Public Relations History

This book presents a unique overview of public relations history, tracing the development of the profession and its practices in a variety of sectors, ranging from politics, education, social movements, corporate communication, and entertainment. Author Cayce Myers examines the institutional pressures, including financial, legal, and ethical considerations, that have shaped public relations and have led to the parameters in which the practice is executed today, exploring the role underrepresented groups and sectors (both in the U.S. and internationally) played in its formation. The book presents the diversity and nuance of public relations practice while also providing a cohesive narrative that engages readers in the complex development of this influential profession. Public Relations History is an excellent resource for upper level undergraduate and graduate courses covering public relations theory, management, and administration; mass communication history; and media history.

This important volume documents events and routines defined as public relations practice, and serves as a companion work to the author's The Unseen Power: Public Relations which tells the history of public relations as revealed in the work and personalities of the pioneer agencies. This history opens with the 17th Century efforts of land promoters and colonists to lure settlers from Europe -- mainly England -- to this primitive land along the Atlantic Coast. They used publicity, tracts, sermons, and letters to disseminate rosy, glowing accounts of life and opportunity in the new land. The volume closes with a description of the public relations efforts of colleges and other non-profit agencies in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, thus providing a bridge across the century line. This study of the origins of public relations provides helpful insight into its functions, its strengths and weaknesses, and its profound though often unseen impact on our society. Public relations or its equivalents -- propaganda, publicity, public information -- began when mankind started to live together in tribal camps where one's survival depended upon others of the tribe. To function, civilization requires communication, conciliation, consensus, and cooperation -- the bedrock fundamentals of the public relations function. This volume is filled with robust public struggles -- the struggles of which history is made and a nation built: * the work of the Revolutionaries, led by the indomitable Sam Adams, to bring on the War of Independence that gave birth to a New Nation; * the propaganda of Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay in the Federalist papers to win ratification of the U.S. Constitution -- prevailing against the propaganda of the AntiFederalists led by Richard Henry Lee; * the battle between the forces of President Andrew Jackson, led by Amos Kendall, and those of Nicholas Biddle and his Bank of the United States which presaged corporate versus government campaigns common today: * the classic presidential campaign of 1896 which pitted pro-Big Business candidate William McKinley against the Populist orator of the Platte, William Jennings Bryan. This book details the antecedents of today's flourishing, influential vocation of public relations whose practitioners -- some 150,000 professionals -- make their case for their clients or their employers in the highly competitive public opinion marketplace.

This innovative book explores ten great works, by well-known thinkers and orators, whose impact has been intellectual, practical and global. Most of the works significantly precede public relations as a phrase or profession, but all are in no doubt about the force of planned public communication, and the power that lies with those managing the process. The works are stimulating and diverse and were written to address some of society’s biggest challenges. Although not traditionally the focus of public relations research, they have all had a global impact as communicators and as the foundation for fundamental ideas, from spirituality to war and economics to social justice. Each addresses the implications of structured communication between organizations and societies, and scrutinizes or advocates activities that are now central to PR and its morality. They could not ignore PR, and PR cannot ignore them. This book will be essential reading for researchers and scholars in public relations and communication and will also be of inter-disciplinary interest to study in sociology, literature, philosophy, politics and history.

Public relations as described in this volume is, among other things, society’s solution to problems of maladjustment that plague an overcomplex world. All of us, individuals or organizations, depend for survival and growth on adjustment to our publics. Publicist Edward L. Bernays offers here the kind of advice individuals and a variety of organizations sought from him on a professional basis during more than four decades. With such knowledge, every intelligent person can carry on his or her activities more effectively. This book provides know-why as well know-how. Bernays explains the underlying philosophy of public relations and the PR methods and practices to be applied in specific cases. He presents broad approaches and solutions as they were successfully carried out in his long professional career. Public relations is not publicity, press agentry, promotion, advertising, or a bag of tricks, but a continuing process of social integration. It is a field of adjusting private and public interest. Everyone engaged in any public activity, and every student of human behavior and society, will find in this book a challenge and opportunity to further both the public interest and their own interest.

In this book the author asks a big question: how did public relations develop in Britain and why? The question is answered through a broad ranging narrative which links the evolution of British public relations in the early twentieth century to key political, economic, social, and technological developments. Drawing on oral history interviews and extensive archival research the book highlights some of the sociological issues relevant to a study of public relations and foregrounds the professionalisation of the occupation in the second part of the twentieth century.

Public Relations, Society and the Generative Power of History examines how histories are used to explore how the past is constructed from the present, how the present is always historical, and how both past and present can power imagined futures. Divided into three distinct parts, the book uses historical inquiry as a springboard for engaging with interdisciplinary, critical and complex issues in the past and present. Part I examines the history of corporate PR, the centrality of the corporation in PR scholarship and the possibility of resisting corporate hegemony through PR efforts. The theme of Part II is ‘Historicising gender, ethnicity and diversity in PR work,’ focusing on how gendered and racialised identities have been constructed and resisted both within the profession and through the result of its work. Part III engages with ‘Histories of public relations in the political sphere,’ bringing together work on the different ways in which public relations has evolved in changing political contexts, both formally as a function within political institutions and in the context of contributions to broader narratives of nationalism and identity. Featuring contributions from leading academics, this book challenges traditional PR historiography and contests the ‘lessons’ derived from existing literature to address the implications of key areas of critically engaged PR theory. This volume is a valuable teaching resource for upper-level undergraduates and postgraduates studying public relations, strategic communications, political communication and organisational communication.

Based largely on primary sources, this book presents the first detailed history of public relations from 1900 through the 1960s. The author utilized the personal papers of John Price Jones, Ivy L. Lee, Harry Bruno, William Baldwin III, John W. Hill, Earl Newsom as well as extensive interviews -- conducted by the author himself -- with Pendleton Dudley, T.J. Ross, Edward L. Bernays, Harry Bruno, William Baldwin, and more. Consequently, the book provides practitioners, scholars, and students with a realistic inside view of the way public relations has developed and been practiced in the United States since its beginnings in mid-1900. For example, the book tells how: * President Roosevelt's reforms of the Square Deal brought the first publicity agencies to the nation's capital. * Edward L. Bernays, Ivy Lee, and Albert Lasker made it socially acceptable for women to smoke in the 1920s. * William Baldwin III saved the now traditional Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade in its infancy. * Ben Sonnenberg took Pepperidge Farm bread from a small town Connecticut bakery to the nation's supermarket shelves -- and made millions doing it. * Two Atlanta publicists, Edward Clark and Bessie Tyler, took a defunct Atlanta bottle club, the Ku Klux Klan, in 1920 and boomed it into a hate organization of three million members in three years, and made themselves rich in the process. * Earl Newsom failed to turn mighty General Motors around when it was besieged by Ralph Nader and Congressional advocates of auto safety. This book documents the tremendous role public relations practitioners play in our nation's economic, social, and political affairs -- a role that goes generally unseen and unobserved by the average citizen whose life is affected in so many ways by the some 150,000 public relations practitioners.

How Propaganda Became Public Relations pulls back the curtain on propaganda: how it was born, how it works, and how it has masked the bulk of its operations by rebranding itself as public relations. Cory Wimberly uses archival materials and wide variety of sources — Foucault’s work on governmentality, political economy, liberalism, mass psychology, and history — to mount a genealogical challenge to two commonplaces about propaganda. First, modern propaganda did not originate in the state and was never primarily located in the state; instead, it began and flourished as a for-profit service for businesses. Further, propaganda is not focused on public beliefs and does not operate mainly through lies and deceit; propaganda is an apparatus of government that aims to create the publics that will freely undertake the conduct its clients’ desire. Businesses have used propaganda since the early twentieth century to construct the laboring, consuming, and voting publics that they needed to secure and grow their operations. Over that time, corporations have become the most numerous and well-funded apparatuses of government in the West, operating privately and without democratic accountability. Wimberly explains why liberal strategies of resistance have failed and a new focus on creating mass subjectivity through democratic means is essential to countering propaganda. This book offers a sophisticated analysis that will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in social and political philosophy, Continental philosophy, political communication, the history of capitalism, and the history of public relations.