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to our will without their knowing about it? The recent practice of propaganda has proved that it is possible, at least up to a certain point and within certain limits.”
    It would be foolish to take issue with this or even to insist that it is necessarily evil in its conception or intent. As anyone who has ever been involved in a public relations or political campaign knows, humans are not coldly rational in their decision making or uniformly predictable in their responses. They are generally busy, a little harried, and appropriately obsessed with their own affairs. In most cases it’s hard to get their attention at all, and when you do, people often respond emotionally or on the strength of biases that may be a complete mystery to an advertiser, an advocate, or a politician hoping to engage in a straight conversation. Effective public relations requires a degree of subtlety. You have to make the effort to understand why people think the way they do, and you have to find a way to communicate in a fashion that will enable them to understand you.
    Bernays also recognized both the benefits and dangers of developing and using such skills. Writing in his other 1928 book, Propaganda, he said that a public relations counsel (another term he appears to have coined) “must never accept a retainer or assume a position which puts his duty to the groups he represents above his duty to society.”
    Bernays then built a great career faithfully exercising his duty to his clients in a way that often seemed to disadvantage society. Some of this was relatively harmless; for example, he organized the first known political pancake breakfast (for Calvin Coolidge). He also organized the Torches of Liberty Brigade in Manhattan in 1929. In what was presented as a demonstration for women’s equality, Bernays assembled a crowd of young women who marched in that year’s Easter parade smoking Lucky Strikes, asserting their right to smoke in public. This stirring performance was paid for by a relatively small investment from the American Tobacco Company, which got the benefit when women felt “liberated” enough to start smoking in public.
    If you consider how little was known at the time about the dangers of smoking, you might be able to pass this off as a cute and clever campaign. (Bernays himself said before his death in 1995 that he would never have organized the event if he had known that smoking was to become one of the principal health threats of the century.) Yet even today, the “torches” parade is used in public relations courses across the country as an example of how you can earn free media attention and shift the public view of an issue in an indirect way. In the way people enjoy being fooled by a good magician, they seem willing to forgive Bernays for having tricked them with a public relations event that at the time he would have argued was harmless.
    Less forgivable was Bernays’s participation in the campaign (and ultimate CIA coup) to oust the democratically elected government of Guatemala in 1954 , an incident that put the interests of the United Fruit Company (now Chiquita Brands International) ahead of all others. Bernays also noted in his own autobiography that Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels praised another of Bernays’s books, Crystalizing Public Opinion, as having been helpful in crafting the campaign against German Jews.
    It would not be fair or accurate to draw some kind of Nazi propagandist thread from Ivy Lee and Edward Bernays through a whole century of public relations abuses and tie all of that to the campaign to confuse people about climate change. But it might be worth contemplating the slippery slope that faces people in public relations who forget their duty to society—the Public Relations Society of America’s caution to practice “professionally, with truth, accuracy, fairness, and responsibility to the public.”
    In an adversarial world full of lawyers, where you get used to hearing one person on