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From part 1: What the corporations realized they had to do was transform the way the majority of Americans thought about products. One leading Wall Street banker, Paul Mazer of Leahman Brothers was clear about what was necessary. We must shift America, he wrote, from a needs to a desires culture. People must be trained to desire, to want new things even before the old had been entirely consumed. We must shape a new mentality in America. Man's desires must overshadow his needs.

Continued... But Bernays' power was about to be destroyed dramatically, and by a type of human rationality that he could do nothing to control....

Throughout the 1920s speculators had borrowed billions of dollars. The banks had promoted the idea that this was a new era where market crashes were a thing of the past. But they were wrong. What was bout to happen was the biggest stock market crash in history. Investors had panicked and begun to sell in a blind relentless fury that no reassurance by bankers or politicians could halt. And on the 29th of October 1929 the market collapsed.

The effect of the crash on the American economy was disastrous. Faced with recession and unemployment millions of American workers stopped buying goods they didn't need. The consumer boom that Bernays had done so much to engineer had disappeared. And he and the profession of public relations fell from favor. Bernays' brief moment of power seemed to be over.