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There is still much uncertainty about its nature. Once the Public Relations News asked readers for definitions and received approximately 2,000 replies calling it a science, system, art, business, process, profession, relationship, program, pattern, moral force and humanizing influence. Edward L. Bernays, one of the alltime panjandrums of p.r., solemnly describes the public relations counsel as a "societal technician who is fitted by training and experience to evaluate the maladjustments and adjustments between his client and the publics upon whom the client is dependent for his socially sound activity." More simply, Author Robert Heilbroner observes: "Public relations is Dale Carnegie writ large." The good p.r. man is, above all, a specialist in communications. He tries to write or edit messages so that they will carry a certain meaning; he tries to report and sometimes stage-manage situations so that the public will see his client in a certain light. He must be able to handle words and—equally—he must know when to keep silent. Naturally, his art is fallible, and it can be used for improper ends. But it is needed in a society where countless institutions and groups want to talk to one another and to the public. In autocratic societies, the state has a monopoly on public relations. Even in many democracies, p.r. is virtually unknown; French businessmen still refuse information to reporters.
In the U.S., modern public relations grew out of business' need to talk to the press and through it to the public. The first modern public relations man was the legendary Ivy Lee, a financial reporter on the New York Journal, who decided that U.S. capitalism should have help against the muckrakers, who were attacking the callous business practices prevailing around the turn of the century. He taught the railroads not to try to suppress news of accidents, as they had always done, but to win over the press by supplying full and frank detail. By ghostwriting speeches and commissioning biographies, by suggesting foundations and philanthropies, he converted the Rockefellers from the most loathed family in America to one of the most admired.
The Role of the Sensors
Lee was succeeded by a remarkable trio of ex-reporters who established a highly personal, flamboyant p.r. style. One was Bernays, now 75 and retired, who thought like a eupeptic Machiavelli and talked like a psychology professor (his uncle, as he has never forgotten, was Sigmund Freud). The second was Benjamin Sonnenberg, now 65 and semiretired, a connoisseur both of power and pleasure who established himself in an antique-crammed house on Manhattan's Gramercy Park, where he could play his favorite game: making his clients feel they were doing well just to be seen with him. The third was Carl Byoir, who died ten years ago at 68, an operative not above such methods as setting up phony front organizations, which sounded like disinterested citizens' groups, to push a client's cause. The firm he founded thrives today, including among its many clients a Philadelphia-based order of nuns, the Sisters of Mercy.