Preface: This article was co-written with ChatGPT.

Public Relations (PR) did not originate as “corporate image management,” but from a far more fundamental problem: how to produce controllable consensus in a mass society. It was born out of crisis, not commercial demand.

From the late nineteenth century to the First World War, rapid industrialization in the United States simultaneously produced two forces: large corporations and mass media. Railroad, coal, steel, and oil conglomerates were forced for the first time to confront an uncontrollable “public.” During this period, big business generally treated the public as an adversary. When faced with strikes, accidents, and scandals, the common responses were information blockades, media manipulation or intimidation, and the suppression of journalistic investigation. The result was not stability but a rapid collapse of trust—once a company spoke, any explanation was preemptively assumed to be a lie.

It was against this background that Ivy Lee emerged. His judgment was not moralistic but structural: the problem was not that the public was emotional, but that corporations had lost the right to explain. Under such conditions, even the strongest propaganda only intensified antagonism.

Lee’s first crucial move was to establish stable, predictable channels of information. In 1906, while handling an accident for the Pennsylvania Railroad, he proactively released information to the press, including negative facts. Such texts later came to be regarded as prototypes of the early “press release.” What he emphasized was not image, but timeliness, accuracy, and verifiability—the public had a right to know what had happened, and news should not be treated as corporate property.

Around 1905–1906, he proposed and disseminated the famous Declaration of Principles. This was not a piece of PR copy but a professional statement of position: no concealment, no distortion, respect for facts, and recognition of the public as the ultimate judge. By today’s standards these principles may seem naïve; at the time, however, they marked a structural shift—for the first time, companies were expected to explain themselves to the public, not only to shareholders.

The most controversial and revealing application of Lee’s methodology came after the Ludlow Massacre of 1914.

The Ludlow Massacre occurred in Colorado and was the outcome of a prolonged labor dispute that escalated into public violence. The conflict centered on a coal-mining system represented by Colorado Fuel & Iron (CF&I), a company closely linked to Rockefeller family capital. Miners endured low wages, high accident rates, company towns and company stores, and systematic restrictions on union organizing. In 1913, with support from the United Mine Workers, miners launched a large-scale strike and were forced to set up a tent colony at Ludlow for a prolonged standoff.

On April 20, 1914, the Colorado National Guard, deployed by the state government, clashed with the miners. The key event that day was not sporadic gunfire but the systematic burning of the camp. Women and children hid in pits dug beneath the tents and were later found dead from suffocation; the confirmed death toll included multiple women and at least eleven children. This was not a case of “out-of-control guards,” but an instance in which state power was used to resolve a labor dispute.

The massacre shocked American society. Newspapers, unions, and intellectuals quickly labeled it a “massacre.” The Rockefeller family, previously an almost anonymous symbol of capital, was for the first time clearly identified by the public as a power subject subject to accountability. The issue was no longer “labor conditions,” but whether an invisible power was killing people. With miners shot and public opinion firmly aligned against capital, Ivy Lee did not attempt to whitewash the event itself. Instead, he did something more fundamental: he made Rockefeller appear in reality. He arranged for Rockefeller to go personally to the mining area, meet with workers, listen to them, be photographed, and be reported on. The point was not what he said, but that the public saw, for the first time, that this power center was no longer abstract, cold, and untouchable.

Lee arranged for Rockefeller to visit the mines, converse with workers, be captured by the media, and be “seen” by the public. This step was not meant to change the facts, but to prevent society from escalating the conflict into an irreversible “capital versus the people.” In other words, his goal was not to win, but to stop the bleeding. At a broader structural level, the Ludlow Massacre exposed a problem modern societies were confronting for the first time head-on: when private capital possesses quasi-state power, who is responsible for violence?

At this critical moment, Ivy Lee intervened. He neither tried to cleanse the event nor to deny the deaths; instead, he took a deeper step—making power visible. By bringing Rockefeller family members into direct contact with workers and into the media’s frame, Lee enabled the public to see that a power previously existing only as institutions and capital had entered reality in human form.

This step was crucial. Lee understood that in conditions of extreme polarization, language had already failed; visibility itself became information. When power exists only as institutions and capital, it is naturally perceived as evil; once it appears in human form, conflict can begin to be reinterpreted. He was not “defending” Rockefeller, but offering society an entry point for reinterpreting the conflict.

Railroad, steel, and oil companies were confronting “public resentment” for the first time. Early responses—crude propaganda and repression—quickly failed. Ivy Lee’s approach was not to beautify facts, but to build information channels: openness to the media, timely responses, and explanations that could be accepted. Here, PR first took shape as a profession—not to persuade the public, but to make conflict digestible.

This episode directly drove three long-term changes: the acceleration of U.S. labor legislation and the gradual legitimation of unions; corporate recognition that “not explaining” itself is itself a risk; and the transformation of Public Relations from propaganda into a tool for repairing legitimacy. The Ludlow Massacre was not an isolated incident; it was the site where modern communication, capital governance, and public opinion politics truly intersected.

Yet Ivy Lee’s method had clear limits. He addressed the problem of “what to do after everything has already exploded.” His PR was reactive—a post-crisis remedy—not a governance tool for shaping public understanding in advance. That might suffice for corporations, but it was far from sufficient for the state.

Between 1900 and 1917, American society underwent structural change: rapid urbanization, exploding newspaper circulation, surging immigration, and frequent labor and social movements. Public opinion was no longer naturally guided by elites; it could spontaneously gather, explode, and backfire. Governments and large organizations gradually realized that explaining only after a crisis was already too late.

Before the U.S. formally entered World War I, there were scattered attempts at public mobilization: coordinating newspaper lines, hiring former journalists for information liaison work, and shaping attitudes through public speeches. But these efforts lacked unified command and institutional recognition.

The true turning point came with World War I. In 1917, the United States established the Committee on Public Information (CPI), which for the first time mobilized media, speakers, visual symbols, and emotional narratives in a systematic, state-led way to persuade an initially antiwar society to support the war. The effect was dramatic—and dangerous. The state confirmed that mass opinion could be engineered. After the war, the term “propaganda” became discredited, but the techniques were fully retained.

It was in this context that Edward Bernays emerged. He was not an academic but a practitioner. He cared less about whether information was true than whether it was effective. He introduced psychology and group behavior research into public opinion operations and styled himself a “public relations counsel,” systematically advancing and defining the profession.

Bernays did not invent the term “public relations,” but he established its modern meaning. He did not believe that democratic societies could form consensus through rational discussion. In his view, the public needed not understanding but guided feelings, symbols, and positions. He applied this logic to politics, business, and public discourse, shifting communication from persuasion to the manipulation of meaning permission.

What he left behind was not a tidy academic model but a reusable operational logic: people do not act on facts, but on legitimized desires and identities. The key to communication is not information, but the recoding of symbols.

The “Torches of Freedom” campaign is the cleanest and most ruthless demonstration of this logic. In 1929, when women’s public smoking was still considered immoral, Bernays did not refute the taboo; he bypassed it. He re-coded women’s smoking as “suppressed desire for freedom” and embedded cigarettes within the grand narrative of women’s liberation. During the New York Easter Parade, he arranged for women to light cigarettes in front of reporters and pre-briefed the media with a unified explanation—these cigarettes were “torches of freedom.”

Women were not persuaded that smoking was “right”; they were permitted to express political identity through smoking. Once an action was legitimized as a symbol, the taboo collapsed. The case reveals an uncomfortable truth of communication studies: people act not because they understand, but because action has been endowed with meaning.

Subsequent concepts—agenda setting, framing theory, symbolic consumption, brand narrative, and identity politics—simply rearticulate, in more respectable language, practices Bernays had already validated. Communication thus ceased to be a matter of technique and became a matter of structure and legitimacy.

Edward Bernays is the founder of modern Public Relations and the key figure who systematized, technologized, and legitimized “propaganda.” He was the first to openly and successfully treat the manipulation of mass psychology as a legitimate profession. To shed the negative connotations of “propaganda” after World War I, he deliberately promoted the term “Public Relations.”

Born in 1891, Bernays was the nephew of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. This was not incidental but foundational. Freud showed that humans are not rational beings, but are driven by the unconscious, desire, fear, sexuality, and identity anxiety. Bernays took this insight and asked a more practical question: if this is so, who manages collective desire so that society can remain stable?

He did not believe that democratic publics could reach consensus through facts and reason. In his view, that was a fantasy. What the public needed was not understanding, but carefully arranged feelings, symbols, and stances. He applied this logic to politics, commerce, and public opinion—not to convince you that something was correct, but to make you naturally align with one side at the level of emotion and identity. Bernays left no neat formula like Lasswell’s model; instead, he left a comprehensive set of reusable practices later abstracted into “models” by scholars.

At the core of his approach was a single judgment: people do not act on facts, but on permitted desires and identities. Communication, therefore, hinges not on information, but on the recoding of meaning.

He operated with a three-layer structure. First, suppressed or illegitimate desires—many actions are wanted but not socially permitted. Second, a grand narrative that appears noble, just, and unassailable—freedom, liberation, progress, science, national interest, modernity. This layer does not debate truth, only legitimacy. Third, embedding a concrete action into that grand narrative so the action becomes a moral or identity gesture. Once aligned, people are no longer choosing actions; they are taking positions. When these layers align, communication no longer needs to be repeated—the system self-replicates.

“Torches of Freedom” was the cleanest demonstration of this logic. In the 1920s, women’s public smoking was widely condemned not by law but by social taboo. Tobacco companies wanted the female market, but advertising, persuasion, and health arguments all failed because smoking had been symbolically condemned. Bernays did not rebut the taboo; he bypassed it. Drawing on psychoanalytic ideas, he reinterpreted women’s smoking as suppressed desire for freedom; cigarettes ceased to be nicotine and became symbolic phallic power, representing access to male-dominated public space. He then wrapped this in an unopposable narrative—women’s liberation—and staged the Easter Parade event with pre-coordinated media framing.

The result was not that women were convinced smoking was good, but that they were allowed to express political identity through smoking. Once the action was symbolically legitimized, the taboo collapsed. In the decades that followed, women’s smoking rates surged, tobacco companies profited enormously—and, more importantly, communication theory won.

This case left several lethal principles for posterity. First, the true battlefield of communication is not facts but meaning permission; once an action is allowed to represent something “right,” questions of health or reason recede. Second, the most effective communication is not when you speak, but when the system speaks for you; Bernays rarely put clients front and center, instead mobilizing media, experts, and social movements. Third, once symbolic binding succeeds, communication requires no continuous investment; it self-replicates within social structures.

Agenda setting is the earliest and most clinical link in this chain. It does not care how you think, only what you think about. Research in the 1960s–70s showed that public judgments of importance closely follow the issues repeatedly presented by media. Media need not tell you whom to support; by deciding what is “important,” they delimit your thinking path. Consensus is not persuaded into existence; it is scheduled.

Framing theory advances further: once an issue must be discussed, how it is interpreted becomes the battlefield. Closely linked to Erving Goffman, this approach shows that people first identify “what kind of situation this is” before reasoning. Frames are not positions but interpretive templates; once selected, conclusions follow almost automatically.

Symbolic consumption brings communication from politics and news into everyday life. People consume not functions but meanings; purchases become declarations of identity. Communication no longer coerces—it embeds itself in choice.

Brand narrative organizes symbolic consumption by providing continuous stories rather than single meanings, allowing individuals to inhabit stable identity worlds.

Identity politics marks the end of this chain. Communication no longer centers on issues or goods but on the legitimacy of existence itself. The focus shifts from persuasion to recognition—who is allowed to speak and whose experience is beyond challenge. Bernays’s “Torches of Freedom” was an early experiment in this logic.

Seen together, the trajectory is clear: attention allocation → interpretive framing → embedding meaning in daily choice → sustaining identity through narrative → elevating identity beyond dispute. Communication did not become kinder; it became more internalized, intimate, and difficult to perceive. It intersects with religion, institutions, and legitimacy because it serves the same function: deciding which forms of existence are natural, which must be justified, and which are never seen.