Part Two: Edward Bernays: The Founding Father of Lies

In part two, Robert is joined again by Jamie Loftus to continue discussing Edward Bernays, a pioneer in public relations, propaganda and lying.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hmm, what's eating My Bags of Dicks? I'm Robert Evans.
This is Behind the Bastards, the show where I talk
about terrible people and try new intros. This one was
inspired by something Sophie said minutes before I started this episode,
when Jamie Loftus expressed a concern that someone would hear

(00:20):
her chewing and would attack her for it on the Internet,
and Sophie said that person could eat a bag of dicks,
which is why the show opened that way. I like
the context, Robert, You're so good at providing historical contact here,
everything glitting things that just happened. It's necessary. Everyone needs
to understand why why I say the things that I say,
and why I opened this show with What's Eating My

(00:42):
Bags of Dicks? I understand why people are bothered by
an occasional eating sound on Mike, But I encourage everyone
to remember that this is entertainment that is free, and
if you don't like it, you can simply go pay
for something, or eat a bag of dicks. According to that,
or eat a bag of dicks. Eat a bag of dicks,
and then other people will hear you chewing. Now I

(01:03):
do I do have I do have a lot of
sympathy for people who just like, for whatever reason, can't
stand the sound of other people chewing because it bugs
me sometimes with certain people, like I can't stand the
sound of other people eating cereal. It drives me fucking nuts.
Other foods I don't have an issue with, but cereal
is not something you can control, and so I don't
judge people for having issues with it. To the plate,

(01:26):
but it is an occasional part of life. It is
an occasional part of life. People eat food, uh, And
that's just the world in which we live. And one
day robots will do all of our eating for us.
But that day is not today. No, No, let's start
talking about Eddie Burnet's again. So at the start of

(01:47):
our last episode, I made the case that it would
Burnet's deserves to be considered one of America's founding fathers.
He invented the tactics of publicity stunts and pr flax
masquerading as journalists that so dominate our national discourse today.
You can look at that Vogue article about Ozma al Asad,
which we discussed in the Bashar al Assad episode. It's
just one of many descendants of Eddie Burns's tactics. He

(02:08):
got women smoking, he helped make thin be vogue, He
invented fox socially conscious ad tactics that cloak capitalism and
robes of charity, And perhaps more than anything else, he
invented bacon as a staple of the American breakfast. Yes, yes,
I don't know. What do you call the kind of

(02:28):
person who will not shut up about bacon besides obnoxious
bacon eaters every time? Because I I love bacon. It's great.
Who doesn't love bacon? Even if you think it's unethical
to eat? You agree that it smells and tastes incredible.
I love bacon, but I dislike when people I feel
like it's it is a talking point for m R
A s I've like any time any time and m

(02:50):
R A comes out there like, oh look Jamie, mom
just suck. She doesn't even like like beer, babes and bacon.
Like I've been, people have invoked the three bees at
me before. There's just it is a weird talking point,
and I would like to hold upward Berney is personally
responsible for it. Yeah, I mean it's it's one of
those things where like, uh, the story of how bacon

(03:12):
became what it is right now, which is like this
internet famous like everybody does these uh look at this
thing that's made I made a burger patty entirely out
of woven bacon or whatever, like all of these like bacon. Yeah. Yeah,
Like that's a tactic to get people because people were
eating less bacon, so they were like, how do we

(03:33):
make bacon cool? It was incorporated into like the quote
unquote like random culture of the mid two thousands. I
feel like everyone because it's kind of a funny word. Yeah,
everyone would like an Invader Zim sleeve of tattoos talks
about bacon too much. And if you're like a company
that produces a product and you can have it be

(03:55):
that kind of popular where like people are making random
internet jokes just because the word bacon is funny. Um,
and then it you know, and then they eat more
bacon because like it's one of those things. It works.
Because as I was researching how Eddie Burne's made bacon
go viral in America, uh, I craved bacon and I

(04:15):
bought a whole fucking pile of bacon and ate it
because I desperately wanted to eat bacon after reading everything
that like had been like you see a bunch of
and it's the same thing, Like you see a bunch
of bacon memes on Twitter, and it's like these are dumb,
and like I understand how stupid they are, but bacon
is delicious and now I'm gonna go eat some. It
does help when the product is fun to consume. Yeah, yeah, yeah,

(04:40):
it really does. Um Now, in the mid nineteen twenties,
Beechnut Packing Company, who was one of America's major bacon producers,
had noticed their sales were starting to plummet. This may
have had something to do with the thinness craze that
Eddie Burnet's had actually helped to spark. Whatever the cause,
Americans were eating lighter breakfasts and going without bacon more
mornings than not, so Beechnut Packing Company hired Bernet's to

(05:03):
turn ship around. Now, Jamie, the average standard admin move
might have been to attack the competition and try to
steal market share from other bacon companies, but Barnes knew
there was no point in doing that. Beech Nuts stood
to make way more money by just changing America's breakfast
habits to include too much bacon. He instituted this change

(05:24):
the same way he got America to smoke by finding
doctors in bribing them to lie to the country. Going
to quote from an inc dot com article, here, Bern's
contacted a doctor he knew and who also had substantial
financial ties to his agency, and commissioned to study on
the health effects of bacon. When the physician came back
with was that bacon was in fact the perfect breakfast

(05:44):
food and that it replaces the energy you lose during sleep.
I fucking I love twenties like bad medical advice reasoning
cigarettes feel your cue es own bacon replaces your sleep energy,
just like inventing things that don't actually exist. Well, yeah,

(06:08):
of course you're going to have less energy after sleeping,
so you need bacon. Is exhausting, I mean that is
that also? Yeah, just contradicts the very concept of sleep. Yeah,
it's it's yeah, it's amazing, it's incredible. Once a shured
of these results, Bernes asked the doctor to communicate his
findings to the medical community, which he did by distributing

(06:30):
them to a list of five thousand m d s
across the country. Within no time, doctors from coast to
coast were recommending that their patients eat bacon for breakfast,
and the eating habits of a nation were transformed. So
there we go, Thanks Eddie. Honestly, I mean that is
I think one of the more positive things that he
did for the world. I mean, it's never good to

(06:51):
lie about something being healthy that's not healthy, but that
certainly wasn't his idea. And yes it was his idea
to say that a healthy I feel like that's been
happening since before, before Edward Burnet's that like lying about
something being healthy. No, I mean not just lying about

(07:11):
something being healthy, finding a doctor to cook up a
fake study about something being healthy, to make that go
viral so that people would start eating all of the
bacon in the world. Like you can tie so much
of like our modern health bullshit to Edward Burnet is
getting a doctor to be like, bacon replenishes your energy.
And now it's like it's come down to be like no,

(07:32):
kale juice is like, you know, got to fight cancer
and stuff. But at all it's descended from the same
tactic like dr oz wouldn't be possible without Edward. Yeah, yeah,
because before like yeah, you'd have lies where people would
be like this morphine cough syrup is good for your kid.
But after medicine started to really become a thing and

(07:53):
like antibiotics were real, and like, it was clear that
like doctors were more legitimate than they've been in the
old sawbones. Day Burns was the first guy to be like, Okay, well,
I've got to I've got to kick this up a notch.
I can't just lie about something being healthy. I gotta
bribe doctors to lie about something being healthy. And that's
how we're gonna fucking get this ship on the road.
And it worked, and it worked, and I'm I'm not

(08:15):
too mad about it. It's a bad it's a bad practice.
But I like bacon at breakfast, so do I. It's delicious,
And he was objectively right that it's a fantastic breakfast food. Um,
but I did feel like I'd be remiss if I
didn't talk a little bit about the health consequences of
all of this bacon consumption on the American people. So

(08:36):
I found an article. Yeah, I found an article on
The Guardian about an announcement made by the World Health
Organization based on the conclusions of twenty two cancer experts
in ten countries reviewing more than four studies on the
health impact of processed meats like bacon. Quote the Who
advised that consuming fifty grams of processed me today equivalent

(08:58):
to just a couple of rashers of bacon or one dog,
would raise the risk of getting bowel cancer by eight
over a lifetime. Eating larger amounts raises your risk more.
Learning that your own risk of cancer is increased from
something like five percent to something like six percent may
not be frightening enough to put you off bacon sandwiches forever.
But learning that consumption of processed meat causes an additional
thirty four thousand worldwide cancer deaths a year is much

(09:19):
more chilling. So if we're if we're calculating the death
toll of Eddie Burnet's, on top of that two million
dead cigarette ladies, we had another thirty or four thousand
a year from bacon from the bacon edge lords. Wow, Wow,
that's brutal. Okay, that is brutal. Now I'm a fair man, Jamie.
And unlike with tobacco, I don't think we can blame

(09:41):
Berne's for purposefully harming here because back in the twenties,
whiskey was still medicine and while he knew that his
medical expert was a paid lying hill to get people
to eat more bacon, he did not know that bacon
was going to give our grandparents bow cancer. Um, so
you can blame him somewhat for that because he knew
he was lying for money. But it's not like we cigarettes,
where he knew he was getting people to give themselves cancer.

(10:03):
He had, yeah, like where he had the research and
had a counter argument prepared. Yeah, okay, I mean yeah,
I'm I'm almost like willing to defend him for this
of just like, yeah, it's not good to have a
like a snake oil doctor cop for your product. But
if the product ain't delicious, if the damned ifest is

(10:26):
its taste, yeah, you know. Now. Over the course of
the Roaring twenties, Berne's gradually refined his strategy create newsworthy
stories by any means necessary, and use that to generate
demand for the product he was representing. He eventually turned
it into something like a science. By nineteen thirty one,
Berns was raking in more than sixty thousand dollars a

(10:47):
year in profits, which equates to more than nine thousand
dollars a year in modern dollars. By nineteen thirty five,
he was earning five times that much. But Edward Burns
was not just content being good at his job and
making money. He wanted to be seen as an intellectual titan,
a serious scholar of mass consciousness. So he started writing
books Propaganda in nineteen twenty eight, which was about well,

(11:11):
you know, it's propaganda. Uh. This quote from the book
is telling about how bernes ideology developed. Quote. The conscious
and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of
the masses is an important element in a democratic society.
Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an
invisible government, which is the true ruling power of our country.

(11:34):
We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed,
and our ideas suggested largely by men we have never
heard of. It is they who pull the wires that
control the public mind. He writes this considering himself a
good guy, which is amazing because like, this is almost
exactly what Alex Jones believes about the world. He just
thinks it's a different group of people, and Bernes is like, no,

(11:54):
this is what we're doing. It is so funny, like
how books of this era that it just you sound
like a villain. But yeah, but he is. He sees
himself as the good guy for sure. And Berne's considered
himself a liberal, But he was also a very elitist liberal.
So not a populist, not a socialist, certainly. He was

(12:16):
one of those people who feared and reviled the masses.
Much of his work and the cynicism behind it, came
from his strongly held belief that the masses were fundamentally
dumb and dangerous. They had to be led and molded
by men like him who could channel their unconscious desires
in productive or at least profitable directions. Cool. So not
not an ego issue with him, not at all. No,

(12:39):
not an ego issue thinking that he knows what's good
for the world better than the people of the world.
But me, and I'm going to kill them with cigarettes
exactly Eddie Bernet's that's a that's a fucking epitaph. Someone
find his his gravestone and carved that in there. Everyone

(12:59):
is trashed but me, So I'm going to get them
hooked on cigarettes. Amazing. Yeah, who's the jewel equivalent of
Eddie Burns today. I'm just want to I mean, he's
the guy who runs jewel maybe, yeah, who runs drill.
All right, I'm going to investigate anyways. Continue. In nineteen

(13:19):
thirty three, he published what would become his most influential work,
Crystallizing Public Opinion. His focus in this book was on
what he called the engineering of consent. A phrase is
horrifying as it is not sound. Yeah, it's it sounds horrible, right,
Like that's bad. That sounds like some Tucker Max ship. Yeah,
that sounds like a little Tucker maxie. Yea god, Okay,

(13:43):
what is that? What is the goal of engineering consent?
He says, is to provide leaders with the ability to quote, control,
and regiment the masses according to our will without their
knowing about it. Oh like consent, Like yeah, yeah, I
just have to remind everyone. At no point did Bernet's
consider himself a bad guy. He's saying this ship and

(14:04):
he thinks like, but I'm I'm I'm in the right here. Well,
it's like, how do you hear this stuff? There? It's
no wonder that. However, many years in the future, his
daughter is like, no, he wasn't that great, Like he
was he was kind of a piece of ship, yea.
His daughter seemed kind of consistent about that. You don't
use the phrase piece of ship. But they're very critical well,

(14:26):
the fact that he's able to be like, I'm a feminist.
I did kill like a million ladies, but I killed
all of the women who were alive in my day.
Other than that, I was very progressive. Yeah. Obviously, while
Bernet's considered himself a good guy, he was very popular
among bad guys, and starting in the nineteen twenties, he

(14:47):
accrued a new and increasingly influential fan, a fella you
might have heard about by the name of Joseph Gebel's.
Now there we go, Jacobs, there it is. Even though
Berne's himself was Jewish, Gebbels loved him. He kept a
copy of Crystallizing Public Opinion in a place of honor

(15:10):
in his office and utilized all of Berne's well worn
techniques to create a cult of personality around Adolf Hitler.
According to an article on Burnet's in the Conversation Quote,
Burne's learned that the Nazis were using his work in
nineteen thirty three from a foreign correspondent for Hearst newspapers.
He later recounted in his nineteen sixty five autobiography, they
were using my books as the basis for a destructive

(15:32):
campaign against the Jews of Germany. This shocked me, but
I knew that any human activity can be used for
social purposes or misused for anti social ones. This observation, Yeah,
what's that? The use of the phrase anti social purposes
to describe the Holocaust is very diplomatic. It's also interesting

(15:53):
because it's exactly the terminology Nazis used. They called people
like homosexuals, people like trans folks, and Jewish people the
selves a social That was one of the terms they
used to talk about the people who they later exterminated. Um.
Interesting to me. Um. Now. This observation led Supreme Court
Justice Felix Frankfurter Or to warn Franklin Roosevelt against allowing

(16:15):
Burns to play a leadership role in World War Two,
describing him and his colleagues as professional poisoners of the
public mind, exploiters of foolishness, fanaticism, and self interest, which
is very true. Yeah, that's a lot more direct. Yeah, Yeah,
which is why Berne's does not get to have as
much fun in World War Two as he had in
World War One. Real tragedy there. Now, it's shocking to

(16:39):
me that Berne's was surprised to see his tactics used
for evil. He had not confined himself to the political realm.
In nineteen four, he'd helped popularize President Calvin Coolidge by
creating the Nonpartisan Committee for Calvin Calvin Coolidge and basically
hiring famous people to come to the White House and
chill out with the president. Coolidge had a reputation for
being cold and utterly a humorous, so Berne has made

(17:01):
sure there were headlines about Al Jolson, the most popular
comedian of the day, making him laugh. Three weeks after
this article ran coolidge one reelection, So he made Coolidge
seem cool. Wow, man, it's it's something horrible. But sometimes
when I hear news from this era, I'm like, well,
maybe people just shouldn't have been so fucking stupid. There.

(17:22):
It is, though. It's the same thing as Donald Trump
showing up on Jimmy Kimmel's show or not Jimmy Kimmel,
what's his fucking name, Jimmy fallon Jimmy Fallon show and
having his hair touseled. It's the same thing It's like,
this guy has a bad reputation. Put him with a famous,
popular comedian, and that will make him look nice. Most
people are Yeah, that'll make him seem at least humane. Exactly.

(17:43):
It's exactly what worked on Coolidge, and it worked with
Donald Trump. Yeah, life as hell. Bernie has also worked
with Herbert Hoover. He advised the president's administration as it
fought to sell the nation and Hooper's disastrously incompetent policies
aimed at mitigating the Great Depression. Berne's influence on Hoover
is obvious in this line from a speech Hoover gave
to a group of advertising executives. You have taken over

(18:05):
the job of creating a Zaiah and if transformed people
into constantly moving happiness machines, machines which have the compkey
to economic progress. Constantly moving Yeah, how do you not
know you're evil if you're calling people happiness machines. Constantly
moving happiness machines sounds like a shitty R E M song.
It's no, it sounds like a great R E M album.

(18:31):
Constantly moving happiness machines. Yeah, that is basically an r
M album. Right, There was a shiny happy people like, yeah, yeah,
it sounds just weird and arrogant enough to be an
r album. Constantly moving happiness machines. It is so uncanny Valley,
it's fucking wild. Yeah, fucking Herbert Hoover says that the

(18:53):
guy who sees the Great Depression, and it's like, clearly
the solution to this is more capitalism. We just didn't
go far enough. It was it was a commitment issue.
It was fully commn issue. It was a commitment issue. Yeah,
all right, yeah, yeah. So Berne's advised Herbert Hoover's campaign
and its attempt to defeat the rise of Democratic candidate

(19:15):
Franklin Delano Roosevelt. According to the father of spin quote, first,
he would enlist his cadra of disinterested experts from business, labor,
and academia. Only this time he was out to win
over the entire nation, which meant signing up as many
as twenty group leaders to his nonpartisan fact finding committee.
For Hoover, they would get out the word that the
economy was about to turn around, and they would help

(19:35):
puncture the inferior personality of Roosevelt by convincing voters that
the Democratic candidate was not the progressive people thought he was,
and that he has been subject to tammany and political jobbery.
Dividing the opposition was the key to conquering it. Burnet's
believed in this case that meant persuading the fifteen million
Americans who had voted four years before for Democrat Alfred
Smith to switch to Hoover right in Smith's name, or

(19:58):
simply stay home on election day. One publicity campaign would
spotlight leading Democrats who thought it had been a mistake
to nominate Roosevelt instead of Smith. Another would show Hoover
to be a courageous, humane leader who brought the nation piece,
if not prosperity. Burnet has also made clear, as he
had in his corporate campaigns, but the best way to
win over the public was by appealing to instinct rather
than reason. Always keep in mind the tendency of human

(20:20):
beings to symbolize their leaders. As Achilles heel Proof his
strategy paper advised also that the inferiority complex of individuals
will respond to feelings superior to a fool create issues
that appeal to pugnacious instincts of human beings. Now you
may recognize all this as the exact same strategy that
worked in two thousand sixteens literally feeling very familiar, convinced

(20:42):
leftist to say home, convinced them that the person, the
other Democrat who lost the nomination, that they should write
in that person's name and instead and get them to
want to fight in order to like like focus on
the instincts that make them angry rather than in the
stuff that brings them together. Like it's this. It's the
same strategy that worked in but fuck fuck Crucially, thankfully,

(21:06):
it didn't work in this campaign, which is why the
United States did not turn into a fascist hell state
like Germany and why the Nazis lost World War Two.
So thankfully, FDR was just too fucking good at running
a political campaign to lose to this. But it worked
a century, almost a century later. So many thoughts, and
I'm going to say none of them allowed at this time.

(21:28):
Oh boy, you know, it'll clear your your mind's palette,
Jamie Robert, I just really need some capitalist messaging to
get me through the next couple of minutes, honest. A
couple of products, a service or three, and then we'll be,
we'll be We'll be on the fucking road to happy town.
That is the exact baking palet cleanser. I'm seeking all

(21:49):
right palettes, which are a type of product. We're back.
I hope you all enjoyed those ads for Raytheon, which
which you know is the finest provider of of missile

(22:10):
guidance equipment. I'm gonna use I'm going to use the
discount code. You know. It's it's funny we're joking about
Raytheon a bunch, But I grew up in Plano, Texas,
where they're headquartered, and like my scout master as a kid,
like the guy who taught me how to like start
a fire and survive in the wilderness, did something for Raytheon,
And we don't know what he could. All he could
could say about his job is that he worked for Raytheon,

(22:32):
and he was the kind of guy who like whatever
he did. The way that he relaxed every year was
by spending a month alone in the bottom of the
Grand Canyon. Like so you know, he's been doing some
any any person who needs to take a very specific
alone dark vacation annually is not doing something good for
a living, like what he would sometimes go with a friend.

(22:54):
And one year that friend broke his leg and so
he had to like use a flare to get the
guy helicoptered out, and then he could continued alone for
weeks after that. Like that's whatever he did at work,
Like that's how he what he needed in order to
like get straight again afterwards, and he would return from
this feeling cleansed and ready to function up for another
eleven months. I mean, it's one of those things. I

(23:16):
don't know what the funk he was doing. I'm sure
it's horrible. He also like taught me everything I know
about woodcrafting, and I'm I'm I'll always be grateful for that.
He was. He was an incredible woodsman, but like a
complicated man. The odor I've gotten in, the more I've
learned about Raytheon, the more I've started to be, like,
oh my god, what the funk were you doing? Man'.

(23:38):
I'm thrilled to be descended from a long line of
weed smoking remedial algebra teachers. It's a very uncomplicated existence.
People who never hurt nobody, never hurt nobody, and they
certainly never taught nobody anything about algebra. Yeah. So, when

(23:58):
we last left off, Edward Burns had invented Donald Trump's
election strategies. It's fucking wild. That hurt my heart to heart.
Yeah yeah, yeah. Now, obviously his attempts to stop FDR
from winning the election did not work. They weren't even close.
Hoover got one of the most resounding defeats in the

(24:22):
history of American politics. Tone deaf weirdo. Yeah, he was
a tone deaf weirdo. He was a terrible president. He
was a terrible, terrible president, one of the worst we
ever had. Um But Eddie's tactics for engineering consent worked
more often than they didn't. Burns knew that well, and
as a clearly intelligent man, he should have known that

(24:43):
writing out a how to guide for manipulating mass consciousness
could be used by Nazis just as well as it
could be used by people who wanted to sell cigarettes.
But Berns wanted to be regarded as a great and
serious thinker, and the only way to do that was
to publish a book and make sure everyone knew how
smart he was. What Burns did with crystallizing public opinion
was the propaganda equivalent of phil figuring out how to

(25:05):
build an atom bomb with household materials and then just
throwing the instructions up on Reddit. Now it's like, yeah,
it's like when I taught you how to make a
bomb inside of fight club, Like wh what? What? What?
Why put that in the thing? Where's the need? Now?
The grossest part of this story is that many of
the ideas Burns wrote about and Crystallizing Public Opinion weren't

(25:26):
even his own ideas. Originally, years before, an academic named
Walter Lippman had published a book called Public Opinion. According
to an article I found in the International Journal of Communication, quote,
what Bernis represents as a friendly reading a public opinion
in his own quickly crafted sequel to Lipman's book, Crystallizing
Public Opinion is actually a calculated reversal of Lippmann's argument.

(25:48):
Lippman was a vehement critic of propaganda who condemned the
manufacture of consent by public relations when that field was
still in its infancy. Crystallizing Public Opinion inverts and subverts
Lippman's radical critique into an apollo g for pr. So
this guy Lippmann, who's a serious scholar, represents what people
like Berne's are doing, like recognizes it, sees it as horrifying,

(26:08):
and writes a book outlining why what they're doing is dangerous,
and then Burns basically flips that around into oh, this
guy wrote out, really well, what we're doing, I'll just
turn it into a how two guy to make it
easier for other people to do it just strips it
down and it's like, but no, he does explain how
to do it. Let's just take out the parts where
we talk about why it's culturally he says, this is

(26:28):
a nightmare. Like, no, but he did tell us how
to build the bomb. He just deleted all the stories
about people dying with bombs. Yeah, about the consequences of
bomb use. So once bern book was out and into
the hands of men like Joseph Garribel's, Burns finally started
to get what he wanted. Respect New York University let

(26:49):
him teach the very first PR course in academic history.
While Lippman was and remains respected in the industry, Bernes's
ideas took a much deeper hold, and unfortunately those ideas
included stereotypes are awesome. Actually, I'm gonna quote again from
that International Journal Communication article quote. Littman was consistently critical
of the manipulation of public opinion by wartime propaganda and

(27:12):
the transfer of propaganda techniques to peacetime endeavors. Conversely, Burne's
contends that propaganda has positive social value in creating unified
purpose in wartime in agreement on industrial purposes in peacetime.
Burnet's regards stereotypes as quote a great aid that the
public relations counsel in his work, because they can be
grasped by the average mind, even though he acknowledges they

(27:32):
are not necessarily truthful pictures of what they're supposed to portray.
No matter. According to Burnet's, PR practitioners can use stereotypes
to reach a public and then add their own ideas
to fortify their position and give it greater carrying power.
PR can also create new stereotypes to advance client's interests.
He does, however, acknowledge that stereotypes have one disadvantage. Demagogues
can use them to take advantage of the public. It's

(27:56):
the only disadvantage of stereotypes. Yeah, that's as long as
he said at it there. Well, I mean, this is
at least we're getting into the cartoon villain territory that
I've come to expect with this program. Because I was
feeling too challenged at the beginning, I'm like, oh, no,
he descends into egotistical madness. Okay, yeah, he's literally saying like, well,

(28:19):
stereotypes can be used to create fascism, and they're also
usually lies, but they help you sell ship, like usually
coming people who have no negative stereotypes about themselves. Yeah yeah, well,
I mean, but it doesn't because Bernet's This is actually
another interesting thing that Berne's was Jewish by like birth,
but he was an atheist and he was like angry

(28:39):
that people considered him Jewish, um because he just didn't
want to be identified as religious at all. But like
you'd think he would understand how dangerous stereotypes be. It
sounds like he always understands that, but just would but
needs the respect and like the whatever Lorie can come

(29:01):
with being the father of spin more than he cares
about anyone. It's like, I mean, I understand, like, based
on the kind of like figure he's trying to be,
I understand why he would divorce himself from any identity
at all, because yeah, but what a tool. I'm just

(29:23):
like stuffing my face with bacon. I'm stressed. Oh I'm
gonna eat so much bacon after this fucking episode, still winning.
He can't stop still winning. Yeah. Edward Burnet spent his
life taking advantage of the public after World War Two.
That meant fighting the Cold War in the name of capitalism.
He convinced President Eisenhower that the right reaction to the
threat of the Soviet Union was to urge Americans towards

(29:45):
an irrational fear of communism in order to drive spending.
Eisenhower's first political campaign directly tied consumer culture to patriotism,
culminating oh yeah, culminating in his you otto by slogan
Rotto was in car. Eisenhower was telling Americans it was
their patriotic duty to buy more things. That's how you

(30:06):
beat the commies is by embracing consumerism. Yeah well yeah yeah.
Radion like Radon, like the wonderful people at Radion. Now
the bulk of his anti communist work would of Bern's
anti communist work would, however, be done in the name
of a corporation, not the United States government, and that

(30:26):
corporation was the United Fruit Company now United Fruit now
Chiquida owned a huge chunk of Guatemala. In the late
forties and early fifties. They had secured the central American
Empire by basically bribing and cutting wildly beneficial deals with
the corrupt government in the area. This allowed them to
grow and export bananas at very low cost, but it

(30:47):
also completely screwed over the local workers and ensured they
made virtually no money from the trade, and that the
nation of Guatemala itself did not benefit in any meaningful
way from United Fruits booming sales. The whole state of
a airs owed an awful lot to Edward Burnet's For
one thing, he helped make bananas popular in America. United
Fruit hired him in the late forties with a mandate

(31:08):
to add the fruit to America's diet. Berne has achieved
this goal by using his usual tactics. He found a
doctor who said bananas were good for people, and then
engineered a spate of news stories around the country about
the amazing health benefits of of bananas. Classic Bernets, which is,
you know, not a bad thing, bananas are great for you,
great thing to bananas. I mean, his his approach is
so unwavering, whether he's like, yeah, bananas, cigarettes like Red's

(31:33):
fair kind of all the same. Yeah, find someone with
a fancy title to lie to America yeah, yeah, which
is still works today. It's it's there's still like whole
TV channels like Dedicade. Yeah, fucking Dr Phil. Like if
it was just Phil, nobody would give a ship. So

(31:55):
as time went on, Edward Burnet has made actual visits
to guatemal it became clear to him how bad conditions
actually were for most Guatemalans. Under years of corrupt rule,
Guatemala's leaders exempted the United Fruit Company from most internal taxes.
They let it import goods duty free. They gave it
control of the nation's only Atlantic seaport and almost all
of its railroads. They capped workers salaries that no more

(32:16):
than fifty cents a day. Since the United Fruit was
the country's largest employer and landowner, this effectively locked the
entire nation into perpetual serfdom to an American fruit company. Now.
Edward Burns was, above all else, the kind of guy
who did need to see himself as a hero, and
this was more than he could bear. According to the
father of spen Quote. When he returned from a month

(32:37):
long company sponsored trip to Guatemala and Honduras in September Ninette,
Burns wrote his Fruit Company clients a long memo warning
them about low worker morale and substandard living conditions. Goodwill
of all groups towards Fruit Company is poor, he said. Ignorance,
conscious and unconscious, distortion by politicos and power or seeking
power by fellow travelers and communist influences all contribute their part.

(32:58):
Guatemala is in a state of transition. All these situations
complicate the issue and make the company vulnerable unless certain
things happen. He advised United Fruit to basically share just
a tiny, tiny, tiny bit of the wealth they were
making in order to alleviate conditions on the ground and
reduce unrest. Being a gigantic capitalist behemoth helmed entirely by
racist to believe brown people were subhuman, United Fruit was

(33:19):
unwilling to do this. Burne's later wrote, the people in
the tropics were remote from Boston. They produced their banana quotas,
and that was what counted. Fruit Company executives in the
Tropics were tough characters who had come up through the ranks.
They were action oriented men. What I propose must have
seemed like molly coddling. I got no reaction to my
voluminous report. Now, based on his own code of ethics,

(33:40):
which He'd outlined in his nine book Propaganda, Burne's should
have quit. He had written that a good pr man
quote refuses a client whom he believes dishonest, a product
which he believes to be fraudulent, or a cause which
he believes to be anti social. But look at his
fucking resume. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And Berne's clearly believed that
United for its behavior was anti social, But he also

(34:02):
knew that they were paying him a hundred thousand dollars
a year, so he continued to work for them, And
as left wing movements rose in the country and agitated
for taking back some of Guatemala's natural resources from United Fruit,
Berne's advised his employers on how to fight back. In
nineteen fifty two, he wrote, this whole manner of effective
counter communist propaganda is not one of improvising. It could
only be fought by the same scientific approach that is applied.

(34:24):
Let us say to a problem of fighting a certain
plant disease through a scientific method of approach. Now the
disease in Guatemala from the perspective of United Fruit and
Edward Burne's was a fellow named Jacobo Arbez. Now Arbez
was not a communist, but he was a socialist. In in
in nineteen fifty one, he'd been elected president of Guatemala.
His big campaign issue was land reform, and upon taking office,

(34:47):
he'd launched Degree nine hundred, a program that confiscated four
hundred thousand acres of unused United Fruit land and redistributed
it to poor Guatemalan farmers. In nineteen fifty Yeah, it
seems like a great idea. Only about ten percent of
Guatemalan land was actually available for purchase for the ninety
percent of its people who might want to own it.

(35:07):
United Fruit had bought up everything else, and in their
tax filings they reported on the land as being almost valueless,
essentially barren, in order to pay less money in taxes.
So when our bends seized their land, he only paid
them back the incredibly low value that they had assessed
for its value. Uh now, this would seem like karmic
justice if everything I'm about to happen talk about hadn't

(35:29):
happened next. So yeah, yeah, it's it's really kind of
like United Fruits like, oh no, this land is almost worthless,
so they don't have to pay much in taxes on it,
and then when Arbez buys it back, He's like, well, okay,
then I'll pay you the worthless price for the land.
Uh yeah yeah. Was he not able to dunk on him? Yeah? Yeah,

(35:53):
Like it was like one of the only things that
this shitty gup man hadn't done was ruined a tree
that wasn't his own. But oh he's got around to
that as well. He got around to that ship real quick. Then,
also pressing people internationally, now, United Fruit went to the
Eisenhower administration and wind that the seizure of their land

(36:13):
was a clear example of evil communism sneaking into Latin America.
They warned the president that it wouldn't stop at just
returning Guatemal's land to its people. United Fruits Inconvenience would
be the first Domino to fall, eventually taking all of
America freedom and capitalism with it. Now, that's a rather
hard line of bullshit to sell. Thankfully, United Fruit had
the greatest salesman on the planet. The year before the

(36:36):
government had started its land expropriation program, Bernese had actually
suggested United Fruit launch a media campaign to quote induced
the President and State Department to issue a policy pronouncement
comparable to the Monroe doctrine concerning expropriation. His idea was
to convince Americans, specifically Americans in power, that the arbe
As administration's totally just land reform was the same as, say,

(36:57):
Joseph Stalin murdering five million Ranian peasants through starvation genocide.
He planned to start by picking ten popular magazines, including
Reader's Digest in the Saturday Evening Post, and convincing their
editors to run similar stories about the crisis in Guatemala
quote from Burns. In certain cases, stories would be written
by staff men. In other certain other cases, the magazine

(37:18):
might ask us to supply the story, and we, in
turn would engage a most suitable writer to handle the matter.
So yeah, just just so, just not a lot of
fact checking going on. No, he's he's providing the facts
to the journalists. Uh yeah, that still happens. Another thing
that has not stopped happening. Uh yep, yep, yep. Cool.

(37:41):
Once Guatemal land expropriation really got started in earnest United
Fruit greenlit Berness campaign, and he engineered a whole spate
of stories aimed at making Yacobo Arbez look like a
Mayan Mao. This culminated on a two week too, in
a two week tour of Guatemala in which Burns led
several journalists through the country in nineteen fifty two. Here's
the Father of spen quote. With him were the publishers

(38:04):
of Newsweek, the Cincinnati in Choir, the Nashville Banner, and
the New Orleans Item, a contributing editor from Time, the
foreign editor of Scripps Howard, and high ranking officials from
the United Press, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Miami Herald,
and the Christian Science Monitor. Bern's insisted in his memoires
that the journalists were free to go where they wanted,
talk to whoever they wanted, and report their findings freely,
and he reacted angrily to suggestions in later years that

(38:26):
the trip was manipulative. But Thomas McCann, who in the
nineteen fifties was young public relations official with United Fruit,
wrote in his memoires the trip and others like it
were under the company's careful guidance, and of course at
company expense. The trips were ostensibly to gather information, but
what the press would here and see was carefully staged
and regulated by the host, the plan represented a serious
attempt to compromise objectivity. Moreover, it was a compromise implicit

(38:49):
in the invitation, only underscored by Burnet's and the company's
repeated claims to the contrary. So that's cool. So he's
just generating a bunch of bullshit that by bowl that
he can then, I mean, it's just like a different
version of what he did with the doctors, but more like,
oh well, Jenna's journalists are credible, So let me find
someone who will lend their name to a whole pile

(39:12):
of bullshit that's too much for people to read on
their own, and they'll just be like, all right, works
for me. He knew what sort of newspapers everyone in
the White House was reading, and he made sure that
they all published stories about how communism was overtaking Guatemala.
Simple as that. A right, okay, cool? Well, I fucking
hate this guy. You know what I don't fucking hate Jamie?

(39:34):
What Robert? The wonderful products and services that support our program.
I'm honest, I can't wait to hear about more of them.
I hope it's a chiquita banana ad man. I hope
it's an ad Jaqua is evil. I hope it's an
ad for the new Chiquido wire guided uh bananas, which

(39:55):
which of course manufactured in part by raytheon guidance chips. Yeah.
I hope that it's a he did Banana Amazon Prime crossover. Yeah. Yeah,
let's get all of the big companies working together to
to drone strike bananas into the mouths of hungry people.
I love it, products, products. We're back, and we're talking

(40:22):
about Eddie b saying can he get worse? Yes? Yes,
uh spoiler alert. In like a minute and a half,
we'll be talking about genocide. So the whole banana Yeah,

(40:46):
now true to form. Edward Burnet's also commissioned scholarly studies
in order to lend extra legitimacy to United Fruit. She
commissioned to twenty five page content analysis of seventeen thousand
words spoken by Guatemala's new left wing leaders and then
compare them to statements from Soviet leaders. The conclusion of
the report was obvious the our Bez administration were hard
line commies. Quote every item mentioned, and almost verbatim form

(41:09):
is frequently found in Soviet propaganda messages. I love some
good false equivalence it's like it happen because literally all
it's happened the shitty memes on the internet that like
reply guys get into your mentions and they're like, oh,
well you said this, and uh, this fucking murderer also
said this word, so you're a murderer, dude, and fun, fun, fun, fun,

(41:32):
And they're the same guys who will tell you it's
not valid to point out when somebody literally repeats Nazi
propaganda verbatim, it's a quite quite amazing and like the
thing that they're calling communism here, I want to point
out like our bez was was a socialist, was not
a communist, was a guy who was like his most
radical stance was like, no, the old, incredibly corrupt leaders

(41:53):
of our country sold all of our nation's national resources
to a fruit company for pennies on the dollar so
that they could get rich, and it's locked our nation
into a form of slavery, and we're just not going
to let that happen. Like, you don't get to own
the whole country because you bought it from a corrupt
asshole twenty years ago. Like that that's what he said,

(42:14):
is yeah, yeah, yeah, And he's not even kicking United
Fruit out. He's taking the land that they hadn't developed
at all, that they were just holding onto in case
and saying no, we're going to give this to people,
like the company could have still made a shipload of money.
Like it's one of those things. Communism got a major
hold in the country after everything that we're about to

(42:35):
talk to happened, because when these moderate reformers came along,
we fought them tooth and nail and treated them like
they were Joseph fucking Stalin reincarnated. Like it's very frustrating
that what the paper said, Roberts so so bernes is
propaganda and United Fruits lobbying did its work. He managed

(42:55):
to get his work, all these articles and studies into
the hands of top men in the White House and
in the National Security Apparatus. The CIA began to train
an arm and insurgent movement, the Liberation Army, under a
piece of ship named Carlos Castillo Armas. Armas was a
military officer living in exile. He and his two hundred
CIA picked guerrillas entered Guatemala on June eighteenth, nineteen fifty four,

(43:16):
with CIA air support. Bern's ensured coverage of the coup
and called them an Army of Liberation. Armas forces took
over Guatemala within a week, and he was quickly named president. Shockingly,
the CIA backed military dictator did not have the best
interests of the Guatemalan people at heart. Arms is first act. Yeah,
I know, really surprising. His first act was to return

(43:38):
all the land taken from United Fruit back to the company.
He told Vice President Nixon, tell me what you want
me to do, and I will do it. Many Guatemalans were,
of course, unhappy with the state of affairs, and by
the nineteen sixties the situation had degraded into a brutal
internesting conflict. The Banana Wars had begun. According to the
Council on Hemispheric Relations, it's a shitty war, are dude.

(44:01):
That's true. It's true. I guess that's not really the
focus of I mean, it's just accurate. These are a
war started over fucking bananas. Fucking bananas. The civil war
between the newly formed leftist guerrillas and the government lasted
for over thirty years, costing approximately two hundred thousand lives,
mostly people of Mayan descent. When the US assisted in

(44:22):
modernizing the government, troops in nineteen sixty five, kidnappings and
assassinations significantly increased in a systematic manner. The war's victims
included farm workers, student activist, Catholic priests, and labor leaders
who are part of a non violent social movement. The
war was devastating. More people were killed in this conflict
than in any Latin American war. The valiant efforts of
the guatemal And Historical Clarification Commission, which the government initiated

(44:43):
at the end of the war, identified genocide in the
Mayan communities. This is atrocious and horrible, and I and
just I mean a little beside the point, but how
have I never heard about this before? This is like
you should have that. Yeah, it seems like if you're
going to talk about this is one of the things
that frustrates me a lot. People will bring up the

(45:05):
huge death count of of communist regimes around the world,
totally valid, absolutely worth talking about the tens of millions
who died under the Mow and the millions who died
under Stalin. But then they pretend like there's no death
toll for capitalism. They ignore the twenty or thirty million
who died in India as a result of the East
India corporations we form of the land they allure the
hundreds of thousands of people who died in Latin America

(45:26):
and are still dying as a result of all the
like it's because history education in the United States is
criminally incompetent at a systemic level. Well, and it's just, yeah,
it has to ignore the evils of capitalism or uh,
young people might start out asking questions. Yeah, and I
you know one other fucking thing we have to blame for.

(45:49):
We have Bernet's to blame for is Sa Guavara t shirts?
Because Yeah. One observer of Yacobo arbez Is overthrow was
a young Argentine and traveler named she Guavara. He told
his mother that the Armust coup was the moment quote
that I left the path of reason. As New York
Times writer Daniel Kurtz fell And wrote in his two

(46:11):
thousand eight article Big Fruit, so too did Latin America.
That day marked a turning point, the end of a
hopeful age of reform in the beginning of a bloody
age of revolution and reaction. Over the next four decades,
hundreds of thousands of people were killed in guerilla attacks,
government crackdowns, and civil wars across Latin America. This is
fucking cool, fucking horrible. I can't even this like the cigarettes.

(46:39):
I can wrap my head around the bacon. Fine, this
is just I mean, this is next level. This is
just like propaganda warfare. Well, yeah, it's a fucking nightmare.
And you mentioned not having heard about any of this before.
I mean, I guess that's pretty common among our listeners.
The only reason I had is that when I was
in my early twenties, a group of friends and I

(47:01):
lived in Guatemala for several wonderful months and it's I
I fucking love Guatemal. It's unbelievably beautiful, like maybe the
prettiest place I've ever been. It's certainly like up there
on that list of just like lands that take your
breath away. But it was impossible to not notice all
the scars of like decades of civil war. There were

(47:23):
there would be times where we would like be driving
through a field and you'd noticed that it was like
it was covered in grass, but the texture of the
land was like the surface of the moon, and it
was because so much mortar fire had filled it with
craters that had then gotten grown over with grass. There's
be thousands of craters. Or you drive past old buildings
covered in heavy machine gun fire, like holes from machine
gun rounds um or you'd be walking down the street

(47:46):
in Antigua and you would see fifteen or twenty old
men missing arms and legs, like lying on the side
of a building, begging for money, all clearly with like
war injuries and stuff on. And so I start like, like,
what the funk happened here? And that's where I didn't
really learn about Bernet's at that point, but I learned
about United Fruit and the fucking banana wars. I mean

(48:07):
the fact that you had to physically be there to
even learn that this had happened, like speaks volumes, yeah, yeah,
and it might like my study of that started when
I was in these little Mayan villages around Lago at
Lawn and people would explain to me why the because
you see soldiers all over the place in Guatemala, because
it's it's one of those countries where they don't have
laws like we do, Like the military doesn't do like

(48:29):
law work in the United States, Like they don't keep
the peace. That's for police to do. Guatemala doesn't have
laws like that, so you see soldiers a lot on
the street and stuff. But once we got to these
little Mayan villages, there would be no soldiers. And I
started asking the people I met, like why that was,
and they're like, oh, we don't let the military in
here because of the genocide they committed, you know, back
in like the a couple of decades ago. Um, so

(48:54):
reasonably reasonable, extremely reasonable, that's very reasonable. And I mean
I like, joke and ship are on, like how could
how could people not like realize that things are going
to kill them? And but it's like and then there's
you know, I and probably most people in this country

(49:15):
have this huge blind spot that is just like intentional
eraser to make it easier to you know, be okay
with how we how we live. Well, ye oh god, Robert,
you're really you're really killing me with this one. This
is yeah, it's it's a bad one. It's fucking bad. Okay. Well,

(49:36):
Edward reading more about this wow. Edward Burns died a
millionaire on March nine. He was a hundred and four
fucking years old. He left behind the world scarred by
the wars. He helped to incite. There were other Latin
American wars by the way that he got involved with,
like this is just as much as I had time
to write about. Well for him it went so great,

(49:57):
uh and a world utterly dumb NATed by the propagandistic
techniques that he pioneered. Perhaps the most insidious piece of
his legacy is the possibly fatal damage done to the
field of journalism. When Bernet's started manipulating the media, PR
was a new field, and the handful of extant PR
flax were massively outnumbered by reporters and journalists. By two
thousand nineteen, that situation had completely reversed itself. There are

(50:21):
currently six PR people for every journalist in the United States.
Like the alleys full of they make a lot more money,
which is why if you look into past Pulitzer Prize winners,
an awful lot of them go into PR because it's
like and it's like I can't even blame them. It's like, Okay,
you worked your ass off making fucking nothing, and you

(50:44):
you told you know, an incredibly important story and got recognized.
Now it's time to ensure that you can retire someday.
Like it's man having ethics means that you're gonna, you know,
be seeing a lot of group on doctors. Yeah, on
the upside, Amy Edward Burne's also advised the Multiple Sclerosis
Foundation to call themselves the m S Foundation because it

(51:06):
was better branding. So like, you know, it equals out.
You cause a war, you help the MS Foundation make
more money. Icon in the last episode, how dare you?
And then and then you throw the banana wars at
the last second, how dare you? You know, well, you
can be a feminist icon and also help spark a brutal,
genocidal civil war in Guatemala. But you can't be a

(51:28):
feminist icon and kill every woman. You know, its cigarettes,
you can't. Well, he didn't know, not his not his
wife because he got her to stop smoking. Oh god, yeah,
I hate all women and women except my wife. M
Bernie Bernie Bernie Bernie Bernet, Eddie b the god. All

(51:51):
villains live forever, We all villains live forever. Yeah, old
cube head. So that was there's no more. There's no more?
Or is there no? That's the fucking tale of Eddie Burnet's.
That's as much of it as I'm going to tell.
There's a lot more. The book The Father of spin
is a is a fine book if you want to
learn more about the guy. Um, but I feel like

(52:14):
this is enough to know about Edward Burns. Yeah. Yeah,
I certainly learned. I certainly learned a lot. And now
I understand why his daughters hate him so much. Ebisil
Yeah yes, oh cube head himself. M hm, oh cube head.

(52:35):
So Jamie, you got any plugables to plug god? Um yeah,
not that they're Yes. You can listen to the Bechtel Cast. Uh,
my name Caitlin Durante's podcast every Thursday at Bechtel Cast.
You can follow me on Twitter at Jamie Lofts help ilbeit.

(52:57):
At Edinburgh Fringe Festival, I guess if you want to
come see a show, you can do that. So fringe
out with your hinge out, fringe out my show, it's
my it's my, uh the Elizabeth Holmes Show. Basically, I
mean actually you could do a really good like comparison

(53:20):
to hang out with your your wing out. They're using
a local British Isles uh synonym for pubic hair. Um. Yeah,
that people will will hinge out with your mine out
your minge. Yeah. Never say that again, Robert, Never say
that that's that's a that's a slang term in the

(53:40):
place you're going to be going. God, why are you
gonna be so cute about all this? Man? Well, you
know what, you know what fanny means up there too, right?
But right, No, it means vagina In the Aisles, it
means vagina. Fanny is slang for a vagina in the
British Isles. So what this is very real important for

(54:00):
you to know you you are in danger if you
don't understand. Well, yeah, so I if I mean not
that I've ever said fanny, but if you said sit
on it, people would be confused, very very sit on
your Fannie means a very different thing in the British
Isles than it does in americaly. Okay, okay, well good,
thank thank you for these travel tips. I do need them. Yeah. Also,

(54:24):
blood putting, surprisingly tasty, really fucking good. Like everybody, everybody
talks about the British, I think they have the second
best breakfast food I've ever encountered. They're not better at
breakfast than the Irish, but they're very good in my opinion.
I'm a big fan, So enjoy yourselves. I don't know
anything about Scottish food that scares me, so I have
no idea. Yeah, I'll just have to find out when

(54:44):
I get there. Drink a lot of talisker, though I do,
I do recommend that. All right. Well, Jamie loftus French Festival.
Watch her be the champion queen of comedy that we
all know her to be. Cheer her on in her
journey through scott and listeners online. If you know of
other slang terms that she should know before she goes there,

(55:06):
hit us up on Twitter and warn her. Um, I
don't Yeah, I don't want to get killed for saying
the wrong thing. Yeah, that happens a lot. The British
are a violent people, violent and I'm and I'm getting
them just pre Brexit. So it's going to be a
stressful time. Oh yeah, everyone's gonna be swinging tally whackers.
That seems like a British slang for a weapon. Sounds

(55:28):
like something, It sounds like something. Well, I'm Robert Evans. Uh,
this is behind the Bastards, has been behind the bastards.
It's not anymore because it's over. You can find me
on Twitter and I right, okay, you can find the
show on Twitter and Instagram and at Bastards pot. You
can buy t shirts on the public by looking for
Behind the Bastards on t public. And that's it. That's
the fucking episode. Thanks for being launch. That's the goal

(55:54):
with every episode Behind the Bastards is to leave you
feeling worse than you did before the all right products.
They usually don't end by shouting products, but I did.
Why Why I'm just thinking, just thinking of them always.
There will be an ad after this, you know that,
Sophie M