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fired on the strikers, killing 17 of them, including a group of woman and children who died in a fire when their tent was set a blaze by the militia. In 1923 Edward L. Bernays published Crystallizing Public Opinion, the first book on professional public relations. In 1929 Bernays staged the "Torches of Freedom" march to promote smoking (History of PR). Clearly, as early as the 1920's, the newly industrialized and centralized population of the US was under the subtle attack of pitch men turned story tellers. Seeing a population engrossed with the "New Era" of finance, stock peddlers such as National City Bank of New York (now Citibank) CEO Charles Mitchell announced to the world that "stocks were safer than bonds," accelerating an already rampaging bull market. When the Federal Reserve in 1929 tried to curb buying and deflate the bubble, Mitchell, to great popular acclaim, single handedly derailed their efforts. The general public was "an America grown ravenous for speculation" (Frank, 52). Mitchell had connected to the public emotionally. He was singing the praises of stock and bonds that had nothing to offer but the ability of an American to acknowledge ownership and participation in this new "market for all". Many of these stocks were from South American companies and foreign projects that had very little chance of financial legitimacy. Americans did little to authenticate their value or even the existence of the companies they invested in. Even two weeks prior to the stock market crash initiating the Great Depression, Mitchell claimed that "market values have a sound basis in the general prosperity" and the people listened.

In the chapter titled "The Politics of Emotion," Frank Furedi, in his book Therapy Culture, concludes that the apprehension of the political and corporate elites towards the mentality of the crowd was driven by the assumption that its emotions could be "manipulated towards destructive ends by demagogues" (46). According to Furedi, the belief that the public was dominated by infantile emotions was widespread in the social literature during the time between the first and second world wars. Often it asserted that the public did not know what is in its best interests. Furedi quotes one American sociologist in 1919 who said, public opinion is often very cruel to those who struggle most unselfishly for the public welfare' (46).

During the Great Depression of the 1930's, a backlash against corporate America gained more traction than the bull

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