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
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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 ENGINEERING CONSENT 159 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.' 16o 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
ENGINEERING CONSENT 161 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
164
CHAPTER TWELVE.
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.'
ENGINEERING CONSENT 165 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, 166 CHAPTER TWELVE 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
ENGINEERING CONSENT 167 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 
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