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I have to admit (with all respect given to our fearless editor) that I disliked this writing challenge the moment he laid it down. I still dislike it. I dislike it in the way I dislike those arbitrary end-of-the-year, pre-New-Year's-day lists of the hundred most famous (fill in the blank). I dislike it because of its emphasis on the mythology of the exceptional work or the exceptional artist, as if historical context, luck, chicanery, and the herd instinct didn't play some role. I dislike it for its bias toward the academic and the élite, as if only authorized artists (dubbed so by whom?) quality for the imprimatur.
And "influential" -- defined how? Is this influence only supposed to be benign, or for "the good" (whatever that sentimentalized notion means)? Can "influence" include the evil, the malignant, the dystopian? For instance, the Bible would fall under both categories, depending upon whether one wanted to emphasize the social-justice angle of the Gospels or the end-time visions of Revelations, both of which have spawned social movements of great force and pressure. And what about geographic range? And chronological range (especially durability over time)?
But I will put aside all these considerations and kvetches and try to get into the spirit of the challenge, and for my choice I choose, in the realm of theatre, Edward L. Bernays, often called "The Father of Public Relations," who died at the age of 103 in 1995 and who began his work in the "engineering of consent" (as he called it) during and just after World War I. (He worked on Woodrow Wilson's Creel Commission, otherwise known as the "Committee on Public Information," to foster public support for America's entry into the Great War.)
Bernays, who was a nephew of Sigmund Freud (his father was Ely Bernays, brother of Freud's wife Martha Bernays, and his mother was Freud's sister, Anna), combined Freud's ideas with the study of crowd psychology by GustaveLeBon in France and Wilfred Trotter in Britain to create methods to control and direct public behavior. As he asked in his 1928 book Propaganda, "If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it?" And he answered his own question in the affirmative by a career dedicated to, as the title of first book in 1923 declared, Crystallizing Public Opinion.
Joe Camel is a penis,
says Edward Bernays.
Bernays did not see his work as negating democracy but actually making democracy possible by getting disparate and disunited people to work together in ways that would quell their instincts toward aggression by uniting them in common acts:
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country....We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society....In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.
His work as a "public relations counsel" (the title he preferred) has been well-documented, and the documentation shows how well mass-marketing in a mass culture works to herd people's desires in one direction or another, whether it's to buy soap or to "engineer consent" for the war in Iraq.
It's not the point of this essay to defend or criticize what Bernays did and started. It's to show that, in terms of the essay challenge — "the one most influential work/artist in the past 100 years" — the effects of Bernays' form of theatrical manipulation far outstrip the influence of any other artist or artistic production, both in breadth (the millions of people) and depth (how we are all, in America, to one degree or another, a mass citizen of a mass culture). The twentieth century had the shape and tenor it did in large measure because of the ideas and practices started by Bernays.
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