Lawrence R Samuel. The Oxford Handbook of Propaganda Studies. Editor: Jonathan Auerbach & Russ Castronovo. December 2013.
“Intelligent men must realize that propaganda is the modern instrument by which they can fight for productive ends and help to bring order out of chaos.” — Edward L. Bernays, Propaganda, 1928
Between the 1930s and the 1950s, a unique set of forces came together to forge a communications and cultural landscape that was heavily propagandist in both character and influence. Although their goals were dramatically different, Nazi fascist propaganda of the 1930s and early 1940s and American advertising and consumer culture of the 1950s had a lot more in common than one might (and might like to) think. Each was a dedicated and concerted effort to, as Edward Bernays neatly expressed it, “bring order out of chaos,” each sharing deep roots in Freudian psychoanalytic theory. Making sense out of confusion, turning irrationality into reason, and transforming diversity into unity were the ideological bridges that supported much of the social, political, and economic dynamics of Western society over the course of these three decades. The widespread and virulent propaganda of the times signaled a profound interest in and perceived need for the values of efficiency, consensus, and control. Whether ultimately intended to promote unity, encourage hate, satisfy desires, or control consumer behavior, the alchemy of converting chaos into order was a prime concern as individuals, organizations, and nations struggled for political power and economic gain.
This essay examines how and why propagandist theory and techniques took root in Europe and America over the course of these three decades of the twentieth century. Although much has been written about Nazi propaganda, the utilization of propagandist strategies by American advertisers after the Second World War is lesser known. Just as Bernays viewed propaganda as a “modern instrument” that could serve “productive ends,” motivation research was a powerful tool for Big Business in the postwar years. Psychological techniques from motivation research to subliminal advertising, which targeted the unconscious, were put in play to help keep Americans vested in the social, political, and economic interests of consumer capitalism. Penetrating the unconscious through psychoanalytic techniques exposed consumers’ wants and needs, motivation research theory suggested. This going around or through the rational conscious was considered the key to effective mass propaganda. By identifying and appealing to consumers’ universal desires, advertising (which Garth Jowett and Victoria O’Donnell have equated with propaganda) could be made far more efficient, much of its well-acknowledged waste eliminated. Order could thus be brought to chaos, and the irrationalism of “the crowd” safely contained and profitably commodified.
Better, Higher, and Purer
Arguably, no one more than Edward Bernays, “the father of public relations,” understood the possibilities of propaganda better or took fuller advantage of them. (Indeed, he literally wrote the book on the subject, and his 1928 Propaganda is still considered a masterpiece.) As Sigmund Freud’s (double) nephew, Bernays’s vision was also steeped in psychoanalytic theory, although his orientation toward public relations was far more practical than theoretical. Publicity was, in Bernays’s words, a “potent social instrument,” able to “organize chaos” by turning confusion and disarray into order. In his book Crystallizing Public Opinion, written five years before Propaganda, Bernays laid out his elitist view that the masses looked to experts like himself for guidance. (He and Progressive intellectual Walter Lippmann, author of Public Opinion [in 1922] and The Phantom Public [in 1927] appeared to be playing a game of literary tag.) Rather than cold hard logic, Bernays argued, suppressed desire was the force that drove most consumer decisions. In his account, the unconscious played a pivotal role in determining which products one purchased (and did not purchase). It was the common longings of the masses—sex, hunger, safety—rather than their differences that served as the skeleton key of persuasion, Bernays (and, a generation later, Ernest Dichter, as we shall see) made clear. For Bernays, reasoning with consumers was a strategy that had little or no chance of success, given the emotional nature of the human race.
Bernays and other American public relations experts were not the only ones to use principles laid out by Freud to mold the mind of the masses and, in the process, create order out of chaos. As key Frankfurt School member Theodor Adorno deftly discussed in a 1951 article called “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda,” the Nazis relied heavily on psychological forces to persuade fellow citizens to join their cause. Adorno proposed that Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1922) had presented the theoretical platform the Nazis would employ a decade later to construct their fascist political movement. Whether Hitler (ironically) read Freud’s book is unclear, but there is little doubt that Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda Joseph Goebbels studied Bernays’s Propaganda to help forge his program of mass persuasion, a fact that Bernays mentions in his 1965 autobiography, almost as an aside.
Freud built on Gustave Le Bon’s theory of “the crowd,” Adorno explained, the two sharing the belief that people in group situations were irrational and easily influenced. Freud rejected Le Bon’s concept of the “herd instinct,” however, looking more to libidinal forces as responsible for turning individuals into the “mass.” Being part of a group was an opportunity for individuals to forget their own faults, Freud argued, a pleasurable experience to be had by (unconsciously) surrendering and submitting to a larger, collective purpose. Individuals regressed when they identified with group leaders with a strong authoritarian streak, forming a relationship not unlike that between child and parent. And, like children eager to please their parents, those subscribing to a fascist regime were happy to obey the orders of a dictator, their mindset akin to a hypnotic state.
The Third Reich’s ability to enlist ordinary citizens to its fascist movement and create an extreme state of order from what had been an extreme state of social, economic, and political confusion rested on this psychological model, according to Adorno. With Hitler as the father figure (“Fuhrer” means “leader” or “guide” in German), perceived as an omnipotent Everyman, a strong emotional tie or bond was established between him and his “children.” Such a demagogue was viewed as an enlargement of oneself, according to Freudian theory, with the process drawing on the key concepts of projection, idealization, and narcissism. The flip side of loving people like oneself was, of course, hating those who were different; this was the component that demonstrated the potential consequences of fascism when put into action. When cast in this light, intolerance and cruelty could not only be possible but expected, an inevitable byproduct of this form of group psychology. “Race” was a particularly effective way to differentiate between people, with hatred of the other serving as a powerful unifying force for members of the group. Freud had made his bleak view of the prospects for humanity clear in his 1930 Civilization and Its Discontents, a prediction that appeared to be accurate, given the events of just a few years later.
Proponents of fascist propaganda benefited in other ways by sharply defining who belonged to the group in power and who did not. The insiders thought of themselves as “better, higher, and purer” than the outsiders; this was, Adorno maintained, another device to minimize social unrest. Any criticism directed from outsiders toward insiders was likely to elicit rage while at the same time strengthen the emotional connections among the latter. This mechanism of unity produced a shared love for a common object—the object being, in this case, the Fuhrer and what he stood for. Although the particulars of such Freudian theory no doubt went far beyond the intellectual grasp of Goebbels, it is reasonable to conclude that he had a working knowledge of these ideas and how to use them. Nazi officials’ heavy reliance on speeches before large, enthusiastic audiences was an example of how group psychology was put into practice, with these verbal spectacles “reduc[ing] individuals to members of crowds.” Repetition and the use of slogans were other proven techniques of mass persuasion, something that many large organizations and institutions had known for centuries. Religious and military leaders were well versed in how to encourage enthusiasm and loyalty to their group at the expense of others, after all. The basic tenets of fascist propaganda were not unique. What was unique were the ways in which the tenets were expressed; this is the singular and most tragic piece of the story.
Even Freud could not anticipate the degree to which his theories would appear to be made real. (He himself was persecuted by the Nazis, fleeing Vienna for London in 1939.) Manipulating individuals’ unconscious through techniques of fascist propaganda served political, economic, and social ends, resulting in nothing less than domination over targeted oppressed groups. Although a familiar story throughout history, the Nazi’s campaign of deindividualization was epic in scope, illustrating the danger of mass persuasion when used for evil intent and with the machinery of modernity fully exploited. The use of psychology, beginning with Bernays, had responded to perceived social disorder. This line of thinking would soon become instrumental not just to how the mass behaved politically but how it consumed, a clear example of how the principles of propaganda can easily cross the boundaries of time and space.
The Art of Asking Why
While the Nazis waged a campaign of persuasion grounded in group psychology, a few Europeans were exploring other possibilities of mass propaganda based in psychoanalytic theory. Something that would become known as motivation research was taking root in Austria as the Third Reich gained power; its aim was also to create order out of chaos but for much different ends. Motivation research can be traced back to one day in Vienna in 1930, when the owners of a new laundry asked a psychology instructor at the city’s famed university, Paul Lazarsfeld, to help them grow their business. Many Austrian women were reluctant to send out their laundry, the instructor learned, as they thought that doing so reduced their role as proper hausfrau. In interviewing existing customers, the psychologist learned that women who did use the laundry often first sent out their wash when an “emergency” occurred, such as a child becoming sick or houseguests unexpectedly dropping in. Once experiencing the joy of having someone else do their wash, however, the women were usually hooked and became regular customers. This particular insight led the psychologist to suggest that the owners of the laundry send a letter describing the services of the business to every household in which a family member had recently died, knowing that the bereaved would find it difficult to do her own wash. The owners of the store tried the idea and business instantly picked up, lighting a spark under a new kind of research that, over the next few decades, would revolutionize global consumer culture.
Paul Lazarsfeld’s clever, if ethically ambiguous, use of what he called the “psychological approach” to studying consumer behavior revealed the indisputable value of what would soon be called motivation (or motivational) research. Although his is hardly a household name, Lazarsfeld was one of the most important figures in the history of advertising and marketing, and his approach to gleaning information from consumers is still practiced today. Pioneering “the analysis of the complex web of reasons and motives that determines the goal strivings of human actions,” Lazarsfeld was, according to Lewis A. Coser, “the father of sophisticated studies of mass communication.” A disciple of Alfred Adler (his mother was a prominent Adlerian psychotherapist), Lazarsfeld absorbed the ideas of this most sociological of Freud’s followers, creating a new, hybrid form of social science in the process. Adlerian analysis focused on “power drives” and the possibilities for individuals to change for the better, ideas that Lazarsfeld embraced in his research. His most famous study, Th e Unemployed Workers of Marienthal (1933), completed when he was a young man in Vienna, was an early attempt to quantify sociological fieldwork. This once radical pursuit was something with which he would be obsessed for the rest of his career.
Although a devout socialist, a quite typical affiliation among Viennese intellectuals between the wars, Lazarsfeld ironically found himself in the market research business when he needed to fund his Wirtschafts Psycholisches Institut (Psycho-Economic Institute), a center studying economic problems in Austria. “We were concerned with why our propaganda was unsuccessful,” the former member of the Socialist Student Movement remembered years later, “and wanted to conduct psychological studies to explain it.” With its in-depth interviews and analysis drawing from sociology, psychology, and psychoanalysis, the institute almost accidentally found itself doing what were probably the most progressive market studies in the world in the 1930s. These studies were the beginnings of motivation research, something that one of Lazarsfeld’s students—Ernest Dichter—would bring to the United States and, in the process, use to change the course of American business. Like the Nazis in the 1930s, motivation researchers’ ultimate goal was to create order out of chaos—in this case, the chaos of the marketplace.
Lazarsfeld’s auspicious work with the Viennese laundry in 1930 would soon lead to much bigger things. That same year, Lazarsfeld offered to help a group of Americans in Vienna “promote the use of applied psychology among business,” and he conducted a series of interviews with people regarding their preferences of soap and also undertook what was perhaps the first survey of radio listeners. Regarding the latter, Lazarsfeld was interested in, as Anthony Heilbut wrote, “what kind of people listened to what kind of programs for what kind of reasons.” This was another seedling that would sprout into motivation research. “The commercial applications were evident,” Heilbut noted, and marketers of perfume and chocolate were eager to apply Lazarsfeld’s findings. Working-class radio listeners in Austria preferred both strong perfume and chocolate, Lazarsfeld discovered, speculating that the reason for this preference was that their economic condition made them “starved for pleasure.” This kind of neo-Freudian interpretation would define motivation research over the next few decades as intellectual descendants of Lazarsfeld kept Viennese psychology alive and well.
After arriving in the United States in 1933 on a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship, Lazarsfeld chose to make America his home as the Nazis rose to power in Europe. (The success of his Marienthal study, with its socialist agenda, had attracted the attention of the police, another factor contributing to his decision to leave Austria while he could.) As a self-proclaimed “Marxist on leave,” Lazarsfeld’s arrival in the States in the 1930s was particularly fortuitous since his own politics matched up nicely with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal progressive reforms. After a brief stint at the University of Newark (now Rutgers University), Lazarsfeld started working for an up-and-coming executive at CBS, Frank Stanton, who would eventually become president of the network. With Stanton, who also held a Ph.D. in psychology, Lazarsfeld found himself doing the same kind of radio research in New York that he had done in Vienna, spelling out his mission in a 1935 article co-written with Arthur Kornhauser. Via “a systematic view of how people’s marketing behavior is motivated,” the psychologist turned market researcher wrote in “The Analysis of Consumer Actions,” companies could “forecast and control consumer behavior,” an idea nothing less than revolutionary in the mid-1930s. Lazarsfeld, admittedly more interested in exploring new methodologies in the social sciences than in selling products or candidates, nevertheless had become not just an agent of consumerism but one of its leading visionaries.
Lazarsfeld’s introduction of psychology-based, in-depth market research made a giant splash in a field in which counting bodies was the height of sophistication. Within a year of his arrival in the States, Lazarsfeld recalled, “the small fraternity of commercial market research experts got interested in my work” and invited him to talk at meetings and serve on committees of the brand-new American Marketing Association (AMA). In addition, the AMA asked Lazarsfeld to write several chapters for a new textbook it planned to publish, Th e Techniques of Marketing Research. One of the chapters contained references to depth psychology and is thus credited as the official beginning of motivation research. The man who was, according to Heilbut, “a product of refined European learning who hustled himself a position in the marketplace,” soon landed a job with the Rockefeller-subsidized Office of Radio Research at Princeton (which moved to Columbia University in 1939 and five years later was renamed the Bureau of Applied Social Research). There, Lazarsfeld, along with a team of notable psychologists (including Adorno and the former’s second wife, Herta Herzog, another Adlerian), worked for decades, surveying radio listeners for ad agencies and sponsors.
Again, with his move to Princeton, Lazarsfeld was in the right place at the right time. Market research was in a decidedly crude state, and interest in surveying radio listeners was just beginning, thus making advertisers very receptive to innovative methodologies directly lifted from the social sciences. The kind of in-depth interviewing done in classic sociological studies like Robert and Helen Lynd’s Middletown and Lloyd Warner’s Yankee City, for example, was exactly what was needed to advance market research beyond simple “nose-counting.” “Our idea was to try to determine … the role of radio in the lives of different types of listeners, the value of radio to people psychologically, and the various reasons why they like it,” Lazarsfeld explained. The whopping salary of $7,000 that came with the Princeton job was an offer he could not refuse. At the university, he consulted with some of the leading psychoanalysts of the day (including Karen Horney and Erich Fromm) to satisfy his curiosity about the role of radio in their patients’ lives. “Can Freudian theory elucidate the entertainment value of radio and account for some especially successful programs?” Lazarsfeld asked the noted analysts; this convergence of social research with psychoanalytical case studies was unheard of in 1937.
Lazarsfeld was not the only one in the 1930s using psychological theory to solve marketing problems, however. In 1935, for example, Donald Laird identified what he considered “irrational” behavior among purchasing agents, claiming that their tough negotiating was not so much about saving money for their company as a way to boost their own egos. A couple of Lazarsfeld’s colleagues, Hadley Cantril and Rensis Likert, were also “important links between academic culture and the applied research of business and government,” according to Jean Converse, and the three constituted a powerful troika of “survey research entrepreneurs.” Unlike most other academics in the social sciences, these men were eager to venture outside the ivory tower, finding the emerging world of polls and surveys quite valuable to their work. While Cantril focused on polling and Likert would go on to develop his famous rating scale, Lazarsfeld stayed true to his roots in the Viennese school of motivation research, applying Freudian and Adlerian theory to the real world of consumer behavior. At the core of the school’s thinking was what was termed “psychologically correct” questioning to identify the role that unconscious motivations played in buying things. Hence “motivation research,” or what Converse described as the exploration of “underlying motives, observation of involuntary actions, and free association of ideas and concepts.”
Lazarsfeld brought an intellectual component to market research that was missing from the field in the 1930s and 1940s. Consumers’ purchase decisions were as complex as any, he felt, entirely worth studying in detail. Lazarsfeld’s 1935 article “The Art of Asking Why in Marketing Research” became a classic, a convincing argument that standard questionnaires were simply not revealing why consumers did the things they did. In the article, Lazarsfeld identified what he called “buyer behavior determinants of the first degree,” which included not just a product’s attributes but also consumers’ emotional likes and dislikes. There were also “buyer behavior determinants of the second degree,” consisting of the reasons for consumers’ likes and dislikes, which were unknown. Lazarsfeld, however, was determined to discover them. “A careful collection of opinions is far superior to pseudo-scholarly tabulations of the type of statistics which have only a remote relationship to the special problem under investigation,” he wrote in another article a couple of years later, rebranding himself as a sociologist rather than a psychologist because the former was more like a market researcher. At Columbia, students felt “they were in on the ground floor of an enterprise that believed it was about to remake social science, if not the world,” remembered one of them—Seymour Martin Lipset, who would go on to become a giant in the field, like many on Lazarsfeld’s team.
Although Lazarsfeld’s trailblazing work in market research was remarkable enough, an even bigger contribution may have been his role in bringing together the previous separate worlds of academia and business. In a 1941 talk to the National Association of Broadcasters, Lazarsfeld made it clear that “communication research [was now a] joint enterprise between industries and universities,” a way for academics to fund their work and an opportunity for American companies (like his clients CBS and the ad agency McCann-Erickson) to achieve their ambitious objectives. “The great innovation was the decision that contract work would be permitted,” he wrote decades later, speaking of his bosses at Princeton and Columbia, “a real turning point in the history of American universities.” Lazarsfeld’s own work focusing on identifying commonalities among people who shared opinions—to find out not just what individuals thought but whether they formed a social group of some kind—was the stuff of marketers’ dreams. Lazarsfeld and researchers who followed in his big footsteps understood that marketing works not just though unification but through diversification, benefiting from an uneven, decentralized landscape comprised of many niches. Researching, managing, and even producing a variegated terrain of consumer groups emerged as a principal goal in American business, the prototype of what would become “market segmentation.” Out of this kind of leading-edge research came, for example, Lazarsfeld’s notion of “opinion leaders,” that certain people shaped the views of the “masses” (this over a half-century before Malcolm Gladwell’s Th e Tipping Point). “Thanks largely to his work, mechanical systems of observation could chart everything from voting preferences to tastes in mouthwash and deodorant,” concluded Heilbut. In short, an accidental researcher had forged an entirely new way to understand the American consumer.
The Psychology of Everyday Living
It would not be Lazarsfeld, however, but one of his students who would show how motivation research could be used to “forecast and control consumer behavior.” Also trained as a psychologist in Vienna, Ernest Dichter arrived in the United States in 1938, ultimately churning out a flood of books, articles, and studies for clients, all grounded in his particular brand of Freudian thought. His positive view of consumer culture—that the material world allowed individuals to more fully express themselves—differed from that of many if not most social critics who were unhappy about, as one put it, the nation’s millions of status seekers. Dichter’s pro-capitalist values also differed from those of Lazarsfeld, who was willing to work with clients to fund his work but would always remain a Marxist at heart. Dichter had studied with Karl and Charlotte Buhler at the University of Vienna, soaking up their views of humanistic psychology and its emphasis on the self-motivated individual (Lazarsfeld too had studied with the legendary couple). Dichter was also strongly influenced by the general cognition theories and philosophical thinking of Moritz Schlick and the Viennese Circle of the 1930s, whose ideas added to his rich intellectual stew. Lazarsfeld’s methods of empirical social research, too, had a deep impact, with the professor’s interest in why somebody did or did not choose to buy something contributing to Dichter’s fascination with the role of motivation in people’s lives. Dichter was one of Lazarsfeld’s two star pupils, the other being the latter’s future second wife, Herta Herzog, who would also go on to great success in motivation research in America.
As Gerd Prechtl observed, the social, political, and cultural climate of Vienna in the early decades of the twentieth century was ideal for a mind like Dichter’s to blossom. The collapse of the Austrian monarchy and rise of modernism allowed more liberal thinking than was previously possible. Jewish intellectuals in particular were able to find their voice, forging a holistic approach to the social sciences that offered a refreshing and exciting alternative to the earlier era’s rigid academic boundaries. Peter Scheer has argued that psychoanalysis in particular was a distinctly Jewish phenomenon, that with the acceptance of Jews by universities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, their knowledge could “finally [be] phrased in academic language.” With its focus on desires and motives, psychoanalysis served as the natural framework for motivation research, allowing Viennese Jews like Lazarsfeld, Herzog, and Dichter to see its implications and applications for consumer research.
Unlike his mentor, Paul Lazarsfeld, Dichter was convinced that psychology was exactly what American business needed after the Second World War, making his case to an increasingly receptive audience intent on jump-starting the postwar economy. Consumption was “behind” production, and the prewar ways of selling were now outmoded and inefficient, he explained in a 1947 Harvard Business Review article. To evolve from a “medicine man” type approach, marketers had to address consumers’ emotions, irrational behavior, and unconscious drives, which were much more basic and powerful than logic. Dichter extended his thinking in his first book, Th e Psychology of Everyday Living, arguing that the things around us mean much more than appearances would suggest.
Although Lazarsfeld and Dichter did not agree on the long-term viability of psychology in the business world, Lazarsfeld’s 1935 article “The Art of Asking Why” had a profound influence on Dichter (and many others), helping him make the connections between psychoanalytic theory and qualitative market research. Through his depth interviews, Dichter listened with what Theodore Reik had called “a third ear,” encouraging subjects to tell stories, recall memories, and free associate to get beyond rational thought. Role-playing through “psychodramas,” in which subjects pretended they were objects, companies, or other people also was one of Dichter’s favorite techniques. Other techniques that Dichter clearly borrowed from psychoanalysis—the Thematic Appreciation Test (TAT), transactional analysis, phrase completion, association tests, caricatures, animal comparisons, and the Rorschach test—soon became the standard tools of motivation research. Dichter’s written reports were as nonlinear as his interviews, filled with verbatim quotes from subjects, stories, and off-the-cuff impressions; they were a long way from other researchers’ statistical tables and charts. Dichter “sifted out the essentials [of Freudian psychology],” noted Patrick Schierholz, who considered Dichter more than any psychotherapist in history “especially concerned with the practical application.”
Perhaps more important than anything else, the psychoanalytic foundation of motivation research shifted the dynamic between marketer and consumer from an “us versus them” relationship to much more of a partnership. Dichter frequently recommended that the client “reorient” consumers by encouraging them to try new things and by advertising products in emotional terms rather than through facts (Esso’s “tiger in the tank” versus “high octane rating” is probably the most famous example). Dichter was also fond of telling clients to give consumers what they wanted, something that makes a lot of sense but was (and is) frequently not done. Many Americans in the early 1950s wanted to borrow money but did not want to take out loans, for example, so Dichter told the bank he was working for to provide what would become known as overdraft protection, the first time this was done.31 Dichter also came up with the idea of the car clock, telling automobile manufacturers that drivers wanted to know how fast they were going in real time rather than just according to the speedometer’s miles per hour. Thinking that women did not like to be considered bad mothers, Dichter told his supermarket client to place candy at the cash registers to make it more of an impulse item rather than regular food. This was just one of many ideas he had regarding how to reap marketing potential out of desire. Throughout his career, Dichter consistently maintained that the role of women in the family’s purchase decisions was greater than popularly believed, an insight that, alone, was a major contribution to marketing thought.
Although he drew from the Platonic (and Aristotelian) tradition of problem solving through discussion, Dichter challenged Plato by arguing that it was emotion, not reason, that ruled human behavior. Emotions and feelings were at the heart of Dichter’s “existentialist approach to human self-realization through action,” as Cudlik and Steiner expressed it; Dichter maintained that self-understanding could be achieved only through internal means rather than by external religious or philosophical systems and beliefs. God was inside, he insisted, and the institutions of faith actually hindered true self-fulfillment and happiness. In Dichter’s perfect world, the human being was his or her own God, disinclined to delegate his or her freedom to a “higher” power. The Edenic paradise of the popular imagination was one of ignorance and static tranquility, an illusion compared to the very real (and more demanding) paradise consisting of intellectual growth and creative challenges. Rather than spend time and energy dreaming of a perfect world perhaps waiting in the future, it was the journey of this life, not its destination, that really mattered (contentedness, he believed, was equivalent with death). Dichter defined his own primary motivation as “creative discontent,” even subtitling his autobiography in the original German version “The Autobiography of a Creatively Discontent Person.” “Getting there is all the fun” was Dichter’s motto—the process was not just half of the joy to be had in life but every bit of it.
Welcome to 1984
It was the backdrop of the Cold War, however, that turned a mere market research technique into a cultural phenomenon and pushed the limits of creating order out of chaos. Reports of mind control and brainwashing by the Communists were widely believed in the late 1950s, with J. Edgar Hoover’s 1958 Masters of Deceit and the 1959 novel The Manchurian Candidate only adding fuel to the fire. Through the Korean War, McCarthy hearings, and launch of Sputnik, fear and paranoia were on the rise in the United States. The Red Scare made many in postwar America hypersensitive and emotionally vulnerable to both real and imaginary outside threats (including The Blob, Them!, and The Thing from Another World). Subliminal advertising, an offshoot of motivation research that reared its ugly head in 1957, was literally a craze, with people afraid they might lose their minds from exposure to it. “For many, subliminal advertising confirms their worst fears about advertising,” wrote Jack Patterson in 1958, with Americans seeing what he called “a psychological sneak attack” as “another, more terrible weapon in Madison Avenue’s arsenal for overpowering the human will.” Madison Avenue’s new interest in consumers’ subconscious was thus concerning, to say the least. Admen apparently had the potential ability to make people buy things they did not really want or need or, much worse, elect Soviet sympathizers into office: a nightmare of epic proportions. If it was possible, subliminal advertising represented the ultimate form of mass propaganda, many agreed. In an age of startling scientific achievements, ranging from the Salk vaccine to Tupperware, however, why couldn’t a new, diabolic kind of communication be possible?
Subliminal possibilities for advertising were first raised in 1913 but there could not have been a more fertile time and place for them than psychology-obsessed, watch-your-back postwar United States. A year or so before subliminal advertising exploded on the scene, Edward (E. B.) Weiss had been prescient about its rise, writing a column about something very similar for Ad Age in May 1956. After hearing about some experimental research that involved electrical stimulation of the brain, Weiss immediately understood the possibilities for manipulating people’s behavior and specifically the role that advertising might play in that. “It is entirely probable that some day at least some of the brain’s functions may be controlled by external electrical penetration. (I get frightened as I write this!) … Will advertising, some day, consist of broadcast electrical discharges beamed to penetrate specific brain areas for the purpose of shaping specific buying behavior patterns?”
Just a little more than a year later, many of Weiss’s fears were realized, as a technology-based form of external brain control swept through the advertising industry and American society. When news of subliminal advertising first leaked out some time in late 1956, few people were really sure what it was or if it even existed. “For a year or so tantalizing rumors have been drifting around the fringes of Madison Avenue,” reported Business Week in September 1957, “rumors about a startling kind of ‘invisible’ advertising that sells products while leaving buyers unaware they are getting a sales pitch.” With a press conference held by a never-heard-from-before company named Subliminal Projection Inc., in mid-September, however, the cat was fully out of the bag. The story was all the more interesting given that James Vicary, one of the top motivation researchers, was involved. Not just the business press but mainstream media jumped on the story, although some reporters, not familiar with the word or how to use it in a sentence, did have to look “subliminal” up in a dictionary. Many readers, too, no doubt consulted their handy Webster’s to learn that the word meant “below the threshold of consciousness or beyond the reach of personal awareness,” a definition that did not ease their concerns in the least.
Subliminal Projection’s big news was that it had conducted a test of subliminal advertising in an undisclosed New Jersey movie theater over a period of six weeks. A “strange mechanism” had been fitted onto the film projector, as reported on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, and, over the next month and a half, 45,699 movie patrons were “subjected to ‘invisible advertising’ that by-passed their conscious and assertedly struck deep into their subconscious.” Once every five seconds, a message was flashed throughout a film for 1/3000th of a second—too fast to be seen by the human eye but supposedly long enough to be registered in the subconscious of the unsuspecting movie-goers. After “COCA-COLA” and “EAT POPCORN” were invisibly blinked on the screen, sales of each reportedly jumped (by 18 and 58 percent, respectively), these results quickly becoming the talk of not just Madison Avenue but also Main Street.
After a century or so of lurking in the dark netherworlds of science and psychology, subliminal perception had been suddenly thrust into the light of day. With a media sensation on their hands, Vicary and his two partners, industrial film producers Francis C. Thayer and Rene Bras, quickly hired a marketing consultant, Richard E. Forrest, as well as a patent attorney, Floyd Crews of Darby and Darby of New York. For the forty-two-year old, well-respected Vicary, subliminal perception could be not just his gravy train but a way to make history. “If we get a patent,” he said in September, “it will represent the first time one has been issued on what is essentially a social invention.” Indeed, some were likening the situation to Freud receiving a patent on psychoanalysis, with the implications for mankind being just as significant. Subliminal Projection was moving quickly to find a movie chain willing to screen subliminal messages and to find advertisers interested in showing “invisible commercials” in theaters or on television, determined to strike while the iron was red-hot. Flashing an image at 1/3000th of a second was not yet possible on television, but experts believed some kind of subliminal perception equipment could be developed for the medium (which would be able to slip subconscious messages past current monitoring methods). Subliminal Projection was testing the use of pictures of brands in place of slogans or messages as televisual stimuli, and licking its chops at the prospect of flashing as many as ten thousand impressions during a fifteen-hour broadcast day (one every five seconds). With subliminal advertising, “the engineering of consent” (the title of an essay Bernays wrote in 1947) was seemingly at hand, the realization of something dreamed of by modern propagandists for a half century.
“Welcome to 1984,” wrote Norman Cousins, editor of Th e Saturday Review, as soon as he got word about the goings-on in subliminal perception. Cousins was just one of many among the intelligentsia to take subliminal perception extremely seriously, even though there was no real evidence that Vicary’s machine actually worked or that the other tests were scientifically valid. Vicary had applied for a patent for his invention but did not disclose any information about its process, making it impossible for other experts to tell whether he could achieve what he said he did. Still, the thought of invisible commercials was terrifying to many, especially to those of the belief that American culture had already become overcommercialized because of television. Cousins worried that not being able to see such commercials meant the inability to filter out any and all undesirable messages, with the implications of this raising all kinds of red flags. Subliminal perception was the worst case of “breaking and entering” that could be imagined or, even worse, the psychological equivalent to radioactive fallout, he thought. “If the device is successful for putting over popcorn, why not politicians or anything else?” he asked readers. It was, for Cousins and no doubt many of his readers, the disguising of people’s real character that represented the most frightening aspect of subliminal perception.
An editor for another magazine for brainy types, the Nation, was similarly distressed upon hearing the news of Vicary’s allegedly successful test. This writer considered subliminal advertising to be a “hybrid spawn of psychology, Yankee know-how and economic enterprise (greed),” a concoction that was bound to have a powerful kick. Even if subliminal perception could not make one partial to things one did not already like, as Vicary made clear in the press conference, there were plenty of things around that most people did like but had the better sense not to buy. “How do we know someone can’t persuade us to mortgage our insurance and buy a sports car with the ill-gotten cash?” the editor worried. Such out-of-control consumerism would obviously be bad for individuals and the country as a whole. Even more alarming was how subliminal perception could be used beyond advertising and with no intent to create order out of chaos, specifically with regard to already tense international relations. “If an ad agency can massage our subconscious into thinking that another nice, cool glass of beer is just what we want” the Nation continued, “still another kind of agency might tickle our egos into thinking that it would be fun to annex Mexico or show the Russians who’s boss.” During this especially icy period of the Cold War, “subliminal advertising is the most alarming and outrageous discovery since Mr. Gatling invented his gun,” the magazine concluded. To its many critics, subliminal advertising was much more than a clever device to sell more popcorn and Coca-Cola in movie theaters.
Very soon, however, the flurry of interest in subliminal perception faded as fast as it had risen, with many, by the fall of 1958, convinced it was a not-so-clever magic act. “Subliminal advertising, introduced publicly a year ago this week, seems to be going nowhere fast,” reported Ad Age in its September 15, 1958, issue. There were clear signs that the writing was on the wall for subliminal perception. Outlawed in Britain and Australia, banned from the American airwaves, and deemed the devil’s handiwork by religious leaders, subliminal advertising was having a pretty rotten one-year birthday party. Even ad agency execs and psychologists—some of the very people who had the most to gain from subliminal perception—had distanced themselves from it, not wanting to be associated with such a controversial and, it increasingly seemed, ineffective technique. Even James Vicary, the once beaming father, had recently changed his tune, now wanting to have nothing to do with his baby. The researcher refused to make any more comments to the press on the subject, his dreams for what he thought would be his proudest achievement shattered. Vicary had undertaken a new challenge, however, which he was excited about: leading a class in motivation research at Fairleigh Dickinson University. “I’m much more interested in teaching the kids than the practitioners,” he said, his experience suggesting that those who can’t do really do teach.
Experiments done by a couple of professors at Indiana University in early 1959 effectively sealed the deal, concluding that subliminal perception had absolutely no persuasive powers. Subliminal commercials run on Indianapolis television station WTTV did not increase sales of a product or raise ratings of a program, the professors found, in as definitive a study as ever done. “Subliminal phenomena are apparently little more than interesting effects which can be produced under laboratory conditions or in classroom demonstrations,” they concluded, providing one more nail in subliminal perception’s coffin.46 As if there were any doubts, by 1961, Raymond A. Bauer, a social psychologist at Harvard, made it clear that mass brainwashing by subliminal advertising was nothing to worry about. “I am skeptical about the extreme pictures of hidden persuasion that have been drawn for either the present or future of business or politics,” Bauer told a group of hospital administrators, thinking that it was highly unlikely a whole society could be controlled psychologically. Although late to the party to squash subliminal advertising paranoia, Bauer did have a good read on why it had started in the first place. Fears of omnipotent powers-that-be resulted from “our primitive anxiety over manipulation” and, more specifically, the worry that “we have lost control over our own destiny.” His comments are a nice interpretation of postwar Americans’ state of mind that had allowed subliminal advertising to grab the nation’s attention.
Although disclosed as a complete hoax, the subliminal advertising craze clearly illustrated the perceived power of mass propaganda that heavily defined the course events between the 1930s and 1950s. Public relations experts of the 1920s, Nazi propagandists, and postwar motivation researchers were equally aware of this power, exploiting this new instrument to control what political scientist Harold Lasswell called “the mental environment.” Propaganda “direct[ed] attention and emotion by bombarding apparently susceptible ‘mass’ audiences with persuasive images and ideas,” Brett Gary wrote. Because humans were not nearly as perfect as their machines, a technological approach to managing what people believed was required. Mass propaganda was a thoroughly modern invention, more powerful than seemingly invincible intellect and reason and thus the ideal means to engineer society.
Versatile, flexible, and accommodating any cause, mass propaganda morphed and shape-shifted over the course of these decades, adapting to situations with complete disregard for the moral and ethical implications. Mass propagandists also learned as they went along, constantly improving their techniques of persuasion until they reached their breaking point with the prospect of subliminal perception. That mass propaganda ran on a parallel course with the rapid rise of a consumption-based culture was hardly a coincidence. Each arena was part of the conversion of citizens to consumers and society to marketplace. The intimate relationship between mass propaganda and psychology, especially psychoanalytic theory, was also not by chance. The two fields fed off each other and shared the common pursuit of figuring out why people did the things they did. That these things were often irrational (i.e., contrary to the best interests of both individuals and groups) makes the cultural dynamics of propaganda one of the most compelling historical sites of the twentieth century.
If there was any common thread that tied the many strands of mass propaganda together, and I believe there was, it was the shared goal of creating some kind of order out of some kind of chaos. “Disorder” in all its forms was the principal enemy of propagandists, something that had to be reduced and ideally eliminated to maximize the odds of success, whatever the particular enterprise. Stability, standardization, and uniformity were the close allies of mass propaganda, with these in turn leading to the ultimate goals of consensus, conformity, and control. With the likes of Facebook and Twitter, chaos may have won the communications day, but it was the order to be achieved through mass propaganda that signified real power as modernity beckoned.