrier was not preference but social norm enforcement, and that social norms could be changed not by advertising but by engineering the social environment.

He consulted A.A. Brill, a prominent New York psychoanalyst, who provided the insight that became the campaign's conceptual foundation. Cigarettes, Brill suggested, represented "torches of freedom" — symbols of masculine power that women were denied. A woman who smoked in public was not merely enjoying nicotine; she was symbolically claiming an equality that society denied her in more substantial ways. The cigarette, in this framing, was not a product. It was an act of liberation.

Timeline of Events

Early 1929: The Commission George Washington Hill of American Tobacco approaches Bernays with a specific brief: find a way to get women to smoke in public. Bernays declines to produce conventional advertising and instead proposes something different — what he calls a "public event" that will be covered by journalists rather than paid for as advertising.

March 1929: The Preparation Bernays works with A.A. Brill to develop the psychological framework of the campaign. He identifies the Easter Sunday parade on Fifth Avenue in New York City as the venue for his pseudo-event. He contacts debutantes and women of social standing — not celebrities, but respectable, recognizably "normal" women — and recruits them to participate.

April 1929: Easter Sunday — The Event On Easter Sunday 1929, a group of women marches down Fifth Avenue in New York City, conspicuously lighting and smoking cigarettes. Bernays had pre-briefed journalists that something newsworthy was about to happen. The women, when asked by reporters why they were smoking, used the phrase Bernays had prepared: they were lighting "Torches of Freedom."

The event was covered by newspapers across the country. The photographs — respectable-looking women, in their Easter best, smoking defiantly on Fifth Avenue — circulated widely. The framing of the cigarette as a symbol of women's liberation dominated the coverage.

April-December 1929: The Aftermath Sales of cigarettes to women increased significantly in the months following the event. The social taboo on public smoking by women did not disappear overnight, but it eroded substantially over the following decade. By the 1940s and 1950s, women smoking in public had become not merely acceptable but fashionable, a shift in which the "Torches of Freedom" campaign played a documented role.

The Longer Arc The health consequences of the campaign's success were catastrophic. As the social taboo on women's smoking collapsed, rates of female tobacco use increased dramatically. Lung cancer, which had been rare in women, became increasingly common. The connection between smoking and lung cancer — well understood by the tobacco industry from at least the 1950s onward — means that the "Torches of Freedom" campaign contributed, in some direct way, to the deaths of millions of women over the following decades.

Analysis

The Mechanism of Invisible Persuasion

What makes the "Torches of Freedom" campaign so analytically valuable is that it exemplifies, with unusual clarity, the core mechanism of sophisticated modern persuasion: invisible manipulation through the engineering of social meaning.

Bernays did not create an advertisement that said "American Tobacco's cigarettes are associated with women's liberation." That would have been transparent, and transparent persuasion is easily resisted. Instead, he created a situation — a genuine social event, covered by genuine journalists, featuring genuine women making genuine choices — in which the association between cigarettes and liberation was produced organically, at least in appearance.

The women who participated believed they were making a genuine political statement. The journalists who covered the event believed they were covering a genuine news story. The women across the country who saw the photographs and began to associate cigarettes with independence and modernity believed they were responding to authentic social signals. In each case, the belief was real. The persuasion was genuine. But it was also entirely manufactured by a man working for a tobacco company.

This is the structure that Bernays called "engineering of consent": not the crude issuance of commands or the blunt assertion of commercial messages, but the construction of situations in which people freely choose to believe and do what you want them to believe and do. The engineering is in the situation; the consent is in the choice. The choice is real; the situation is manufactured.

Aristotle in 1929

Viewed through Aristotle's framework, the "Torches of Freedom" campaign is a masterpiece of all three modes of persuasion deployed in concert.

The ethos was established not by Bernays (who remained invisible) but by the women who participated — respectable, socially recognized women whose actions carried credibility precisely because they appeared to be acting from conviction rather than instruction. The journalists who covered the event added additional ethos: news coverage implies newsworthiness, which implies importance and authenticity.

The pathos was the emotional identification of the cigarette with liberation, independence, and equality — among the most powerful positive emotions available in a social context where women were explicitly denied political and economic equality. The cigarette was not being sold on flavor or quality; it was being sold as a symbol of something women deeply desired and were systematically denied.

The logos, such as it was, came from the apparent social evidence: here were women smoking publicly, here were journalists covering it as significant, here was a cultural shift apparently in progress. The "argument" was implicit but powerful: this is what liberated, modern women do.

The Intent-Effect Gap

The "Torches of Freedom" campaign is also a canonical illustration of the gap between intent and effect. Bernays was not trying to kill women. Hill was not trying to create a public health catastrophe. The women who participated were not trying to normalize an addiction. Each actor had intentions that were, from their perspective, at least partially benign: Bernays was doing his job; Hill was trying to grow his business; the women were making what they understood as a feminist gesture.

The effect — the normalization of female smoking, and the deaths that followed — was not intended by anyone and was not foreseeable with any certainty in 1929 (the health evidence against tobacco was not yet widely available). But it was a direct consequence of the campaign's success.

This does not excuse anyone. The tobacco industry's subsequent suppression of health evidence is a separate and far more clearly culpable story. But the "Torches of Freedom" case illustrates that the gap between intent and effect can be vast even in the absence of obvious bad faith, and that persuasion technology operating at scale can produce consequences that no individual participant intended or foresaw.

Continuity with Contemporary Practice

The "Torches of Freedom" campaign's techniques are not historical curiosities. They are the foundation of contemporary influencer marketing, brand activism, and native advertising.

When a fitness influencer on Instagram posts what appears to be an authentic workout video but is actually a paid promotion for a supplement brand, the structure is identical to Bernays': a real person, making what appears to be an authentic choice, in a context that appears organic, producing an association between the brand and a desirable identity (fitness, discipline, health) that the audience internalizes as their own response to authentic social signals.

When a brand "takes a stand" on a social justice issue — posting an equality message or donating to a charity — and the coverage of this corporate gesture functions as advertising, the structure is Bernays' pseudo-event, updated for the social media era.

When platforms design their interfaces to make certain user choices feel natural and others feel effortful — to engineer the social environment so that heavy use feels like authentic self-expression rather than a designed outcome — they are practicing what Bernays called the engineering of consent at a scale he could never have imagined.

What This Means for Users

The "Torches of Freedom" case offers several lessons for contemporary social media users.

First, the most powerful persuasion is invisible persuasion. Content that you experience as authentic, organic, and socially meaningful is often the product of deliberate design. The influencer whose lifestyle you admire, the content that seems to reflect your values back to you, the social norms that make certain behaviors feel natural — these are not necessarily organic. They may be manufactured.

Second, the fact that persuasion is invisible does not mean you were passive or stupid. The women who lit their Torches of Freedom were making genuine choices in a real social context. The fact that the context was manufactured does not make them fools. It makes them human beings responding to social signals, as human beings always have. The lesson is not self-blame; it is systemic awareness.

Third, the gap between intent and effect matters. The people who design persuasive systems — even systems as harmful as tobacco advertising or social media algorithms — often do not intend the full consequences of their designs. This does not excuse them from responsibility. But it means that responsibility is distributed across a system, not concentrated in a single bad actor, and that systemic solutions are more appropriate than purely moralistic ones.

Discussion Questions

Bernays' campaign worked, in part, because the women who participated believed they were making an authentic feminist gesture. Does the authenticity of their belief affect the ethics of what Bernays did? Does it matter that the persuasion felt genuine to those experiencing it?
The "Torches of Freedom" campaign used a real social movement (feminism) to sell a harmful product (cigarettes). Is there a meaningful ethical distinction between using social values to sell products and using social values to promote genuinely beneficial behaviors? What would that distinction look like?
Compare the structure of the "Torches of Freedom" campaign to a specific contemporary social media marketing practice — influencer marketing, brand activism, or native advertising. What is the same? What is different? Does the difference matter ethically?
Bernays remained essentially invisible throughout the campaign — neither the journalists nor the public knew who had organized the event. Contemporary platform algorithms are similarly invisible to users. Is there an ethical obligation to disclose the source of persuasion, and how does that obligation apply to both Bernays' era and the present?
The health consequences of the "Torches of Freedom" campaign were not foreseeable with certainty in 1929. At what point in the subsequent history of tobacco does Bernays' (or the industry's) responsibility for those consequences become clear? What principle does your answer suggest for evaluating the responsibility of social media companies for harms that are documented but whose full consequences remain contested?