The famous 1929 protest went nearly unnoticed in its own time.

Evidence

It is of course impossible to assign—or deny—definitive credit for something as complex as a change in social norms. Suffice it to say that contemporary reporting of the “Torches of Freedom” event was relatively thin. The New York Times buried its account of the protest halfway through its story on the presumably more urgent subject, the Easter Parade itself: “About a dozen young women strolled back and forth [on Fifth Avenue] while the parade was at its peak, ostentatiously smoking their cigarettes….One of the group explained that the cigarettes were ‘torches of freedom’ lighting the way to the day when women would smoke on the street as casually as men.” The Washington Post would not mention the demonstration until 1991, by which time the event had gathered significance by reason of the story’s propagation; in the end, Bernays’s signal triumph may have been the particularly good job he did capturing the attention of historians. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 240

Categorization

• SEED: Essay angle: events that gain historical significance retroactively through retelling — Bernays’s real coup was capturing historians, not women smokers.
• DEEPTHINKING: Dense point about how attention is captured twice: once at the event, once through subsequent narration, and the second capture can be the more durable one.