Crystallizing Public Opinion

Edward L. Bernays's Crystallizing Public Opinion includes a preface to a new edition, which notes that ten years have passed since the book was written and recalls that the book stressed that industrial organizations dealing with the public must take public opinion into consideration.

The text describes how institutions and the public act on each other. One passage reprints campaigns that the New York World and the Evening World listed in The World Almanac of 1922, among them its coverage of the Washington Conference on Limitation of Armament and its part in a resolution broadening the power of the Lockwood Housing Committee. Another describes events created to win notice, such as a shop opened by prominent women to show the effect of the tariff on women's wear, the launching of battleships and the laying of corner stones. A further passage describes a second view of the press, that it merely accepts, reflects and intensifies established public opinion, and quotes Everett Dean Martin's The Behavior of Crowds.