Removing the Spin: Toward a New Theory of Public Relations History

Abstract

PART I: OVERVIEW Introduction In the absence of a general theory that describes the rise and growth of public relations, scholars have tended to organize public relations and its antecedents into time periods that present a progressive evolution from unsophisticated and unethical early roots to planned, strategic, and ethical campaigns of the current day. We argue that such attempts at periodization have obscured our understanding of public relations and its history. Indeed, public relations historians have long called for such a departure, noting the constraints it has imposed on understanding the development of public relations in the United States and around the world (e.g., Brown, 2003; Gower, 2007, 2008 Hoy, Raaz, & Wehmeier, 2007 L'Etang, 2004, 2008; Lamme, 2003 McBride, 1989; Miller, 2000 Pearson, 1990; Piasecki, 2000 Toledano, 2005). We therefore analyzed scholarship about public relations (whether it is called publicity, press agentry, propaganda, or public relations) prior to 1900 to understand the growth of the in a variety of contexts and time periods. This is not an attempt to catalog additional antecedents to 20th century practices. Instead, this study seeks to break away from the misleading dependence on linear interpretations of the field's past and construct a broad, long-term view of the development and institutionalization of persuasive organizational communication strategies and techniques. In the process, we seek to correct misunderstandings about public relations history which have (mis)informed public relations theory for more than 20 years and to describe and understand the historical relationship between public relations, the mass media, and the historical contexts in which public relations emerged. By doing so, we seek to depart from what L'Etang (2008, p. 321) called the patterning, or colligation, of history, which can artificially inflate or diminish the historical role of people and events, and reappraise the criteria used to establish the meaning of value in the field (Creedon, 1989, p. 29). The effect of these efforts, then, will be to remove the spin - the conscious positioning of public relations history that has heretofore dominated scholarly understanding of the field's development. SIGNIFICANCE TO MASS COMMUNICATION Public relations history has been of great interest to disciplines lying outside the mass communication field, such as social history (Ewen, 1996; Pimlott, 1951), business history (Gras, 1945; Marchand, 1998, Raucher, 1968, Tedlow, 1979), political science (Maltese, 1992), cultural history (Leach, 1993), English (Davis, 2007), and history (Billington, 1978; Goldman, 1948, 1978; Nevins, 1963). Mass communication scholars also have contributed studies of significance to American public relations history, largely concerning the press and government (e.g., Cone, 2007; Lumsden, 2000; Oukrop, 1976; Streitmatter, 1990), religion (e.g., Ferre, 1993; Nord, 1984), and the advocacy press (e.g., Burt, 1998, 1999; Steiner, 1983; Folkerts, 1985). The latter, in particular, has been found to serve as a tool for community-building (Steiner, 1983; Folkerts, 1985), for enhancing a movement's legitimacy (Folkerts, 1985), for articulating a movement's message, for propagating a movement's mission, for recruiting, mobilizing, and sustaining support and membership (Burt, 2000, p. 73), and for serving as community bulletin boards (Burt, 1999, p. 39). Finally, three authors grounded in journalism have, to date, written the most extensively on three 20th century public relations pioneers: Hiebert (1966) on Ivy Lee, Tye (1998) on Edward L. Bernays, and Henry (1997, 1998, 1999) on Doris Fleischman. Within the public relations field, however, scholars have pursued new theoretical ground by looking outside the to apply multi-tiered analyses and frameworks (e.g., Brown, 2006; L'Etang, 2004; Miller, 2000; and Pearson, 1990). Others have considered public relations history in the context of ethics (McBride, 1989) and ethical propaganda (St. …