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A hundred years ago a new theory about human nature was put forth by Sigmund Freud.
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He had discovered he said, primitive, sexual and aggressive forces
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hidden deep inside the minds of all human beings.
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Forces which if not controlled, led individuals and societies to chaos and destruction.
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This series is about how those in power have used Freud's theories
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to try and control the dangerous crowd in an age of mass democracy.
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But the heart of the story is not just Sigmund Freud but other members of the Freud family.
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This episode is about Freud's American nephew, Edward Bernays.
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Bernays is almost completely unknown today but his influence
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on the 20th century was nearly as great as his uncles.
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Because Bernays was the first person to take Freud's idea
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about human beings and use them to manipulate the masses.
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He showed American corporations for the first time how to they could make people want
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things they didn't need by linking mass produced goods to their unconscious desires.
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Out of this would come a new political ideal of how to control the masses.
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By satisfying people's inner selfish desires one made them happy and thus docile.
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It was the start of the all-consuming self which has come to dominate our world today.
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Part One - Happiness Machines
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Freud's ideas about how the human mind works have now become an accepted part of society.
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As have psychoanalysts.
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Every year the psychotherapists' ball is held in a grand palace in Vienna.
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Dr. Alfred Fritz, President World Council for Psychotherapy
This is the psychotherapy ball.
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Psychotherapists come, some advanced patients come, former patients come,
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and many other people - friends, but also people from the Viennese society
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who like to come to a nice, elegant, comfortable ball.
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But it was not always so.
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A hundred years ago Freud's ideas were hated by Viennese society.
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At that time Vienna was the center of a vast empire ruleing central Europe.
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And to the powerful nobility of the Habsburg accord, Freud's ideas were not only embarrassing,
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but the very idea of examining and analyzing ones inner feelings
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was a threat to their absolute control.
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Countess Erzie Karolyi - Budapest:
You see at that time these people had the power
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and of course you just weren't allowed to show your bloody feelings, I mean you just couldn't.
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You know if you were unhappy, can you imagine,
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for instance you sit somewhere in the country, in a castle, you are deeply unhappy, you are a woman;
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you couldn't go to your made and cry on her shoulders, you couldn't go into the village
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and complain about your feelings,
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it was like selling yourself to someone, you just couldn't. You know?
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Because they had to respect you. Now of course, Freud, he put that thought very much into question
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you see to examine yourself you would have to put other things into question - the society,
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everything that surrounds you and that was not a good thing at that time.
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- Why not?
- Because your self-created empire to a certain extent would have fallen to bits
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much earlier already.
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But what frightened the rulers of the empire even more was Freud's idea
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that hidden inside all human beings
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were dangerous instinctual drives.
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Freud had devised a method he called psychoanalysis.
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By analyzing dreams and free association he had unearthed he said
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powerful sexual and aggressive forces which were the remnants of our animal past.
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Feelings we repressed because they were too dangerous.
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Dr. Earnest Jones - Colleague of Freud:
Freud devised a method
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for exploring the hidden part of the mind which we nowadays call the unconscious
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this the part is totally unknown to our consciousness.
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That there exists a barrier in all our minds which prevents these
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hidden and unwelcome impulses from the unconscious from emerging.
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In 1914 the Austria-Hungarian Empire led Europe into war.
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As the horror mounted Freud saw it as terrible evidence of the truth of his findings.
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The saddest thing he wrote, is that, this is exactly the way we should have expected
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people to behave, from our knowledge of psychoanalysis.
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Governments had unleashed the primitive forces in humans beings
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and no one seemed to know how to stop them.
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At that time, Freud's young nephew, Edward Bernays was working as a press agent in America.
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His main client was the world famous opera singer Caruso who was touring the United States.
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Bernays' parents had emigrated to America 20 years before,
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but he kept in touch with his Uncle who joined him for Holidays in the Alps.
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But Bernays was now about to return to Europe for a very different reason.
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On the night that Caruso opened in Toledo Ohio
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America announced that it was entering the war against Germany and Austria.
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As a part of the war effort, the US government set up a committee on public information
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and Bernays was employed to promote America's war aims in the press.
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The president Woodrow Wilson, had announced that the United States would fight
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not to restore the old empires
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but to bring democracy to all of Europe.
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Bernays proved extremely skillful at promoting this idea both at home and abroad
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and at the end of the war was asked to accompany the President to the Paris Peace Conference.
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Edward Bernays - 1991:
Then to my surprise they asked me to go
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with Woodrow Wilson to the peace conference.
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And at the age of 26 I was in Paris for the entire time of the peace conference
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that was held in the suburb of Paris and we worked to make the world safe for democracy.
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That was the big slogan.
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Wilson's reception in Paris astounded Bernays and the other American propagandists.
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Their propaganda has portrayed Wilson as a liberator of the people.
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The man who would create a new world in which the individual would be free.
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They had made him a hero of the masses.
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And as he watched the crowd surge around Wilson,
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Bernays began to wonder whether it would be possible
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to do the same type of mass persuasion, but in peace time.
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Edward Bernays - 1991:
When I came back to the United States, I decided
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that if you could use propaganda for war you could certainly use it for peace.
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And propaganda got to be a bad word because of the Germans using it.
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So what I did was try to find some other words so we found the word "Council on Public Relations".
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Bernays returned to New York and set up as a Public Relations Councilman
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in small office off Broadway.
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It was the first time the term had even been used.
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Since the end of the 19th century, America had become a mass industrial society
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with millions clustered together in the cities.
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Bernays was determined to find a way to manage and alter the way
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these new crowds thought and felt.
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To do this he turned to the writings of his Uncle Sigmund.
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While in Paris Bernays had sent his Uncle a gift of some Havana cigars.
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In return Freud had sent him a copy of his "General Introduction to Psychoanalysis".
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Bernays read it, and the picture of hidden irrational forces inside human beings, fascinated him.
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He wondered whether he might make money by manipulation of the unconscious.
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Pat Jackson - Public Relations Adviser and Colleague of Bernays:
What Eddie got from Freud, was indeed this idea
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that there is a lot more going on in human decision making.
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Not only among individuals but even more importantly among groups
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that this idea that information drives behavior.
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So Eddie began to formulate this idea that you had to look at things that will play
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to people's irrational emotions.
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You see, that mooved Eddie immediately into a different category from other people in his field
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and most government officials and managers of the day
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who thought if you just hit people with all this factual information
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they would look at that say go "of course"
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and Eddie knew that was not the way the world worked.
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Bernays set out to experiment with the minds of the popular classes.
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His most dramatic experiment was to persuade women to smoke.
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At that time there was a taboo against women smoking and one of his early clients George Hill,
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the President of the American Tobacco corporation asked Bernays to find a way of breaking it.
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Edward Bernays - 1991:
He says we're losing half of our market.
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Because men have invoked a taboo against women smoking in public.
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Can you do anything about that? I said let me think about it.
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And then I said: If I may have permission to see a psychoanalyst
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to find out what cigarettes mean to women.
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He said: what'll cost? So I called up Dr. Brille,
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A.A. Brille, who was the leading psychoanalyst in New York at the time.
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- How come you didn't call your uncle? Why didn'y you call your uncle?
- Cause he was in Vienna..
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A.A. Brille was one of the first psychoanalysts in America.
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And for a large fee, he told Bernays that cigarettes were a symbol of the penis
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and of male sexual power.
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He told Bernays that if he could find a way to connect cigarettes
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with the idea of challenging male power
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then women would smoke, because then they would have their own penises.
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Every year New York held an Easter day parade to which thousands came.
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And Bernays decided to stage an event there .
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He persuaded a group of rich debutants to hide cigarettes under their clothes.
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Then, they should join the parade and at a given signal from him
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they were to light up the cigarettes dramatically.
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Bernays then informed the press that he had heard that a group of suffragettes
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were preparing to protest by lighting up what they called torches of freedom.
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Pat Jackson - Public Relations Adviser and Colleague of Bernays:
He knew this would be an outcry,
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and he knew that all of the photographers would be there to capture this moment
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so he was ready with a phrase which was "torches of freedom".
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So here you have a symbol, women, young women, debutantes,
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smoking a cigarette in public with a phrase that means
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anybody who believes in this kind of equality
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pretty much has to support them in the ensuing debate about this,
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because... "torches of freedom".
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I mean, What's on all our American coins? it's liberty, she's holding up the torch, you see?
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and so all of this is there together, there's emotion, there's memory and there's a rational phrase,
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even knowing it's using a lot of emotionall, it's a phrase that works in a rational sense...
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And all of this is together...
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And So the next day this was not just in all the New York papers
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it was across the United States and around the world.
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And from that point forward the sale of cigarettes to woman began to rise.
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He had made them socially acceptable with a single symbolic act.
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What Bernays had created was the idea that if a women smoked
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it made her more powerful and independent.
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An idea that still persists today.
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It made him realize that it was possible to persuade people to behave irrationally
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if you link products to their emotional desires and feelings.
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The idea that smoking actually made women freer, was completely irrational.
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But it made them feel more independent.
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It meant that irrelevant objects could become powerful emotional symbols
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of how you wanted to be seen by others.
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Peter Strauss - Employee of Bernays 1948-1952:
Eddie Bernays saw the way
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to sell product was not to sell it to your intellect,
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that you ought to buy an automobile,
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but that you will feel better about it if you have this automobile.
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I think he originated that idea, that they weren't just purchasing something
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that they were engaging themselves emotionally or personally in that product or service.
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It's not that you think you need a new piece of clothing
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but you will feel better with the piece of clothing.
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That was his contribution in a very real sense.
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We see it all over the place today, but I think he originated the idea,
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the emotional connect to a product or service.
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What Bernays was doing fascinated America's corporations.
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They had come out of the war rich and powerful, but they had a growing worry.
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The system of mass production had flourished during the war
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and now millions of goods were pouring off production lines.
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that they were frightened of was the danger of overproduction,
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that there would come a point when people had enough goods and would simply stop buying.
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Up until that point, the majority of products were still sold to the masses on the basis of need.
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While the rich had long been used to luxury goods, for the millions of working class Americans
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most products were still advertised as necessities.
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Goods like shoes, stockings, even cars were promoted in functional terms, for their durability.
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The aim of the advertisements were simply to show
people the products practical virtues, nothing more.
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What the corporations realized they had to do was transform the way the majority of Americans
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thought about products.
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One leading Wall Street banker, Paul Mazer of Leahman Brothers was clear about what was necessary.
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We must shift America, he wrote, from a needs, to a desires culture.
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People must be trained to desire, to want new things even before the old had been entirely consumed.
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We must shape a new mentality in America.
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Man's desires must overshadow his needs.
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Peter Solomon - Investment Banker - Leahman Brothers:
Prior to that time
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there was no American consumer, there was the American worker.
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And there was the American owner.
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And they manufactured, and they saved and they ate what they had to
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and the people shopped for what they needed.
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And while the very rich may have bought things they didn't need, most people did not.
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And Mazer envisioned a break with that, where you would have things that you didn't actually need,
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but you wanted, as opposed to needed.
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And the man who would be at the center of
changing that mentality for the corporations,
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was Edward Bernays.
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Stuart Ewen - Historian of Public Relations:
Bernays really is the guy within the United States,
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more than anybody else,
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who sort of brings out to the table psychological theory
as something that is an essential part of
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how, from the corporate side, of how we are going to appeal to the masses effectively
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and the whole sort of merchandising
establishment and the sales establishment
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is ready for Sigmund Freud.
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I mean they are ready for understanding what motivates the human mind.
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And so there's this real openness to Bernays techniques being used to sell products to the masses.
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Beginning in the early 20's the New York banks funded the creation of chains of
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department stores across America.
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They were to be the outlets for the mass produced goods.
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And Bernays' job was to produce the new type of customer.
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Bernays began to create many of the techniques of mass consumer persuasion that we now live with.
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He was employed by William Randolph Hurst to promote his new women's magazines,
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and Bernays glamorized them by placing articles and advertisements
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that linked products made by others of his clients
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to famous film stars like Clara Bow, who was also his client.
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Bernays also began the practice of product placement in movies,
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and he dressed the stars at the films premieres
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with clothes and jewelry from other firms he represented.
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He was, he claimed, the first person to tell car companies
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they could sell cars as symbols of male sexuality.
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He employed psychologists to issue reports that said products were good for you
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00:18:52,066 --> 00:18:55,282
and then pretended they were independent studies.
228
00:18:56,163 --> 00:18:58,565
He organized fashion shows in department stores
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00:18:58,938 --> 00:19:02,321
and paid celebrities to repeat the new and essential message,
230
00:19:02,862 --> 00:19:08,036
you bought things not just for need but to express your inner sense of your self to others.
231
00:19:11,335 --> 00:19:13,617
Mrs. Stillman, 1920s Celebrity Aviator:
There's a psychology of dress,
232
00:19:13,617 --> 00:19:15,114
have you ever thought about it?
233
00:19:15,317 --> 00:19:17,163
How it can express your character?
234
00:19:18,396 --> 00:19:22,213
You all have interesting characters but some of them are all hidden.
235
00:19:22,714 --> 00:19:28,287
I wonder why you all want to dress always the same, with the same hats and the same coats.
236
00:19:28,965 --> 00:19:32,821
I'm sure all of you are interesting and have wonderful things about you,
237
00:19:33,134 --> 00:19:38,678
but looking at you in the street you all look so much the same.
238
00:19:39,154 --> 00:19:42,841
And that's why I'm talking to you about the psychology of dress.
239
00:19:43,117 --> 00:19:46,664
Try and express yourselves better in your dress.
240
00:19:50,007 --> 00:19:53,395
Bring out certain things that you think are hidden.
241
00:19:54,180 --> 00:19:57,133
I wonder if you've thought about this angle of your personality.
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00:19:59,073 --> 00:20:02,946
- I'd like to ask you some questions...
- Why do you like short skirts?
243
00:20:03,197 --> 00:20:04,979
- Oh, because there's more to see...
244
00:20:05,259 --> 00:20:09,842
- More to see, eh?
- What good does that do you?
245
00:20:10,431 --> 00:20:14,218
- It makes you more attractive.
246
00:20:14,511 --> 00:20:15,906
- oh, it does?
247
00:20:19,355 --> 00:20:24,788
In 1927 an American journalist wrote: A change has come over our democracy,
248
00:20:25,042 --> 00:20:27,259
it is called consumptionism.
249
00:20:27,807 --> 00:20:32,698
The American citizens first importance to his country is now no longer that of citizen,
250
00:20:32,935 --> 00:20:35,423
but that of consumer.
251
00:20:37,032 --> 00:20:41,606
The growing wave of consumerism helped in turn to create a stock market boom.
252
00:20:42,044 --> 00:20:45,064
And yet again Edward Bernays became involved.
253
00:20:45,575 --> 00:20:49,360
Promoting the novel idea that ordinary people should buy shares,
254
00:20:49,684 --> 00:20:52,923
borrowing money from banks, that he also represented.
255
00:20:53,532 --> 00:20:56,287
And yet again, millions followed his advice.
256
00:20:57,360 --> 00:21:00,732
Peter Strauss - Employee of Bernays 1948-1952:
He was uniquely knowledgeable about
257
00:21:00,732 --> 00:21:05,261
how people in large numbers are going to react to products and ideas,
258
00:21:07,451 --> 00:21:10,561
but in political terms if he were to go out
259
00:21:10,954 --> 00:21:14,373
I can't imagine he could get three people to stand and listen.
260
00:21:14,809 --> 00:21:19,421
He wasn't particularly articulate, he was kind of funny looking, and didn't have
261
00:21:19,672 --> 00:21:24,818
any sense of reaching out for people one on one. None at all.
262
00:21:25,248 --> 00:21:28,951
He didn't talk about, didn't think about people in groups of one,
263
00:21:29,266 --> 00:21:32,440
he thought about people in groups of thousands.
264
00:21:41,329 --> 00:21:45,438
Bernays soon became famous as the man who understood the mind of the crowd,
265
00:21:45,925 --> 00:21:49,138
and in 1924 the President contacted him.
266
00:21:50,237 --> 00:21:54,352
President Coolidge was a quiet taciturn man and had become a national joke.
267
00:21:55,348 --> 00:21:58,006
The press portrayed him as a dull humorless figure.
268
00:21:58,907 --> 00:22:02,908
Bernays' solution was to do exactly the same as he had done with products.
269
00:22:03,283 --> 00:22:06,677
He persuaded 34 famous film stars to visit the White House,
270
00:22:08,130 --> 00:22:12,083
and for the first time politics became involved with public relations.
271
00:22:14,017 --> 00:22:20,849
Bernays speaking in 1991:
And I lined up these 34 people and I'd say what's your name,
272
00:22:21,793 --> 00:22:26,362
and he'd say Al Jolson, and I'd say Mr. President, Al Jolson.
273
00:22:27,073 --> 00:22:34,444
The next day every newspaper in the United States had a front page story:
274
00:22:35,385 --> 00:22:41,865
"President Coolidge Entertains Actors at White House".
275
00:22:42,680 --> 00:22:50,007
And the Times had a headline which said "President Nearly Laughed"
276
00:22:54,232 --> 00:22:56,230
and everybody was happy.
277
00:23:00,369 --> 00:23:06,273
But while Bernays became rich and powerful in
America, in Vienna his uncle was facing disaster.
278
00:23:06,725 --> 00:23:10,995
Like much of Europe Vienna was suffering an economic crisis and massive inflation
279
00:23:11,242 --> 00:23:13,990
which wiped out all of Freud's' savings.
280
00:23:14,384 --> 00:23:17,544
Facing bankruptcy he wrote to his nephew for help.
281
00:23:18,399 --> 00:23:23,169
Bernays responded by arranging for Freud's works to be published for the first time in America,
282
00:23:23,962 --> 00:23:29,680
and began to send his uncle precious dollars which Freud kept secretly in a foreign bank account.
283
00:23:32,897 --> 00:23:34,609
Pat Jackson - Public Relations Adviser and Colleague of Bernays:
He was Freud's "agent"
284
00:23:34,609 --> 00:23:36,568
if you will, to get his books published.
285
00:23:36,815 --> 00:23:40,314
Well of course, once the books were being published, Eddie couldn't help himself but to
286
00:23:40,726 --> 00:23:46,798
promote these books; see that everybody read them, make them controversial;
287
00:23:47,172 --> 00:23:50,398
emphasize the fact that "do you know what Freud says about sex?"
288
00:23:50,612 --> 00:23:53,765
and what he thinks cigarettes are a symbol of and so on and so forth...
289
00:23:53,987 --> 00:23:55,845
How do you suppose all those stories got out?
290
00:23:56,047 --> 00:23:59,596
Certainly the academics weren't spreading these around the country, Eddie Bernays was...
291
00:24:00,298 --> 00:24:06,922
Then when Freud became accepted, well then of course to go to a client and go 'well Uncle Siggy'
292
00:24:07,321 --> 00:24:09,098
see then that had some cache.
293
00:24:09,355 --> 00:24:16,381
But notice there, first Eddie created Uncle Siggy in the US, made him acceptable secondly,
294
00:24:16,614 --> 00:24:21,980
and thirdly then, capitalized on Uncle Siggy. Typical Bernays performance.
295
00:24:22,791 --> 00:24:26,800
Bernays also suggested Freud promote himself in the United States.
296
00:24:27,018 --> 00:24:31,864
He proposed his uncle write an article for Cosmopolitan, the magazine that Bernays represented,
297
00:24:32,197 --> 00:24:35,443
entitled 'A Woman's Mental Place in the Home'.
298
00:24:35,760 --> 00:24:39,238
Freud was furious. Such an idea he said was unthinkable,
299
00:24:39,481 --> 00:24:42,273
it was vulgar and anyway, he hated America.
300
00:24:44,740 --> 00:24:48,025
Freud was becoming increasingly pessimistic about human beings.
301
00:24:48,992 --> 00:24:52,430
In the mid 20s he retreated in the summers to the Alps,
302
00:24:52,771 --> 00:24:57,022
sometimes staying in an old hotel, the Pension Moritz in Berchtesgaden.
303
00:24:57,700 --> 00:24:59,054
It is now a ruin.
304
00:25:00,647 --> 00:25:03,039
Freud began to write about group behavior;
305
00:25:03,714 --> 00:25:07,287
about how easily the unconscious aggressive forces of human beings
306
00:25:07,573 --> 00:25:10,368
could be triggered when they were in crowds.
307
00:25:11,295 --> 00:25:15,400
Freud believed he had underestimated the aggressive instincts within human beings;
308
00:25:16,265 --> 00:25:19,577
they were far more dangerous than he had originally thought.
309
00:25:20,888 --> 00:25:27,026
Dr. Ernst Federn - Viennese Psychoanalyst:
After World War-I, Freud was basically a pessimist.
310
00:25:27,427 --> 00:25:32,014
He felt that man is an impossible creature
311
00:25:33,229 --> 00:25:39,994
and a very sadistic and bad species
312
00:25:41,683 --> 00:25:45,639
and did not believe that man can be improved.
313
00:25:45,955 --> 00:25:48,717
Man is a ferocious animal,
314
00:25:48,981 --> 00:25:53,527
the most ferocious animal that exists.
315
00:25:54,119 --> 00:25:58,026
They enjoy torturing and killing
316
00:25:58,402 --> 00:26:00,902
and he didn't like man.
317
00:26:03,905 --> 00:26:07,529
The publication of Freud's works in America had an extraordinary effect
318
00:26:07,734 --> 00:26:10,704
on journalists and intellectuals in the 1920s.
319
00:26:10,996 --> 00:26:16,469
What fascinated and frightened them was the picture Freud painted of submerged dangerous forces
320
00:26:16,707 --> 00:26:20,016
lurking just under the surface of modern society.
321
00:26:20,530 --> 00:26:23,838
Forces that could erupt easily to produce the frenzied mob
322
00:26:24,050 --> 00:26:26,737
which had the power to destroy even governments.
323
00:26:26,997 --> 00:26:29,687
It was this they believed had happened in Russia.
324
00:26:31,121 --> 00:26:35,403
To many this meant that one of the guiding principles of mass democracy was wrong;
325
00:26:35,936 --> 00:26:40,553
the belief that human beings could be trusted to make decisions on a rational basis.
326
00:26:41,834 --> 00:26:44,747
The leading political writer, Walter Lippmann argued that
327
00:26:44,976 --> 00:26:49,468
if human beings were in reality driven by unconscious irrational forces
328
00:26:49,769 --> 00:26:52,080
then it was necessary to re-think democracy.
329
00:26:53,809 --> 00:26:58,517
What was needed was a new elite that could manage what he called the bewildered herd.
330
00:26:59,400 --> 00:27:03,027
This would be done through psychological techniques that would control
331
00:27:03,233 --> 00:27:05,568
the unconscious feelings of the masses.
332
00:27:07,621 --> 00:27:10,925
Stewart Ewen - Historian of Public Relations:
And so here you have Walter Lippmann, probably the most influential
333
00:27:11,166 --> 00:27:13,956
political thinker in the United States,
334
00:27:14,172 --> 00:27:19,339
who is essentially saying the basic mechanism of the mass mind is unreason,
335
00:27:19,591 --> 00:27:22,246
is irrationality, is animality.
336
00:27:22,447 --> 00:27:26,812
He believes that the mob in the street, which is how he sees ordinary people,
337
00:27:27,213 --> 00:27:30,751
are people who are driven not by their minds but by their spinal chords.
338
00:27:31,140 --> 00:27:36,340
The notion of animal drives, unconscious and instinctual drives,
339
00:27:36,340 --> 00:27:39,043
lurking beneath the surface of civilization;
340
00:27:39,393 --> 00:27:42,860
and so they started looking towards
psychological science
341
00:27:43,213 --> 00:27:49,111
as a way of understanding the mechanisms by which the popular mind works
342
00:27:50,151 --> 00:27:55,923
specifically with the goal of figuring out
how to understand and how to apply
343
00:27:56,151 --> 00:27:59,935
those mechanisms to strategies for social control.
344
00:28:01,122 --> 00:28:04,064
Edward Bernays was fascinated by Lippmann's arguments
345
00:28:04,718 --> 00:28:07,940
and also saw a way to promote himself by using them.
346
00:28:09,939 --> 00:28:14,562
In the 1920s he began to write a series of books which argued that he had developed
347
00:28:14,562 --> 00:28:17,312
the very techniques that Lippmann was calling for.
348
00:28:18,189 --> 00:28:22,675
By stimulating people's inner desires and then sating them with consumer products
349
00:28:23,019 --> 00:28:27,343
he was creating a new way to manage the irrational force of the masses.
350
00:28:28,952 --> 00:28:31,346
He called it "The engineering of consent".
351
00:28:33,079 --> 00:28:36,947
Ann Bernays, Daughter of Edward Bernays:
Democracy to my father was a wonderful concept,
352
00:28:37,265 --> 00:28:42,984
but I don't think he felt that all those publics out there had reliable judgment,
353
00:28:43,453 --> 00:28:50,915
and that they very easily might vote for the wrong man or want the wrong thing;
354
00:28:51,257 --> 00:28:54,206
so that they had to be guided from above.
355
00:28:55,463 --> 00:28:58,719
It's enlightened despotism in a sense.
356
00:29:00,346 --> 00:29:06,513
You appeal to their desires and unrecognized longings, that sort of thing.
357
00:29:08,373 --> 00:29:17,672
That you can tap into their deepest desires or their deepest fears and use that to your own purposes.
358
00:29:18,741 --> 00:29:23,529
And then in 1928 a President came to power, who agreed with Bernays.
359
00:29:24,676 --> 00:29:27,874
President Hoover was the first politician to articulate the idea
360
00:29:28,185 --> 00:29:31,875
that consumerism would become the central motor of American life.
361
00:29:33,063 --> 00:29:37,469
After his election he told a group of advertisers and public relations men:
362
00:29:38,233 --> 00:29:41,310
"You Have taken over the job of creating desire
363
00:29:42,062 --> 00:29:46,811
and have transformed people into constantly moving happiness machines.
364
00:29:47,586 --> 00:29:51,488
Machines which have become the key to economic progress."
365
00:29:53,998 --> 00:29:59,814
What was beginning to emerge in the 1920s was a new idea of how to run mass democracy.
366
00:30:00,983 --> 00:30:05,847
At it's heart was the consuming self which not only made the economy work
367
00:30:06,346 --> 00:30:10,711
but was also happy and docile and so created a stable society.
368
00:30:13,088 --> 00:30:17,180
Stewart Ewen - Historian of Public Relations:
Both Bernays and Lippmann's concept of managing the masses
369
00:30:17,440 --> 00:30:23,213
takes the idea of democracy and turns it into a palliative,
370
00:30:23,753 --> 00:30:28,910
It turns it into giving people some kind of feel good medication
371
00:30:29,705 --> 00:30:33,313
that will respond to an immediate pain or immediate yearning
372
00:30:33,626 --> 00:30:37,628
but will not alter the objective circumstances one iota.
373
00:30:39,761 --> 00:30:45,532
The idea of democracy at it's heart was about changing the relations of power
374
00:30:45,765 --> 00:30:48,126
that had governed the world for so long;
375
00:30:48,341 --> 00:30:53,078
and Bernays' concept of democracy was one of maintaining the relations of power,
376
00:30:53,296 --> 00:30:58,662
even if it meant that one needed to stimulate the psychological lives of the public.
377
00:30:59,377 --> 00:31:02,439
And in fact in his mind that is what was necessary.
378
00:31:04,192 --> 00:31:07,517
That if you can keep stimulating the irrational self
379
00:31:08,290 --> 00:31:12,451
then leadership can go on doing what it wants to do.
380
00:31:14,232 --> 00:31:17,327
Bernays now became one of the central figures in a business elite
381
00:31:17,608 --> 00:31:21,546
that dominated American society and politics in the 1920s.
382
00:31:22,482 --> 00:31:28,172
He also became extremely rich and lived in a suite of rooms in one of New York's most expensive hotels
383
00:31:28,629 --> 00:31:30,639
where he gave frequent parties.
384
00:31:31,019 --> 00:31:34,362
Peter Strauss - Employee of Bernays 1948-1952:
Oh my goodness, he had a home in the corner suite
385
00:31:34,921 --> 00:31:37,537
of the Sherry Netherland hotel
386
00:31:37,537 --> 00:31:39,017
and here's this wonderful suite with all these windows
387
00:31:39,017 --> 00:31:41,509
looking out on central park and across at the plaza,
388
00:31:41,509 --> 00:31:43,298
and on the square,
389
00:31:43,637 --> 00:31:46,860
and he would use this place to hold a soiree.
390
00:31:47,111 --> 00:31:50,268
The mayor would come, all the media leaders would come,
391
00:31:50,268 --> 00:31:53,516
the political leaders, the business leaders, the people in the arts;
392
00:31:53,516 --> 00:31:59,614
it was a who's who. People wanted to know Eddie Bernays because he himself
393
00:31:59,832 --> 00:32:05,697
became a sort of a famous man, a sort of magician that could make things happen.
394
00:32:05,697 --> 00:32:08,112
Ann Bernays, Daughter of Edward Bernays:
He knows everybody he knows the mayor,
395
00:32:08,112 --> 00:32:13,971
and he knows the senator, and he calls politicians on the telephone as if he did get
396
00:32:14,230 --> 00:32:20,946
literally a high or bang out of doing what he did,
397
00:32:21,207 --> 00:32:25,302
and that's fine, but it can be a little hard on the people around you.
398
00:32:25,801 --> 00:32:29,364
Especially when you make other people feel stupid.
399
00:32:30,114 --> 00:32:33,180
The people who worked for him were stupid, the children were stupid,
400
00:32:33,510 --> 00:32:40,741
and if people did things in a way that he wouldn't have done them, they were stupid.
401
00:32:41,114 --> 00:32:44,896
It was a word that he used over and over:
"don't be stupid".
402
00:32:45,949 --> 00:32:49,794
- And the masses?
- They were stupid.
403
00:32:54,805 --> 00:32:58,695
But Bernays' power was about to be destroyed dramatically
404
00:32:58,929 --> 00:33:02,867
and by a type of human rationality that he could do nothing to control.
405
00:33:03,901 --> 00:33:08,587
At the end of October 1929 Bernays organized a huge national event to celebrate
406
00:33:08,587 --> 00:33:12,305
the 50th anniversary of the invention of the light bulb.
407
00:33:12,649 --> 00:33:17,512
President Hoover, the leaders of major corporations and bankers like John D Rockefeller
408
00:33:17,715 --> 00:33:22,149
were all summoned by Bernays to celebrate the power of American business.
409
00:33:23,141 --> 00:33:27,744
But even as they gathered news came through that shares on the New York stock exchange
410
00:33:27,744 --> 00:33:30,650
were beginning to fall catastrophically.
411
00:33:34,519 --> 00:33:38,602
Throughout the 1920s speculators had borrowed billions of dollars.
412
00:33:38,602 --> 00:33:44,440
The banks had promoted the idea that this was a new era where market crashes were a thing of the past.
413
00:33:45,148 --> 00:33:50,819
But they were wrong. What was about to happend was the biggest stock market crash in history.
414
00:33:51,303 --> 00:33:56,116
Investors had panicked and begun to sell in a blind relentless fury that no reassurance
415
00:33:56,116 --> 00:33:59,603
by bankers or politicians could halt.
416
00:34:02,981 --> 00:34:07,805
And on the 29th of October 1929, the market collapsed.
417
00:34:15,832 --> 00:34:18,418
The effect of the crash on the American economy was disastrous.
418
00:34:19,208 --> 00:34:22,631
Faced with recession and unemployment, millions of American workers
419
00:34:22,631 --> 00:34:25,399
stopped buying goods they didn't need.
420
00:34:25,399 --> 00:34:29,544
The consumer boom that Bernays had done so much to engineer, disappeared.
421
00:34:29,921 --> 00:34:33,806
And he and the profession of public relations fell from favor.
422
00:34:34,178 --> 00:34:37,308
Bernays' brief moment of power seemed to be over.
423
00:34:46,776 --> 00:34:50,196
The effect of the Wall Street crash on Europe was also catastrophic.
424
00:34:50,799 --> 00:34:54,999
It intensified the growing economic and political crisis in the new democracies.
425
00:34:56,010 --> 00:34:58,935
In both Germany and Austria, there were violent street battles
426
00:34:59,143 --> 00:35:02,205
between the armed wings of different political parties.
427
00:35:06,402 --> 00:35:12,548
Against this backdrop Freud who was suffering from cancer of the jaw retreated yet again to the alps.
428
00:35:14,483 --> 00:35:17,651
He wrote a book called "Civilization and it's Discontents".
429
00:35:19,089 --> 00:35:24,207
It was a powerful attack on the idea that civilization was an expression of human progress.
430
00:35:25,946 --> 00:35:30,697
Instead Freud argued, civilization had been constructed to control
431
00:35:31,007 --> 00:35:34,351
the dangerous animal forces inside human beings.
432
00:35:35,976 --> 00:35:39,709
What was implicit in Freud's argument was that the ideal of individual freedom
433
00:35:40,000 --> 00:35:43,209
which was at the heart of democracy was impossible.
434
00:35:43,912 --> 00:35:48,886
Human beings could never be allowed to truly express themselves because it was too dangerous.
435
00:35:50,010 --> 00:35:54,728
They must always be controlled and thus always be discontent.
436
00:35:59,710 --> 00:36:03,625
Dr. Ernst Federn - Viennese Psychoanalyst:
Man doesn't want to be civilized
437
00:36:04,386 --> 00:36:09,899
and civilization brings discontent but is necessarily to survival
438
00:36:12,564 --> 00:36:19,211
so he must be discontent because this would be the only way to keep you within your limits.
439
00:36:20,288 --> 00:36:26,562
- What did Freud think about the idea of the equality of man?
- He didn't believe in it.
440
00:36:28,567 --> 00:36:36,629
We had 32 parties and Hitler said: "before those parties don't vanish there is no Germany".
441
00:36:37,128 --> 00:36:47,090
That's true, you can't have 32 parties so they said this one person will put an end to this comedy.
442
00:36:48,364 --> 00:36:50,788
Freud was not alone in his pessimism.
443
00:36:51,005 --> 00:36:56,286
Politicians like Adolf Hitler emerged from a growing despair in the 1920s about democracy.
444
00:36:57,039 --> 00:37:01,992
The Nazis were convinced that democracy was dangerous because it unleashed a selfish individualism
445
00:37:02,383 --> 00:37:04,728
but didn't have the means to control it.
446
00:37:05,883 --> 00:37:10,403
Hitler's party - "The National Socialists" stood in elections promising in their propaganda
447
00:37:10,663 --> 00:37:15,218
they would abandon democracy because of the chaos and unemployment it led to.
448
00:37:17,479 --> 00:37:20,322
"The democratic parties are promising a heaven on earth!"
449
00:37:27,030 --> 00:37:32,251
"38 parties - over 6 million unemployed"
450
00:37:35,626 --> 00:37:39,490
In March 1933, the National Socialists were elected to power in Germany
451
00:37:39,908 --> 00:37:44,724
and they set out to create a society that would control human beings in a different way.
452
00:37:46,502 --> 00:37:49,191
One of their first acts was to take control of business.
453
00:37:49,833 --> 00:37:53,057
The planning of production would in the future be done by the state.
454
00:37:53,412 --> 00:37:57,411
The free market was too unstable as the crash in America had proven.
455
00:37:58,756 --> 00:38:01,429
Workers leisure time was also planned by the state
456
00:38:01,684 --> 00:38:04,349
through a new organization called "strength through joy".
457
00:38:05,210 --> 00:38:08,086
One of it's mottos was: "Service, not self!".
458
00:38:14,266 --> 00:38:18,691
But the Nazi's did not see this as return to an old form autocratic control.
459
00:38:19,409 --> 00:38:21,658
It was a new alternative to democracy,
460
00:38:21,910 --> 00:38:25,473
in which the feelings and desires of the masses would still be central,
461
00:38:26,493 --> 00:38:30,409
but they would be channeled in such a way as to bind the nation together.
462
00:38:31,274 --> 00:38:35,728
The chief exponent of this was Joseph Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda.
463
00:38:37,274 --> 00:38:43,728
It may be a good thing to hold power based on guns
464
00:38:44,274 --> 00:38:47,728
It is far better though if you win the heart of the nation
465
00:38:48,274 --> 00:38:50,728
and keep it's affection !
466
00:38:53,102 --> 00:38:57,698
Goebbels organized huge rallies whose function he said was to forge the mind of the nation
467
00:38:58,024 --> 00:39:01,479
into a unity of thinking, feeling and desire.
468
00:39:02,280 --> 00:39:04,718
One of his inspirations, he told an American journalist
469
00:39:04,919 --> 00:39:08,431
was the writings of Freud's nephew, Edward Bernays.
470
00:39:10,372 --> 00:39:13,573
In his work on crowd psychology, Freud had described how
471
00:39:13,822 --> 00:39:18,949
the frightening irrationality inside human beings could emerge in such groups.
472
00:39:19,156 --> 00:39:23,478
The deep what he called 'libidinal' forces of desire were given up to the leader
473
00:39:24,123 --> 00:39:28,129
while the aggressive instincts are unleashed on those outside the group.
474
00:39:28,814 --> 00:39:33,510
Freud wrote this as a warning, but the Nazis were deliberately encouraging these forces
475
00:39:33,889 --> 00:39:37,261
because they believed they could master and control them.
476
00:39:41,190 --> 00:39:47,391
Dr Leoppold Lowenthal - Freudian Psychoanalyst at a rally in Vienna in 2000:
Freud was saying that masses
477
00:39:47,637 --> 00:39:51,753
are bound by libidinal forces.
478
00:39:52,515 --> 00:40:01,107
They love each other and delegate their ideas and feelings through the "jack on top".
479
00:40:01,724 --> 00:40:04,734
What are libidinal forces?
480
00:40:05,004 --> 00:40:06,984
Well, forces of love.
481
00:40:09,500 --> 00:40:15,482
Not hate?
No,.. hate?... Hate is delegated on the others, outside.
482
00:40:28,500 --> 00:40:30,482
The mob...
483
00:40:40,196 --> 00:40:45,770
I could see from afar, looking up between the trees
484
00:40:45,770 --> 00:40:50,953
how there were hundreds of thousands of people when they passed Hitler
485
00:40:51,206 --> 00:41:01,382
they were speaking completely delirious and they
began to shout, this cries will never get out of my ears...
486
00:41:01,666 --> 00:41:12,082
"Heil! Sieg Heil!" (Hail! Hail Victory!)...and here I got confirmation how those irrational forces,
487
00:41:12,300 --> 00:41:19,197
uncontrollable forces in Germany, in the Germans, had erupted, were brought out
488
00:41:19,535 --> 00:41:31,080
were running wild where the party was marching, marching on."
489
00:41:29,535 --> 00:41:35,080
Fuehrer (Leader's) comand we will follow!
490
00:41:40,535 --> 00:41:42,080
Crowds and their behavior
491
00:41:44,301 --> 00:41:48,523
And in America too democracy was under threat from the force of the angry mob.
492
00:41:50,428 --> 00:41:53,263
The effect of the stock market crash had been disastrous.
493
00:41:53,849 --> 00:41:58,835
There was growing violence as an angry population took out there frustration on the corporations
494
00:41:59,055 --> 00:42:01,491
who were seen to have caused this disaster.
495
00:42:03,209 --> 00:42:08,704
Then in 1932 a new President was elected who was also going to use the power of the state
496
00:42:08,930 --> 00:42:11,337
to control the free market.
497
00:42:11,712 --> 00:42:15,944
But his aim, was not to destroy democracy, but to strengthen it.
498
00:42:16,168 --> 00:42:20,422
And to do this he was going to develop a new way of dealing with the masses.
499
00:42:21,854 --> 00:42:25,711
President Roosevelt's in his inauguration speech:
"I am prepared under my constitutional duty
500
00:42:25,928 --> 00:42:31,672
to recommend the measures that a stricken nation in the midst of stricken world, may require.
501
00:42:32,076 --> 00:42:36,091
But, in the event that the national emergency is still critical
502
00:42:36,496 --> 00:42:41,871
I shall not evade the clear course of duty that will then confront me.
503
00:42:42,432 --> 00:42:45,779
I shall ask the congress for the one remaining instrument
504
00:42:46,218 --> 00:42:51,406
to meet the crisis - broad executive power."
505
00:42:56,875 --> 00:42:59,658
It was the start of what would become known as "The New Deal".
506
00:43:00,623 --> 00:43:04,181
Roosevelt assembled a group of young
technocrats and planners in Washington.
507
00:43:05,210 --> 00:43:10,850
He told them that their job was to plan and run giant new industrial projects for the good of the nation.
508
00:43:12,179 --> 00:43:15,343
Roosevelt was convinced the stock market crash had shown
509
00:43:15,678 --> 00:43:19,976
that "laissez faire"-capitalism could no longer run modern industrial economies.
510
00:43:20,446 --> 00:43:22,656
This has become the job of government.
511
00:43:23,884 --> 00:43:29,039
Big business was horrified but The New Deal had attracted the admiration of the Nazis,
512
00:43:29,373 --> 00:43:31,664
especially Joseph Goebbels.
513
00:43:34,088 --> 00:43:40,759
Joseph Goebbels:
"I am very interested in social developments in America.
514
00:43:40,998 --> 00:43:47,165
I believe that President Roosevelt has chosen the right path.
515
00:43:47,506 --> 00:43:52,624
We are dealing with the greatest social problems ever known.
516
00:43:52,826 --> 00:44:02,453
Millions of unemployed must get their jobs back and this cannot be left to private initiative.
517
00:44:07,472 --> 00:44:12,222
It's the government that must tackle the problem."
518
00:44:14,961 --> 00:44:19,291
But although Roosevelt like the Nazis was trying to organize society in a different way,
519
00:44:20,075 --> 00:44:23,849
unlike the Nazis he believed that human beings were rational
520
00:44:24,065 --> 00:44:27,126
and could be trusted to take an active part in government.
521
00:44:28,607 --> 00:44:32,440
Roosevelt believed it was possible to explain his policies to ordinary Americans
522
00:44:32,440 --> 00:44:34,904
and to take into account their opinions.
523
00:44:35,732 --> 00:44:41,316
To do this he was helped by the new ideas of an American social scientist called George Gallup.
524
00:44:43,065 --> 00:44:47,667
"Favorite reading of new deal Washington - the survey of US public opinion.
525
00:44:47,920 --> 00:44:52,638
From offices at Princeton New Jersey a famed statistician, dr. George Gallup tells Washington
526
00:44:52,858 --> 00:44:55,731
from week to week, what the nation is thinking.
527
00:44:57,187 --> 00:45:02,438
And in New York Fortune Magazines analyst Elmo
Roper compiles for publication a continuous record
528
00:45:02,438 --> 00:45:06,569
of the nations approval or disapproval of how the country is being run."
529
00:45:07,468 --> 00:45:12,767
Gallup and Roper rejected Bernays' view that human beings were at the mercy of unconscious forces
530
00:45:13,015 --> 00:45:15,830
and so needed to be controlled.
531
00:45:16,069 --> 00:45:19,268
Their system of opinion polling was based on the idea that people
532
00:45:19,608 --> 00:45:22,515
could be trusted to know what they wanted.
533
00:45:22,879 --> 00:45:27,131
They argued that one could measure and
predict the opinions and behavior of the public
534
00:45:27,351 --> 00:45:32,114
if one asked strictly factual questions and avoided manipulating their emotions.
535
00:45:35,351 --> 00:45:39,114
Well, how about this one? Do you think Franklin D. Roosevelt's new deal
536
00:45:39,651 --> 00:45:41,114
has been bad for the nation in general?
537
00:45:42,651 --> 00:45:45,614
No, that question is loaded.. It automaticly sugests an answer..
538
00:45:46,151 --> 00:45:52,114
Well, how 'bout this? Is your present feeling towards president Roosevelt, one of general aproval,
539
00:45:53,151 --> 00:45:55,114
or general disaproval?
540
00:45:56,151 --> 00:45:58,114
That's better!...
541
00:45:59,175 --> 00:46:03,895
George Gallup Jr. - Son of George Gallup:
Prior to scientific polling the view of many people
542
00:46:04,176 --> 00:46:07,551
was that you couldn't trust public opinion, that it was irrational;
543
00:46:08,238 --> 00:46:12,303
that it was ill-informed, that it was chaotic, unruly and so forth;
544
00:46:12,613 --> 00:46:15,364
and so that opinnnion should be dismissed.
545
00:46:15,612 --> 00:46:22,554
But with scientific polling I think it established very clearly that people are rational,
546
00:46:22,866 --> 00:46:24,742
that they do make good decisions,
547
00:46:24,951 --> 00:46:29,616
and this offers democracy a chance to be truly informed by the public
548
00:46:29,888 --> 00:46:33,802
giving everybody a voice in the way the country is run.
549
00:46:34,321 --> 00:46:37,925
I know my father wouldn't necessarily say that the voice of the public is the voice of God,
550
00:46:38,146 --> 00:46:44,162
but he did feel very much that the voice of the people is a rational voice and should be heard.
551
00:46:45,927 --> 00:46:50,640
What Roosevelt was doing was forging a new
connection between the masses and politicians.
552
00:46:51,492 --> 00:46:55,931
No longer were they irrational consumers who were managed by sating their desires,
553
00:46:56,138 --> 00:47:00,837
instead, they were sensible citizens who could take part in the governing of the country.
554
00:47:01,608 --> 00:47:07,432
In 1936 Roosevelt stood for re-election. He promised further control over big business.
555
00:47:07,715 --> 00:47:10,682
To the corporations it was the beginning of a dictatorship.
556
00:47:15,471 --> 00:47:19,338
Big business leader speaking in an interview:
"Roosevelt interferes with private enterprise
557
00:47:19,845 --> 00:47:23,025
and he's running the country into debt for generations to come.
558
00:47:23,025 --> 00:47:26,596
The way to get recovery is to let business alone."
559
00:47:26,902 --> 00:47:29,423
But Roosevelt was triumphantly re-elected.
560
00:47:29,602 --> 00:47:34,223
"It looks , my friens, like a real land-slide, this time..
561
00:47:35,202 --> 00:47:42,423
So, please let me thank you again, and tell you that I hope to see you all very soon,
562
00:47:43,302 --> 00:47:44,923
and wish you an affectionate good night!
563
00:47:46,390 --> 00:47:51,871
Faced with this, business now decided to fight back, to regain power in America.
564
00:47:52,591 --> 00:47:56,656
At the heart of the battle would be Edward Bernays and the profession he had invented,
565
00:47:56,991 --> 00:47:59,340
public relations.
566
00:48:00,797 --> 00:48:03,393
Stewart Ewen - Historian of Public Relations:
Following that lecture,
567
00:48:03,393 --> 00:48:09,123
business people start to get together and start to carry on discussions,
568
00:48:09,123 --> 00:48:14,419
primarily in private and they start talking to each other about the need to sort of carry on
569
00:48:14,656 --> 00:48:18,531
ideological warfare against the New Deal.
570
00:48:18,865 --> 00:48:24,969
And to sort of reassert the sort of connectedness between the idea of democracy on the one hand
571
00:48:25,179 --> 00:48:28,420
and the idea of privately owned business on the other.
572
00:48:28,782 --> 00:48:32,847
And so, under the umbrella of an organization that still exists
573
00:48:32,847 --> 00:48:36,124
which is called The National Association of Manufacturers
574
00:48:36,471 --> 00:48:41,422
and whose membership included all of the major corporations of the United States
575
00:48:42,155 --> 00:48:48,876
a campaign is launched explicitly designed to create emotional attachments
576
00:48:49,102 --> 00:48:51,921
between the public and big business;
577
00:48:52,334 --> 00:48:56,815
it's Bernays' techniques being used on a grand scale. I mean totally.
578
00:48:57,334 --> 00:49:00,815
A film story of the "General Motors Parade of Progress"
579
00:49:16,129 --> 00:49:20,147
The campaign set out to show dramatically that it was business not politicians
580
00:49:20,147 --> 00:49:22,315
who have created modern America.
581
00:49:28,034 --> 00:49:31,876
Bernays was an advisor to General Motors but he was no longer alone.
582
00:49:32,474 --> 00:49:34,474
The industry he had founded now flourished
583
00:49:34,692 --> 00:49:39,036
as hundreds of public relations advisors organized a vast campaign.
584
00:49:39,686 --> 00:49:43,504
They not only used advertisements and billboards but managed to insinuate their message
585
00:49:43,504 --> 00:49:46,525
into the editorial pages of the newspapers.
586
00:49:49,276 --> 00:49:51,193
It became a bitter fight.
587
00:49:51,441 --> 00:49:56,053
In response to the campaign the government made films to warn about the unscrupulous manipulation
588
00:49:56,053 --> 00:49:58,867
of the press by big business
589
00:49:59,085 --> 00:50:03,381
and the central villain was the new figure of the public relations man.
590
00:50:05,883 --> 00:50:09,413
"They try to achieve their ends by working entirely behind the scenes
591
00:50:09,616 --> 00:50:12,133
corrupting and deceiving the public.
592
00:50:12,480 --> 00:50:17,133
The aims of such groups may be either good or bad so far as the public interest is concerned,
593
00:50:17,458 --> 00:50:22,040
but their methods are a grave danger to democratic institutions."
594
00:50:22,975 --> 00:50:27,759
The films also showed how the responsible citizens could monitor the press themselves.
595
00:50:28,468 --> 00:50:33,038
They could create a chart that analyzed the reporting for signs of hidden bias.
596
00:50:35,225 --> 00:50:41,510
But such earnest instruction was to be no match for the powerful imagination of Edward Bernays.
597
00:50:44,841 --> 00:50:49,042
He was about to help create a vision of the utopia that free market capitalism
598
00:50:49,399 --> 00:50:52,854
would build in America if it was unleashed.
599
00:51:02,065 --> 00:51:08,282
In 1939 New York hosted the World's Fair.
Edward Bernays was a central adviser.
600
00:51:08,868 --> 00:51:14,373
He insisted that the theme be the link between democracy and American business.
601
00:51:20,687 --> 00:51:26,719
At the heart of the fair was a giant white dome that Bernays named "Democra-City"
602
00:51:29,532 --> 00:51:33,475
and the central exhibit was a vast working model of America's future
603
00:51:33,764 --> 00:51:36,793
constructed by the General Motors corporation.
604
00:51:37,794 --> 00:51:40,421
Ann Bernays - Daughter of Edward Bernays:
To my father, the World's Fair,
605
00:51:40,624 --> 00:51:44,258
was an opportunity to keep the status quo.
606
00:51:44,365 --> 00:51:51,375
That is, capitalism in a democracy, democracy and capitalism and that marriage.
607
00:51:57,144 --> 00:52:02,744
He did that by manipulating people and getting them to think that
608
00:52:03,244 --> 00:52:07,400
you couldn't have real democracy in anything but a capitalist society
609
00:52:08,536 --> 00:52:14,942
which was capable of doing anything; of creating these wonderful highways,
610
00:52:15,275 --> 00:52:20,193
of making moving pictures inside everybody's house,
611
00:52:21,661 --> 00:52:25,926
of telephones that didn't need chords, of sleek roadsters.
612
00:52:28,087 --> 00:52:33,519
It was consumerist but at the same time you inferred that
613
00:52:33,995 --> 00:52:37,482
in a funny way that democracy and capitalism went together.
614
00:52:39,055 --> 00:52:43,947
The World's Fair was an extraordinary success and captured America's imagination.
615
00:52:44,666 --> 00:52:48,120
The vision it portrayed was of a new form of democracy
616
00:52:48,493 --> 00:52:54,898
in which business responded to people's innermost desires in a way politicians could never do.
617
00:52:56,323 --> 00:53:00,672
But it was a form of democracy that depended on treating people not as active citizens,
618
00:53:00,978 --> 00:53:06,387
like Roosevelt did, but as passive consumers. Because this Bernays believed,
619
00:53:06,680 --> 00:53:10,244
was the key to control in a mass democracy.
620
00:53:11,150 --> 00:53:13,431
Stewart Ewen - Historian of Public Relations:
It's not that the people are in charge
621
00:53:13,744 --> 00:53:17,244
but that the people's desires are in charge.
622
00:53:17,486 --> 00:53:22,996
The people are not in charge, the people exercise no decision making power within this environment.
623
00:53:23,428 --> 00:53:29,285
So democracy is reduced from something which assumes an active citizenry
624
00:53:29,659 --> 00:53:32,939
to the idea of the public as passive consumers
625
00:53:36,634 --> 00:53:40,458
driven primarily by instinctual or unconscious desires
626
00:53:40,848 --> 00:53:45,868
and that if you can in fact trigger those needs and desires, you can get what you want from them.
627
00:53:48,908 --> 00:53:54,629
But this struggle between the two views of human beings as to whether they were rational or irrational
628
00:53:55,035 --> 00:53:58,525
was about to be dramatically affected by events in Europe.
629
00:53:59,283 --> 00:54:03,002
Events that would also change the fortunes of the Freud family.
630
00:54:06,411 --> 00:54:12,025
In March 1938 the Nazis annexed Austria. It was called the Anschluss.
631
00:54:12,286 --> 00:54:16,192
Hitler arrived in Vienna to an extraordinary outpouring of mass adulation
632
00:54:16,916 --> 00:54:21,710
but even as he drove through the city behind the scenes the Nazis were systematically whipping up
633
00:54:22,036 --> 00:54:27,539
and unleashing the hatred of the crowd against the enemies of the new greater Germany.
634
00:54:29,339 --> 00:54:32,537
Marcel Faust - Resident of Vienna 1930's:
The Anschluss was a kind of an explosion
635
00:54:32,756 --> 00:54:35,975
of terrible hatred of aginst enemies, so called enemies
636
00:54:36,322 --> 00:54:42,381
or whatever they considered as enemies, against the Jews totally
637
00:54:43,357 --> 00:54:50,504
and also against a lot of Austrians who opposed the Nazis in Austria.
638
00:54:51,596 --> 00:54:55,608
They said it's legitimate now, you can do what you want, so they did it...
639
00:54:56,009 --> 00:54:59,743
Stealing and robbing and killing, I can't stay there a while;
640
00:54:59,840 --> 00:55:09,186
human depravity was always near to normal behavior, it can change very quickly...
641
00:55:18,490 --> 00:55:23,937
As the violence and assassinations raged in Vienna, Freud decided he had to leave.
642
00:55:24,440 --> 00:55:27,626
His aim was to go to Britain, but he knew Britain like many countries
643
00:55:27,908 --> 00:55:30,615
was refusing entrance to most Jewish refugees.
644
00:55:33,469 --> 00:55:37,029
But help came from the leading
psychoanalyst in Britain, Ernest Jones.
645
00:55:38,001 --> 00:55:41,627
He was in the same ice skating club as the Home Secretary - Sir Samuel Hall,
646
00:55:42,303 --> 00:55:46,127
and Jones persuaded Hall to issue Freud a British work permit
647
00:55:49,398 --> 00:55:56,098
and in May 1938 Freud, his daughter Anna and
other members of his family set off for London.
648
00:56:03,190 --> 00:56:07,752
Freud arrived in London as Britain was preparing for war and he settled with his daughter Anna
649
00:56:08,118 --> 00:56:10,204
in a house in Hampstead.
650
00:56:11,297 --> 00:56:15,519
But Freud's cancer was now far advanced and in September 1939,
651
00:56:15,754 --> 00:56:19,876
just 3 weeks after the outbreak of war, he died.
652
00:56:25,002 --> 00:56:29,163
The second world war would utterly transform the way government saw democracy
653
00:56:29,662 --> 00:56:31,746
and the people they governed.
654
00:56:33,767 --> 00:56:37,631
Next week's program will show how the
American government, as a result of the war
655
00:56:37,911 --> 00:56:43,243
became convinced there were savage dangerous forces hidden inside all human beings.
656
00:56:43,852 --> 00:56:45,975
Forces that needed to be controlled.
657
00:56:47,693 --> 00:56:51,255
The terrible evidence from the death camps seemed to show what happened
658
00:56:51,505 --> 00:56:53,961
when these forces were unleashed.
659
00:56:54,311 --> 00:56:57,054
And politicians and planners in post war America
660
00:56:57,054 --> 00:57:00,311
would come to believe that hidden under the surface of their own population
661
00:57:00,311 --> 00:57:03,289
were the same dangerous forces.
662
00:57:05,914 --> 00:57:11,141
And they would turn to the Freud family to help control this enemy within.
663
00:57:16,328 --> 00:57:21,790
And ever adaptable Edward Bernays would work
not just for the American government but the CIA
664
00:57:25,227 --> 00:57:29,811
and Sigmund Freud's daughter Anna,
would also become powerful in the United States
665
00:57:30,136 --> 00:57:34,884
because she believed that people could be taught to control the irrational forces within them.
666
00:57:35,604 --> 00:57:42,057
Out of this, would come vast government programs to manage the inner psychological life of the masses.