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