Torches of Freedom

The campaign

In the 1920s American women were beginning to smoke, but not in public, where it was still thought vulgar. George Washington Hill, president of the American Tobacco Company, saw a market the size of the existing one going unsold and told Edward Bernays, whom he had retained for Lucky Strike, that it was like a gold mine in his front yard. Bernays consulted the psychoanalyst A. A. Brill, who told him that cigarettes were for women a symbol of freedom and, in the vocabulary of the day, of the masculine prerogative; the cigarette was a torch of freedom. Bernays took the phrase.

He arranged, through a secretary and a feminist friend, Ruth Hale, for a group of young women to join the Easter parade on Fifth Avenue on 31 March 1929 and, at a signal, to light cigarettes. He hired photographers. He made sure that the women were debutantes rather than actresses, so that the pictures would read as society rather than show business, and that the press received the story in advance as a demonstration for women's rights. The next day the New York Times reported, under the headline "Group of Girls Puff at Cigarettes as a Gesture of 'Freedom'", that the women had struck a blow against the taboo. Papers across the country ran the pictures. None mentioned the American Tobacco Company, and Bernays's role was not public until he described it himself, decades later.

The parade was one move in a longer campaign. Through the late 1920s and early 1930s Lucky Strike ran the "Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet" advertisements, which sold the cigarette to women as a slimming aid and provoked the confectionery industry into a public quarrel that gave the brand still more coverage. Bernays commissioned surveys of physicians, arranged for fashion houses to feature the green of the Lucky Strike packet when Hill refused to change it, and placed stories about women smokers in the women's pages. The parade was the piece that was remembered because it was the piece that looked least like an advertisement.

Who ran it and why

Bernays was the nephew of Sigmund Freud and had worked on the Creel Committee's foreign section during the war. He opened his office in 1919, calling himself a "counsel on public relations", and spent the 1920s inventing the trade. His method, set out in Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923) and Propaganda (1928), was to work on the public indirectly, through events, authorities, and groups, so that the desired conclusion seemed to arise on its own. He called it the engineering of consent.

The Torches of Freedom stunt was that method in miniature. Hill wanted women to smoke in public. A direct advertisement saying so would have been read as a cigarette company's self-interest. A news event in which independent women asserted a right was read as social change, and the change happened to benefit the company. The cause was real: women's public smoking was a genuine question of the day, and the women in the parade meant what they did. Bernays's innovation was to attach a product to a cause without the attachment being visible.

The techniques, in order of weight

Transfer is the heart of it. The feeling attached to women's emancipation, which in 1929 was recent and strong, was carried over to a cigarette. Nothing was claimed about the cigarette; the association did the work.

Leak And Plant is the method. The event was staged, the press was briefed, and the story ran as news. The audience evaluated it as something that had happened rather than something that had been said, and news is believed where advertising is discounted.

Front Groups, in an early form: the demonstrators appeared as independent women, and in a sense were, but they had been recruited through a feminist of standing whose own name lent the event credibility, and the organizer was a tobacco company.

Glittering Generalities supplied the vocabulary. "Freedom" and "equality" were the words the story traveled on, and no one who repeated them was endorsing Lucky Strike.

Testimonial operated through the choice of participants, debutantes whose social standing made the act respectable, and later through the paid endorsements of actresses and opera singers that the company ran in the same years.

Appeal To Authority: Brill's psychoanalytic reading gave the campaign a scientific rationale that Bernays repeated in later accounts, and the company's wider campaign leaned on physicians and on the slimming claim.

The artifacts

The photographs from the parade are the campaign's artifact, and their status is instructive. They were taken by photographers Bernays had hired, distributed to newspapers as news pictures, and have been reproduced ever since as documents of women's emancipation. They are genuine photographs of a real event. They are also an advertisement, and the two descriptions are both correct.

The archive reproduces the Lucky Strike advertising of the same period, which shows the open half of the campaign: the "Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet" series, with its slim silhouettes and its physicians, and the testimonial advertisements in which opera singers and actresses, paid by the company, attested that the cigarette did not irritate the throat. Read beside the parade photographs, the advertisements show the division of labor. The advertisements made claims and were discounted as advertisements; the parade made no claim and was believed as news.

The wider campaign also produced the green campaign of 1934, in which Bernays, unable to persuade Hill to change the color of the Lucky Strike packet to suit women's fashions, set out instead to make green fashionable: a Green Ball, green-themed luncheons, and stories in the fashion press, none of which mentioned the cigarette. The episode is the Torches of Freedom method applied to a color, and it shows the method's reach: anything the product needed could be manufactured in the culture around it.

What happened

Women's smoking in public became unremarkable within a few years, and the share of cigarettes sold to women roughly doubled over the following decade. How much of that was the parade is impossible to say; the trend was under way and the company's advertising budget was vast. But the episode became the model. Bernays wrote it up as a triumph, and the public relations industry taught it as one. Its structure, cause first and product behind it, is the pattern of a great deal of corporate communication since, from brand activism to the "purpose-driven" campaigns of the present.

The irony is that the cause was real and the product was lethal. The women in the parade were asserting a right; the company was selling a carcinogen; and the technique allowed both to be true in the same photograph. Bernays himself gave up tobacco clients in later life and campaigned against smoking, and said that had he known in 1929 what cigarettes did, he would have refused the work.

The case has a coda. Bernays lived to 103 and spent his last decades as the public relations industry's historian and conscience, giving interviews in which he described the Torches of Freedom with pride in the craft and regret at the client. In 1990 Life magazine listed him among the hundred most influential Americans of the century. The profession he founded has never quite decided whether he was its founder or its warning, and the parade is the reason: it is the perfect demonstration of a method that works equally well for a good cause and a lethal product, and the method does not know the difference.

What it teaches

The Torches of Freedom are the canonical case of selling a product as a cause. The lesson for a reader is to ask of any message that arrives as a movement, a value, or a piece of news, rather than as an advertisement, who arranged it and who benefits. The question is not cynical. The cause may be good. But the attachment of a product to it is a technique, and it was invented on Fifth Avenue on Easter Sunday 1929.