The Easter Parade, the Cigarette, and the Oldest Con Still
Running
1929 and we’re in New York City. Fifth Avenue. Wealthy,
elegant women, in their pastel Easter dresses are tip tapping their heels on
the street as they saunter IN the parade. Their chins up, eyes blazing, and
they are smoking cigarettes. Publicly! Defiantly! Cigarettes held aloft like
tiny torches of freedom! Liberation! Men can smoke, and doctors advise smoking
for anxiety, and weight loss, so why shouldn’t women smoke! And the press is there, cameras ready,
notebooks open, because apparently, miraculously, word got out that something spontaneous
and remarkable and deeply newsworthy was about to happen on Fifth Avenue
at Easter and wasn't that convenient. The headlines wrote themselves: Women
Light Torches of Freedom! Suffragettes Claim the Right to Smoke! The public
watched and thought, well, if it's in the papers it must be real, it must be a
movement, it must be the authentic voice of women rising up and claiming their
bodily autonomy one cigarette at a time!
Company. Bernays had his receptionist call a magazine (Vogue, because of course!) and gotten the receptionist at Vogue to share the names of society women listed as subscribers, then recruited those women to show up and smoke on cue. He promised them they were liberating women! This was there chance to Be Someone! And for the Good Of Women!!! Yes, of course, because even in 1929 girls girls existed!
Bernays had coined the phrase "torches of freedom" himself, in his own office, at his own desk, because he understood something that should genuinely alarm you: that if you hand people the right story for their existing hunger, they will tell it as if it were their own and never once ask who wrote it.
Ed Bernays was, without a doubt, one the OG Happiness Hijackers.
Here is what makes this so spectacularly, nauseatingly
brilliant, and I say that as someone who is not happy about it. He didn't
manufacture a desire that wasn't there. He didn't trick women into wanting
freedom — women did want freedom, urgently and legitimately, because it was
1929 and the list of things women were not allowed to do in public was frankly
exhausting. What he did was take that real, genuine, completely valid hunger
that makes up our human nature — the need to Be Free, to Be in Control, to Be
Someone who fights for something, to Belong to a movement of women who understand
— and he stapled a cigarette to it. Suddenly smoking wasn't a habit, it was
a statement. It wasn't a product, it was a personality. It wasn't something
the American Tobacco Company needed you to buy so their quarterly numbers
looked good — perish the thought — it was your identity as a liberated woman
and how dare anyone suggest you put it down. The influencers weren't called
influencers yet, they were just society women with beautiful clothes and a lucky
lot in life, and a willingness to show up on Fifth Avenue. But the method was
identical to what happens today when someone with four hundred thousand
followers posts a very candid, very ‘authentic’, very ‘spontaneously lit’
photograph of themselves using a product they were absolutely paid to hold. The
only difference is that in 1929 Bernays had to get the names from a
receptionist. Now the algorithm delivers them pre-sorted by engagement rate.
And this is the part where I need you to get just a little
bit cynical with me, not in a way that makes you miserable at parties, but in a
way that keeps you from being the woman on Fifth Avenue who thinks she's
leading a revolution when she's actually working and unwittingly depositing money in a stranger's bank account!
The exact same theater is running today, continuously, on
every platform. The production values have improved enormously but the script
is identical: find the hunger, name it something beautiful or rebellious, attach
a product, and make the whole thing look like it erupted spontaneously from the
‘authentic soul of the people’, and then stand back while the people defend it
as their own idea. The women in 1929 genuinely believed they were making a
statement. Some of them probably were. That's what makes it so effective: the
belief is real even when the event is staged, and real belief is contagious in
a way that paid advertising simply isn't.
And can we just pause for one second and ask the question
nobody on Fifth Avenue apparently thought to ask, which is; did any of those
women actually want to smoke? Cigarettes are a not so charming bouquet of
ashtray and regret and stained teeth that arrive in a room approximately forty
seconds before the rest of you. But once the story of freedom and rebellion took hold the whole
disgusting thing became cool, then normal, then people became addicted and…well,
we know how that went!
Jägermeister did the exact same thing to an entirely
different generation — a drink that tastes like cough syrup that someone left
in a car in August, that no sane person would order if presented with literally
any alternative, and yet there we all were, an entire generation of us, doing
shots of it at two in the morning and calling it a good time. The product is
almost beside the point. It always was.
So when you see a trend that seems to have appeared
everywhere at once, a cause that suddenly has a very photogenic spokesperson, a
moment that the cameras somehow all caught from different angles, a grassroots
movement that comes with its own merchandise — you are allowed to ask. You are
supposed to ask. Who got the list from the receptionist? Who coined the phrase?
Who is benefiting from me becoming addicted to this product? Who needed this particular
longing redirected toward this particular thing right now, and what are they
selling? This is not paranoia. This is just the minimum alertness required to
walk through the modern world without accidentally starring in someone else's
Easter parade!!
