Part 1: Origins

The early form of Public Relations did not originate from "corporate image management," but rather as a response to a more fundamental reality: in a mass society where organizational power expands rapidly and public opinion escapes elite control, how can an acceptable social explanatory framework be reconstructed? It was not a profession that grew naturally out of commercial prosperity; rather, it was a collection of practices shaped by crises of trust, conflicts of opinion, and the pressures of governance. Between the late 19th century and the eve of World War I, rapid industrialization in the United States simultaneously gave birth to two new phenomena: large-scale corporations operating across regions, and mass media covering the entire nation. For the first time, industries such as railways, coal, steel, and oil had to face a "public" that was vast, highly mobile, and no longer bound by a single authority. At this stage, large corporations often viewed the public as a potential threat rather than a subject for communication. In the face of strikes, accidents, and scandals, the common practice was information suppression, pressuring the media, manipulating reports, or even directly threatening investigative journalists. However, this strategy did not bring stability; instead, it rapidly depleted trust. Once a corporation spoke, its explanation was often presupposed to be a lie, leading to an escalation in public conflict. It was against this backdrop that the practices of Ivy Lee began to show their structural significance. His judgment was based not on moral idealism, but on a pragmatic diagnosis: the problem was not whether the public was emotional, but that the corporation had already lost the prerequisite for being believed. Under such conditions, one-way propaganda would only intensify opposition.

One of Lee's key pivots was the attempt to establish stable, predictable information channels. Around 1906, while assisting with external communication for a railway accident, he proactively provided information to the media, including unfavorable facts. Such texts were later regarded as one of the archetypes of the early "press release." Its core did not lie in whitewashing the image, but in being timely, accurate, and verifiable—treating the public as a subject capable of judgment and news as something other than a private corporate resource. During the same period, he proposed and disseminated a professional position text later known as the Declaration of Principles. This was not a promotional piece, but a clarification of the boundaries of PR practice: no concealment, no distortion, respect for facts, assistance in verification, and treating the public as the subject of judgment. By today's standards, these principles seem limited or even idealized; however, at the time, they marked a significant turn—large organizations were now required to explain their actions to the public, not just to shareholders or internal powers. The most controversial and symbolic of Ivy Lee's methods appeared following the Ludlow Massacre of 1914.

The Ludlow event in Colorado resulted from long-standing labor-management conflicts escalating into public violence. The conflict centered on the Colorado Fuel & Iron (CF&I) coal mining system, a company closely linked to Rockefeller family capital. Miners had long been subject to low wages, high accident rates, and the "company town" and "company store" systems, with their right to unionize systematically restricted. In 1913, with the support of the United Mine Workers, the miners struck and were forced to establish a long-term tent colony in the Ludlow area. On April 20, 1914, the conflict escalated sharply after the intervention of the Colorado National Guard. The tent colony was burned, and several women and children suffocated in the cellars beneath the tents due to smoke and fire. The event sent shockwaves through the nation and was widely termed the "Ludlow Massacre." Public opinion no longer focused solely on labor conditions but shifted toward a sharper question: when private capital is deeply entangled with state power, who bears the responsibility for violence?

In this context, the Rockefeller family shifted from a relatively abstract symbol of capital to a subject that could be identified, held accountable, and criticized by the public. Ivy Lee's intervention did not alter the facts of the event, nor could it eliminate the moral impact of the deaths. The strategy he adopted was closer to visibility management: facilitating public appearances by Rockefeller family members, visits to the mining areas, and interactions with workers, all recorded by the media. The emphasis was not on the specific content of the speeches, but on the fact that power no longer existed in an anonymous, untouchable form. This approach was not intended to "whitewash" the event, but rather to prevent the conflict from being permanently solidified as an irreconcilable opposition between "Capital and the People." It could not reverse public opinion, but it provided society with an entry point to re-examine the relationship between power and responsibility. Consequently, the Ludlow Massacre is often viewed as a major intersection of modern PR, labor politics, and public opinion governance, rather than an isolated corporate crisis. Such practices also exposed the clear boundaries of Ivy Lee's method: it was a reactive mechanism used to reconstruct minimal social communicability after a conflict had already erupted, rather than a systematic tool for proactively shaping consensus. For a corporation, this "stop-the-bleeding" style of PR might suffice; but for the governance of public opinion at the state level, it was clearly insufficient.

In the early 20th century, the structure of American society changed rapidly: urbanization accelerated, newspaper circulation surged, the immigrant population expanded, and labor unions and social movements became frequent. Public opinion began to possess the capacity for spontaneous aggregation and backlash. Government and large organizations gradually realized that if they only explained themselves after a crisis had occurred, they had already lost the initiative. The true institutional turning point came during World War I. In 1917, the United States established the Committee on Public Information (CPI), which for the first time systematically mobilized news media, speaking networks, visual symbols, and emotional narratives in the name of the state to persuade the domestic society to support participation in the war. This practice proved that mass opinion could be shaped in a highly organized and coordinated manner. After the war, the term "propaganda" became notorious due to the wartime experience, but the relevant techniques and experiences did not disappear; they were transferred, renamed, and continued to be used.

It was in this context that the practice of Edward Bernays secured its place in history. He was not an academic theorist, but a highly self-aware practitioner of public opinion manipulation. He did not invent the term "public relations," but by calling himself a "public relations counsel" and practicing it continuously, he systematically shaped the modern meaning of the profession in the 20th century. He introduced psychology and the study of group behavior into opinion manipulation, emphasizing that the key to communication lay not in whether the information was true, but in whether it was effective. Bernays did not believe that the masses could naturally form a stable consensus through rational discussion. In his view, the masses acted more through symbols, emotions, and identity. His practice was not simple persuasion, but a determination of which behaviors became socially acceptable—or even impossible to oppose—by re-encoding the "permits of meaning."

The "Torches of Freedom" campaign is a classic demonstration of this logic. In 1929, in a social environment where female smoking in public was still considered immoral, Bernays did not directly refute the taboo. Instead, he embedded female smoking into the symbolic narrative of "female liberation." During the New York Easter Parade, he arranged for women to smoke in front of media cameras and provided a unified explanation to the press in advance. This action did not change perceptions through rational argument, but rather granted legitimacy to a previously forbidden behavior through symbolic attribution. While this case alone cannot explain long-term changes in female smoking rates, it clearly demonstrates a communication mechanism: people do not act solely because they understand; rather, taboos crumble when an action is endowed with a sense of righteous meaning. Later concepts like agenda-setting, framing theory, symbolic consumption, brand narrative, and identity politics did not evolve simply and directly from Bernays, but they theoretically addressed the same problem on different levels: how attention is allocated, how explanations are presupposed, how meaning is embedded in daily choices, and how identity is maintained over the long term. When communication is no longer just a matter of technique, but a matter of legitimacy, structure, and a way of existence, public relations and communication studies truly enter their modern form.

Part 2: Slowing Down

Edward Bernays (1891–1995) was born in Vienna, Austria, and immigrated to the United States as a child. He was the nephew of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. This familial connection was not a mere anecdote but a significant background for his intellectual development. Bernays did not pursue an academic research path; instead, he grew up within the practices of news, propaganda, and government. During World War I, he participated in the U.S. government's war propaganda and information mobilization system, observing firsthand how a democratic society could be mobilized to support war in a short time through media, symbols, and narratives. After the war, he systematized these practical experiences, turning his services toward corporations, governments, and political forces, gradually repackaging the highly politicized concept of "propaganda" into the more neutral-sounding "Public Relations." He was not the sole shaper of this industry, but he was undoubtedly the first to systematically articulate and practice the professional role, technical logic, and social function of public relations. Bernays viewed himself not as a conspirator or a simple manipulator, but as a "social engineer" attempting to answer an unavoidable question: as mass society arrives irreversibly, how should social order be maintained?

Bernays’ so-called "cold premise" was not an emotional value judgment but a structural one. In his book Propaganda, he repeatedly emphasized that he was not accusing the general public of being stupid, but was describing the realistic conditions faced by mass society at a structural level. The scale of information in modern society far exceeds an individual's processing capacity; fields such as finance, diplomacy, technology, and law are highly specialized. Therefore, the problem is not a lack of individual rationality, but that the power of judgment is structurally and necessarily outsourced and entrusted to intermediary systems. Under this premise, Bernays clearly distinguished between individual rationality and group behavior. He inherited and absorbed the group psychology research of the time, believing that while individuals can remain rational under certain conditions, once they enter a large-scale group, their behavior tends to become emotional, imitative, and polarized, driven strongly by symbols, slogans, and identity. His concern was not a moral judgment of this phenomenon, but its realistic consequences: on a mass scale, collective decision-making is more likely to lose control than to approach the truth.

Against this backdrop, Bernays proposed the concept of the "Invisible Government." This concept is often misunderstood as a conspiracy theory, but in his original meaning, it does not point to secret meetings or a specific organization; rather, it refers to a functional layer that inevitably emerges under the conditions of mass society. In Bernays' description, the "Invisible Government" is not composed solely of politicians, but is a network operated by various roles: media editors and gatekeeping mechanisms that influence which issues enter the public view and how they are presented; experts, scholars, and research institutions that provide the appearance of professional authority for specific judgments; PR and communication planners responsible for designing narrative frames; and opinion leaders and social symbols who translate abstract issues into perceptible, imitable images. These roles do not need to conspire; they only need to operate within the same logic. The power exercised by this structure is not primarily manifested in traditional state tools such as law, police, or the military, but in the shaping of cognitive boundaries. Traditional government manages behavior, while this "invisible governance layer" manages the scope of issues, acceptable forms of expression, and the "range of reasonable conclusions." It does not directly command people how to think, but rather controls visibility and framing so that other possibilities gradually become invisible or are not regarded as serious options.

In Bernays' view, this structure is unavoidable because the logic itself is closed: the masses cannot process highly complex public affairs, so judgment necessarily relies on intermediaries; once intermediaries appear, a structure is formed; this structure either operates unconsciously and creates chaos, or is consciously organized to maintain order. Bernays explicitly chose the latter. He was never concerned with whether manipulation existed, but with who manipulated and according to what principles. This leads to his most controversial stance: in his discourse, transparency does not necessarily bring rationality; instead, it may exacerbate panic, polarization, and systemic disorder under certain conditions. Therefore, in his view, completely spontaneous public decision-making is a dangerous illusion; if democracy is to function in a mass society, it must be "engineered." The unsettling aspect of this logic lies not in its moral position, but in its high degree of compatibility with the structure of modern society. This is why the psychological warfare of the Cold War era, contemporary political communication, and platform-based information distribution mechanisms tend to operate naturally in the direction Bernays described. In essence, Bernays’ "Invisible Government" refers to the layer of structure that determines how people "understand the world" in a mass society. It requires no additional legitimacy because it has already decided, at an earlier stage, what will be regarded as a legitimate question and what is worth serious discussion.

Part 3: The Rationalized Transgression

Bernays clearly realized that lies are inefficient tools in long-term communication. Once a lie is exposed, it rapidly erodes trust, and a communication structure that has lost trust cannot continue to operate. Therefore, what he truly pursued was not short-term deception, but an opinion structure capable of stable, long-term operation. In this sense, his rejection of lies was based on a functional judgment: lies lack systemic sustainability. Based on this judgment, Bernays proposed a key premise: facts themselves do not automatically generate meaning. Facts are often scattered, and meaning is not embedded within them; rather, it is endowed through selection, ordering, and interpretation. Public opinion is never a simple accumulation of facts, but an organized, structured result. Therefore, the core of propaganda lies not in fabricating facts, but in deciding which facts are presented, how they are arranged, and how they are connected into a coherent narrative. Meaning comes not from the facts themselves, but from the designed relationships between them. At this level, "selection" is unavoidable. Even those claiming to conduct "objective reporting" cannot escape structural trade-offs. Bernays did not invent this bias; he simply stated it clearly—so-called neutrality does not mean an absence of trade-offs, but merely that the trade-offs are not acknowledged.

This explains a common misunderstanding: Bernays’ "propaganda" is not synonymous with "brainwashing." He did not believe that people are passive containers into which ideas can be directly poured. Instead, his judgment was that people can only react within existing psychological structures, emotional patterns, and social identities. Therefore, his goal was not to transform thoughts, but to activate, amplify, and rearrange existing psychological predispositions. Consequently, Bernays relied not on logical argument, but on fear, identity, shame, honor, and the herd mentality. He did not create new desires; he reconfigured existing desires and emotional resources so that a certain position became the most natural and effortless choice. This method is particularly clear in the case of the United Fruit Company and Guatemala.

Between the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the core dilemma of Guatemala was not ideology, but a lack of state capacity: weak finances, a lack of infrastructure, and a highly singular export structure. The government hoped to attract foreign capital through a concession system in exchange for the construction of railways, ports, and export channels. It was in this context that the United Fruit Company entered, gradually obtaining a special status in terms of land, taxation, and transportation. The company held vast amounts of high-quality land suitable for export crops, much of which was not put into production. This land structure limited the space for local farmers and competitors and compressed the state's room for maneuver in agricultural policy. In terms of logistics, the company controlled the railway systems and participated in the operation of key ports. While these were commercial assets in form, they functioned as national-level infrastructure. The control over transportation, prices, and market information translated into a structural advantage in negotiations, as the state’s lag in information acquisition weakened its governance capacity. Fiscally, United Fruit long reported land and assets at low valuations, paying minimal taxes. Labor-wise, the company formed a highly closed employment system within its controlled areas, replacing state regulatory functions with internal corporate systems. The result was that while the state nominally retained sovereignty and law, it could no longer make independent decisions in the key areas of land, transportation, finance, and labor.

It was in this structural context that Jacobo Árbenz came to power. Árbenz was elected president (1951–1954) within a constitutional framework. His reform focus lay in restoring the state’s basic capacity to allocate land, taxes, and public resources. The 1952 Land Reform Law explicitly distinguished between productive and idle land, expropriating only the latter and providing compensation based on existing tax valuations. This design did not deny private property rights but sought to increase land utilization. It was on the compensation mechanism that the institutional contradiction was exposed. The long-term practice of underreporting land value to reduce taxes was reversed, as compensation based on those same reported valuations directly penalized the company. The focus of the conflict was not just lost profits, but whether the state was re-exercising its sovereignty according to rules.

In this structural conflict, Bernays' role lay not at the legal or political level, but at the narrative level. He did not participate in land negotiations; he participated in the redefinition of the conflict: reshaping an economic conflict between "state governance capacity and corporate interests" into an "ideological threat" and a "national security issue." In this narrative, land systems and tax valuations were moved out of the center of discussion, replaced by labels such as "leftist government," "communist infiltration," and "Soviet influence in the Western Hemisphere." Simultaneously, the company's own interests were deliberately downplayed, and voices were provided by journalists, scholars, and so-called "Latin American experts" to create the impression of a "consensus of independent judgments." This operation did not directly decide the occurrence of the coup, but it changed the defensibility and political endurance of the intervention. When the CIA launched Operation PBSUCCESS, the threat narrative was already mature, making the action acceptable at the level of public opinion and politics. Therefore, Bernays did not overthrow the Guatemalan government, but he participated in shaping a cognitive environment that made "overthrowing it" appear reasonable and understandable in the United States. In a mass democracy, it is often this pre-laid rationality, rather than direct command, that determines the direction of historical events.