By 1928, he had become the leading figure in his ever-growing field. Not only had he managed to legitimize his craft (“Counsel on Public Relations” always was his pointed self-description), but his own shop was bustling. His services were therefore not available to everyone; Propaganda is aimed mainly at Bernays’s potential corporate clientele. And yet the author variously masks that plutocratic bias. At the outset, his seductive use of “us” implies that he, like most of us, is just a fuddled propaganda, and not himself the ablest of “invisible governors.”
