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Title: Crystallizing Public Opinion
Author: Bernays, Edward L.
Language: English
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CRYSTALLIZING
PUBLIC OPINION
EDWARD L. BERNAYS
[Illustration]
LIVERIGHT PUBLISHING CORPORATION
PUBLISHERS NEW YORK
_Copyright, 1923, by_
BONI AND LIVERIGHT, INC.
LIVERIGHT PUBLISHING CORPORATION
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
TO MY WIFE
DORIS E. FLEISCHMAN
PREFACE TO NEW EDITION
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.
E. L. B.
_January, 1934_
FOREWORD
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.
E. L. B.
December, 1923.
CONTENTS
PART I--SCOPE AND FUNCTIONS
CHAPTER PAGE
I THE SCOPE OF THE PUBLIC RELATIONS COUNSEL 11
II THE PUBLIC RELATIONS COUNSEL; THE INCREASED AND
INCREASING IMPORTANCE OF THE PROFESSION 34
III THE FUNCTION OF A SPECIAL PLEADER 50
PART II--THE GROUP AND HERD
I WHAT CONSTITUTES PUBLIC OPINION? 61
II IS PUBLIC OPINION STUBBORN OR MALLEABLE? 69
III THE INTERACTION OF PUBLIC OPINION WITH THE FORCES THAT
HELP TO MAKE IT 77
IV THE POWER OF INTERACTING FORCES THAT GO TO MAKE UP PUBLIC
OPINION 87
V AN UNDERSTANDING OF THE FUNDAMENTALS OF PUBLIC MOTIVATION
IS NECESSARY TO THE WORK OF THE PUBLIC RELATIONS COUNSEL
98
VI THE GROUP AND HERD ARE THE BASIC MECHANISMS OF PUBLIC
CHANGE 111
VII THE APPLICATION OF THESE PRINCIPLES 118
PART III--TECHNIQUE AND METHOD
I THE PUBLIC CAN BE REACHED ONLY THROUGH ESTABLISHED
MEDIUMS OF COMMUNICATION 125
II THE INTERLAPPING GROUP FORMATIONS OF SOCIETY, THE
CONTINUOUS SHIFTING OF GROUPS, CHANGING CONDITIONS AND
THE FLEXIBILITY OF HUMAN NATURE ARE ALL AIDS TO THE
COUNSEL ON PUBLIC RELATIONS 139
III AN OUTLINE OF METHODS PRACTICABLE IN MODIFYING THE POINT
OF VIEW OF A GROUP 166
PART IV--ETHICAL RELATIONS
I A CONSIDERATION OF THE PRESS AND OTHER MEDIUMS OF
COMMUNICATION IN THEIR RELATION TO THE PUBLIC RELATIONS
COUNSEL 177
II HIS OBLIGATIONS TO THE PUBLIC AS A SPECIAL PLEADER 208
PART I
SCOPE AND FUNCTIONS
CRYSTALLIZING PUBLIC OPINION
CHAPTER I
THE SCOPE OF THE PUBLIC RELATIONS COUNSEL
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.
CHAPTER II
THE PUBLIC RELATIONS COUNSEL; THE INCREASED AND INCREASING IMPORTANCE
OF THE PROFESSION
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?’”
CHAPTER III
THE FUNCTION OF A SPECIAL PLEADER
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.
PART II
THE GROUP AND HERD
CHAPTER I
WHAT CONSTITUTES PUBLIC OPINION?
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.
CHAPTER II
IS PUBLIC OPINION STUBBORN OR MALLEABLE?
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.
CHAPTER III
THE INTERACTION OF PUBLIC OPINION WITH THE FORCES THAT HELP TO MAKE IT
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.
CHAPTER IV
THE POWER OF INTERACTING FORCES THAT GO TO MAKE UP PUBLIC OPINION
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.
CHAPTER V
AN UNDERSTANDING OF THE FUNDAMENTALS OF PUBLIC MOTIVATION IS NECESSARY
TO THE WORK OF THE PUBLIC RELATIONS COUNSEL
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.
CHAPTER VI
THE GROUP AND HERD ARE THE BASIC MECHANISMS OF PUBLIC CHANGE
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.
CHAPTER VII
THE APPLICATION OF THESE PRINCIPLES
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.
PART III
TECHNIQUE AND METHOD
CHAPTER I
THE PUBLIC CAN BE REACHED ONLY THROUGH ESTABLISHED MEDIUMS OF
COMMUNICATION
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.
CHAPTER II
THE INTERLAPPING GROUP FORMATIONS OF SOCIETY, THE CONTINUOUS SHIFTING
OF GROUPS, CHANGING CONDITIONS AND THE FLEXIBILITY OF HUMAN NATURE ARE
ALL AIDS TO THE COUNSEL ON PUBLIC RELATIONS
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.
CHAPTER III
AN OUTLINE OF METHODS PRACTICABLE IN MODIFYING THE POINT OF VIEW OF A
GROUP
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.
PART IV
ETHICAL RELATIONS
CHAPTER I
A CONSIDERATION OF THE PRESS AND OTHER MEDIUMS OF COMMUNICATION IN
THEIR RELATION TO THE PUBLIC RELATIONS COUNSEL
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.
CHAPTER II
HIS OBLIGATIONS TO THE PUBLIC AS A SPECIAL PLEADER
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.
THE END
FOOTNOTES
[1] Cardozo, “The Nature of the Judicial Process” (page 9).
[2] Walter Lippmann, “Public Opinion” (page 248).
[3] “Public Opinion” (page 342). Mr. Lippmann goes on to say that
“having hired him, the temptation to exploit his strategic position is
very great.” As to that aspect of the situation, see later chapters.
[4] William Trotter, “Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War” (page 36).
[5] “Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War,” William Trotter (pages
36–37).
[6] Page 45.
[7] “Public Opinion” (page 350).
[8] _Atlantic Monthly_, March, 1914.
[9] _Atlantic Monthly_, June, 1914.
[10] Francis E. Leupp, “The Waning Power of the Press,” _Atlantic
Monthly_, July, 1910.
[11] Rollo Ogden, “Some Aspects of Journalism,” _Atlantic Monthly_,
July, 1906.
[12] “Publicity at Paris,” _New York Times_, April 2, 1922.
[13] H. L. Mencken on Journalism, _The Nation_, April 26, 1922.
[14] “The Behavior of Crowds” (page 193).
[15] W. Trotter, “Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War.”
[16] It should be explained at the very outset that Mr. Trotter does
not use the term “herd” in any derogatory sense. He approaches the
entire subject from the point of view of the biologist and compares the
gregarious instinct in man to the same instinct in lower forms of life.
[17] “Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War” (page 32).
[18] _Ibid._
[19] “Public Opinion” (page 81).
[20] “Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War” (page 38).
[21] _Ibid._ (page 112 _et seq._). Italics mine.
[22] Bleyer, “The Profession of Journalism” (page 269).
[23] “Public Opinion” (page 354).
[24] “Public Opinion” (page 292).
[25] “Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War” (page 62).
[26] Given, “Making a Newspaper” (pages 306–307).
[27] “Press Tendencies and Dangers,” _Atlantic Monthly_, January, 1918.
[28] “The Behavior of Crowds” (pages 23–24).
[29] Walter Lippmann, “Public Opinion.”
[30] Mr. Given’s definition of the qualifications of a good reporter
applies very largely to the qualifications of a good public relations
counsel. “There is undoubtedly a good deal of truth,” says Mr. Given,
“in the saying that good reporters are born and not made. A man may
learn how to gather some kinds of news, and he may learn how to write
it correctly, but if he cannot see the picturesque or vital point of an
incident and express what he sees so that others will see as through
his eyes, his productions, even if no particular fault can be found
with them, will not bear the mark of true excellence; and there is, if
one stops to think, a great difference between something that is devoid
of faults and something that is full of good points. The quality which
makes a good newspaper man must, in the opinion of many editors, exist
in the beginning. But when it does exist, it can usually be developed,
no matter how many obstacles are in the way.”
[31] “Public Opinion” (page 160).
[32] Given, “Making a Newspaper.”
[33] “What Is News?” by Will Irwin, _Collier’s_, March 18, 1911 (page
16).
[34] Italics mine.
[35] “Making a Newspaper” (page 168).
[36] “What is News?” Will Irwin, _Collier’s_, March 18, 1911 (page 16).
[37] “What is News?” by Will Irwin, _Collier’s_, March 18, 1911 (pages
17–18). Italics mine.
[38] “Making a Newspaper,” by Given (pages 59–62).
[39] Given, “Making a Newspaper” (page 57).
[40] “Public Opinion” (pages 339–340).
[41] “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” _Collier’s_, May 6, 1911 (page
18).
[42] “Public Opinion” (page 344).
[43] _Times Book Review and Magazine_, January 1, 1922. “Men Who Wield
the Spotlight,” by Charles J. Rosebault.
[44] “The Behavior of Crowds” (pages 128–129).
[45] “History of the _New York Times_” (pages 379–380).
Transcriber’s Note
Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a
predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they
were not changed.
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