We Make Your Life Work

How Big Oil Killed Our Political Imagination

Edward Bernays: The Freudian Slip

Amy Westervelt

There are two types of PR guys, the ones who make themselves a central character in the story and the ones who work their magic quietly behind the scenes. Earl Newsom was the latter sort to the extreme. His name only really comes up in the context of other PR legends talking about what a genius he was. But while he kept an extremely low profile, Newsom was possibly the most influential PR guy of the 20th century, working for corporate giants like Ford, GM, Campbell's Soup, Standard Oil of New Jersey (which later became Exxon), and many more.

Newsom was born in Wellman, Iowa, and graduated from Oberlin College in 1921. He took time off of college to serve as a Navy pilot in WWI. His approach to the job was not at all about press releases or talking to journalists, instead he really focused on truly managing the relationship between a company or an industry and the public. He was a trusted advisor to CEOs, helping them navigate crises and keep a constant, close read on the public. Newsom also collaborated often with Elmo Roper, who pioneered market research and polling. From the late 1930s onward, Roper based the majority of his PR plans on polling reports from Roper.

Earl Newsom worked for Standard Oil of New Jersey, which eventually became Exxon, from the early 1940s til he retired in the mid-1960s. He managed every aspect of the company's public persona, from seemingly inconsequential decisions like whether or not a VP should accept an 
award from a PR college for his work on education (Newsom said no, lest people think Standard's investments in universities were just a PR stunt) to the company's approach to developing oil fields in South America and the Middle East to cross-industry strategies for shaping how Americans think about the economy. One of the most fascinating documents Newsom left behind was a 

strategy document from early in the year in 1945.

 WWII was coming to a close, and Newsom was concerned—not that the Allies would lose, or that the companies he worked for would have to find new revenue streams once wartime purchasing ended, but that Americans had grown so used to the government taking care of them that they might turn away from the benefits of free enterprise. At the time, Newsom was working for Standard Oil of New Jersey, Ford, and GM, but the plan included non-clients too, it was an all-hands-on-deck moment for industry.

"Next to crushing the Axis, and avoiding runaway inflation while we are doing it, the most important problem confronting us is to keep the American people convinced of the intrinsic social and economic worth of the free enterprise system," 

"And of its superiority over statism, so that the people will be determined to remove unnecessary governmental controls and reestablish competitive, democratic, free enterprise capitalism when the war is won."

"There is grave danger that many millions of Americans will be given the impression that the free enterprise system is full of gross abuses and dishonesties," he continued. "That private business has put and is putting its own narrow selfish, financial interests above patriotism; that the free enterprise system has outlived its usefulness; and that all-encompassing state-imposed economic planning is better for the people than the system of competitive free enterprise."

We've gathered hundreds of pages of documents from Newsom's time with Standard Oil of New Jersey, available on our 

Newsom also worked for General Motors in the 1960s during a particularly tough time for the company, when it was dealing with the fallout of Ralph Nader's seminal 1965 book, 

. More so than the book itself, GM faced 

and a Senate investigation over its handling of the book, which included gathering opposition research on Nader and even trying to entrap him with young women. Newsom counseled GM's executives through the 

 and apology for the Nader debacle, and through various skirmishes with labor unions over the years.

Newsom's longtime friend and collaborator the pollster Elmo Roper started pushing Ford to hire Newsom in the 40s and initially Newsom actually said he was too busy. He thought Henry Ford 
and his son Edsel would be too tough to manage. This is where you 

 see how different Newsom was from most of his compatriots in the field. He really saw himself as a close advisor to CEOs, managing every aspect of their relationship with the public. And he couldn't do that—wouldn't do it—with a difficult CEO. But in 1945, Newsom had a meeting with Henry Ford that convinced him; he set about turning the elder Ford into what he called "an industrial statesman," giving speeches, meeting with politicians, acting as a sort of ambassador for American industry to both the U.S. public and the world. Newsom counseled Ford through the highly controversial move of pulling the paid lunch period post-war, crafting and executing an internal communications strategy that painted the company as benevolent and fair, the idea of paid lunch as Communist, and the striking employees as criminals.

Newsom was one of the first publicists to work with the pharmaceutical industry, 

for years, with a focus on pushing the idea that private enterprise and pharma profits were the key to innovation and life-saving miracles. Newsom and Lilly's other PR firm, Hill & Knowlton, would coordinate various campaigns and press pushes through the pharma trade group, the 

Newsom Documents

Petroganda

Mad Men

Earl Newsom: The Man Behind the Curtain

Martin Zaltz-Austwick

[00:00:00] Over the course of this series, we've looked at the early days of PR, a new profession created to stem the looming threat of democracy, the expansion of the vote, the emergence of labor unions and regulations. The critical eye of journalists, journalists like Upton Sinclair.

[00:00:20] Henry told me his ideas about the fact that it all problems in America and all over the world depended upon men like Henry Ford. Well, once in a while I got a few sentences and I told him that I thought industry was becoming more and more dominant in the world, and I miss America gradually move into industrial democracy. America would find itself in some horror, like the Russian Revolution, and assume

[00:01:00] that Sinclair late in life talking about a meeting he once had with Henry Ford. We've also looked at how early PR guys like Abby Lee helped American industrialists like the Rockefellers maintain their stranglehold on democracy.

[00:01:17] Mr. Rockefeller listened to me patiently, pleasantly and calmly until I'd finished my eloquent presentation of why he should do what we recommended. And then he turned to me and whether bland smiles at Mr Lee. Now tell me all the reasons you can thank God why I should not do what you recommend.

[00:01:37] But the journalists and activists and artists didn't just give up the fight when PR came on the scene. This tug of war between industrialists and the public has continued throughout American history, with wave after wave of battles for the truth. After World War Two, industrialists and their PR teams once again felt their existence was under threat, and they mobilized for another fight to protect American free enterprise or really to make the connection between free enterprise and freedom itself much stronger in the minds of the American public

[00:02:15] and using the magic of research, oil companies compete with each other in taking the petroleum molecule apart and rearranging it into, well, you name it. Fabrics, toothbrushes, tires, insecticides and cosmetics. We gillers our home galaxy of things that make a better life on Earth. And you know, it isn't just oil companies that try to outdo each other competing for the customers dollars. The same story is true of almost every successful business enterprise in America. The result is a higher standard of living in the USA than in any other country on the whole planet at last. The secret was mine.

[00:03:07] This is from a filmstrip commissioned by the American Petroleum Institute in the 1950s. It's animated, and it kind of looks like something we'd eventually see in The Jetsons in the 60s and 70s. It's called Destination Earth, and it follows a group of Martians who apparently are communists as they discover the wonders of free market capitalism. This sort of thing was rampant during this period of time. The oil industry was not alone in putting out these kinds of films. It started almost as soon as World War Two ended and rolled right into the Cold War. Although most other campaigns didn't lean so heavily into commie Martians. But wouldn't you know our projects were the standard bearers and flag wavers for this new push to rebrand American industry, too? And that's the story you will be digging into today. Welcome back to record a podcast about the war for hearts and minds and identity right here on U.S. soil. I'm Amy Westervelt. Today's trick educational propaganda. Earlier this year, I found an archive that housed all the old papers and files of a PR guy I'd heard mentioned a lot. Earl Newsome, he was more of a behind the scenes Ivy League or John W Hill type, so there's not a lot out there on him or by him. But I'd seen his name mentioned by other PR people in this kind of awestruck way, like they all looked up to him. So I'd been trying to find out more about him, and I saw that all of his papers had been donated to the Wisconsin Historical Society. So off I went to Madison. Traveling two thousand miles to poke around a PR guy's old dusty archives might not sound like your idea of a birthday trip, but it was for me and I hit the mother lode that day in Madison. When I got home, I had to call up my partner in crime writer Mary A. Hagler to process it all. So, all right, this is the thing that is probably blown my mind the most in the last, like 10 years. Like when I oh wow, 10 years, that's a long time. Yeah, it's really like I was really like, Holy crap. So I went to this archive in Wisconsin. As you know, this was my birthday present.

[00:05:51] without telling me you're a nerd. I know, I know. And because I had, I had seen this one guy's name mentioned by other PR people. But like, you know, they would just be like, Oh, Earl Newsom was a genius. But then I couldn't find that much about him in particular. And so I thought, Oh, this guy must have been really interesting because he's being name checked by all these people. But he, like, kept a low profile. And those are those are the ones that usually like, you know, did the most M.C. Lady

[00:06:22] Kert and certainly exactly is the one who leaves the

[00:06:26] Kert. That's right. That's right. Mm hmm. That's right. Yeah, I found him and I realized that, oh, like, he worked for Standard Oil of New Jersey, which is now ExxonMobil. He worked for, you know, he did some stuff for a couple of different petroleum trade groups. He worked for Ford GM Campbell's Soup, Eli Lilly like a ton of massive American companies. And in his Don Draper totally Don Draper. Yes. I mean, he worked with Standard Oil from the late 30s to the late 60s. So a really long time there were like, I mean, I don't even know, like maybe a hundred boxes of standard oil things. And in one of them, there was a bunch of folders marked confidential and all these like strategy documents and stuff. And I found this thing where he had pulled together all of his big corporate clients, and he had basically warned them as World War Two was coming to a close. And he was like, You guys, there's a big problem coming down the pipeline for you. And it's not, you know, us losing the war and it's not, you know, all these government contracts going away. It is the fact that the American public has spent the last few years getting very used to the government being extremely competent and actually making their lives run well. And that's not good for you because you don't want the American public turning away from free enterprise. And so like, we need to get ahead of this. We need to remind Americans that free enterprise and competitive capitalism are like what makes America unique and what gives them their freedom? And I mean, he lays out this whole strategy of like, OK, we're going to focus on all of the innovative things our research departments are doing and how we offer higher wages than other places in the world and how we're coming up with all these really cool gadgets that people can buy and how we're taking America into the future and we're going to coordinate. But it's not going to look coordinated. We're not going to use like, you know, the US Chamber of Commerce or anything like that. We're not even going to say the phrase free enterprise in any of these things. We're just going to like make sure that we sort of highlight this throughout. I mean, maybe there were some there was some amount of like, you know, organic reaction to the war or something. But but like it's I don't know. It was surprising to me just how much these companies had sort of strategized and also like how freaked out they were about the American public getting used to the government, like doing stuff for them. Oh my God, this is still so pernicious today, right? Where people are like, it's why so many people hate the Green New Deal, because the government in a position of giving you things and they're like, No, that's the corporations job, but they don't do that. Yeah, they never have. In digging through the URL, Newsom archives some more. I found that one way a standard oil in particular invested in spreading the gospel of free enterprise was via donations to universities. And they weren't alone in that. In the 1950s, various lawsuits in state courts had paved the way for corporations to make tax deductible donations to universities. Newsom's files mention a guy named Frank Abrams. He was a VP on Standard Oil in the 1950s. They found a speech that Abrams gave and that Newsom's team wrote in New York. The title was education and industry and in it. Abrams quotes the chairman of the board of one of Newsom's. Other clients probably also a quote that Newsom wrote, saying if

[00:10:26] corporations do not intervene with generous donations, the federal government will by default be given this responsibility. Government aid will mean increase taxes with the final result that business will in effect, be aiding but without any freedom of choice.

[00:10:43] In other words, if you donate, at least you get some say in how your donation is used at universities. If you just pay taxes well, then the government decides new society as a whole will decide how it wants to be organized. They might make decisions that don't benefit. Your business can't have that. Abrams goes on to emphasize certain indirect benefits of corporations donating to universities education.

[00:11:12] More and better education is needed if we are to maintain that most cherished of man's works a free society.

[00:11:20] Later on, he really hits the free enterprise message

[00:11:24] as an example. There is a tendency on the part of some people to call on the government to take over more and more functions and responsibilities, born previously by citizens acting as individuals or voluntary associations. In each case, the claim is that private or voluntary group initiative has failed, but the public can be better served by a new government bureau. My observation of political history both here and abroad during 40 years was Standard Oil Company provides evidence of how this thinking can develop even in a swill like ours, where the tradition of democracy and free enterprise is well developed. Each time government takes over a new function, a free society shrinks by that much. A step has been taken toward statism, a system holding great dangers for the general well-being of this country and incidentally, for stockholders investment in corporations. This is a problem with great dimension, in my view, but I think finally, we can rely on a prudent and mature people that is an educated people to deal properly with it.

[00:12:41] Again, he's framing a healthy civil society supported by a functional government. That's something that happened during the World War as a dangerous threat to freedom. Newsom had recommended various ad campaigns highlighting the benefits of free enterprise without ever using the words free enterprise, of course.

[00:13:03] Markets are people with incomes and demand. In the past two years alone, our population has increased by five million. Kind of personal freedom, which creates the greatest incentive for individual achievement incentives that inspire free to action that fire the spirit of great accomplishments that enable all of us to put our whole hearts into hard work because of the personal satisfactions and benefits that we know will be our reward. In America, our free, privately owned competitive enterprise system never stops with rewards, but just a few people. The freedom, the opportunities, the rewards for achievement have directly enabled all of us to live on a scale and dreamed of in any other country of the world.

[00:13:43] Socialism has spread the shadow of human regimentation over most of the nations of the Earth, and the shadow is encroaching upon our own liberty. Now, let's be practical for a moment, is the American way of life worth bothering about. That is where the viewpoint of self-interest. Well, let's see. Our freedom stems from the fact that America is a republic founded on a constitution and dedicated to the principle of democracy and the worth of the individual.

[00:14:17] Our old friend Eddie Bernays, was big on corporate America, protecting free enterprise too. Around the same time that Newsom was cautioning his clients about the threat of statism, Bernays was giving speeches to industrialists about that very same threat and advising them on how they should handle the postwar era to ensure that free enterprise survived between the two of them. Bernays and NewsOne would have been bending the ear of almost every top CEO in the country on this subject. But something even more terrifying than a functional government was looming on the horizon could throw a spanner in the works of the finely tuned PR machine the 1960s. More on that after this break. We heard in the first half how PR spent the 1940s and 1950s selling the American public on the restorative and invigorating qualities of free enterprise. But even the fear and paranoia of the Cold War couldn't keep the 1960s from rushing on in. Suddenly, it looked like the early 20th century again, you had social movements everywhere, arguing for civil rights, gender equity, LGBTQ rights and then the antiwar movement responding to Vietnam. Here's Reverend Lennox Yearwood, founder of the Hip Hop Caucus. Talking about those days

[00:15:45] was also important is that the people were in the streets, so you had the black people with the Black Power movement was in the streets

[00:15:52] and that was the most famous actors.

[00:15:55] You had the women's movement that was emerging, the gay rights movement that was that was powerful and in New York City and throughout the world was just moving forth. You had all of the even had the the anti-Vietnam movements, even young white kids who were putting out street heat.

[00:16:12] Then at the same time, you also had the emergence of the environmental and consumer protection movements with Rachel Carson.

[00:16:20] We have to remember the children born today are exposed to these chemicals from birth, perhaps even before birth. Now what is going to happen to them in adult life as a result of that exposure?

[00:16:36] the business is not so much opposed to Marxism or communism as they are to good old, free enterprise, competitive business and consumer sovereignty. That's what really gets them all worried. One can imagine what would happen if people could see what goes into their food, processed food products where they could see what frauds so many of the so-called cleaners and cleaning agents are and the kind of harm that's involved. Or they could see the enormous price fixing that goes on in the petroleum industry.

[00:17:07] Wealthy and powerful Americans were once again caught flat footed and once again really freaked out about regaining control of the narrative and the importance of free enterprise and, well, their own power with it all nighter in particular, had a real target on his back. He was Public Enemy number one. Companies were hiring investigators to follow him. I'm sure more than one had staff dedicated to digging up dirt on Nader. They tried to entrap him with women. Catch him getting paid off. Corporate America really wanted to take this guy down, in part because he was really good at framing the way corporations behaved as what was actually un-American, undemocratic, counter to freedom. Here he is doing just that in an interview with the British TV show Money Go Round in the 1970s.

[00:18:03] You're accused of being anti-business. You are, you know,

[00:18:09] basically the accusation is a mixture of of terminology we're against are illegal, deceptive, fraudulent, collusive behavior. And if they want to associate that with the term business, that's their own terminology, not ours. We'd like to separate you two.

[00:18:28] And do you think it's a conspiracy against people?

[00:18:31] Actually, it can be. That's incidental to them. They're not interested conspiring against people. They're interested in maximizing their own power and their own sales and their own profits and their own prestige. If the people get into the way, that's secondary, but that's not their primary purpose.

[00:18:48] Would you describe yourself as a revolutionary?

[00:18:51] No, actually. I describe the corporations as the revolutionaries. I mean, they're basically the institutions who are trying to upset our basic value systems. And I mean that very, very seriously. If we if you say our basic value systems, our compliance with the law are arm's length relationship with the government, our competitive quality competition, our concern for the neighbors are the avoidance of violent impacts on people and who are in effect, perpetuating all these injustices. Corporations produce most of the violence in terms of pollution and hazardous products. They corrupt governments. They, in effect, make a mockery out of competition and quality in the marketplace as they concentrate the economy in hands of larger and larger corporations.

[00:19:39] Again, for a while there, people power won. The civil rights movement saw some big wins. Women got access to birth control, the workforce and their own credit cards. Journalists shone a light on the corruption of war and politics, but it didn't take long for the corporate titans to recalibrate and for their PR geniuses to come up with new strategies. In 1971, attorney Lewis Powell appeared on the scene. He was a lobbyist for the tobacco industry and sat on the board of Philip Morris for years, basically like a Richard Berman type, but quiet and soft spoken. So Paul writes this memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that reads a lot like Newsome's 1944 a fever dream about free enterprise. He says the American free enterprise system is under attack from those who prefer socialism or some form of statism. And then he particularly calls out universities and the media as problems for giving these attackers a platform, especially Nader, who Powell names specifically in this memo and describes as the quote single most effective antagonist of American business. Then, he says, the time has come. Indeed, it is long overdue for the wisdom, ingenuity and resources of American business to be marshaled against those who would destroy it. Paul proposes that the Chamber of Commerce coordinate this battle for business, which is funny because back in the 1940s, Newsome was like, Don't use the chamber. That's too obvious. By the 1970s, they were desperate enough to act in plain sight. One of the first things that Paul suggests is to target university campuses. He pinpoints the university as ground zero for all this anti-free enterprise thought and goes on for many, many pages about it. He thinks the business community needs to get more pro-business faculty speakers and textbooks onto campuses for a start. He says wealthy businessmen should think about starting centers on university campuses focused on free enterprise. And he mentions the importance of getting into high schools with a pro free enterprise message, too. Now we've seen throughout this series how PR men have fought their propaganda battles in the press, on TV and even in train carriages. But this marks a shift to target people a bit earlier. It moved the battleground to schools and universities. And now, look, I'm not saying that there's one PR guy Earl Newsome or this one lobbyist, Lewis Powell, and his memo single handedly changed the course of American society. But all of those things that Newsom suggested back in the 40s and what Powell is laying out in his memo, they all actually happened. There was a huge increase in corporate funded curricula in high schools and universities. Here's one of my favorite examples American Enterprise, a five part film series about the American economy hosted by William Shatner and commissioned by Phillips Petroleum in the 1970s. It was used by high schools all over the country

[00:23:09] when we needed petroleum. We had it black gold in Pennsylvania and the Southwest when we needed uranium for nuclear power. We had our hills old enough to last for centuries. The land has provided on a grand scale. Most of us are optimistic and we have faith in our manifest destiny. Our land has fed that faith. It gave us the strength to make good our independence. It gave us room and time to grow in and things to grow on. Rich soil, immense forests, navigable rivers, water power, fossil fuels, minerals, the building blocks of agriculture and industry, it never disappointed us.

[00:24:06] Something else happened in the wake of the Powell memo, a sudden and rapid increase in the cost of college tuition. Here's Noam Chomsky, someone both Earl Newsome and Lewis Powell probably would have hated talking about that increase and the correlation between skyrocketing college tuition prices and the Powell memo. A few decades after that memo was sent,

[00:24:30] Powell was a corporate lobbyist, later appointed to the Supreme Court by Richard Nixon, and he wrote a very important memorandum, very influential memorandum, I think 1971. The only choices, he said, are between freedom, free enterprise or bureaucratic regulation of our lives by the state. And they're winning. They've taken over everything. They're destroying free enterprise. He said the businessmen, he said, are the group that have the least influence in the country and government and the economy and everything else. And then he said, we've got to do something to mobilize, and the cure for it is the universities, the institutions responsible for the indoctrination of the young. He said after all, we the business world have the resources. We have the money, we fund them, we pay them. We're what's now called job creators, profit creators. And so we have the money. So we've got to mobilize and organize and do something about it. And right at that point, this kind of common conception across the spectrum did lead to many significant changes which you're living in right now. So it takes a student debt that is now, as you probably know, over over a trillion dollars, that's more than credit card debt. It's phenomenal. Well, that's a crucial way of dealing with the failure of the institutions responsible for indoctrination of the young. You come out of college with a heavy debt, you're trapped, but the rest of your life. Maybe you wanted to be, say, a public interest lawyer when you went to Harvard, but come out with tens of thousands of dollars of debt just going to have to go into a corporation to pay off your debt. You get trapped in the corporate culture. See any end of that.

[00:26:35] Making your message into school curricula, taking over universities, making college more expensive so the youth stop turning on business so much. There are some real guerrilla tactics right there. It's not a mad campaign or a TV interview. It's a large scale psychological manipulation. Here's Carroll Muffett, who heads up the Center for International Environmental Law and has been studying how oil companies in particular have contributed to this over the past few decades.

[00:27:05] What the industry is doing is making the teacher, making educators the messengers for their message. And when you do that, when you take your message and you put it in the mouth of someone who is teaching your children who is told, you know who children are told to believe and to trust, it is among the most insidious and among the most effective forms of propaganda.

[00:27:32] Today, we're at another one of these inflection points where there's a real wrestling for the story, for truth. Once again, we're seeing these cries of absolutely any form of government support being socialism. And we're seeing politicians and business leaders again point to universities and the media as a problem, as the enemy trying to take down American free enterprise. Here's one of several recent examples on Fox and Friends.

[00:28:06] Almost 50 percent of students coming out of university today believe that socialism is the answer. That's frightening to me. 50 percent. Home Depot's co-founder calling out the rise in socialism on college campuses across the country. How did we get here? Retired professor of liberal arts at NYU and author of Springtime for Snowflakes, Dr. Michael Rectangle, joins us live in the studio. Good morning to you, sir. Morning, Steve. You know, when you look at the rise of socialism, you think, Oh, this is something new. This isn't something new. This all started back in the 1920s. That's right. Well, yes, because you had professors going over to the Soviet Union, you know, from America going over to the Soviet Union, learning about the Soviet system of education and being convinced that they should bring it to the US and re-engineer the entire education system after it. OK, so that was decades ago. And then you combine that, which was ingrained in college campuses over the decades with, for instance, Bernie Sanders running for president two years ago. And it's like, Hey, why not? I'm an idealistic kid. I want everybody to get everything, but that's socialism.

[00:29:12] Everybody getting everything. That's socialism. The cycle is repeating itself yet again. And here's where I think that knowing about this history, knowing about the specific tactics and stories that have been told over and over and over again over the past century or more, and the specific people who've told them and why, maybe it helps us to spot these patterns in today's news cycle and to pause and think, Hmm, who does this story serve? What's being promoted here and by whom and for what? What are people trying to get me to think or do? And then, you know, decide for yourself, your decision may not match mine, but that's OK. That's freedom. We've heard about this handful of rich men who've used mountains of cash to manipulate the American public. Smooth talking bully her experts train spotter Ivy Ledbetter, Lee, Richard Dick, Evil Berman, Eduard Pina, Snake Bernays, the silent but deadly John Hill, the Edelman Dynasty of Disinfo and the PR man's PR man Earl New Song. But it's important to remember that there are also people working to dispel the mountain of bullshit these guys have dumped into the living room of American society. These guys don't always win. It was editorials unmasking of standard oil that first made the Rockefellers realize they were not above the law or untouchable. And today we remember Woody Guthrie's version of the Ludlow Massacre, not Ivy leads the Edelman's have been dragged into public scandals again and again and again. And Richard Berman's own son was on the record, calling him a despicable motherfucking sob a bitch. But above and beyond holding any one company or person accountable, it's important to think about the system that enables all these folks to do these things, how it came about and how we might fix it or scrap it altogether. That's it for this episode and for this series. I hope you've enjoyed our little tour of the PR Nether World for a whole lot more. Please check out our online archive at Rigged Dot Media. If you've enjoyed the show, let us know. Ratings and reviews help us find new listeners and decide whether to make more episodes. You can also find me on Twitter at Amy Westervelt or Drop Me a line at Amy Critical Frequency dot org. Rigged is an original Critical Frequency production. Our producer is Martin's Elswick. He also scored this season. Artwork is by Matthew Fleming. Our fact checker is Ashley Broad. Our First Amendment attorney is James Wheaton of the First Amendment project. Big thanks to Mary Anais Hagler, who you've heard throughout this series. You can get more of me and Mary on our podcast Hot Take, which also has a newsletter. Archival tape in this episode is courtesy of the Library of Congress, the Wisconsin Historical Society, CBS News and the Vanderbilt University TV Archive. The show is reported by me, Amy Westervelt. Thanks again for joining us.

Transcription

In 1944 the greatest threat to American industry wasn't World War II, it was convincing Americans to fall back in love with free-market capitalism after having experienced government systems that actually worked for the greater good. In the season finale of Rigged, we lay out the strategy contained in a never-before-published confidential document from the archive of Earl Newsom, Standard Oil of New Jersey's (today ExxonMobil) top PR guy from the late '30s to the late '60s.

John Hill: The Right-Hand Man

Daniel Edelman: The Psy-Opps King

Herb Schmertz: The Bully

Rick Berman: "Dr. Evil"

Ivy Lee: The Godfather

E. Bruce Harrison: The Godfather of Greenwashing

The Reason Covid-19 and Climate Seem So Similar: Disinformation

To understand the current state of disinformation in the U.S., it helps to know the history of how and why the PR industry was created. 

In response to a protest, the country’s largest oil company sent in private security teams, who wound up killing several protestors, including women and children. The company’s spokesperson claimed the protestors were hired by a labor union trying to stir up trouble.

Sounds like it could have been written about any of a half dozen recent pipeline protests, right? But these are the basic details of a mining strike in 1914, in Ludlow, Colorado. The mine was owned by Standard Oil, and the Rockefeller family had only a few years prior been raked over 
the coals by a messy antitrust lawsuit and a series of 

 about their monopoly on the country’s burgeoning oil industry.

They needed help burnishing their image, so they called on another industry that was just emerging at the time: Public relations. Ivy Ledbetter Lee, the first modern PR guy, came up with that idea that the protestors were 

 Today we would call them “crisis actors” and it’s an accusation thrown at almost every protest, but few people know the whole thing was created
 by a PR guy working for an oil company back in 1914.

Lee invented all sorts of other tricks of the trade too. 

 for a start. Before Lee, companies had a pretty adversarial relationship with the press and vice versa. Lee thought businesses would do better to tell journalists more of their story themselves. It was so unusual that when he first began sending press releases to The New York Times, the paper printed them verbatim. On behalf of rail, coal, oil and tobacco clients Lee also created seemingly independent information bureaus, like the 

, whose experts were regularly quoted criticizing railroad tax proposals.

Again, this was more than 100 years ago. And Lee was followed by generation after generation of PR experts, each adding another bell or whistle to America’s disinformation machine—some on behalf of oil, others on behalf of the chemical or tobacco industries, often on behalf 
of all three at the same time.

For years, the story about disinformation has been that Big Tobacco created it all and then Big Oil copied them. And there's a thread of truth there. Some of the same phony scientists who sold America on the idea that smoking was safe turned around and told them not to worry about climate change. But it’s not the whole story. To get that, we need to look at the context that enabled climate denial to flourish, an information system polluted by 100 years of propaganda. And we need to look at who was hiring those phony scientists—not companies, but PR firms. When people focus on one particular form of science denial, or on one technique that this or that industry copied from another, this is the big picture they miss: the disinformation machine driving everything from QAnon conspiracies to climate denial, vaccine hesitation to white nationalism. It’s bigger than any one industry, but it was built on behalf of all of them, and if we want to have any hope of addressing the large, intersecting, complex problems facing us today, it must be better understood. And then reconfigured, or dismantled altogether.

Just as Ivy Lee was building the modern PR industry, the U.S. government realized it needed a bit of propaganda to help sell American citizens on World War I. President Woodrow Wilson had made staying out of the war a key part of his campaign, and now he needed to convince Americans that it was a good idea to join in...without looking like a hypocrite. He tapped George Creel, a journalist turned political campaigner who had helped with Wilson's electoral bid, to build out what was eventually called the Committee on Public Information and generally referred to as The Creel Committee or the Creel Commission. Creel tapped some of the nation's greatest journalists (Ida Tarbell, for one!), filmmakers, artists, and publicity men to create a 360-degree assault on the 
American public. They made films, created compelling posters, and even launched the world's first "influencers." In cities and towns across the country, Creel and his team found influential members of society and trained them to give 4-minute pro-war speeches before screenings of 
silent films or big events. They were known as the "4-Minute Men".

Several members of the Creel Committee went on to be major influences on the burgeoning PR industry. One of them was a young publicity agent from the theater, Edward Bernays. Bernays had done some creative promotion of plays with particular social missions and had worked for major ballet companies as well, and his work caught the eye of Creel. It didn't hurt that Bernays's uncle was Sigmund Freud—on both sides, in a bizarre and some might say Freudian twist (Edward's mother was Freud’s sister, and Freud was also married to Bernays’ father’s sister). Bernays grew up in Vienna, hearing all about Freud’s theories on the deeply buried human impulses that drive behavior. While Ivy Lee was 

 part of the Creel Committee, he handled publicity for the American Red Cross during the war effort, and he and Bernays worked together often through their respective positions. Bernays became a trusted colleague of Lee's during the war, the only other PR guy that Lee thought his equal. It was after WWI that Bernays famously said, “If propaganda could be used so effectively in war, why could we not use it in peace?”

At the time, democracy was still a relatively new idea, and those in power were almost universally terrified of it. Propaganda—which Bernays later 

 because “the Germans had given it a bad name”—was created as a reaction to growing public criticism of the titans of industry who had once been hailed as heroes. But it was also created to provide those in power with the tools to manipulate the masses. Bernays, Lee, and 

—Adolf Hitler—were all close readers of French philosopher Gustav Le Bon, who posited that the public, or as Le Bon put it 

 could only be both satisfied and safe when it was controlled. Like Le Bon, Bernays had a real disdain for the public, writing in his seminal book 

Those who manipulate the unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government, which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested largely by men we have never heard of. In almost every act of our lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by a relatively small number of persons who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind.

To be clear, Bernays saw himself as part of that “ruling power,” and he relished the role of manipulator.

Ivy Lee died fairly young, in his 50s, and when he did Edward Bernays inherited many of his clients, including both 

the fossil fuel industry trade group that Lee had helped Standard Oil create as World War I was ending. While Ivy Lee largely focused on shaping and controlling the way the media got information as a way to mold public opinion, Bernays tried to manipulate the masses more directly. His best known trick was obliterating the taboo against women smoking in about six months, a 

They tasked Bernays with increasing sales, and he actually went to a psychoanalyst to talk about what cigarettes signified. You guessed it, phalluses. This got Bernays thinking about the “penis envy” women supposedly feel and an emergent push for women’s rights, and boom he had it: he would make smoking a women’s empowerment issue. He convinced a few young women he knew to stage a smoking “protest” in New York, calling cigarettes “freedom torches,” then alerted the press to the protest. It made headlines across the country and within a few months women all over the country were smoking and American Tobacco’s sales were soaring.

So, to recap, PR emerged as a way for industry to deal with a three-pronged threat: the rise of investigative journalism and activism shining a light on the misdeeds of industry, the emergence of regulation (which previously left industry to its own devices), and the expansion of the vote to members of society that had little in common with captains of industry. It was wildly successful. The first wave of PR effectively put a stop to the muckrakers’ early calls for corporate accountability.

Then the Depression hit and once again America’s bosses were the bad guys. Publicists like John W. Hill helped companies like 

paint labor unions, social security, and the New Deal as socialist. Hill paid commentators like 

 to write op-eds in newspapers and magazines, or join panel discussions 

 ginning up fear about these ideas. (At one point, Hill’s firm Hill & Knowlton was paying Sokolsky $40,000 a year to write pieces criticizing Social Security and the New Deal—that's a high six-figure salary in today's dollars). Hill would go on to mastermind the 

 (TIRC), a hub of science denial around smoking...that sounds an awful lot like the research bureaus Ivy Lee had set up some 40 years before. Not a huge shock given that Hill idolized Lee.

Hill’s client roster also included the 

 during those years, so it's no surprise that you see the same tactics deployed by TIRC then used by oil companies to combat rising concern over "the greenhouse effect" or by agribusiness to combat rising concern over GMOs. In fact Hill would have folks from the tobacco companies and chemical companies join the API, because he spotted ways for all three industries to work together—to lobby together for or against regulation, to trade strategies and ideas, even to create new products together. Without PR firms bringing them together, these industries and companies 
may have tended to stay in their own worlds, but the type of cross-pollination Hill enabled was hugely influential.

In fact it’s how the cigarette filter came about.

Cigarette filters are one of the reasons oil and gas companies were named defendants in the tobacco litigation of the 1990s. “When tobacco companies needed to assess the toxics in their cigarettes and in cigarette smoke, the people they turned to to do it were the oil companies,” says Carroll Muffett, President and CEO of the Center for International Environmental Law. Oil companies had been testing exhaust and refinery smoke for years because of the Clean Air Act, so they were the ones that had the sophisticated equipment and the knowledge to test for toxins in cigarette smoke.

“And when the oil companies reported back to the tobacco companies on the toxins they were in fact finding in that smoke, you know, what did they do with the information?" Muffett said. "Did they go public and say there's a massive risk here? No. They entered into joint enterprises, joint ventures with the tobacco companies to produce cigarette filters.”

Since the inception of the PR industry, its most expert practitioners have deployed a handful of techniques on behalf of multiple industries and really in service of all industry: to paint business as a good faith member of the community, to sway public opinion, to avoid what infamous PR guy Rick Berman calls "public judgement," and to create political will in their favor. But they weren't operating in a vacuum. In deploying these techniques on behalf of industry, they fundamentally shifted the information ecosystem in America.

Today, it's not just industries that want to avoid regulation or deal with a crisis who use PR techniques, it's everyone from your local county government to your favorite musician to the most 
earnest nonprofit. It's the filter through which all information flows to the public. Which doesn't 

 to be a bad thing, but it has certainly led to the information pollution we have in the U.S. today, where trust in journalists and experts is at an all-time low, the public is tremendously confused, people can (and do) just consume "news" that tracks with their opinions, and so on. To clean up that pollution, it helps to know how to spot these techniques. Our hope with this investigation and related podcasts and documents is to help people do just that—not to make people even more suspicious of everything they see, or double down on getting their information only from one trusted YouTuber, but to pull the mask off a bit and help people find their way through the filters to the information they need to make important decisions about their lives.

E. Bruce Harrison Documents

John Hill Documents

Ivy Lee Documents

Edelman Documents

Schmertz Documents

Berman Documents

Bernays Documents

S9, Ep2 | A Legal Strategy

S3, Bonus: We Interrupt This Podcast for New Research + Emily Atkin and Guardian CEO Anna Bateson on Banning Fossil Fuel Ads

S3, Ep9 | Jay Rosen and Nicholas Johnson on What the Media Can Do About Disinformation

S3, Ep7 | John Hill and the Tobacco-Oil-Plastic Triangle

S3, Ep8 | Meet The Harrisons

S9, Ep1 | The Panic

S3, Ep6 | Manipulating the Masses and Predicting the Future—Edward Bernays and W. Howard Chase

S1, Ep5 | Fun With Front Groups

S3, Ep5 | Oil Slick, Part 2—False Equivalence and Free Speech

S1, Ep2 | Ye Olde Crisis Actor Myth

S1, Ep4 | The Birth of SponCon

S3, Ep4 | Oil Slick, Part 1—The Rise of the Corporate Persona

S1, Ep6 | How a Standard Oil PR Guy Shaped Post-War America

S1, Ep1 | Fake Experts and Real Bacon

S3, Ep3 | Psychological Warfare, Astroturfing, and Another Tobacco-Oil Connection

S3, Ep2 | The Oil-Nazi-Propaganda Triangle

S1, Ep3 | A Tie Is a Win

S3, Ep1 | The Father of Public Relations

S1, Ep3 | Weaponizing False Equivalence

S9, Ep3 | The Next Citizens United Will Be a Climate Case

Rigged Season 1

In Rigged, we rummage through the bag of tricks used by PR to shape the world you live in. Over the last century, these tricks have rigged the media, the government… society, really...with sometimes ridiculous, and sometimes profoundly serious effects on our democracy. This is a podcast about that war for hearts and minds right here on US soil.

S1, Ep6 | How a Standard Oil PR Guy Shaped Post-War America

About This Episode

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