Introduction

In early nineteen hundred, the labor force across industries had grown weary of enduring the abuses of big business, giving rise to a rash of strikes in every decade. Though the time-honored method of strikebreaking was clearly not a lasting solution, big business was still trying to squash insurrection by force. A new era of labor relations was soon to emerge but in April 1913, in the wake of a tragedy, the man heralded as the father of PR was working to make the public believe it had already come in the person of John D. Rockefeller.

In April 1914, the ongoing conflict reached the mine workers of the state of Colorado and the Colorado Fuel and Iron Co. (CF&I) breaking out with tragic consequences. After some weeks of tense disputes and unrest, a military action in the mining settlement of Ludlow left disputed scores of people dead, most of them on the side of the miners. Though striking miners and militia men had died before, public outcry came the next day when, in the charred remains of the miners’ camp, the bodies of two women and ten children were found. Anger and fear continued to fuel the fire and smaller attacks continued until on April 30th, President Woodrow Wilson decided to send federal troops to the place of the tragedy to stop the confrontation. At that moment, the physical violence ceased, but the animosity did not automatically disappear. A new battle then started: the public relations battle.

The CF&I was the largest of the 170 coal operators in Colorado. The greatest share of the company was held by the imperial John D. Rockefeller Sr. Still, the company was theoretically independent. It was frequent at that time that the owners of industrial and financial giants created similar theoretically independent companies to avoid conflicts with the U.S. Council on Industrial Relations (USCIR), an institution originated in 1912 to protect the free trade and to prevent the formation of trusts (Mannheim, 2001). Rockefeller had purchased the CF&I shares as a favor to a friend and had intended to sell them off as soon as he could make a profit. Many industrial moguls left the management of such companies in the hands of trusted employees (Hallahan, 2002, p.226). This was exactly the situation of the CF&I when the tragedy occurred.

The conflict between miners and mine operators started when the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) tried to get recognition in the Colorado mining settlements. The union found opposition not only among the mine operators and owners, traditional enemies of movements and policies that tried to limit the free circulation of capital. According to Scamehorn (1955), the official company narrator of the Ludlow Massacre, the miners were also reluctant about the intrusion of the union. Many of them feared the methods of the union as much as the operators did. Some miners even expressed a desire to leave their jobs rather than to bow to the threats and the pressure exerted by the union during violent strikes.

There does not seem to be a final and reliable version of the life conditions of the CF&I workers. According to Scamehorn (1955), most of the miners were satisfied with the treatment they received from the operators and did not support either the union or the pending strike. There are, however, other versions that depict the situation of the mine workers in much more dramatic terms. Papanikolas (1967, p.43), for instance, writes about “starving children who, before the union became involved, had no shoes, nor knew they what a Christmas present was”.

The union started an aggressive communication and publicity campaign to secure the support of the mine workers. The campaign was effective and the union felt confident to call a strike on September 23rd, 1913. When the company ousted the striking mine workers from company housing, the union established a tent settlement to shelter those miners and their families who wanted to leave the CF&I camps. The miners, in response to periodic gunfire attacks, excavated trenches under the tents in which to hide themselves in case of an attack with firearms. The union fed the animosity, fueled the hatred and prepared the miners for a battle that would become a self-fulfilling prophecy. According to Scamehorn (1955), some union leaders provided the miners with firearms and ammunitions.

The strike started with violence. Though many would claim that it was the union that ignited the spiral of violence, it is a difficult distinction since union organizers had been beaten, blown up, jailed, killed and threatened during the preceding coal strike of 1903 and at every step afterward (Papanikolas, 1991). The union put guns in the strikers’ hands and the first victims of the clash were miners who decided not to join the strike. En Walsenburg, houses of the strikebreakers were dynamited. Between October 25 and 28, the strikers and union members attacked Berwind and Tabasco, two small mining emplacements north of Trinidad. The purpose of this action was to terrorize the population with rifle shots and dynamite bombs (Scamehorn, 1992). Eventually, the company called for women and children to evacuate these communities. The union’s fury was not just aimed at the strike-breaking miners, but also at company guards and state militia, which were often the same men in different uniforms.

After Governor Ammon intervened and demanded both sides surrender their weapons, some strikers went back to work, and much of the militia was sent home. However, through the long cold Colorado winter, the strikers, the union leaders and two small detachments anxiously eyed each other, waiting for the violence to resume (Scamehorn p 45).

A coincidence – ironic coincidence – triggered the tragic event at this place. Major Pat Hamrock, who was the official in charge of the militia, telephoned the Ludlow settlement to look for the husband of one Greek woman who could not speak English. Hamrock spoke with the strike leader Louis Tikas, also of Greek descent, who refused to come down to the military camp. Hamrock sensed agitation in Tikas’s voice as he refused to come down and became worried because of the tense atmosphere in the camp. A speaker seemed to be inciting the crowd. Miners were running around with frantic and uncertain activity. Without exactly knowing what was going on in the settlement, Hamrock ordered his troops to assemble and search the tent colony for the woman’s missing husband. The soldiers lined up and aimed their machine guns at the tents of the miners. Meanwhile, Tikas had agreed to meet Hamrock at the depot (Papanikolas, 1991).

Supposedly, Tikas left the tent colony an explicit order to not taking any action and to wait for him to come back. However, when the Greek miners saw the soldiers aiming their machine guns toward the tents, they thought that an attack was imminent and panicked. According to Scamehorn (1955, 1992), the mine workers started to run frenetically in different directions in order to draw the attention of the soldiers away from the tents, where the women and children remained. For the same reason, they also fired some shots.

These first shots caused the reaction of the military forces, which swept the whole camp with systematic gunfire, one tent after the next. Papanikolas reports that, after the fire, the undisciplined troops were “looting, clinging to that strange, useless junk that in their excitement they scoured the colony for” (Papanikolas, 1968, p.225). The commanders, having lost control over their men, followed the ravaging troops trying to save the women and children from the burning tents.

Public Perception of the Tragedy

Obviously, the union tried to instrumentally use the news of the violent repression and the subsequent tragedy to incite public outcry, and in this way, to reinforce its claims. The union leaders tried to gain publicity from the very beginning of the conflict. However, and although 10 miners had been killed in the violent confrontations since the start of the strike, the American public opinion remained indifferent. The labor conflicts in the mining regions of Colorado did not belong to its agenda. This lack of interest radically changed after the Ludlow massacre. The fact that an important part of the victims were women and children deeply impressed, in Scamehorn’s opinion, the perception of the public (Scamehorn, 1955). The union soon started to use the term “massacre” to refer to the tragic events of Ludlow. They were aware, as were the propagandists of the Boston Massacre, of the importance of words to influence the perception of the facts and the formation of opinion. One of the strategies of the union and the muckraking press was to direct the public fury not toward a company – aloof, impersonal and remote – but toward an individual everybody knew: John D. Rockefeller Jr..

The Rockefeller family owned 40% of the CF&I’s stock and an important portion of its bonds. The family acquired the common and preferred stocks as a personal favor to the financier George Gould. John D. Rockefeller named Larmont Montgomery Bowers, who was a friend of the family, as chairman of CF&I (Hallahan, 2002). In the hearings carried out by the U.S. Council on Industrial Relations (USCIR) to elucidate the so-called Ludlow massacre, John D. Rockefeller Jr. denied having been aware of what was going on in Colorado or involved in any of the strategies and decisions that led to the tragedy (Scamehorn, 1992). In spite of that, the Rockefellers, both father and son, “were under heavy verbal assault from the nation’s press and public for the brutal strikebreaking tactics in their Colorado Fuel and Iron Co. strike” (Cutlip, 1994, p.57).

It was not the first time that the Rockefeller empire – or their Standard Oil Co. – became the target of public attacks. In fact, they had already been for years the favorite prey of a group of journalist and intellectuals socially engagé and morally indignant: the muckrakers. The term was used for the first time by Teddy Roosevelt in 1906 (Hofstaedter, 1995). The intense journalistic activity of the muckrakers in many ways left its mark on the American society at the turn of the 20th century. They made the public aware of social inequities and discriminations and galvanized the large American middle class, which constituted their natural readership. Their way to understand journalism was militant, radical, combative and uncompromising. With unusual aggressiveness, the muckrakers denounced governmental and corporative corruption. In their view, such corruption was becoming endemic and threatened to destroy the American political and social system. Upton Sinclair, together with Ida Tarbell the most relevant writer of the muckrakers, describes the process with following words:

See, we are just like Rome. Our legislators are corrupt: our politicians are unprincipled; our rich men are ambitious and unscrupulous. Our Newspapers have been purchased and gagged; our colleagues have been bribed; our churches have been cowed. Our masses are sinking into degradation and misery; our ruling classes are becoming wanton and cynical. (Shapiro, 1968, p.12)

The activity of the muckrakers made clear the importance of public support also in the private corporate world. On the one hand, the public became aware of its power. The effect of muckraking journalism opened the eyes of the corporate giants, who realized that their success – not less than the political success – rested on public opinion. With no favorable and friendly environment, any company, even the apparently most powerful, could fail. The omnipresent and almighty public opinion also decides the fate of big business. This certitude was what incited Cornelius Vanderbilt, the railroad magnate, to pronounce his famous sentence: “The public be damned” (Kunczik, 2000).

Muckraking journalism was a warning signal that the press had become one more of the powers that be. The awareness of this power was further reason why the public relations practice exploded in the first years of the 20th century. In fact, the first PR practitioners had all been working as journalists before becoming corporate journalists and image manufacturers. Before Edward L. Bernays coined the name “public relations counsel”, they were known as press agents.

Rockefeller’s Toughest Battlefront

Probably the worst crime John Davison Rockefeller Sr. (1839-1937) ever committed was to be rich. And if this was a crime, then Rockefeller should be labeled as one of the worst criminal of history because his fortune was one of the largest the world has known. En 1902, Rockefeller’s capital added up to $ 200 million; what represented twice the whole national wealth (around $ 101 million) (Aguilera & Rolfe, 2001). The patriarch of the family, who came from a poor family, built the first oil refinery in America in 1863. Two years later, he founded the Standard Oil Company of Ohio, which would become in 1882 the legendary Standard Oil Trust, the first American trust, which comprised 40 Standard Oil subsidiaries. Rockefeller’s tactic to get control over the U.S. refineries was to drive them out of business selling oil for extremely low prices, with which they could not compete. Rockefeller’s company was able to offer such low prices because he owned the largest refinery in the country and worked with vast quantities of oil. As a result, he also managed to get the cheapest rate from the railroad (Latham, 1949).

American public opinion vehemently turned in the last decade of the 19th century against trusts. Legislation against this commercial practice followed the shift in public opinion. A series of judicial decisions against the Standard Oil led to the dissolution of the company in 39 independent entities.

The problems of the Standard Oil did not end with this dissolution, though. The actual hatred campaign started in 1902, when Ida M. Tarbell published her legendary article “History of Standard Oil” in McClure’s Magazine, which is regarded as the first of the muckraking articles. Still, Tarbell was not an impartial observer, for her family owned one of the independent refineries, the Pure Oil Company, that was stubbornly standing against the takeover attempts of the Standard Oil. In her articles, Tarbell portrayed the Standard Oil as an unscrupulous giant that put small refineries into the dilemma of selling or perishing.

As a consequence of the muckraking campaign, Rockefeller became the symbol of all the negative characteristics and vices traditionally attributed to capitalism. In the public mind, no individual or corporations contributed so much to the increase of political and social corruption, the degenerations of human relationships and the exploitation of poor people, as Rockefeller did. His religious devotion was perceived as the worst manifestation of hypocrisy. The muckrakers presented him as pious inside the church, but merciless in his business (Latham, 1949).

The Ludlow incidents served the muckraking press to intensify the attacks against the Rockefeller family. Written diatribes were combined with satires, caricatures and cartoons (Aguilera & Rolfe, 2001). Thus, the legend of the Rockefeller patriarch was forged, a man who built an economic empire based on “little men crushed” (Latham, 1949, p.5). The death of several women and children in Ludlow served the press to shift the criticism toward the younger Rockefeller, who at that time had already assumed control over the family business.

The Man Behind the Scenes: Ivy L. Lee

John D. Rockefeller Sr. seldom responded to the written attacks of the press. Silence was his strategy when dealing with the muckrakers, above all against those published in McClure Magazine by Ida M. Tarbell. Still, there are some authors who consider that Rockefeller’s companies were fair, or even generous with their workers, and the price they paid for the refineries in the takeovers, adequate to their actual value (Latham, 1949). However, the patriarch systematically refused to enter the media battle to defend his personal honor or the reputation of the company. Regarding communication policies, John d. Rockefeller Sr. belonged to another era. His public relations policy was not as visionary as his business strategies. According to Latham (1949), Rockefeller always expressed a candid faith in the power of facts to speak for themselves. Obviously, Machiavelli had not been one of his recurrent readings.

John D. Rockefeller Jr. inherited an economic empire, and a damaged reputation. It was his life’s mission not only to make his father proud through business, but also to vindicate his father’s name through any means necessary. The media reaction following the Ludlow Massacre convinced him that a strategy change was inevitable. The press could easily mobilize public opinion by means of stirring up feelings and emotions. And the public opinion exerted a pressure on companies, consumers and legislators that could make the most powerful economic structure tumble. It was the humility lesson the father refused to learn that the son accepted after all (Cutlip, 1994). In spite of his father’s reluctance, John D. Rockefeller Jr. decided to seek out the services of the publicist Ivy L. Lee. He followed the advice of a journalist: the editor of the Evening Journal, Arthur Brisbane (Hallahan, 2002). At that point, Lee was working for the Pennsylvania Railroad Corporation (Penn RR).

Lee recommended the family not to confront the crisis with advertisements to influence public opinion. He had already realized and experienced that the world was moving fast toward an era of public relations. In his vision, the communication strategies had to explore new ways to gain the credibility that advertising lacked. Lee advised Rockefeller to provide the press with the information it needed. Informative transparency was, in his opinion, the best way to gain and maintain public trust. Rockefeller Sr. was impressed by this revolutionary approach to crisis communication (Hallahan, 2002). Lee’s hiring was broadly discussed and received strong media coverage. It was presented as the evidence that the Rockefeller family cared about public opinion, indeed. Lee’s first mission was to feed the press relevant information to keep public opinion informed. Very soon, the figure of Ivy L. Lee appeared as the man behind the scenes working to repair the deteriorated image of the family business (Cutlip, 1994).

Ivy Ledbetter Lee, Ivy L. Lee for the history, was probably not the first individual who sensed that economic success depends on a good relationship with public opinion, but he was the first who systematically applied this certitude to the management of organizations.

Lee was born on July 6th 1877, in Cedartown, Georgia. He grew up in a cultivated environment, in which sophisticated intellectual disputes were frequent. His father was a Protestant circuit preacher who especially enjoyed getting involved in scholarly debates on the evolution theory. His mother was an autodidactic intellectual. Although she married at the age of 13, she reached a notable intellectual stature. Above all after her husband’s death, Lee’s mother traveled frequently through different states and achieved a certain reputation as lecturer (Cutlip, 1994).

Ivy L. Lee graduated with honors from High School in St. Louis, where he also was the leader of the Debate Society. In 1894, Lee enrolled in Emory College, where he discovered his journalistic vocation. For the two years he spent at Emory, he worked as editor of the college department of Atlanta Constitution (Cutlip, 1994).

In 1894, Lee transferred to Princeton University, where he continued developing his journalistic skills. He wrote for the daily Princetonian and was the editor of Alumni Princetonian. Future president of the U.S. Woodrow Wilson was one of the fellow students and friends of Ivy Lee at Princeton. His journalistic activity and, above all, his ability in public debate gave Lee visibility during this time. His academic records, however, were never outstanding (Cutlip, 1994).

After graduating at Princeton, Lee rushed into the world of journalism. He wrote articles for Associated Press, Philadelphia Press, and Chicago Record, and finally worked as reporter for New York Journal. When he left this journal, Lee wrote for The New York Times and New York World, where he obtained solid knowledge of economy and the mysteries of Wall Street.

In 1903, tired of the journalistic activity, Lee left New York World and discovered his real passion. Two days after he left the World, he became involved in a campaign in favor of Mayor Seth Low, who, by the way, was not reelected. Lee’s early acquaintances would reappear later in his life. Low chaired the committee commissioned by Wilson to reach a settlement between the Colorado coal operators and the miners in 1915. His experiences in the field of political campaigns were the basis for Ivy Lee’s first book: The City for the People: The Best Administration New York Ever Had. The title suggests that Lee did not throw away the opportunity to make publicity for the candidate.

After this first experience, and while working for the Democratic National Committee, Lee met George Parker, who was in charge of publicity at the committee. Parker hired Lee, but very soon, convinced of the potential and the talent of his pupil, proposed the two start a publicity agency together. Thus, “Parker and Lee” was born. This agency was not the first one, but unquestionably was the one that shaped the development of the public relations professional field. According to Scott Cutlip (1994), Parker and Lee represented two radically different ways to conceive the publicist activity. Parker was the traditional press agent, a mere middleman between organizations and the press. Lee brought into the profession an unusual sophistication. More than just to transmit information to the press, the press agent had to use information to mold the perception of the public. Lee himself explained it this way:

When I started this business, it seemed to me there were two courses open to me. I could tell my clients what they wanted me to tell them. That, of course, would please them. But it would never get me very far. The other course was to tell them what I thought irrespective of their opinion. If my judgment was right, they would come to respect it. If I were wrong, I’d soon find it out. In either case, I’d eventually find my level. (Cutlip, 1994, p.45)

The agency presented itself as news source characterized by three values: “Accuracy, Authenticity, and Interest” (Cutlip, 1994, p.43). In fact, they fabricated ideal portraits of the corporate leaders who hired them.

In 1906, the anthracite coal operators consortium hired Parker & Lee to publicize and support its arguments during a long-standing conflict with the union, as well as to condemn the strike in front of the public. Working on this assignment, Ivy Lee created a small art piece: his declaration of principles. Just for this short statement, which was sent out and published in different newspapers, Ivy L. Lee could claim a unique place in the history of public relations. The New York Times would refer to the declaration some years later as “something new to the business of publicity” (Cutlip, 1994, p.46).

This is not a secret bureau. All our work is done in the open. We aim to supply news. This is not an advertising agency; if you think any of our matter ought properly to go to your business office, do not use it. Our matter is accurate. Further details on any subject treated will be supplied promptly, and any editor will be assisted most cheerfully in verifying directly any statement of fact … In brief, our plan is, frankly and openly, on behalf of business concerns and public institutions, to supply to the press and public of the United States prompt and accurate information concerning subjects which it is of value and interest to the public to know about. (Kunczik, 1996 p.107)

The declaration of principles is the first attempt to create a code of ethical standards for the PR profession. It was issued not just as a mission statement for the Parker & Lee agency. The document had more pretensions. In those few sentences, Lee explained what and how the public relations activity ought to be. Precursory in the declaration was not as much the ethical reflection, as the vision of the role of honesty –or perceived honesty as Machiavelli would nuance – in the process of constructing corporate identity. The old corporative communication strategy that treated the public as annoyance to be loathed would end up, in Lee’s vision, damaging any company’s bottom line.

Lee carried to an extreme his policy of transparency when he was working for the Pennsylvania Railroad. After an accident in which several passengers died, Lee not just gave the journalists the information about the details and casualties, but also gave the journalists access to the fateful site (Tedlow, 1979). This way to manage a crisis, which now is recommended in every PR textbook, was at that point not so common.

Ivy L. Lee, who sold himself as a man of deep culture, was, according to Stuart Ewen, more interested in collecting books than in reading them (Ewen, 2001). He seems to have been familiar with the theories of Gustave Le Bon, the French author and pioneer in the field of social-psychology. Le Bon emphasizes in his work the cognitive limitations of “the crowd”. This shapeless phenomenon is unable to elaborate complex ideas or to distinguish between the objective and the subjective (Le Bon, 1896). The crowd, according to Le Bon, acts on the basis of “images”, and these images are the result of the reduction of the natural complexity of things. The images that set the crowd in motion condense certain aspects of reality, but they are not the reality. Still, those images fill the popular mind with “illusions”, and these illusions constitute the inner world of the crowd. Le Bon’s illusions form the reality inside our mind that later Walter Lippmann (1922) would call pseudo-environment. The art of controlling the crowd, which was what most intrigued Lee, was based, according to Le Bon, in the ability to generate illusions through the use of symbols to which certain values or strong emotions are attached in the crowd’s mind (Le Bon, 1896). In the case of Ivy L Lee’s declarations of principles, the values used by the publicists to “fill and beset” the public mind (Le Bon, 1896, p.150) were honesty and transparency.

Obviously, another ethical debate unfolds at this point, one of those ethical debates with such deep implications that there is no way to reach the bottom of the matter. For it is impossible to establish with total certitude whether the urge for honesty and transparency expressed by public relations firms is an end in itself or just a means to strengthen their position in the public mind. Since it is impossible to penetrate into the heart of the publicists – or any other human being – this question will remain unanswered.

The Ludlow Campaign

The challenge Ivy L. Lee faced when he was hired by the Rockefeller family to deal with the Ludlow tragedy laid in changing the public perception of the events. The muckraking press, fed with information by the union, had portrayed the case as a flagrant example of murder of innocent women and children which the Colorado mine operators were mainly to blame for. The actual villain of the story was John D. Rockefeller Jr.. And as heroes of the story, those who defended the rights of the exploited workers, appeared the union leaders.

Rockefeller’s intention was to invert this already established public opinion. The coal operators should appear as generous and compassionate employers in the public perception. The union had to be presented as the real instigator of the conflict. One of Lee’s objectives was, of course to clean up John D. Rockefeller’s image. It was important to demonstrate to the public that Rockefeller Jr. had nothing to do with the management of the CF&I. On the other hand, it was also important to improve the image of this company. And Lee did it stressing the amount of money invested in Colorado and the benefits that the mining exploitation brought to the state.

Lee started a frantic public relations activity. Perfectly aware of the fact that the success of his efforts depended on the press coverage, Lee first tried to create a public perception of informative transparency. Reporters and editors of influential magazines and newspapers were invited to the numerous events organized by the company in relation to the Ludlow case. Every day, news releases were issued with the intention of controlling the flow of information. Lee persuaded Jesse F. Welborn, at the time president of the CF&I in Colorado, and Rockefeller Jr. to write and send letters to the editor stating their points of view. Not seldom, according to Hallahan (2002), it was Lee himself who wrote the letters signed by Welborn and Rockefeller.

Lee made an intensive use of mailings and bulletins, too, always trying to control the flow of information. The information he received from the company was systematically used with instrumental purposes. The contents of those mailings and bulletins were favorable speeches made by congressmen, testimony given by Rockefeller in court, statistics on open shop mine salaries, and of course, carefully contrived propaganda. Lee made sure that the different messages were tailored for and distributed to the specific target audiences. Sometimes, messages were duplicated and sent to different channels. If Lee thought, for instance, that the bulletins would unlikely reach the miners, then he created posters for this purpose. Another highly successful idea, truly revolutionary for the time, was to create an internal newspapers for CF&I workers.

Lee analyzed all possible causes that might have led to the image deterioration of the CF&I. One of the findings of his investigation was that the chairman of the company, Lamont Montgomery Bowers, had a terrible reputation both in front of the employees and in front of the public in general. Thus, he persuaded the Rockefeller family to fire him, which they did, in spite of his being a close friend of the family. Lee extended his revolution to all the levels of the company. With the idea of swapping public opinion, Lee actively participated in the elaboration of the Colorado Industrial Plan (CIP), which would trigger a radical restructuring of the industrial relations and social and managerial policies of the CF&I.

Audiences

Hallahan (2003) and Cutlip (1994) identify four basic audiences that were targeted by the communication campaigns created in order to mitigate the consequences of the Ludlow massacre.

First of all, of course, Lee had to deal with the mine workers at CF&I. A series of posters were designed in order to show the corporative gratitude to the miners for their loyalty to the company and their efforts. The CF&I, as already mentioned, contributed to the creation of the comprehensive Colorado Industrial Plan (CIP), which took account of the life quality and the safety of the workers. One of the measures contemplated in the plan was the establishment of economic compensations for the families affected by the Ludlow tragedy, or also in case of injuries caused by labor accidents. At last, Lee created the already mentioned bulletin for workers, an employee newspaper: the CF&I Industrial Bulletin. The contents of the newspaper were mostly social issues related to the life conditions of the miners, company news, labor policies, etc. The newspaper also published employee questions, as well as letters and articles written by the workers. The importance of this was that it gave the miners a place to air their grievances and for the company to respond, thereby making the miners feel that their complaints, and their voices, were heard and considered. Even if the company did not value the employees’ opinions, the newspaper gave the appearance that it did.

Ivy L. Lee soon realized that the opinion of the miners’ wives was also crucial to create a climate favorable to the interest of the company. With this aim, a series of pamphlets were published. Those PR pieces exalted the comfort of the houses built by the CF&I for the workers’ families. Hygiene and safety were praised in the pamphlets, as well as the social services provided by the company.

Community relations were an important item in Lee’s agenda. One of his priorities was to establish communication strategies aimed to soothe the anxiety of the people in Colorado. The Ludlow massacre, as the logical end of many months of unrest, had sowed fear among the inhabitants of the region. The CF&I was perceived as one more risk factor. Lee’s objective was to change this perception. Lee started a campaign to present the company as a source of wealth and progress. In a series of advertisements, stories and pamphlets, Lee compared the development in Colorado with the decadence in some other regions in which the union had taken hold of the situation.

One of Lee’s visions was to realize the importance of opinion leaders and gatekeepers in the communication flow. He established contact and finally persuaded many influential clergymen, public officials, editors, teachers and relevant businessmen to support him (Yellen, 1974). They used their influence to shift the responsibility for the tragedy in the public mind from the mine operators to the union leaders. Lee also sent letters to the editors of the most relevant newspapers in Colorado. The letters were, in Hallahan’s opinion (2002), decidedly flattering. Through them, Lee hoped to secure their goodwill in the press coverage of the CF&I. Several op-eds were published with the signature of operators of the company, as well as prestigious congressmen and politicians from Colorado. Many of these, were, of course, written by Ivy Lee.

Specific Tactics

During the healing process that followed the Ludlow Massacre, the public relations activity of the Rockefeller family increased in an unknown way. The effects of the communication efforts were spectacular, indeed. Contemporary public relations textbooks normally assign Ivy L. Lee all the merit in this process. However, Lee worked together with labor relations counselor: the Canadian Mackenzie King, who was hired by the family the same week they employed Lee. According to Hallahan, King was actually responsible for “fixing the root causes of the problem”, while Lee was more effective “swaying public opinion by bringing out unknown facts about the conflict” (Hallahan, 2003, p.45). Hallahan also states that the relationship between the two was not always harmonious. Occasionally, they clashed because of their divergent points of view (Hallahan, 2002). It seems that King was more concerned with the social aspects of the case than Lee, who rather focused on the communication aspects. Mackenzie King was a man with ample experience in labor conflicts. He even became the first Labor Minister in Canada. Between 1908 and 1911, the time he held this position, King had to arbitrate in over 40 labor conflicts, some of them in the mining business. Later in his life, Mackenzie King would become Prime Minister of Canada from 1921 to 1930 and from 1935 to 1948 (Hallahan, 2003).

Ivy L. Lee produced a series of 19 bulletins entitled “The Struggle in Colorado for Industrial Freedom”. The series aimed to influence, above all, opinion leaders. Lee carefully planned the contents of each bulletin. He decided himself even the type setting used. The bulletins were then printed in Philadelphia, shipped to Denver and sent from the CF&I headquarters to convey the impression that this was their origin. Thus, Lee was ignoring the principle of informative transparence that he established as ethical standard in his famous declaration.

The first 15 bulletins of the series, published in the name of all the Colorado mine operators, were sent to approximately 11,000 people. Later they were compiled into a booklet called Facts. The circulation of the booklet was 40,000 exemplars. Many of them were sent to influential individuals on the east coast. The second group of bulletins, the last four of the series, was sent only in the name of the CF&I, after this company split from the rest of the Colorado mine operators (Hallahan, 2002).

Lee orchestrated similar mass mail actions. First, he created a large list of addressees with influential individuals both in Colorado and on the east coast, where the Rockefeller family had its headquarters. One of these actions was the response to a pamphlet issued by the Junior Order United American Mechanics Union. In a parallel action, 20,000 to 30,000 reprints of a fierce anti-union speech delivered by George N. Kindel, a Colorado congressman, were sent to the mailing list, as well as to the local newspapers.

In order to gain the favor of the local press, Lee wrote a letter-to-the-editor to the most important Colorado newspapers. The letter was, again, signed by the president of CF&I, Jesse M. Welborn, another example of how easily Lee transgressed his own principle of transparency. The letter, flattering yet again in style and contents, praised the crucial role of the press in general and the editors in particular that were enlightening public opinion and courageously pointing to those actually responsible: the union leaders. They were portrayed in the letter as selfish and mischievous and accused of preferring their particular agenda to the interest and the well-being of the miners, whom they were supposedly protecting (Hallahan, 2002).

Lee published another booklet giving detailed response to President Wilson’s demands. The aim of the booklet, according to Hallahan (2002), was to distance the Rockefeller Company, the CF&I, from the rest of the Colorado mine operators. This was its actual effect, too. The reason for this strategic step was to sterilize the name of the company. He wanted the name to be detached in the public mind from the scandalous consequences of the Ludlow Massacre. With this goal in mind, Lee conceived a series of advertisements with the motto: “That Colorado Might Know”. Those ads, which had a strong emotional load, aimed to create the impression that the company really cared about all its workers, even those who performed the humblest tasks. Every employee at CF&I, Hallahan reports (2003), was supposed to feel that the company was a friend.

John D. Rockefeller Jr. used Lee as his representative at CF&I. This way, Lee became one of the directors of the company. The pecuniary reparation of the victims of the Ludlow incidents, as well as the workers injured in labor accidents became Lee’s priority in this position. He established policies that improved the working conditions of the mine workers and helped implement the pledge made by the Rockefeller Foundation to establish a program that took care of the displaced Colorado workers. Of course, Lee made sure that all these new policies and courses of action received the necessary publicity and media relevance.

Lee advised John D. Rockefeller Jr. during the USCIR hearings in connection with the Ludlow massacre. With the conviction that transparency – even if the transparency is only virtual – always improves the public perception of the corporate image, Lee persuaded Rockefeller to offer to the public the contents of the hearings. To this end, Rockefeller’s testimonies were released to the press, and later compiled and published in a booklet.

A humanization of Rockefeller’s image was, in Lee’s opinion, the key point to swap public opinion. With this conviction in mind, he advised Rockefeller to visit the mining region in Colorado to approach the miners. During this historic trip, Rockefeller Jr. met with different strike leaders. Of special note is his meeting with Mother Jones, an 83-year old union activist who enjoyed almost religious devotion and was known as “angel of the mine”. Still, Hallahan (2002) credits Mackenzie King with the intellectual authorship of the innovative public relations tour. In fact, King accompanied John D. Rockefeller Jr. and oversaw all his steps during the visit to the Colorado mines. During those intensive days, young Rockefeller fraternized with the miners and their families, asked them about their working conditions and inquired about their opinion and concerns. The meetings with the miners were very positive. The closeness to the miners paid off, for many miners, even strike leaders among them, became convinced of the good will and the honesty of John D. Rockefeller Jr., who was willing to put on a miner’s suit and went down to the mine to create the spirit of comradeship.

King accompanied Rockefeller Jr. in all these actions. He also provided the miners with safer miner’s suits. In two key events, Mackenzie King’s involvement was especially relevant. First of all, he was able to arrange a meeting with one of Rockefeller’s bitterest enemies: Samuel Gompers. Gompers had been presenting the Rockefeller Company as enemy of the workers since John D. Rockefeller Jr. organized a campaign to raise money to support the Anti-Bolshevism American Alliance for Labor and Democracy (Hallahan, 2003). The meeting with Gompers had broad media coverage and helped bring the magnate’s image nearer to the miners. The second event managed by King was a speech by Rockefeller Jr. to the miners to introduce the Colorado Industrial Representation Plan. According to Hallahan (2003), Rockefeller Jr. definitely won the heart of the miners with this speech.

Although McKenzie King was closer to John D. Rockefeller Jr. during the implementation of the campaign, this path-breaking plan was engineered by Ivy L. Lee (Hallahan, 2002, p.63). The main objective of the ambitious and comprehensive plan was to establish a communication strategy between the company, its workers, the local and the national public opinion and the state of Colorado. Lee also established a frame of communication channels that would smooth and make more effective the internal relations of the company. For instance, the plan contemplated a series of mechanisms for grievance resolution. The companies undertook to build schools, churches, hospitals and clubs for the workers in the mining regions and their families. The plan guaranteed the schedule of wages, as well as the right to free associations of the miners. Aware of Machiavelli’s lesson that good deeds don’t help if the public doesn’t know them, Lee created a booklet with the contents of the plan. As he used to do with all his communication tools, Lee supervised the production and distribution of the more than 500,000 copies of the booklet among local and national opinion leaders.

Outcomes and Effectiveness

The intensive public relations campaign bore the desired fruit. John D. Rockefeller Jr. repaired his dented image and recovered the trust of his employees and the public in general. The name of the family, which had been in the eye of the hurricane for several years, enjoyed overall esteem again.

It was not an easy way, though. John D. Rockerfeller Jr. was asked to testify at the hearings called by the USCIR (U.S. Council on Industrial Relations). It was evident, to judge by the outcomes of those sessions, that the magnate had put Bowers at the head of CF&I, whose mission was to protect the interests of the Rockefeller family. This was negative publicity, but Rockefeller Jr. was exonerated by the USCIR. Furthermore, his image recovered vigor and luster after his visit to the Colorado mines and above all because of the Colorado Industrial Plan. The intense public relations campaign succeeded in shaping the public image of the magnate as a man truly concerned with the wellbeing of his employees and a pioneer in the field of industrial relations (Cutlip, 1994).

The Union totally lost its possible influence at CF&I. The miners celebrated the agreement of the Colorado Industrial Plan and for the most part joined the union created inside the company. The breaking of the alliance with the rest of the Colorado mine operators also contributed to improve the image of CF&I. The company was detached in the public mind from the traditional conflict in the mining trade, which further helped dispel the public hatred created by the Ludlow massacre.

Ivy L. Lee on Philanthropy

In his last years, John D. Rockefeller Sr. attained in the American public a halo of philanthropic sanctity. The public relations legend also gives Ivy L. Lee the credit for this public perception. However, although it is well documented that Lee advised the patriarch in some philanthropic decisions, it does not seem that his influence was determining in this regard. For instance, there is no evidence that Lee directly influenced the creation or direction of the Rockefeller Foundation (Hiebert, 1966).

An image that greatly helped shape this public perception was the picture of the old tycoon giving dimes to poor children. According to T. J. Ross, a long time partner of Lee, as well as to Lee’s biographer Ray Hiebert, it was Rockefeller himself who had the initiative. Lee must just have recommended he publicizes the action, to take some pictures and release them to the press (Hiebert, 1966).

However, one can perfectly imagine Lee’s hand working behind the scenes. Lee was obviously aware that the public – and also the hostile press – would never take seriously Rockefeller’s philanthropic activity if they suspected that it was just spin, the result of propaganda activity. The pragmatic value of the gesture, Lee must have been aware, depends directly on the perceived honesty. If the public had suspected Ivy L. Lee’s hand behind the pictures of the old Rockefeller with the children, the philanthropic myth would have instantly evaporated.

Lee’s Own Reputation

Lee was also called to testify during the USCIR hearings for his publicist activity for the CF&I. His reputation came off badly, far worse than Rockefeller’s name. His public relations maneuvers during the Ludlow crisis increased the hatred of the muckraking press, which started calling him “poison Ivy”. Sandburg named him a “paid liar”, and summarized his publicity work on behalf of the CF&I as “dirty work. It was coarse. It was cheap. It was desperately bold and overplayed . . . Ivy Lee is below the level of the hired gunman and slugger. His sense of right and wrong is a worse force in organized society than that of the murderers …” (Hiebert, 1965, p.101).

The cause of those attacks was that the information Lee used during the whole campaign for the bulletins of the CF&I frequently contained inaccuracies. Lee fought against the accusation of fraud claiming that he was just a transmitter of information with the best will, and that his job was to secure the broadest possible audience for this information. In his answers to the USCIR, Lee made clear that he never questioned the credibility or accuracy of his sources:

I had no responsibility for the facts and no duty beyond compiling them and getting them into the best form for publicity work. I took the facts that Mr. Welborn gave me on his word. I have no reason to believe that word was not given in perfectly good faith. (Ewen, 1996, 80)

This declaration was thought by some authors to be cynical (Ewen, 1996), or at least naïve, for Lee admitted having accepted without any scrutiny the information CF&I provided him with. Although the investigation could never prove that Lee lied, his reputation suffered serious damage.

The muckraking press emphasized Lee’s lack of sensitivity toward the mine workers. One of the bulletins sent by Lee to the local editors, for instance, described the origin of the fire that caused most deaths in the Ludlow tragedy as a stampede triggered by the presence of the armed troops. According to the bulletin, the women and children of the tent camp probably pulled down a stove in their hysterical flight, and this stove was what set the whole camp in flames.

Another bulletin entitled “How Colorado Editors View the Strike” gives us some clues about Lee’s ability to manipulate public opinion, too. This bulletin recounts a conference of Colorado editors held in connection with the mining conflict. In this conference, most of the editors supported the position of the coal company. Still, as stated by Marvin Olasky (1987), the bulletin does not specify that the conference was attended by just 14 of the 331 Colorado editors. And from these, just 11 signed the final report. Those 11 editors worked for the newspapers that were controlled by the coal companies.

The last years of Ivy Lee’s professional activity were stained by scandals. The public distrust against Lee intensified again when the press disclosed that he had been working for the Soviet government. Supposedly, Lee was involved in the production and distribution of a series of pamphlets to improve the image of the Soviet Union among the American Public (Hiebert, 1966, p.271).

The mistrust became hatred when the public knew that Lee had been advising the very German NAZI party on the possibility of winning over U.S. public opinion. In order to preserve the secret of this consulting job, Lee used as a front the U.S. division of the German Company IG Farben (Kunkzic, 1996). Lee was called to testify in front of the House on Un-American Activities in 1934 because of this affair. He never admitted having distributed NAZI propaganda in the U.S.A., but he could not deny having advised the German government on how to improve its relations to the United States. To this end, Lee met several times with Adolph Hitler, his propaganda minister Joseph Goebbles and other NAZI officials.

Lee never made a public statement in connection with this affaire. We will never know if it was because he had nothing to say or because he thought that the fight was not worth it. Lee died a few months later, in November 1934, of a fulminant brain tumor.

Conclusions

Also in his final assignment, Ivy L. Lee transgressed the informative transparency that he honored in his declaration of principles. This fact, by the way, does not reduce the value of the declaration, or of the principles established in the historical document, which still represents an ethical landmark in the PR profession. Only because of this declaration, Ivy L. Lee would deserve to go down into public relations history as one of the fathers of the profession. Albert Oeckl, German scholar in the PR field, considered the declaration the “Gerburtsstunde” (birth moment) of the professional field (Oeckl, 1987).

Lee’s relationship to the Rockefeller family during the Ludlow crisis offers us the best example of the way he interpreted and practiced his trade. Lee acknowledged the importance of the public in the American political system and was able to persuade the Rockefeller family of the key role of this public in the corporate world. The public perception of a company was, in his vision, the conditio sine qua non for its financial survival. Lee realized that the relationship with the anonymous but omnipresent public was the main weakness of the capital.

The press was at the turn to the 20th century the only mass medium. Lee’s experience as a journalist soon persuaded him of the key role of the press to achieve his goals. The press would eventually become the main channel to transmit messages to the public. Lee knew first hand the news values, what really makes news, as well as the preferences, trends, vices and inclinations of the newspaper editors. The press might shape the way we comprehend reality through its selection power. What does not appear in the media will never enter our awareness. Therefore, most of Lee’s publicity endeavors were aimed to control the information that was going to appear in the press.

Lee systematically defined the specific audiences he wanted to target with his messages. Based on his audience analyses, he chose the more effective channels and shaped the contents of his messages.

Any historical analysis of the PR profession has to deal with Ivy L. Lee also because of the ambiguity that characterizes all his activities, the same ambiguity that characterizes the PR profession in this day and age. In contemporary public relations, as it was the case of Lee’s work, we can never clearly distinguish between the expressed and the actual objective of the different strategies. The best example of this ambiguity is Ivy L. Lee’s declaration of principles. We will never be totally able to discern whether the ethical standards established in the declaration were an end in itself or just a maneuver to gain the favor and trust of public opinion and the press.

There are other instances of Lee’s ambiguous approach to his profession. Repeatedly, Lee expressed his faith in an enlightened public opinion. He stated that “the American people, intelligent, just and generous to a cause that appeals to them, want facts and figures” (Cutlip, 1994, p.63). The appeal to the emotions would never be effective dealing with American public opinion, which, in Lee’s depiction, would match the ideal public sphere fashioned by Jürgen Habermas. The brainless crowd – always easy to impress, as described by Gustave Le Bon – was a phenomenon of the past. It had been replaced by an intelligent public that would immediately detect the scheming intention behind the instrumental use of emotions. This appeal to the intelligent public, however, may hide one of the habitual Lee’s rhetorical schemes.

With such statements, Lee obviously wanted to flatter the public. Still, he frequently did not treat the public as an intelligent entity. His strategy rather followed what Petty and Cacioppo designated as peripheral route to persuasion. We could even talk about a special form of heuristic, the satisfied-ego heuristic. When Lee exalted the intelligence of his audiences, he expected that the mere exaltation would be enough to avoid a critical analysis of the delivered information. For such an attempt to mislead the public would be in contradiction with the explicit praise of its intelligence. Emphasizing that the public would not be influenced by means of easy emotional artifices, Lee expected that they would never question the facts he released either. Yet, Lee was neither rigorous with the information he delivered to the public, nor scrupulous with the fashion it was delivered. In the analysis of the Ludlow campaign, we could see how he repeatedly concealed the actual source of the messages and tried to mislead gatekeepers and audiences. Again, his acts seem to contradict Lee’s public discourse. The appeal to the intelligence of the public loses credibility when those who expressed it are, at the same time, trying to deceive the public.

When Lee stressed the importance of informative transparency, he was more interested in the credibility that flows from the transparency than in the honest dealing with information itself. When he appealed to the intelligence of the public, he was counting on the effect of the mere cajolement to neutralize criticism. Ivy L. Lee, a man with complex and sophisticated mental structures, lent his complexity and sophistication to the public relations practice. Many business- and statesmen were captivated by this new approach to the world of communication. Lee’s legacy is an unknown depth in the field of public relations that makes this profession one of the columns of modern society – extraordinarily complex, too.

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