Each generation has brought us a new PR legend who has added new bells and whistles to the disinformation machine. This is a guide to all those we've profiled so far.
Ivy Ledbetter Lee
Ivy Ledbetter Lee is widely considered the father of modern public relations (yes, yes Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud’s nephew, also sometimes claims that prize, but he started his firm 25 years after Lee).
Lee worked for coal companies and railroads and then in 1914 went to work for the Rockefellers. In response to an ongoing strike at a Colorado mine owned by the family, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. had sent in armed guards, who teamed up with the Colorado national guard to bust up the protest. The men invaded a camp of some 1200 miners and their families, and began setting tents on fire, and then shooting at protestors. Ultimately 22 protestors were killed, including 11 children and two women, who were suffocated by smoke when they got trapped in a pit, trying to hide from the gunfire. The incident came to be known as the Ludlow Massacre. The Rockefellers were just a few years out from the break-up of the Standard Oil Trust, and the Ludlow strike quickly made the son as unpopular as his father. They were in great need of a new image, and Ivy Lee was just the man to give it to them.
An archival news photo of the aftermath of the Ludlow Massacre.
Lee went on to work for Standard Oil and the Rockefellers for the rest of his life. After WWI he helped them bring oil companies together into the first industry PR group, the American Petroleum Institute, back in 1919. In 1929, when Standard Oil signed a partnership deal with German chemical manufacturer I.G. Farben, creating Standard-IG Farben, a joint venture that aimed to develop petrochemicals and synthetic fuels, Lee picked up IG Farben as a client too. And when Adolf Hitler began consolidating power in Germany, Farben asked Lee to come to Germany. The $4,000 a year they were paying him was increased to $25,000 a year, and they offered his son a full-time job in Germany, too, for $33,000 a year, big money at the time. Lee met with minister of propaganda Josef Goebbels, and with Hitler himself, along with various other Third Reich leaders, and advised them on relations with the press and with America in general. When the Nazis were planning to kick out the foreign press, Lee advised them against that idea, and suggested they build relationships with the foreign press instead.
Lee also advised them that Americans would never go for the Third Reich’s stance on Jews, but it’s unlikely that he realized at the time how far that thinking went or what it would lead to in a few short years. Lee was brought before the House Un-American Activities Committee to testify about his involvement on “Nazi propaganda” in 1934. The transcript of that testimony is here.
In addition to creating the "crisis actors" narrative we still see in use today and the press release, and launching a whole new industry in the U.S. that then spread around the globe, Lee pioneered the creation of fake expert organizations. On behalf of the railroads in the early 20th century, he created the Bureau of Railroad Economics. The Bureau had the appearance of independence but was created and funded by Lee, on behalf of his railroad clients. Economists at the Bureau would tell newspaper journalists that taxes on railroads or railroad companies were bad, and at the time journalists didn't really think to question this ostensibly independent economic think tank. It's yet another technique we still see all over today.
Ivy Ledbetter Lee
Bureau of Railway Economics
Ivy Lee - API Meeting Minutes
Ivy Lee Relationship with Nazis
Biographers of Lee are often torn over whether or not he was well intended. His lofty "principles of PR" are often pointed to as ethical touchstones for the industry. We cannot speak to the intentions of a long-dead man, but we can think about the many things he said and wrote himself about the industry he helped to create. Lee was an absolute believer in the power of business to solve problems, of the free market to deliver solutions. His counseling of Hitler was more driven by wanting German and American businesses to keep trading than anything else; ditto his efforts to establish trade relations between the U.S. and Russia. He figured you don't go to war with your trade partners. As a spokesperson for and counselor to industry, Lee always encouraged telling the public the truth, but he also had a very...let's say unusual...understanding of the word "truth" and spoke often about his job being to deliver “my interpretation of the facts" to the public.
Carl Byoir
Born to Polish Jewish immigrants in Des Moines, Iowa, Carl Byoir started his career like a lot of the PR men we've profiled here: working for a newspaper. At just 17, he was appointed managing editor of his local newspaper, The Waterloo (Iowa) Times-Tribune. He put himself through college and started a savings account with money he won from various writing and debate contests. While at school, he helped publicize various shows the drama program put on, and staged his first big public relations campaign—to get himself elected manager of the college yearbook. He graduated from the University of Iowa in 1910 and enrolled at Columbia's Law School.
Here's a plot twist if there ever was one: Byoir is largely responsible for bringing the Montessori approach to early childhood education to the United States. On the train on his way to law school one day, he read a magazine feature about Maria Montessori and her approach to kindergarten. He thought American mothers would love this approach, so he took a leave of absence from law school and went to study under Montessori in Italy for a few weeks so that he could become the U.S. expert on her system. Then he bought the American franchise for the system and started a small publishing company called The House of Childhood. Through that company, Byoir sold both Montessori curricula and training materials, and a magazine for children.
Byoir's children's magazine, John Martin's Book, did okay but never succeeded financially the way he'd hoped. He figured it was because he didn't know enough about circulation and ad sales, so he applied for an apprenticeship at Hearst to learn more. He had a real knack for the publishing business and seemed to dominate every department he moved through, ultimately winning a job as circulation manager for all the Hearst publications.
The Creel Committee
Byoir was still at that job at Hearst when the government's propaganda arm, the Committee on Public Information, came calling. One year before Edward L. Bernays joined the Committee on Public Information, Byoir was called to Washington by George Creel, the journalist-turned-political campaigner who ran the Committee. His combination of a law education, sales, advertising, publishing and journalism skills made Byoir the perfect right-hand man for Creel.
Byoir's first challenge for the Committee was just getting things printed. The Committee had the content for its pamphlets and newsletters, but no way to get them made thanks to a backlog of wartime print jobs. Byoir drew on his experience at his college yearbook, remembering that smaller printers that mostly worked on mail order catalogs had a slack period in early spring and fall. He signed a contract with one, got their materials printed and saved the Committee 40 percent. These sorts of feats earned Byoir the nickname "the miracle man."
Byoir also helped to recruit and train men who were influential in various communities to become part of the Committee's 4-Minute Men program—the original influencers, these guys gave prepared 4-minute speeches in support of the war effort at various parties, functions, silent film screenings, and conventions. Byoir also helped the Committee reach America's many immigrant communities, placing ads in various foreign language newspapers, enlisting 4-Minute Men in these communities, sending notices directly to people's mailboxes, and creating film reels, all of which helped to increase the number of men enlisting in the military by millions.
Byoir gained infamy during the 1930s for his role in helping Cuba and then Germany build their tourism industries. He created the March of Dimes as part of an effort to burnish the image of one terrible rich guy. His work with foreign clients was critical in understanding how to sell American ideas and ideals to other parts of the world, a task that became a huge part of his work for the Creel Commission. Amidst it all, Byoir also created the model for PR billing and staffing that still exists today.
He was one of only a few Committee members kept on after the war to handle post-war messaging, eventually leaving in 1919 to start his own PR business, and hiring Edward Bernays to help with his very first client, The Lithuanian National Council in the United States. The Council wanted Byoir's help getting the U.S. Senate to officially recognize Lithuania as a free and independent nation, and he delivered. But unlike Bernays, Byoir wasn't immediately great at running a PR business. He went back to what he knew best: sales and advertising, working for Nuxated Iron.
Cuba
It was, of all things, sinus infections that drew Byoir to Cuba in the late 1920s. The warmth and humidity cured him of infections that had been life-threatening living on the U.S. East Coast, and Byoir decided to stay. He leased two newspapers and set about looking for ways to increase circulation. Rather than try to figure out if the techniques he'd used back home would work here, Byoir decided to focus on getting more American tourists to Cuba. He signed a deal with then-president Machado that if he could increase American tourism to Cuba spending his own money, the government would sign a five-year, $300,000 contract to hire Carl Byoir & Associates as the PR firm for the Cuban government. They doubled American tourism to Cuba in just one year and became the country's official PR firm. By 1932, locals were threatening to kill him over his association with Machado, and Byoir fled back to New York to set up shop there again.
Later, Byoir's work for the German government, trying to encourage more American tourism in Germany, combined with his work for Cuba, would draw raised eyebrows and a trip to the House Un-American Affairs Committee. He was acquitted of any wrongdoing in both cases, but it cast a shadow on his reputation.
March of Dimes
Like Ivy Lee before him, one of Byoir's anchor clients was a shady rich guy who needed help improving his reputation: Henry L. Doherty. Doherty had made most of his millions cutting corners during the Depression, and Byoir was looking for a way to rehabilitate his rep when he got a call from a charity affiliated with Franklin D. Roosevelt. The Warm Springs Infantile Paralysis Foundation wanted a multi-million-dollar donation from Doherty, and Byoir thought it was a great idea.
He designed a fundraising event to make news that would make his client look good. Every person and group involved in the event was part of the sell, for Byoir. He brought in third-party influencers like the Elks, Masons, American Legion, labor unions, business organizations, Kiwanis, Booster and Exchange clubs. And to boost attention, they planned the event for the President's birthday.
Byoir personally called every newspaper publisher in the U.S. and asked them to nominate a local FDR Birthday Ball chairman. Those nominations also made news. The Birthday Ball turned into an annual event, but was eventually rebranded to The March of Dimes. Later in his memoir, Byoir mused:
When you set out to influence and persuade people to action, when the campaign is tremendous, nation-wide [sic] in scope, don't think that it just happens; something has to be done to get millions of people to think the thought you want them to think and then to get them to act on that thought."
The A&P
In the late 1930s, at the height of the Depression, legislators began floating the idea of taxing chain stores. The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company (A&P) went to Byoir for help combating the idea. Byoir used a relatively new technique—opinion polling—to determine that people were generally in favor of taxing chain stores, but were unaware that those taxes would probably increase the cost of the food they were buying. Byoir set about getting that information out and effectively turned the tide. His clients were ecstatic...until the campaign resulted in an anti-trust investigation in the early 1940s.
The Railroad-Truckers Brawl
In the early 1950s, truckers in Pennsylvania wanted to change the laws around weight maximums for trucks. The railroads didn't like this idea because they figured trucking companies would steal railroad clients. Eastern Railroad hired Byoir & Associates to help defeat the proposal and Byoir did his thing. He created ads about how terrible truckers were and created unfavorable ads about truckers and generated anti-truck studies and white papers to distribute to reporters. He also sent journalists an advance copy of Maryland's State Road Commission's test which reported the negative effects of differing truck axles on highways. The bill was vetoed immediately... and Byoir & Associates once again found themselves facing an anti-trust investigation. They would eventually be cleared in 1961, but Byoir himself wouldn't live to see it.
Edward Bernays
Edward Bernays gave himself the title "The Father of Modern Public Relations," a clever way to erase the contributions of those who came before them and solidify his legacy. Clever because it was technically true: he created the term "public relations" after the Germans had, as he put it, "given the word propaganda a bad name."
Bernays is better known than his predecessor Ivy Lee, in part because Lee died so young, while Bernays lived to over 100 and continued to work, write, and think about PR almost to his dying day. He's a central figure in the documentary The Century of the Self, which provides fascinating insight into who Bernays was as a person and what he believed, namely that the masses needed to be controlled because most of them were too stupid to know what was good for them, and certainly to know what was good for the country.
Bernays's uncle was Sigmund Freud—on both sides, in a bizarre and some might say Freudian twist (Edward's mother was Freud’s sister, and Freud was also married to Edward's father’s sister). Bernays grew up in Vienna, hearing all about Freud’s theories on the deeply buried human impulses that drive behavior. As a young man, he was very interested in the performing arts, particularly ballet and theater and he began to work in that world as a new sort of publicity man, less focused on posters and ticket sales and more on making his clients a major topic of conversation at dinner parties. His work in that realm attracted the attention of George Creel, who was heading up the government's WWI propaganda effort, and Bernays headed to Washington to join the effort.
It was here that he saw the real power in propaganda and became a bit drunk with his own ability to manipulate the masses. Bernays chaired the Committee on Public Information's Export Service, meaning his job was to help sell Europe on the idea of America as an ally and a savior. There is very little documentation of what Bernays actually did during WWI, but unlike his predecessor Ivy Lee, Bernays was all about promoting himself as much as his clients, and he spun a narrative for decades that he was integral to the Committee's success.
Bernays and Lee represent two archetypes that we see over and over again in PR history, with Lee preferring to operate behind the scenes and Bernays seeing value in being as visible himself as his clients were. Which is why, in addition to crowning himself the father of public relations and playing up his role in the Creel Commission, Bernays also consistently referenced his uncle and his relationship to him, creating the impression that he had a special understanding of human psychology and behavior by virtue of that family connection.
If Bernays was good at selling himself, he was also very good at delivering big wins for his clients. And he fundamentally changed many aspects of American society without Americans really knowing it. His list of successes includes:
Bernays Bacon Ad
Ad Pegged to Bernays’s Torches of Freedom Campaign
Edward Bernays
Earl Newsom
There are two types of PR guys, the ones who make themselves a central character in the story and the ones who work their magic quietly behind the scenes. Earl Newsom was the latter sort to the extreme. His name only really comes up in the context of other PR legends talking about what a genius he was. But while he kept an extremely low profile, Newsom was possibly the most influential PR guy of the 20th century, working for corporate giants like Ford, GM, Campbell's Soup, Standard Oil of New Jersey (which later became Exxon), and many more.
Newsom was born in Wellman, Iowa, and graduated from Oberlin College in 1921. He took time off of college to serve as a Navy pilot in WWI. His approach to the job was not at all about press releases or talking to journalists, instead he really focused on truly managing the relationship between a company or an industry and the public. He was a trusted advisor to CEOs, helping them navigate crises and keep a constant, close read on the public. Newsom also collaborated often with Elmo Roper, who pioneered market research and polling. From the late 1930s onward, Roper based the majority of his PR plans on polling reports from Roper.
Standard Oil of New Jersey
Earl Newsom worked for Standard Oil of New Jersey, which eventually became Exxon, from the early 1940s til he retired in the mid-1960s. He managed every aspect of the company's public persona, from seemingly inconsequential decisions like whether or not a VP should accept an award from a PR college for his work on education (Newsom said no, lest people think Standard's investments in universities were just a PR stunt) to the company's approach to developing oil fields in South America and the Middle East to cross-industry strategies for shaping how Americans think about the economy. One of the most fascinating documents Newsom left behind was a strategy document from early in the year in 1945. WWII was coming to a close, and Newsom was concerned—not that the Allies would lose, or that the companies he worked for would have to find new revenue streams once wartime purchasing ended, but that Americans had grown so used to the government taking care of them that they might turn away from the benefits of free enterprise. At the time, Newsom was working for Standard Oil of New Jersey, Ford, and GM, but the plan included non-clients too, it was an all-hands-on-deck moment for industry.
"Next to crushing the Axis, and avoiding runaway inflation while we are doing it, the most important problem confronting us is to keep the American people convinced of the intrinsic social and economic worth of the free enterprise system," he wrote. "And of its superiority over statism, so that the people will be determined to remove unnecessary governmental controls and reestablish competitive, democratic, free enterprise capitalism when the war is won.”
"There is grave danger that many millions of Americans will be given the impression that the free enterprise system is full of gross abuses and dishonesties," he continued. "That private business has put and is putting its own narrow selfish, financial interests above patriotism; that the free enterprise system has outlived its usefulness; and that all-encompassing state-imposed economic planning is better for the people than the system of competitive free enterprise."
General Motors
Newsom also worked for General Motors in the 1960s during a particularly tough time for the company, when it was dealing with the fallout of Ralph Nader's seminal 1965 book, Unsafe At Any Speed. More so than the book itself, GM faced public backlash and a Senate investigation over its handling of the book, which included gathering opposition research on Nader and even trying to entrap him with young women. Newsom counseled GM's executives through the Senate hearing and apology for the Nader debacle, and through various skirmishes with labor unions over the years.
Early report on Nader, prepared by Newsom’s team for General Motors
Ford
Newsom's longtime friend and collaborator the pollster Elmo Roper started pushing Ford to hire Newsom in the 40s and initially Newsom actually said he was too busy. He thought Henry Ford and his son Edsel would be too tough to manage. This is where you really see how different Newsom was from most of his compatriots in the field. He really saw himself as a close advisor to CEOs, managing every aspect of their relationship with the public. And he couldn't do that—wouldn't do it—with a difficult CEO. But in 1945, Newsom had a meeting with Henry Ford that convinced him; he set about turning the elder Ford into what he called "an industrial statesman," giving speeches, meeting with politicians, acting as a sort of ambassador for American industry to both the U.S. public and the world. Newsom counseled Ford through the highly controversial move of pulling the paid lunch period post-war, crafting and executing an internal communications strategy that painted the company as benevolent and fair, the idea of paid lunch as Communist, and the striking employees as criminals.
Eli Lilly
Newsom was one of the first publicists to work with the pharmaceutical industry, advising Eli Lilly for years, with a focus on pushing the idea that private enterprise and pharma profits were the key to innovation and life-saving miracles. Newsom and Lilly's other PR firm, Hill & Knowlton, would coordinate various campaigns and press pushes through the pharma trade group, the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association.
John Hill
John Hill was born on a farm in Indiana in 1890. His grandfather had been wealthy, but his father lost all the family’s money in a series of business deals gone wrong, and Hill would spend the rest of his life trying to recapture his family's status, chasing the company and approval of rich men. Like a lot of other PR legends, he started his career as a journalist. But unlike the others, he seems to have been fairly good at it. While most of the rest just spent a year or two struggling to make journalism work, Hill was a financial and business reporter for 17 years before he got into the PR game. He even started a couple of newspapers himself, although struggled to keep them afloat.
His first foray into PR came in 1920, in Ohio, when he took a gig creating a newsletter that Cleveland’s Union Trust Company wanted to send out to local executives. By this time he was the financial editor of a steel industry trade magazine … because Ohio. These jobs put him in regular contact with executives who complained to him constantly that most reporters were inept at numbers. They also introduced him to a lot of influencers and executives in the area, and eventually Hill saw a niche he could fill: helping companies explain themselves to reporters who didn’t “get it” quite as well as he did.
Hill opened up his own firm in 1927 with Union Trust and Otis Steel as his first clients. Because Hill was well-liked by local executives, word spread fast and within a couple months he had built an impressive roster that included United Alloy Steel, Republic Steel and Standard Oil of Ohio.
The Standard Oil account was an important win for Hill because he was a huge fan of Ivy Lee, the country's first PR guy. Lee may have tapped Edward Bernays as his successor, but John Hill was probably a more natural fit. Hill hated how flashy Bernays and many of the other PR guys of his day were. He preferred Lee’s distinguished southern demeanor and emulated it. Like Lee, he preferred to stay behind the scenes … although Hill took it to an extreme, almost never appearing in the press. When he did show up anywhere, it was always in a conservative suit, clean shaven, hair slicked back, wire-rimmed glasses.
But just when his business was starting to take off, the financial markets came crashing in on themselves… The PR industry was actually one of the few to benefit from the Depression. In Hill’s case, when his first client, Union Trust, went under, he invited one of its top executives, Don Knowlton, to join him in March 1933, launching the firm Hill & Knowlton. His steel and oil clients had weathered the financial storm fairly well, and Republic Steel had just scored the firm a whale: the American Iron and Steel Institute—the trade group for the whole steel industry. They requested that Hill and Knowlton open up a New York branch near their headquarters in the Empire State building. That same month, Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office, and the new firm was only too happy to oblige.
That same month, Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office, with promises of a New Deal. Hill hated this idea, and so did most of his clients. Standard Oil had him write up an advertorial assuring people American business would be okay, and his steel clients had the firm cranking out pamphlets emphasizing the great relationship between steel workers and their managers.
“Workers in the steel industry represent a high degree of skill and intelligence,” it reads. “Most of the managers of the industry have worked their way up from the ranks. For a long time the industry has been distinguished by harmonious relationships and collective cooperation between employees and employers.”
The reality, of course, was that steel workers and their bosses had been fighting for a long time. And America’s big steel companies had done everything they could to repress unionization. It was a fight that went beyond the industry itself--as the largest industry and the largest employer in the country at the time, the steel industry viewed itself as sort of the last, best defense against unionization. A protector of American business, defender of bosses everywhere. They were helped in their efforts by near constant concern about creeping Communism in the U.S., starting with the 1919 Red Scare and continuing for decades.
Anti-union pamphlets Hill and Knowlton made for Republic Steel highlighted how union shops actually infringed on workers’ rights. “A closed union shop denies the right of the individual worker to make his own choice as to whether he wishes to belong to a union,” one notes. Another Hill + Knowlton client, the National Association of Manufacturers, one of the earliest industry trade groups went beyond pamphlets to sponsor a weekly, pro-business, anti-New Deal radio drama called the American Family Robinson.
But after more than a decade of suppression, the labor movement was gaining steam again in the 1930s. A few years after opening his firm’s New York office, John Hill faced his first big challenge in P.R. And just like with his hero Ivy Lee, it came in the form of a violent labor strike.
Steel workers were starting to band together by 1936, forming the Steel Workers Organizing Committee within one of the country’s biggest unions (the CIO), officially freaking steel bosses out. The American Iron and Steel Institute put Hill and Knowlton on the case, and they wrote up full page ads with a manifesto for the industry. The ads suggested that outside agitators had coerced employees into joining the union; that the union amounted to forcing a worker to pay for a job; and that the industry, and therefore its employees, would be irreparably harmed by a work stoppage right in the midst of its recovery from the Depression. On the last day of June and the first of July 1936, the trade group sponsored full-page ads in 382 newspapers in thirty-four states.
But the unions persisted … and actually most of the industry was willing to negotiate. In 1937 U.S. Steel agreed to recognize the unions and negotiate a contract, which made it more difficult for other companies to resist. Eventually even the trade group backed down. But there was one holdout: Little Steel, an umbrella group that included smaller independent steel companies, was having none of it. Led by a man named Tom Girdler, president of Republic Steel, they refused to have any sort of contract with the union. Then in May 1937, Girdler was elected president of the steel industry trade group. Apparently, he had been stockpiling weapons in the months leading up to his takeover of the industry group, and he fully intended to crush this whole union idea once and for all. A strike began at the Republic Steel plant in Chicago the day before Girdler’s election, and within four days he had turned it into an armed conflict.
The union quickly branded the event as the Memorial Day Massacre, holding a mass funeral in Chicago attended by hundreds of working-class residents. Another riot broke out at the Republic plant in Youngstown, Ohio, that June, ending with two dead and forty-two injured.
The FDR administration was having none of it. In October, the National Labor Relations Board ordered the companies to reinstate more than 7,000 workers with back pay.
Then the Senate launched investigations into the steel boss’s methods. Because of Hill’s involvement in pushing anti-union messages and ads in newspapers, he was caught up in the investigation, too. Senator Bob LaFollete discovered that not only had Hill placed ads, he had successfully bribed a journalist. George Sokolsky, a columnist for the New York Herald Tribune, frequently wrote about free enterprise and anti unionism in magazines, like the Atlantic Monthly. From 1936 to 1938, Sokolsky received $29,000 from Hill and Knowlton to write anti-union articles for the steel industry trade group. It worked: he wrote stories in prestigious newspapers and magazines about how the riots were all the union’s fault … never disclosing his connection to Hill and Knowlton or the steel industry. Sokolsky also regularly ranted on the radio for the National Association of Manufacturers and various other pro-business groups. Here he is ranting about that terrible socialist policy: social security.
