Pope Gregory XV, frightened by the global spread of Protestantism, urgently proposed an addition to the Roman curia. The Office for the Propagation of the Faith (Congregatio de propaganda fide) would supervise the Church’s missionary efforts in the New World and elsewhere: “They are to take account of and to deal with each and every concern for the spread of the faith throughout the world.” Far from denoting lies, half-truths, selective history or any of the other tricks that we associate with “propaganda” now, that word meant, at first, the total opposite of such deceptions.

Formerly, the lords of industry and commerce had often seen the advertising agent as a charlatan, associated with the tawdry bunkum used to peddle patent medicines and cigarettes, and trying to sell a service that any boss with half a brain could surely manage on his own. The nascent field of public relations also had been disesteemed by those atop the social pyramid, who saw that sort of work as necessary only on the vaudeville circuit and on Broadway. The great Allied campaign to celebrate (or sell) Democracy, etc., was a venture so successful, and, it seemed, so noble, that it suddenly legitimized such propagandists, who, once the war had ended, went right to work massaging or exciting various publics on behalf of entities like General Motors, Procter & Gamble, John D. Rockefeller, General Electric.

Like its wartime prototype, the post-war propaganda drive was an immense success, as it persuaded not just businessmen but journalists and politicians that “the manufacture of consent,” in Walter Lippmann’s famous phrase, was a necessity throughout the public sphere.

Bernays derived this vision from the writings of his intellectual hero, Walter Lippmann, whose classic Public Opinion had appeared in 1922.

“We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.”

By 1928, the word’s troubling connotations had not faded: on the contrary. Throughout the decade there had been a gradual, disorienting revelation of just how systematically, and how ingeniously, the Allied governments had fooled the peoples of two great democracies, Great Britain and, in particular, the USA. Once the thrill of victory had faded, and the troops came home (if they came home at all) disfigured or disabled, and the reasons for the war were now less clear than they had seemed, the sordid details of the propaganda drive against “the Hun” began to circulate, spread far and wide in a belated flood of memoirs, reminiscences, published diaries, after-dinner speeches and historical accounts.

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.

If you can influence the leaders, either with or without their conscious cooperation, you automatically influence the group which they sway. But men do not need to be actually gathered together in a public meeting or in a street riot, to be subject to the influences of mass psychology. Because man is by nature gregarious he feels himself to be member of a herd, even when he is alone in his room with the curtains drawn. His mind retains the patterns which have been stamped on it by the group influences.

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