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We continue our look at historical visions of beauty today with the birth of the public relations movement. Long before the Marlboro Man and Joe Camel, there was Edward Bernays, who associated smoking as a form of weight-control amongst American women.

In order to mobilize public opinion behind the World War I effort, American President Wilson formed the Committee of Public Information (CPI), thus marking the American government’s first foray into the illicit realms of propagandist methodology.

The CPI’s zealous use of literature, posters, films, and other material equating the American cause with that of democracy and patriotism gave rise to a movement for the homogenization of the American melting pot by eliminating “un-American” influences. The ensuing xenophobic hysteria that followed would demonize German-Americans and serve as a basis for future ethnic discrimination.

One CPI graduate would take the knowledge he gleaned while serving in the CPI and apply it to America’s newest propaganda organization: public relations. While Edward Bernays did not invent public relations, he was nonetheless one of its most capable and influential cultivators.

The key to Bernays’ success, claims historian Larry Tye, is what he has dubbed his “Big Think” theory: “…hired to sell a product or service, [Bernays] instead sold whole new ways of behaving, which appeared obscure but over time reaped huge rewards for his clients and redefined the very texture of American life.”*

And one of Bernays most successful tactics can be found in his post-war campaign for Lucky Strikes cigarettes. At the end of the war, George Washington Hill, head of the American Tobacco Company, hired Bernays to help him win over the huge potential female market for Lucky Strikes.

To accomplish this, Bernays went about “crystallizing public opinion” among women in favor of smoking through a covert campaign that tied cigarettes to health, beauty, and feminism. To support Hill’s slogan, “Reach for A Lucky Instead of a Sweet” he enlisted experts in the fashion and health industries to write about the benefits of slimness and the dangers of sugar.

Instead of eating between meals … instead of fattening sweets … beautiful women keep youthful slenderness these days by smoking Luckies. The smartest and loveliest women of the modern stage take this means of keeping slender … when others nibble fattening sweets, they light a Lucky!

And in proving Tye’s theory, Bernays would not only sell cigarettes, he would sell a entirely new cultural code to women in which weight is seen as the enemy, to be avoided at all costs.

*Work cited: Tye, Larry. The Father of Spin: Edward L. Bernays and the Birth of Public Relations. York University Press, 1997.