IB: What were the historical circumstances that produced an Ivy Lee and produced public relations?

CB: The tradition of American capitalism in the latter part of 19th century was, I think, exemplified by commodore Vanderbilt, who was the founder of the NY Central Railroad and his attitude was: the public be damned. That is to say, the power of rising capital in America at that period was so strong and public opinion was not a terribly significant factor in influencing either the policies of government or private corps in any way. And so the result was the media-that is to say, the newspapers, which was the only medium at the time-tended to be either corrupt-that is to say, bought and paid for by private interests or they tended to free and very independent and hostile to the rising power of the corps and corruption in government. And along came around the turn of the century Ivy Lee, who had been a newspaper man among other employers, the NY Times, and his attitude was, well business had bad things about it and it had good things about it, but it wasn't telling the good things and the media people, reporters and editors, didn't know about the good things and he said, I'm going to try and set up a business where I help corps or business tell their story honestly to the public and that had not been done before. His first client almost, was John D. Rockefeller and um, Ivy Lee's record over the period of his firm-which was the first PR firm in the US, starting in 1904, I think it was-he left a record of honesty and integrity. Nobody could go back in later years and say, "Hey, you lied to us, you didn't tell us the truth." He made sure he told accurate facts and began to build a reputation for credibility and that was something new in American business.

IB: What was the difference between press agents of the time and what Ivy Lee had in mind?

CB: First of all, the typical press agent in the 19th C and even as early as the 18th C going back to Tom Payne who was a propagandist, you could say a PR man, except the term wasn't coined back then Ira. Was primarily in the political sector, not in the business sector. That's the first thing. The second thing was there was no particular sense of responsibility for accuracy among the political propagandists of the period-you can find exaggeration and rhetoric all the way back. The third thing was Ivy Lee's attitude, at least to the extent I understand it-is, sure there were bad things, let's try to talk about them honestly and try to balance them with the good and that was a new concept, not one that had been previously practiced.

IB: In the end, corporations loved him but the press didn't. They called him Poison Ivy and those kinds of things. Why do you think the press wasn't as eager to embrace what he was doing as maybe they should have been?

CB: Well, first of all, having been an editor myself and having sat at the news desk myself and seeing the junk and the nonsense that comes from PR people, I think there's a built-in and reasonable enmity and distrust from editors toward anything coming from PR people. I think the editors of Ivy Lee's period-which was the period of the so-called muckrakers, digging up the dirt about corps-I think that would inevitably would tend to make editors distrustful of the stuff that Ivy Lee was putting out. I dug in at some length to the campaign that Ivy Lee did for the NY subway system which was then a private company. And I think and I thought it held up very well. There was no exaggeration. For example, Ivy Lee's attitude was very well exemplified in that campaign he did for the subways from about 1916 on, something like that. He said, "Hey, we need a fare increase and here's why." And then he went into tremendous specific details-the rails on which the subway trains in NY city run cost so much a ton, they're wearing out, we need to replace them, and so on. Well, as a matter of fact, he failed in that campaign. I don't know if you know the story but in 1904, when the subway system was started in NY, the city gave this private company, (can't make out name), the right to tear up the streets, to knock down buildings-anything they had to do to build a subway. But among the things they were promised in return was that the fare would remain at 5 cents forever. And this worked from 1904 when the subways opened till 1917/18, for about 14 years, and then gradually inflation, fuelled by WWI, had forced up the subway's cost and they asked for an increase-they went to board of alderman, which was the governing body of NY at the time. And they asked for an increase to 6 cents and the political leadership of the city said "Absolutely not, we're not going to have this big corporation exploiting the people of NY City." And they voted it down. Ivy Lee took the job of trying to change that and he failed to do it. He was unable to do it. But if you look at the material he presented it was about as well done as it could've been done but it wasn't enough to overcome the political reality of NY politics and he lost. The fare remained at 5 cents in NYC until approximately after WWII. I don't remember the exact year. By that time, the subway company didn't have enough money to pay decent wages, they were exploiting the workers so the union came in and organized the workers, equipment was falling apart, there were many accidents and so on. Finally the railroad corp. went bankrupt. The city took it over and then they started subsidizing it and they raised the fare and so on. But IL's part at the time, was as skillful as could be done and it was not based on lies.

IB: What was his legacy in terms of his contribution to PR?

IB: I think very strongly that Ivy Lee's contribution was that the only thing that really carries is truth. Not spin. And while he failed in his campaign of telling the truth, he left a very important precedent. And after him came Arthur Page at TT&T, who, in 1927, he became the first PR officer of any US corporation … … Arthur Page said a corporation's reputation is chiefly dependent on what it does and to a lesser degree on what it says. And that's the tradition IL started, that's the tradition that is, I think, completely, or largely, lost today where everything is put in terms of not what the truth is and here's where we're honestly going to tell you but rather how can we spin it to make ourselves look better than we really are.

IB: So you see his legacy as being the antithesis of spin?

CB: Absolutely. Absolutely. I don't think spin works. In my experience in public relations, propaganda/spin can work very powerfully and very successfully but the thing that will overcome it is not more spin or better spin or more money or more propaganda but reality. I think that's the only thing. When people see in their own lives the reality-whether it's a product they bought that isn't up to expectations or a political candidate that isn't delivering what they wanted-that's the only thing that changes and defeats spin.

IB: How do you define spin?

CB: How do I define spin? By presenting the facts first of all in the most favourable way I can without sticking too close to reality and without giving the other side of the coin. Let me try to illustrate what I'm talking about. How I think it should be. I have always, at least in my experience, regarded the biggest problem in PR or the biggest problem of persuasion as not getting the audience's attention-that's what most public relations people worry about, how can I get my story in print, how can I get attention for it, that's my primary problem. I've always found the primary problem-that when I do get it into your attention, into your awareness… why should you believe me? Credibility, to me, has always been the major problem with communication or persuasion or public relations. Getting people to believe something and I have found when you tell the truth and you point out the negatives as well as the positives, people develop credibility in your message, that they will not develop when you get a spin. Spin is telling the positive side invariably and in an exaggerated fashion.

IB: What is the difference between spin and public relations?

CB: I would say it's the difference between good and bad PR. I think most of the PR activity today would fit the definition of spin and for that reason most of it is ineffective. Most of it doesn't work. It works for a while but when the reality clashes with what people have been told, the whole thing falls apart. I think that's what's happening, for instance, look what happened with Enron. Enron being a very good example. It's interesting in the Enron case, while the company had presented itself as a great forerunner of American business, there were no public relations people even involved in the management of the company and that's a pretty interesting fact.

It's significant that none of the people who've been accused were public relations people. Spin was the whole essence of the corporation; it wasn't just the public relations department, the whole company was spin. And the whole image presented was a very innovative, forward-leaning corporation doing new, great things. When the reality hit, which was that it was a fraud, the whole company collapsed and now you have an enormous distrust that has spread and not just a distrust of Enron but of the whole business community and the whole accounting profession and the investment field. There's no question that it has affected negatively public opinion. But it wasn't public relations exposing Enron, it was reality. Reality collapsed the company.

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