Bacon, Fear, and a Banana Republic

Torches of Freedom, Part 6 of 9. If cigarettes were the demo, this is the catalog, and it includes one entry that's no laughing matter. — Kiler Davenport

Think about your breakfast. Think about where you learned what a "normal" morning looks like. It feels like tradition. It feels like it was always that way.

Bernays's client list shows how little of "normal" is natural.

Breakfast. Working for a pork producer, he commissioned a survey asking physicians whether a hearty breakfast beat a light one, then publicized the predictable results. Bacon and eggs became the all-American morning.

Fear, bottled. For the Dixie Cup company, he stoked public anxiety about germs on shared drinking cups, then offered the disposable cup as the cure. He sold the fear of the alternative.

The president. In 1924, he helped stage a pancake breakfast with a famously quiet Calvin Coolidge photographed alongside vaudeville stars. The image did the campaigning.

Those are almost funny. Here's the one that isn't.

In the early 1950s Bernays worked for the United Fruit Company. When Guatemala's elected president, Jacobo Árbenz, moved to take back unused company land for peasants, Bernays's campaign painted Árbenz as a communist menace: stories placed in major American outlets, and a pamphlet, "Communism in Guatemala — 22 Facts," mailed in bulk. The campaign helped prepare American opinion for the CIA-backed coup of 1954, followed by decades of civil war and mass killing.

The hard truth: the same technique that moved bacon and paper cups also helped move a government. The method has no natural limit. Only the client changes.

Part 7: the questions that make people uncomfortable. Were the women duped? Did Bernays believe his own pitch?

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