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+In the ten years that have elapsed since this book was written, events
+of profound importance have taken place. During this period, many of
+the principles set forth in the book have been put to the test and have
+been proven true.
+
+The book, for instance, emphasized ten years ago that industrial
+organizations dealing with the public must take public opinion into
+consideration in the conduct of their affairs. We have seen cases in
+the past decade where the public has actually stepped in and publicly
+supervised industries which refused to recognize this truth.
+
+The field of public relations counsel has developed tremendously
+in this period. But the broad basic principles, as originally set
+forth, are as valid today as they were then, when the profession was
+a comparatively new one. It seems appropriate that this new edition,
+for which the publishers have asked me to write a new foreword, should
+appear at a time when the new partnership of government, labor and
+industry has brought public relations and its problems to the fore.
+The old group relationships that make up our society have undergone and
+are undergoing marked changes. The peaceful harmonizing of all the new
+conflicting points of view will be dependent, to a great extent, upon
+an understanding and application by leaders of public relations and its
+technique.
+
+In the future, each industry will have to act with increasing
+understanding in its relationship to government, to other industries,
+to labor, to stockholders and to the public. Each industry must be
+cognizant of new conditions and modify its conduct to conform to them
+if it is to maintain the good-will of those upon whom it depends for
+its very life.
+
+This principle applies not only to industry; it applies to every kind
+of organization and institution that uses special pleading, whether it
+be for profit or for any other cause.
+
+The new social and economic structure in which we live today demands
+this new approach to the public. Public relations has come to play an
+important part in our life.
+
+It is hoped that this book may lead to a greater recognition and
+application of sound public relations principles.
+
+In writing this book I have tried to set down the broad principles
+that govern the new profession of public relations counsel. These
+principles I have on the one hand substantiated by the findings of
+psychologists, sociologists, and newspapermen--Ray Stannard Baker,
+W. G. Bleyer, Richard Washburn Child, Elmer Davis, John L. Given, Will
+Irwin, Francis E. Leupp, Walter Lippmann, William MacDougall, Everett
+Dean Martin, H. L. Mencken, Rollo Ogden, Charles J. Rosebault, William
+Trotter, Oswald Garrison Villard, and others to whom I owe a debt of
+gratitude for their clear analyses of the public’s mind and habits;
+and on the other hand, I have illustrated these principles by a number
+of specific examples which serve to bear them out. I have quoted from
+the men listed here, because the ground covered by them is part of the
+field of activity of the public relations counsel. The actual cases
+which I have cited were selected because they explain the application
+of the theories to practice. Most of the illustrative material is drawn
+from my personal experience; a few examples from my observation of
+events. I have preferred to cite facts known to the general public,
+in order that I might explain graphically a profession that has little
+precedent, and whose few formulated rules have necessarily a limitless
+number and variety of applications.
+
+This profession in a few years has developed from the status of circus
+agent stunts to what is obviously an important position in the conduct
+of the world’s affairs.
+
+If I shall, by this survey of the field, stimulate a scientific
+attitude towards the study of public relations, I shall feel that this
+book has fulfilled my purpose in writing it.
+
+A new phrase has come into the language--counsel on public relations.
+What does it mean?
+
+As a matter of fact, the actual phrase is completely understood by
+only a few, and those only the people intimately associated with the
+work itself. But despite this, the activities of the public relations
+counsel affect the daily life of the entire population in one form or
+another.
+
+Because of the recent extraordinary growth of the profession of public
+relations counsel and the lack of available information concerning
+it, an air of mystery has surrounded its scope and functions. To the
+average person, this profession is still unexplained, both in its
+operation and actual accomplishment. Perhaps the most definite picture
+is that of a man who somehow or other produces that vaguely defined
+evil, “propaganda,” which spreads an impression that colors the mind
+of the public concerning actresses, governments, railroads. And yet,
+as will be pointed out shortly, there is probably no single profession
+which within the last ten years has extended its field of usefulness
+more remarkably and touched upon intimate and important aspects of the
+everyday life of the world more significantly than the profession of
+public relations counsel.
+
+There is not even any one name by which the new profession is
+characterized by others. To some the public relations counsel is known
+by the term “propagandist.” Others still call him press agent or
+publicity man. Writing even within the last few years, John L. Given,
+the author of an excellent textbook on journalism, does not mention the
+public relations counsel. He limits his reference to the old-time press
+agent. Many organizations simply do not bother about an individual name
+and assign to an existing officer the duties of the public relations
+counsel. One bank’s vice-president is its recognized public relations
+counsel. Some dismiss the subject or condemn the entire profession
+generally and all its members individually.
+
+Slight examination into the grounds for this disapproval readily
+reveals that it is based on nothing more substantial than vague
+impressions.
+
+Indeed, it is probably true that the very men who are themselves
+engaged in the profession are as little ready or able to define their
+work as is the general public itself. Undoubtedly this is due, in
+some measure, to the fact that the profession is a new one. Much more
+important than that, however, is the fact that most human activities
+are based on experience rather than analysis.
+
+Judge Cardozo of the Court of Appeals of the State of New York finds
+the same absence of functional definition in the judicial mind. “The
+work of deciding cases,” he says, “goes on every day in hundreds of
+courts throughout the land. Any judge, one might suppose, would find
+it easy to describe the process which he had followed a thousand times
+and more. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Let some intelligent
+layman ask him to explain. He will not go very far before taking refuge
+in the excuse that the language of craftsmen is unintelligible to those
+untutored in the craft. Such an excuse may cover with a semblance
+of respectability an otherwise ignominious retreat. It will hardly
+serve to still the prick of curiosity and conscience. In moments of
+introspection, when there is no longer a necessity of putting off with
+a show of wisdom the uninitiated interlocutor, the troublesome problem
+will recur and press for a solution: What is it that I do when I decide
+a case?”[1]
+
+From my own records and from current history still fresh in the public
+mind, I have selected a few instances which only in a limited measure
+give some idea of the variety of the public relations counsel’s work
+and of the type of problem which he attempts to solve.
+
+These examples show him in his position as one who directs and
+supervises the activities of his clients wherever they impinge upon
+the daily life of the public. He interprets the client to the public,
+which he is enabled to do in part because he interprets the public to
+the client. His advice is given on all occasions on which his client
+appears before the public, whether it be in concrete form or as an
+idea. His advice is given not only on actions which take place, but
+also on the use of mediums which bring these actions to the public it
+is desired to reach, no matter whether these mediums be the printed,
+the spoken or the visualized word--that is, advertising, lectures, the
+stage, the pulpit, the newspaper, the photograph, the wireless, the
+mail or any other form of thought communication.
+
+A nationally famous New York hotel found that its business was falling
+off at an alarming rate because of a rumor that it was shortly going
+to close and that the site upon which it was located would be occupied
+by a department store. Few things are more mysterious than the origins
+of rumors, or the credence which they manage to obtain. Reservations at
+this hotel for weeks and months ahead were being canceled by persons
+who had heard the rumor and accepted it implicitly.
+
+The problem of meeting this rumor (which like many rumors had no
+foundation in fact) was not only a difficult but a serious one. Mere
+denial, of course, no matter how vigorous or how widely disseminated,
+would accomplish little.
+
+The mere statement of the problem made it clear to the public relations
+counsel who was retained by the hotel that the only way to overcome the
+rumor was to give the public some positive evidence of the intention of
+the hotel to remain in business. It happened that the _maître d’hôtel_
+was about as well known as the hotel itself. His contract was about to
+expire. The public relations counsel suggested a very simple device.
+
+“Renew his engagement immediately for a term of years,” he said. “Then
+make public announcement of the fact. Nobody who hears of the renewal
+or the amount of money involved will believe for a moment that you
+intend to go out of business.” The _maître d’hôtel_ was called in and
+offered a five-year engagement. His salary was one which many bank
+presidents might envy. Public announcement of his engagement was made.
+The _maître d’hôtel_ was himself something of a national figure. The
+salary stipulated was not without popular interest from both points of
+view. The story was one which immediately interested the newspapers.
+A national press service took up the story and sent it out to all its
+subscribers. The cancellation of reservations stopped and the rumor
+disappeared.
+
+A nationally known magazine was ambitious to increase its prestige
+among a more influential group of advertisers. It had never made any
+effort to reach this public except through its own direct circulation.
+The consultant who was retained by the magazine quickly discovered that
+much valuable editorial material appearing in the magazine was allowed
+to go to waste. Features of interest to thousands of potential readers
+were never called to their attention unless they happened accidentally
+to be readers of the magazine.
+
+The public relations counsel showed how to extend the field of their
+appeal. He chose for his first work an extremely interesting article
+by a well-known physician, written about the interesting thesis that
+“the pace that kills” is the slow, deadly, dull routine pace and not
+the pace of life under high pressure, based on work which interests
+and excites. The consultant arranged to have the thesis of the article
+made the basis of an inquiry among business and professional men
+throughout the country by another physician associated with a medical
+journal. Hundreds of members of “the quality public,” as they are known
+to advertisers, had their attention focused on the article, and the
+magazine which the consultant was engaged in counseling on its public
+relations.
+
+The answers from these leading men of the country were collated,
+analyzed, and the resulting abstract furnished gratuitously to
+newspapers, magazines and class journals, which published them widely.
+Organizations of business and professional men reprinted the symposium
+by the thousands and distributed it free of charge, doing so because
+the material contained in the symposium was of great interest. A
+distinguished visitor from abroad, Lord Leverhulme, became interested
+in the question while in this country and made the magazine and
+the article the basis of an address before a large and influential
+conference in England. Nationally and internationally the magazine
+was called to the attention of a public which had, up to that time,
+considered it perhaps a publication of no serious social significance.
+
+Still working with the same magazine, the publicity consultant advised
+it how to widen its influence with another public on quite a different
+issue. He took as his subject an article by Sir Philip Gibbs, “The
+Madonna of the Hungry Child,” dealing with the famine situation in
+Europe and the necessity for its prompt alleviation. The article was
+brought to the attention of Herbert Hoover. Mr. Hoover was so impressed
+by the article that he sent the magazine a letter of commendation for
+publishing it. He also sent a copy of the article to members of his
+relief committees throughout the country. The latter, in turn, used
+the article to obtain support and contributions for relief work. Thus,
+while an important humanitarian project was being materially assisted,
+the magazine in question was adding to its own influence and standing.
+
+Now, the interesting thing about this work is that whereas the public
+relations counsel added nothing to the contents of the magazine, which
+had for years been publishing material of this nature, he did make its
+importance felt and appreciated.
+
+A large packing house was faced with the problem of increasing the
+sale of its particular brand of bacon. It already dominated the
+market in its field; the problem was therefore one of increasing
+the consumption of bacon generally, for its dominance of the market
+would naturally continue. The public relations counsel, realizing that
+hearty breakfasts were dietetically sound, suggested that a physician
+undertake a survey to make this medical truth articulate. He realized
+that the demand for bacon as a breakfast food would naturally be
+increased by the wide dissemination of this truth. This is exactly what
+happened.
+
+A hair-net company had to solve the problem created by the increasing
+vogue of bobbed hair. Bobbed hair was eliminating the use of the
+hair-net. The public relations counsel, after investigation, advised
+that the opinions of club women as leaders of the women of the country
+should be made articulate on the question. Their expressed opinion,
+he believed, would definitely modify the bobbed hair vogue. A leading
+artist was interested in the subject and undertook a survey among the
+club women leaders of the country. The resultant responses confirmed
+the public relations counsel’s judgment. The opinions of these women
+were given to the public and helped to arouse what had evidently been
+a latent opinion on the question. Long hair was made socially more
+acceptable than bobbed hair and the vogue for the latter was thereby
+partially checked.
+
+A real estate corporation on Long Island was interested in selling
+coöperative apartments to a high-class clientele. In order to do this,
+it realized that it had to impress upon the public the fact that this
+community, within easy reach of Manhattan, was socially, economically,
+artistically and morally desirable. On the advice of its public
+relations counsel, instead of merely proclaiming itself as such a
+community, it proved its contentions dramatically by making itself an
+active center for all kinds of community manifestations.
+
+When it opened its first post office, for instance, it made this local
+event nationally interesting. The opening was a formal one. National
+figures became interested in what might have been merely a local event.
+
+The reverses which the Italians suffered on the Piave in 1918 were
+dangerous to Italian and Allied morale. One of the results was the
+awakening of a distrust among Italians as to the sincerity of American
+promises of military, financial and moral support for the Italian cause.
+
+It became imperative vividly to dramatize for Italy the reality of
+American coöperation. As one of the means to this end the Committee
+on Public Information decided that the naming of a recently completed
+American ship should be made the occasion for a demonstration of
+friendship which could be reflected in every possible way to the
+Italians.
+
+Prominent Italians in America were invited by the public relations
+counsel to participate in the launching of the _Piave_. Motion and
+still pictures were taken of the event. The news of the launching and
+of its significance to Americans was telegraphed to Italian newspapers.
+At the same time a message from Italian-Americans was transmitted
+to Italy expressing their confidence in America’s assistance of
+the Italian cause. Enrico Caruso, Gatti-Casazza, director of the
+Metropolitan Opera, and others highly regarded by their countrymen in
+Italy, sent inspiriting telegrams which had a decided effect in raising
+Italian morale, so far as it depended upon assurance of American
+coöperation. Other means employed to disseminate information of this
+event had the same effect.
+
+The next incident that I have selected is one which conforms more
+closely than some of the others to the popular conception of the work
+of the public relations counsel. In the spring and summer of 1919 the
+problem of fitting ex-service men into the ordinary life of America
+was serious and difficult. Thousands of men just back from abroad were
+having a trying time finding work. After their experience in the war it
+was not surprising that they should be extremely ready to feel bitter
+against the Government and against those Americans who for one reason
+or another had not been in any branch of the service during the war.
+
+The War Department under Colonel Arthur Woods, assistant to the
+Secretary of War, instituted a nation-wide campaign to assist those
+men to obtain employment, and more than that, to manifest to them as
+concretely as it could that the Government continued its interest in
+their welfare. The incident to which I refer occurred during this
+campaign.
+
+In July of 1919 there was such a shortage of labor in Kansas that it
+was feared a large proportion of the wheat crop could not possibly be
+harvested. The activities of the War Department in the reëmployment of
+ex-service men had already received wide publicity, and the Chamber
+of Commerce of Kansas City appealed directly to the War Department
+at Washington, after its own efforts in many other directions had
+failed, for a supply of men who would assist in the harvesting of the
+wheat crop. The public relations counsel prepared a statement of this
+opportunity for employment in Kansas and distributed it to the public
+through the newspapers throughout the country. The Associated Press
+sent the statement over its wires as a news dispatch. Within four days
+the Kansas City Chamber of Commerce wired to the War Department that
+enough labor had been secured to harvest the wheat crop, and asked
+the War Department to announce that fact as publicly as it had first
+announced the need for labor.
+
+By contrast with this last instance, and as an illustration of a type
+of work less well understood by the public, I cite another incident
+from the same campaign for the reëstablishment of ex-service men to
+normal economic and social relations. The problem of reëmployment was,
+of course, the crux of the difficulty. Various measures were adopted
+to obtain the coöperation of business men in extending employment
+opportunities to ex-members of the Army, Navy and Marines. One of these
+devices appealed to the personal and local pride of American business
+men, and stressed their obligation of honor to reëmploy their former
+employees upon release from Government service.
+
+A citation was prepared, signed by the Secretary of War, the Secretary
+of the Navy and the Assistant to the Secretary of War for display in
+the stores and factories of employers who assured the War and Navy
+Departments that they would reëmploy their ex-service men. Simultaneous
+display of these citations was arranged for Bastile Day, July 14, 1919,
+by members of the Fifth Avenue Association.
+
+The Fifth Avenue Association of New York City, an influential group
+of business men, was perhaps the first to coöperate as a body in this
+important campaign for the reëmployment of ex-service men. Concerted
+action on a subject which was as much in the public mind as the
+reëmployment of ex-service men was particularly interesting. The story
+of what these leaders in American business had undertaken to do went
+out to the country by mail, by word of mouth, by newspaper comment.
+Their example was potent in obtaining the coöperation of business men
+throughout the land. An appeal based on this action and capitalizing
+it was sent to thousands of individual business men and employers
+throughout the country. It was effective.
+
+An illustration which embodies most of the technical and psychological
+points of interest in the preceding incidents may be found in
+Lithuania’s campaign in this country in 1919, for popular sympathy
+and official recognition. Lithuania was of considerable political
+importance in the reorganization of Europe, but it was a country little
+known or understood by the American public. An added difficulty was the
+fact that the independence of Lithuania would interfere seriously with
+the plans which France had for the establishment of a strong Poland.
+There were excellent historical, ethnic and economic reasons why, if
+Lithuania broke off from Russia, it should be allowed to stand on its
+own feet. On the other hand there were powerful political influences
+which were against such a result. The American attitude on the question
+of Lithuanian independence, it was felt, would play an important
+part. The question was how to arouse popular and official interest in
+Lithuania’s aspirations.
+
+A Lithuanian National Council was organized, composed of prominent
+American-Lithuanians, and a Lithuanian Information Bureau established
+to act as a clearing house for news about Lithuania and for special
+pleading on behalf of Lithuania’s ambitions. The public relations
+counsel who was retained to direct this work recognized that the first
+problem to be solved was America’s indifference to and ignorance about
+Lithuania and its desires.
+
+He had an exhaustive study made of every conceivable aspect of
+the problem of Lithuania from its remote and recent history and
+ethnic origins to its present-day marriage customs and its popular
+recreations. He divided his material into its various categories, based
+primarily on the public to which it would probably make its appeal.
+For the amateur ethnologist he provided interesting and accurate data
+of the racial origins of Lithuania. To the student of languages he
+appealed with authentic and well written studies of the development of
+the Lithuanian language from its origins in the Sanskrit. He told the
+“sporting fan” about Lithuanian sports and told American women about
+Lithuanian clothes. He told the jeweler about amber and provided the
+music lover with concerts of Lithuanian music.
+
+To the senators, he gave facts about Lithuania which would give
+them basis for favorable action. To the members of the House of
+Representatives he did likewise. He reflected to those communities
+whose crystallized opinion would be helpful in guiding other opinions,
+facts which gave them basis for conclusions favorable to Lithuania.
+
+A series of events which would carry with them the desired implications
+were planned and executed. Mass meetings were held in different cities;
+petitions were drawn, signed and presented; pilgrims made calls upon
+Senate and House of Representatives Committees. All the avenues of
+approach to the public were utilized to capitalize the public interest
+and bring public action. The mails carried statements of Lithuania’s
+position to individuals who might be interested. The lecture platform
+resounded to Lithuania’s appeal. Newspaper advertising was bought and
+paid for. The radio carried the message of speakers to the public.
+Motion pictures reached the patrons of moving picture houses.
+
+Little by little and phase by phase, the public, the press and
+Government officials acquired a knowledge of the customs, the character
+and the problems of Lithuania, the small Baltic nation that was seeking
+freedom.
+
+When the Lithuanian Information Bureau went before the press
+associations to correct inaccurate or misleading Polish news about the
+Lithuanian situation, it came there as representative of a group which
+had figured largely in the American news for a number of weeks, as a
+result of the advice and activities of its public relations counsel.
+In the same way, when delegations of Americans, interested in the
+Lithuanian problem, appeared before members of Congress or officials
+of the State Department, they came there as spokesmen for a country
+which was no longer unknown. They represented a group which could no
+longer be entirely ignored. Somebody described this campaign, once it
+had achieved recognition for the Baltic republic, as the campaign of
+“advertising a nation to freedom.”
+
+What happened with Roumania is another instance. Roumania wanted to
+plead its case before the American people. It wanted to tell Americans
+that it was an ancient and established country. The original technique
+was the issuance of treatises, historically correct and ethnologically
+accurate. Their facts were for the large part ignored. The public
+relations counsel, called in on the case of Roumania, advised them to
+make these studies into interesting stories of news value. The public
+read these stories with avidity and Roumania became part of America’s
+popular knowledge with consequent valuable results for Roumania.
+
+The hotels of New York City discovered that there was a falling off of
+business and profits. Fewer visitors came to New York. Fewer travelers
+passed through New York on their way to Europe. The public relations
+counsel who was consulted and asked to remedy the situation, made an
+extensive analysis. He talked to visitors. He queried men and women
+who represented groups, sections and opinions of main cities and
+towns throughout the country. He examined American literature--books,
+magazines, newspapers, and classified attacks made on New York and New
+York citizens. He found that the chief cause for lack of interest in
+New York was the belief that New York was “cold and inhospitable.”
+
+He found animosity and bitterness against New York’s apparent
+indifference to strangers was keeping away a growing number of
+travelers. To counteract this damaging wave of resentment, he called
+together the leading groups, industrial, social and civic, of New
+York, and formed the Welcome Stranger Committee. The friendly and
+hospitable aims of this committee, broadcasted to the nation, helped
+to reëstablish New York’s good repute. Congratulatory editorials were
+printed in the rural and city journals of the country.
+
+Again, in analyzing the restaurant service of a prominent hotel, he
+discovers that its menu is built on the desires of the average eater
+and that a large group of people with children desire special foods
+for them. He may then advise his client to institute a children’s diet
+service.
+
+This was done specifically with the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, which
+instituted special menus for children. This move, which excited wide
+comment, was economically and dietetically sound.
+
+In its campaign to educate the public on the importance of early radium
+treatments for incipient cancer, the United States Radium Corporation
+founded the First National Radium Bank, in order to create and
+crystallize the impression that radium is and should be available to
+all physicians who treat cancer sufferers.
+
+An inter-city radio company planned to open a wireless service between
+the three cities of New York, Detroit and Cleveland. This company might
+merely have opened its service and waited for the public to send its
+messages, but the president of the organization realized astutely that
+to succeed in any measure at all he must have immediate public support.
+He called in a public relations counsel, who advised an elaborate
+inauguration ceremony, in which the mayors of the three cities thus
+for the first time connected, would officiate. The mayor of each city
+officially received and sent the first messages issued on commercial
+inter-city radio waves. These openings excited wide interest, not only
+in the three cities directly concerned, but throughout the entire
+country.
+
+Shortly after the World War, the King and Queen of the Belgians visited
+America. One of the many desired results of this visit was that it
+should be made apparent that America, with all the foreign elements
+represented in its body, was unified in its support of King Albert
+and his country. To present a graphic picture of the affection which
+the national elements here had for the Belgian monarch, a performance
+was staged at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City, at which
+the many nationalist groups were represented and gave voice to their
+approval. The story of the Metropolitan Opera House performance was
+spread in the news columns and by photographs in the press throughout
+the world. It was evident to all who saw the pictures or read the story
+that this king had really stirred the affectionate interest of the
+national elements that make up America.
+
+An interesting illustration of the broad field of work of the public
+relations counsel to-day is noted in the efforts which were exerted to
+secure wide commendation and support among Americans for the League
+of Nations. Obviously a small group of persons, banded together for
+the sole purpose of furthering the appeal of the League, would have no
+powerful effect. In order to secure a certain homogeneity among the
+members of groups who individually had widely varied interests and
+affiliations, it was decided to form a non-partisan committee for the
+League of Nations.
+
+The public relations consultant, having assisted in the formation of
+this committee, called a meeting of women representing Democratic,
+Republican, radical, reactionary, club, society, professional and
+industrial groups, and suggested that they make a united appeal for
+national support of the League of Nations. This meeting accurately and
+dramatically reflected disinterested and unified support of the League.
+The public relations counsel made articulate what would otherwise have
+remained a strong passive sentiment. The still insistent demand for
+the League of Nations is undoubtedly due in part to efforts of this
+nature.
+
+Cases as diverse as the following are the daily work of the public
+relations counsel. One client is advised to give up a Rolls-Royce car
+and to buy a Ford, because the public has definite concepts of what
+ownership of each represents--another man may be given the contrary
+advice. One client is advised to withdraw the hat-check privilege,
+because it causes unfavorable public comment. Another is advised to
+change the façade of his building to conform to a certain public taste.
+
+One client is advised to announce changes of price policy to the public
+by telegraph, another by circular, another by advertising. One client
+is advised to publish a Bible, another a book of French Renaissance
+tales.
+
+One department store is advised to use prices in its advertising,
+another store not to mention them.
+
+A client is advised to make his labor policy, the hygienic aspect of
+his factory, his own personality, part of his sales campaign.
+
+Another client is advised to exhibit his wares in a museum and school.
+
+Still another is urged to found a scholarship in his subject at a
+leading university.
+
+Further incidents could be given here, illustrating different aspects
+of the ordinary daily functions of the public relations counsel--how,
+for example, the production of “Damaged Goods” in America became
+the basis of the first notably successful move in this country for
+overcoming the prudish refusal to appreciate and face the place of
+sex in human life; or how, more recently, the desire of some great
+corporations to increase their business was, through the advice of
+Ivy Lee, their public relations counsel, made the basis of popular
+education on the importance of brass and copper to civilization. Enough
+has been cited, however, to show how little the average member of the
+public knows of the real work of the public relations counsel, and
+how that work impinges upon the daily life of the public in an almost
+infinite number of ways.
+
+Popular misunderstanding of the work of the public relations counsel is
+easily comprehensible because of the short period of his development.
+Nevertheless, the fact remains that he has become in recent years too
+important a figure in American life for this ignorance to be safely or
+profitably continued.
+
+The rise of the modern public relations counsel is based on the need
+for and the value of his services. Perhaps the most significant
+social, political and industrial fact about the present century is
+the increased attention which is paid to public opinion, not only by
+individuals, groups or movements that are dependent on public support
+for their success, but also by men and organizations which until very
+recently stood aloof from the general public and were able to say, “The
+public be damned.”
+
+The public to-day demands information and expects also to be accepted
+as judge and jury in matters that have a wide public import. The
+public, whether it invests its money in subway or railroad tickets,
+in hotel rooms or restaurant fare, in silk or soap, is a highly
+sophisticated body. It asks questions, and if the answer in word or
+action is not forthcoming or satisfactory, it turns to other sources
+for information or relief.
+
+The willingness to spend thousands of dollars in obtaining
+professional advice on how best to present one’s views or products to a
+public is based on this fact.
+
+On every side of American life, whether political, industrial, social,
+religious or scientific, the increasing pressure of public judgment has
+made itself felt. Generally speaking, the relationship and interaction
+of the public and any movement is rather obvious. The charitable
+society which depends upon voluntary contributions for its support
+has a clear and direct interest in being favorably represented before
+the public. In the same way, the great corporation which is in danger
+of having its profits taxed away or its sales fall off or its freedom
+impeded by legislative action must have recourse to the public to
+combat successfully these menaces. Behind these obvious phenomena,
+however, lie three recent tendencies of fundamental importance; first,
+the tendency of small organizations to aggregate into groups of such
+size and importance that the public tends to regard them as semi-public
+services; second, the increased readiness of the public, due to the
+spread of literacy and democratic forms of government, to feel that it
+is entitled to its voice in the conduct of these large aggregations,
+political, capitalist or labor, or whatever they may be; third, the
+keen competition for public favor due to modern methods of “selling.”
+
+An example of the first tendency--that is, the tendency toward an
+increased public interest in industrial activity, because of the
+increasing social importance of industrial aggregations--may be found
+in an article on “The Critic and the Law” by Richard Washburn Child,
+published in the _Atlantic Monthly_ for May, 1906.
+
+Mr. Child discusses in that article the right of the critic to say
+uncomplimentary things about matters of public interest. He points
+out the legal basis for the right to criticize plays and novels. Then
+he adds, “A vastly more important and interesting theory, and one
+which must arise from the present state and tendency of industrial
+conditions, is whether the acts of men in commercial activity may
+ever become so prominent and so far reaching in their effect that
+they compel a universal public interest and that public comment is
+impliedly invited by reason of their conspicuous and semi-public
+nature. It may be said that at no time have private industries become
+of such startling interest to the community at large as at present
+in the United States.” How far present-day tendencies have borne out
+Mr. Child’s expectation of a growing and accepted public interest in
+important industrial enterprises, the reader can judge for himself.
+
+With regard to the second tendency--the increased readiness of the
+public to expect information about and to be heard on matters of
+political and social interest--Ray Stannard Baker’s description of
+the American journalist at the Peace Conference of Versailles gives
+an excellent picture. Mr. Baker tells what a shock American newspaper
+men gave Old World diplomats because at the Paris conference they
+“had come, not begging, but demanding. They sat at every doorway,”
+says Mr. Baker. “They looked over every shoulder. They wanted every
+resolution and report and wanted it immediately. I shall never forget
+the delegation of American newspaper men, led by John Nevin, I saw
+come striding through that Holy of Holies, the French Foreign Office,
+demanding that they be admitted to the first general session of the
+Peace Conference. They horrified the upholders of the old methods, they
+desperately offended the ancient conventions, they were as rough and
+direct as democracy itself.”
+
+And I shall never forget the same feeling brought home to me, when
+Herbert Bayard Swope of the _New York World_, in the press room at
+the Crillon Hotel in Paris, led the discussion of the newspaper
+representatives who forced the conference to regard public opinion and
+admit newspaper men, and give out communiques daily.
+
+That the pressure of the public for admittance to the mysteries of
+foreign affairs is being felt by the nations of the world may be seen
+from the following dispatch published in the _New York Herald_ under
+the date line of the _New York Herald_ Bureau, Paris, January 17,
+1922: “The success of Lord Riddell in getting publicity for British
+opinion during the Washington conference, while the French viewpoint
+was not stressed, may result in the appointment by the Poincaré
+Government of a real propaganda agent to meet the foreign newspaper
+men. The _Eclair_ to-day calls on the new premier to ‘find his own
+Lord Riddell in the French diplomatic and parliamentary world, who can
+give the world the French interpretation.’” Walter Lippmann of the
+_New York World_ in his volume “Public Opinion” declares that “the
+significant revolution of modern times is not industrial or economic
+or political, but the revolution which is taking place in the art of
+creating consent among the governed.” He goes on: “Within the life of
+the new generation now in control of affairs, persuasion has become a
+self-conscious art and a regular organ of popular government. None of
+us begins to understand the consequences, but it is no daring prophecy
+to say that the knowledge of how to create consent will alter every
+political premise. Under the impact of propaganda, not necessarily
+in the sinister meaning of the word alone, the only constants of our
+thinking have become variables. It is no longer possible, for example,
+to believe in the cardinal dogma of democracy, that the knowledge
+needed for the management of human affairs comes up spontaneously from
+the human heart. Where we act on that theory we expose ourselves to
+self-deception and to forms of persuasion that we cannot verify. It has
+been demonstrated that we cannot rely upon intuition, conscience, or
+the accidents of casual opinion if we are to deal with the world beyond
+our reach.”[2]
+
+In domestic affairs the importance of public opinion not only in
+political decisions but in the daily industrial life of the nation may
+be seen from numerous incidents. In the _New York Times_ of Friday,
+May 20, 1922, I find almost a column article with the heading “Hoover
+Prescribes Publicity for Coal.” Among the improvements in the coal
+industry generally, which Mr. Hoover, according to the dispatch,
+anticipates from widespread, accurate and informative publicity about
+the industry itself, are the stimulation of industrial consumers
+to more regular demands, the ability to forecast more reliably the
+volume of demand, the ability of the consumer to “form some judgment
+as to the prices he should pay for coal,” and the tendency to hold
+down over-expansion in the industry by publication of the ratio of
+production to capacity. Mr. Hoover concludes that really informative
+publicity “would protect the great majority of operators from the
+criticism that can only be properly leveled at the minority.” Not
+so many years ago neither the majority nor the minority in the coal
+industry would have concerned itself about public criticism of the
+industry.
+
+From coal to jewelry seems rather a long step, and yet in _The
+Jeweler’s Circular_, a trade magazine, I find much comment upon the
+National Jewelers’ Publicity Association. This association began with
+the simple commercial ambition of acquainting the public with “the
+value of jewelry merchandise for gift purposes”; now it finds itself
+engaged in eliminating from the public mind in general, and from the
+minds of legislators in particular, the impression that “the jewelry
+business is absolutely useless and that any money spent in a jewelry
+store is thrown away.”
+
+Not so long ago it would scarcely have occurred to any one in the
+jewelry industry that there was any importance to be attached to the
+opinion of the public on the essential or non-essential character of
+the jewelry industry. To-day, on the other hand, jewelers find it a
+profitable investment to bring before the people the fact that table
+silver is an essential in modern life, and that without watches “the
+business and industries of the nations would be a sad chaos.” With all
+the other competing interests in the world to-day, the question as to
+whether the public considers the business of manufacturing and selling
+jewelry essential or non-essential is a matter of the first importance
+to the industry.
+
+The best examples, of course, of the increasing importance of public
+opinion to industries which until recently scarcely concerned
+themselves with the existence or non-existence of a public opinion
+about them, are those industries which are charged with a public
+interest.
+
+In a long article about the attitude of the public towards the
+railroads, the _Railway Age_ reaches the conclusion that the most
+important problem which American railroads must solve is “the problem
+of selling themselves to the public.” Some public utilities maintain
+public relations departments, whose function it is to interpret the
+organizations to the public, as much as to interpret the public to
+them. The significant thing, however, is not the accepted importance of
+public opinion in this or the other individual industry, but the fact
+that public opinion is becoming cumulatively more and more articulate
+and therefore more important to industrial life as a whole.
+
+The New York Central Railroad, for example, maintains a Public
+Relations Department under Pitt Hand, whose function it is to make it
+clear to the public that the railroad is functioning efficiently to
+serve the public in every possible way. This department studies the
+public and tries to discover where the railroad’s service can be mended
+or improved, or when wrong or harmful impressions upon the public mind
+may be corrected.
+
+This Public Relations Department finds it profitable not only to bring
+to the attention of the public the salient facts about its trains, its
+time tables, and its actual traveling facilities, but also to build
+up a broadly coöperative spirit that is indirectly of great value to
+itself and benefit to the public. It coöperates, for example, with
+such movements as the Welcome Stranger Committee of New York City in
+distributing literature to travelers to assist them when they reach
+the city. It coöperates with conventions, to the extent of arranging
+special travel facilities. Such aids as it affords to the directors
+of children’s camps at the Grand Central Station are especially
+conspicuous for their dramatic effect on the general public.
+
+Even a service which is in a large measure non-competitive must
+continually “sell” itself to the public, as evidenced by the strenuous
+efforts of the New York subways and elevated lines to keep themselves
+constantly before the people in the most favorable possible aspect. The
+subways strive in this regard to create a feeling of submissiveness
+toward inconveniences which are more or less unavoidable, and they
+strive likewise to fulfill such constructive programs as that of
+extending traffic on less frequented lines.
+
+Let us analyze, for example, the activities of the health departments
+of such large cities as New York. Of recent years, Health Commissioner
+Royal S. Copeland and his statements have formed a fairly regular part
+of the day’s news. Publicity is, in fact, one of the major functions of
+the Health Department, inasmuch as its constructive work depends to a
+considerable extent upon the public education it provides in combating
+evils and in building up a spirit of individual and group coöperation
+in all health matters. When the Health Department recognizes that such
+diseases as cancer, tuberculosis and those following malnutrition
+are due generally to ignorance or neglect and that amelioration or
+prevention will be the result of knowledge, it is the next logical step
+for this department to devote strenuous efforts to its public relations
+campaign. The department accordingly does exactly this.
+
+Even governments to-day act upon the principle that it is not
+sufficient to govern their own citizens well and to assure the people
+that they are acting whole-heartedly in their behalf. They understand
+that the public opinion of the entire world is important to their
+welfare. Thus Lithuania, already noted, while it had the unbounded love
+and support of its own people, was nevertheless in danger of extinction
+because it was unknown outside of the immediate boundaries of those
+nations which had a personal interest in it. Lithuania was wanted by
+Poland; it was wanted by Russia. It was ignored by other nations.
+Therefore, through the aid of a public relations expert, Lithuania
+issued pamphlets, it paraded, it figured in pictures and motion
+pictures and developed a favorable sentiment throughout the world that
+in the end gave Lithuania its freedom.
+
+In industry and business, of course, there is another consideration
+of first-rate importance, besides the danger of interference by the
+public in the conduct of the industry--the increasing intensity of
+competition. Business and sales are no longer to be had, if ever
+they were to be had for the asking. It must be clear to any one who
+has looked through the mass of advertising in street cars, subways,
+newspapers and magazines, and the other avenues of approach to the
+public, that products and services press hard upon one another in the
+effort to focus public attention on their offerings and to induce
+favorable action.
+
+The keen competition in the selling of products for public favor makes
+it imperative that the seller consider other things than merely his
+product in trying to build up a favorable public reaction. He must
+either himself appraise the public mind and his relation to it or he
+must engage the services of an expert who can aid him to do this. He
+may to-day consider, for instance, in his sales campaign, not only the
+quality of his soap but the working conditions, the hours of labor,
+even the living conditions of the men who make it.
+
+The public relations counsel must advise him on these factors as well
+as on their presentation to the public most interested in them.
+
+In this state of affairs it is not at all surprising that industrial
+leaders should give the closest attention to public relations in both
+the broadest and the most practical concept of the term.
+
+Large industrial groups, in their associations, have assigned a
+definite place to public relations bureaus.
+
+The Trade Association Executives in New York, an association of
+individual executives of state, territorial or national trade
+associations, such as the Allied Wall Paper Industry, the American
+Hardware Manufacturers’ Association, the American Protective Tariff
+League, the Atlantic Coast Shipbuilders’ Association, the National
+Association of Credit Men, the Silk Association of America and some
+seventy-four others, includes among its associations’ functions such
+activities as the following: coöperative advertising; adjustments and
+collections; cost accounting; a credit bureau; distribution and new
+markets; educational, standardization and research work; exhibits; a
+foreign trade bureau; house organs; general publicity; an industrial
+bureau; legislative work; legal aid; market reports; statistics; a
+traffic department; Washington representation; arbitration. It is
+noteworthy that forty of these associations have incorporated public
+relations with general publicity as a definite part of their program in
+furthering the interests of their organizations.
+
+The American Telephone and Telegraph Company devotes effort to studying
+its public relations problems, not only to increase its volume of
+business, but also to create a coöperative spirit between itself and
+the public. The work of the telephone company’s operators, statistics,
+calls, lineage, installations are given to the public in various forms.
+During the war and for a period afterwards its main problem was that of
+satisfying the public that its service was necessarily below standard
+because of the peculiar national conditions. The public, in response to
+the efforts of the company, which were analogous to a gracious personal
+apology, accepted more or less irksome conditions as a matter of
+course. Had the company not cared about the public, the public would
+undoubtedly have been unpleasantly insistent upon a maintenance of the
+pre-war standards of service.
+
+Americans were once wont to jest about the dependence of France and
+Switzerland upon the tourist trade. To-day we see American cities
+competing, as part of their public relations programs, for conventions,
+fairs and conferences. The _New York Times_ printed some time ago
+an address by the governor of Nebraska, in which he told a group of
+advertising men that publicity had made Nebraska prosper.
+
+The _New York Herald_ carried an editorial recently, entitled, “It
+pays a state to advertise,” centering about the campaign of the state
+of Vermont to present itself favorably to public attention. According
+to the editorial, the state publishes a magazine, _The Vermonter_,
+an attractive publication filled with interesting illustrations and
+well-written text. It is devoted exclusively to revealing in detail the
+industrial and agricultural resources of the state and to presenting
+Vermont’s strikingly beautiful scenic attractions for the summer
+visitor. Similar instances of elaborate efforts, taking the form of
+action or the printed word, either to obtain public attention or to
+obtain a favorable attitude from the public for individual industries
+and groups of industries, will come readily to the reader’s mind.
+
+Without attempting to take too seriously an amusing story printed
+in a recent issue of a New York newspaper, leaders in movements
+and industries of modern life will be inclined to agree with the
+protagonist of publicity spoken of. According to the story, a man set
+out to prove to another that it was not so much what a man did as
+the way it was heralded which insures his place in history. He cited
+Barbara Frietchie, Evangeline, John Smith and a half dozen others as
+instances to prove that they are remembered not for what they did, but
+because they had excellent counsel on their public relations.
+
+“‘Very good,’ agreed the friend. ‘But show me a case where a person who
+has really done a big thing has been overlooked.’
+
+“‘You know Paul Revere, of course,’ he said. ‘But tell me the names of
+the two other fellows who rode that night to rouse the countryside with
+the news that the British were coming.’
+
+“‘Never heard of them,’ was the answer.
+
+“‘There were three waiting to see the signal hung in the tower of the
+Old North Church,’ he said. ‘Every one of them was mounted and spurred,
+just as Mr. Longfellow described Paul Revere. They all got the signal.
+They all rode and waked the farmers, spreading the warning. Afterward
+one of them was an officer in Washington’s army, another became
+governor of one of the States. Not one in twenty thousand Americans
+ever heard the names of the other two, and there is hardly a person in
+America who does not know all about Revere.’
+
+“‘Did Revere make history or did Longfellow?’”
+
+Public opinion has entered life at many points as a decisive factor.
+Men and movements whose interests will be affected by the attitude of
+the public are taking pains to have themselves represented in the court
+of public opinion by the most skillful counselors they can obtain. The
+business of the public relations counsel is somewhat like the business
+of the attorney--to advise his client and to litigate his causes for
+him.
+
+While the special pleader in law, the lawyer for the defense, has
+always been accorded a formal hearing by judge and jury, this has not
+been the case before the court of public opinion. Here mob psychology,
+the intolerance of human society for a dissenting point of view, have
+made it difficult and often dangerous for a man to plead for a new or
+unpopular cause.
+
+_The Fourth Estate_, a newspaper for the makers of newspapers, says:
+“‘Counsel on public relations’ and ‘director of public relations’ are
+two terms that are being encountered more often every day. There is a
+familiar tinge to them, in a way, but in justice to the men who bear
+these titles and to the concerns which employ them, it should be said
+that they are--or can be--dissociated from the old idea of ‘publicity
+man.’ The very fact that many of the largest corporations in the
+country are recognizing the need of maintaining right relationships
+with the public is alone important enough to assure a fair and even
+favorable hearing for their public relations departments.
+
+“Whether a man is really entitled to the appellation ‘counsel on public
+relations’ or whether he should merely be called ‘publicity man’ rests
+entirely with the individual and the firm that employs him. As we see
+it, a man who is really counsel or director of public relations has one
+of the most important jobs on the roster of any concern; but a man who
+merely represents the old idea of getting something for nothing from
+publishers is about _passé_....
+
+“So there is made plain the difference between two terms, the old and
+the new, both of which have occasioned much natural curiosity among
+newspaper men. When Napoleon said, ‘Circumstance? I make circumstance,’
+he expressed very nearly the spirit of the public relations counsel’s
+work. So long as this new professional branch live up to the
+possibilities that their title suggests, they are bound to accomplish
+general constructive good. Maybe they, at last, will make us forget
+that ingratiating though insidious individual, the publicity man.”
+
+As indicative perhaps of the growing importance of the profession, an
+article by Mary Swain Routzahn, in charge of the Department of Surveys
+and Exhibits of the Russell Sage Foundation, on “Woman’s Chance as
+Publicity Specialist” published in the _New York Globe_ of August 2nd,
+1921, discusses the profession as one of recent development, but of
+such importance as to deserve the serious consideration of women who
+are interested in making a professional career for themselves.
+
+The public relations counsel is first of all a student. His field
+of study is the public mind. His text books for this study are the
+facts of life; the articles printed in newspapers and magazines, the
+advertisements that are inserted in publications, the billboards that
+line the streets, the railroads and the highways, the speeches that are
+delivered in legislative chambers, the sermons issuing from pulpits,
+anecdotes related in smoking rooms, the gossip of Wall Street, the
+patter of the theater and the conversation of other men who, like him,
+are interpreters and must listen for the clear or obscure enunciations
+of the public.
+
+He brings the talent of his intuitive understanding to the aid of his
+practical and psychological tests and surveys. But he is not only a
+student. He is a practitioner with a wide range of instruments and a
+definite technique for their use.
+
+First of all, there are the circumstances and events he helps to
+create. After that there are the instruments by which he broadcasts
+facts and ideas to the public; advertising, motion pictures, circular
+letters, booklets, handbills, speeches, meetings, parades, news
+articles, magazine articles and whatever other mediums there are
+through which public attention is reached and influenced.
+
+Now sensitiveness to the state of mind of the public is a difficult
+thing to achieve or maintain. Any man can tell you with more or less
+accuracy and clearness his own reactions on any particular issue. But
+few men have the time or the interest or the training to develop a
+sense of what other persons think or feel about the same issue. In his
+own profession the skilled practitioner is sensitive and understanding.
+The lawyer can tell what argument will appeal to court or jury. The
+salesman can tell what points to stress to his prospective buyers. The
+politician can tell what to emphasize to his audience, but the ability
+to estimate group reactions on a large scale over a wide geographic
+and psychological area is a specialized ability which must be developed
+with the same painstaking self-criticism and with the same dependence
+on experience that are required for the development of the clinical
+sense in the doctor or surgeon.
+
+Of course, the public relations counsel employs all those practical
+means of gauging the public mind which modern advertising has developed
+and uses. He employs the research campaign, the symposium, the survey
+of a particular group or of a particular state of mind as a further
+aid, and confirmation or modification of his own appraisals and
+judgments.
+
+Charles J. Rosebault, the author of an article in the _New York Times_
+recently, headed “Men Who Wield the Spotlight,” remarks that the
+competent public relations counsel has generally had some newspaper
+training and that the value of this training “is a keen sense of the
+likes and dislikes of what we call the public--that is, the average
+of men and women. The needle of the compass is no more sensitive to
+direction, nor the mercury in the thermometer to variations of heat and
+cold than is this expert to the influence of publicity upon the mind
+and emotions of the man in the street.”
+
+It is not surprising that the growing interest of the public in men
+and movements should have led to the spontaneous creation of the new
+profession.
+
+We have presented here, in very broad outline, a picture of the
+fundamental work of the public relations counsel and of the fundamental
+conditions which have produced him. On the one hand, a complex
+environment of which only small, disconnected portions are available
+to different persons; on the other hand, the great and increasing
+importance either of making one’s case accessible to the public mind or
+of determining whether that case will impinge favorably or unfavorably
+upon the public mind--these two conditions, taken together, have
+resulted inevitably in the public relations counsel. Mr. Lippmann finds
+in these facts the underlying reason for the existence of what he calls
+the “press agent.” “The enormous discretion,” he says, “as to what
+facts and what impressions shall be reported is steadily convincing
+every organized group of people that, whether it wishes to secure
+publicity or to avoid it, the exercise of discretion cannot be left to
+the reporter. It is safer to hire a press agent who stands between the
+group and the newspapers.”[3]
+
+It is clear that the popular impression of the scope and functions
+of the counsel on public relations must be radically revised if any
+accurate picture of the profession is to be looked for. The public
+relations counsel is the lineal descendant, to be sure, of the
+circus advance-man and of the semi-journalist promoter of small-part
+actresses. The economic conditions which have produced him, however,
+and made his profession the important one it is to-day, have in
+themselves materially changed the character of his work.
+
+His primary function now is not to bring his clients by chance to the
+public’s attention, nor to extricate them from difficulties into which
+they have already drifted, but to advise his clients how positive
+results can be accomplished in the field of public relations and to
+keep them from drifting inadvertently into unfortunate or harmful
+situations. The public relations counsel will find that the conditions
+under which his client operates, be it a government, a manufacturer of
+food products or a railroad system, are constantly changing and that he
+must advise modifications in policy in accordance with such changes in
+the public point of view. As such, the public relations counsel must be
+alive to the events of the day--not only the events that are printed
+but the events which are forming hour by hour, as reported in the words
+that are spoken on the street, in the smoking cars, in the school room,
+or expressed in any of the other forms of thought communication that
+make up public opinion.
+
+So long as the press remains the greatest single medium for reaching
+the public mind, the work of the public relations counsel will
+necessarily have close contacts with the work of the journalist. He
+transmits his ideas, however, through all those mediums which help to
+build public opinion--the radio, the lecture platform, advertising, the
+stage, the motion picture, the mails. On the other hand, he is becoming
+to-day as much of an adviser on actions as he is the communicator of
+these actions to the public.
+
+The public relations consultant is ideally a constructive force in the
+community. The results of his work are often accelerated interest in
+matters of value and importance to the social, economic or political
+life of the community.
+
+The public relations counsel is the pleader to the public of a point
+of view. He acts in this capacity as a consultant both in interpreting
+the public to his client and in helping to interpret his client to the
+public. He helps to mould the action of his client as well as to mould
+public opinion.
+
+His profession is in a state of evolution. His future must depend as
+much upon the growing realization by the public of the responsibility
+to the public of individuals, institutions and organizations as upon
+the public relations counsel’s own realization of the importance of his
+work.
+
+The character and origins of public opinion, the factors that make
+up the individual mind and the group mind must be understood if the
+profession of public relations counsel is to be intelligently practiced
+and its functions and possibilities accurately estimated. Society must
+understand the fundamental character of the work he is doing, if for no
+other reason than its own welfare.
+
+The public relations counsel works with that vague, little-understood,
+indefinite material called public opinion.
+
+Public opinion is a term describing an ill-defined, mercurial
+and changeable group of individual judgments. Public opinion is
+the aggregate result of individual opinions--now uniform, now
+conflicting--of the men and women who make up society or any group of
+society. In order to understand public opinion, one must go back to the
+individual who makes up the group.
+
+The mental equipment of the average individual consists of a mass of
+judgments on most of the subjects which touch his daily physical or
+mental life. These judgments are the tools of his daily being and
+yet they are his judgments, not on a basis of research and logical
+deduction, but for the most part dogmatic expressions accepted on the
+authority of his parents, his teachers, his church, and of his social,
+his economic and other leaders.
+
+The public relations counsel must understand the social implications
+of an individual’s thoughts and actions. Is it, for example, purely an
+accident that a man belongs to one church rather than another or to any
+church at all? Is it an accident that makes Boston women prefer brown
+eggs and New York women white eggs? What are the factors that work in
+favor of conversion of a man from one political party to another or
+from one type of food to another?
+
+Why do certain communities resist the prohibition law--why do others
+abide by it? Why is it difficult to start a new party movement--or to
+fight cancer? Why is it difficult to fight for sex education? Why does
+the free trader denounce protectionism, and vice versa?
+
+If we had to form our own judgments on every matter, we should all have
+to find out many things for ourselves which we now take for granted. We
+should not cook our food or live in houses--in fact, we should revert
+to primitive living.
+
+The public relations counsel must deal with the fact that persons who
+have little knowledge of a subject almost invariably form definite and
+positive judgments upon that subject.
+
+“If we examine the mental furniture of the average man,” says William
+Trotter, the author of a comprehensive study of the social psychology
+of the individual,[4] “we shall find it made up of a vast number of
+judgments of a very precise kind upon subjects of very great variety,
+complexity, and difficulty. He will have fairly settled views upon the
+origin and nature of the universe, and upon what he will probably call
+its meaning; he will have conclusions as to what is to happen to him at
+death and after, as to what is and what should be the basis of conduct.
+He will know how the country should be governed, and why it is going
+to the dogs, why this piece of legislation is good and that bad. He
+will have strong views upon military and naval strategy, the principles
+of taxation, the use of alcohol and vaccination, the treatment of
+influenza, the prevention of hydrophobia, upon municipal trading, the
+teaching of Greek, upon what is permissible in art, satisfactory in
+literature, and hopeful in science.
+
+“The bulk of such opinions must necessarily be without rational
+basis, since many of them are concerned with problems admitted by the
+expert to be still unsolved, while as to the rest it is clear that the
+training and experience of no average man can qualify him to have any
+opinion upon them at all. The rational method adequately used would
+have told him that on the great majority of these questions there could
+be for him but one attitude--that of suspended judgment.”
+
+The reader will recall from his own experience an almost infinite
+number of instances in which the amateur has been fully prepared to
+deliver expert advice and to give final judgment in matters upon which
+his ignorance is patent to every one except himself.
+
+In the Middle Ages, society was convinced that there were witches.
+People were so positive that they burned people whom they suspected
+of witchcraft. To-day there is an equal number of people who believe
+just as firmly, one way or the other, about spiritualism and spirits.
+They do not burn mediums. But people who have made no research of the
+subject pass strong denunciatory judgments. Others, no better informed,
+consider mediums divinely inspired. Not so long ago every intelligent
+man knew that the world was flat. To-day the average man has a belief
+just as firm and unknowing in the mysterious force which he has heard
+called atomic energy.
+
+It is axiomatic that men who know little are often intolerant of a
+point of view that is contrary to their own. The bitterness that has
+been brought about by arguments on public questions is proverbial.
+Lovers have been parted by bitter quarrels on theories of pacificism
+or militarism; and when an argument upon an abstract question engages
+opponents they often desert the main line of argument in order to abuse
+each other.
+
+How often this is true can be seen from the congressional records of
+controversies in which the personal attack supersedes logic. In a
+recent fight against the proposed tariff measures, a protagonist of
+protection published long vindictive statements, in which he tried to
+confound the character and the disinterestedness of his opponents.
+Logically his discussion should have been based only upon the sound
+economic, social and political value of the bill as presented.
+
+A hundred leading American bankers, business men, professional men and
+economists united in public disapproval of this plan. They stated their
+opinion that the “American” Valuation Plan, as it was called, would
+endanger the prosperity of the country, that it would be inimical to
+our foreign relations and that it would injure the welfare of every
+country with whom our commercial and industrial ties were at all
+close. This group was a broadly representative group of men and women,
+yet the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee accused all these
+people of acting upon motives of personal gain and lack of patriotism.
+Prejudice superseded logic.
+
+Intolerance is almost inevitably accompanied by a natural and true
+inability to comprehend or make allowance for opposite points of view.
+The skilled scientist who may be receptive to any promising suggestion
+in his own field may outside of his own field be found quite unwilling
+to make any attempt at understanding a point of view contrary to his
+own. In politics, for example, his understanding of the problem may
+be fragmentary, yet he will enter excitedly into discussions on bonus
+and ship subsidy, of which he has made no study. We find here with
+significant uniformity what one psychologist has called “logic-proof
+compartments.”
+
+The logic-proof compartment has always been with us. Scientists have
+lost their lives through refusing to see flaws in their theories.
+Intelligent mothers give food to their babies that they would
+manifestly forbid other mothers to give their children. Especially
+significant is the tendency of races to maintain religious beliefs
+and customs long after these have lost their meaning. Dietary laws,
+hygienic laws, even laws based upon geographical conditions that have
+been changed for more than a thousand years are still maintained in the
+logic-proof compartment of dogmatic adherence. There is a story that
+certain missionaries give money to heathen at the time of conversion
+and that the heathen, having got their money, bathe away their
+conversion in sacred streams.
+
+The characteristic of the human mind to adhere to its beliefs is
+excellently summarized in the volume by Mr. Trotter to which reference
+has been made before. “It is clear,” says Mr. Trotter,[5] “at the
+outset that these beliefs are invariably regarded as rational and
+defended as such, while the position of one who holds contrary views is
+held to be obviously unreasonable.
+
+“The religious man accuses the atheist of being shallow and irrational,
+and is met by a similar reply. To the Conservative the amazing thing
+about the Liberal is his incapacity to see reason and accept the
+only possible solution of public problems. Examination reveals the
+fact that the differences are not due to the commission of the mere
+mechanical fallacies of logic, since these are easily avoided, even by
+the politician, and since there is no reason to believe that one party
+in such controversies is less logical than the other. The difference
+is due rather to the fundamental assumptions of the antagonists being
+hostile, and these assumptions are derived from herd-suggestions;
+to the Liberal certain basal conceptions have acquired the quality
+of instinctive truth, have become _a priori_ syntheses, because of
+the accumulated suggestions to which he has been exposed; and a
+similar explanation applies to the atheist, the Christian, and the
+Conservative. Each, it is important to remember, finds in consequence
+the rationality of his position flawless and is quite incapable of
+detecting in it the fallacies which are obvious to his opponent, to
+whom that particular series of assumptions has not been rendered
+acceptable by herd suggestion.”
+
+Thus the public relations counsel has to consider the _a priori_
+judgment of any public he deals with before counseling any step that
+would modify those things in which the public has an established belief.
+
+It is seldom effective to call names or to attempt to discredit the
+beliefs themselves. The counsel on public relations, after examination
+of the sources of established beliefs, must either discredit the old
+authorities or create new authorities by making articulate a mass
+opinion against the old belief or in favor of the new.
+
+There is a divergence of opinion as to whether the public mind is
+malleable or stubborn--whether it is a passive or an active element.
+On the one hand is the profound belief that “you can’t change human
+nature.” On the other hand is the equally firm assurance that certain
+well-defined institutions modify and alter public opinion.
+
+There is a uniformity of opinion in this country upon many issues.
+When this uniformity accords with our own beliefs we call it an
+expression of the public conscience. When, however, it runs contrary
+to our beliefs we call it the regimentation of the public mind and are
+inclined to ascribe it to insidious propaganda.
+
+Uniformity is, in fact, largely natural and only partly artificial.
+Public opinion may be as much the producer of “insidious propaganda”
+as its product. Naturally enough, where broad ideas are involved,
+criticisms of the state of the public’s mind and of its origin come
+most frequently from groups that are out of sympathy with the accepted
+point of view. They find the public unreceptive to their point of
+view, and justly or unjustly they attribute this to the influence of
+antagonistic interests upon the public mind.
+
+These groups see the press, the lecture platform, the schools, the
+advertisements, the churches, the radio, the motion picture screen,
+the magazines daily reaching millions. They see that the preponderant
+point of view in most, if not all, these institutions conforms to the
+preponderant state of mind of the public.
+
+They argue from the one to the other and reach their conclusions
+without much difficulty. They do not stop to think that agreement in
+point of view between the public and these institutions may often be
+the result of the control exercised by the public mind over these
+institutions.
+
+Many outside forces, however, do go to influence public opinion. The
+most obvious of these forces are parental influence, the school room,
+the press, motion pictures, advertising, magazines, lectures, the
+church, the radio.
+
+To answer the question as to the stubbornness or malleability of the
+public, let us analyze the press in its relation to public opinion,
+since the press stands preëminent among the various institutions which
+are commonly designated as leaders or moulders of the public mind. By
+the press, in this instance, I mean the daily press. Americans are
+a newspaper-reading public. They have become accustomed to look to
+their morning and evening papers for the news of the world and for
+the opinions of their leaders. And while the individual newspaper
+reader does not give a very considerable portion of his day to this
+occupation, many persons find time to read more than one newspaper
+every day.
+
+It is not surprising that the man who is outside the current of
+prevailing public opinion should regard the daily press as a coercive
+force.
+
+Discussions of the public’s reaction to the press are two-sided, just
+as are discussions of the influence of the pulpit or other forces.
+Some authorities hold that the public mind is stubborn in regard to
+the press and that the press has little influence upon it. There are
+graphic instances of the stubbornness of the public point of view.
+A most interesting example is the reëlection of Mayor Hylan of New
+York by an overwhelming majority in the face of the opposition of all
+but two of the metropolitan dailies. It is also noteworthy that in
+1909, Gaynor was elected Mayor of New York with every paper except
+one opposing his candidacy. Likewise, Mayor Mitchel of New York was
+defeated for reëlection in 1917, although all the New York papers
+except two Hearst papers and the _New York Call_ supported him. In
+Boston, in a recent election, a man was elected as mayor who had
+been convicted of a penal offense, and elected in the face of the
+practically united opposition of all the newspapers of that city.
+How would such authors as Everett Dean Martin, Walter Lippmann and
+Upton Sinclair explain these incidents? How, on the theory of the
+regimentation of the public mind by the daily press, can such thinkers
+explain the sharpness with which the public sometimes rejects the
+advocacies of a united press? These instances are not frequent; but
+they show that other influences beside the press enter into the making
+of a public opinion and that these forces must never be disregarded in
+the estimate of the quality and stability of a prevalent public opinion.
+
+Francis E. Leupp, writing in the _Atlantic Monthly_ for February,
+1910, on “The Waning Power of the Press,” remarks that Mayor Gaynor’s
+comments shortly after his election in 1909 “led up to the conclusion
+that in our common sense generation nobody cares what the newspapers
+say.” Mr. Leupp continues: “Unflattering as such a verdict may be,
+probably the majority of a community if polled as a jury would concur
+in it. The airy dismissal of some proposition as ‘mere newspaper talk’
+is heard at every social gathering until one who is brought up to
+regard the press as a mighty factor in modern civilization is tempted
+to wonder whether it has actually lost the power it used to wield among
+us.”
+
+And H. L. Mencken, writing in the same magazine for March, 1914,
+declares that “one of the principal marks of an educated man, indeed,
+is the fact that he does _not_ take his opinions from newspapers--not,
+at any rate, from the militant, crusading newspapers. On the contrary,
+his attitude toward them is almost always one of frank cynicism, with
+indifference as its mildest form and contempt as its commonest. He
+knows that they are constantly falling into false reasoning about the
+things within his personal knowledge,--that is, within the narrow
+circle of his special education,--and so he assumes that they make the
+same, or even worse, errors about other things, whether intellectual or
+moral. This assumption, it may be said at once, is quite justified by
+the facts.”
+
+The second point of view holds that the daily press and the other
+leading forces merely accept, reflect and intensify established public
+opinion and are, therefore, responsible for the uniformity of public
+reaction. A vivid statement of the point of view of the man who
+typifies this group is found in Everett Dean Martin’s volume on “The
+Behavior of Crowds.” He says:[6] “The modern man has in the printing
+press a wonderfully effective means for perpetuating crowd-movements
+and keeping great masses of people constantly under the sway of certain
+crowd-ideas. Every crowd-group has its magazines, press agents, and
+special ‘literature’ with which it continually harangues its members
+and possible converts. Many books, and especially certain works of
+fiction of the ‘best seller’ type, are clearly reading mob phenomena.”
+
+There is a third group which perhaps comes nearer the truth,
+which holds that the press, just as other mediums of education or
+dissemination, brings about a very definite change in public opinion.
+A most graphic illustration of what such mediums can do to change
+opinions upon fundamental and important matters is the woman suffrage
+question and its victory over established points of view. The press,
+the pulpit, the lecture platform, the motion pictures and the other
+mediums for reaching the public brought about a complete popular
+conversion. Other examples of the change that may be brought about in
+public opinion in this way, by such institutions of authority, is the
+present attitude towards birth control and towards health education.
+
+Naturally the press, like other institutions which present facts or
+opinions, is restricted, often unconsciously, sometimes consciously, by
+various controlling conditions. Certain people talk of the censorship
+enacted by the prejudices and predispositions of the public itself.
+Some, such as Upton Sinclair, ascribe to the advertisers a conscious
+and powerful control of publications. Others, like Walter Lippmann,
+find that an effective barrier between the public and the event exists
+in the powerful influence which, he says, is exerted in certain cases
+on the press by the so-called quality public which the newspapers’
+advertisers wish to reach and among whom the newspapers must circulate
+if the advertising is to be successful. Mr. Lippmann observes that
+although such a restriction may exist, much of what may be attributed
+to censorship in the newspaper, often is actually inadequate
+presentation of the events it seeks to describe.
+
+On this point he says:[7] “It follows that in the reporting of strikes,
+the easiest way is to let the news be uncovered by the overt act, and
+to describe the event as the story of interference with the reader’s
+life. This is where his attention is first aroused and his interest
+most easily enlisted. A great deal, I think myself, of the crucial
+part of what looks to the worker and the reformer as deliberate
+misrepresentation on the part of newspapers, is the direct outcome
+of a practical difficulty in uncovering the news, and the emotional
+difficulty of making distinct facts interesting unless, as Emerson
+says, we can ‘perceive’ (them) and can ‘set about translating (them) at
+once into parallel facts.’”
+
+In view then of the possibility of a malleable public opinion the
+counsel on public relations, desiring to obtain a hearing for any given
+cause, simply utilizes existent channels to obtain expression for the
+point of view he represents. How this is done will be considered later.
+
+Because of the importance of channels of thought communication, it
+is vital for the public relations counsel to study carefully the
+relationship between public opinion and the organs that maintain it or
+that influence it to change. We shall look into this interaction and
+its effect in the next chapter.
+
+The public and the press, or for that matter, the public and any force
+that modifies public opinion, interact. Action and interaction are
+continually going on between the forces projected out to the public
+and the public itself. The public relations counsel must understand
+this fact in its broadest and most detailed implications. He must
+understand not only what these various forces are, but he must be able
+to evaluate their relative powers with fair accuracy. Let us consider
+again the case of a newspaper, as representative of other mediums of
+communication.
+
+“We print,” says the _New York Times_, “all the news that’s fit to
+print.” Immediately the question arises (as Elmer Davis, the historian
+of the _Times_ tells us that it did when the motto was first adopted)
+what news _is_ fit to print? By what standard is the editorial decision
+reached which includes one kind of news and excludes another kind? The
+_Times_ itself has not been, in its long and conspicuously successful
+career, entirely free from difficulties on this point.
+
+Thus in “The History of The _New York Times_,” Mr. Davis feels the
+need for justifying the extent to which that paper featured Theodore
+Tilton’s action against the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher for alienation
+of Mrs. Tilton’s affections and his conduct with her. Mr. Davis says
+(pages 124-125): “No doubt a good many readers of the _Times_ thought
+that the paper was giving an undue amount of space to this chronicle
+of sin and suffering. Those complaints come in often enough even in
+these days from readers who appreciate the paper’s general reluctance
+to display news of this sort, and wonder why a good general rule
+should occasionally be violated. But there was a reason in the Beecher
+case, as there has usually been a reason in similar affairs since.
+Dr. Beecher was one of the most prominent clergymen in the country;
+there was a natural curiosity as to whether he was practicing what
+he preached. One of the counsel at the trial declared that ‘all
+Christendom was hanging on its outcome.’ Full reporting of its course
+was not a mere pandering to vulgar curiosity, but a recognition of the
+value of the case as news.”
+
+The simple fact that such a slogan can exist and be accepted is for
+our purpose an important point. Somewhere there must be a standard
+to which the editors of the _Times_ can conform, as well as a large
+clientele of constant readers to whom that standard is satisfactory.
+“Fit” must be defined by the editors of the _Times_ in a way which
+meets with the approval of enough persons to enable the paper to
+maintain its reading public. As soon, however, as the definition is
+attempted, difficulties arise.
+
+Professor W. G. Bleyer, in an article in his book on journalism,
+first stresses the importance of completeness in the news columns of
+a paper, then goes on to say that “the only important limitations
+to completeness are those imposed by the commonly accepted ideas of
+decency embodied in the words, ‘All the news that’s fit to print’ and
+by the rights of privacy. Carefully edited newspapers discriminate
+between what the public is entitled to know and what an individual has
+a right to keep private.”
+
+On the other hand, when Professor Bleyer attempts to define what
+news is fit to print and what the public is entitled to know, he
+discusses generalizations capable of wide and frequently inconsistent
+interpretation. “News,” says he, “is anything timely which is
+significant to newspaper readers in their relations to the community,
+the state and the nation.”
+
+Who is to determine what is significant and what is not? Who is
+to decide which of the individual’s relations to the community
+are safeguarded by his right of privacy and which are not? Such a
+definition tells us nothing more definite than does the slogan which it
+attempts to define. We must look further for a standard by which these
+definitions are applied. There must be a consensus of public opinion on
+which the newspaper falls back for its standards.
+
+The truth is that while it appears to be forming the public opinion on
+fundamental matters, the press is often conforming to it.
+
+It is the office of the public relations counsel to determine the
+interaction between the public, and the press and the other mediums
+affecting public opinion. It is as important to conform to the
+standards of the organ which projects ideas as it is to present to
+this organ such ideas as will conform to the fundamental understanding
+and appreciation of the public to which they are ultimately to appeal.
+There is as much truth in the proposition that the public leads
+institutions as in the contrary proposition that the institutions lead
+the public.
+
+As an illustration of the manner in which newspapers are inclined to
+accept the judgments of their readers in presenting material to them,
+we have this anecdote which Rollo Ogden tells in the _Atlantic Monthly_
+for July, 1906, about a letter which Wendell Phillips wished to have
+published in a Boston paper.
+
+“The editor read it over, and said, ‘Mr. Phillips, that is a very good
+and interesting letter, and I shall be glad to publish it; but I wish
+you would consent to strike out the last paragraph.’
+
+“‘Why,’ said Phillips, ‘that paragraph is the precise thing for which I
+wrote the whole letter. Without that it would be pointless.’
+
+“‘Oh, I see that,’ replied the editor; ‘and what you say is perfectly
+true! I fully agree with it all myself. Yet it is one of those things
+which it will not do to say publicly. However, if you insist upon it, I
+will publish it as it stands.’
+
+“It was published the next morning, and along with it a short editorial
+reference to it, saying that a letter from Mr. Phillips would be found
+in another column, and that it was extraordinary that so keen a mind
+as his should have fallen into the palpable absurdity contained in the
+last paragraph.”
+
+Recognition of this fact comes from a number of different sources.
+H. L. Mencken recognizes that the public runs the press as much as the
+press runs the public.
+
+“The primary aim of all of them,” says Mr. Mencken,[8] “not less
+when they play the secular Iokanaan than when they play the mere
+newsmonger, was to please the crowd, and to give a good show; and the
+way they set about giving that good show was by first selecting a
+deserving victim, and then putting him magnificently to the torture.
+
+“This was their method when they were performing for their own profit
+only, when their one motive was to make the public read their paper;
+but it was still their motive when they were battling bravely and
+unselfishly for the public good, and so discharging the highest duty of
+their profession.”
+
+There are interesting, if somewhat obscure, examples of the
+complementary working of various forces. In the field of the motion
+pictures, for example, the producers, the actors and the press, in
+their support, have continually waged a battle against censorship.
+Undoubtedly censorship of the motion pictures is in its practical
+workings an economic and artistic handicap. Censorship, however, will
+continue in spite of the producers as long as there is a willingness on
+the part of the public to accept this censorship. The public, on the
+whole, has refused to join the fight against censorship, because there
+is a more or less articulate belief that children, if not women, should
+be protected from seeing shocking sights, such as murders visibly
+enacted, the taking of drugs, immoralities and other acts which might
+offend or suggest harmful imitation.
+
+“Damaged Goods,” before its presentation to America in 1913, was
+analyzed by the public relations counsel, who helped to produce the
+play. He recognized that unless that part of the public sentiment which
+believed in education and truth could be lifted from that part of
+public opinion which condemned the mentioning of sex matters, “Damaged
+Goods” would fail. The producers, therefore, did not try to educate the
+public by presenting this play as such, but allowed group leaders and
+groups interested in education to come to the support of Brieux’s drama
+and, in a sense, to sponsor the production.
+
+Proof that the public and the institutions that make public opinion
+interact is shown in instances in which books were stifled because of
+popular disapproval at one time and then brought forward by popular
+demand at a later time when public opinion had altered. Religious and
+very early scientific works are among such books.
+
+A more recent instance is the announcement made by _Judge_, a weekly
+magazine, that it would support the fight for light wine and beer.
+_Judge_ took this stand because it believed in the principle of
+personal freedom and also because it deemed that public sentiment
+was in favor of light wine and beer as a substitute for absolute
+prohibition. _Judge_ believed its stand would please its readers.
+
+Presumably writing of newspaper morality, Mr. Mencken, in his article
+just quoted, finds at the end of it that he has “written of popular
+morality very copiously, and of newspaper morality very little.
+
+“But,” says Mr. Mencken, “as I have said before, the one is the other.
+The newspaper must adapt its pleading to its clients’ moral limitation
+just as the trial lawyer also must adapt _his_ pleading to the jury’s
+limitations. Neither may like the job, but both must face it to gain
+the larger end.”
+
+Writing on the other hand from the point of view of the man who feels
+that the public taste requires no justification, Ralph Pulitzer
+nevertheless agrees with Mr. Mencken that the opinion of the press
+is set by the public; and he justifies “muckraking”[9] by finding it
+neither “extraordinary nor culpable that people and press should be
+more interested in the polemical than in the platitudinous; in blame
+than in painting the lily; in attack than in sending laudatory coals to
+Newcastle.”
+
+Even Mr. Leupp[10] concludes that “whatever we may say of the modern
+press on its less commendable side, we are bound to admit that
+newspapers, like governments, fairly reflect the people they serve.
+Charles Dudley Warner once went so far as to say that no matter how
+objectionable the character of a paper may be, it is always a trifle
+better than the patrons on whom it relies for its support.”
+
+Similarly, from an unusually wide experience on a paper as highly
+considered, perhaps, as any in America, Rollo Ogden claims this give
+and take between the public and the press is vital to a just conception
+of American journalism.
+
+“The editor does not nonchalantly project his thoughts into the void.
+He listens for the echo of his words. His relation to his supporters is
+not unlike Gladstone’s definition of the intimate connection between
+the orator and his audience. As the speaker gets from his hearers in
+mist what he gives back in shower, so the newspaper receives from the
+public as well as gives to it. Too often it gets as dust what it gives
+back as mud; but that does not alter the relation. Action and reaction
+are all the while going on between the press and its patrons. Hence it
+follows that the responsibility for the more crying evils of journalism
+must be divided.”[11]
+
+The same interaction goes on in connection with all the other forces
+that mould public opinion. The preacher upholds the ideals of society.
+He leads his flock whither they indicate a willingness to be led. Ibsen
+creates a revolution when society is ripe for it. The public responds
+to finer music and better motion pictures and demands improvements.
+“Give the people what they want” is only half sound. What they want
+and what they get are fused by some mysterious alchemy. The press, the
+lecturer, the screen and the public lead and are led by each other.
+
+The influence of any force which attempts to modify public opinion
+depends upon the success with which it is able to enlist established
+points of view. A middle ground exists between the hypothesis that
+the public is stubborn and the hypothesis that it is malleable. To a
+large degree the press, the schools, the churches, motion pictures,
+advertising, the lecture platform and radio all conform to the demands
+of the public. But to an equally large degree the public responds to
+the influence of these very same mediums of communication.
+
+Some analysts believe that the public has no opinions except those
+which various institutions provide ready made for it. From Mr. Mencken
+and others it would almost seem to follow that newspapers and other
+mediums have no standards except those which the public provides, and
+that therefore they are substantially without influence upon the public
+mind. The truth of the matter, as I have pointed out, lies somewhere
+between these two extreme positions.
+
+In other words, the public relations counsel who thinks clearly on
+the problem of public opinion and public relations will credit the
+two factors of public opinion respectively with their influence and
+effectiveness in mutual interaction.
+
+Ray Stannard Baker says[12] that “while there was a gesture of
+unconcern, of don’t care what they say, on the part of the leaders (of
+the Versailles conference), no aspect of the conference in reality
+worried them more than the news, opinions, guesses that went out by
+scores of thousands of words every night, and the reactions which
+came back so promptly from them. The problem of publicity consumed
+an astonishing amount of time, anxiety and discussion among the
+leaders of the conference. It influenced the entire procedure, it was
+partly instrumental in driving the four heads of States finally into
+small secret conferences. The full achievement of publicity on one
+occasion--Wilson’s Italian note--nearly broke up the conference and
+overturned a government. The bare threat of it, upon other occasions,
+changed the course of the discussion. Nothing concerned the conference
+more than what democracy was going to do with diplomacy.”
+
+For like causes we find great industries--motion pictures being one and
+organized baseball another--appointing as directors of their activities
+men prominent in public life, doing this to assure the public of
+the honest and social-minded conduct of their members. The Franklin
+Roosevelts are in this class, the Will Hayses and the Landises.
+
+A striking example of this interaction is illustrated in what
+occurred at the Hague Conference a few years ago. The effect of the
+Hague Conference’s conduct upon the public was such that officials
+were forced to open the Conference doors to the representatives of
+newspapers. On June 16th, 1922, a note came from The Hague by the
+Associated Press that Foreign Minister Van Karnebeek of Holland
+capitulated to the world’s desire to be informed of what was going
+on by admitting correspondents. Early announcement that “the press
+cannot be admitted” was, according to the report, followed by anxious
+emissaries begging the journalists to have patience. Editorials printed
+in Holland pointed out that the best way to insure public coöperation
+was to take the public into its confidence. Minister van Karnebeek, who
+had been at Washington, was thoroughly awake to the invaluable service
+the press of the world rendered there. One editorial here pointed out
+that public statements “were used by the diplomats themselves as
+a happy means of testing popular opinion upon the various projects
+offered in council. How many ‘trial balloons’ were sent up in this
+fashion, nobody can recall. Nevertheless each delegation maintained
+clipping bureaus, which were brought up to date every morning and which
+gave the delegates accurate information as to the state of mind at
+home. Thus it came about that world opinion was ready and anxious to
+receive the finished work of the conference and that it was prompt to
+bring individual recalcitrant groups into line.”
+
+Let me quote from the _New York Evening Post_ of July, 1922, as to the
+important interaction of these forces: “The importance of the press
+in guiding public opinion and the coöperation between the members of
+the press and the men who express public opinion in action, which has
+grown up since the Peace Conference at Paris, were stressed by Lionel
+Curtis, who arrived on the _Adriatic_ yesterday to attend the Institute
+of Politics, which opens on July 27 at Williamstown. ‘Perhaps for the
+first time in history,’ he said, ‘the men whose business it is to make
+public opinion were collected for some months under the same roof with
+the officials whose task in life is the actual conduct of foreign
+affairs. In the long run, foreign policy is determined by public
+opinion. It was impossible in Paris not to be impressed by the immense
+advantage of bringing into close contact the writers who, through the
+press, are making public opinion and the men who have to express their
+opinion in actual policy.’”
+
+Harvard University, likewise, appreciating the power of public opinion
+over its own activities, has recently appointed a counsel on public
+relations to make its aims clear to the public.
+
+The institutions which make public opinion conform to the demands of
+the public. The public responds to an equally large degree to these
+institutions. Such fights as that made by _Collier’s Weekly_ for pure
+food control show this.
+
+The Safety First movement, by its use of every form of appeal, from
+poster to circular, from lecture to law enforcement, from motion
+pictures to “safety weeks,” is bringing about a gradual change in the
+attitude of a safety-deserving public towards the taking of unnecessary
+risks.
+
+The Rockefeller Foundation, confronted with the serious problem
+of the hookworm in the South and in other localities, has brought
+about a change in the habits of large sections of rural populations
+by analysis, investigation, applied medical principles, and public
+education.
+
+The moulder of public opinion must enlist the established point of
+view. This is true of the press as well as of other forces. Mr. Mencken
+mixes cynicism and truth when he declares that the chief difficulty
+confronting a newspaper which tries to carry out independent and
+thoughtful policies “does not lie in the direction of the board of
+directors, but in the direction of the public which buys the paper.”[13]
+
+The _New York Tribune_, as an example of editorial bravery, points out
+in an advertisement published May 23, 1922, that though “news knows no
+order in the making” and though “a newspaper must carry the news, both
+pleasant and unpleasant,” nevertheless, it is the duty of any newspaper
+to realize that there is a possibility of selective action, and that
+“in times of stress and bleak despair a newspaper has a hard and fast
+duty to perform in keeping up the morale of the community.”
+
+Indeed, the instances are frequent and accessible to the recollection
+of any reader in which newspapers have consciously maintained a point
+of view toward which the public is either hostile or cold.
+
+Occasionally, of course, even the established point of view is
+alterable. The two Baltimore Suns do brave their public and have been
+braving their public for some time, not entirely without success.
+As severe a critic as Oswald Garrison Villard points out that though
+modern Baltimore is a difficult city to serve, yet the two _Suns_ have
+courageously and consistently stood for the policies of their editors
+and have refused to yield to pressure from any source. To the public
+relations counsel this is a striking illustration of the give and take
+between the public and the institutions which attempt to mould public
+opinion. The two interact upon each other, so that it is sometimes
+difficult to tell which is one and which is the other.
+
+The _World_ and the _Evening World_ of New York, pride themselves upon
+the following campaigns which are listed in _The World Almanac_ of
+1922. They illustrate this interaction.
+
+“_Conference on Limitation of Armament Grew from ‘World’s’ Plea_
+
+“Bearing in mind in 1921 the injunction of its founder, Joseph
+Pulitzer, to fight always for progress and reform, and having led the
+campaign for disarmament in advance of any other demand therefor, the
+_World_ covered the Washington Conference on Limitation of Armament in
+a comprehensive way....
+
+“_Measures Advocated by ‘World’ Made Law_
+
+“During the 1921 session of the New York Legislature many measures
+advocated by the _World_ were enacted. One of this paper’s chief
+achievements was the passage of a resolution broadening the power
+of the Lockwood Housing Committee, enabling it to inquire into high
+finance as related to the building trades situation.
+
+“The _World_ was instrumental in obtaining the Anti-Theater Ticket
+Speculator Law. It also brought about a change in bills to abolish
+the Daylight-Saving Law so that municipalities might enact their
+own daylight-saving ordinances. It was successful in its campaign
+against the search-and-seizure and other drastic features of the State
+Prohibition Enforcement Law.
+
+“_The ‘World’ Told Facts About Ku Klux Klan_
+
+“The _World_ on September 6 commenced the publication of a series
+of articles telling the truth about the Ku Klux Klan. Twenty-six
+newspapers, in widely separated sections of the United States, joined
+the _World_ in the publication; some had been invited to participate,
+others requested the _World_ to let them use the articles. All these
+newspapers realized that the only motive back of the _World’s_
+publication was public service. It was their desire to share in this
+service, and the _World_ is proud that they asked only assurance of its
+traditional accuracy and fairness before they saw their way clear to
+coöperation.
+
+“The _World_ is proud that the completed record shows no evidence
+either that it was terrified by threats or was goaded by abuse into
+departures from its object of presenting the facts honestly and without
+exaggeration.
+
+“_Changes in Motor Vehicle Laws_
+
+“As a result of a crusade to lessen automobile fatalities in New
+York City and State, the _World_ won a victory when changes in the
+motor vehicle laws were made. The paper printed exclusive stories
+giving the motor and license numbers of cars stolen daily in this
+city, and started a campaign against outlaw taxicabs and financially
+irresponsible drivers and owners.
+
+“_‘Evening World’s’ Achievements_
+
+“The _Evening World_ continued its campaign against the coal monopoly
+and the high coal prices charged in New York City--a state of affairs
+that has been constantly and vigorously exposed in _Evening World_
+columns. After consultation with leading Senators at Washington,
+several bills were introduced in Congress to alleviate the conditions.”
+
+I am letting the _World_ speak for itself merely as an example of
+what many splendid newspapers have accomplished as leaders in public
+movements. The _New York Evening Post_ is another example, it having
+long led popular demand for vocational guidance and control.
+
+The public relations counsel cannot base his work merely upon the
+acceptance of the principle that the public and its authorities
+interact. He must go deeper than that and discover why it is that a
+public opinion exists independently of church, school, press, lecture
+platform and motion picture screen--how far this public opinion affects
+these institutions and how far these institutions affect public
+opinion. He must discover what the stimuli are to which public opinion
+responds most readily.
+
+Study of the mirrors of the public mind--the press, the motion
+pictures, the lecture platform and the others--reveal to him what their
+standards are and those of the groups they reach. This is not enough,
+however. To his understanding of what he actually can measure he must
+add a thorough knowledge of the principles which govern individual and
+group action. A fundamental study of group and individual psychology is
+required before the public relations counsel can determine how readily
+individuals or groups will accept modifications of viewpoints or
+policies, which they have already imposed upon their respective mediums.
+
+No idea or opinion is an isolated factor. It is surrounded and
+influenced by precedent, authority, habit and all the other human
+motivations.
+
+For a lucid conception of the functions, power and social utility of
+the public relations counsel it is vitally important to have a clear
+grasp of the fundamentals with which he must work.
+
+Before defining the fundamental motivations of society, let me mention
+those outward signs on which psychologists base their study of
+conditions.
+
+Psychological habits, or as Mr. Lippmann calls them, “stereotypes,”
+are shorthand by which human effort is minimized. They are so clearly
+and commonly understood that every one will immediately respond to
+the mention of a stereotype within his personal experience. The words
+“capitalist” or “boy scout” bring out definite images to the hearer.
+These images are more comprehensible than detailed descriptions. Chorus
+girl, woman lawyer, politician, detective, financier are clean-cut
+concepts and capable of definition. We all have stereotypes which
+minimize not only our thinking habits but also the ordinary routine of
+life.
+
+Mr. Lippmann finds that the stereotypes at the center of the code
+by which various sections of the public live “largely determine what
+group of facts we shall see and in what light we shall see them.” That
+is why, he says, “with the best will in the world, the news policy
+of a journal tends to support its editorial policy, why a capitalist
+sees one set of facts and certain aspects of human nature--literally
+sees them; his socialist opponent another set and other aspects, and
+why each regards the other as unreasonable or perverse, when the real
+difference between them is a difference of perception. That difference
+is imposed by the difference between the capitalist and socialist
+pattern of stereotypes. ‘There are no classes in America,’ writes an
+American editor. ‘The history of all hitherto existing society is the
+history of class struggles,’ says the Communist Manifesto. If you have
+the editor’s pattern in your mind, you will see vividly the facts
+that confirm it, vaguely and ineffectively those that contradict. If
+you have the communist pattern, you will not only look for different
+things, but you will see with a totally different emphasis what you and
+the editor happen to see in common.”
+
+The stereotype is the basis of a large part of the work of the
+public relations counsel. Let us try to inquire where the stereotype
+originates--why it is so influential and why from a practical
+standpoint it is so tremendously difficult to affect or change
+stereotypes or to attempt to substitute one set of stereotypes for
+another.
+
+Mr. Martin attempts to answer questions such as these in his volume on
+“The Behavior of Crowds.” By “crowds” Mr. Martin does not mean merely a
+physical aggregation of a number of persons. To Mr. Martin the crowd is
+rather a state of mind, “the peculiar mental condition which sometimes
+occurs when people think and act together, either immediately where the
+members of the group are present and in close contact, or remotely, as
+when they affect one another in a certain way through the medium of an
+organization, a party or sect, the press, etc.”
+
+Motives of social behavior are based on individual instincts.
+Individual instincts, on the other hand, must yield to group needs.
+Mr. Martin pictures society as an aggregation of people who have
+sacrificed individual freedom in order to remain within the group. This
+sacrifice of freedom on the part of individuals in the groups leads its
+members to resist all efforts at fundamental changes in the group code.
+Because all have made certain sacrifices, reasons are developed why
+such sacrifices must be insisted upon at all times. The “logic-proof”
+compartment is the result of this unwillingness to accept changes.
+
+“What has been so painstakingly built up is not to be lightly
+destroyed. Each group, therefore, within itself, considers its own
+standards ultimate and indisputable, and tends to dismiss all contrary
+or different standards as indefensible.
+
+“Even an honest, critical understanding of the demands of the opposing
+crowd is discouraged, possibly because it is rightly felt that the
+critical habit of mind is as destructive of one crowd-complex as the
+other, and the old crowd prefers to remain intact and die in the last
+ditch rather than risk dissolution, even with the promise of averting
+a revolution. Hence the Romans were willing to believe that the
+Christians worshiped the head of an ass. The medieval Catholics, even
+at Leo’s court, failed to grasp the meaning of the outbreak in North
+Germany. Thousands saw in the reformation only the alleged fact that
+the monk Luther wanted to marry a wife....”[14]
+
+The main satisfaction, Mr. Martin thinks, which the individual derives
+from his group association is the satisfaction of his vanity through
+the creation of an enlarged self-importance.
+
+The Freudian theories upon which Mr. Martin relies very largely for
+his argument lead to the conclusion that what Mr. Henry Watterson has
+said of the suppression of news applies equally to the suppression of
+individual desire. Neither will suppress. With the normal person,
+the result of this social suppression is to produce an individual who
+conforms with sufficient closeness to the standards of his group to
+enable him to remain comfortably within it.
+
+The tendency, however, of the instincts and desires which are thus
+ruled out of conduct is somehow or other, when the conditions are
+favorable, to seek some avenue of release and satisfaction. To the
+individual most of these avenues of release are closed. He cannot, for
+example, indulge his instinct of pugnacity without running foul of
+the law. The only release which the individual can have is one which
+commands, however briefly, the approval of his fellows. That is why
+Mr. Martin calls crowd psychology and crowd activity “the result of
+forces hidden in a personal and unconscious psyche of the members of
+the crowd, forces which are merely released by social gatherings of
+a certain sort.” The crowd enables the individual to express himself
+according to his desire and without restraint.
+
+He says further, “Every crowd ‘boosts for’ itself, gives itself airs,
+speaks with oracular finality, regards itself as morally superior, and
+will, so far as it has the power, lord it over every one. Notice how
+each group and section in society, so far as it permits itself to think
+as crowd, claims to be ‘the people.’”
+
+As an illustration of the boosting principle Mr. Martin points out the
+readiness of most groups to enter upon conflict of one kind or another
+with opposing groups. “Nothing so easily catches general attention
+and grips a crowd as a contest of any kind,” he says. “The crowd
+unconsciously identifies its members with one or the other competitor.
+Success enables the winning crowd to ‘crow over’ the losers. Such an
+action becomes symbolical, and is utilized by the ego to enhance its
+feeling of importance. In society this egoism tends to take the form of
+the desire for dominance.” According to Mr. Martin, that is why “...
+whenever any attempt is being made to secure recruits for a movement
+or a point of view the leaders intuitively assume and reiterate the
+certainty of ultimate victory.”
+
+Two points which Mr. Martin makes seem to me most important. In the
+first place, Mr. Martin points out with absolute justice that the
+crowd-mind is by no means limited to the ignorant. “Any class,” he
+says, “may behave and think as a crowd--in fact, it usually does so in
+so far as its class interests are concerned.” Neither is the crowd-mind
+to be found only when there is a physical agglomeration of people. This
+fact is important to an understanding of the problems of the public
+relations counsel, because he must bear in mind always that the readers
+of advertisements, the recipients of letters, the solitary listener at
+a radio speech, the reader of the morning newspapers are mysteriously
+part of the crowd-mind.
+
+When Bergson came to America about a decade ago, men and women flocked
+to his classes, both the French and the English sessions. It was
+obvious to the observer that numbers of disciples who conscientiously
+attended the full course of lectures understood almost nothing of what
+was being said. Their behavior was an instance of the crowd-mind.
+
+Everybody read “Main Street.” Each reader in his own study tried to
+react as a crowd-mind. They felt as they thought they ought to.
+
+Initiation scandals, where the crowd-mind has created a brutality not
+possible to individuals, take place not only in brotherhoods among what
+Mr. Martin calls “the lower classes,” but also among well-bred college
+youths and the fraternal orders of successful business and professional
+men. A more specific instance is the football game, with its
+manifestations of the crowd-mind among a selected group of individuals.
+The Ku Klux Klan has numbered among its violent supporters some of the
+“best” families of the affected localities.
+
+The crowd is a state of mind which permeates society and its
+individuals at almost all times. What becomes articulate in times of
+stress under great excitement is present in the mind of the individual
+at most times and explains in part why popular opinion is so positive
+and so intolerant of contrary points of view. The college professor in
+his study on a peaceful summer day is just as likely to be reacting as
+a unit of a crowd-mind, as any member of a lynching party in Texas or
+Georgia.
+
+Mr. Trotter in his book, “Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War,”[15]
+gives us further material for study. He discusses the underlying causes
+and results of “herd” tendencies, stressing the herd’s cohesiveness.
+
+The tendency the group has to standardize the habits of individuals
+and to assign logical reasons for them is an important factor in the
+work of the public relations counsel. The predominant point of view,
+according to Mr. Trotter, which translates a rationalized point of view
+into an axiomatic truth, arises and derives its strength from the fact
+that it enlists herd support for the point of view of the individual.
+This explains why it is so easy to popularize many ideas.
+
+“The cardinal quality of the herd is homogeneity.”[16] The biological
+significance of homogeneity lies in its survival value. The wolf
+pack is many times as strong as the combined strength of each of its
+individual members. These results of homogeneity have created the
+“herd” point of view.
+
+One of the psychological results of homogeneity is the fact that
+physical loneliness is a real terror to the gregarious animal, and that
+association with the herd causes a feeling of security. In man this
+fear of loneliness creates a desire for identification with the herd in
+matters of opinion. It is here, says Mr. Trotter,[17] that we find “the
+ineradicable impulse mankind has always displayed towards segregation
+into classes. Each one of us in his opinions and his conduct, in
+matters of amusement, religion, and politics, is compelled to obtain
+the support of a class, of a herd within the herd.”
+
+Says Mr. Trotter:[18] “The effect of it will clearly be to make
+acceptable those suggestions which come from the herd, and those only.
+It is of especial importance to note that this suggestibility is not
+general, and it is only herd suggestions which are rendered acceptable
+by the action of instinct, and man is, for example, notoriously
+insensitive to the suggestions of experience. The history of what is
+rather grandiosely called human progress everywhere illustrates this.
+If we look back upon the developments of some such thing as the steam
+engine, we cannot fail to be struck by the extreme obviousness of each
+advance, and how obstinately it was refused assimilation until the
+machine almost invented itself.”
+
+The workings of the gregarious instinct in man result frequently in
+conduct of the most remarkable complexity, but it is characterized by
+all of the qualities of instinctive action. Such conduct is usually
+rationalized, but this does not conceal its real character.
+
+We may sincerely think that we vote the Republican ticket because we
+have thought out the issues of the political campaign and reached our
+decision in the cold-blooded exercise of judgment. The fact remains
+that it is just as likely that we voted the Republican ticket because
+we did so the year before or because the Republican platform contains a
+declaration of principle, no matter how vague, which awakens profound
+emotional response in us, or because our neighbor whom we do not like
+happens to be a Democrat.
+
+Mr. Lippmann remarks:[19] “For the most part we do not first see and
+then define, we define first and then see. In the great booming,
+buzzing confusion of the outer world we pick out of the clutter what
+is already defined for us, and we tend to perceive that which we have
+picked out in the form stereotyped for us by our culture.”
+
+Mr. Trotter cites as a few of the examples of rationalization the
+mechanism which “enables the European lady who wears rings in her ears
+to smile at the barbarism of the colored lady who wears her rings
+in her nose”[20] and the process which enables the Englishman “who
+is amused by the African chieftain’s regard for the top hat as an
+essential piece of the furniture of state to ignore the identity of his
+own behavior when he goes to church beneath the same tremendous ensign.”
+
+The gregarious tendency in man, according to Mr. Trotter, results in
+five characteristics which he displays in common with all gregarious
+animals.
+
+1. “_He is intolerant and fearful of solitude, physical or
+mental._”[21] The same urge which drives the buffalo into the herd
+and man into the city requires on the part of the latter a sense of
+spiritual identification with the herd. Man is never so much at home as
+when on the band wagon.
+
+2. “_He is more sensitive to the voice of the herd than to any other
+influence._” Mr. Trotter illustrates this characteristic in a paragraph
+which is worth quoting in its entirety. He says: “It (the voice of
+the herd) can inhibit or stimulate his thought and conduct. It is
+the source of his moral codes, of the sanctions of his ethics and
+philosophy. It can endow him with energy, courage, and endurance, and
+can as easily take these away. It can make him acquiesce in his own
+punishment and embrace his executioner, submit to poverty, bow to
+tyranny, and sink without complaint under starvation. Not merely can
+it make him accept hardship and suffering unresistingly, but it can
+make him accept as truth the explanation that his perfectly preventable
+afflictions are sublimely just and gentle. It is this acme of the power
+of herd suggestion that is perhaps the most absolutely incontestable
+proof of the profoundly gregarious nature of man.”
+
+3. “_He is subject to the passions of the pack in his mob violence and
+the passions of the herd in his panics._”
+
+4. “_He is remarkably susceptible to leadership._” Mr. Trotter points
+out that the need for leadership is often satisfied by leadership of a
+quality which cannot stand analysis, and which must therefore satisfy
+some impulse rather than the demands of reason.
+
+5. “_His relations with his fellows are dependent upon the recognition
+of him as a member of the herd._”
+
+The gregarious tendency, Mr. Trotter believes, is biologically
+fundamental. He finds therefore that the herd reaction is not confined
+to outbreaks such as panics and mob violence, but that it is a constant
+factor in all human thinking and feeling. Discussing the results of
+the sensitiveness of the individual to the herd point of view, Mr.
+Trotter says in part, “To believe must be an ineradicable natural bias
+of man, or in other words, an affirmation, positive or negative, is
+more readily accepted than rejected, unless its source is definitely
+disassociated from the herd. _Man is not, therefore, suggestible by
+fits and starts, not merely in panics and mobs, under hypnosis, and so
+forth, but always, everywhere, and under any circumstances._”
+
+The suggestibility of people to ideas which are part of the standards
+of their groups could not be more succinctly expressed than in the old
+command, “When in Rome do as the Romans.”
+
+Psychologists have defined for the public relations counsel the
+fundamental equipment of the individual mind and its relation to group
+reactions. We have seen the motivations of the individual mind--the
+motivations of the group mind. We have seen the characteristics in
+thought and action of the individual and the group. All these things
+we have touched on, though briefly, since they form the ground-work of
+knowledge for the public relations counsel. Their application will be
+discussed later.
+
+The institutions that make public opinion carry on against a background
+which is in itself a controlling factor. The real character of this
+controlling background we shall take up later. Let us first consider
+some examples that prove its existence--then we can look into its
+origin and its standards.
+
+Powerful standards control the very institutions which are supposed to
+help form public opinion. It is necessary to understand the origin, the
+working and the strength of these institutions in order to understand
+the institutions themselves and their effect upon the public.
+
+In tracing the interaction of institution upon public and public upon
+institution, one finds a circle of obedience and leadership. The press,
+the school and other leaders of thought are themselves working in a
+background which they cannot entirely control.
+
+Let us turn to the press again for a text.
+
+That the press is so frequently unable to achieve a result on which
+its combined members are unanimously set makes it evident that the
+press itself is working in a medium which it cannot entirely control.
+The _New York Times_ motto, “All the news that’s fit to print,” drives
+this point home. The standards of fitness created in the minds of
+the publishers express the point of view of a mass of readers, and
+this enables the newspapers to achieve and maintain circulation and
+financial success.
+
+The very fact that newspapers must sell to the public is an evidence
+that they must please the public and in a measure obey it. In the press
+there is a very human tendency to compromise between giving the public
+what it wants and giving the public what it _should_ want. This is
+equally true in music, where artists like McCormack or Rachmaninoff
+popularize their programs. It is true in the drama, where managers,
+producers and authors combine to adjust plots, situations and endings
+to what the public will be willing to pay to see. It is true in art, in
+architecture, in motion pictures. It is true of the lecture platform
+and of the pulpit.
+
+So-called radical preachers, for example, usually succeed in
+broadcasting their radical ideas only when their following is prepared
+to accept their views. The Rev. Percy Stickney Grant was a great
+problem to the upholders of the accepted order, only because there was
+so large a body of parishioners eager to hear and accept his _dicta_.
+The Rev. Billy Sunday, evangelist, derived his following from among
+people who were awaiting a faith-stirring appeal.
+
+Another evidence of the fact that a powerful outside influence helps
+make the forces that mould public opinion is shown by the newspapers in
+the actual selection of news. The public actually demands that certain
+types of facts be omitted. The standing problem of every newspaper
+office--the winnowing of the day’s news from the mass of material that
+reaches the editorial desks--illustrates pointedly the need there is to
+examine the reasons which prompt the editors in selection.
+
+In an exceedingly interesting advertisement published by the _New York
+Tribune_, on April 19, 1922, the _Tribune’s_ editors state the problem
+most graphically. The advertisement is headed, “What Else Happened That
+Day?” and it reads as follows:
+
+    “Madame Caillaux was on trial in Paris for killing Gaston
+    Calmette.
+
+    “In Long Island a woman was mysteriously shot in a doctor’s
+    office while on a night visit.
+
+    “Forty-five stage coaches were held up in Yellowstone Park by
+    two masked bandits who took all the cash of 165 tourists.
+
+    “Romantic crime, mystery crime, adventurous crime, a public
+    eagerly interested--and they suddenly dropped from the
+    newspapers. The public forgot them. As news, these events
+    became as if they had never happened. Something else had
+    happened.
+
+    “The day of Madame Caillaux’s acquittal Austria declared war
+    on Serbia. Russia mobilized fourteen army corps on the German
+    border and the price of wheat in this country soared.
+
+    “All the news that a newspaper prints is affected by what else
+    happened that day. If an earthquake occurs the day you announce
+    your daughter’s engagement her picture may be left out of the
+    newspaper.
+
+    “The man who made a golf hole in one the day of the
+    Dempsey-Carpentiér fight was out of luck so far as an item on
+    the sporting page was concerned.
+
+    “When real news breaks, semi-news must go. When real news is
+    scarce, semi-news returns to the front page. A very great man
+    picked out Sunday night to dine at a Bowery mission. Monday is
+    usually a dull day for news, although some big events, notably
+    the sinking of the _Titanic_, came over the wires Sunday night.
+
+    “All papers feature big news. When there is no big news, real
+    editing is needed to select the real news from the semi-news.
+
+    “What you read on dull news days is what fixes your opinions
+    of your country and of your compatriots. It is from the
+    non-sensational news that you see the world and assess, rightly
+    or wrongly, the true value of persons and events.
+
+    “The relative importance your newspaper gives to an occurrence
+    affects your thought, your character, and your children’s
+    thought and character. For few daily habits are as firmly
+    established as the habit of reading the newspaper.”
+
+Now each of the items mentioned in the _Tribune’s_ advertisement was
+news. Comparison of the newspapers of that day will undoubtedly show a
+wide divergence in the manner in which these items were treated and in
+the relative importance assigned to each. The basis of the selection
+was clearly the general standard of the clientele of each individual
+paper.
+
+And this selection of ideas for presentation goes on in every medium of
+thought communication.
+
+This basis of selection has long been recognized. Thus in an article in
+the _Atlantic Monthly_ for February, 1911, Professor Hargar, formerly
+head of the Department of Journalism at the University of Kansas,
+draws attention to it in regard to newspapers, and points out that
+“the province of the city paper is one of news selection.[22] Out of
+the vast skein of the day’s happenings what shall it select? More
+‘copy’ is thrown away than is used. The _New York Sun_ is written as
+definitely for a given constituency as is a technical journal. Out of
+the day’s news it gives prominence to that which fits into its scheme
+of treatment, and there is so much news that it can fill its columns
+with interesting materials, yet leave untouched a myriad of events. The
+_New York Evening Post_ appeals to another constituency, and is made
+accordingly. The _World_ and the _Journal_ have a far different plan,
+and ‘play up’ stories that are mentioned briefly, or ignored, by some
+of their contemporaries. So the writer on the metropolitan paper is
+trained to sift news, to choose from his wealth of material that which
+the paper’s traditions demand shall receive attention; and so abundant
+is the supply that he can easily set a feast without exhausting the
+market’s offering. Unconsciously he becomes an epicure, and knows no
+day will dawn without bringing him his opportunity.”
+
+Mr. Lippmann makes the same observation. He says:[23] “Every newspaper
+when it reaches the reader is the result of a whole series of
+selections as to what items shall be printed, in what position they
+shall be printed, how much space each shall occupy, what emphasis
+each shall have. There are no objective standards here. There are
+conventions. Take two newspapers published in the same city on the same
+morning. The headline of one reads: ‘Britain pledges aid to Berlin
+against French Aggression. France Openly Backs Poles.’ The headline
+of the second is: ‘Mrs. Stillman’s Other Love.’ Which you prefer is a
+matter of taste, but _not entirely a matter of the editor’s taste_. It
+is a matter of his _judgment as to what will absorb the half hour’s
+attention a certain set of readers will give to his newspaper_.”
+
+The American stage continually bows to public demand and consciously
+ascribes to the public the changes it undergoes. The character
+of advertising has definitely yielded to public demand and fake
+advertising has been to a great extent eliminated. Motion pictures have
+responded, too, to public taste and public pressure, both as to the
+kind of picture presented and, in isolated instances, to the type of
+action permitted to appear.
+
+It is therefore apparent that these and the other institutions which
+modify public opinion carry on against a background which is also
+in itself a controlling factor. What the real character of this
+controlling background is we shall now consider.
+
+Both Trotter, Martin and the other writers we have quoted confirm what
+the actual experience of the public relations counsel shows--that the
+cause he represents must have some group reaction and tradition in
+common with the public he is trying to reach. This must exist before
+they can react sympathetically upon one another. Given these common
+fundamentals, much can be done to capitalize or destroy them. It is
+as untrue to contend that public opinion is manufactured as it is to
+contend that public opinion governs the agencies which mould it.
+
+The public relations counsel must continually realize that there are
+always these limitations to his effectiveness.
+
+The very “leaders,” men who have been selected from the mass to “lead
+the nation,” live with their ears to the ground for every slight
+rumbling of public sentiment. Preachers, acknowledged to be the ethical
+leaders of their flocks, express obedience to public opinion.
+
+The critics who hold these extreme points of view about public opinion
+have too easily confused cause and effect. The sympathy between the
+orator and his audience is not one which the orator can create. He
+can intensify it, or by tactless speaking he can dissipate it, but he
+cannot manufacture it from thin air.
+
+Margaret Sanger, a leader in the fight for education on birth control,
+will evoke enthusiasm when she addresses an audience that approves
+of her sentiments. When, however, she injects her point of view into
+groups that have a preconceived aversion to them, she is in danger
+of abuse, if not of actual physical violence. Likewise, a man who
+would talk of prison reform at a time when the public is aroused by
+an unwonted crime wave will find little response. On the other hand,
+when Madam Curie, co-discoverer of radium, came to America, she found
+a country that was prepared to meet her because of intensive effort on
+the part of a large radium corporation and a committee of women formed
+by Marie B. Meloney, to apprise the public of the importance of her
+visit. Had she come two years sooner, she might have been ignored save
+by a few scientists.
+
+A historic incident illustrative of the interaction between a leader
+and a public is that of the sudden turn in the affairs of Rear
+Admiral Dewey. The idol of the Spanish American War, he nevertheless
+alienated popular affection by giving to his wife a house which had
+been presented to him by an admiring public. For some reason the public
+failed to sympathize with Admiral Dewey’s own undoubtedly sound and
+worthy reasons.
+
+To say, therefore, as some persons have said at great length and
+with considerable vehemence, that the public relations counsel is
+responsible for public opinion, is not true. The public relations
+counsel is not needed to persuade people to standardize their points of
+view or to persist in their established beliefs. The established point
+of view becomes established by satisfying some real or assumed human
+need.
+
+In common with the scenario writer, the preacher, the statesman, the
+dramatist, the public relations counsel, has his share in making up the
+mind of the public. The public quite as truly makes up the mind of the
+journalist, the pamphleteer, the scenario writer, the preacher and the
+statesman. The main direction of the public mind is often irrevocably
+set for its leaders.
+
+Hendrik Van Loon, in his “Story of Mankind,” paints a picture of the
+action and interaction between Napoleon the Great and his public in
+a way that might well have been made to illustrate our point. When
+Napoleon led the public truly in the direction towards which it was
+headed, that is, towards democracy and equality, he was its successful
+leader and its idol, says Van Loon. When in the latter part of his
+career he turned back to a goal which the public had discarded and was
+eager to forget, that is, Bourbonism, Napoleon met with irresistible
+defeat.
+
+“Damaged Goods” was able to make the American public accept the word
+“syphilis” because the counsel on public relations projected the
+doctrine of sex hygiene through those groups and sections of the public
+which were prepared to work with him.
+
+Public opinion is the resultant of the interaction between two forces.
+
+This may help us to see with greater clarity the position the public
+relations counsel holds in relation to the world at large, and what the
+factors are with which he is concerned and by which he accomplishes his
+work.
+
+We have gone somewhat elaborately into the fundamental equipment of
+the individual mind and its relation to the group mind because the
+public relations counsel in his work in these fields must constantly
+call upon his knowledge of individual and group psychology. The public
+relations counsel can come forward, first, as the representative of
+established things when their security is shaken, or when they desire
+greater power; and second, as the representative of the group which is
+struggling to establish itself.
+
+Mr. Lippmann says propaganda is dependent upon censorship. From my
+point of view the precise reverse is more nearly true. Propaganda is a
+purposeful, directed effort to overcome censorship--the censorship of
+the group mind and the herd reaction.
+
+The average citizen is the world’s most efficient censor. His own mind
+is the greatest barrier between him and the facts. His own “logic-proof
+compartments,” his own absolutism are the obstacles which prevent him
+from seeing in terms of experience and thought rather than in terms of
+group reaction.
+
+The training of the public relations counsel permits him to step out
+of his own group to look at a particular problem with the eyes of an
+impartial observer and to utilize his knowledge of the individual and
+the group mind to project his clients’ point of view.
+
+When the United States was made up of small social units with common
+traditions and a small geographic and social area, it was comparatively
+simple for the proponent of a point of view to address his public
+directly. If he represented a social or a political idea, he could, at
+no very great expense and with no very great difficulty in the early
+Eighteenth Century, cover New England with his pamphlets. He could
+arouse the thirteen colonies with his journals and brochures. That was
+because the heritage of these groups made them sensitive to the same
+stimuli. One man, remarks Mr. Lippmann, then was able single-handed to
+crystallize the common will of his country in his day and generation.
+To-day the greatest superman as yet developed by humanity could not
+accomplish the same result with the United States.
+
+Populations have increased. In this country geographical areas have
+increased. Heterogeneity has also increased. A group living in any
+given area is now extremely likely to have no common ancestry, no
+common tradition, as such, and no cohesive intelligence. All these
+elements make it necessary to-day for the proponent of a point of view
+to engage an expert to represent him before society, an expert who
+must know how to reach groups totally dissimilar as to ideals, customs
+and even language. It is this necessity which has resulted in the
+development of the counsel on public relations.
+
+Now it must be understood that the proponent of a point of view,
+whether acting alone or under the guidance of a public relations
+counsel, must utilize existing avenues of approach. Modern conditions
+are such that it is not feasible to build up independent organs.
+Innovators and innovations cannot create their own channels of
+communication. They must for a great part work through the existing
+daily press, the existing magazine, the existing lecture circuit,
+existing advertising mediums, the existing motion picture channels
+and other means for the communication of ideas. The public relations
+counsel, on behalf of the groups he represents, must reach majorities
+and minorities through their respective approaches.
+
+If the public relations counsel can succeed in presenting ideas and
+facts to the public in spite of the heterogeneity of society, in
+spite of the vast psychological and geographic problems, in spite of
+the difficulties, monetary and otherwise, of reaching and influencing
+populations numbering millions--if he can succeed in overcoming
+these difficulties by a skillful understanding of the situation, his
+profession is socially valuable.
+
+Absolute homogeneity, resulting in a dead level of uniformity in public
+and individual reaction, is undesirable. On the other hand, agreement
+on broad social purposes is essential to progress. Agreement on broad
+industrial purposes may be equally desirable. Without such agreement,
+without unified purposes, there can be no progress and the unit must
+fall. The men who were most effective in stimulating national morale
+during the war never lost sight of these underlying needs, whether they
+stimulated a whole nation to ration itself voluntarily and give up the
+eating of sugar, or whether they stimulated knitting and Red Cross
+activities and voluntary contributions to funds.
+
+Three ways are cited by Mr. Lippmann to obtain cohesive force among
+the special and local interests which make up national and social
+units. The public relations counsel avails himself only of the third.
+The first method which is described is that of “patronage and pork.”
+This is very largely the method relied upon by certain legislative
+bodies to-day to maintain cohesive force. As an instance of this, the
+investigations of the methods used in connection with the bills to
+secure the building of local post offices or the dredging of harbors or
+rivers seem to point out that a representative from one community will
+promise reciprocal support to the member from another community, if he
+in turn will act favorably on another item. This method intensifies
+the feeling that all are working together, even though they may not be
+working for the highest interests of the country. Similarly the chief
+executive of a city may institute certain measures to placate school
+teachers. He will expect the school teachers to support him on some
+other project at some other period.
+
+The second method named by Mr. Lippmann[24] is “government by terror
+and obedience.”
+
+The third method is “government based on such a highly developed system
+of information, analysis and self-consciousness that ‘the knowledge
+of national circumstances and reasons of state’ is evident to all
+men. The autocratic system is in decay. The voluntary system is in
+its very earliest development and so, in calculating the prospects
+of associations among large groups of people, a league of nations,
+industrial government, or a federal union of states, the degree to
+which the material for a common consciousness exists determines how
+far coöperation will depend upon force, or upon the milder alternative
+to force, which is patronage and privilege. The secret of great state
+builders, like Alexander Hamilton, is that they know how to calculate
+these principles.”
+
+The method of education by information, which was to a great extent
+relied upon by the United States, for example, was evidenced in the
+formation during the war of such agencies as the Committee on Public
+Information. The public relations counsel, through the mediums chosen
+by him, presented to the public the information necessary to aid in
+understanding America’s war aims and ideals. George Creel and his
+organization reached vast groups, representing every phase of our
+national elements, in every modern method of thought communication. But
+even in the United States the other two methods were used to obtain
+cohesive force.
+
+In fact the method least relied upon in any of the belligerent
+countries was that of “government based on such a highly developed
+system of information, analysis and self-consciousness that ‘the
+knowledge of national circumstances and reasons of state’ is evident to
+all men.”
+
+This breakdown did not occur among small, inefficiently organised
+groups. It occurred among the representatives of the highest
+development in social organization.
+
+If this was the fate of the most highly organized social groups,
+consider then the problem which confronts the social, economic,
+educational or political groups in peace time, when they attempt to
+obtain a public hearing for new ideas. Innumerable instances have shown
+the difficulty that any group faces in gaining an acceptance for its
+ideas.
+
+The development of the United States to its present size and
+diversification has intensified the difficulty of creating a common
+will on any subject because it has heightened the natural tendency of
+men to separate into crowds opposed to one another in point of view.
+This difficulty is further emphasized by the fact that often these
+crowds live in different traditional, moral and spiritual worlds. The
+physical difficulties of communication make group separation greater.
+
+Mr. Trotter’s conclusions from a study of the gregarious instinct are
+singularly apt on this point. He says that[25] “the enormous power
+of varied reaction possessed by man must render necessary for his
+attainment of the full advantages of the gregarious habit a power
+of inter-communication of absolutely unprecedented fineness. It is
+clear that scarcely a hint of such power has yet appeared, and it is
+equally obvious that it is this defect which gives to society the
+characteristics which are the contempt of the man of science and the
+disgust of the humanitarian.”
+
+When the worker was of the same ancestry as his employer, labor
+difficulties, for example, could be discussed in terms which were
+comprehensible to both parties. To-day the United States Steel
+Corporation must exert tremendous effort to present its view to its
+thousands of employees who are South Europeans, North Europeans,
+Americans.
+
+Czechoslovakia, during the Peace Conference, wanted to appeal to
+its countrymen in America, but this group was vague and scattered
+in a population that lived in many cities throughout the country.
+The public relations counsel who was engaged to reach this scattered
+population had, therefore, to translate his appeals so that they
+might be understood logically and emotionally by the educated and the
+uneducated, the urban, the rural, the laboring and the professional man.
+
+The same problem in a quite different guise presented itself to the
+public relations counsel who wanted to insure a public response to
+the appeal of the Diaghileff Russian Ballet, of which the public knew
+nothing. He had, therefore, to surmount the difficulties of dissimilar
+geographic and artistic heritage and taste, of unwillingness to accept
+novelty and of interests already firmly attached to other forms of
+amusement.
+
+Dominant groups to-day are more secure in their position than was the
+most successful autocrat of several hundred years ago, because to-day
+the inertia which must be overcome in order to displace these groups
+is so much greater. So many persons with so many different points of
+view must be reached and unified before anything effective can be
+done. Unity can be secured only by finding the greatest common factor
+or divisor of all the groups; and it is difficult to find one common
+factor which will appeal to a large and unhomogeneous group.
+
+A very simple and broadly appealing campaign for reaching the public
+was undertaken recently by the railroads in combination. They utilized
+the poster in graphic, fundamental appeal to awaken an instinct of
+carefulness in regard to crossing railroad tracks. When the government
+sought to reëstablish ex-service men, the public relations counsel
+had to appeal vividly and quickly to employers and returned soldiers
+out of the vast complexity of their interests. He selected the most
+fundamental appeals of loyalty, fairness and patriotism in order to be
+understood actively.
+
+Domination to-day is not a product of armies or navies or wealth or
+policies. It is a domination based on the one hand upon accomplished
+unity, and on the other hand upon the fact that opposition is generally
+characterized by a high degree of disunity. The institution of electing
+representatives to Congress is so firmly established that no existent
+force to-day can overthrow it. More specifically, why is it that the
+two parties, Republican and Democrat, have maintained themselves as
+the dominant force for so many years? Only the leadership of Theodore
+Roosevelt seemed for a time to supersede them; and events since then
+have shown that it was Roosevelt and not his party who succeeded. The
+Farmer-Labor Party, the Socialist Party despite years of campaigning
+have failed to become even strongly recognizable opponents to the
+established groups. The disunity of forces which seek to overthrow
+dominant groups is illustrated every day in every phase of our
+lives--political, moral and economic. A new point of view, although
+faced by the difficulty of unifying a group to concerted will or
+action, can seldom establish new mediums by which to approach those
+people to whom it wishes to appeal.
+
+It is possible for advertising and pamphletizing to blanket the country
+at a cost. To establish a new lecture service in order to reach the
+public would be expensive, and effective only to a limited extent.
+To establish an independent radio station to broadcast an idea would
+be difficult and probably disproportionately expensive. To create a
+new motion picture and a distributing agency would be slow, and very
+difficult and costly, if possible at all.
+
+The difficulty of establishing and building new channels of approach
+to the public is shown best by an examination of the principal mediums
+which are available to the public relations counsel who desires to
+direct public thought to the problems of the group he represents.
+
+It is only necessary to picture the newspaper and magazine situation
+in the United States to-day to realize the difficulty of establishing
+a new medium for the representation of a point of view. Americans are
+accustomed to first-rate service from their press. They demand a high
+standard not only in the physical appearance of their newspapers but
+in the news service as well. Their daily paper must provide them with
+items of local, state and international interest and importance. In the
+complex activities of modern life, the newspaper must find and select
+the subjects which interest its readers. It must also give to its
+readers the news fresh from the making. Whatever vagueness there may be
+about the definition of news itself, one admitted constant is that it
+must be fresh.
+
+The cost of establishing a paper with a wide appeal, which will have
+the facilities of gathering news, of printing and distributing it,
+is such that groups can no longer depend upon their own organs of
+expression. The Christian Science church does not depend upon its
+admirable publication, the _Christian Science Monitor_ in order to
+reach its own and new publics. Even where the issue demands a partisan
+or class origin of a newspaper, as in the case of a political party,
+the results achieved by so expensive and laborious a step seldom
+justify it.
+
+Mr. Given in his book “Making a Newspaper,” points out the great
+expense that is attached to the publication of a large metropolitan
+daily. In proportion to their field of appeal and potential income, the
+smaller dailies undoubtedly face the same economic problems. Mr. Given
+says:[26] “Few persons not having intimate knowledge of a newspaper
+have any idea of the great amount of money required to start one, or to
+keep one running which is already established. The mechanical equipment
+and delivery service alone may demand an investment of several hundred
+thousand dollars--there is one New York paper whose mechanical
+equipment cost $1,000,000--supplies are in constant demand, and the
+salary list is a long and heavy one. For a new paper the salary list
+of the editorial department is especially formidable, as editors and
+reporters who have employment with well-established publications are
+always reluctant to change to a venture that at best is in for a rough
+voyage, and can be attracted only by high pay.
+
+“A good many of the newspapers that are started soon become memories,
+and fewer than are generally supposed are paying their own way. The
+sum of $3,000,000 would hardly suffice at the present time to equip a
+first-class newspaper establishment in New York City, issue a morning
+and an evening edition paper, build up a circulation of 75,000 for
+each, and place the establishment on a money-making basis. Run on the
+lines of those already established and possessing no extraordinary
+features to recommend them to the public, the two papers might
+continue to lose money for twenty years. When one learns that there
+are in New York business managers who are compelled to reckon with an
+average weekly expense account of nearly $50,000, he can understand
+the possibility of heavy losses. And it might be added, in contrast,
+that there are in New York newspapers which could not be bought for
+$10,000,000.”
+
+Discussing substantially the same point, Mr. Oswald Garrison Villard
+observes the narrowing down of the number of newspapers in our large
+cities and points out the imminent danger of a news monopoly in
+the United States. He says:[27] “It is the danger that newspaper
+conditions, because of the enormously increased costs and this tendency
+to monopoly, may prevent people who are actuated by passion and
+sentiment from founding newspapers, which is causing many students of
+the situation much concern. What is to be the hope for the advocates
+of new-born and unpopular reforms if they cannot have a press of their
+own, as the Abolitionists and the founders of the Republican party set
+up theirs in a remarkably short time, usually with poverty-stricken
+bank accounts?”
+
+The public relations counsel must always sub-divide the appeal of his
+subject and present it through the widest possible variety of avenues
+to the public. That these avenues must be existing avenues is both a
+limitation and an opportunity.
+
+People accept the facts which come to them through existing channels.
+They like to hear new things in accustomed ways. They have neither the
+time nor the inclination to search for facts that are not readily
+available to them. The expert, therefore, must advise first upon the
+form of action desirable for his client and secondly must utilize the
+established mediums of communication, in order to present to the public
+a point of view. This is true whether it is that of a majority or
+minority, old or new personality, institution or group which desires to
+change by modification or intensification the store of knowledge and
+the opinion of the public.
+
+The public relations counsel works with public opinion. Public opinion
+is the product of individual minds. Individual minds make up the
+group mind. And the established order of things is maintained by the
+inertia of the group. Three factors make it possible for the public
+relations counsel to overcome even this inertia. These are, first,
+the interlapping group formation of society; second, the continuous
+shifting of groups; third, the changed physical conditions to which
+groups respond. All of these are brought about by the natural inherent
+flexibility of individual human nature.
+
+Society is not divided into two groups, although it seems so to many.
+Some see modern society divided into capital and labor. The feminist
+sees the world divided into men and women. The hungry man sees the
+rich and the poor. The missionary sees the heathen and the faithful. If
+society were divided into two groups, and no more, then change could
+come about only through violent upheaval.
+
+Let us assume, for example, a society divided into capital and labor.
+It is apparent on slight inspection that capital is not a homogeneous
+group. There is a difference in point of view and in interests between
+Elbert H. Gary or John D. Rockefeller, Jr., on the one hand, and the
+small shopkeeper on the other.
+
+Occasions arise, too, upon which even in one group sharp differences
+and competitive alignments take place.
+
+In the capital group, on the tariff question, for example, the retailer
+with a net income of ten thousand dollars a year is apt to take a
+radically different position from the manufacturer with a similar
+income. In some respects the capitalist is a consumer. In other
+respects he is a worker. Many persons are at the same time workers and
+capitalists. The highly paid worker who also draws income from Liberty
+Bonds or from shares of stock in industrial corporations is an example
+of this.
+
+On the other hand, the so-called workers do not consist of a
+homogeneous group with complete identity of interests. There may be
+no difference in economic situation between manual labor and mental
+labor; yet there is a traditional difference in point of view which
+keeps these two groups far apart. Again, the narrower field of manual
+labor, the group represented by the American Federation of Labor,
+is frequently opposed in sympathies and interests to the group of
+Industrial Workers of the World. Even in the American Federation of
+Labor there are component units. The locomotive engineer, who belongs
+to one of the great brotherhoods, has different interests from the
+miner, who belongs to the United Mine Workers of America.
+
+The farmer is in a class by himself. Yet he in turn may be a tenant
+farmer or the owner of an estate or of a small patch of tillable soil.
+
+That group so vaguely called “the public” consists of all sorts and
+conditions of men, the particular kind or condition depending upon
+the point of view of the individual who is making the observation or
+classification. This is true likewise of great and small subdivisions
+of the public.
+
+The public relations counsel must take into account that many groups
+exist, and that there is a very definite interlapping of groups.
+Because of this he is enabled to utilize many types of appeal in
+reaching any one group, which he sub-divides for his purposes.
+
+The Federation for the Support of Jewish Charities recently instituted
+a campaign to raise millions of dollars for what it called its
+United Building Fund. The directors of that campaign might have
+subdivided society for their purpose into two groups, the Jewish and
+the non-Jewish group, or they might have decided that there were
+rich people who could give and poor people who could not give. But
+they realized the interlapping nature of the groups they wanted to
+reach. They analyzed these component groups closely and divided them
+into groups which had common business interests. For instance, they
+organized a group of dentists, a group of bankers, a group of real
+estate operators, a group of cloak-and-suit-house operators, a group of
+motion picture and theatrical owners and others.
+
+Through an approach to each group on the strongest appeal to which the
+members of the group as a group would respond, the charity received the
+support of the individuals who made it up. The social aspirations of
+the group, the ambitions for leadership of the group, the competitive
+desires and philanthropic tendencies of the individuals who made up
+these groups were capitalized.
+
+The interlapping nature of these groups made it possible, too, for the
+public relations counsel to reach all the individuals by appeals that
+were directed not merely to the individual as a member of the business
+group with which he was aligned, but also as a member of a different
+group. For instance, as a humanitarian, as a public-spirited citizen,
+or as a devoted Jew. Because of this interlapping characteristic of
+groups, the organization was able to accomplish its purpose more
+successfully.
+
+Society is made up of an almost infinite number of groups, whose
+various interests and desires overlap and interweave inextricably. The
+same man may be at the same time the member of a minority religious
+sect, supporter of the dominant political party, a worker in the sense
+that he earns his living primarily by his labor, and a capitalist in
+the sense that he has rents from real estate investments or interest
+from financial investments. In an issue which involves his religious
+sect he will align himself with one group. In an issue which involves
+the choice of a President of the United States he aligns himself with
+another group. In an industrial issue between capital and labor it
+might be very nearly impossible to estimate in advance how he would
+align himself. It is from the constant interplay of these groups and of
+their conflicting interests upon each other that progress results, and
+it is this fact that the public relations counsel takes into account
+in pleading his cause. A movement called “The Go-Getters,” instituted
+by a magazine, as much to keep itself before the public eye as to
+stimulate commercial activity, found rapid acceptance throughout the
+country because it appealed to trades of every description, because
+each group had among its members men who belonged also to a large
+group, the group of salesmen.
+
+Let us examine for a moment the personnel of the Horseshoe at the
+Metropolitan Opera House. It is composed of people who are rich,
+but this economic classification is only one, for the men and women
+who assemble there are presumably music lovers. But we may again
+break up this classification of music lovers and discover that
+this group contains art lovers as well. It contains sportsmen. It
+contains merchants and bankers. There are philosophers in it. There
+are motorists and amateur farmers. When the Russian Ballet came to
+America the essential parts of this group attended the performances,
+but in going after his public, the public relations counsel based his
+actions upon the interlapping of groups, and appealed to his entire
+possible audience through their various interlapping group interests.
+The art lover had been stimulated by hearing of the Ballet through
+his art group or the art publications and by seeing pictures of the
+costumes and the settings. The music lover, who might have had his
+interest stimulated through seeing a photograph, also had his interest
+stimulated by reading about the music.
+
+Every individual heard of the Russian Ballet in terms of one or more
+different appeals and responded to the Ballet because of these appeals.
+It is naturally difficult to say which one of them had its strongest
+effect upon the individual’s mind. There was no doubt, however, that
+the interlapping group formation of society made it possible for more
+to be reached and to be moved than would have been the case if the
+Ballet had been projected on the world at large only as a well-balanced
+artistic performance.
+
+The utilization of this characteristic of society was shown recently in
+the activities of a silk firm which desired to intensify the interest
+of the public in silks. It realized that fundamentally women were its
+potential buying public, but it understood, too, that the women who
+made up this public were members of other groups as well. Thus, to
+the members of women’s clubs, silk was projected as the embodiment of
+fashion. To those women who visited museums, silk was displayed there
+as art. To the schools in the same town, perhaps, silk became a lesson
+in the natural history of the silkworm. To art clubs, silk became color
+and design. To newspapers, the events that transpired in the silk
+mills became news matters of importance.
+
+Each group of women was appealed to on the basis of its greatest
+interest. The school teacher was appealed to in the schoolroom as an
+educator, and after school hours as a member of a women’s club. She
+read the advertisements about silk as a woman reader of the newspapers,
+and as a member of the women’s group which visited the museums, saw
+the silk there. The woman who stayed at home was brought into contact
+with the silk through her child. All these groups made up the potential
+market for silk, reached in this way in terms of many appeals to each
+individual. These are the implications present for the public relations
+counsel, who must take into account the interchange and interplay of
+groups in pleading his cause.
+
+For society, the interesting outcome of this situation is that progress
+seldom occurs through the abrupt expulsion by a group of its old ideas
+in favor of new ideas, but rather through the rearrangement of the
+thought of the individuals in these groups with respect to each other
+and with respect to the entire membership of society.
+
+It is precisely this interlapping of groups--the variety, the
+inconsistency of the average man’s mental, social and psychological
+commitments which makes possible the gradual change from one state
+of affairs or from one state of mind to another. Few people are life
+members of one group and of one group only. The ordinary person is a
+very temporary member of a great number of groups. This is one of the
+most powerful forces making for progress in society because it makes
+for receptivity and open-mindedness. The modification which results
+from the inconstancy of individual commitments may be accelerated
+and directed by conscious effort. These changes which come about so
+stealthily that they remain unobserved in society until long after they
+have taken place, can be made to yield results in chosen directions.
+
+Changed external conditions must be taken into account by the public
+relations counsel in his work.
+
+Such changes carry with them modifications in the interests and points
+of view of those they affect. They make it possible to modify group and
+individual reaction. The public relations counsel, too, can modify the
+results of the changed external condition by calling attention to it or
+interpreting it in terms of the interest of those affected.
+
+The radio might be taken as an example. In considering the radio from
+the standpoint of his work, the public relations counsel has a new
+medium which can readily reach huge sections of the public with his
+message. The public relations counsel must be ready to estimate, too,
+what difference in viewpoint the radio will produce or has produced in
+any given section of the public it reaches. He will have to consider,
+for instance, that due to it the average farmer is much more closely in
+contact with the world’s events than formerly.
+
+In the case of the radio, too, if his clients be, for instance, large
+manufacturers of radio supplies and demand acceleration of this changed
+external condition in order to increase their business, he may enlarge
+the radio’s field, activity and effectiveness. Or, he may stress to
+the public the importance of this new instrument and strengthen its
+prestige, so that it may better fulfill its mission as a modifier of
+conditions.
+
+Changed conditions can make possible modifications in the public point
+of view, as can be instanced by a campaign carried on by savings
+banks to encourage thrift. This campaign was successful at that time
+because inflation made it easy for the public to see the wisdom of the
+doctrines preached and to act upon them.
+
+Another example of this modification in the public point of view due to
+a changed condition was the demand made by the Executive Committee of
+the Central Trades and Labor Council of New York for the government to
+take over the railways of the country. Public ownership had been a pet
+subject for school debate for more than two decades, but it had seldom
+passed into the field of serious consideration by the general public.
+Yet the conditions of hardship created by the last strike of the
+railroad shopmen caused a much greater receptivity in the public mind
+to this idea.
+
+The airplane slowly emerges as an important factor in the daily life
+of the people. What it will mean in the psychology of the nation when
+commuters can settle within a radius of a hundred or more miles of
+cities is only to be guessed at. Cities may cease to exist except as
+industrial centers. There will be greater groups and broader interests.
+There will be fewer geographic divisions.
+
+When the automobile was first used motoring was a dangerous and
+thrilling sport. To-day it is found that the automobile has altered the
+fundamental conception of daily life held by thousands of people, both
+in the urban and the rural population. The automobile has removed much
+of the isolation of country districts. It has increased the possibility
+of education in them. It has caused millions of miles of excellent
+roads to be laid.
+
+Changed conditions can be national or local in their import and
+significance. They can be as national in scope as the revolutionary
+introduction over night of a national prohibition law or as local as a
+police captain’s edict in Coney Island against stockingless feminine
+bathers. But they must be taken into consideration by the public
+relations counsel in his work if they concern in the slightest degree
+his particular public.
+
+The basic elements of human nature are fixed as to desires and
+instincts and innate tendencies. The directions, however, in which
+these basic elements may be turned by skillful handling are infinite.
+Human nature is readily subject to modification. Many psychologists
+have attempted to define the component parts of human nature, and while
+their terminology is not the same, they do follow more or less the same
+general outlines.
+
+Among the universal instincts are--self-preservation, which includes
+the desire for shelter, sex hunger and food hunger. It is only
+necessary to look through the pages of any magazine to see the way
+in which modern business avails itself of these three fundamentals
+to exert a coercive force upon the public it is trying to reach. The
+American Radiator advertisement with its cozy home, the family gathered
+around the radiator, the storm raging outside, definitely makes its
+appeal to the universal desire for shelter.
+
+The Gulden Mustard advertisements with their graphic delineation of
+cold cuts and an inviting glass of what is presumably near-beer
+definitely appeal to our gustatory sense.
+
+As for the sex appeal, the soap advertisements run a veritable race
+with these ends in view. Woodbury’s “the skin you love to touch” is a
+graphic illustration.
+
+The instinct of self-preservation, one of the most basic of human
+instincts, is most flexible. The dispensers of raisins, upon the
+advice of an expert on public opinion, adopted a slogan to appeal
+to this instinct: “Have you had your iron to-day?”--iron presumably
+strengthening a man and increasing his powers of resistance. The same
+man appealed to here will respond to the sales talk which persuades him
+that insurance may save him at a time of need.
+
+An important hair-net manufacturer wanted to increase the sales of
+his product. The public relations counsel, therefore, appealed to the
+instinct of self-preservation of large groups of the public. He talked
+of self-preservation with respect to hygiene for food dispensers. He
+talked of self-preservation with respect to safety for women who work
+near exposed machinery.
+
+The same instinct of preservation which may cause a worker to give up
+necessary food so that he may save a little money will cause him to
+contribute money to a common fund if he can be shown that this too is a
+safety measure.
+
+The public relations counsel extracts from his clients’ causes ideas
+which will capitalize certain fundamental instincts in the people he
+is trying to reach, and then sets about to project these ideas to his
+public.
+
+William MacDougall, the psychologist, classifies seven
+primary instincts with their attendant emotions. They
+are flight-fear, repulsion-disgust, curiosity-wonder,
+pugnacity-anger, self-display-elation, self-abasement-subjection,
+parental-love-tenderness. These instincts are utilized by the public
+relations counsel in developing ideas and emotions which will modify
+the opinions and actions of his public.
+
+The action of public health officials in stressing the possibility of
+a plague or epidemic is effective because it appeals to the emotion
+of fear, and presents the possibility of preventing the spread of the
+epidemic or plague. Of course, the element of flight in this particular
+situation is not one of movement, but of a desire to get away from the
+danger.
+
+The instinct of repulsion with its attendant emotion of disgust is not
+often called upon by the public relations counsel in his work.
+
+On the other hand, curiosity and wonder are continually employed. In
+Governmental work, particularly, the statesman who has an announcement
+to make is continually exhausting every effort to arouse public
+interest in advance of the actual announcement. Feelers are often sent
+out to the public to help create curiosity.
+
+It is interesting to note, too, that even book publishers rely upon the
+element of wonder, termed suspense in drama, to increase their public
+and their sales. Our now famous “What is wrong with this picture?”
+advertisements, and those used for the O. Henry books illustrate this
+point.
+
+Pugnacity with its attendant emotion of anger is a human constant.
+The public relations counsel uses this continually in constructing
+all kinds of events that will call it into play. Because of it, too,
+he is often forced to enact combats and create issues. He stages
+battles against evils in which the antagonist is personified for
+the public. New York City, when it wants to reduce the death rate
+from tuberculosis, aligns its citizens yearly in a fight against the
+disease and continues the idea of combat by announcing the number of
+victims from year to year. It uses the terminology of warfare in these
+bulletins. Such phrases in this or other health campaigns as “kill the
+germs,” “swat the fly,” illustrate this point. The public responds to
+a battle in a way that it might not respond to a plea to take care of
+itself or to do its civic duty.
+
+Under pugnacity would come that technique of the public relations
+counsel which is continually devising tests and contests. Mr. Martin,
+in his experience as director of the Cooper Union Forum, noticed that
+the sort of interest which will most easily bring an assemblage of
+people together is most commonly an issue of some kind.
+
+On the one hand, says Mr. Martin:[28] “I have seen efforts made in New
+York to hold mass meetings to discuss affairs of the very greatest
+importance, and I have noted the fact that such efforts usually fail
+to get out more than a handful of specially interested persons, no
+matter how well advertised, if the subject to be considered happens
+not to be of a controversial nature. On the other hand, if the matter
+to be considered is one about which there is keen partisan feeling and
+popular resentment--if it lends itself to the spectacular personal
+achievement of one whose name is known, especially in the face of
+opposition or difficulties--or if the occasion permits of resolutions
+of protest, of the airing of wrongs, of denouncing a business of some
+kind, or of casting statements of external principles in the teeth of
+‘enemies of humanity,’ then, however trivial the occasion, we may count
+on it that our meeting will be well attended.
+
+“It is this element of conflict, directly or indirectly, which plays
+an overwhelming part in the psychology of every crowd. It is the
+element of contest which makes baseball so popular. A debate will
+draw a larger crowd than a lecture. One of the secrets of the large
+attendance of the forum is the fact that discussion--‘talking back’--is
+permitted and encouraged. The Evangelist Sunday undoubtedly owes the
+great attendance at his meetings in no small degree to the fact that he
+is regularly expected to abuse some one.
+
+“Nothing so easily catches general attention and creates a crowd as a
+contest of any kind. The crowd unconsciously identifies its members
+with one or the other competitor. Success enables the winning crowd
+to ‘crow’ over the losers. Such an occasion becomes symbolic and is
+utilized by the ego to enhance its feeling of importance.”
+
+The public relations counsel finds in the instinct of pugnacity a
+powerful weapon for enlisting public support for or public opposition
+to a point of view in which he is interested. On this principle, he
+will, whenever possible, state his case in the form of an issue and
+enlist, in support of his side, such forces as are available.
+
+The dangers of the method must be recognized and borne in mind.
+Pugnacity can be enlisted on the side of decency and progress. He who
+looks at it from that point of view will agree with Mr. Pulitzer,
+the great publisher, that it seems neither extraordinary nor culpable
+that “people and press should be more interested in the polemical than
+in the platitudinous; in blame than in painting the lily; in attack
+than in sending laudatory coals to Newcastle.” On the other hand, the
+instinct of pugnacity can be utilized to suppress and to oppress. From
+the point of view of the public relations counsel, who is interested
+from day to day in accomplishing definite results on specific issues,
+the dangers of the method are only the ordinary dangers of every
+weapon, physical or psychological, which has been devised.
+
+It is interesting in this connection to note that a newspaper uses
+the same methods to encourage interest in itself as do others. The
+_New York Times_ promoted public interest in heavier-than-air-machines
+by creating sporting issues of contests between aviators on altitude
+records, continuous stays in the air, distance flying and so forth.
+
+Mr. Lippmann comments on this same characteristic:
+
+“But where pugnacity is not enlisted, those of us who are not directly
+involved find it hard to keep up our interest. For those who are
+involved the absorption may be real enough to hold them even when no
+issue is involved. They may be exercised by sheer joy in activity or
+by subtle rivalry or invention. But for those to whom the whole problem
+is external and distant, these other faculties do not easily come into
+play. In order that the faint image of the affair shall mean something
+to them, they must be allowed to exercise the love of struggle,
+suspense, and victory.”[29]
+
+We have to take sides. We have to be able to take sides. In the
+recesses of our being we must step out of the audience onto the stage
+and wrestle as the hero for the victory of good over evil. We must
+breathe into the allegory the breath of our life.
+
+Recently a philanthropic group was advised to hold a prize fight
+for charity. This recognition of the importance of the principle of
+pugnacity was correct. It is a question whether the application was
+not somewhat ill advised and in bad taste. The Consumer’s Committee
+of Women opposed to American Valuation was avowedly aligned to fight
+against a section of the tariff presented by Chairman Fordney. The Lucy
+Stone League, a group who wish to make it easy for married women to
+maintain their maiden names, dramatized the fight that they are making
+against tradition by staging a debate at their annual banquet.
+
+Very often the public relations counsel utilizes the
+self-display-elation motive and draws public attention to particular
+people in groups, in order to give them a greater interest in the
+work they are espousing. It is often found to be true that when a
+man’s adherence or allegiance to a movement is lukewarm and he is
+publicly praised for his adherence to it, he will become a forceful
+factor in it. That is why the intelligent hospital boards name rooms
+or beds after their donors. It is one of the reasons for the elaborate
+letterheads so many of our philanthropic organizations have.
+
+Self-abasement and subjection, its attendant emotion, are seldom called
+upon. On the other hand, parental love and tenderness are continually
+employed, viz., the effort of the baby-kissing candidate for public
+office or the attempt to popularize a brand of silk by having a child
+present a silk flag to a war veteran at a public ceremony. The whole
+flood of post-war charity-drives was keyed to this pitch. The starving
+Belgian orphan personified in every picture, the starving Armenian, and
+then the hungry Austrian and German orphans appeared, and the campaigns
+all succeeded on this issue. Even issues where the child was not the
+predominant factor used this appeal.
+
+Four other instincts are listed in this
+classification--gregariousness, individualism, acquisition and
+construction. We have already dealt with the first at length.
+
+The gregarious instinct in man gives the public relations counsel
+the opportunity for his most potent work. The group and herd show
+everywhere the leader, who because of certain qualifications, certain
+points that are judged by the herd to be important to its life, stands
+out and is followed more or less implicitly by it.
+
+A group leader gains such power with his group or herd that even on
+matters which have had nothing to do with the establishment or gaining
+of that leadership he is considered a leader and is followed by his
+group.
+
+It is this attribute of men and women that again gives the public
+relations counsel free play.
+
+A group leader of any given cause will bring to a new cause all those
+who have looked to his leadership. For instance, if the adherence
+of a prominent Republican is secured for the League of Nations, his
+adherence will probably bring to the League of Nations many other
+prominent Republicans.
+
+The group leadership with which the public relations counsel may work
+is limited only by the character of the groups he desires to reach.
+After an analysis of his problem the subdivisions must be made. His
+action depends upon his selective capacity, and the possibility of
+approach to the leaders. These leaders may represent therefore a wide
+variety of interests--society leaders or leaders of political groups,
+leaders of women or leaders of sportsmen, leaders of divisions by
+geography, or divisions by age, divisions by language or by education.
+These subdivisions are so numerous that there are large companies in
+the United States whose business it is to supply lists of groups and
+group leaders in different fields.
+
+This same mechanism is carried out in many other cases. In looking for
+group leaders, the public relations counsel must realize that some
+leaders have more varied and more intensified authority than others.
+One leader may represent the ideals and ideas of several or numerous
+groups. His coöperation on one basis may bring into alignment and may
+carry with it the other groups who are interested in him primarily for
+other reasons.
+
+The public relations counsel, let us say, enlists the support of a
+man, president of two associations; (a) an economic association, (b)
+a welfare association. The issue is an economic one, purely. But
+because of his leadership, the membership of association (b), that
+is, the welfare group, joins him in the movement as interestedly as
+association (a) does, which has the more logical, direct reason for
+entering the field.
+
+I have given this in general terms rather than as a specific instance.
+The principle which governs the interlapping and continually shifting
+group formation of society also governs the gregariousness.
+
+Individualism, another instinct, is a concomitant of gregariousness,
+and naturally follows it. The desire for individual expression is
+always a trait of the individuals who go to make up the group. The
+appeal to individualism goes closely in hand with other instincts, such
+as self-display.
+
+The instincts of acquisition and construction are minor instincts as
+far as the ordinary work of the public relations counsel is concerned.
+Examples of this type of appeal come readily to mind in the “Own your
+own home” and “Build your own home” campaigns.
+
+The innate tendencies are susceptibility to suggestion, imitation,
+habit and play. Susceptibility to suggestion and imitation might well
+be classified under gregariousness, which we have already discussed.
+
+Under habit would come one very important human trait of which the
+public relations counsel avails himself continually. The mechanism
+which habit produces and which makes it possible for the public
+relations counsel to use habit is the stereotype we have already
+touched upon.
+
+Mental habits create stereotypes just as physical habits create certain
+definite reflex actions. These stereotypes or reflex images are a great
+aid to the public relations counsel in his work.
+
+These short-cuts to reactions make it possible for the average mind
+to possess a much larger number of impressions than would be possible
+without them. At the same time these stereotypes or _clichés_ are not
+necessarily truthful pictures of what they are supposed to portray.
+They are determined by the outward stimuli to which the individual has
+been subject as well as by the content of his mind.
+
+To most of us, for example, the stereotype of the general is a stern,
+upright gentleman in uniform and with gold braid, preferably on a
+horse. The stereotype of a farmer is a slouching, overall-clad man
+with straw sticking out of his mouth and a straw hat on his head. He
+is supposed to be very shrewd when it comes to matters of his own farm
+and very ignorant when it comes to matters of culture. He despises
+“city fellers.” All this is the connotation brought up by the one word
+“farmer.”
+
+The public relations counsel sometimes uses the current stereotypes,
+sometimes combats them and sometimes creates new ones. In using them
+he very often brings to the public he is reaching a stereotype they
+already know, to which he adds his new ideas, thus he fortifies his
+own and gives a greater carrying power. For instance, the public
+relations counsel might well advise Austria, which in the public mind
+might still represent a belligerent country, to bring forward other
+Austrian stereotypes, namely the Danube waltz stereotype and the Danube
+blue stereotype. An appeal for help would then come from the country
+of the well-liked Danube waltz and Danube blue--the country of gayety
+and charm. The new idea would be carried to those who accepted the
+stereotypes they were familiar with.
+
+The combating of the stereotype is seen in the battle waged against
+the American Valuation Plan by the public relations counsel. The
+formulators of the plan dubbed it “American Valuation” in order to
+capitalize on the stereotype of “American.” In fighting the plan, its
+opponents put the word “American” in quotation marks whenever reference
+was made to the subject in order to question the authenticity of the
+use of this stereotype. Thus patriotism was definitely removed from
+what was evidently an economical and political issue.
+
+The public relations counsel creates new stereotypes. Roosevelt, his
+own best adviser, was an apt creator of such stereotypes--“square
+deal, de-lighted, molly-coddle, big stick,” created new concepts for
+general acceptance.
+
+Stereotypes sometimes become shop-worn and lose their power with the
+public that has previously accepted them. “Hundred per cent American”
+died from over use.
+
+Visible objects as stereotypes are often used by the public relations
+counsel with great effectiveness to produce the desired impression.
+A national flag on the orator’s platform is a most common device. A
+scientist must of necessity be in juxtaposition with his instruments.
+A chemist is not a chemist to the public unless test tubes and
+retorts are near him. A doctor must have his kit, or, formerly, a
+Van Dyke beard. In photographs of food factory buildings white is a
+good stereotype for cleanliness and purity. In fact, all emblems and
+trade-marks are stereotypes.
+
+There is one danger in the use of stereotypes by the public relations
+counsel. That is, by the substitution of words for acts, demagogues in
+every field of social relationship can take advantage of the public.
+
+Play as an innate tendency is utilized by the public relations counsel
+whenever conditions merit such an appeal. When a charity committee is
+advised to institute a street fair to gather money, the committee is
+recognizing this tendency. When a city government arranges fireworks
+for its citizens, when a metropolitan news-daily stages marble contests
+or horseshoe pitching events, the play tendency of human society finds
+an outlet and the initiators of the event find friends.
+
+On the question of specific devices upon which the public relations
+counsel relies to accomplish his ends, volumes could probably be
+written without exhausting the subject. The detailed presentation
+is potentially endless. Pages could be filled with instances of the
+stimuli to which men and women respond, the circumstances under
+which they will respond favorably or unfavorably, and the particular
+application of each of these stimuli to concrete conditions. Such
+an outline, however, would have less value than an outline of
+fundamentals, since circumstances are never the same.
+
+These principles, by and large, consist of fundamentals already
+defined, to which the public relations counsel has recourse in common
+with the statesman, the journalist, the preacher, the lecturer and all
+others engaged in attempting to modify public opinion or public conduct.
+
+How does the public relations counsel approach any particular problem?
+First he must analyze his client’s problem and his client’s objective.
+Then he must analyze the public he is trying to reach. He must devise a
+plan of action for the client to follow and determine the methods and
+the organs of distribution available for reaching his public. Finally
+he must try to estimate the interaction between the public he seeks
+to reach and his client. How will his client’s case strike the public
+mind? And by public mind here is meant that section or those sections
+of the public which must be reached.
+
+Let us take the example of a public relations counsel who is confronted
+with the specific problem of modifying or influencing the attitude
+of the public toward a given tariff bill. A tariff bill, of course,
+is primarily the application of theoretical economics to a concrete
+industrial situation. The public relations counsel in analyzing must
+see himself simultaneously as a member of a large number of publics. He
+must visualize himself as a manufacturer, a retailer, an importer, an
+employer, a worker, a financier, a politician.
+
+Within these groups he must see himself again as a member of the
+various subdivisions of each of these groups. He must see himself, for
+example, as a member of a group of manufacturers who obtain the bulk of
+their raw material within the United States, and at the same time as a
+member of a group of manufacturers who obtain large portions of their
+raw material from abroad and whose importations of raw material may be
+adversely affected by the pending tariff bill. He must see himself not
+only as a farm laborer but also as a mechanic in a large industrial
+center. He must see himself as the owner of the department store and as
+a member of the buying public. He must be able to generalize, as far as
+possible, from these points of view in order to strike upon the appeal
+or group of appeals which will be influential with as many sections of
+society as possible.[30]
+
+Let us assume that our problem is the intensification in the public
+mind of the prestige of a hotel. The problem for the public relations
+counsel is to create in the public mind the close relationship between
+the hotel and a number of ideas that represent the things the hotel
+desires to stand for in the public mind.
+
+The counsel therefore advises the hotel to make a celebration of its
+thirtieth anniversary which happens to fall at this particular time
+and suggests to the president the organization of an anniversary
+committee of a body of business men who represent the cream of the
+city’s merchants. This committee is to include men who represent a
+number of stereotypes that will help to produce the inevitable result
+in the public mind. There are to be also a leading banker, a society
+woman, a prominent lawyer, an influential preacher, and so forth until
+a cross section of the city’s most telling activities is mirrored in
+the committee. The stereotype has its effect, and what may have been an
+indefinite impression beforehand has been reënforced and concretized.
+The hotel remains preëminent in the public mind. The stereotypes have
+proved its preëminence. The cause has been strongly presented to the
+public by identification with different group stereotypes.
+
+Here is another example. A packing company desires to establish in the
+public mind the fact that the name of its product is synonymous with
+bacon. Its public relations counsel advises a contest on “Bring home
+the Beech-Nut,” the contest to be open to salesmen and to be based on
+the best sale made by salesmen throughout the country during the month
+of August. But here again it is necessary to use a stereotype to help
+the possible contestant identify the cause. A committee of nationally
+known sales-managers is chosen to act as judges for the contest and
+immediately success is assured. Thousands of salesmen compete for the
+prize. The stereotype has bespoken the value of the contest.
+
+The public relations counsel can try to bring about this identification
+by utilizing the appeals to desires and instincts discussed in the
+preceding chapter, and by making use of the characteristics of the
+group formation of society. His utilization of these basic principles
+will be a continual and efficient aid to him.
+
+He must make it easy for the public to pick his issue out of the great
+mass of material. He must be able to overcome what has been called “the
+tendency on the part of public attention to ‘flicker’ and ‘relax.’” He
+must do for the public mind what the newspaper, with its headlines,
+accomplishes for its readers.
+
+Abstract discussions and heavy facts are the groundwork of his involved
+theory, or analysis, but they cannot be given to the public until
+they are simplified and dramatized. The refinements of reason and the
+shadings of emotion cannot reach a considerable public.
+
+When an appeal to the instincts can be made so powerful as to secure
+acceptance in the medium of dissemination in spite of competitive
+interests, it can be aptly termed news.
+
+The public relations counsel, therefore, is a creator of news for
+whatever medium he chooses to transmit his ideas. It is his duty to
+create news no matter what the medium which broadcasts this news.
+It is news interest which gives him an opportunity to make his idea
+travel and get the favorable reaction from the instincts to which he
+happens to appeal. News in itself we shall define later on when we
+discuss “relations with the press.” But the word news is sufficiently
+understood for me to talk of it here.
+
+In order to appeal to the instincts and fundamental emotions of the
+public, discussed in previous chapters, the public relations counsel
+must create news around his ideas. News will, by its superior inherent
+interest, receive attention in the competitive markets for news, which
+are themselves continually trying to claim the public attention. The
+public relations counsel must lift startling facts from his whole
+subject and present them as news. He must isolate ideas and develop
+them into events so that they can be more readily understood and so
+that they may claim attention as news.
+
+The headline and the cartoon bear the same relation to the newspaper
+that the public relations counsel’s analysis of a problem bears to the
+problem itself.
+
+The headline is a compact, vivid simplification of complicated issues.
+The cartoon provides a visual image which takes the place of abstract
+thought. So, too, the analyses the public relations counsel makes,
+lift out the important, the interesting, and the easily understandable
+points in order to create interest.
+
+“Yet human qualities are themselves,” says Mr. Lippmann,[31] “vague and
+fluctuating. They are best remembered by a physical sign. And therefore
+the human qualities we tend to ascribe to the names of our impressions,
+themselves tend to be visualized in physical metaphors. The people of
+England, the history of England, condense into England, and England
+becomes John Bull, who is jovial and fat, not too clever, but well able
+to take care of himself. The migration of a people may appear to some
+as a meandering of a river, and to others like a devastating flood. The
+courage people display may be objectified as a rock, their purpose as
+a road, their doubts as forks of the road, their difficulties as ruts
+and rocks, their progress as a fertile valley. If they mobilize their
+dreadnaughts they unsheath a sword. If their army surrenders they are
+thrown to earth. If they are oppressed they are on the rack or under
+the harrow.”
+
+Perhaps the chief contribution of the public relations counsel to the
+public and to his client is his ability to understand and analyze
+obscure tendencies of the public mind. It is true that he first
+analyzes his client’s problem--he then analyzes the public mind; he
+utilizes the mediums of communication between the two, but before he
+does this he must use his personal experience and knowledge to bring
+two factors into alignment. It is his capacity for crystallizing the
+obscure tendencies of the public mind before they have reached definite
+expression, which makes him so valuable.
+
+His ability to create those symbols to which the public is ready to
+respond; his ability to know and to analyze those reactions which
+the public is ready to give; his ability to find those stereotypes,
+individual and community, which will bring favorable responses; his
+ability to speak in the language of his audience and to receive from it
+a favorable reception are his contributions.
+
+The appeal to the instincts and the universal desires is the basic
+method through which he produces his results.
+
+When the question of preparing and publishing this volume was first
+considered, the publishers wrote letters to several hundred prominent
+men asking their opinions, individually, as to the probable public
+interest in a work dealing with public relations. Newspaper editors and
+publishers, heads of large industries and public service corporations,
+philanthropists, university presidents and heads of schools of
+journalism, as well as other prominent men made up the number. Their
+replies are exceedingly interesting in as much as they show, almost
+uniformly, the increasing emphasis placed upon public relations by
+leaders in every important phase of American life. These replies show
+also a growing understanding of the need for specialized service in
+this field of specialized problems.
+
+Particularly interesting were the comments of newspaper publishers
+and editors in response to Mr. Liveright’s inquiry, for nothing could
+better indicate the light in which the public relations counsel is held
+by those very individuals who are supposed popularly to disparage his
+value in the social and economic scheme of things.
+
+What are the relations of the public relations counsel to the various
+mediums he can employ to carry his message to the public? There is,
+of course, first and perhaps most important, the press. There is the
+moving picture; the lecture platform; there is advertising; there is
+the direct-by-mail effort; there is the stage--drama and music; there
+is word of mouth; there is the pulpit, the schoolroom, the legislative
+chamber--to all of these the public relations counsel has distinct
+relationship.
+
+The journalist of to-day, while still watching the machinations of the
+so-called “press agent” with one half-amused eye, appreciates the value
+of the service the public relations counsel is able to give him.
+
+To the newspaper the public relations counsel serves as a purveyor of
+news.
+
+As disseminator of news the newspaper holds an important position in
+American life. This has not always been the case, for the emphasis upon
+the news side is a development of recent years. Originally, the name
+newspaper was scarcely an accurate or appropriate designation for
+the units of the American press. So-called newspapers were, in fact,
+vehicles for the expression of opinion of their editors. They contained
+little or no news, as that word is understood to-day--largely because
+difficulties of communication made it impossible to obtain any but the
+most local items of interest. The public was accustomed to look to its
+press for the opinion of its favorite editor upon subjects of current
+interest rather than for the recital of mere facts.
+
+To-day, on the other hand, the expression of editorial opinion is only
+secondarily the function of a newspaper; and thousands of persons read
+newspapers with whose editorial policy they do not in the slightest
+agree. Such a situation would have been nearly impossible in the days
+of Horace Greeley.
+
+The need which the American press is to-day engaged in satisfying is
+the need for news. “A paper,” says Mr. Given,[32] “may succeed without
+printing editorials worth reading and without having any aim other than
+the making of money, but it cannot possibly thrive unless it gets the
+news and prints it in a pleasing and attractive form.”
+
+Writing from a long experience with the profession of journalism,
+Will Irwin reaches the conclusion that[33] “news is the main thing,
+the vital consideration of the American newspaper; it is both an
+intellectual craving and a commercial need to the modern world. In
+popular psychology it has come to be a crying primal want of the mind,
+like hunger of the body. Tramp windjammers, taking on the pilot after
+a long cruise, ask for the papers before they ask, as formerly, for
+fresh fruit and vegetables. Whenever, in our later Western advance,
+we Americans set up a new mining camp, an editor, his type slung
+on burro-back, comes in with the missionaries, evangel himself of
+civilization. Most dramatically the San Francisco disaster illuminated
+this point. On the morning of April 20, 1906, the city’s population
+huddled in parks and squares, their houses gone, death of famine or
+thirst a rumor and a possibility. The editors of the three morning
+newspapers, expressing the true soldier spirit which inspires this most
+devoted profession, had moved their staffs to the suburb of Oakland,
+and there, on the presses of the _Tribune_, they had issued a combined
+_Call-Chronicle-Examiner_. When, at dawn, the paper was printed, an
+editor and a reporter loaded the edition into an automobile and drove
+it through the parks of the disordered city, giving copies away. They
+were fairly mobbed, they had to drive at top speed, casting out the
+sheets as they went, to make any progress at all. No bread wagon, no
+supply of blankets, caused half so much stir as did the arrival of the
+news.
+
+“We need it, we crave it; this nerve of the modern world transmits
+thought and impulse from the brain of humanity to its muscles; the
+complex organism of modern society could no more move without it than
+a man could move without filaments and ganglia. On the commercial
+and practical side, the man of even small affairs must read news
+in the newspapers every day to keep informed on the thousand and
+one activities in the social structure which affect his business.
+On the intellectual and spiritual side, it is--save for the Church
+alone--our principal outlook on the higher intelligence. The thought
+of legislature, university, study, and pulpit comes to the common man
+first--and usually last--in the form of news. The tedious business of
+teaching reading in public schools has become chiefly a training to
+consume newspapers. We must go far up in the scale of culture before we
+find an intellectual equipment more a debtor to the formal education of
+school and college than to the haphazard education of news.”
+
+The extent to which the editorial aspect of the newspaper has given way
+to an increased importance of the news columns is vividly illustrated
+in the anecdote about the _Philadelphia North American_, which Mr.
+Irwin relates. “The _North American_,” says Mr. Irwin, “had declared
+for local option. A committee of brewers waited on the editor; they
+represented one of the biggest groups in their business. ‘This is
+an ultimatum,’ they said. ‘You must change your policy or lose our
+advertising. We’ll be easy on you. We don’t ask you to alter your
+editorial policy, _but you must stop printing news of local-option
+victories_.’[34] So the deepest and shrewdest enemies of the body
+politic give practical testimony to the ‘power of the press’ in its
+modern form.”
+
+In the case of the brewers of Philadelphia it is my own opinion that
+if they had been well advised, instead of attempting to interfere with
+the policy of the _North American_, they would have made it a point to
+bring to the attention of the _North American_ every instance of the
+defeat of local option. The newspaper would undoubtedly have published
+both sides of the story, as far as both sides consisted of news.
+
+It is because he acts as the purveyor of truthful, accurate
+and verifiable news to the press that the conscientious and
+successful counsel on public relations is looked upon with favor
+by the journalist. And in the Code of Ethics recently adopted in
+Washington by a national editors’ conference, his function is given
+acknowledgment. Just as in the case of the other mediums for the
+dissemination of information, mediums which range from the lecture
+platform to the radio, the press, too, looks to the public relations
+counsel for information about the causes he represents.
+
+Since news is the newspaper’s backbone, it is obvious that an
+understanding of what news actually is must be an integral part of the
+equipment of the public relations counsel. For the public relations
+counsel must not only supply news--he must create news. This function
+as the creator of news is even more important than his others.
+
+It has always been interesting to me that a concise, comprehensive
+definition of news has never been written. What news is, every
+newspaper man instinctively knows, particularly as it concerns the
+needs of his own paper. But it is almost as difficult to define news
+as it is to describe a circular staircase without making corkscrew
+gestures with one’s hand, or as to define some of the abstruse concepts
+of the metaphysician, like space or time or reality.
+
+What is news for one newspaper may have no interest whatever, or very
+little interest, for another newspaper. There are almost as many
+definitions of news as there are journalists who take the trouble
+to define it. Certain of the characteristics of news, of course, can
+be readily seized upon; and definitions of news generally consist of
+particular emphasis upon one or another of these characteristics. Mr.
+Given remarks that[35] “news was once defined as ‘Fresh information
+of something that has lately taken place.’...” The author of this
+definition puts the chief emphasis upon the element of timeliness.
+Undoubtedly in most news that element must be present. It would not be
+true, however, to say that it must always be present, nor would it be
+true to say that everything which is timely is news. Obviously, the
+well-nigh infinite number of occurrences which take place in daily life
+throughout the world are timely enough, so far as each of them in its
+respective environment is concerned; but few of them ever become news.
+
+Mr. Irwin defines news as “a departure from the established order.”
+Thus, according to Mr. Irwin, a criminal act is news because it is
+a departure from the established order, and at the same time, an
+exceptional display of fidelity, courage or honesty is also news for
+the same reason.
+
+“With our education in established order, we get the knowledge,” he
+says,[36] “that mankind in bulk obeys its ideals of that order only
+imperfectly. When something brings to our attention an exceptional
+adhesion to religion, virtue, and truth, that becomes in itself a
+departure from regularity, and therefore news. The knowledge that most
+servants do their work conscientiously and many stay long in the same
+employ is not news. But when a committee of housewives presents a
+medal to a servant who has worked faithfully in one employ for fifty
+years, that becomes news, because it calls our attention to a case of
+exceptional fidelity to the ideals of established order. The fact that
+mankind will consume an undue amount of news about crime and disorder
+is only a proof that the average human being is optimistic, that he
+believes the world to be true, sound and working upward. Crimes and
+scandals interest him most because they most disturb his picture of the
+established order.
+
+“That, then, is the basis of news. The mysterious news sense which
+is necessary to all good reporters rests on no other foundation
+than acquired or instinctive perception of this principle, together
+with a feeling for what the greatest number of people will regard
+as a departure from the established order. In Jesse Lynch William’s
+newspaper play, ‘The Stolen Story,’ occurs this passage:
+
+    “(_Enter Very Young Reporter; comes down to city desk with air
+    of excitement._)
+
+    “VERY YOUNG REPORTER (_considerably impressed_): ‘Big story.
+    Three dagoes killed by that boiler explosion!’
+
+    “THE CITY EDITOR (_reading copy. Doesn’t look up_): ‘Ten
+    lines.’ (_Continues reading copy._)
+
+    “VERY YOUNG REPORTER (_looks surprised and hurt. Crosses over
+    to reporter’s table. Then turns back to city desk. Casual
+    conversational tone_): ‘By the way. Funny thing. There was a
+    baby carriage within fifty feet of the explosion, but it wasn’t
+    upset.’
+
+    “THE CITY EDITOR (_looks up with professional interest_):
+    ‘That’s worth a dozen dead dagoes. Write a half column.’
+
+    “(_Very Young Reporter looks still more surprised, perplexed.
+    Suddenly the idea dawns upon him. He crosses over to table,
+    sits down, writes._)
+
+“Both saw news; but the editor went further than the reporter. For
+cases of Italians killed by a boiler explosion are so common as to
+approach the commonplace; but a freak of explosive chemistry which
+annihilates a strong man and does not disturb a baby departs from it
+widely.”
+
+Here again it is clear that Mr. Irwin has merely emphasized one of the
+features generally to be found in what we call news, without, however,
+offering us a complete or exclusive definition of news.
+
+Analyzing further within his general rule that news is a departure
+from the established order, Mr. Irwin goes on to point out certain
+outstanding factors which enhance or create news value. I cite them
+here because all of them are unquestionably sound. On the other hand,
+analysis shows that some of them are directly contradictory to his main
+principle that only the departure from the established order is news.
+In Mr. Irwin’s opinion, the four outstanding factors making for the
+creation or enhancement of news value are the following:[37]
+
+    1. “_We prefer to read about the things we like._” The result,
+    he says, has been the rule: “Power for the men, affections for
+    the women.”
+
+    2. “_Our interest in news increases in direct ratio to our
+    familiarity with its subject, its setting, and its dramatis
+    personæ._”
+
+    3. “_Our interest in news is in direct ratio to its effect on
+    our personal concerns._”
+
+    4. “_Our interest in news increases in direct ratio to the
+    general importance of the persons or activities which it
+    affects._” This is so obvious that it scarcely needs comment.
+
+Some notion of the diversity of news arising in a city may be obtained
+if one studies the points which are watched as news sources, either
+continuously or closely by metropolitan dailies. Mr. Given[38] lists
+the places in New York which are watched constantly:
+
+    “Police Headquarters.
+
+    Police Courts.
+
+    Coroner’s Office.
+
+    Supreme Courts, New York County.
+
+    New York Stock Exchange.
+
+    City Hall, including the Mayor’s Office, Aldermanic Chamber,
+    City Clerk’s Office, and Office of the President of Manhattan
+    Borough.
+
+    County Clerk’s office.”
+
+Those places, says Mr. Given, which the newspapers watch carefully, but
+not continually, are:
+
+    “City Courts (Minor civil cases).
+
+    Court of General Sessions (Criminal cases).
+
+    Court of Special Sessions (Minor criminal cases).
+
+    District Attorney’s Office.
+
+    Doors of Grand Jury rooms when the Grand Jury is in session
+    (For indictments and presentments).
+
+    Federal Courts.
+
+    Post Office.
+
+    United States Commissioner’s Offices, and Offices of the United
+    States Secret Service officers.
+
+    United States Marshal’s Office.
+
+    United States District Attorney’s Office.
+
+    Ship News, where incoming and outgoing vessels are reported.
+
+    Barge Office, where immigrants land.
+
+    Surrogate’s Office, where wills are filed and testimony
+    concerning wills in litigation is heard.
+
+    Political Headquarters during campaigns.”
+
+Finally, “the following are visited by the reporters several times, or
+only once a day:
+
+    “Police Stations.
+
+    Municipal Courts.
+
+    Board of Health Headquarters.
+
+    Fire Department Headquarters.
+
+    Park Department Headquarters.
+
+    Building Department Headquarters.
+
+    Tombs Prison.
+
+    County Jail.
+
+    United States Sub-treasury.
+
+    Office of Collector of the Port.
+
+    United States Appraiser’s Office.
+
+    Public Hospitals.
+
+    Leading Hotels.
+
+    The Morgue.
+
+    County Sheriff’s Office.
+
+    City Comptroller’s Office.
+
+    City Treasurer’s Office.
+
+    Offices of the Tax Collector and Tax Assessors.”
+
+Mr. Given’s example of the broker, John Smith, illustrates aptly the
+point I am making. “For ten years,” said Mr. Given,[39] “he pursues
+the even tenor of his way and except for his customers and his friends
+no one gives him a thought. To the newspapers he is as if he were not.
+But in the eleventh year he suffers heavy losses and, at last, his
+resources all gone, summons his lawyer and arranges for the making of
+an assignment. The lawyer posts off to the County Clerk’s office, and
+a clerk there makes the necessary entries in the office docket. Here
+in step the newspapers. While the clerk is writing Smith’s business
+obituary, a reporter glances over his shoulder, and a few minutes
+later the newspapers know Smith’s troubles and are as well informed
+concerning his business status as they would be had they kept a
+reporter at his door every day for over ten years. Had Smith dropped
+dead instead of merely making an assignment his name would have
+reached the newspapers by way of the Coroner’s office instead of the
+County Clerk’s office, and in fact, while Smith did not know it, the
+newspapers were prepared and ready for him no matter what he did. They
+even had representatives waiting for him at the Morgue. He was safe
+only when he walked the straight and narrow path and kept quiet.”
+
+An overt act is often necessary before an event can be regarded as news.
+
+Commenting on this aspect of the situation, Mr. Lippmann discusses
+this very example of the broker, John Smith, and his hypothetical
+bankruptcy. “That overt act,” says Mr. Lippmann,[40] “‘uncovers’ the
+news about Smith. Whether the news will be followed up or not is
+another matter. The point is that before a series of events become news
+they have usually to make themselves noticeable in some more or less
+overt act. Generally, too, in a crudely overt act. Smith’s friends may
+have known for years that he was taking risks, rumors may even have
+reached the financial editor if Smith’s friends were talkative. But
+apart from the fact that none of this could be published because it
+would be libel, there is in these rumors nothing definite on which
+to peg a story. Something definite must occur that has unmistakable
+form. It may be the act of going into bankruptcy, it may be a fire,
+a collision, an assault, a riot, an arrest, a denunciation, the
+introduction of a bill, a speech, a vote, a meeting, the expressed
+opinion of a well-known citizen, an editorial in a newspaper, a sale, a
+wage-schedule, a price change, the proposal to build a bridge.... There
+must be a manifestation. The course of events must assume a certain
+definable shape, and until it is in a phase where some aspect is an
+accomplished fact, news does not separate itself from the ocean of
+possible truth.”
+
+From the point of view of the practical journalist, Mr. Irwin has
+applied this observation to the making of the news of the day. He
+says:[41] “I state a platitude when I say that government by the people
+is the essence of democracy. In theory, the people watch and know;
+when, in the process of social and industrial evolution, they see a
+new evil becoming important, they found institutions to regulate it
+or laws to repress it. They cannot watch without light, know without
+teachers. The newspaper, or some force like it, must daily inform them
+of things which are shocking and unpleasant in order that democracy,
+in its slow, wobbling motion upward, may perceive and correct. It is
+good for us to know that John Smith, made crazy by drink, came home and
+killed his wife. Startled and shocked, but interested, we may follow
+the case of John Smith, see that justice in his case is not delayed by
+his pull with Tammany. Perhaps, when there are enough cases of John
+Smith, we shall look into the first causes and restrain the groggeries
+that made him momentarily mad or the industrial oppression that made
+him permanently an undernourished, overnerved defective. It is good to
+know that John Jones, a clerk, forged a check and went to jail. For not
+only shall we watch justice in his case, but some day we shall watch
+also the fraudulent race-track gambling that tempted him to theft. If
+every day we read of those crimes which grow from the misery of New
+York’s East Side and Chicago’s Levee, some day democracy may get at the
+ultimate causes for overwork, underfeeding, tenement crowding.
+
+“No other method is so forcible with the public as driving home the
+instance which points the moral. General description of bad conditions
+fails, somehow, to impress the average mind. One might have shouted to
+Shreveport day after day that low dives make dangerous negroes, and
+created no sentiment against saloons. But when a negro, drunk on bad
+gin which he got at such a dive, assaulted and killed Margaret Lear, a
+schoolgirl, Shreveport voted out the saloon.”
+
+For the great mass of activities there is no machinery of record
+whatever. How these are to be recorded when they are important is the
+real problem for the press.
+
+In this field the public relations counsel plays a considerable part.
+His is the business of calling to the public attention, through the
+press and through every other available medium, the point of view, the
+movement or the issue which he represents. Mr. Lippmann has observed
+that it is for this reason that what he calls the “press agent” has
+become an important factor in modern life.
+
+Mr. Lippmann’s observation on this point deserves comment. He says:[42]
+“This is the underlying reason for the existence of the press agent.
+The enormous discretion as to what facts and what impressions shall be
+reported is steadily convincing every organized group of people that
+whether it wishes to secure publicity or to avoid it, the exercise of
+discretion cannot be left to the reporter. It is safer to hire a press
+agent who stands between the group and the newspapers.”
+
+The really important function of the public relations counsel, in
+relation to the press as well as to his client, lies even beyond these
+considerations. He is not merely the purveyor of news; he is more
+logically the _creator_ of news.
+
+An amateur can bring a good story to the average newspaper office and
+receive consideration, although the amateur is only too likely to miss
+precisely those features of his story which give it news value, and
+to overlook precisely that element of the story which will make it
+interesting to the particular newspaper he is approaching.
+
+The New York hotel proprietors were enforcing the prohibition law in
+relation to their own establishments, but saw that certain restaurants
+were violating the law with impunity. Realizing the injustice to them
+of this situation, they built a definite news event by going over the
+heads of the local law enforcement offices and wired an appeal direct
+to President Harding, asking for enforcement. This naturally became
+news of the first order.
+
+The opening of a shop by prominent women in which were shown graphic
+examples of the effect of the tariff on women’s wear was an event
+created to intensify interest in this subject.
+
+The launching of battleships with ceremony; the laying of corner
+stones; the presentation of memorials; demonstration meetings, parties
+and banquets are all events created with a view to their carrying
+capacity in the various mediums that reach the public.
+
+The departments of a modern newspaper will show the great variety of
+possible approaches on any subject from the standpoint of the press.
+When this is correlated to the possible approaches on any subject
+from the standpoint of human psychology, we see the diversification
+of methods to which the public relations counsel can have recourse to
+construct events.
+
+In the metropolitan press, for instance, there are the news
+departments, the editorial departments, the letter-to-the-editor
+department, the women’s department, the society department, the current
+events department, the sport department, the real estate department,
+the business department, the financial department, the shipping
+department, the investment department, the educational department,
+the photographic department and the other special feature writers and
+sections, different in different journals.
+
+In a valuable study on the “Newspaper Reading Habits of Business
+Executives and Professional Men in New York” compiled by Professor
+George Burton Hotchkiss, Head of the Department of Advertising and
+Marketing, and Richard B. Franken, Lecturer in Advertising at New York
+University, there are several tables setting forth the features of
+morning and evening newspapers preferred as a whole by the group to
+whom the questionnaires were sent, and by various smaller groups within
+the main group.
+
+The counsel on public relations not only knows what news value is, but
+knowing it, he is in a position to _make news happen_. He is a creator
+of events.
+
+An organization held a banquet for a building fund to which the
+invitations were despatched on large bricks. The news element in this
+story was the fact that bricks were despatched.
+
+In this capacity, as purveyor and creator of news for the press as
+well as for all other mediums of idea dissemination, it must be clear
+immediately that the public relations counsel could not possibly
+succeed unless he complied with the highest moral and technical
+requirements of those with whom he is working.
+
+Writing on the profession of the public relations counsel, the author
+of an article in the _New York Times_[43] says “newspaper editors are
+the most suspicious and cynical of mortals, but they are as quick to
+discern the truth as to detect the falsehood.” He goes on to discuss
+the particular public relations counsel whom he has in mind and
+whom he designates by the fictitious name Swift, and remarks that:
+“Irrespective of their position on ethics, Swift & Co. won’t deal
+in spurious goods. They know that one such error would be fatal. The
+public might forget, but the editor never. Besides, they don’t have to.”
+
+Truthful and accurate must be the material which the public relations
+counsel furnishes to the press and other mediums. In addition, it must
+have the elements of timeliness and interest which are required of all
+news--and it must not only have these elements in general, but it must
+suit the particular needs of each particular newspaper and, even more
+than that, it must suit the needs of the particular editor in whose
+department it is hoped that it will be published.
+
+Finally, the literary quality of the material must be up to the best
+standards of the profession of journalism. The writing must be good,
+in the particular sense in which each newspaper considers a story well
+written.
+
+In brief, the material must come to the editorial desk as carefully
+prepared and as accurately verified as if the editor himself had
+assigned a special reporter to secure and write the facts. Only by
+presenting his news in such form and in such a manner can the counsel
+on public relations hope to retain, in the case of the newspaper, the
+most valuable thing he possesses--the editor’s faith and trust. But it
+must be clearly borne in mind that only in certain cases is the public
+relations counsel the intermediary between the news and the press. The
+event he has counseled upon, the action he has created finds its own
+level of expression in mediums which reach the public.
+
+The radio stations offer an avenue of approach to the public. They are
+controlled by private organizations, large electrical supply companies,
+department stores, newspapers, telegraph companies and in some cases by
+the government. Their programs broadcast information and entertainment
+to those within their radius. These programs vary in different
+localities.
+
+To the public relations counsel there is a wide opportunity to utilize
+the means of distribution the radio program affords. In partisan
+matters, the controllers of the radio insist upon the presentation of
+all points of view in order to have the onus of propaganda removed
+from their shoulders. The public relations counsel is therefore in a
+position to suggest to the broadcasting managers a symposium treatment
+of the subject in which he happens to be interested. Or in the case of
+information, which has not this partisan character, he is in a position
+to assure treatment of his subject by embodying his thesis in the form
+of a speech delivered by some individual of standing and reputation.
+
+In the case of events which the public relations counsel may be
+instrumental in creating, such as large public meetings, the radio
+to-day becomes a natural form of distribution, just as news treatment
+in a newspaper does, and the broadcasting to thousands and thousands
+of people of the speeches becomes a corollary of the event itself. The
+broadcasting of Lord Robert Cecil’s speech on the League of Nations,
+delivered at a banquet in New York, is a case in point.
+
+Many magazines, for instance, are availing themselves of the radio
+stations to supply speeches on the particular topics they are most
+interested in. So the housekeeping magazines supply the radio stations
+with information about that phase of women’s activities. The fashion
+magazines do likewise in their fields. And they thereby heighten their
+own prestige and authority in the minds of their hearers.
+
+The use of the wireless telegraph in war time was an important factor
+in broadcasting information of war aims and war accomplishments
+to enemy countries. It was used successfully by both Allied and
+Central powers. It was utilized even by the Soviet Government in the
+announcement of its communications. This form of propagation differs
+slightly from the radio, referred to previously, since it depends for
+its efficacy not upon reaching great numbers of hearers, but upon
+reaching newspapers and other mediums that give currency to the
+material broadcasted. The wireless telegraph of course was and is a
+valuable asset to the public relations counsel.
+
+The lecture platform is another well-established means of idea
+communication.
+
+The spoken word has to a certain extent lost its efficacy when the
+lecture platform alone is considered.
+
+The appeal of the lecture platform is limited by the actual number
+of those who hear the message. It is possible to reach vaster
+numbers through the printed word or the motion picture or even the
+radioed word. Both the weakness of the human voice and the physical
+characteristics of the place of assemblage bring about this limitation.
+
+The lecture platform, however, still retains its importance for the
+public relations counsel because it affords him the opportunity to
+speak before group audiences which in themselves have a news value, or
+because it presents the opportunity to stage dramatic events that bring
+intensification of interest and action on the part of larger audiences
+than those actually addressed.
+
+The lecture field open to the public relations counsel for the
+propagation of information or ideas may be divided into several
+classifications. First there are the lecture managers and bureaus,
+which act as agents in booking lecturers to different kinds of group
+audiences throughout the country. The public relations counsel can,
+for instance, suggest to his client to secure a prominent person, who
+because of interest in a cause will be glad to undertake a lecture
+tour. Then a bureau may manage the tour. The tours of important
+proponents on such issues as the League of Nations fall in this class
+as well as the tours of prominent authors, arranged by publishers in
+their behalf.
+
+Then there is the lecture tour managed by the client himself and
+arranged through the booking of engagements with such local groups as
+might be interested in assuming sponsorship for what is said. A soap
+company might engage a lecturer on cleanliness to speak in the schools
+of leading communities. Or a woolen firm arrange for a home economics
+authority to lecture to women’s clubs on dress. These speeches of
+course, locally, gain a wider audience than the speaker would who
+addressed a single meeting because they give opportunity for treatment
+in newspapers, advertising, circularizing, and other mediums.
+
+The lecture field offers another means of communication in as much
+as it gives the public relations counsel a range of group leaders to
+whom he can furnish the facts and ideas he is trying to propagate. The
+lecturers of Boards of Education in cities throughout the country,
+the lecturers before schools and other institutions of learning, the
+lecturers of one sort or another who address varied audiences can be
+reached directly and can become the carriers of the information the
+public relations counsel desires to give forth.
+
+The meeting or public demonstration, at which prominent speakers voice
+their views upon the particular problem or problems at issue, would
+fall quite naturally under this same classification. Its main purpose,
+of course, is not so much to reach the audience being addressed as to
+make a focal point of interest for those thousands and millions who
+do not attend, but who get the reverberations of the speaker’s voice
+through other mediums than their own auditory sensation.
+
+Advertising is a medium open to the public relations counsel. In the
+sense in which the word is used here, the term applies to every form of
+paid space available for the carrying of a message. From the newspaper
+advertisement to the billboard, its forms are so varied that it has
+developed its own literature and its own principles and practice. In
+considering his objectives and the mediums through which his potential
+public can be reached the public relations counsel always considers
+advertising space as among his most important adjuncts. The wise public
+relations counsel calls into conference on the particular kinds of
+advertising to be used in a given problem the advertising agent who
+has made this study his lifework. The public relations counsel and the
+advertising agent then work out the problem in their respective fields.
+
+Advertising up to the present time has laid its greatest stress upon
+the creation of demands and markets for specific goods. It is also
+applied with effectiveness to the propagation of ideas as well. It is
+peculiarly effective when used in combination with other methods of
+appeal.
+
+Advertising controls the amount of physical space it occupies before
+the public eye. Advertising’s dimensional qualities give it a facile
+flexibility that can be extended or limited at will. In a sense, too,
+this quality gives the special leader the opportunity to select his
+audience and to give them his message directly.
+
+The field of coöperative advertising by combinations of advertisers in
+the same business or profession, by governments or their subdivisions,
+for one reason or another, is open to future possibilities.
+
+The stage offers an avenue of approach to the public which must be
+regarded both from the standpoint of the numbers of individuals it
+reaches as well as from the circles of influence it creates by word
+of mouth and otherwise. To the public relations counsel therefore it
+offers a wide field.
+
+Through coöperation with playwrights or managers, ideas can be given
+currency on the stage. When they can be translated to the action that
+takes place upon a stage, they are given emphasis by the visual and
+auditory presentation.
+
+The motion picture falls into two fields for the purposes of the public
+relations counsel. There is the field of the feature film. Here any
+direct utilization of the public relations counsel’s ideas must come
+indirectly and be taken by the producer of the film from some of the
+other organs of thought communication. The producer may adopt for the
+subject of a film some idea which the public relations counsel has
+agitated. The film, for instance, dealing with the drug traffic came
+very definitely as a result of the work carried on to help relieve the
+drug evil.
+
+The second field is one the public relations counsel can employ more
+directly. Educational films are made to order to-day to illustrate
+specific points for public consumption, from showing how a product is
+made to showing the necessity for subway relief in a big city. These
+films are usually shown before a special group audience arranged for
+by the public relations counsel or before some other group interested
+in the idea the particular film stands for. Thus a Chamber of
+Commerce can further a film having to do with the need for better port
+facilities.
+
+One phase of this kind of film is the news reel which, controlled by a
+private organization, films events and occasions which may have been
+created by the public relations counsel, but which carries because of
+its value in the competitive market of events.
+
+Word of mouth is an important medium to be considered. Ideas and facts
+can be given currency by word of mouth. Here group leaders are strong
+factors in giving currency to ideas. The public relations counsel often
+communicates the ideas he wishes to promulgate to group leaders whose
+espousal of the idea he wishes to obtain.
+
+The direct-by-mail campaign and the printed word afford the public
+relations counsel channels of approach to such individuals as he may
+desire to reach. Large companies have available for such purposes lists
+of individuals arranged according to innumerable criteria. There are
+geographical divisions, professional divisions, business divisions, and
+divisions of religion. There are classifications by economic position,
+classifications by all manner of preferences. This classification of
+his public into the right groups for the proper appeals is one of
+the most important functions of the public relations counsel, as we
+have pointed out. The direct-by-mail method of approach offers wide
+opportunities for capitalizing his training and experience along these
+lines. Telegraphic and wireless communications would of course come
+under this heading.
+
+It has been the history of new professions--and every profession
+has been at some time a new profession--that they are accepted by
+the public and become firmly established only after two significant
+handicaps are overcome. The first of these, oddly enough, lies in
+public opinion itself; it consists of the public’s reluctance to
+acknowledge a dependence, however slight, upon the ministrations of
+any one group of persons. Medicine, even to-day, is still fighting
+this reluctance. The law is fighting it. Yet these are established
+professions.
+
+The second handicap is that any new profession must become established,
+not through the efforts and activities of others, who might be
+considered impartial, but through its own energy.
+
+These handicaps are particularly potent in a profession of advocacy,
+because it is engaged in the partisan representation of one point of
+view. The legal profession is perhaps the most familiar example of this
+fact, and in this light at least a trenchant comparison may be drawn
+between the bar and the new profession of the public relations counsel.
+
+Both these professions offer to the public substantially the same
+services--expert training, a highly sensitized understanding of the
+background from which results must be obtained, a keenly developed
+capacity for the analysis of problems into their constituent elements.
+Both professions are in constant danger of arousing crowd antagonism,
+because they often stand in frank and open opposition to the fixed
+point of view of one or another of the many groups which compose
+society. Indeed it is this aspect of the work of the public relations
+counsel which is undoubtedly the foundation of a good deal of popular
+disapproval of his profession.
+
+Even Mr. Martin, who on several occasions in his volume talks with
+severe condemnation of what he calls propaganda, sees and admits the
+fundamental psychological factors which make the adherents to one point
+of view impute degraded or immoral motives to believers in other points
+of view. He says:[44]
+
+“The crowd-man can, when his fiction is challenged, save himself from
+spiritual bankruptcy, preserve his defenses, keep his crowd from going
+to pieces, only by a demur. Any one who challenges the crowd’s fictions
+must be ruled out of court. He must not be permitted to speak. As
+a witness to contrary values, his testimony must be discounted. The
+worth of his evidence must be discredited by belittling the disturbing
+witness. ‘He is a bad man; the crowd must not listen to him.’ His
+motives must be evil; he is ‘bought up’; he is an immoral character; he
+tells lies; he is insincere or he ‘has not the courage to take a stand’
+or ‘there is nothing new in what he says.’
+
+“Ibsen’s ‘Enemy of the People,’ illustrates this point very well. The
+crowd votes that Doctor Stockman may not speak about the baths, the
+real point at issue. Indeed, the mayor takes the floor and officially
+announces that the doctor’s statement that the water is bad is
+‘unreliable and exaggerated.’ Then the president of the Householders’
+Association makes an address accusing the doctor of secretly ‘aiming at
+revolution.’ When finally Doctor Stockman speaks and tells his fellow
+citizens the real meaning of their conduct, and utters a few plain
+truths about ‘the compact majority,’ the crowd saves its face, not by
+proving the doctor false, but by howling him down, voting him an ‘enemy
+of the people,’ and throwing stones through the window.”
+
+If we analyze a specific example of the public relations counsel’s
+work, we see the workings of the crowd-mind, which have made it so
+difficult for his profession to gain popular approval. Let us take,
+for example, the tariff situation again. It is manifestly impossible
+for either side in the dispute to obtain a totally unbiased point
+of view as to the other side. The importer calls the manufacturer
+unreasonable; he imputes selfish motives to him. For his own part he
+identifies the establishment of the conditions upon which he insists
+with such things as social welfare, national safety, Americanism, lower
+prices to the consumer, and whatever other fundamentals he can seize
+upon. Every newspaper report carrying the flavor of adverse suggestion,
+whether on account of its facts or on account of the manner of its
+writing, is immediately branded as untrue, unfortunate, ill-advised. It
+must, the importer concludes, it must have been inspired by insidious
+machinations from the manufacturers’ interests.
+
+But is the manufacturer any more reasonable? If the newspapers
+publish stories unfavorable to his interests, then the newspapers
+have been “bought up,” “influenced”; they are “partisan” and many
+other unreasonable things. The manufacturer, just like the importer,
+identifies his side of the struggle with such fundamental standards
+as he can seize upon--a living wage, reduced prices to the consumer,
+the American standard of employment, fair play, justice. To each the
+contentions of the other are untenable.
+
+Now, carry this situation one step further to the point at which the
+public relations counsel is retained, on behalf of one side or the
+other. Observe how sincerely each side and its adherents call even
+the verifiable facts and figures of the other by that dread name
+“propaganda.” Should the importers submit figures showing that wages
+could be raised and the price to the consumer reduced, their adherents
+would be gratified that such important educational work should be done
+among the public and that the newspapers should be so fair-minded as
+to publish it. The manufacturers, on the other hand, will call such
+material “propaganda” and blame either the newspaper which publishes
+those figures or the economist who compiled them, or the public
+relations counsel who advised collating the material.
+
+The only difference between “propaganda” and “education,” really, is in
+the point of view. The advocacy of what we believe in is education. The
+advocacy of what we don’t believe in is propaganda. Each of these nouns
+carries with it social and moral implications. Education is valuable,
+commendable, enlightening, instructive. Propaganda is insidious,
+dishonest, underhand, misleading. It is only to-day that the viewpoint
+on this question is undergoing a slight change, as the following
+editorial would indicate:
+
+“The relativity of truth,”[45] says Mr. Elmer Davis, “is a commonplace
+to any newspaper man, even to one who has never studied epistemology;
+and, if the phrase is permissible, truth is rather more relative in
+Washington than anywhere else. Now and then it is possible to make a
+downright statement; such and such a bill has passed in one of the
+houses of Congress, or failed to pass; the administration has issued
+this or that statement; the President has approved, or vetoed, a
+certain bill. But most of the news that comes out of Washington is
+necessarily rather vague, for it depends on the assertions of statesmen
+who are reluctant to be quoted by name, or even by description. This
+more than anything else is responsible for the sort of fog, the haze
+of miasmatic exhalations, which hangs over news with a Washington date
+line. News coming out of Washington is apt to represent not what is so
+but what might be so under certain contingencies, what may turn out to
+be so, what some eminent personage says is so, or even what he wants
+the public to believe is so when it is not.”
+
+Most subjects on which there is a so-called definite public opinion are
+much more vague and indefinite, much more complex in their facts and in
+their ramifications than the news from Washington which the historian
+of the _New York Times_ describes. Consider, for example, what
+complicated issues are casually disposed of by the average citizen.
+An uninformed lay public may condemn a new medical theory on slight
+consideration. Its judgment is hit or miss, as medical history proves.
+
+Political, economic and moral judgments, as we have seen, are more
+often expressions of crowd psychology and herd reaction than the result
+of the calm exercise of judgment. It is difficult to believe that this
+is not inevitable. Public opinion in a society consisting of millions
+of persons, all of whom must somehow or other reach a working basis
+with most of the others, is bound to find a level of uniformity founded
+on the intelligence of the average member of society as a whole or of
+the particular group to which one may belong. There is a different
+set of facts on every subject for each man. Society cannot wait to
+find absolute truth. It cannot weigh every issue carefully before
+making a judgment. The result is that the so-called truths by which
+society lives are born of compromise among conflicting desires and
+of interpretation by many minds. They are accepted and intolerantly
+maintained once they have been determined. In the struggle among ideas,
+the only test is the one which Justice Holmes of the Supreme Court
+pointed out--the power of thought to get itself accepted in the open
+competition of the market.
+
+The only way for new ideas to gain currency is through the acceptance
+of them by groups. Merely individual advocacy will leave the truth
+outside the general fund of knowledge and beliefs. The urge toward
+suppression of minority or dissentient points of view is counteracted
+in part by the work of the public relations counsel.
+
+The standards of the public relations counsel are his own standards and
+he will not accept a client whose standards do not come up to them.
+While he is not called upon to judge the merits of his case any more
+than a lawyer is called upon to judge his client’s case, nevertheless
+he must judge the results which his work would accomplish from an
+ethical point of view.
+
+In law, the judge and jury hold the deciding balance of power. In
+public opinion, the public relations counsel is judge and jury because
+through his pleading of a case the public is likely to accede to his
+opinion and judgment. Therefore, the public relations counsel must
+maintain an intense scrutiny of his actions, avoiding the propagation
+of unsocial or otherwise harmful movements or ideas.
+
+Every public relations counsel has been confronted with the necessity
+of refusing to accept clients whose cases in a law court would be
+valid, but whose cases in the higher court of public opinion are
+questionable.
+
+The social value of the public relations counsel lies in the fact that
+he brings to the public facts and ideas of social utility which would
+not so readily gain acceptance otherwise. While he, of course, may
+represent men and individuals who have already gained great acceptance
+in the public mind, he may represent new ideas of value which have not
+yet reached their point of largest acceptance or greatest saturation.
+That in itself renders him important.
+
+As for the relations between the public relations counsel and his
+client, little can be said which would not be merely a repetition of
+that code of decency by which men and women make moral judgments and
+live reputable lives. The public relations counsel owes his client
+conscientious, effective service, of course. He owes to his client
+all the duties which the professions assume in relation to those they
+serve. Much more important than any positive duty, however, which the
+public relations counsel owes to his client is the negative duty--that
+he must never accept a retainer or assume a position which puts his
+duty to the groups he represents above his duty to his own standards
+of integrity--to the larger society within which he lives and works.
+
+Europe has given us the most recent important study of public opinion
+and its social and historical effects. It is interesting because it
+indicates the sweep of the development of an international realization
+of what a momentous factor in the world’s life public opinion is
+becoming. I feel that this paragraph from a recent work of Professor
+Von Ferdinand Tonnies is of particular significance to all who would
+feel that the conscious moulding of public opinion is a task embodying
+high ideals.
+
+“The future of public opinion,” says Professor Tonnies, “is the future
+of civilization. It is certain that the power of public opinion is
+constantly increasing and will keep on increasing. It is equally
+certain that it is more and more being influenced, changed, stirred by
+impulses from below. The danger which this development contains for a
+progressive ennobling of human society and a progressive heightening
+of human culture is apparent. The duty of the higher strata of
+society--the cultivated, the learned, the expert, the intellectual--is
+therefore clear. They must inject moral and spiritual motives into
+public opinion. Public opinion must become public conscience.”
+
+It is in the creation of a public conscience that the counsel on public
+relations is destined, I believe, to fulfill his highest usefulness to
+the society in which he lives.