Alarmed by the horrors of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the rise of fascism and totalitarian regimes in Europe, the interwar years in the USA were marked by a heated political discourse about the nature of people and their role in politics and society. To many, these wars and revolutions revealed what inhumane and irrational actions people could be capable of when acting in large groups. Influenced by Freudian notions of irrational unconscious drives and theories advanced by the likes of Walter Lippman and Gustave LeBon about crowd psychology, political and business leaders feared that the collective human mind presented a fundamental threat to the health of American democracy. And so they sought the means to control it.

Spearheaded by its two founders, Edward Bernays and Ivy Lee, the newly established field of public relations claimed that it had exactly these means. As they explained it, they would use the full sophistication of science, and put it into practice to help businesses and politicians to promote both themselves and their ideologies. From psychoanalysis and behavioural psychology to sociology and the advent of modern polling techniques, PR practitioners were eager to use the full range of the human sciences to study the population and thereby to devise the techniques to manipulate it. And in the process, they would also create a new political ideology, wherein a society built around consumerism would keep the people happy and the intellectual elites would guide the masses in their decisions.