This important volume documents events and routines defined as
public relations practice, and serves as a companion work to the
author's "The Unseen Power: Public Relations" which tells the
history of public relations as revealed in the work and
personalities of the pioneer agencies.
This history opens with the 17th Century efforts of land promoters
and colonists to lure settlers from Europe -- mainly England -- to
this primitive land along the Atlantic Coast. They used publicity,
tracts, sermons, and letters to disseminate rosy, glowing accounts
of life and opportunity in the new land. The volume closes with a
description of the public relations efforts of colleges and other
non-profit agencies in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, thus
providing a bridge across the century line.
This study of the origins of public relations provides helpful
insight into its functions, its strengths and weaknesses, and its
profound though often unseen impact on our society. Public
relations or its equivalents -- propaganda, publicity, public
information -- began when mankind started to live together in
tribal camps where one's survival depended upon others of the
tribe. To function, civilization requires communication,
conciliation, consensus, and cooperation -- the bedrock
fundamentals of the public relations function.
This volume is filled with robust public struggles -- the
struggles of which history is made and a nation built:
* the work of the Revolutionaries, led by the indomitable Sam
Adams, to bring on the War of Independence that gave birth to a New
Nation;
* the propaganda of Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John
Jay in the Federalist papers to win ratification of the U.S.
Constitution -- prevailing against the propaganda of the
AntiFederalists led by Richard Henry Lee;
* the battle between the forces of President Andrew Jackson, led
by Amos Kendall, and those of Nicholas Biddle and his Bank of the
United States which presaged corporate versus government campaigns
common today:
* the classic presidential campaign of 1896 which pitted pro-Big
Business candidate William McKinley against the Populist orator of
the Platte, William Jennings Bryan.
This book details the antecedents of today's flourishing,
influential vocation of public relations whose practitioners --
some 150,000 professionals -- make their case for their clients or
their employers in the highly competitive public opinion
marketplace.
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