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Lee "A Physician to Corporate Bodies"—a title he liked so much that he reprinted the article as a pamphlet. Other writers, hostile to capitalism and pressagentry, have called him "Corporation Dog Rob ber," "Little Brother of the Rich," "Minnesinger to Millionaires," and even "Poison Ivy." Ivy Lee would state his own occupation as "adviser in public relations." Whatever the title, the noteworthy facts are that Ivy Lee first sold the "public relations" idea to Big Business, and made an unequalled personal success of it.
Like all good publicity men, Ivy Lee was once a newshawk. Son of a Methodist minister in Georgia, he came out of Princeton in 1898, broke in as a cub on Hearst's New York Journal, went to the Times and the World. A friendly lawyer hired him to publicize a local political campaign.
Next year he got a press job with the Democratic National Committee. There he met potent men. Also he saw that Business, which was currently quivering from the muckrake scars inflicted by Lincoln Steffens, Ida Tarbell, Upton Sinclair et al., was badly in need of having its public relations patched. To Ivy Lee it was simple. Let the big corporations "take the public into their confidence." Let them tell their story "candidly and fully" and the newspapers would print it.
The idea was startling to businessmen who felt they had reason to mistrust the Press; but Pennsylvania Railroad took a chance. The Lee scheme worked so well that when in 1914 the Rockefellers got into trouble with their Colorado Fuel & Iron strike, John D. Rockefeller Jr. took Arthur Brisbane's advice: he borrowed Pennsylvania's Ivy Lee. Since young Ivy Lee was new to a new game, his success was not signal. He made the grave error of accepting and circulating as true all facts & figures given him by the mine operators. Later he was revealed by a U. S. commission as having drafted a strike memorandum for the Governor of Colorado to send, as his own, to President Wilson. However his testimony before the Commission headed by the late great Senator Walsh was front-page news and the best advertisement he could have wished. He never lacked clients thereafter.
It is Ivy Lee's boast that he never asked an editor to print anything or to suppress anything (except once, when he asked that news of a huge donation to an endowment fund be withheld until other donations rolled in). News bulletins go out not under his name, but those of his clients. Sometimes he summons reporters to his office, gives them copies of a bulletin, elaborately invites further questions, rarely tells more than is in the written "handout." Some newshawks curse him for allegedly spoiling a Hearst scoop on Abby Rockefeller's engagement. When the Hearst man asked him to confirm it, Mr. Lee immediately gave it to all papers.