Bernays himself may have inflated the parade’s historical importance.

Evidence

The historical record is somewhat muddled as to the real effect of the stunt, precisely because of Bernays’s natural tendency to take credit as the mysterious puppet master behind the scenes. Perhaps seduced by an irresistible story, many have accepted his version of events, in which the “Torches of Freedom” parade marks a kind of social turning point. No less astute a critic of propaganda than Noam Chomsky allows that Bernays’s “major coup, the one that really propelled him into fame in the late 1920s, was getting women to smoke.” — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 239

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how much of PR history itself is manufactured by PR — Bernays’s self-mythologizing may be his real triumph.