Edward Bernays (1891–1995) was the Austrian-American publicist almost universally described as the father of public relations. From a New York office opened just after the First World War, he turned techniques developed for wartime information work into a peacetime profession, wrote the young field’s first books, and ran campaigns — for cigarettes, breakfast food and soap — that are still taught a century later. He also left his discipline its oldest argument: whether organising public opinion is a service to democracy or a polite way of overruling it.

His fingerprints are on almost everything the field now does without thinking: the staged event, the borrowed expert, the worthy cause wrapped around a product, the claim that counsel belongs inside the client’s decisions rather than underneath them. What follows is an honest account of who Bernays was, what he actually did, which of his ideas survive inspection — and which parts of his method a modern practitioner has to refuse, politely and in writing.

Who was Edward Bernays?

Bernays was born in Vienna in 1891 and brought to the United States as a small child. Psychology was, in an unusual sense, the family business: his mother was Sigmund Freud’s sister, and his father was the brother of Freud’s wife Martha, which made the founder of psychoanalysis his uncle twice over. Bernays never became an analyst, but he read his uncle closely and borrowed the central insight that people are moved by desires and anxieties they cannot always name — an insight he would spend a career applying to soap, cigarettes and governments.

He took a degree in agriculture at Cornell, worked in medical publishing, and promoted plays before the First World War drew him into the United States Committee on Public Information, the government’s wartime information agency. There he helped prepare material aimed at audiences overseas, and the war taught him the lesson his whole career rested on: organised communication, applied patiently, could move the opinion of whole populations. When the war ended, he asked the obvious commercial question — what could the same machinery do for companies, causes and products in peacetime?

A long career spent selling PR itself

Bernays opened his New York office in 1919 with Doris Fleischman, who became his wife and professional partner. They rejected the existing labels — press agent, publicist — and called themselves counsel on public relations, a title borrowed from the law and chosen deliberately: counsel is hired to advise before a decision, not to announce it afterwards. Over the following decades his client list came to include soap makers, tobacco companies, car manufacturers, publishers and governments. He taught, lectured, wrote his memoir (Biography of an Idea, 1965) and worked, by his own cheerful admission, at promoting one client above all — himself, and the profession he claimed to have founded. He died in 1995, aged 103.

The books that built the theory

Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923) was the first book to set out what a public relations counsel actually does, and Bernays followed it by teaching what is generally described as the first university course in the subject. The book’s argument was modest by his later standards: the public’s view of an organisation is formed from impressions, and the counsel’s job is to understand those impressions and supply better material for them. It is Propaganda (1928) that made his reputation and his notoriety. The later book argues, calmly and in the open, that in a crowded democracy the organised shaping of opinion is not an aberration but a permanent feature of public life — the only real question being who does the shaping, and how openly.

His most famous formulation came in a 1947 essay, The Engineering of Consent. The phrase is usually quoted as a confession; in context it was meant as a programme. Bernays argued that democratic leaders could not simply command consent, but neither could they wait for it to appear: they had to build it, using symbols, staged events and trusted voices to carry arguments the public had no time to study. What he added to earlier thinking about crowds was Freud: the crowd, for Bernays, is not merely emotional but made of wishes, fears and hopes in disguise — and the skilled counsel speaks to the disguise, not to the argument.

The two-way street he preached

In his later writing especially, Bernays insisted that public relations had to be a two-way street. The counsel’s duty ran in both directions: interpret the organisation to the public, yes, but also interpret the public to the organisation — and tell the client, when necessary, that the behaviour had to change because the publicity could not honestly fix it. He supported the idea of professional standards for practitioners, and spent much of his long retirement polishing the claim that what he had built was a profession, not a trick. The difficulty, which the rest of this article does not dodge, is that the doctrine and some of the practice were two different things.

The campaigns everyone still teaches

Two of Bernays’ interwar campaigns appear in nearly every history of the field, and both are worth examining closely — not because they were typical work, but because each contains his whole method, its brilliance and its defect, in miniature.

Torches of Freedom, 1929

The American Tobacco Company wanted women to smoke in public: an unembarrassed female smoker doubled the market for Lucky Strike cigarettes. Bernays consulted the psychoanalyst A. A. Brill, who told him that, symbolically, cigarettes stood for exactly the independence women of the period were demanding in other areas of life. So for the Easter Sunday Parade on Fifth Avenue in 1929, Bernays arranged for a group of young women to light cigarettes as they strolled, and let the press know in advance that suffragists would be smoking “torches of freedom” in protest at male double standards. Photographers arrived, the pictures ran, and a product had successfully disguised itself as an emancipation.

Notice what was engineered and what was not. The cause was real, the women’s grievance was real, and the walking was real; what was manufactured was the connection between the cause and the cigarette — and nobody watching was told who had paid for the connection. Late in his life, once the medical evidence had hardened, Bernays supported campaigns against smoking. The parade itself remains the founding parable of the modern publicity stunt, warning label included.

A breakfast endorsed by doctors

For the Beech-Nut Packing Company, the problem was bacon. Bernays’ method this time ran through professional authority. He had a physician connected with his office canvass other doctors on a simple question: is a hearty breakfast better for a working person than a light one? The replies favoured the substantial breakfast, and Bernays supplied the findings to newspapers around the country, where they appeared as medical opinion — with bacon and eggs, Beech-Nut’s products among them, sitting at the centre of the doctor-approved plate. No single advertisement said any of this. That was the point.

The machinery on display — a surveyed authority, a finding that reads as news, a product riding quietly inside it — is the direct ancestor of the expert-quote news story, the commissioned survey and the sponsored study. Other work of the period used the same grammar: a national soap-sculpture competition for children built around a soap brand, and a vast golden-jubilee celebration of the electric light staged for an electrical manufacturer. Bernays did not invent publicity. He systematised it.

The ethical problem Bernays left behind

The case for Bernays is real. He wrote the first serious books about the field, gave its practitioners a job description more elevated than the press agent’s, and argued — at least in his doctrine — that an organisation which has to mislead the public should first change its behaviour. If modern PR has a claim to be a profession rather than a trade in favours, the claim starts with him.

The case against is equally real, and it is drawn from his own record. Techniques developed for wartime state information work were sold, undisclosed, to private interests; endorsements were arranged in ways designed to hide the arranging hand; a feminist symbol was used to sell cigarettes to women. The darkest documented episode came late: in the 1950s his firm worked for the United Fruit Company and helped establish, in American coverage, the picture of Guatemala’s elected government as a communist threat, in the years before the 1954 coup removed it. Historians still argue about how much weight his publicity carried, but the episode is the standing exhibit in the argument about where engineered consent can end — an argument examined further in our discussion of why an unethical action can harm the reputation of brands.

What modern PR kept from Bernays

Strip away the period detail and the undisclosed payments, and four of Bernays’ instincts remain load-bearing in honest practice:

• Start from the audience’s real motives. His crude Freudianism became today’s audience research: people act on identity, habit and feeling first, and on argument second.
• Make the story happen. The staged event that embodies a message — his pseudo-event — still outperforms the announcement that merely describes one.
• Borrow credibility carefully. The expert voice and the independent endorsement survive in modern media relations — now fenced by disclosure rules Bernays himself treated as optional.
• Counsel before coverage. His insistence that communication belongs inside the decision, not after it, is the ancestor of every serious planning conversation in the field.

To these he added a habit worth keeping in itself: he wrote everything down. The books, the essays and the memoir mean his methods can be audited — which is more than can be said for many of his imitators, then or since.

What an honest practitioner must refuse

Other parts of the inheritance have to be declined, and it helps to name them plainly:

• Manufactured grassroots. Front groups, planted enthusiasm and “spontaneous” public feeling organised from an office.
• Undisclosed interest. Any endorsement, survey or spokesman whose paymaster is hidden from the audience.
• Private pressure points. Appeals designed to work on anxieties the audience cannot see and therefore cannot argue with.
• Causes as costume. Borrowing a movement’s moral weight to sell something that does nothing for the movement.
• Daylight failure. Any method the client would be ashamed to see described accurately in print.

These refusals are not modern decoration. The professional codes, advertising-standards rules and platform disclosure policies that now govern the field were written, in large part, because the Bernays era demonstrated what happens without them. The two-way street he described in his books turns out to be the right test after all — he simply failed to apply it to his own parades.

Edward Bernays and modern PR: the honest verdict

The fairest reading is that Bernays was right about how publics work and careless about what that knowledge licensed. He understood, earlier than almost anyone, that symbols move people further than leaflets, that events beat announcements, and that credibility is always borrowed from someone. A modern public relations strategy still runs on those insights; what has changed is the audit. The consent he proposed to engineer is now something practitioners are expected to earn, disclose and re-earn — closer to his own later doctrine than to his early practice.

So read him the way you would read a founder whose company you have inherited: with gratitude for the building, and a thorough inspection of the foundations. He gave public relations its theory, its vocabulary and its ambitions. The century since has been spent, campaign by campaign and code by code, deciding which of his permissions to hand back.

Frequently asked questions

Why is Edward Bernays called the father of public relations?

Because he did the founding work in public: he wrote the field’s first books in the 1920s, named and modelled the role of public relations counsel, taught early university courses in the subject, and ran the interwar campaigns that defined its methods. Earlier press agents existed, but Bernays supplied the theory and the professional claim.

What does “engineering of consent” mean?

It is Bernays’ 1947 term for the deliberate building of public agreement through symbols, events and trusted voices rather than through orders or long arguments. Modern practice keeps the psychology but rejects the implication that consent is raw material: it now has to be informed, disclosed and revocable.

What was the Torches of Freedom campaign?

A 1929 stunt for the American Tobacco Company in which young women lit cigarettes during New York’s Easter Sunday Parade, presented to the press as a feminist protest. Arranged by Bernays after a psychoanalyst described cigarettes as symbols of female independence, it remains the textbook example of a publicity event — and of a cause used as a costume.

Did Edward Bernays invent public relations?

No. Press agentry is older, and figures such as Ivy Lee were developing modern practice in the same years. Bernays’ distinct contribution was systematising the field: its first literature, its counsel model, and a repeatable method built on audience psychology, staged events and borrowed credibility.

What should practitioners today take from Bernays — and leave behind?

Take the audience research, the event that embodies the story, and the claim to counsel before decisions. Leave the undisclosed payments, the front groups and the exploitation of private fears: the parts of his method that depended on the audience not knowing what was being done to it.