Early Public Relations

Overview

Public relations as a practice traces to antiquity; however, public relations as a professional field of endeavor is barely a century old. Public relations agents carefully select data points from a complex of events to create a way of understanding those events and using that slanted (but not inaccurate) portrayal to inform a large number of people in order to generate a particular perception or to encourage a particular action on a large scale. In the late nineteenth century, the Industrial Revolution and the expansion of railroads and commerce gave rise to an exceptionally monied class. Working conditions and the economic chasm between the rich (employers) and the poor (labor) resulted in popular perceptions of the rich as greedy and morally bankrupt, a view that became increasingly disadvantageous to the "robber barons" and sparked a demand for reputation fixers. Public relations would rise to prominence between the world wars and establish itself as a ubiquitous communications force in the decades between the introduction of television (late 1940s) and the advent of digital communications in the last two decades of the twentieth century. Digital technology revolutionized the public relations field by introducing an entirely new information environment with unprecedented access to a global audience. During its earliest decades, however, pioneering public relations agents would be hired to create public reaction and in turn to shape a community of people who would buy into a common cause, share a common perception, and/or commit to common opinion.

From its inception, public relations was mostly viewed as a necessary strategy to counter negative publicity for a business or an individual, to provide a balanced view of a controversial subject or event, or to promote the value of a program or a cause widely misunderstood or ignored. Simon Moore in his sweeping 2014 history of public relations, terms such strategies as "managing communication" and argues it is hardly new. Julius Caesar was famously known for sending back to Rome overhyped accounts of his army's victories; in the decades after Martin Luther's Reformation challenge, the Catholic Church, facing the widespread charges of corruption and venality, organized a vast network of secret commissions to counter that perception with vigorous campaigns of self-promotion and the ruthless suppression of dissent.

Indeed Church agents coined the term "propaganda"; the first-generation settlers in America, both the Puritans in New England and the farmers in the South, relayed exaggerated accounts of the "New World" as a way to encourage mass emigration; the Boston Tea Party, itself carefully staged and ultimately used a widespread political and military promotion, was an act of orchestrated publicity to generate support for the cause of colonial independence; Andrew Jackson was the first American politician to use the resources of what would become a public relations machine to counter the image that he was some frontier ruffian who would bring disgrace to the office of the presidency; abolitionists in America and Europe created massive public information campaigns to change public attitudes about slavery, a method that would later be effectively employed by woman suffragists.

Further Insights

Contemporary mass communication theorists point to the emergence in the late nineteenth century in the United States of the railroad as a national transportation monopoly and the subsequent concentration of great wealth in a handful of families as the beginnings of public relations. The rich were perceived to live in opulence, indifferent to the conditions of the working-class whose backbreaking work under difficult conditions had ensured that wealth. Indeed, the rise of public relations is often traced to a single off-the-cuff comment: When asked in 1883 whether the national railroad system should be run not as a private business that privileged the few but rather as a public service, railroad magnate William Henry Vanderbilt (1821–1895), widely held to be the wealthiest man in America at the time, replied curtly, "The public be damned."

Vanderbilt's comment was carried by national news agencies and appeared on front pages across America, creating a classic "public relations disaster" for the man, his family, and his company. To combat the firestorm of negative press, Vanderbilt's New York Central Railroad created what it termed the Publicity Bureau to counter the perception of the company as heartless and corrupt. This first generation of public relations agents was led largely by Ivy Lee (1877–1934). His groundbreaking work defined public relations as essentially (and necessarily) one-sided; that is, a company needed to direct its message to the widest possible audience (Zoch, Supa & VanTuyll, 2014); indeed, Lee created the idea of a press release. Public relations was strategic self-promotion, a way to change popular perceptions by advancing a benign view of the client, point out the essential services the company (in this case, the railroad) provides, the company's role in the community as an economic force, its commitment to on-time service, and its quick response to any catastrophe.

Thus, the first public relations bureaus were seen as essentially providers of information, dispensers of facts that the wider public simply did not know or had overlooked in the emotional response to some event or revelation. Public relations was seen as a business strategy for setting the public record straight. Informing would in turn persuade people to moderate their views or even alter them entirely.

In the era of muckraking journalism intent on exposing the corruption of political machines and corporations, those same targets used public relations as a way to balance what was otherwise an entirely toxic public image. For example, in 1913 the wealthy industrialist John D. Rockefeller (1839–1937) faced public outcry over his handling of a wildcat strike in the Colorado mining fields that had resulted in major loss of life among the strikers (termed a massacre in the press); public relations agents worked to rehabilitate the family's image by emphasizing the community good done by the Rockefeller family and by accusing the strikers of violent intentions, of being against providing coal to the country, and of being anti-American. Perhaps most notably, the administration of Woodrow Wilson, facing enormous public resistance to the country committing its military to the war in distant Europe, used Lee's model to generate enthusiasm and to sell bonds to finance the war effort. President Franklin Roosevelt used Lee's basic model more than a decade later when, in an attempt to push forward his controversial New Deal public works programs, he created a government information agency that, in turn, promoted the economic value of the programs, the heroic integrity of the working class, and portrayed Big Business interests as unfeeling obstructionists interested only in their profits.

Of course, Lee's model had the potential to justify the use of the power and influence of a government to push its agenda and to deliberately suppress dissent. Lee's basic concept of one-directional publication relations would have perhaps its most insidious application in Germany between the wars under the direction of Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) and his Ministry of Public Enlightenment. Under Goebbels, the concept of one-sided public relations became a ruthless and systematic program of propaganda, a national strategy to control the news and to shape an entirely distorted view of the government itself. To resist or to object was seen at best as unpatriotic and counterproductive, at worst as treasonous and betrayal of the Fatherland. Indeed, the Nazi regime, even as it consolidated its political power base during the 1930s, used a wide variety of media platforms—posters, books, pamphlets, radio broadcasts, newspapers, films, and carefully choreographed public events and rallies—to generate fear (O'Shaughnessy, 2009). The public relations campaign lionized the ambition and vision of the Third Reich, eliminated opposition views as worthless and nonsense, and created a heroic, even mythic (and entirely manufactured) sense of national identity that would, in turn, be used to justify the arrest, imprisonment, and extermination of millions who did not fit that national profile.

Discourse

Lee's public relations model was basic: Focus a corporation or agency's message and get that specific message out to an audience that needed the information or was operating under misperceptions or half-truths that damaged the reputation and/or thwarted the agenda of the corporation or agency. In the late 1920s, however, a more sophisticated public relations dynamic was theorized by Edward Bernays (1891–1995), a first-generation Austrian immigrant, a grain exporter trained in journalism. It is difficult to underestimate Bernays' impact in the emerging field of public relations. "Although practically invisible to the outside world, Bernays became an influential architect of modern mass persuasion techniques, which continue to inspire the PR industry" (Mostegel, 2016). Bernays was interested not so much in corporate imperatives as by the needs of the public those corporations served. He reconceived the purpose of public relations as less about securing some corporate goal and more about addressing an audience's desires—corporations and agencies needed to gather hard and reliable data about their targeted demographic and their needs and then pitch their idea and/or product as a way to satisfy that need. Bernays, himself a nephew of iconic psychologist Sigmund Freud, saw public relations as a two-way exercise in culture-wide psychology. The job of effective public relations agencies was to explain the public to the client as much as to explain the client to the public.

For Bernays, the potential power of public relations came from a response to the people and their needs. He posited that the "habits and opinions" of the masses could be organized into a "mechanism," which could be controlled by an "invisible government." The quest to harness the mechanism and become the real power in America defined a new era in public relations. For example, Bernays' public relations agency was approached in the late 1930s by the tobacco industry stymied over its inability to generate sales among women. Bernays researched women in their twenties and thirties and found that, in the new era of their earned civil rights, they wanted to feel independent and empowered. Bernays then shaped a successful ad campaign that used cigarettes as a way for women to demonstrate their freedom and their strength. After Prohibition, many Americans were still uncertain over the value and moral worth of hard liquor and wines; Bernays' agency crafted a campaign that promoted beer as safe alcohol, working-class refreshment with no moral layer. When in the early 1950s, data showed that Americans were beginning to lose touch with the traditional family, Bernays' agency developed an ad campaign that sold bacon and eggs as an occasion for the family to sit down and have breakfast before the business of the day.

In the flush of America's economic boom following the end of World War II, Bernays' theoretical template became the basis for modern public relations. Public relations itself became a burgeoning industry; ad agencies, mostly concentrated along New York City's Madison Avenue, developed increasingly more sophisticated application of Bernays' basic methodology. Solicit feedback and listen; then respond; then listen to that feedback—public relations became an integral part of America's media landscape.

Between 1960 and the advent of the digital revolution in the 1980s, public relations firms addressed the image needs of four large groups: politicians in need of building a reputation or of repairing damage to it; grassroots activists interested in launching ambitious large-scale public movements to effect social change and/or to address neglected issues; celebrities in need of enhancing marginal profiles and/or rehabbing their prominent profile after some negative event(s); and businesses and corporations in need of major image repair—not advertising, but what came to be called damage control. The jargon of public relations became part of the cultural vocabulary: orchestrated "photo ops"; highly visible, tightly scripted "talking heads"; press agents getting "out front" of the news, known as "spin doctoring."

In this generation of public relations, these agents used mass media, most notably television, not to set the record straight or to dispense corrective facts, as earlier public relations agents had done, but rather to make a bald pitch to the emotions of the audience as a way to secure community-wide assent or approval. Perhaps the most notable application of Bernays' two-way public relations dynamic in the decade leading up to the digital revolution was the strategy employed in 1982 by the pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson in the wake of a national panic caused by the mysterious lacing of Extra-Strength Tylenol capsules cyanide. In the days before tamperproof containers, the poisoned capsules appeared in apparently random packages in and around the Chicago area over several months. The occurrences were unpredictable, the criminal anonymous, the motive obscure. The only thing that seemed certain to consumers was that taking a Tylenol might be deadly.

Tylenol was one of the company's most popular products; it controlled nearly 40 percent of over-the-counter painkiller sales. The stock profile of Johnson & Johnson plummeted. Facing a catastrophic loss and the possibility of bankruptcy, Johnson & Johnson began the work of rebuilding its public image through a massive public relations campaign that, first, responded to an anxious public by recalling all lots of the product and redesigning its containers to prevent tampering in the future (Analyzing, 2017). In addition, as part of its public relations campaign, the company created a series of feel-good ads designed to restore trust: television commercials, newspaper and magazine spreads, and a blitz of company executives giving interviews to underscore the company's proactive moves. The public relations work projected the company as one of the nation's most trusted healthcare operations, in business for nearly a century. Acknowledging customers' reasonable fears, preventing additional deaths by recalling stock, and precluding future incidents with the adoption of tamperproof packaging—in other words, taking an economic hit to secure the safety of consumers—restored trust and allowed Tylenol to resume its place in American medicine cabinets. Johnson & Johnson flourished.

From Julius Caesar to the executives of Johnson & Johnson nearly two millennia later, public relations operatives, whatever the media and whatever their agenda, have worked to used mass communications platforms to first inform an audience and then create a powerful community of consent.

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