The Fish That Ate the Whale (27 page)

Where did the interest of United Fruit end and the interest of the United States begin? It was impossible to tell. That was the point of all Sam's hires: If I can perfectly align the interests of my company with the interests of top officials in the U.S. government—not the interests of the country, but the interests of the people in charge of the country—then the United States will secure my needs.

*   *   *

Zemurray's most important hire was Edward Bernays, the man who invented modern public relations. Bernays approached the age of mass media like a scientist in search of general principles, which he recorded in articles and books:
Crystallizing Public Opinion
,
Propaganda
,
The Engineering of Consent
.

He had two basic insights from which everything else followed:

First: modern society, with its millions, is essentially ungovernable. The public must instead be controlled by manipulation. The men who do this manipulating, in government or not, are the true leaders, philosopher-kings. They need not manipulate all the people, only the few thousand who set the agenda. The drivers of history are not the people, in other words, nor the elite who influence the people, but the PR men who influence the elite who influence the people. “Those who manipulate [the] unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power,” wrote Bernays. “We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.”

Second: the people can be made to behave as you want them to behave via the subconscious of the public mind—no one else believed such a thing existed—which can be directed with symbols and signs. “If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind,” asked Bernays, “is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it?”

Editor & Publisher
called Bernays the “young Machiavelli of our time.”
The Atlantic
titled its profile on him “The Science of Ballyhoo.” In a letter to FDR, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter characterized Bernays and others in his trade as “professional poisoners of the public mind.” To someone like Frankfurter, a public relations man was a cross between a hypnotist and a snake-oil salesman. In 1933, a Hearst reporter told Bernays that
Crystallizing Public Opinion
was a favorite book of Joseph Goebbels, the minister of propaganda in Nazi Germany, who, the reporter said, was using Bernays's ideas to design his campaign against the Jews. “It shocked me,” Bernays wrote, “but I knew any human activity can be used for social purposes or misused for antisocial ones.”

Edward Bernays, born in Vienna, Austria, in 1891, spent his first birthday on the ship that carried him to New York. He was Jewish, but neither poor, nor huddled, nor part of the masses he would spend his lifetime manipulating. His family was, in fact, illustrious, counting among its forebears Heinrich Heine and the chief rabbi of Hamburg. His father, a wealthy grain merchant, had a sister, and she married a Viennese man named Sigmund Freud. In other words, Freud was the PR man's uncle. In his writings, Bernays recalled vacations to a family summer house in the Austrian Tyrol, where he spent time with Uncle Sigmund. “Although Freud was almost a quarter century my senior, we got along like two contemporaries,” Bernays wrote in his autobiography. “Freud and I took long walks together through the woods that surrounded Carlsbad, he in pepper-and-salt knickerbockers, green Tyrolean hat with feather and ram's horn stuck in the hat band, brown hand-knit socks, heavy brown brogues and sturdy walking stick—and I in my Brooks Brothers suit. We walked over the sloping hills, talking all the way.”

Bernays claimed he crafted his philosophy under the influence of Freud, specifically the notion of a public subconscious, a concept Freud himself would surely have rejected.

Bernays grew up in apartments all over the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He was a short man, five four in fancy shoes, a trim hyphen of a mustache. His first job was in publishing, as editor of the
Medical Review of Reviews
, a magazine filled with research articles on goiter pain. He exceeded his mandate at the magazine, championing an unsolicited play—a play sent to a medical journal!—that dramatized syphilis via a dozen characters who pay for one night of sin. It was called
Damaged Goods
. Bernays said he published the play as an act of conscience, but he clearly saw it as a way out of the boring world of medical jargon and into the bright lights of Broadway. He described it as a warning to the young and a call to acknowledge those syphilitics who suffer quietly among us. The publication of the play was reported in newspapers and journals. Bernays then contacted a theatrical producer who had turned down the play previously and convinced him that, with all the media attention,
Damaged Goods
could be marketed as a public service. Bernays filled the seats at the first performance with doctors and social workers, who then sat on panels and wrote editorials.
Damaged Goods
was a hit. You had to see it even if you didn't want to. It was performed at the White House for President Wilson. Bernays had pioneered a trick he would use throughout his career. If you want to advance a private interest, turn it into a public cause.

He worked on other plays, including Jean Webster's
Daddy-Long-Legs
, a precursor to
Little Orphan Annie.
Audiences were asked to make a contribution to the Daddy-Long-Legs Fund—look for the cans in the lobby. In the end, it was not plays that interested Bernays: it was trends, driving opinion. In 1915, he opened a public relations firm. There had been others—the literary bureau of Mutual Life Insurance, 1888; the Publicity Bureau, 1900; Ivy Ledbetter Lee's Parker and Lee, 1905—but Bernays's firm was the most influential. He coined the term “public relations.” Before that, practitioners had been known as “press agents.” A press agent is a boozy hack with a big mouth; a public relations expert is a scientist. Early clients included Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, which Bernays made famous in America, and Enrico Caruso, whom Bernays tagged “the man with the orchid-lined voice.”

In 1928, Bernays was hired by George Washington Hill, the owner of the American Tobacco Company, to expand the cigarette market. Especially irksome to Hill was the convention that kept women from smoking in public, behavior considered unladylike. Hill tried to sell smoking to women as a way to shed pounds, strike a pose, stay alert, but nothing worked. Bernays told Hill that he should instead link his private interest—get women to smoke more—to a public cause. With this in mind, he planted newspaper articles that challenged the taboo against female public smoking, arguing that cigarettes were neither a dirty habit nor a weight-loss tool, but a symbol of empowerment. He took out an ad, calling women to “smoke out”: the female citizens of New York were asked to leave their offices one afternoon and stroll along Fifth Avenue, puffing all the way. This was followed by “smokeouts” across the country. Bernays claimed he had not invented the issue—women really did want to smoke in public—but had merely exploited an existing sentiment, “crystallizing public opinion” and “manufacturing consent,” just as Joseph Goebbels did not invent the hatred of the Jews in Germany but merely exploited an existing sentiment, crystallizing public opinion and manufacturing consent for the Holocaust.

By the 1930s, Bernays was a leading media figure in the United States. His clients included General Motors, General Electric, United States Radium, Eugene O'Neill, Georgia O'Keeffe, Mutual Benefit Life Insurance, Columbia Broadcasting System, National Broadcasting,
Cosmopolitan
,
Fortune
,
Good Housekeeping
,
Ladies' Home Journal
,
Time
, Woolworth, Macy's, and the government of India. He described his grand strategy as indirection. If General Motors hired Joe Schmo to sell cars, Joe Schmo would give an interview to
Road & Track
, telling them the specs of the Thunderbird, engine size in cubic inches, zero-to-sixty, and so on. Given the same job, Bernays would lobby Congress for higher speed limits, making it more fun to own a Thunderbird. Rather than fight for a single season of sales, he would make the world more friendly to his product. In the 1950s, a consortium of publishers—including Harcourt Brace and Simon & Schuster—concerned about a dip in numbers, hired Bernays. Did he go into schools and make the case for books? No, he talked to the architects and contractors who were designing the new suburban homes and convinced them a house is not modern if it does not include built-in bookshelves.

Indirection.

*   *   *

Zemurray hired Bernays in 1944. Their first meeting took place in Zemurray's office on Pier 3 in Manhattan. “Mr. Zemurray sat at a flat-top desk in a large room overlooking the Hudson,” Bernays wrote. “A tall, well-built man, six feet two or three, he towered over me as he stood to greet me. His accent was slightly guttural, a hangover from immigrant days, I learned later. He had great surety about himself, and after a few minutes of conversation I recognized I was in the presence of a wise, strong, mature man. Zemurray was an extraordinary man,” Bernays continued, “experienced in the rough and tumble action of the banana business, and with a broad, liberal, philosophical bent. In years of meeting tycoons, I had met few who combined as he did the ability to think abstractly and to translate ideas into actions.”

Bernays was asked to help grow the banana market, which he did in all the usual ways: by stressing the nutritional value of warm-weather fruit, by bemoaning the bland nature of American breakfast. But his job changed dramatically in the mid-1940s when the Guatemalan president Juan Arévalo pressed for land reform. Bernays had been worried about the atmosphere on the isthmus since his first days with the company. His belief in indirection kept him focused on the big picture. The fisherman worries about the size of the catch; the philosopher worries about the soul of the river. “I kept insisting to Zemurray that revolutionary movements would spread in Middle America, as they had in other parts of the world,” Bernays explained. “Despite his wisdom and mature judgment, Zemurray kept pooh-poohing this warning. The Indians, he said, were too ignorant; they had no channels of communication, no press or radio, which drew dissidents together in other parts of the world. How could ideas of communism be spread from one person to another—ignorant persons at that—without primary channels of communication?”

When Zemurray finally accepted the seriousness of the Guatemala situation, he called Bernays into his office and asked him what should be done.

Bernays said he needed to study the problem.

Zemurray told him to go down, take a look, and report back.

Bernays spent several weeks on the isthmus, traveling compound to compound, talking to banana men, laborers, government officials, peasants, people in town. He took notes, sketched ideas. “This whole matter of effective counter-Communism propaganda is not one of improvising,” he wrote in a 1952 memo to Ed Whitman, “[but requires] the same type of scientific approach that is applied, let us say, to the problem of fighting a certain plant disease through a scientific method of approach.”

In other words, blast them till they're as blue as parakeets.

Bernays devised a strategy built on his trademark tricks. By 1952, Jacobo Arbenz was the issue, yet the solution was not direct confrontation. That would only increase Arbenz's standing, threatening United Fruit. But if the company could turn its corporate challenge (Arbenz is confiscating land) into a problem for the United States (Communists are infiltrating the isthmus), the U.S. government would take care of the rest. Never mind that Arbenz claimed no allegiance to the Communist Party; never mind that Arbenz cited Franklin Roosevelt as among his heroes; never mind that many of the Arbenz policies that United Fruit found so offensive were patterned on the New Deal—the signs were evident for those who knew where to look. (Doesn't the Comintern allow adherents to obfuscate their true nature in the process of infiltration?) There was, for example, the fact that Arbenz included Communists in his government and seemed to support the spirit of communism as a whole; there was the fact of land reform, which replicated the policy of Communist governments everywhere; there was also the rhetoric, the interviews and the speeches—Arbenz sounded like a Communist; there was the statecraft, too, which, like a star speeding away, shifted red. In 1953, when Joseph Stalin died, Arbenz declared a day of mourning in Guatemala. As it says in the book of Matthew, “You shall know them by their fruits.”

Bernays set various goals: convince the American people of the Communist presence in Guatemala; convince members of Congress the issue is a winner; convince the CIA, which can actually do something on the ground, it's time to act. Bernays wouldn't make the world better for bananas, he would make the world better for American politicians, who would make the world better for the CIA, which would make the world better for bananas.

Indirection.

*   *   *

If Zemurray seemed less actively involved in Guatemala than he had once been in Honduras, that's probably because he had moved into a new stage of life, taken on a new role in the company: no longer on the ground with the machete and vaqueros, he had gone into the shadows, where he operated as a puppet master, watching, waiting, giving a tiny nod—plausible deniability—that serves as the green light. He vanished into the background, became the manipulator described in the most paranoid rants. For the first time in his life, he worked entirely through underlings and advisers. He must have known the company was on dangerous ground. Guatemala was something new and terrible even in the history of the banana trade. The company was perverting the politics and social life of the country just as it had already polluted its soil and fields.