Our Fateful Hoaxing

Patrick O’Brien reviews ‘The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead: A Historical Analysis of Her Samoan Research’ by Derek Freeman.

Patrick O’Brien. Population and Environment. New York: Nov 1999.Vol.21, Iss. 2; pg. 247

Derek Freeman’s thoroughly researched latest work on Margaret Mead’s classic study of adolescent females in Polynesia, Coming of Age in Samoa, amply demonstrates the degree to which Mead was wrong in her understanding of life in that part of the world. The issue for Freeman in this book is to explore why Mead got it so wrong: were her methods and fieldwork merely inadequate, or did she deliberately mislead the anthropological world. The question is of no little import since Mead’s 1926 study, as The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy put it, set ‘new standards for anthropological fieldwork’ and ‘revolutionized the field of anthropology’ (p. 1).

In some ways Freeman’s investigation of Mead’s education and fieldwork strongly imply that Mead knowingly fabricated data and conclusions about adolescent girls and other aspects of life in Samoa. For instance, Freeman notes that Mead had recorded two cases of forcible rape, yet wrote in a paper submitted to the National Research Council that ‘the idea of forceful rape or of any sexual act to which both participants do not give themselves freely is completely foreign to the Samoan mind.’ Mead’s notes also contain unambiguous information on virginity and ritual defloration both for taupou (ceremonial female virgins) and for ordinary girls, yet Freeman shows that in Coming of Age Mead ‘invents the supplementary fiction that the taupou alone was ‘excepted’ from ‘free and easy experimentation’ in ‘love affairs,’ while parents of lower rank ‘complacently ignore their daughters’ experiments.’

Also, Mead had attended a court case which concerned two adolescent girls, ‘one of whom had bitten off the other’s ear in a fight.’ Her conclusion in Coming of Age: prohibitions against such violence ‘had worked like a yeast.’ Similarly, in one of her letters Mead describes how a Samoan boy had, in a dispute over a girl, shot and killed another boy. Freeman’s comments: “Yet in defining the pattern of their culture, she claims of the Samoans that ‘they never hate enough to want to kill anyone and that there is no jealously among them.’ In each instance, an imagined ‘cultural pattern’ completely supplants realities that, as the relevant historical sources show, were, in fact, well known to Mead.” Finally, Mead, who lived through a terrifying New Year’s Day hurricane in 1926, one that, she noted, ‘destroyed every house’ and induced severe famine, massaged this fact into a portrayal of ‘the general casualness’ of Samoan society by stating that ‘neither poverty or great disasters’ threaten Samoans (pp. 187-188).

Such misrepresentations have prompted at least one serious researcher to conclude that Mead was guilty of deliberate falsifications. While Freeman agrees that this researcher, Martin Orans, may be correct ‘when one limits one’s attention, as does Orans, to Mead’s field notes and published texts,’ he believes that it ‘cannot be sustained when her Samoan research is analyzed in its full historical context’ (pp. 211-212). After all, Freeman reasons, if Mead were deliberately misleading us, she never would have ‘preserved with such thoroughness the very extensive documentation of her Samoan research of 1925-1926.’ Freeman is convinced that ‘this action of hers conclusively confirms Margaret Mead’s professional integrity, for, in lodging her papers in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress she has . . . made all of the field notes and other documents concerned with her Samoan fieldwork available for critical evaluation’ (p. 9).

Despite the weight of evidence suggesting Mead’s duplicity in these cases, Freeman is of the opinion that other, more complex factors explain Mead’s errors. Chief among these is the education she received under famed anthropologist Franz Boas and one of Boas’s prized proteges, Ruth Benedict. In essence, when Mead began her work in cultural anthropology, she stepped into a field that ‘had many of the characteristics of a belief system,’ one in which Mead’s own work was soon ‘standing in the checkered history of cultural anthropology as a deeply instructive instance of the way in which human understanding can be misled by uncritical adherence to a cherished dogma rather than to the demanding discipline of impartially objective scholarly inquiry’ (pp. 209-210).

In becoming one of Franz Boas’s students, Margaret Mead was exposed to the powerful ideology of cultural determinism - the view that human nature is completely plastic and that biological universal and human genetic differences can be safely ignored in our thinking about cultures and differences between cultures. ‘It was as late as 1934,’ Freeman writes, ‘that Franz Boas asserted that “the genetic elements which may determine personality” were “altogether irrelevant as compared with the powerful influence of the cultural environment . . .” ’ Freeman’s verdict: Boas ‘was massively mistaken’ (p. 213). In a fascinating Afterword, perhaps the best part of the book, Freeman makes a brief for biological influences on human nature, though he never insists on their exclusiveness. Anthropology is indeed evolving into an increasingly exact science but it is now evident ‘that the way in which this is likely to be achieved is by the emergence of a new anthropological paradigm in which full recognition is given to both biological and cultural variables and to their complex interaction’ (p. 217).

Freeman is at pains to show how influential Boas’s ideology was on both Ruth Benedict - one of Mead’s mentors - and Mead herself. Boas’s mission was to separate the issues of biological and cultural inheritance, and he did this by persistently excluding the ‘nature’ side of the nature-nurture debate. At Columbia University he was to unflaggingly propagate this dogma among his students, many of whom, like Alfred Kroeber, went on to establish the preeminence of cultural determinism in the field of anthropology. Mead dutifully obliged Boas, so that when Boas examined her work, he accepted it despite its glaring flaws. ‘Convinced, as he was, of the “truth” of his ideas, all that mattered to him was that he had “won” ’ (p. 178).

Had Boas won merely a war within the discipline of academic anthropology? Although Freeman is quite aware that there was in fact a war going on, he does not really describe the combatants or their motivations. Many of Boas’s proteges were Jewish, and were motivated by their perceptions of Jewish interests, especially the eradication of anti-Semitism, which was thought to be nurtured by the evolutionary and genetic theories they combated so strongly (Frank, 1997; MacDonald, 1998), The Jewish core of the Boasian movement included Alexander Goldenweiser, Melville Herskovits, Robert Lowie, Paul Radin, Edward Sapir, Leslie Spier, Alexander Lesser, Ruth Bunzel, Gene Weltfish, Esther Schiff Goldfrank, Ruth Landes and others. (Two of the most illustrious non-Jewish students of Boas, Mead and Benedict, were outsiders for other reasons, Mead because of her bisexuality and Benedict because of her lesbianism. Curiously, Freeman chooses only to note that Mead and Benedict had ‘an intimate sapphic relationship.’)

Boas’s battle was thus an aspect of ethnic conflict over the construction of culture. Boasian anthropology was one front in a larger critique of culture - one in which prominent Jewish intellectuals and activists such as Freud, those of the Frankfurt School, and later the sixties radicals, strove to combat anti-Semitism, often portraying gentile culture as essentially pathological (MacDonald, 1998). The following description of Stephen Jay Gould applies equally as well to Boas and others: ‘The point here is that Gould’s career of intellectual dishonesty has not existed in a vacuum but has been part and parcel of a wide-ranging movement that has dominated the most prestigious intellectual areas in the United States and the West’ (MacDonald, 1998, p. 38).

As with his reticence regarding the issue of Mead’s sexual orientation, Freeman largely refrains from discussing the pivotal role of Jewish or gentile identities, which is a pity since the list of social scientists overshadowed by Boasian anthropologists reads like a Who’s Who of WASP America: Frank R. Lillie, T.H. Morgan, E.L. Thorndike, R.S. Woodworth, Edward Craighill Handy, Herbert E. Gregory and others. Mead’s early professional life indicates how she emerged from a highly functional WASP network that served to advance the careers of its members and, presumably, to maintain dominance over other ethnic groups. For example, when Mead arrived in Honolulu to consult with officials of the Bishop Museum, she ‘was met with “necklaces of flowers” by Mrs. May Dillingham Frear. May Dillingham, who came from one of Hawaii’s old missionary families and who had been a friend of Mead’s mother at Wellesley College, had returned to Honolulu to marry Walter F, Frear, the governor of the Hawaiian Islands from 1907 to 1913” (p. 67).

Also, Mead’s first husband’s father-in-law, ‘a country doctor,’ wrote on Mead’s behalf to Rear Admiral E.R. Stitt, ‘who had been his friend at the Medical School of the University of Pennsylvania.’ Finally, when she arrived at the United States Naval Station on the South Seas island of Tutuila, she was fortunate enough ‘to meet Lieutenant G.R. Veed and his wife, whose sister she had known at Columbia. They introduced her to naval station life by taking her back to their quarters’ (p. 79). Such connections among WASPS are later mirrored by those among Jews in the social sciences.

In addition to the role ideology played in Mead’s inaccurate depictions of life in Samoa Freeman also documents her devious acceptance of a secondary task from the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, Hawaii - a task that Mead kept secret from her mentor and overseer Boas, which is understandable, given his explicit warnings against doing more generalized ethnological work. Freeman (p. 53) cites the college undergraduate Mead’s love of these lines from an Edna St. Vincent Millay poem to explain Mead’s deviousness:

My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends-
It gives a lovely light

Later, when Mead was pressed to complete her investigation of the behavior of sixty-six Samoan girls, she devoted almost all of her time to the Bishop Museum’s ethnology study, ‘ostentatiously burning her candle at both ends . . .’

Ultimately, the fulcrum around which Mead’s errors (and deceptions) pivot is summed up in the title of the book itself: The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead. The combined pressures of doing two not wholly related projects, of working in a foreign climate and eating foreign food, of the very time constraints Mead imposed on herself, set the stage for ‘the hoaxing,’ which occurred when two of Mead’s close acquaintances, Fa’apua’a and Fofoa, misled her about their sexual activities.

Nearing the end of her stay in Samoa, Mead took advantage of time alone with Fa’apua’a and Fofoa to bluntly ask them about their sexual experiences. Embarrassed by this question - a ‘preposterous proposition (so it seemed to them) that despite the great emphasis on virginity in the traditional taupou system of Samoa and within the Christian church to which all Manu’ans were adherents at that time, unmarried Samoan girls were, in secret, sexually promiscuous’ - the two girls resorted to ‘recreational lying,’ which researchers have found to be a common form or entertainment among Samoans (p. 139). Freeman himself witnessed the deposition Fa’apua’a gave some sixty years after her acquaintance with Mead, a deposition in which Fa’apua’a admitted that she and Fofoa had only been joking. For Mead, however, the ‘hoax’ was exactly what she had been looking for, since it gave her the ‘cultural pattern’ she so desperately needed to provide a solution to ‘the problem Boas required her to investigate under the terms of her research fellowship.’

In an earlier book, Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth, Freeman ignited a firestorm in the world of anthropology by challenging, in one professor’s words, ‘the Mother-Goddess of American Anthropology.’ From the publication of that book in 1983, Freeman ‘was subjected to a highly emotional and, at times, flagrantly ad hominem campaign that reached its apogee in Chicago during the Eighty Second Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, when . . . there was a special session (to which [he] was not invited) devoted to the evaluation of [his] book.’ Descriptions of the meeting from those who attended ranged from ‘a sort of grotesque feeding frenzy’ to ‘I felt I was in a room with 200 people ready to lynch you’ (pp. 208-209). Amidst all this controversy, what was Mead’s classic work if it was not a scientifically objective, detached example of anthropology? Here, Robin Fox’s (1989, p. 3) description is of use: ‘If . . . we were to treat Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa as Utopia, not as ethnography, then we would understand it better and save a lot of pointless debate.’

A more general lesson which may be drawn from Freeman’s work on Mead is that some social scientists have at best sometimes misled their readers, mainly in the Western world, in many important ways, and at worst may have abandoned scientific objectivity in favor of an aggressive intellectual critique of established Western society. That so many of the classic works of social science have now been shown to be of dubious scientific value, or have been revealed as extremely ideologically motivated - as was Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa - suggests a healthy dose of skepticism is long overdue when considering many of these ‘classic’ works.

First and foremost of these ‘classic’ works must be what was, at least until recently, a highly influential strand of 20th-century social science, the work of Sigmund Freud. In recent years, his work has come into critical doubt, as shown by books such as E. Fuller Torrey’s Freudian Fraud, Yosef Yerushalmi’s Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable, Kevin MacDonald’s The Culture of Critique, and, most tenaciously, Frederick Crews’ blistering essays in The New York Review of Books and his edited volume Unauthorized Freud: Doubters Confront a Legend.

Another example might be what we now know of Alfred Kinsey, once hailed for his ground-breaking Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. In ‘The Secret Life of Alfred Kinsey,’ Joseph Epstein (1998) explores how the lives of social scientists can grossly distort their work in a way that is less likely to happen in the hard sciences. Presented as a dispassionate scientist at the time, Kinsey has since been exposed as ‘a voyeur, an exhibitionist, a homosexual, and a masochist,’ (which would not, of course, disqualify him today as a scientific researcher.) According to Kinsey’s biographer, ‘The beauty of sex research [was] that it allowed Kinsey to transform his voyeurism into science.’ For instance, he encouraged nude field trips with his male graduate students, hired his young homosexual lover as a full-time assistant, and conducted ‘research’ trips to Chicago that were actually homosexual ‘assignations’ of the ‘quick-hit’ variety. What made this behavior so egregious was not that it represented a moral lapse on Kinsey’s part, but that he portrayed many of these fringe acquaintances as typical American males of the time.

One more case worth considering, while not part of academic social science proper, is that of Betty Friedan and her classic feminist work The Feminine Mystique. In an essay that appeared in American Quarterly (and has since been published as a book), Daniel Horowitz (1996) explores how Friedan deceptively portrayed herself well into the 1970s as someone who, prior to writing The Feminine Mystique, ‘wasn’t even conscious of the woman problem,’ a woman still ‘in the embrace of the feminine mystique.’ In fact, Friedan had been a labor journalist with more than two decades of experience with ‘the woman problem.’ Horowitz’s findings practically suggest that a conscious effort has been made to misrepresent Friedan’s life. In 1991, for example, Donald Meyer, a historian of feminism, ‘skipped over’ Friedan’s years as a labor journalist and portrayed her as ‘the exemplary victim of the feminine mystique.’ Similarly, David Halberstam, in his 1993 book The Fifties, described Friedan’s nine-year journalism career with this one uninspiring line: ‘Betty Goldstein [Friedan’s maiden name] worked as a reporter for a left-wing paper’ (in Horowitz, p. 8).

The ideologies present in so much social ‘science,’ if not the unapologetic activism of many social scientists, seems to preclude the possibility of their advancing knowledge through what is normally thought of as scientific method. Witness, for example, anthropologist Gelya Frank, who, in the opening paragraph of an otherwise important article concerning the importance of Jewish identity for Boas and other icons of anthropology, announces that her article is directed at anthropologists, ‘especially ones concerned with turning multiculturalist theories into agendas for activism’ (1997, p. 731). Such explicit advocacy simply undermines any attempt to maintain scientific objectivity. Should not such partiality a priori disqualify one as a scientist?

Frank’s article on Boas elliptically asks whether or not anthropology has ‘a Jewish problem.’ One might just as profitably ask ‘Do the social sciences have a social activism problem?’ Reading Derek Freeman’s critique of Margaret Mead, one is strongly inclined to answer in the affirmative.

REFERENCES
Crews, F. (1998,) Unauthorized Freud : Doubters Confront a Legend. New York: Viking Press.
Crews, F., ed. (1995) The Memory Wars: Freud’s Legacy in Dispute. New York: New York Review of Books.
Epstein, J. (1998). The Secret Life of Alfred Kinsey. Commentary 105(1), 35-39.
Fox, R. (1989). The Search for Society: Quest for a Biosocial Science and Morality. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Frank, G. (1997). Jews, Multiculturalism, and Boasian Anthropology. American Anthropologist 99(4), 731-745.
Horowitz, D. (1996). Rethinking Betty Friedan and The Feminine Mystique: Labor Union Radicalism and Feminism in Cold War America. American Quarterly 48(1), 1-42.
MacDonald, K. B. (1998). The Culture of Critique: Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements. Westport, CT: Praeger.
Torrey, E. Fuller. (1992) Freudian Fraud: The Malignant Effect of Freud's theory on American Thought and Culture. New York: HarperCollins.
Yerushalmi, Y. (1991). Freud's Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

The Dispossessed Majority: The Secularization of Religion

Quotes from Wilmot Robertson, The Dispossessed Majority (Howard Allen, Cape Canaveral, Fl., 1981)

See also The Cultural Clash: The Dissolution of Art and The Cultural Clash: The Atrophy of Education

The Cultural Clash: The Secularization of Religion

Art is one of the battlegrounds of the cultural clash now taking place in the United States. Religion is another. The intention of this chapter, however, is not to indulge in theological speculations or question the truth or error of any particular faith, but to examine the purely social and pragmatic side of religion and its appositeness to the present tides of political, economic, and social change.

God may be dead, as it was once announced that Great Pan was dead and as many twentieth-century churchmen, echoing the wishful thinking of Nietzsche, proclaim. But the religious instinct is very much alive. Though science is a long way from confirming it, it almost seems that men are born with a religious gene. There may have been an alarming decrease in the spiritual magnetism and uplift of formal religion in modern times, but men have made up for it by shifting their innate religiosity to more mundane creeds - democracy, liberalism, capitalism, nationalism, fascism, socialism, and communism. If an abundance of saints, devils, martyrs, and prophets is a sign of religious zeal, the twentieth century ought to rank as the most religious of all centuries. Never since the days of Rome have so many heads of state, both living and dead, been deified or diabolized on such a grand scale. Belief in the old gods may be flickering, but belief in the more worldly deities of the present is laser bright.

A review of organized religion in America must concentrate on a discussion of Christianity. Until quite recently, the United States was called a Christian nation and statistically about 60 per-cent of all Americans still belong to a Christian church. But what exactly is a Christian? The definition seems to depend on the religious denomination of the definer. In Roman Catholic eyes, St. Francis, one of the few who ever took Christ literally, and Boniface VIII, more Caesar than pope, were both Christians. In Protestant eyes, so was Captain (later Reverend) John Newton, who composed the ever popular hymn, ‘How Sweet the Name of Jesus Sounds,’ while the vessel he commanded waited off the Guinea coast to pick up a new shipment of slaves from the interior. Other Christians have included Syrian column-sitters, sword-wielding Norsemen, cannibalistic blacks, lust-ridden empresses, and piety-stricken nuns.

The difficulty of defining a Christian stems in part from the massive polarizations and cyclic sweeps of Christianity in the first nineteen centuries of its existence. No religion has been so many things to so many believers and so many theologians. None has provoked so many heresies and schisms, so much war and so much peace, so much animosity and so much love. Perhaps the only time that Christianity was truly unified and truly one religion was in its very beginnings, when it was a simple offshoot of Judaism - one of the many sects that flourished in the spiritual ferment stirred up by Roman encroachments on Jewish statehood.

The first great problem of Christianity was a purely racial one. Would it be a religion for Jews or for Gentiles? Jesus himself was a Galilean from ‘Galilee of the Gentiles.’ There is no definite proof that he was a Jew, but it is almost certain he was brought up in a Jewish cultural ambiance. At first many Jews looked upon him as a possible Messiah come to satisfy their craving for a return to the temporal glories of Solomon. Later, when the ministry of Jesus began to include outsiders and when he demonstrated more interest in an otherworldly than in a worldly kingdom, the Jews quickly closed their hearts and their purses. In the words of Toynbee, ‘this inspired Jewish scion of forcibly converted Galilean gentiles was then rejected and done to death by the Judaean leaders of the Jewry of his age.’

The next problem facing Christianity, once it moved away from the Jews, was how much of its original Jewish background and tradition would or should be preserved. One faction, the Marcionites, attempted to purge the early church of all Jewish influence and went so far as to brand the Old Testament the work of the devil. The Petrine Church, on the other hand, accepted the Jewish Bible, a great deal of Jewish theology and law, and the special position of the Jews as midwives of Christianity - indeed almost everything Jewish except the Jews themselves. Eventually the Judaizing party won, though remnants of Marcionite influence persisted until the Cathars of Southern France were liquidated by papal auxiliaries in the twelfth century. If the Marcionites had prevailed, there would have been very little Judeo in the Judeo-Christian heritage of Western civilization.

One of the principal themes of Gibbon’s magnificent obituary of the Roman Empire was the important role of Christianity in its decay and dissolution. If the great historian had explored the workings of the Early Church more penetratingly, he might have found the real culprit was not the Christian religion as such, but those who played up the equalitarian and insurrectionary elements of Christianity at the expense of the more fundamental Christian concept of otherworldliness. On the one side, the power and privilege of the dwindling Roman elite were undermined by the New Testament’s accent on brotherhood and renunciation.

On the other, the subject races were aroused to violence by the inflammatory sermons of the Early Fathers, whose strictures against Roman paganism demanded the destruction of everyone and everything connected with the old religion. In A.D. 310 there was one last flare-up of pagan repression when the Emperor Galerius poured molten lead down Christian throats and fed the lions a final meal of martyrs in the Coliseum. Two years later, Constantine saw the blazing cross and Rome soon had a Christian Emperor.

When Christianity became a state religion the bishops changed their tune. Instead of opposing the government the Church became its guardian. Instead of attacking military service it advocated it. Once the oppressed, Christians were now the oppressors and the flames of Greek and Roman temples lit the night sky of dying Rome. Although it was too late to prevent the Empire’s collapse, the bishops did manage to convert, in a fashion, the conquering Teutons, who later saved Western Christianity from the Huns, Arabs, Turks, and other heathen marauders.

By the time of the Crusades, Christianity had divided into the Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox churches. It divided again when Northern Europe, incited by princes with a covetous eye on the heavy gold exports to the Holy See, broke away from the spiritual absolutism and temporal Realpolitik of the Latinized Popes. The Reformation drew the religious frontiers which today separate Protestant from Catholic Europe and the racial frontiers which in many areas separate Nordic from Alpine Europe.

Professor Guignebert of the University of Paris, perhaps the most informed modern biblical scholar, has provided an interesting sidelight on the development of Christianity by noting the changing ‘appearance’ of Jesus through the ages. The first depictions of Jesus made him hairy, ugly, and abject. Later in Gothic rose windows and statuary and in Renaissance paintings and frescoes, Christ was endowed with Nordic features and at times looked more like Siegfried than the son of a Mediterranean carpenter. Many paintings of the Holy Family portrayed the Virgin and the Christ Child with blond hair and blue eyes. The Aesthetic Prop was everywhere visible in the greatest masterpieces of Church-sponsored art.

Christianity was brought to the United States by members of practically every Christian denomination - Anglicans and Anabaptists, Catholics and Mennonites, Lutherans, Quakers and Shakers, Greek Orthodox and Doukhobors. The Episcopal Church - two-thirds of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were Episcopalians - and the Calvinist churches (principally the Congregational and the Presbyterian) remained dominant until the rise of the revivalist and evangelical sects in the early nineteenth century. The slavery issue dissolved whatever Christian unity existed between North and South, turning many Yankees from the eye-for-an-eye morality and ironbound predestination of Calvinism to Unitarianism and other less rigorous and less selective creeds. In the same years Southern churches fastened a stratified, black-and-white Christianity on the slave states, justifying their actions by murky biblical passages on human bondage.

Shortly before the Civil War, Roman Catholicism began to assume some prominence in national affairs. In addition to its religious function the Church served as an immense social service organization for the mass influx of hungry, homesick Irish immigrants. Decades later, it became the spiritual and, on occasion, the political shepherd for the millions of Central and Southern European Catholics who furnished the bulk of the New Immigration. By the early 1930s the Catholic Church was the largest and most powerful religious body in the United States. In 1928 Alfred E. Smith lost the presidential election partly because he was a Catholic. In 1960 John F. Kennedy won the presidency partly because he was a Catholic. In the 97th Congress (1981-82), more congressmen belonged to the Catholic Church than to any other religious denomination.

Today, Christianity in the United States - the fundamentalists excepted - has turned its attention from God to man and become the champion of the minorities. Many Protestant ministers take the money from their collection plates and spend it on projects for blacks and Hispanics that are often more political than charitable. Churches are transformed into meeting places for black gangs. Clergymen record their ‘deep appreciation’ to the black militant who stormed into Manhattan’s Riverside Church and demanded $500 million in ‘reparations.’ Long tolerant of communism in its various Stalinist, Titoist, and Maoist guises, many churchmen now openly endorse revolution in Central America, smuggle in illegal aliens, propagandize for unilateral disarmament, raise bail for Black Panthers, and conspire against a future draft as they conspired against the American war effort in Vietnam. Some Catholic priests have been active in inciting strikes of Mexican-American migrant farm workers against California farmers. Others, notably the Berrigan brothers, have broken into Selective Service offices and destroyed draft records. Still others have taken to the streets and led mass sit-ins in defiance of state and local laws and Pope John Paul II’s strictures against priests in politics.

Altogether the present liberal-minority stance of Christianity in America lacks credibility and smacks of dilettantism. Jesus was an underdog and his poverty and minority status stimulated an honest concern for the oppressed and downtrodden. The well-fed, well-funded clergyman who walks a mile or two in a ‘freedom march’ and drops in from time to time to see how his Negro friends are doing in the slums seems a little counterfeit. So does the ‘social conscience’ of the Vatican ($80 billion in assets, including a $5.6 billion stock portfolio) and of the United States religious establishment (property alone valued at $102 billion). Such a vast hoard of wealth, which is nothing new in church history, has always made Christianity suspect in the eyes of left-leaning radicals. It helps explain why, despite all that Christian liberals did to prepare the way, in the three great revolutions of modern history - French, Russian, and Chinese - Christianity was officially or unofficially proscribed.

Although Christians are almost a billion strong, their faith is cooling. Popes no longer command armies, excommunicate kings, and organize crusades. There are no more Sainte Chapelles abuilding and no artists with one iota of the religious intensity found in a Fra Angelico painting. The pens of Luther and Milton are still, and the rousing Protestant hymns of yesteryear have lost their Sunday punch and are increasingly unsung. Revival meetings in tents and on television continue to draw large audiences, but more lips are converted than hearts. The old-time religion is still alive and well in some areas, but it has more relevance to the ambitions of prominent evangelists than to God. Catholic and Protestant clerics may get reams of favorable publicity in the press when they abandon their flocks to spread their ‘good works’ among the minorities, but it gains them few points with their hometown congregations. The leaders of the so-called Moral Majority have won a certain amount of acclaim, not, however, for spreading the gospel but for attacking the pandemic corruption and immorality of the times.

The deformation of religion in America, the shift from the Old Testament stamp of the original white settlers to the permissive social Christianity of the present, brings up the age-old question of how effectively religion shapes a people’s character and how effectively a people’s character shapes religion. According to modern standards the colonial American, his rifle in one hand and his Bible in the other, was a caricature of a Christian. He may have read the Good Book to his family once a week, but he seldom went to church. The Pilgrims, it is known, had no pastor for nine years after their arrival. In Virginia fewer than one out of nineteen were church members. Among Massachusetts Bay colonists only one-fifth were even professing Christians. Joshua, though perhaps not the late Bishop Pike, would have been proud of the Pilgrims. When they did go to Plymouth Church, they marched in three abreast with their muskets and firelocks at the ready, while other members of the congregation manned six cannon on the roof, each capable of shooting iron balls of four to five pounds. Was this a different kind of Christianity? Or was it a different kind of Christian?

Many other aspects of early American Christianity are equally abhorrent to modern church leaders. John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, probably spoke for all the Puritan elders when he said that democracy ‘has always been counted the meanest and worst of all forms of government.’ In Connecticut and Massachusetts the right to vote was restricted to church members, upsetting as this may be to those who believe that the American political tradition is unalterably bound to the separation of church and state. Equally upsetting is that the New England church thrived on the slave and rum trade, and that many well-known Congregational ministers owned slaves.

The Protestant religion has passed through its Old Testament pioneering phase and, despite some noisy fundamentalists, its New Testament evangelical phase. It is now well into its liberal phase. The Catholic religion is on a somewhat similar, but later-starting, timetable. The burning faith brought over by immigrants from Ireland and Central and Southern Europe has gradually cooled. Many of their descendants now obey a less rigid and more tolerant code, which permits them to defy their Church’s ban on contraceptives and divorce, skip mass for golf, and escape or think about escaping from the warm protection of their religious cocoon into the uncharted spaces of agnosticism.

Priests and even nuns are marrying, not always within the Church. Parochial schools are shut down for lack of funds. Members of the hierarchy are challenging papal infallibility. As the possibility of another great schism looms, the Church in America will have an increasingly difficult time keeping its decreasingly devout communicants under one roof. If it moves too far to the left to appease its growing Hispanic contingent, it must alienate its Irish and white ethnics. As racial divisions within its ranks sharpen, as the old external battle against the Protestants turns into an internal struggle for power, Catholic unity, once such a strong political force in the United States, may soon decline to the point where Catholics will no longer vote according to their religion but according to their race.

Judaism in America has followed the same hylotheistic route as Protestantism and Catholicism. The orthodox zealotry of the Sephardim of pre-Revolutionary and Revolutionary days compares to the more rational religiosity of contemporary Reform and Conservative Judaism as an acetylene torch to a candle. At present no more than 10 percent of American Jewry observe dietary laws and surveys show that Jewish college students are considerably less religious than non-Jewish students. There are some 4,000 Jewish congregations in the United States, comprising approximately 70 percent of all Jewish families, but most Jews affiliated with synagogues can hardly be described as pious. Only 19 percent of American Jews visit a temple once a week.

The establishment of Israel has reversed or at least slowed this secular trend and drawn some Jews back into the religious fold by renewing their interest in Jewish history. Judaism also continues to be attractive to many Jews for a reason that has nothing to do with religion and much to do with practical politics. As one prominent American Jew explained, ‘In fighting the cause of Jewish rights abroad, the religious approach is usually the one that Jewish leadership finds it most advisable to take.’ He might have added that Judaism also serves as a useful camouflage for Jewish activity in domestic affairs. In the meantime their old religious animus against Christianity has been mollified as Jews discover the advantages to be gained from the Christian liberal’s emphasis on selective tolerance and the Christian conservative’s support for Israel.

The ecumenical movement, though successful in bringing Protestants and Catholics closer together than at any time since the Reformation, has been powerless to prevent the various Christian denominations from abandoning their moral ascendancy over American life. If secularization continues at its present pace, Christianity may soon have no deeper significance in the American scheme of things than sports. Protestantism, in fact, has become so lukewarm that even the issue of federal aid to education no longer secretes undue amounts of adrenaline in Baptist or Methodist glands. Without regard to small, scattered voices of protest, national, state, and local governments often subsidize parochial schools with free lunches and transportation and aid parochial institutions of higher learning with five- and six-figure monetary grants for the physical and social sciences. There is even less outcry when the flaming liberal Jesuit, Robert Drinan, his white collar resplendent in television floodlights, runs for public office.

In recent years the most sensitive area of church-state relationship has not been the mixing of religion and politics, but the public observance of religion. Supreme Court rulings against prayers in public schools and the display of religious symbols in public places, minority attacks on Christmas pageantry in the classroom, minority complaints about Christmas stamps with religious themes -- all these are the outgrowths of what is essentially a mounting racial controversy.

Formerly, separation of church and state meant that churches were to stand alone without financial, legal, or any other kind of assistance from government. Now it is beginning to mean that religion must be isolated and even quarantined from public contact. This could be construed as more of a constriction than an extension of religious liberty. The free exercise of religion is hardly possible without freedom of religious expression.

The campaign against public celebrations of the nation’s religion, in addition to its built-in iconoclasm, cannot avoid becoming a campaign against the nation’s culture. Quite apart from its religious significance, Christmas - decorative tree, yule log, Santa Claus, elves, reindeer, and sky-riding sleigh - is an exuberant manifestation, perhaps the most exuberant manifestation, of Majority folkways.

Already Majority members have permitted their biggest holiday to be transformed into an overcommercialized Oriental bazaar by the great department store chains, many of which are owned by non-Christians. Any further censorship or perversion of Christmas would be a further abridgement, not just of the Majority’s religious freedom, but of its cultural freedom. Justice Potter Stewart, the lone dissenter in the Supreme Court’s school prayer rulings, made this point clear when he said that the Court, instead of being neutral toward religion, was actually showing signs of hostility by denying students ‘the opportunity of sharing in the spiritual heritage of the nation.’

In Notes towards the Definition of Culture, T. S. Eliot writes, ‘the culture of a people [is] an incarnation of its religion,’ and ‘no culture has appeared or developed except together with a religion …’ This is tantamount to saying that religion and culture are indivisible, that one cannot be isolated from the other without severe damage to both. In Eliot’s view, it was no coincidence that mankind’s greatest artistic achievements occurred when church and state were working together, not apart.

Nine of the thirteen colonies had established churches, as did England and the Scandinavian countries throughout most of their history. Church disestablishment in America came about during the War of Independence, which disrupted colonial ties to the Church of England. It was made official by the First Amendment, which was chiefly the work of Franklin, Jefferson, and Madison, many of whose religious (or irreligious) ideas had been taken from the French Enlightenment.

If the Greeks had been disestablishmentarians, there would have been no Parthenon, which was built with government funds, and none of the great plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes, which were staged in a government amphitheater, subsidized in part by the state treasury and offered to the public during state-sponsored religious festivities. If church and state had been separated in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, there would have been no Abbey of Cluny, no Gothic cathedrals, no Florentine Baptistery, no Sistine Chapel, no Last Supper. Bach, it should be added, spent much of his musical life in state-supported churches. Finally, since the most ardent advocates of church-state separation are frequently those who consider every word of the Bible divine revelation, it might be recalled that the Old Testament was the book of the ancient Hebrews, who more than any other people believed that church and state were one.

It is ironic that the Supreme Court, at present the most powerful opponent of church-state unity, sits in an imitation Greek temple, the originals of which would never have been built without the subsidies of an established church. Could it be that the poverty and unoriginality of Washington’s architecture - with its highest monument copied from an Egyptian obelisk and its most famous landmarks slavishly duplicating Greek, Hellenistic, and Roman building styles - owe something to the fact that Washington is the capital of the only large nation where church and state have been separated for more than a hundred years?

The greatest attraction of religion, according to Miguel de Unamuno, is the promise of immortality. Equally as attractive, if endurance and survival are signs of attractiveness, are religious ceremonies, rites, sacraments, liturgies, and feast days - the intersecting points between religion and folkways, between faith and art. The Northern gods have gone to Valhalla, but the yule log still blazes. In Russia the Eastern Orthodox Church has been stripped of its primacy and its privileges, but the spectacular Russian Easter services continue to enthrall believers and nonbelievers alike. In Mexico, priests are not supposed to wear cassocks in the streets, yet each year hundreds of thousands of Mexicans go on pilgrimages, some even bloodying their heads with crowns of thorns in gruesome reenactments of the stations of the cross.

Unamuno to the contrary, most people want to live in the present as well as in the hereafter. The immediately understandable and enjoyable emanations of religion - its dramaturgy - seem as necessary to Western man and to Western aesthetics as its theology. As if sensing this, the liberal-minority coalition now attacks the manifestations of Christianity rather than Christianity itself. Those in the vanguard of the attack, however, are already finding it simpler to silence prayers in public schools than it is to silence Christmas carols.

Many devout Christians, having taken note of the intelligentsia’s open season on religion and religious observances, conclude that they are living in a profane age. They are right to the extent that the times are inauspicious for organized religion. But, as pointed out earlier, the reservoir of human faith is always full. It is not the amount of faith that changes, it is the direction. Religious ages do not yield to ages of skepticism, as some historians pretend. Old established faiths simply give way to new inchoate faiths. Much of the religious feeling loose in the world is in the hearts of those who most object to being called religious.

The usual sequel to the decline of formal religion is the reappearance of the shaman or witchdoctor, whose bag of magic potions and cure-alls is as old as humanity itself. In times of established churches, the shaman must work in the shadows. But in eras of religious ‘freedom’ he is everywhere at once, gathering followers here, collecting donations there, and spreading the tidings of his own peculiar metaphysics up and down the land. Sometimes the shaman operates on the outer fringes of a universal religion. Sometimes he leads his flock out of one universal religion into another, as did Elijah Muhammad of the Black Muslims. Frequently, he dissociates himself from all contemporary religious manifestations and goes back to the primeval bedrock of religion to animism and anthropomorphism.

The phenomenal resurgence of astrology and soothsaying is one example of this trend. But the most striking evidence of the descent of religion from the sublime to the subliminal is provided by that special and somewhat illegitimate branch of psychology known as psychoanalysis. Here in one beguiling gift-wrapped box is almost all the religious stock-in-trade of ancient man -- interpretations of dreams, casting out of devils, incest myths, obsessive sexual teleologies, and confessionals. And the jack-in-the-box is none other than the grand old shaman himself, Sigmund Freud.

As a scientific method for the investigation of the inner man or as a therapeutic tool for mental illness, psychoanalysis can hardly be taken seriously by any rational person. Yet this masterwork of spiritual primitivism has been raised to such psychological, philosophical, and even religious heights that it has exercised and continues to exercise a deeply corrosive effect on Western manners and morals. In the realm of art and aesthetics, where it has probably done the most harm, psychoanalysis has taken man, once thought to be a little lower than the angels, and deescalated him to the level of the brute.

To learn about the workings of the human brain it would have seemed wiser to investigate the neuron, a physiological fact, than the id, ego, or superego, which are hardly more than psychological or, more accurately, psychomantic fancies. That Freud did not take the more difficult approach is one of the secrets of his popularity. Intuition and revelation, the scientific euphemism for which is synthesis, pack in a much bigger audience than long hours of controlled laboratory experiments. To establish and preserve his professional status, Freud coated his teachings with just enough psychological lore to convince the unwary, unstable, and untutored that he was not a humbug. His scientific pretensions notwithstanding, he operated more in the tradition of Joseph and Daniel, his remote forebears, than in the footsteps of those who performed the plodding, painful research responsible for the real advances in the study of human behavior.

After reading Freud one has difficulty in imagining how the world managed to get along until the advent of psychoanalysis. Either the pre-Freudian victims of neurosis never knew what they were suffering from, or the affliction was no older than the diagnosis. Though only the rich can afford psychoanalysis - at rates presently ranging from $50 to $200 an hour - the man-in-the-street undergoes it daily at bargain prices through the massive Freudian backwash in the arts. The greatest writers in modern English literature - Eliot, Yeats, and D. H. Lawrence, to name three - abhorred Freud, and Lawrence even went to the trouble of writing two anti-Freudian tracts, Fantasia of the Unconscious and Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious. But second-rate writers made Freudian theories and characters a central part of their work. James Joyce and Thomas Mann were two of the better novelists who borrowed from Freud, although Mann warned that there is an aspect of psychoanalysis which ‘maims life at its roots.’

Liberalism raised the environment to godhood. Freud preached the unconscious, the id, that seething mass of sex-ridden instincts and drives, that interior devil that can only be effectively exorcised by Freudian priests. Theoretically modern liberalism and psychoanalysis should have not one square inch of common ground. The former appeals, or pretends to appeal, to the rational in man; the latter to the irrational. Nevertheless there are subterranean links that establish a very strange symbiosis. Himself an authoritarian, Freud never let his writings stray beyond equalitarianism into the political area of race. A liberal in politics, a minority member, and an enemy of Nazism, he probably did as much as anyone to change the face of Western civilization, at least in the United States, where he was forgiven for his illiberal view of history and his sickening stress on the reptilian and mammalian aspects of human behavior, and welcomed into the club.

Freud sharpened his attack on the freedom of the will by classifying several important manifestations of individuality as repressions, which he defined as harbingers of neuroses, psychoses, or worse. One such repression was guilt, Freud’s favorite bogeyman, the elimination of which he set as one of the principal goals of psychotherapy. But by getting rid of guilt, one also gets rid of a bulwark of social stability - the most practical, or at least the most inexpensive, of all crime deterrents. If it had the choice, which would society prefer, murderers who feel guilty or those who don’t?

Freud’s advocacy of compliant adjustment to one’s surroundings is not unrelated to the widespread intellectual conformity which has descended on America. His cloacal approach to the roots of human thought and action has opened up a whole new dimension of vulgarity and tastelessness and helped smooth the way for the present Age of Pornography. The Freudian antidote for the mental imbalance caused by technology, deracination, and the contemporary social centrifuge is to rummage around the events of one’s childhood for sexual ghosts. The good doctor’s seething concern for the bizarre, the banal, and the perverse has attracted so many neurotic personalities to his camp it is often difficult to distinguish between patient and analyst.

A case in point is Dr. Douglas Kelley, one of the court-appointed psychiatrists of the Nuremberg trials, who wrote a bestseller on the neurotic tendencies of the incarcerated Nazi leaders, much of the space being devoted to an analysis of Hermann Goering. Later Kelley, like Goering, committed suicide by swallowing a cyanide pill. Another Freudian doctor, Wilhelm Reich, who died in Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary in 1957 while serving a sentence for mail fraud, founded and directed a schismatic psychoanalytic cult dedicated to the knowledge, function, and psychological ramifications of the orgasm.

In its aberrant attempts to cure or control mental disorders, psychoanalysis has been able to obscure but not bury certain axiomatic truths. The mind breaks down permanently or temporarily from overwork or overleisure. Some minds are born with organic defects. Some develop them. If the mind lives alone, if the mind tries to survive on its own waste, it becomes disordered. Sanity is a function of purpose. Remove the spiritual props, the cultural reinforcements, the time-tested morale builders, the four-dimensional insurance of family, race, nation, and church, and the delicate balance of the human mentality can easily crack. Even a brain as powerful as Nietzsche’s could not stand the strain of continuous isolation.

Psychoanalysis recognizes rootlessness as a cause of mental disorder, but it avoids the subject of racelessness, the extreme case of rootlessness. It stresses the importance to mental health of the feeling of belonging, but it ignores race consciousness, one of the most intensive expressions of the feeling of belonging. For such reasons psychoanalysis totally misses the point when if tries to explain the origins of the most pernicious mental affliction of all - the state of mind which leads to suicide.

Suicide is the tenth cause of death in the United States among the general population, the third cause among the 15-19 age group and the second cause among college students. Some of the lowest suicide rates are found in Mississippi and South Carolina; some of the highest in the Pacific states. One study revealed that the suicide rate of American whites was more than twice as great as that of American nonwhites. In 1950-77 the annual suicide rate for young white males rose from 3.5 per 100,000 to 15.3 per 100,000, an increase of 437 percent. In 1977, 1,871 Americans in the 15-19 year age bracket killed themselves.

The racial patterns that emerge from these statistics seem to be almost totally lost on psychoanalysts, who continue to explain suicide in terms of death wishes, depressive states, the frustration of high expectations (the poor don’t have such expectations), and the implosion of aggressive instincts. The statistics also stand in sharp contradiction to Marxist and environmentalist theories which would predict that the rich with their greater material blessings would be less apt to commit suicide than the poor.

It is, of course, the opposite that takes place. The greatest number of suicides occur not in the world’s backward areas, but in the more advanced. It is among the rich and ‘successful’ that the highest suicide rates are usually found, not among the poor. Where there is more racism, there is likely to be less suicide. Urbanism, loss of religion, career setbacks, and intellectual exhaustion are contributing factors to suicide, but an all-important correlation remains the ‘racial morale’ of a given population group at a given time.

Almost everyone who has studied the origins of psychoanalysis is aware that it is the product of the minority mind. Not only was Freud Jewish, but so were almost all his associates. Few, however, are aware that psychoanalysis is also the product of minority animus. According to Howard Sachar, a chief motivation of the pioneer Freudians was

the unconscious desire of Jews to unmask the respectability of the European society which closed them out. There was no more effective way of doing this than by dredging up from the human psyche the sordid and infantile sexual aberrations … Even Jews who were not psychiatrists must have taken pleasure in the feat of social equalization performed by Freud’s ‘new thinking.’ The B’nai B’rith Lodge of Vienna, for example, delighted in listening to Freud air his theories …

Freud can also count a large number of prominent social scientists among his following. Claude Lévi-Strauss, the ‘structural anthropologist,’ has injected the Freudian schematic into modern anthropology, writing in typical psychoanalytical jargon, ‘In the language ... of myth vomit is the correlative and inverse term of coitus and defecation is the correlative and inverse term to auditory communication.’

Herbert Marcuse, the late mentor of the New Left, constructed a synthesis of Marx and Freud, modifying and rearranging the Oedipus Complex in such a way that the father stands for capitalism and the parricidal son, the proletariat. Such fanciful nonsense would make interesting footnotes in a history of scholarly tomfoolery, if it were not taken seriously by so many liberal intellectuals.

It is to Freudianism and its basically hostile practitioners that the Majority member often comes when seeking relief from real or imagined mental illness. He is at once subjected to a sordid, demeaning, demoralizing, and deracinating interrogatory that extinguishes whatever sparks of self-respect he has left. The crux of his problem is not touched, and the problem itself is exacerbated. For the Majority patient, as he or, more usually, she may not discover in time, the psychoanalyst’s couch is the bed of Procrustes. In no area of the cultural clash has the toll of Majority psyches been so heavy.

Religious fervor can be a great catalyst of human energy. But a pseudo religion like Freudianism, when ministered by a minority priesthood to a Majority congregation, can only induce a lethargic hedonism that brings out the worst in everyone. What good can possibly come from what Jung has called those ‘frightful gods [who] have only changed their names and now ... rhyme with “ism” ’?

Dr. Percival Bailey, director of research at the Illinois Psychiatric Institute, in perhaps the most devastating attack ever written on Freud and his works, has predicted that psychoanalysis in the long run will probably be remembered as something akin to animal magnetism. As a means of avoiding the Freudian cul-de-sac which he asserts has never kept a psychiatric patient out of an asylum, as well as providing a cautionary guideline for the Majority member in search of a religion, Dr. Bailey invokes some memorable words of D.H. Lawrence:

The soul is not to pile up defenses around herself. She is not to withdraw and seek out her heavens inwardly, in mystical ecstasies. She is not to cry to some God beyond, for salvation. She is to go down the open road, as the road opens, into the unknown, keeping company with those whose soul draws them near to her, accomplishing nothing save the journey, and the works incident to the journey, in the long life-travel into the unknown, the soul, in her subtle sympathies accomplishing herself by the way.

The Unseen Power: Edward Bernays

Quotes from Scott M. Cutlip, The Unseen Power: Public Relations, a History (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, NJ., 1994)

Edward L. Bernays was born in Vienna, Austria, on November 22, 1891, the son of Eli Bernays and Anna Freud Bernays. The Bernays family had lived in Hamburg, Germany, for centuries after Bernays’s forebears had fled Spain during the Inquisition. Eli Bernays had moved to Vienna at an early age where he found a job as a secretary to an economics professor. There he met Anna Freud, sister of Sigmund Freud, the pioneering psychoanalyst. Freud in turn married Martha Bernays, Eli’s sister, that making young Edward a double-nephew of the famous man -- a fact that was an over arching presence in Bernays’s mind-set and practice. In 1890, Eli Bernays came to America to find a better opportunity for himself and his growing family. The elder Bernays found a place for himself on New York’s Produce Exchange and in 1892, brought his family to New York. His brother-in-law, Sigmund Freud, helped with the financial expenses of the move even though the brothers-in-law were not on the best of terms. Young Edward celebrated his first birthday aboard ship.

In an interview with me on March 12, 1959, Bernays recalled, “My earliest recollection is attending kindergarten in New York. Then I attended private and public schools. I went to DeWitt Clinton High School in 1908 and took a classical course, Greek, Latin, and the like.” In the fall of 1908, Bernays enrolled in the College of Agriculture at Cornell University. His high school grades had earned him a state scholarship that would have permitted him to enroll in any college at Cornell. But his parents insisted that he enroll in agriculture -- a field for which the young man was totally unsuited. Bernays told me, “My father had been influenced by Theodore Roosevelt’s ‘back to the land movement’ and my mother was a lover of nature, so I went to the Cornell University College of Agriculture.” This, as Bernays acknowledged, was a day when parents generally dictated a child’s choice of college. Bernays rebuffed my question as to whether the free tuition in a state school was a factor, saying, “My father was a well-to-do Produce Exchange member when I went to college.”

Bernays continued, “When I was graduated from Cornell, I knew I would not become a farmer and went to work on the Produce Exchange with a young former associate of my father’s. Office work, copying letters, stamping bills of lading, soon bored me, and I went off to Europe for the rest of the summer.” [pp.160-161]

After his return from Europe, young Bernays was at loose ends until one December morning he met up with a former schoolmate, Fred Robinson, when they were traveling on the recently electrified Ninth Avenue elevated. Fred was then helping his father, a physician, publish books, booklets, and a journal, Critic and Guide, that campaigned against the prevailing prudery of the time. Fred’s father had just given him two monthly medical magazines, Medical Review of Reviews and Dietetic and Hygienic Gazette. On the spur of the moment, Robinson asked, “Ed, how’d you like to help me run the Review and the Gazette?” Bernays’s response was quick and spontaneous, “Sure.” Bernays as a school pupil and high school student had found pleasure in working on his school papers. At Cornell, he had worked on the Countryman. When the son proudly announced to his parents that evening that he was going to work on medical journals the next morning, the Victorian father asked, “How can you be a competent editor of a medical journal when Cornell University prepared you for an agricultural career?” Little did the father know that his son’s job would lead him to his natural mètier, press gentry, and promotion. Bernays told me, “I had always liked communications and journalism.”

Bernays continued in our interview:

In 1913 I read a manuscript submitted to us about Damaged Goods, a propaganda play that fought for sex education. We published the manuscript. Within several weeks I heard that Richard Bennett [then a famous actor] wanted to produce the play. He was unable to because of its strong content for the period, an era Comstockery. I suggested to him and to Fred Robinson that we organize the “Medical Review of Reviews Sociological Fund,” selling memberships in the fund. As a result we produced the play.

Bernays expanded on this landmark event in his career in his memoirs:

Suddenly an idea came to me. Damaged Goods could be produced by Medical Review of Reviews Sociological Fund Committee. We would organize the fund and the committee, made up of distinguished men and women. This would raise the funds necessary for the production. Our office would be headquarters for both. . . . Fund membership of four dollars would entitle a person to a ticket to Damaged Goods. This would defray production costs, which were negligible because Bennett's actors were donating their services. . . . My salary would be twenty-five dollars a week. The Medical Review of Reviews would make no profit.

This was a pioneering move that is common today in the promotion of public causes -- a prestigious sponsoring committee. In retrospect, given the history of public relations, it might be termed the first effort to use the front or third party technique. Bernays was “careful to invite men and women whose good faith was beyond question and who would be responsive to our cause.” “Hundreds of checks poured in after our first public announcement.” Bernays also solicited testimonials from prominent people and got John D. Rockefeller, Jr. to comment for publication, “The evils springing from prostitution cannot be understood until frank discussion of them has been made possible.” The play was presented to a full house on the afternoon of March 14, 1913. Among those in the audience were Mr. and Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt. Next morning’s papers gave the sensational play full coverage. With the play’s success, Richard Bennett took his rights to Damaged Goods and ran, telling Bernays and Robinson, “I don’t need you or your damned sociological fund any more. I’ll start my own fund.”

Questioned about this innovation in our 1959 interview, Bernays expanded:

We used it (the idea of a prestigious sponsoring committee) many times since then because I think it is still the most useful method in a multiple society like ours to indicate the support of an idea of the many varied elements that make up our society. Opinion molders and group leaders have an effect in a democracy and stand as symbols to their constituency. . . . I might add, however, that when this was done, we did it in an open or overt way.

Bernays emphasized the last point because by 1959 use of fronts or third party techniques had come under heavy fire from the critics of public relations and issues in landmark lawsuits.

Building the public opinion that had permitted and funded this then sensational play had been a heady experience for young Bernays, then 22 years old. He found return to the routines of magazine editing boring. Once again bored, he took off for Europe with the money he had saved while working on the magazine and tutoring on the side. His time in Europe included a good visit with his Uncle Sigmund. In the fall of 1913, when Bernays returned to the United States, he decided “to become a newspaperman.” But it was to press agentry that he gravitated -- an art for which he was a natural talent. He told me, “I decided that I liked the theater, wrote to Klaw and Erlanger for a job, and that started my career in publicity. I became the publicity man for a whole string of actors and plays that kept me busy from 1913 to 1915. Then I was offered a partnership in the Metropolitan Musical Bureau and remained there to handle a concert tour of Caruso and Nijinsky and the Russian Ballet.”

The dull blanket of war and turmoil fell across this happy existence when President Woodrow Wilson persuaded Congress to declare war on Germany and the Central Powers in April 1917. “Immediately in 1917 when war broke out, I tried every possible way to get into war service, but my eyesight was poor. It was not until 1918 that I went to work with the United States Committee on Public Information (CPI).” Finally a friend, George Cosgrove, introduced Bernays to Ernest Poole, head of the Committee on Public Information's Foreign Press Bureau, and in 1918, after getting military clearance, Bernays went to work in the bureau's New York office. In his autobiography, The Bridge, Ernest Poole, praised Bernays as “one of the ablest and most devoted younger workers on our staff.” In their Words That Won the War, Mock and Larson wrote, “The two most important figures in the CPI invasion of Latin America were Lieutenant F. E. Ackerman and Edward L. Bernays,” adding, “Creel was not uniformly pleased with the post-Armstice work of Bernays, but everyone granted the importance of his contributions while we were still at war.” [pp.162-163]

George Creel, director of the CPI, included Bernays in the official party to accompany President Wilson to the Versailles Peace Conference where the CPI, according to early plans, would provide “technical assistance” to the press covering the conference. The party left from New York on the Baltic on November 10, 1918. According to Bernays, Poole instructed him to issue a release prior to the CPI party’s departure. As would happen on later occasions, Bernays’s penchant for publicity got him in hot water. Bernays’s release announced that the Official Press Mission to the Peace Conference was leaving the next day for Paris and instead of the narrow technical press support mission Creel had defined for the group, Bernays inserted this sentence: “The announced object of the expedition is to interpret the work of the Peace Conference by keeping up a worldwide propaganda to disseminate American accomplishments and ideals.” Two days later, the New York World headlined the story: “TO INTERPRET AMERICAN IDEALS.” George Creel was furious; already in a battle with Congress, Creel knew that this would add fat to the fire. He disavowed the story. Nonetheless, it hastened the demise of the CPI.

Mock and Larson reported more blandly that Creel was displeased at the “way Bernays was handling publicity for the group towards the end.” Creel’s ire was brought about because Republican Senators, already antagonistic toward him, attacked him for this presumptuous release. The upshot of this that the CPI never functioned at the Paris Conference as had been planned. Bernays related, “We never did what it was intended to do. My speculation is that if Creel had insisted on carrying out his original intention, world history might have been different because America would have been informed of the activities at the conference,” Bernays insisted to me that “Mock and Larson’s conclusion relative to Creel’s attitude toward me, was not based on true fact.”

Bernays told me in the 1959 interview:

The work I did for the C. P. I., based upon my publicity experience, aroused some interest at the time. It gave me the first real understanding of the power of ideas as weapons and words as bullets. When I came back from the war, I recognized consciously what we had done to make “the world safe for democracy” in intensifying the attitude of our own people in support of our war aims and ideals, in winning over the neutrals and in deflating enemy morale. [p.165]

BERNAYS AND CARL BYOIR TEAM UP -- BRIEFLY

Bernays and Carl Byoir, who starting in 1930 built the most successful public relations agency of its time, had a somewhat distant relationship during their days in CPI. Byoir was in Washington managing the agency as Creel’s deputy, while Bernays was in the New York office in a lesser role. They were together in the CPI delegation Creel selected to go to Paris. Immediately after World War I, Byoir and Bernays came together in a brief association to promote recognition of Lithuania’s independence. In that brief time, Bernays envisioned the opportunity to use public relations as a lucrative vocation; Byoir wouldn’t. Ultimately, Byoir came back to public relations in 1930 and made his mark as well as millions. His story is told in chapters 17 and 18. The Bernays-Byoir story goes this way.

Shortly after his return from Paris, Bernays was having lunch with Byoir, who suddenly asked him, “Would you like to do publicity on a free lance basis for the (Lithuanian National) Council trying to win support of the American people for Lithuanian recognition?” The next day Byoir, on behalf of the Council, contracted with Bernays to advise the Council on how to meet their objective and write six short articles a week about Lithuania for newspapers.

Aided by Bernays, Byoir’s task was to mobilize public opinion that would assure affirmative action by the U. S. Senate on a resolution extending such recognition. They waged a successful campaign, using techniques developed in the Creel Committee. They spread their message through chosen spokesmen in the nation’s large cities and the newspapers. They were successful in eliciting editorials and telegrams to U. S. Senators supporting the Lithuanian cause.

In 1919, The Senate duly recognized Lithuania as an independent nation, but formal U. S. recognition did not come until July 1922. Bernays recorded in his 1965 memoirs that this campaign was “the prototype of modern-day public relations techniques.” He described it as a “pioneering effort to mobilize public opinion.”

To spread these targeted messages, Bernays distributed the articles to newspapers, syndicated feature services, and trade papers. His clipping bureau returned hundreds of stories from newspapers across the country. In a victorious America that had successfully fought a war to make the world safe for democracy, Bernays found a favorable public opinion climate for his propaganda efforts.

The Lithuania National Council paid Byoir $23,000 to defray the costs of the campaign. Byoir paid Bernays a $150 weekly salary but took no salary himself. The success of the Lithuanian campaign persuaded the perceptive Bernays there was money to be made on this new vocation, then burgeoning in the wake of World War I. [pp.165-166]

Bernays’s thinking at this crucial juncture in his career had been heavily influenced by his work for the CPI. In our interview, he said, “There was one basic lesson I learned in the CPI -- that efforts comparable to those applied by the CPI to affect the attitudes of the enemy, of neutrals, and people of this country could be applied with equal facility to peacetime pursuits. In other words, what could be done for a nation at war could be done for organizations and people in a nation at peace.” [p.168]

Bernays’s relationship as a double nephew of the famous Sigmund Freud exerted a profound influence on Bernays’s public relations concepts and was a central theme in his indefatigable self-promotion over his long career. More importantly, Bernays’s early publicizing of his uncle’s revolutionary theories of psychoanalysis in the United States in 1920 had profound impact on American thought. Once again there is the significant impact of public relations practice on American society. Thus, this relationship merits an accounting.

When a person would first meet Bernays, it would not be long until Uncle Sigmund would be brought into the conversation. His relationship to Freud was always in the forefront of his thinking and his counseling. In his profile of Bernays, Irwin Ross caught this quickly when he interviewed him in the 1960s: “Addressing a client or a reporter, he displays the tolerant, unruffled manner of a psychoanalyst-an appropriate resemblance for Bernays’ proudest family connection was the late Sigmund Freud, his uncle, and Bernays liked to think of himself as a kind of psychoanalyst to troubled corporations.”

The Freudian influence is first clearly evident in Bernays’s seminal book, Crystallizing Public Opinion, published in 1923 shortly after he had arranged for and publicized Freud’s book, Introductory Lectures in Psychoanalysis in the United States. For example, in his chapter “The Group and the Herd,” Bernays wrote, “We have gone somewhat elaborately into the fundamental equipment of the mind and its relation to the group mind because the public relations counsel in his work in these fields must constantly call upon his knowledge of individual and group psychology.”

When I asked if Freud’s theories had influenced him, Bernays replied, “I would say very definitely yes to this question. Although I do not qualify as a psychoanalyst, because I was brought up in a background of psychology and my uncle’s methods, I have undoubtedly gotten a lot of it by osmosis, and what I didn’t get by osmosis, I got from reading his works. As a matter-of-fact, as far back as 1923, in Crystallizing Public Opinion, I urged the study of social sciences as underlying a sound approach to public relations.”

Little wonder that Henry F. Pringle, writing in the February 1930 issue of The American Mercury tagged Bernays with the title “Mass Psychologist.” Pringie wrote, “Nephew Eddie can foretell the future. He makes no claim to crystal gazing, as such. He would modestly deny that he is clairvoyant. His science, once understood, is really very simple. What he does is to create a demand by molding the public mind. He creates a desire for specified goods or services. It is not often that mass psychology fails to find a solution.” [pp.170-171]

Even though he never profited monetarily from his efforts to promote the Freudian theory of psychoanalysis, Bernays gained favorable public attention through this association. More importantly, he publicized and popularized the new science of psychoanalysis in the United States with a profound effect on American mores.

The Bernays-managed publication of his uncle’s book and his ceaseless publicizing of Freudian theories had a far-reaching influence on American thought then and to this day. It fully illustrates a basic theme of this volume - the unseen power of the public relations specialist on American political, social, and cultural thoughts. Publication of Freud’s lectures was indeed timely - his theories of sexual freedom fit neatly into the context of the Roaring Twenties of post-World War I. Freud’s name in the 1920s became inextricably linked with the idea of social reform as well as sexual freedom. Ultimately, it became more. As Dr. E. Fuller Torrey wrote in a harsh book, The Malignant Effect of Freud’s Theory on American Thought and Culture, “The name Freud, once merely a euphemism for sex with overtones of social reform and liberal political belief, slowly became reified into a broader symbol of nongenetic approaches to human behavior, liberalism, and humanism.” [pp.175-176]

Bernays’s most enduring contribution to the development of public relations was his landmark book, Crystallizing Public Opinion, first published in 1923 and then republished in 1961 on the occasion of his 70th birthday. In this book, Bernays was the first to set down the rationale for public relations as a function in management, introduce the two-way concept of public relations in contra-distinction to one-way publicity, and introduce the term public relations counsel in the American lexicon. In this book, Bernays developed the theory of public relations as a two-way mediating-interpretation liaison between an organization and its constituent publics, a theory that has stood the test of 70 years, though it did not gain the acceptance of management until years later. In this landmark work, Bernays stressed that public relations theory and practice must be based on a full knowledge of the social sciences, another concept new for that time. [p.176]

A British government public information office, J. A. R. Pimlott, gave an outsider’s view of American public relations in 1951 in his book, Public Relations and American Democracy. He said, “Bernays’s book . . . though published as long ago as 1923, stood alone among works dealing specifically with public relations in having exerted any influence outside the narrow public relations world or much influence within it.”

In his little book Two-Way Street, subsidized by Bernays, Eric Goldman wrote:

The book emphatically disassociated public relations from either press agentry or mere publicity work. The public relation man’s primary function, Bernays declared, was “not to bring his clients by chance to the public’s attention, nor to extricate them from difficulties into which they have already drifted …” Developing its fullest kind of thinking toward which men of the Lee school had been tending, Bernays declared the primary function to be both the changing of public policy and public attitudes so as to bring about a rapport between the two. . . . He helps to mold the action of his client as well as to mold public opinion.

Running through Bernays’s discussion was an emphasis on the social role of public relations. He challenged the contention that the public relations man was inevitably, or even primarily, the defender of the status quo. The greatest bulwarks of the status quo were the stereotypes of the public mind that prevented people from seeing in terms of experience and thought and hence impelled them to oppose new points of view. Bernays argued that the social value of the public relations counsel lies in the fact that he brings to the public facts and ideas that would not so readily gain acceptance otherwise. Bernays emphasized in this path-breaking work that the public relations man’s ability to influence public opinion placed upon him an ethical duty above that of his clients to the larger society. Though these seem like platitudes today, they were revolutionary thoughts in the adolescent vocation. [p.177]

There was plenty of adverse reaction to Bernays’s revolutionary concepts of the ways of dealing with public opinion. Using loaded words, the Survey said, “Mr. Bernays writes frankly of the processes by which the herd instincts are exploited in the instincts of a new and far-ranging salesmanship.” Ernest Gruening, a social critic of the period and later a United States Senator from Alaska, wrote in a 1924 review for the Nation:

This new sublimation is in response to an obvious need. Mr. Bernays points out that . . . perhaps the most significant social, political and industrial fact about the present century is the increased attention paid to public opinion, “especially by men and organizations whose attitude not long ago would have been “The public be damned”. . . . Will the final result be greatly different for the public which, while it no longer tolerates being “damned,” guilelessly permits itself to be “bunked”? Is seduction preferable to ravishment?

Further, Gruening pooh-poohed Bernays’s claim that the public relation counsel serves as a conscience for his client, writing, “Not only may one doubt that the glorified press agent will fulfill this destiny, but that a public conscience thus created would be useful or desirable.” There were other voices of concern about the potential power of this new breed. [p.179]

SECOND BOOK, PROPAGANDA, CONFUSES AND BRINGS CRITICISM

A public relations historian, Marvin N. Olasky, in a Bernays perspective, in Public Relations Review, Fall 1984, described Bernays’s purpose in this book: “Bernays was one of the first to realize fully that American 20th Century liberalism would be increasingly based on social control posing as democracy, and would be desperate to learn all the opportunities for social control that it could. Thus his candor in Propaganda.” Writing in the Independent of September 1, 1928, Bernays gave this defense of his book:

It is altogether fitting and proper . . . to inquire in the light of the last ten years what have been the developments in postwar propaganda, especially as applied to industry -- to Big Business. The World War left business astounded at what the technique of propaganda had accomplished in the conflict. Not only had it raised men and money for individual Governments. There had been propaganda in favor of the love of nations, and other propaganda for the hate of other nations -- all successful. Big Business was not the first force to recognize what it could mean to it. The war had brought about big money deficiencies in the funds of colleges and other . . . social service bodies. The war technique was turned to the solution of these problems. [p.184]

In the Survey of 1929, Leon Whipple wrote of the new Bernays beliefs:

Somebody “who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses” should manipulate these controls so that people can know what to believe or buy. The counsel steps in to help -- at a price. He rides here in a world of “high spotting,” fashion-making window dressing, blind instincts and artificial habits, where events are created to make news, and indirection is the watchword. . . . The book is worth reading, for the Herr Doktor gives an almost metaphysical exposition of his creed. . . . The general idea is to control every approach to the public mind so we get the desired impression, often unconsciously. [p.185]

“THE ENGINEERING OF CONSENT” -- ANOTHER CLUB FOR PUBLIC RELATIONS’ CRITICS

In 1935, Bernays handed the growing army of critics of the field, now populated in substantial numbers, another weapon to fire at practitioners when he wrote an article, “The Engineering of Consent,” for the Annals of Social and Political Science. His essay was in a special issue, “Pressure Groups and Propaganda.” Bernays explained his purpose, “I first studied books on medicine and law to find whether doctors and lawyers apply a common procedure to every case. I found that they do. I then tried to find a common approach to public affairs -- as well as other public relations problems.” He argued, “An engineering approach is essential because of the myriad choices to be made and interests to be dealt with -- internal and external publics, their group leaders and opinion molders, the broadcast and print media. Engineering of consent deals both with attitudes and actions of the business man, consistent with coincidence of the public and private interest, and their communications to the publics concerned, to inform and persuade.” [p.186]