Propaganda Battle

Around a dinner table in Manhattan frequently gather some 20 of the ace propagandists in the U. S. This unpublicized, high-powered group calls itself the Council on Public Opinion, chairman is the nation's No. 1 publicist, dark, Machiavellian Edward L. Bernays. Others: General Motors' Public Relations Counsel Paul Willard Garrett, American Iron and Steel Institute's John Wiley Hill, Rockefeller

Center's Merle Crowell, NBC's Vice President Frank Earl Mason, Yale's Professor James Harvey Rogers, Columbia University's Professors Robert Staughton Lynd, Lyman Bryson, Joseph Daniel McGoldrick, Clyde. Raymond Miller. Back & forth across the council table flies weighty talk of big U. S. problems about which the public forms opinions--Capital & Labor, the New Deal, John L. Lewis, Education. This small group might easily be the seat of a sinister super-government were it not that no two members of the Council on Public Opinion completely agree on anything very important.

Last week, for instance, Publicist Bernays and Publicist Miller were belaboring each other as enthusiastically and skilfully as they knew how. What they were battling over was Clyde Miller's Institute for Propaganda Analysis (TIME, Oct. 11), which has been sending monthly bulletins to educators, publicists, editors and others, telling how to detect propaganda, denned as "expression of opinion or action deliberately designed to influence opinions or actions of others with reference to predetermined private ends." Edward Bernays sent to his own mailing list, covering the same groups, a broadside "to dissipate any public hope for important accomplishment" by Mr. Miller's Institute.

To scores of schools and his 4,000 subscribers Clyde Miller thereupon sent last week what was intended to be a crushing reply--the Institute's first major work, an outline of a course of study for high-school students. Only contemporary propagandist specifically named in this somewhat general booklet was none other than Edward Bernays: "Hired by [Western Union] to boost its business," said the booklet "Edward L. Bernays suggested that delivery boys, paging the recipient of a telegram . . . say, 'Western Union for

Mr. ' instead of 'telegram for Mr.

The company's business increased." Mr. Bernays promptly repudiated the charge. Said he: "Sitting next to [Western Union's board chairman] Newcomb Carlton one evening at a testimonial dinner, where I had met him for the first time, I suggested that Mr. Carlton ask the chairman to refer to telegrams he was reading aloud as Western Union messages instead of telegrams."

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