Effect On Public Relations
Many historians credit Lee with being the originator of modern crisis communications. His principal competitor in the new public relations industry was Edward Bernays.
In 1914 he was to enter public relations on a much larger scale when he was retained by John D. Rockefeller Jr to represent his family and Standard Oil, ("to burnish the family image"), after the coal mining rebellion in Colorado known as the "Ludlow Massacre". Upton Sinclair dubbed him "Poison Ivy" after Lee tried to send bulletins saying those that died were victims of an overturned stove, when in fact they were shot by the Colorado militia.
From then on he faithfully served the Rockefellers and their corporate interests, including a strong involvement in Rockefeller Center — he was in fact the first to suggest to Junior (against his reservations) that he give to the complex his family name — even after he moved on to set up his own consulting firm.
He became an inaugural member of the Council on Foreign Relations in the U.S. when it was established in New York City in 1921.
His supposed instruction to the son of the Standard Oil fortune was to echo in public relations henceforth: "Tell the truth, because sooner or later the public will find out anyway. And if the public doesn't like what you are doing, change your policies and bring them into line with what people want". The context of the quote was said to be apocryphal, being spread by Lee as self promotion, making it both famous and infamous.
Lee is considered to be the father of the modern public relations campaign when, from 1913–1914, he successfully lobbied for a railroad rate increase from a reluctant federal government.
Lee espoused a philosophy consistent with what has sometimes been called the "two-way street" approach to public relations, in which PR consists of helping clients listen as well as communicate messages to their publics. In practice, however, Lee often engaged in one-way propagandizing on behalf of clients despised by the public. Shortly before his death in 1934, the US Congress had been investigating his work in Nazi Germany on behalf of the controversial company IG Farben.
Lee also worked for Bethlehem Steel, in which capacity he famously advised managers to list their top priorities and work on tasks in that order, not proceeding until a task was completed. For this suggestion company head Charles M. Schwab paid him $25,000. Over his career he also was a public relations advisor to the following: George Westinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, John W. Davis, Otto Kahn and Walter Chrysler.
Read more about this topic: Ivy Lee
Famous quotes containing the words effect on, effect, public and/or relations:
“Living more lives than one, knowing people of all classes, all shades of opinion, monarchists, republicans, socialists, anarchists, has had a salutary effect on my mind. If every year of my life, every month of the year, I had lived with reformers and crusaders I should be, by this time, a fanatic. As it is I have had such varied things to do, I have had so many different contacts that I am not even very much of a crank.”
—Rheta Childe Dorr (1866–1948)
“Nothing could his enemies do but it rebounded to his infinite advantage,—that is, to the advantage of his cause.... No theatrical manager could have arranged things so wisely to give effect to his behavior and words. And who, think you, was the manager? Who placed the slave-woman and her child, whom he stooped to kiss for a symbol, between his prison and the gallows?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“At Hayes’ General Store, west of the cemetery, hangs an old army rifle, used by a discouraged Civil War veteran to end his earthly troubles. The grocer took the rifle as payment ‘on account.’”
—Administration for the State of Con, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“Our relations to each other are oblique and casual.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)