To develop public relations, Bernays synthesized elements of Freud's work with Gustave Le Bon's researches into crowd psychology, and Wilfred Trotter's theories of herd instinct.
He contacted a female friend and asked her to find a group of women to march in the New York City Easter Day parade.
Letters were written to interior and fashion designers, department stores, and prominent women of society pushing green as the new hot color for the season.
[2] Bernays applied Freud's observations to convince the public, among other things, that bacon and eggs was the true all-American breakfast.
[3] On October 17, 1924, Bernays once engineered a "pancake breakfast" with vaudevillians for Calvin Coolidge in what is widely considered one of the first overt publicity stunts for a US president.
[4] Bernays's most extreme political propaganda activities were said to be conducted on behalf of the multinational corporation United Fruit Company (renamed Chiquita Brands International in 1984) and the U.S. government to facilitate the successful 1954 coup against the democratically elected president of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz Guzman.
Bernays's propaganda (documented in the BBC documentary The Century of the Self), branding Arbenz as communist, was published in major U.S. media.
The publicity elements of the Jubilee–including the special issuance of a U.S. postage stamp and Edison's "re-creating" the invention of the light bulb for a nationwide radio audience – provided evidence of Bernays's love for big ideas and "ballyhoo".
A follow-up event for the 75th anniversary, produced for television by David O. Selznick, was titled Light's Diamond Jubilee and broadcast on all four American TV networks on October 24, 1954.