Case Study 1: Bernays, Lucky Strike, and Women's Cigarette Adoption

The Ethics of the Engineer of Consent

Overview

Edward Bernays is the most instructive and most troubling figure in the history of advertising propaganda, not because he was uniquely villainous but because he was extraordinarily talented, extraordinarily candid about what he was doing, and entirely without apparent remorse about its consequences. His work for American Tobacco Company — particularly the Torches of Freedom campaign of 1929 and his sustained subsequent work through the 1930s — represents one of the most consequential applications of advertising propaganda techniques in the twentieth century. It contributed to the normalization of women's smoking and, downstream, to hundreds of thousands of deaths from smoking-related illness. Bernays, who was still giving interviews at the age of one hundred, never expressed anything resembling regret.

This case study examines the full arc of Bernays's work for American Tobacco: the commercial problem he was hired to solve, the techniques he developed, the specific operation of the Torches of Freedom campaign, his subsequent Lucky Strike campaigns, the measured consequences in female smoking rates, and the ethical problem his career poses for everyone who studies or practices persuasion.

Part 1: The Commercial Problem

George Washington Hill, president of the American Tobacco Company and one of the most aggressive advertising spenders of the 1920s, retained Edward Bernays in the late 1920s with a specific brief: find a way to make it acceptable for women to smoke in public.

The commercial logic was straightforward. In 1929, women's smoking rates were substantially below men's. Social convention — enforced partly by law in several states, partly by social pressure, partly by the association of women smoking in public with prostitution and moral looseness — prevented women from smoking in the settings where men smoked freely: restaurants, parks, theaters, public streets. A woman who smoked at all typically did so privately, in domestic settings, away from public scrutiny. This convention effectively cut American Tobacco's potential market in half.

Bernays's approach to this problem was not to simply advertise cigarettes to women more aggressively. He understood — this was his foundational insight, derived from his uncle Freud's work and from Walter Lippmann's Public Opinion (1922) — that social behavior is governed not by individual rational choice but by social norms and symbolic associations. The norm against women smoking in public was not just an advertising problem. It was a social norm problem. Advertising could not solve it directly; it required a symbolic intervention in the norm itself.

The strategy Bernays developed was to change the symbolic meaning of a woman smoking in public. If smoking could be made to symbolize not moral looseness but political liberation — specifically, women's claim to full public participation and social equality with men — then the social norm could be shifted. People who smoked (or who approved of women smoking) would be making a political statement, not violating a moral code.

Part 2: The Architecture of the Operation

The genius, and the cynicism, of the Torches of Freedom campaign was its structure. Bernays did not create an advertisement. He created a news event.

Working with A.A. Brill, a prominent New York psychoanalyst, Bernays developed the symbolic framework: cigarettes as "torches of freedom," the act of smoking in public as a claim on the equality that suffrage had promised but social convention continued to deny. The "scientific" imprimatur of psychoanalytic endorsement gave the message credibility that advertising could not have provided — Brill was a legitimate figure, not a paid spokesperson, and his endorsement of the symbolic interpretation was presented as objective psychological analysis.

For the event itself, Bernays needed participants who were credibly sympathetic to women's liberation — not paid models, whose commercial relationship would be discoverable, but actual women of the appropriate social class and political identification. He recruited ten debutantes, young women from socially prominent families who would be attending the Easter Sunday parade on Fifth Avenue. He scripted the action with precision: at a specific time, the women would produce cigarettes from their stockings and light them simultaneously, in an act of visible defiance.

He then did something that illustrates the sophistication of his understanding of media: he tipped off journalists in advance. He told them — without revealing that the event was commercially commissioned — that a group of women suffragettes were planning a protest action at the Easter parade, lighting "torches of freedom." Journalists, eager for a story, positioned themselves to witness the event.

The result was exactly what Bernays had engineered: genuine news coverage, based on an entirely constructed event, presenting the story as a spontaneous political demonstration by women claiming their rights. The New York Times ran the story. Papers across the country picked it up. The coverage was not advertising — it was news, in the most literal sense. Editors exercised no skepticism about the story's origins because Bernays had given them no reason to.

The concealment of source was total. American Tobacco's name was nowhere in the coverage. Bernays's name was nowhere. The event looked like, and was reported as, grassroots political action by women's liberation advocates.

Part 3: Subsequent Lucky Strike Work

The Torches of Freedom operation was not an isolated campaign. Bernays continued to work for American Tobacco through the 1930s, developing additional campaigns that applied the same principles — psychological research, emotional association, concealed commercial interest — to the problem of expanding the cigarette market.

One of the most consequential subsequent campaigns addressed a different commercial problem: Lucky Strike cigarettes had a distinctive dark green packaging, and Hill wanted women to buy more Luckies. Hill's (apparently genuine) belief was that the green packaging was hurting sales among women because it did not coordinate with fashionable women's clothing colors.

Bernays's solution was not to change the package. It was to change fashion. Working through a series of fronts — charity events, society women, fashion industry contacts — Bernays orchestrated a campaign to make green the fashionable color of the season. He organized charity balls with green themes. He cultivated fashion editors to feature green prominently. He seeded the trend at multiple points in the fashion media ecosystem simultaneously, so that what appeared to be an organic trend emerging from multiple independent sources was actually a coordinated campaign.

The green fashion campaign is notable because it illustrates how Bernays's techniques could be extended beyond direct product promotion into the wholesale manipulation of cultural trends for commercial purposes. It also illustrates the specific mechanism that would become the foundation of twentieth-century influence operations: creating the appearance of organic social consensus through the coordination of multiple seemingly independent sources.

A third dimension of Bernays's Lucky Strike work addressed the most serious obstacle to tobacco industry growth: health concerns. By the late 1920s and early 1930s, there were already physicians raising concerns about cigarette smoking's health effects. American Tobacco was fighting a PR war on two fronts — expanding the market while containing the damage from health critiques.

Bernays's work here was more straightforwardly deceptive. He helped American Tobacco cultivate the services of doctors who would vouch for the mildness of Lucky Strike cigarettes, using what appeared to be professional medical endorsement to counteract health concerns. The advertisement series in which doctors attested to cigarette mildness — "20,679 Physicians say LUCKIES are less irritating" — was standard industry practice at the time and Bernays was involved in shaping it. Doctors were not bribed, exactly; they were provided with free samples, cultivated as sympathetic figures, and their endorsements were then deployed as commercial messages without full disclosure of the commercial relationship.

Part 4: The Consequences

The commercial consequences of Bernays's work for American Tobacco are documented in the company's sales figures and in population-level data on women's smoking rates. American Tobacco's revenues grew substantially through the late 1920s and 1930s. More significantly, women's smoking rates in the United States rose consistently from the early 1930s through the 1960s, with the sharpest increases among younger women and women of higher educational and income levels — precisely the demographic that Bernays had targeted.

The public health consequences of this trend were enormous. The relationship between cigarette smoking and lung cancer, heart disease, and other serious illnesses was established with increasing clarity through the 1950s and definitively by the 1964 Surgeon General's Report. Women who had taken up smoking in the 1930s and 1940s — some of them influenced, however indirectly, by the social normalization campaigns Bernays helped engineer — were among the cohorts with the highest lung cancer mortality increases in the second half of the twentieth century.

It would be an oversimplification to attribute women's increased smoking rates solely to Bernays's campaigns. Other factors contributed: the economic independence of women entering the workforce, the genuine social changes in women's public participation, the marketing campaigns of other tobacco companies. But it would also be an evasion to pretend that successful normalization campaigns have no effect on behavior. That is precisely what they are designed to achieve, and the evidence that they achieved it in the case of women's smoking is substantial.

Part 5: Bernays's Self-Understanding

Edward Bernays is unusual among propaganda practitioners in that he was highly articulate about what he was doing and why. His 1928 book Propaganda argued explicitly that the "engineering of consent" — the systematic management of public opinion by expert practitioners — was not merely commercially useful but socially necessary. Democratic society, in Bernays's view, requires leadership by elites who understand mass psychology and can guide public opinion toward socially beneficial ends.

This framework allowed Bernays to conceive of his tobacco work, and all of his work, as socially legitimate regardless of the specific interests he was serving. He was a professional technician of opinion management, and his clients were legitimate commercial actors. The fact that his work contributed to a health catastrophe was, in his framework, not his responsibility — he was practicing his craft, his clients made the decisions about how to use it.

This self-understanding is instructive precisely because it represents a coherent position, not an obvious rationalization. There is a recognizable professional ethics of the hired expert: lawyers represent guilty clients, accountants file legal returns for companies they may personally dislike, engineers build facilities for industries they may find objectionable. Bernays was applying a version of this professional ethics to the propaganda trades.

The question the case poses, and refuses to answer neatly, is whether the professional ethics model holds for propaganda — for the business of manufacturing consent. The lawyer represents a specific party in an adversarial system with procedural safeguards and opposing counsel. The propaganda practitioner constructs the public's perception of reality, operating through channels where there is no opposing counsel and where the existence of the proceeding is typically concealed. The analogy to professional neutrality does not survive scrutiny, but Bernays never engaged that argument because he never appears to have considered it.

Part 6: The Ethical Reckoning

Bernays's career poses the central ethical question of propaganda practice with unusual clarity: Is there a meaningful ethical distinction between the technique and its use?

Bernays's techniques — the creation of pseudo-events, the cultivation of third-party credibility, the concealment of commercial interest, the association of products with authentic human desires — are politically and commercially neutral in themselves. The same technique that normalized women's smoking in the service of a tobacco company could be used, and was used by Bernays himself, to encourage Americans to eat more bacon for a pork industry client, to advance the public relations interests of Guatemala's United Fruit Company during the 1954 CIA-backed coup (one of the most ethically compromised episodes of his career), and to promote the fluoridation of drinking water for the public health benefits it actually provided.

The technique does not contain its own ethics. It is equally available to genuinely good causes and to causes that are harmful, exploitative, or actively dangerous. Bernays, who thought of himself as a socially beneficial practitioner of a socially beneficial art, spent his career primarily serving the interests of large corporations and, on at least one occasion, a government engaged in overthrowing a democratic government.

For students of propaganda, the case poses several specific ethical questions that do not have clean answers:

First: Is there a meaningful ethical difference between a propagandist who conceals commercial interest and a journalist who inadvertently amplifies a constructed event without recognizing it as constructed? The journalists who covered the Torches of Freedom parade were not unethical. They were deceived. Who bears moral responsibility for the story that resulted?

Second: Does the effectiveness of a propaganda campaign impose any additional ethical obligation on its practitioner? Bernays knew his campaigns were effective — he was measuring their effectiveness in sales figures. Does knowing that your campaign will contribute to a behavior (women smoking more) that will harm the people it affects impose any obligation to consider that harm?

Third: The techniques Bernays developed are not secret. They are taught in public relations programs, documented in industry literature, and described in standard advertising texts. Does the transparency of the technique diminish its manipulation? Or does the fact that the techniques are publicly known while the specific instances of their application are typically concealed preserve the power differential?

Bernays gave one interview near the end of his life — he died in 1995 at the age of 103 — in which he acknowledged some discomfort with his tobacco work, though he stopped well short of regret. He said he had not known the full health consequences at the time. This may or may not be fully accurate. What it reveals is that the engineer of consent, at one hundred years old, still found it important to have a justification — still felt the claim of the ethical question even as he deflected it.

That says something worth sitting with.

Discussion Questions

1. Bernays developed his techniques by reading Freud and Lippmann and applying psychological theory to commercial problems. Does the scientific basis of motivational research — the fact that it was empirically grounded in real psychology — make its commercial application more or less problematic than if it were purely intuitive?

2. American Tobacco was a legal company selling a legal product. Bernays's contract with them was legal. At what point, if any, does the lawfulness of a propaganda operation become insufficient to establish its ethical legitimacy?

3. The Torches of Freedom operation relied entirely on the journalists covering it having no idea they were reporting a manufactured event. Modern journalism has developed fact-checking practices partly in response to precisely this kind of operation. Are those practices sufficient protection against contemporary versions of the technique?

4. Bernays argued that professional propagandists serve an essential social function — making democratic society governable by managing the opinions of a mass public that could not fully manage its own opinion formation. Is this argument defensible? What are its premises, and which of those premises would you contest?

Chapter 22 | Propaganda, Power, and Persuasion