Preface: This article was co-written with ChatGPT.

Public Relations did not initially emerge as a practice of “corporate image management,” but as a response to a more fundamental problem: how, in a mass society, organizations could reconstruct socially acceptable frameworks of explanation when power expanded faster than public trust. It did not grow naturally out of commercial prosperity; it took shape through crises of legitimacy, public conflict, and pressures of governance.

From the late nineteenth century to the eve of World War I, rapid industrialization in the United States simultaneously produced two new realities: large-scale corporations operating across regions, and mass media with national reach. Railroads, coal mines, steel, and oil enterprises were forced, for the first time, to confront a vast, mobile public no longer disciplined by a single authority. In this period, corporations generally treated the public as an adversary rather than a communicative counterpart. When faced with strikes, accidents, and scandals, common responses included information suppression, press intimidation, and interference with journalistic investigation. These tactics did not produce stability. Instead, they rapidly depleted trust. Once corporations spoke, their statements were widely presumed to be false, and public conflict intensified.

It was within this context that the structural significance of Ivy Lee’s practice emerged. His diagnosis was not moral but pragmatic: the core problem was not that the public was emotional, but that corporations had lost the preconditions for being believed. Under such conditions, stronger propaganda would only deepen antagonism.

One of Lee’s key interventions was the attempt to establish stable and predictable channels of information. Around 1906, while assisting with external communication following railway accidents, he proactively supplied the press with factual accounts, including unfavorable details. These materials are often cited as early prototypes of the press release. The emphasis was not on image polishing, but on timeliness, accuracy, and verifiability. The public was treated as capable of judgment, and news was no longer framed as corporate property.

During the same period, Lee articulated and circulated what later became known as the Declaration of Principles. This was not a publicity document, but a statement outlining the boundaries of professional practice: no concealment, no distortion, respect for facts, assistance in verification, and recognition of the public as a judging entity. By contemporary standards, these principles may appear limited or idealistic; in their historical context, however, they marked a significant shift. Large organizations were now expected to explain themselves to the public, not solely to shareholders or internal power structures.

The most controversial and symbolically charged application of Lee’s approach occurred after the Ludlow incident of 1914.

The Ludlow conflict in Colorado arose from a prolonged labor dispute that escalated into public violence. The struggle centered on the Colorado Fuel & Iron (CF&I) mining system, a company closely tied to Rockefeller family capital. Miners endured low wages, high accident rates, and company-town and company-store regimes that severely constrained union organizing. In 1913, supported by the United Mine Workers, miners initiated a large-scale strike and established tent colonies in the Ludlow area.

On April 20, 1914, the situation escalated sharply following the involvement of the Colorado National Guard. The tent colony was set on fire, and multiple women and children—sheltering in pits dug beneath the tents—died from smoke inhalation and fire. The incident triggered nationwide shock and came to be widely labeled the “Ludlow Massacre.” Public attention shifted from labor conditions alone to a more acute question: when private capital and state force become entangled, who bears responsibility for violence?

In this context, the Rockefeller family—previously an abstract symbol of capital—became a publicly identifiable and accountable target of criticism. Ivy Lee’s intervention did not alter the facts of the event or mitigate its moral gravity. His strategy instead focused on visibility management: facilitating public appearances by Rockefeller family members, arranging visits to mining areas, enabling contact with workers, and allowing media documentation. The significance lay less in specific statements than in the fact that power no longer appeared solely as anonymous capital or institutional force.

This intervention was not an effort to erase responsibility, but to prevent the conflict from hardening into an irreconcilable binary of “capital versus the people.” It did not reverse public judgment, but it provided a means through which society could reconsider how power and responsibility were distributed. For this reason, the Ludlow incident is often understood not as an isolated corporate crisis, but as a critical intersection of modern public relations, labor politics, and public opinion governance.

These practices also revealed the limits of Lee’s approach. His model was fundamentally reactive—designed to restore minimal communicability after conflict had already erupted, rather than to shape public understanding in advance. Such “damage-control” public relations might suffice for corporations, but it was clearly inadequate for state-level opinion management.

In the early twentieth century, American society underwent rapid structural change: accelerated urbanization, surging newspaper circulation, expanding immigration, and frequent labor and social movements. Public opinion acquired the capacity to coalesce autonomously and rebound unpredictably. Governments and large organizations increasingly recognized that post-crisis explanations often came too late.

The first fully institutionalized response emerged during World War I. In 1917, the United States established the Committee on Public Information (CPI), which for the first time systematically mobilized news media, speaker networks, visual symbolism, and emotional narratives under state authority to build domestic support for war. This experience demonstrated that public opinion could be highly organized and coordinated. After the war, the term “propaganda” became deeply discredited, but the techniques and institutional knowledge were preserved, renamed, and repurposed.

It was within this environment that Edward Bernays assumed historical significance. He was not an academic theorist, but a highly self-conscious practitioner of opinion management. He did not invent the term “public relations,” but through his consistent use of the title “public relations counsel” and his body of work, he decisively shaped the modern meaning of the profession in the twentieth century. He introduced psychological and crowd-behavior insights into opinion practice and argued that the decisive criterion of communication was not truth, but effectiveness.

Bernays did not believe that mass publics could arrive at stable consensus through rational deliberation. In his view, people acted primarily through symbols, emotions, and identity alignment. His work did not focus on persuasion through argument, but on re-encoding the conditions under which certain behaviors became socially permissible or even morally unassailable.

The “Torches of Freedom” campaign offers a canonical illustration of this logic. In 1929, when women’s public smoking was widely regarded as immoral, Bernays did not confront the taboo directly. Instead, he embedded women’s smoking within the symbolic narrative of women’s emancipation. During the New York Easter Parade, he arranged for women to smoke in front of media cameras and supplied journalists in advance with a unified explanation. The act did not change beliefs through argument; it conferred legitimacy through symbolic framing.

This case cannot by itself explain long-term shifts in women’s smoking behavior, but it clearly demonstrates a communicative mechanism: people do not act solely because they understand, but because actions acquire socially sanctioned meaning.

Later developments—agenda-setting, framing theory, symbolic consumption, brand narrative, and identity politics—did not evolve directly from Bernays in a linear sense. Rather, they theorized, at different levels, the same underlying dynamics: how attention is allocated, how interpretation is pre-structured, how meaning is embedded in everyday choice, and how identification is sustained over time. Once communication ceased to be merely a technical matter and became a question of legitimacy, structure, and modes of existence, public relations and communication research entered their modern phase.