November 22 is a day that may be remembered in some future societies as a black mark on history, and the point at which our current society embraced propaganda and deception as industrial-class tools to be freely used at a vast scale. It all started in 1891 and 1893, when, two years apart, two men were born: Edward Bernays, in Vienna, and Harley Earl, in Hollywood.
Bernays moved with his family to the US when he was just a year old. He graduated college with a degree in agriculture, but instead became a journalist. This was not entirely unrelated; his first job was for the National Nurseryman magazine, which was about raising plants and shrubs. Then he became an editor of Medical Review of Reviews and Dietetic and Hygienic Gazette. It was a magazine distributed for free to doctors. He wrote a rave review of the play Damaged Goods on the basis that it was an educational piece about venereal disease, and on the basis of working with the author and lead actor, he talked his way into becoming a press agent for other performers, including Enrico Caruso, the famous opera singer. It was his idea to promote Caruso by publicizing extreme measures taken to protect his “sensitive voice.” He just dreamed up the “extreme measures.”
Then World War I began, and Bernays started work for the Committee on Public Information to build public support for the US war effort. He called his work “psychological warfare,” and may have even coined the term. He was no stranger to psychology, though; his uncle was Sigmund Freud. After the war he began his career in public relations. He worked to convince the US public that the “true American breakfast” was bacon and eggs. In the 1930s he used some of his old ideas from his stint in medical journalism to convince people that disposable paper cups (sold by the Dixie company, which had hired him) were the only sanitary way to avoid venereal disease. Although you’d be hard-pressed to explain the connection, Bernays simply used subliminal (too brief to consciously register) images of venereal disease behind images of ordinary, non-paper cups. He did, at least reportedly, decline to accept the Nazi party as a client. There are a lot more examples, and Bernays had a long career including both commercial and government propaganda campaigns; he lived to be 103.
Harley Earl was born in Hollywood, California. Growing up, he worked in his father’s coachbuilding business, which initially built horse-drawn carriages, and in 1908 shifted to automobile bodies. They built custom-designed cars for Hollywood movie stars and other notables. By that time, Harley was in charge of designing the cars, and may have independently come up with the practice of sculpting the bodies in modeling clay to begin a design. At the time, which was the first three decades of the 20th Century, the standard process of building luxury cars in the US was for the manufacturer to design and build a mechanical chassis, then ship it to a coachbuilder chosen by the customer to add the body. Earl Automotive Works gained a reputation as one of the top coachbuilders, and the business was purchased, ending up as part of the General Motors company.
Automotive executives at the time were mostly engineers who valued and understood things like engines, materials, and manufacturing; when Harley Earl became the head of GM’s “Art and Color Section” in 1927, he was mostly dismissed as a “pretty picture boy” who worked in the “beauty parlor.” But Earl persisted, and rose to be a vice president who worked closely with the GM president, Alfred Sloan. He suggested to Sloan that they’d sell more cars if they changed the appearance and outward design every year, so the general public would think last year’s car was obsolete. Basically, Earl invented “planned obsolescence.”
If you’ve ever seen vintage US cars from the late 1940s through the late 1950s, you’ve probably noticed “tail fins.” They’re entirely nonfunctional, but did manage to make it clear to everybody who had the newest car. You’ve also noticed that American cars of that era were typically enormous — very long, and very low to the ground — those were Earl’s ideas too.
So there you have it. It’s amazing what two guys born on November 22 managed. And since tomorrow is US Thanksgiving Day, it’s probably a good time to say to Harley Earl and Edward Bernays: “wherever you are, thanks a lot.”
