HISTORY
A New York Times reviewer wrote that Carson “ tries to scare the living daylights out of us and , in large measure , succeeds . Her work tingles with anger , outrage and protest .”
In revisiting the impact of Silent Spring more than half a century later , two threads are interesting to pursue . The first is the context in the US at the time of its release in 1961 . That ’ s best viewed through the lens of a single individual : Edward Bernays .
His uncle was Sigmund Freud and his cousin Anna Freud , Sigmund ’ s daughter , who came to dominate Western psychology after her father ’ s death .
Figure 3 : A clipping of an article in the New York Times .
Figure 4 : Post-war American corporations were booming and needed to sell goods . Hence , marketing campaigns like these were doing the rounds .
The Bernays family moved from Vienna to the US in the 1890s . Edward studied agriculture but soon moved to journalism . During World War 1 he joined the government as a consultant on “ public information ”, after which he set up private practice in New York as a “ public relations counsel ”, a profession unheard of at the time . He was to become hugely influential in both industry and government , specialising in what he called “ engineering consent ” — marketing propaganda .
The masses , he said , were dangerous . Citing his uncle , he described them as irrational and subject to herd instinct . However , skilled practitioners could use crowd psychology and psychoanalysis to control them in desirable ways . He described this as public relations , “ the science of managing information released to the public by an organisation , in a manner most advantageous to the organisation ”. He was hired by corporations and politicians and became immensely wealthy .
Post-war American corporations were booming and needed to sell goods . Bernays showed them how to shift their marketing from needs to making consumers “ slaves to their desires ”. Among his many campaigns , he pioneered smoking by women and orchestrated a CIA-engineered coup that overthrew the democratically elected government of Guatemala which had expropriated the US-owned United Fruit Company .
Figure 5 & 6 : These were the ideas that drove the chemical companies in their lucrative campaign to spread hydrocarbon poisons across America .
The idea that the masses were politically dangerous and needed to be controlled by “ superior ” men was perpetuated through the teachings of his cousin , Anna Freud , within the psychiatry movement and was reflected in immensely popular books like Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand .
Grassroots Vol 21 No 3 November 2021 44