Guatemala Overthrow Campaign

Public Opinion Series

Father of Spin by Larry Tye, 1998, Excerpts

Bernays presented to United Fruit boss Samuel Zemurray his plan for “psychological activities aimed at developing a better climate of public opinions.” He counseled United Fruit to scream so loud that the United States would step in to check this threat so near its border. Bernays warned that Guatemala was ripe for revolution and that the Communists were gaining increasing influence over Guatemala’s leaders.

Articles began appearing in the New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, the Atlantic Monthly, Time, Newsweek, the New Leader, and other publications, all discussing the growing influence of Guatemala’s Communists. Arthur Sulzberger, publisher of the New York Times, was a relative of Bernay’s wife, Doris. A surprising number of respected reporters seemed not to know or care the fact that Bernays worked for a firm with huge economic interests at stake. What mattered was that his releases were filled with facts they could quickly transform into stories.

In January 1952, he took a group of journalists on a two-week tour of the region. With him were the publishers of Newsweek, the Cincinnati Enquirer, the Nashville Banner, and the New Orleans Item, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Miami Herald, and the Christian Science Monitor. The results of his trips to the Tropics were beyond dispute: more and more stories were sounding an alarm about Guatemala.

Events in Guatemala were firing up. The Eisenhower administration, which assumed office in 1953, stepped up the pressure on Arbenz. The fruit company had powerful friends in the Eisenhower administration, including Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, whose law firm had represented United Fruit.

The Guatemalan president responded by hardening his stance, and month by month, the situation edged toward confrontation. The final showdown began on June 18, 1954, when Carlos Castillo Armas, an army officer living in exile, crossed the border from Honduras with two hundred men recruited and trained by the CIA – a band Bernays referred to as an “army of liberation.” This “invasion,” supported by a CIA air attack, quickly achieved its goal, and on June 27 a military junta took control of Guatemala. Armas was named president a week later.

United Fruit was the most important force in toppling Arbenz and Bernays was the fruit company’s most effective propagandist. Propaganda was the key ingredient in undermining the Guatemalans. “A hostile and ill-informed American press helped to create an emotional public opinion. This, in turn, worked on Congress and, ultimately, on the State Department.”

Vietnam

In 1961, history seemed to be repeating itself. Bernays was advising a New York advertising agency that was working for the government of South Vietnam just as America was ratcheting up its involvement there. And his advice included precisely the sort of campaign he had engineered on behalf of Guatemala.

John Foster Dulles





Guatemala Redistributes Land

Public Opinion Series

Father of Spin by Larry Tye, 1998, Excerpts

Guatemala was a hot spot and had been since 1944, when a mass uprising ended the fourteen-year rule of military strongman General Jorge Ubico Casteneda. Juan Jose Arevalo, a professor living in exile in Argentina, returned home and was swept into office in 1945 with more than 85 percent of the vote. Arevalo faced overwhelming obstacles from 70 percent illiteracy to more than 70 percent of the land being held by just 2 percent of the population. But he began to make changes, introducing a democratic political system, overseeing construction of new schools and hospitals, establishing a limited social security network, and giving workers the right to organize and strike.

The Arevalo reign raised a red flag for United Fruit. Workers went on strike at its banana plantation and seaport, forcing it for the first time to make concessions in a labor contract, and the fruit company was targeted as Guatemala’s most glaring symbol of hated Yankee imperialism.

In March 1951 Arevalo was succeeded by his defense minister, Jacob Arbenz Guzman. Arbenz picked up the pace of change, most significantly, implementing a plan to redistribute uncultivated lands of large plantations. Between 1952 and 1954 the Arbenz government confiscated and turned over to 100,000 poor families 1.5 million acres – including some 210,000 acres of United Fruit Company holdings.

United Fruit Company in Guatemala

Public Opinion Series

Father of Spin by Larry Tye, 1998, Excerpts

Upon Bernays’ death in 1995, the Library of Congress made public fifty-three boxes of his papers concerning United Fruit. Those documents paint in vivid detail his behind-the-scenes maneuvering and show how, in 1954, he helped to topple Guatemala’s left-leaning regime.  The papers also offer insights into the foreign policies of U.S. corporations and the U.S. diplomatic corps during the turbulent 1950s. And they make clear how the United States viewed its Latin neighbors as ripe for economic exploitation and political manipulation – and how the propaganda war Bernays waged in Guatemala set the pattern for future U.S.-led campaigns in Cuba and Vietnam.

By 1885, eleven ships were sailing under the banner of the new Boston Fruit Company, bringing to the United States 10 million bunches of bananas a year. United Fruit was formed in 1899, with assets that included more than 210,000 acres of land across the Caribbean and Central America, 112 miles of railroad, and so much political clout that Honduras, Costa Rica, and other countries in the region became known as banana republics. That term reflected North Americans’ disdain for Latin Americas, whom they regarded as politically and socially backward and economically ripe for the picking.

The United Fruit Company had a kingpin worthy of its swashbuckling history: Samuel Zemurray, better known as Sam the Banana Man. Big and blunt, this Jewish immigrant from Russia used a blend of cleverness and cunning to buy up a bankrupt steamship company, to plot the overthrow of the Honduran government, to acquire millions of dollars’ worth of United Fruit stock, and  to insert himself as head of the Boston-based firm. By 1949 Zemurray had built United Fruit into one of America’s biggest companies, with $54 million in earnings and an empire of railroads and ships, and control of more than half of the U.S. market in imported bananas.

In the early 1940s, he hired Bernays as his public relations counsel. Bernays realized that if United Fruit wanted to cement its position in the North American economy, it had to teach North Americans about their neighbors to the south. The mission wasn’t just to sell bananas, he told Zemurray, but to sell an entire region of the hemisphere.

Tobacco and Deniability

Public Opinion Series

Father of Spin by Larry Tye, 1998, Excerpts

Bernays worked with doctors who were willing to argue the tobacco company’s side of the story. “The benefits of tobacco are: [1] It is a pleasure. [2] A good laxative after breakfast. [3] Checks obesity by lessening the appetite. [4] Aids nutrition by stimulating the secretory functions of the stomach. [5] It consoles the lonely. [6] It aids contemplation. [7] It is a manual as well as oral activity. [8] It promotes sociability.

Decades later, when the surgeon general and other medical authorities released incontrovertible evidence of the dangers of smoking, Bernays used his talents of persuasion to help undo addictions he’d help build. In 1964, he unveiled a bold and detailed plan to transform smoking into “an antisocial action which no self-respecting person caries on in the presence of others.” To do that, he proposed enlisting moviemakers and radio and television personalities, advertising executives, clergy and doctors, in a bid “to outlaw and eliminate cigarette smoking.”

Tobacco and the Green Ball

Public Opinion Series

Father of Spin by Larry Tye, 1998, Excerpts

Company surveys showed that many women wouldn’t smoke Luckies because its green package with the red bull’s-eye clashed with their favorite clothing. Bernays offered advice that kicked off a campaign almost as legendary as the Torches of Freedom parade. “If you won’t change the color of the package, change the color of fashion – to green.”

First he analyzed the color itself, much as his uncle Sigmund might have done. A book entitled The Language of Color informed him that green was “an emblem of hope, victory, and plenty: and “symbolic of solitude and peace.” Those were upbeat themes to build on. Even more encouraging were statistics showing that green made up 20 percent of the current lines being turned out by French fashion houses.

He settled on a Green Ball to be held at the stately Waldorf-Astoria, attended by New York’s leading debutantes, with proceeds going to some deserving charity. A Green Ball would require not just green gowns, but also green gloves, green shoes, green handkerchiefs, green bandeaux, and, yes, green jewelry. The luncheon with green menus featuring green beans, asparagus-tip salad, broiled French lamb chops with haricots verts and olivette potatoes, pistachio mousse glace, green mints, and crème de menthe. The Green Ball came off as planned. It was “a gay, vivid night, something to remember,” Vogue reported. The ball firmly established green’s predominance.

A Color Fashion Bureau was available for green advice and was besieged with requests for information from 77 newspapers, 95 magazines, 29 syndicates 301 department stores, 145 women’s clubs, 175 radio stations, 83 manufacturers of furniture and home decorations, 64 interior decorators, 10 costumers, and 49 photographers and illustrators.

Bernays’ crusade on behalf of the color green was a precursor to today’s promotions by Macy’s and other retailers of products featuring the “Colors of Van Gough: and the “Palette of Picasso.” Similarly, his bid to link smoking to popular causes like women’s liberation and the stay-thin movement helped to inspire contemporary efforts to sell cigarettes by linking them to the macho Marlboro Man and super-cool Joe Camel.

Green dress worn by Keira Knightley in the film Intonement

Tobacco and Women’s Waistlines

Public Opinion Series

Father of Spin by Larry Tye, 1998, Excerpts

The share of cigarettes consumed by women more than doubled from 1923 to 1929, but it was still just 12 percent. The quickest way to rally more women to cigarettes was to zero in on their waistlines. Slimness was coming into vogue, and cigarettes could be sold to the public, especially women, as a fat-free way to satisfy their hunger. Bernays furnished magazines and newspapers with the latest findings on the get-thin trend. For fashion editors, that meant photo after photo of slender Parisian models in haute couture dresses. For news editors, it meant testimonials of medical officers warning that sweets caused tooth decay and advising that “the correct way to finish a meal is with fruit, coffee, and a cigarette.” Hotels were urged to add cigarettes to their dessert lists.

Bernays urged homemakers to demand kitchen cabinetmakers to provide special places to hold cigarettes the same way as they did for flour and sugar. He urged container makers to provide labeled tins for smokes just as they did for tea and coffee, and encouraged home economics writers to “stress the importance of cigarettes in home-making. Just as the young and inexperienced housewife is cautioned not to let her supplies of sugar or salt or tea or coffee run low, so she should be advised that the same holds true of cigarettes.” Never had a publicity campaign been carried out on so many fronts.

Tobacco Targets Women

Public Opinion Series

Father of Spin by Larry Tye, 1998, Excerpts

In 1928, Bernays began working for George Hill, head of the American Tobacco Company, which made America’s fastest-growing brand of cigarettes, Lucky Strikes. Hill was obsessed by the prospect of winning over the large potential female market for Luckies. “It will be like opening a new gold mine right in our front yard.”

Bernays had become the acknowledged master of accentuating trends and capitalizing on them for his clients, a process he termed “crystallizing public opinion.” And during his eight-year association with the tobacco tycoon, he would make clear his willingness to employ whatever  antics or deceptions it took to do that crystallizing, including trying to discredit new research linking smoking to deadly diseases.