Biography of public opinion – Picture of the day – Kommersant

Today, customers will receive printed copies of a biography of Ivy Lee, one of the founders of “public relations.” As one of the pioneers of the field of PR, Ivy Lee looked at it with almost renaissance breadth, distinguishing the general patterns that govern complex social phenomena, from the development of industries to international relations. Why a book about a man who lived and worked a century ago turned out to be so useful at the end of 2022 was understood by Ivan Sukhov.

Alpina Pro’s Alpina Pro book Courtier for the Crowd by Ray Eldon Huibert is reminiscent of the plot of an action movie. Before the reader is a panorama of America in the first third of the 20th century – the one that the Bolsheviks dreamed of catching up and overtaking, the one that mysteriously remained behind the Iron Curtain, and the one that many think about not without nostalgia when they encounter America today. The picture of a period full of both crises and inspiring upsurges, in addition to everything else, also reminds us that the current nervous time is far from the first “roaring” decade in history.

Wikipedia calls Ivy Ledbetter Lee (1934–1977) “the journalist who developed the principles of the public relations profession.” However, Lee himself did not formulate until the end of his life what he actually did – “he often said that he did not know how to describe the essence of his work, because they had not yet come up with a name for this,” Ray Heibert writes in the preface to the second American edition of the book (2017). And then he cites a number of concepts that had not yet been properly formulated at the beginning of the 20th century: social responsibility, conflict management, public diplomacy.

One of the central episodes of Lee’s biography exhaustively explains who he is. In April 1914, the Colorado National Guard, local police, and the guards of the Rockefeller coal mines broke into the camp of the striking miners in Ludlow and opened fire there. The shooting and fire killed several people, including several women and children. The owner of the enterprise, John Rockefeller Jr., was faced with the need to explain himself not only to the workers who continued to strike, but also to the outraged public. Until that moment, such situations, as a rule, were resolved on the basis of the principle of the complete moral rightness of the owner, but the Rockefellers decided that this time the usual scheme would not work. Ivy Lee, a 37-year-old journalist with a background in “public relations,” was recommended to the family.

“When Rockefeller asked Lee what to do, he replied: the first and most important rule is that any information campaign should be as open as possible, there should be no place for dubious methods in it.”

Lee believed that the mine operators should state their version of events “for themselves, honestly and in detail”. He managed to convince the employer: he did the unthinkable – he went to Colorado, met and explained to the workers, their families and union leaders. And in the end, together with Lee, they found a way not only to save, but to re-create the image of the company and its owners themselves.

The name of the Russian edition of Ivy Lee’s biography is the same as the original one – “Courtier To The Croud”. The subtitle of the original – “Ivy Lee and the development of public relations in America” ​​- the Russian publisher replaced with a more explanatory “The story of Ivy Lee, who taught the world’s elite to listen to people.” In the publisher’s foreword, Georgy Prokopov, editor-in-chief of the Moscow Daily News, writes how impressed he was with the American edition of Lee’s biography when it was in his hands: industry, philanthropy, cinematography, aviation, auto industry – Ivy Lee has worked with companies and structures from all these industries. What is called the “pulse” of the era absorbs the reader: “Industrial development soared to historic highs, the consolidation of companies was at a record pace, and, unlike previous decades, few objected to this. The presidential administration was now oriented towards the interests of business, and industrialists paid more and more attention to building trust with the public and making their strategies acceptable to them,” writes biographer Li. At the same time, the years of the protagonist’s life, the years of the First World War, the revolution in Russia, inflation, the Great Depression – “the peak of the crisis experienced by democracy in a mass society … The word was used not to prevent the abuse of power, but to usurp power,” recalls Ray Huibert in the preface to the 1966 edition.

Li was witnessing—and participating—an epic transformation: the “contempt for the public (fuck the public!)” prevalent among industrialists and Western political elites alike was giving way to a culture of dialogue.

Obviously, these changes were not motivated solely by the good will of the people in whose hands power and property were concentrated. Simultaneously with gigantic industrial projects, with the creation of entire industries and services, the trade union movement grew, and workers’ strikes could paralyze production for months. In Soviet Russia (where Ivy Lee visited several times, met the leaders and almost met Stalin), a socio-political project arose and gained momentum, an alternative to the West and declaring precisely the priority of workers’ rights. In Germany, faced with political restrictions, the need to pay reparations and the contemptuous attitude of the winners after the defeat in the First World War, another alternative was emerging in the form of National Socialism.

Both of these options seemed unacceptable to Lee and many of his clients: “he came to the conclusion that this was not the solution to the problem and that, despite the difficulties, a pluralistic society and democracy must be preserved.” Lee believed that different groups should be able to publicly and clearly state their position. He went so far in this belief that in the early 1930s he suggested that Soviet leaders buy advertising space in Western newspapers in order to convey his vision of the situation to the Western public (only Nikita Khrushchev would first resort to this practice in 1962: London Daily Express will print as an advertisement, a two-page speech by the Soviet leader at a session of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR).

For what sometimes looked like sympathy for the “Reds”, Ivy Lee was expectedly criticized from the right, but for the left he was also an unconditional anti-hero: the author of “A Courtier for the Crowd” somehow found his book in 37th place in the list of the most dangerous books compiled by left-wing activists. Lee, the left believed, contributed to the “rehabilitation of greedy capitalism.” However, both he and his biographer are inclined to believe that Lee contributed precisely to teaching the rules of the game to the “greedy capitalists” – the American “robber barons”; to force public groups, groups of countries and individual countries to listen to each other and come to mutually acceptable solutions. As a member of the New York Chamber of Commerce, Lee was outraged when the chamber passed a resolution in January 1926 calling on the US administration not to recognize the USSR as long as the Bolsheviks held power there. At the same time, he “tossed his hat” when President Hoover’s administration imposed a moratorium on German reparations payments.

Lee was an unconditional supporter of capitalism, defending the interests of entrepreneurs in conflicts with both workers and the government, which sought, for example, to impose low tariffs on railways.

“The forces that move the economy and trade are beyond the control of the management of companies, just as the planets do not choose the orbits in which they move,” he wrote. His “primary concern was the public”, the satisfaction of its interests is, in his own term, “enlightened self-interest”: the more a company can do for society, the more it will receive in return. The policy of “cooperation and encouragement” is the “politics of common sense,” Lee said, and “personal freedom, expressed in some form of capitalism, is most conducive to growth and progress.”

This idyllic scheme, of course, was not without controversy. “In the modern world, the people rule,” Lee said, speaking to the Guild of American Railroads in 1914. “Instead of the divine right of kings, there is now the divine right of the mob. The crowd is enthroned. This new ruler has his own “couriers” who flatter their king and amuse him in the same way that the medieval retinue pleased the emperors. True, Lee himself called “court courtiers for the crowd” rather investigative journalists, “diggers of dirt” – those who, in his opinion, often did not put the common good and sustainable development at a penny. He himself studied the conflict between the freedom of the individual and the power of public opinion in mass society, but he only came to the conclusion about the need for prudent decisions aimed at preserving freedom and allowing in any conflict to keep open the channels of exchange of information necessary for mutual understanding. “The central theme of his legacy was the conviction that it is the truth that makes a man free,” writes Ray Heibert. “As a courtier to the crowd, he felt that the truth was the best form of flattery for the people in a democratic society. In a democracy, the truth will sooner or later come out, so honesty in politics is the shortest way to win the sympathy of the public.

In the United States, this biography of Ivy Lee has been published twice: immediately after it was written and in 2017. In the preface to the second edition, Huibert admits disappointedly that “today, most likely, I would not write this book”: “For 50 years I have not agreed to its reprint – and in the meantime, its topic has again acquired relevance. The tycoons and robber barons are back, economic inequality is growing, and social media outlaws are reminiscent of the lawlessness of the American Wild West in the 19th century.” The ability, and perhaps the art of listening to each other, which Lee considered as a pledge of the common good, is incredibly scarce, and those who speak about the need to hear the truth are laughed at, as they say, on both sides of the front line – it does not matter if he passes the world map , or on the screen of a gadget connected to a social network. It remains only to agree with Lee, who believed that “turning away from each other, problems cannot be solved”, and to admit that there is little better time for the publication of a Russian translation of his biography than the current one, with its turbulence, fears and hopes for the best. future.