Ch. 12. ENGINEERING CONSENT: the fluoride deception by Christopher Bryson from archive.org

Engineering Consent 



VISITING THE CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts, home of Edward L. 
Bernays was a thrilling and unsettling experience. On the occasion of his 
hundredth birthday in 1991, 1 spoke with him for the British Broadcasting 
Corporations World Service.' The nephew of Sigmund Freud was in 
good health, briskly walking me to an old-fashioned elevator that rose 
into his private office. 

The elevator seemed like a time machine. Bernays seized the brass 
control switch, and the lattice cage doors slammed shut. The diminutive 
old man smiled, his eyes twinkling. His audience was captive, and once 
again the tiny hands of Mr. Edward L. Bernays-the "father of public 
relations" — gripped the levers of power. The doors opened. We entered a 
softly lit photo gallery. Bernays shuffled forward, pointing proudly. 
There he was, rubbing shoulders with men of power from the twentieth 
century, like the omnipresent character in the Woody Allen movie Zelig: 
Bernays at the signing of the Treaty of Versailles; Bernays with Henry 
Ford, with Thomas Edison, with Eleanor Roosevelt, with 
Eisenhower, with Truman; and Bernays with George Hill, the head of the 
American Tobacco Company. (Bernays's wife was the leading feminist 
Doris Fleischman. He was a master of exploiting such modern liberal 
sentiment. On behalf of his tobacco client Bernays had once persuaded 
women's suffrage activists to march in the 1929 New York Easter Parade 
holding cigarettes as "torches of liberty." ) 2 

The tiny propagandist counted among his clients the dancer Nijinski, 
the singer Enrico Caruso, and some of the most powerful 



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corporations in America, including CBS, Procter and Gamble, and Allied 
Signal. Bernays also had close ties to the U.S. military. As a young man in 
World War I he had been a foot soldier in the governments Committee on 
Public Information, creating some of the nation s earliest war propaganda. 
He volunteered those skills for the U.S. Army in World War II, and during 
the cold war he was in communication with the CIA. Other resume items 
included advising the United Fruit Company during the U.S. governments 
overthrow of the elected government of Guatemala; shaping strategy for 
the U.S. Information Agency (USIA); and advising the government of 
South Vietnam. 

Bernays also persuaded Americans to add fluoride to water.' 

"I do recall doing that," he said softly during another interview at his 
home in 1993. Although Bernays was then 102 years old, his memory was 
good. Selling fluoride was child s play, Bernays explained. The PR wizard 
specialized in promoting new ideas and products to the public by stressing 
a claimed public-health benefit. He understood that citizens had an often 
unconscious trust in medical authority. You can get practically any idea 
accepted, Bernays told me, chuckling. If doctors are in favor, the public is 
willing to accept it, because a doctor is an authority to most people, 
regardless of how much he knows, or doesnt know. ... By the law of 
averages, you can usually find an individual in any field who will be 
willing to accept new ideas, and the new ideas then infiltrate the others who 
haven t accepted it. 

In 1913, for example, Bernays played on medical and liberal sympathies 
to boost ticket sales of a Broadway play he had helped to produce. The play, 
Damaged Goods, dealt with the then-controversial subject of venereal 
disease. Bernays circumvented potential censorship, he said, by creating a 
politically diverse Sociological Committee of doctors and prominent New 
York citizens to extol the health benefits of sex education and endorse the 
new play. This committee, which included John D. Rockefeller and a 
founder of the ACLU, turned Damaged Goods into a Broadway hit. By 
publicizing the purported health benefits of certain products, Bernays 
similarly increased sales of bananas for the United Fruit Company, bacon 
for the Beechnut Packing Company, and Crisco cooking oil for Procter and 
Gamble.' 



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CHAPTER TWELVE 



In his 1928 book, Propaganda, Bemays explained his technique more 
formally. He noted "the psychological relationship of dependence of men 
on their physicians and other such opinion leaders in society. Those who 
manipulate this unseen mechanism of society, he wrote, constitute an 
invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country . . . our 
minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men 
we have never heard of.'" 

Before World War II, the diminutive media wizard had been a PR 
adviser to Alcoa. He operated from the same office building, One Wall 
Street, where the Alcoa lawyer Oscar Ewing had also worked. In 1950 
Ewing had been the top government official to sign off on the endorsement 
of water fluoridation, as Federal Security Administrator in charge of the 
US Public Health Service. 

"Do you recall working with Oscar Ewing on fluoridation?" I asked 
Bernays. "Yes," he replied. 

Pressed about his relationship with Ewing, Bernays shifted 
uncomfortably. A memory that had been crystal clear seconds earlier 
suddenly clouded. I had the same relationship that I had to other clients, I 
treated them the way a lawyer treats a client or a doctor treats a client. We 
had discussion of the problem at hand and how to meet them. I don't 
remember him very well," he insisted. Bernays glanced furtively at me: 
Obviously I did nothing without their approval, in advance. 

Bernays s personal papers detail his involvement in one of the nation's 
earliest and biggest water fluoridation battles, which took place in New 
York City. It was a key moment. The fight for fluoride was in full swing 
around the country, with referenda and public opinion running mostly in 
favor of the antifluoridationists. b Both camps understood the importance of 
winning in New York. A victory for fluoride in the liberal media 
metropolis would give fluoride promoters a big boost elsewhere, according 
to Bernays. If New York accepts an idea, the other states will accept the 
idea too," he explained to me. 

In one corner of the ring was a vigorous popular movement opposing 
fluoridation. The protesters were backed by leading doctors, such as Dr. 
Simon Beisler, a former president of the American Urological Association; 
Dr. Fred Squier Dunn of the Lenox Hill 



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Hospital; radiologist Frederick Exner; and Dr. George Waldbott. I n 
the other corner was New York Citys Health Department, led by 
Commissioner Dr. Leona Baumgartner. She was supported by the big 
guns of the nations health establishment, including Louis Dublin, 
formerly of the Metropolitan Life insurance company; Robert Kehoe 
of the Kettering Laboratory; Detlev Bronk of the Rockefeller 
Foundation; Nicholas C. Leone of the Public Health Service; and 
Herman Hilleboe, New York State s Health Commissioner. 

During the campaign Bernays secretly advised Health Com- 
missioner Baumgartner on how to sell fluoride to the voters. All this 
intrigues me no end, he told Dr. Baumgartner in a December 8, 1960, 
letter discussing fluoridation, because it presents challenging 
situations deeply related to the public's interest which may be solved 
by the engineering of consent.'" ("The Engineering of Consent was a 
well-known Bernays essay on techniques of media manipulation and 
public relations.) 

Bernays advised the Health Commissioner to write TV network 
bosses David Sarnoff at NBC and William Paley at CBS, telling them 
that debating fluoridation is like presenting two sides for 
anti-Catholicism or anti-Semitism and therefore not in the public 
interest. ' She should approach the TV executives gingerly, he warned, 
without necessarily asking them to act in any specific way, but rather 
generically. . . . This might lead to a revision of the whole policy of 
what shall and shall not be considered controversial. 

Other media strategies included mailing innocuous-sounding 
letters to influential editors, explaining what fluoridation entailed. We 
would put out the definition first to the editors of important 
newspapers," Bernays said. "Then we would send a letter to publishers 
of dictionaries and encyclopedias. After six or eight months we would 
find the word fluoridation was published and defined in dictionaries 
and encyclopedias. 

During the battle for New Yorkers hearts and minds the citys 
Health Department received support from an influential profluoride 
citizens committee — purporting to be interested in fluoride for 
public -health reasons. The titular head of the Committee to Protect 
Our Children s Teeth was the famous pediatrician Benjamin Spock. 
Also lending their names to the Committee s effort was a long list of 
celebrities, liberals, and notables including Mrs. Franklin 



162 

D. Roosevelt, baseball great Jackie Robinson, and trade union leader A. 
Philip Randolph. A lavish booklet called Our Children's Teeth was 
published by the Committee and distributed around the country. It was a 
compendium of reassurances of fluorides safety and denunciations of 
critics. Safety problems were "nonexistent," wrote Dr. Robert Kehoe from 
the Kettering Laboratory, while Dr. Hilleboe tarred opponents as food 
faddists, cultists, chiropractors and misguided and misinformed persons 
who are ignorant of the scientific facts involved. 

Sold to New Yorkers as a public-health initiative, the Committee to 
Protect Our Children's Teeth had powerful links to the U.S. 
military-industrial complex, and to the efforts of big industrial corporations 
to escape liability for fluoride pollution. In 1956, for example, the 
Committees booklet Our Children's Teeth was hot off the press. Before 
most New York parents had an opportunity to read about fluorides wonders, 
lawyers for the Reynolds aluminum company submitted the booklet to a 
federal appeals court in Portland, Oregon, where the company had been 
found guilty of injuring the health of a local farming family through 
fluoride pollution (see chapter 13). 

Inside the booklet, the judges were told, "are to be found the statements 
of one medical and scientific expert after another, all to the effect that 
fluorides in low concentrations (such as are present around aluminum and 
other industrial plants) present no hazard to man." (Today such a pseudo 
grass-roots effort would be known as an "astroturf" organization because 
of its fake popular character and essentially corporate roots.) 

The committee was funded by the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, and its 
goals were to break the political logjam in New York and to help topple 
dominoes across the country, according to the committee's program 
director, Henry Urrows. 10 "That was the working assumption — our 
justification as far as the Kellogg people were concerned — and it turned out 
that was quite correct because we broke the back of the anti-fluoridation 
movement by winning in New York and Chicago," Urrows told me. 

Although the Committee s expert composition and broad social 
representation was a classic Bernays-style propaganda technique, Urrows 
denied that the campaign had anything to do with Bernays, 



whom he dismissed in clipped, Harvard tones of barely concealed 
repugnance: He was a man who would take credit for anything that would 
reflect credit on him. He was a professional liar. (Urrows may not have 
known what Bernays was doing, but Bernays kept tabs on Urrows. 
Correspondence from Urrows to Health Commissioner Leona 
Baumgartner is found in the Bernays archive.) 

More evidence of the Committees ties to industry can be seen in its 
staffing and endorsements. General counsel to the committee was Ford 
Foundation trustee and leading corporate attorney, Bethuel M. Webster. He 
had been a wartime associate of Harvard president James Conant and of 
Vannevar Bush, the two leading science bureaucrats who had shepherded 
the early development of the atomic bomb." And the booklet includes 
statements from eight DuPont scientists; three scientists from the nuclear 
complex at Oak Ridge; a doctor from the Army Chemical Center in 
Maryland; the president of Union Carbide; the former supervisor of 
uranium hexafluoride production at Harshaw Chemical; the former director 
of the AECs Division of Biology and Medicine; Shields Warren, a member 
of the AEC s Medical Advisory Committee; Detlev Bronk; and Dr. Herbert 
Stokinger, who had performed many of the Manhattan Projects fluorine 
toxicity studies for Harold Hodge at the University of Rochester. 12 

According to Urrows, it was "a coincidence" that so many scientists 
listed in the booklet were associated with the atomic-weapons industry. 
Fluorides use in industry was "pervasive," he said. It was therefore 
unnecessary to list all those various industrial applications in a dental 
publication, he added. Urrows knew that Dr. Shields Warren, for example, 
had been associated with the AEC and that the nuclear industry had an 
interest in fluoride, but he bristled at any suggestion that his committee 
misled the public by not informing them of fluorides military uses. "I think 
what you are doing is injecting a suspicion as though there were a 
self-interest beyond the public interest. And I think that you are mistaken," 
Urrows said. 

It was not until 1965 that fluoride finally began spilling from New York 
City faucets. Foes complained bitterly that, while city residents were given 
a referendum on off-track betting, the fluoride vote had been turned over to 
the five-man Board of Estimate. An exclusive cocktail party corralling 
New York's political leaders at the home 



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of Mary and Albert Lasker had launched the final push for fluoride that 
summer, according to National Fluoridation News. Mary Lasker was a 
member of the Committee to Protect our Children s Teeth and a prominent 
public health advocate. Her husband was a wealthy advertising executive, 
whose money came in part from pushing Lucky Strike cigarettes with 
Edward Bernays for the American Tobacco Company. 13 Guests at the 
Lasker party on July 25 included Mayor Robert Wagner, members of the 
Board of Estimate, twelve out of twenty-five members of the City Council, 
and Brooklyn s borough president Abe Stark. 

This government by cocktails is really unique, commented a press 
release from the antifluoride Association for the Protection of our Water 
Supply. Here is a private one-sided hearing on a most controversial subject, 
in a meeting by officials in an ex cathedra session. Where does it leave the 
masses of citizens opposed to fluorida-tion? Will they have to pool their 
meager resources and invite the city fathers to an inexpensive bar to hear 
their story? 

The Committee to Protect Our Children s Teeth had accomplished its 
broader national mission, said Urrows. 14 "At the time we began work, there 
may have been — Im guessing now — 5 percent of the public water supplies 
[in the United States] being fluoridated, at the time we went out of business 
we had about two-thirds," Urrows added. 

The father of public relations helped the U.S. Public Health Service to 
sell fluoride too, it seems. On Valentines Day of 1961, assistant surgeon 
general and chief dental officer for the Public Health Service, Dr. John 
Knutson, wrote to Bernays in New York. Knutson asked Bernays to pay a 
visit to his office to discuss new approaches to the promotion of water 
fluoridation. The letter is on government stationery. Bernays answered by 
return mail, announc ing that he expected to be in Washington shortly to 
see some of my friends in Government and when the date is set I will make 
it a point to clear with you for an appointment. ,s 

The federal public-relations effort grew in strength during the 1950s and 
1960s. From the beginning the scale of the taxpayer-funded propaganda 
was driven by the strength of public opposition to fluoridation and had as 
its hallmark disrespect for open debate and a democratic vote.' 



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Big Brother watched. The Public Health Service, the American Dental 
Association, the American Medical Association, and the American Water 
Works Association all operated semicovert investigative offices, 
compiling McCarthyite dossiers on antifluo-ride medical professionals and 
sending often second-hand and derogatory information to profluoride 
groups.' The government agency for perpetuating such smear campaigns, 
which serves as the CIA and the USIA of the pro-fluoridationists 
according to Science magazine, was a taxpayer-funded outfit inside the 
NIH, the National Fluoridation Information Service of the Division of 
Dental Health of the U.S. Public Health Service. The spying unit, remarked 
Science, makes it its business to know who stands where in the 
fluoridation controversy." 18 

Medical professionals critical of fluoride were regularly mauled in 
the press, while doctors and dentists were expelled from their profes 
sional organizations for antifluoride heresy.' 9 At least one researcher, 
Dr. Reuben Feltman, who had found that fluoride supplements 
produce harmful side effects in pregnant women, had his federal 
funding withdrawn. 20 And the leading fluoride critic, Dr. George 
Waldbott from Michigan, soon found himself in the cross hairs of 
fluoride propagandists. 21 In 1988 Chemical and Engineering News 
reviewed the damage that had been done to Waldbott's scientific 
standing as a result of such attacks. Rather than deal scientifically 
with his work, wrote Bette Hileman, ADA mounted a campaign of 
criticism based largely on a letter from a West German health officer, 
Heinrich Hornung. The letter made a number of untrue statements, 
including an allegation that Waldbott obtained his information on 
patients' reactions to fluoride solely from the use of questionnaires. 
ADA later published Waldbott's response to this letter. But the widely 
disseminated original news release was not altered or corrected, and 
continued to be published in many places. As late as 1985, it was still 
being quoted. Once political attacks effectively portrayed him as 
v anti-fluoridation', Waldbott's work was largely ignored by physicians 
and scientists." 

22 

Journalists, too, were seized by the Zeitgeist. In the summer of 1956 the 
writer Donald McNeil served as cover for the AMAs Bureau of 
Investigation in a failed bid to smear a leading antifluoride scientist. 
Although he would later write propaganda pamphlets for the ADA, 



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McNeil was then preparing what was regarded as an objective book on 
fluoride; he would become perhaps the leading media observer of the 
nationwide debate over fluoride. On July 2, 1956, McNeil wrote to the 
distinguished radiologist Frederick B. Exner in Seattle, Wash ington, 
requesting reprints of Exner s critical paper Fluoridation. McNeil wrote 
under a pseudonym, explaining he was an antifluoride activist planning a 
"door-to-door" campaign in Wisconsin and asking if Exner could give him 
some idea on the price of reprints. 

Secretly McNeil was responding to a personal request from the AMA's 
chief gumshoe, Oliver Field, to obtain information in order to show "that 
people are profiting" from the sale of antifluoride literature. (Dr. Exner had 
no idea of the subterfuge. He duly charged McNeil a.k.a. "Don Marriott" a 
dollar for a single copy, a rate that fell on a sliding scale to 55 cents per 
hundred.) 23 

Scientists with an eye for a successful career read the tea leaves closely. 
A river of federal dollars from the newly flush National Institutes of Health 
was cascading into research laboratories and college campuses around the 
nation, profoundly shaping the nations scientific research priorities. While 
millions of these taxpayer dollars were spent promoting fluoridation, little 
money was given to study the potentially harmful effects from fluoride. 
Instead, the PHS spent lavishly during the cold war, producing profluoride 
films and public exhibits, as well as funding pseudoscholarly works. 

An example of these expenditures was the 1963 booklet, The Role of 
Fluoride in Public Health, produced by the Kettering Laboratory and funded 
by the PHS. The Kettering Laboratory was simultaneously being funded by 
several of the biggest fluoride -polluting industries in the United States. The 
booklet's censorship of details and the Laboratory's interest in proving 
fluoride safe in low doses can be seen in its near-complete omission of 
scientists and articles critical of fluoride — and in the tract's propagandistic 
subtitle, "The Soundness of Fluoridation of Communal Water 
Supplies. 24 

The American Dental Association — funded in part by millions of dollars 
in taxpayer grants from the Public Health Service — joined the propaganda 
campaign, releasing a torrent of movies, slides, booklets, and exhibits, even 
suggesting scripts for radio programs. 25 One such script — with fake 
dialogue for doctors, dentists, and a " member" of the Parent Teacher's 
Association — dealt with the issue 



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of dental fluorosis with Orwellian doubletalk, stating that Fluoridated 
water gives the teeth an added sparkle.' 

A 1952 ADA pamphlet also advised against democracy. At no time 
should the dentist be placed in the position of defending himself, his 
profession, or the fluoridation process, stated the leaflet How to 
Obtain Fluoridation for Your Community Through a Citizens 
Committee. Fluoridation "should not be submitted to the voters, who 
cannot possibly sift through and comprehend the scientific evidence, 
the pamphlet advised. 

Yet the scale of the public -relations campaign mounted on behalf of 
water fluoridation appears to have startled even the ADA. In August 
1952, for example, a blizzard of identical news stories appeared in 
papers around the country. They all praised fluoride for reducing 
dental cavities in Newburgh, New York. Curiously, they all did so in 
exactly the same language. Who in hell is feeding newspapers canned 
pro-fluoridation arguments????????" asks a note found by the 
historian Donald McNeil in the archives of the American Dental 
Association.' Two clippings, EXACTLY ALIKE, starting with Every 
time we hear a piece of news like the following from one part of the 
country we are surprised, and a little dismayed, that we don't get the 
same news from lots of other places.' Then tells of Newburgh's 47 
percent reduction in decay" [emphasis in original]. The mystified 
author then lists several newspapers in Washington, Idaho, Missouri, 
Iowa, Arkansas, and South Dakota where the promotional story had 
appeared. 



13 



Showdown in the West 

Martin vs. Reynolds Metals