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 https://www.blogger.com/null
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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