Torches of Freedom

Why it works

At New York's Easter Parade in 1929 a handful of young women lit cigarettes on Fifth Avenue and called them "torches of freedom", a gesture for women's equality. It was a sales promotion. Edward Bernays, working for the American Tobacco Company's Lucky Strike, took the phrase from the psychoanalyst A. A. Brill. The group's spokeswoman, Bertha Hunt, was Bernays's secretary; she sent the telegram inviting some thirty debutantes to take part, then told reporters it was no publicity stunt. The New York Times gave the smokers a subheading in its parade report. Working from Bernays's own scrapbooks, the historian Vanessa Murphree found the coverage far less celebratory, and its effect far smaller, than he later claimed, and several columnists reported that a cigarette firm had planted the women. It is taught as the textbook pseudo-event and as an ethics warning: a social cause borrowed, without disclosure, to sell a harmful product. From the early 1960s Bernays campaigned against smoking.