Published by EH.NET (September 1999
)
Karen S. Miller. The Voice of Business: Hill & Knowlton and Postwar Public
Relations. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. xiii +
261 pp. Notes, bibliography, index, and illustrations. $ 39.95 (cloth),
ISBN 0-8078-2439-9.
Reviewed
for H-Business and EH.NET by Pamela W. Laird, University of Colorado at Denver.
Listening to a Voice of Business
Public relations, like advertising, is alternatively blamed and credited for
both the good and the wicked conditions of modern times. How can a scholar
tread the perilous course of responsibly assessing the impacts of a public
relations firm, while avoiding both platitudes and alarms? Karen S.
Miller provides us with a solidly researched and insightful model in her
masterful case study of Hill & Knowlton (H&K), one of the most important public
relations firms in the United States. Instead of a false drama of blame or
credit, Miller weaves together a lively and finely tuned narrative of H&K
activities after World War II with a balanced evaluation of their impacts. She
sticks closely to her evidence, resulting in a solid and most useful study.
Moreover she knows that looking at her subjects’ output does not necessarily
tell the historian whether or not “the general
public saw,
read, agreed with, or discussed the material” (p. 112). Like advertisements,
public relations messages tell us more about their creators than their
audiences. This approach is not the stuff of which New York Times best
sellers are made, but
The Voice of Business should make the best seller list of all those
interested in how ideas combine with business activities and interests when
business people try to influence public policy, consumption, and mainstream
attitudes.
Public relations advisors and textbooks alike insist that practitioners’
most important tasks focus on clients. After all, without commitment and
participation by managerial authorities, no PR program can function. Even more
than an advertising campaign, which certainly requires some managerial
cooperation, a public relations policy or program must engage decision makers.
For instance, in an all-time classic case, public relations pioneer Ivy Lee
guided the Rockefellers’ recovery from the public opinion disaster of the 1914
Ludlow Massacre by convincing John D. Rockefeller Jr. to come to the site of
the anti-labor violence and express his sorrow and regret. Had Lee simply
issued a press statement on the Rockefellers’ behalf, it would not have
sufficed to calm public outrage at
a time when Progressive Era opinion already mistrusted Robber Barons, and
firms were more generally identified with their owners than now. In a more
recent classic, Johnson &
Johnson executives decided in 1982, at huge cost, to remove and destroy all
Tylenol packages from store shelves across the United States after seven
poisonings in the Chicago area. Even though the cyanide had been inserted by a
murderer in a single locale, with public confidence their highest priority,
Johnson & Johnson managers sought to assure consumers that they would
thereafter see only safe products on the shelves. They did not hesitate or
argue about their firm’s lack of culpability.
Miller demonstrates the merits of such focus on clients by public relations
practitioners. Th rough a series of case studies she shows how H&K’s prestige
and influence grew because founder John W. Hill early on recognized the client
as the public relations practitioner’s first audience. Selecting cases for
their importance to successive stages of H&K’s development, Miller covers the
agency’s postwar work for and relations
with the steel, aircraft, butter, and tobacco industries. The public opinion
campaigns H&K generated and waged on behalf of these business interests yield
fascinating narratives and provide Miller the means of analyzing complex
relationships between large-scale businesses,
the state, and the public. On behalf of steel interests, for instance, H&K
argued against labor militancy and state authority, taking on the task of
“popular education” about “basic economics,” that is, pro-business economics.
Through the usual armamentarium of news releases, publications,
film, radio broadcasts, speeches, and congressional testimony, plus a comic
book for school distribution, H&K attacked what
Hill called the “national problem of winning more friends for the steel
industry” (pp. 55-9).
In the early stages of the professionalization of advertising agencies, F.
Wayland Ayer raised the stature of the field by operating as a businessman
among businessmen, helping the latter to make decisions rather than just
taking their orders. John W. Hill likewise raised his profession by always
conducting himself as a peer to his clients, counseling them and speaking–not
shouting–for them. Hill expected to participate in policy making, and
believed that clients who sought only publicity risked “poor policy and bad
public relations” (p. 142). When even major clients, like the National Retail
Dry Goods Association and the tobacco industry, closed their decision-making
processes, H&K resigned those accounts.
Miller concludes that “Hill’s legacy must be viewed as mixed.” H&K’s
“manipulation of information” did influence “both the content and the quantity
of public discussion,” but its “biggest impact was not on
the general public but on its own clients” and others who already agreed with
them (p. 3). For instance, the agency helped settle the 1948-1950 controversy
over oleomargarine by “urging the butter lobby [its client] to alter its policy
to a compromise position that in turn changed legislators’
goals” (p. 72). Miller also suggests that in other cases H&K’s influence
followed in part from reinforcing the pre-existing opinions of clients and
like-minded citizens. By fulfilling its mission “to amplify the voice of
industry,” H&K “fortified executives in the face of battle” and strengthened
their resolve (pp. 189, 193).
Perhaps Miller’s strongest methodological contribution is her use of the social
science concept of issue framing. In each of her cases, she
finds H&K’s greatest impact in its “adding to the frames of interpretation used
in public debates” (p. 190). This analytical insight alone is well worth
historians’ attention, for others besides skilled, professional communicators
deliberately attempt to
frame public debates. H&K’s work for the tobacco industry during the 1950s and
1960s provides Miller’s strongest example of purposeful framing. To combat
growing evidence and fears that cigarette smoking was hazardous, H&K
“emphasized several themes within the
‘case is not proved’ frame.” At that early stage in the gathering of
antismoking evidence, H&K helped the tobacco industry to define the public
opinion problem not as a direct confrontation with scientists and their
evidence, but rather as a matter
of raising doubts about the validity of their concerns. “Medical science” had
not proven a health hazard, and H&K recommended that the industry set up a
research program to “demonstrate that a controversy existed” (pp. 129-30,
133-4). This campaign succeeded in rebuilding consumers’ confidence in tobacco
by raising comforting doubts about the challengers’ arguments. After a decline
in smoking among adults during 1953 and 1954, consumption rose again until the
Surgeon General’s 1964 report, which made it increasingly difficult to
maintain the decade-old framing of the controversy. In this case, as in others,
H&K sometimes increased the flow of information, and at other times decreased
it. More importantly, it learned to direct that flow by framing issues for the
press and the public.
Miller’s opening critiques of those who have
“overestimated the power of public
relations” initially raised my concerns that The Voice of Business
might parallel the apologists for cigarette advertising–whose modesty about
its marketing impacts before courts and legislators clashes repeatedly with
the immodesty implied by massive campaign spending. Miller,
however, is no apologist; nor is she a critic. Instead her scholarship conveys
little of her own opinions about the ethical consequences of H&K activities,
although I think I detected a sigh of relief when H&K resigned the tobacco
account in 1969. Clearly, Miller admires John W. Hill for his skills, dignity,
and his steadfast adherence to personal and professional standards, yet she
also points to his political contradictions. She frequently refers to Hill’s
political conservatism and party affiliation without positive or negative
comment.
Linking labor’s goals and state authority with the thin edge of socialism’s
wedge
, especially when arguing against President Truman’s seizure of steel mills in
April, 1951, during the Korean War, H&K fought the free enterprise battle in
each of its big postwar campaigns. Intriguing contradictions popped up,
however, such as promoting
the butter lobby’s desires that the federal government intervene in the market
by forbidding oleo manufacturers to color their product yellow. Similarly,
H&K’s extensive campaigns on behalf of the air transport industries lobbied
both Congress and the public to increase government contracts. In both these
cases, anti-government partisans unabashedly saw government action as the
solution to their problems.
Exercising the reviewer’s prerogative, what would I have asked Miller to do
differently? A broadened
perspective that included slightly fuller treatments of the public relations
story before and during the postwar period could have deepened Miller’s
analysis of Hill’s principles and practices. Similarly, although Hill’s
pro-business, politically conservative ideas are key to her story,
contextualization and explanation run thin: “Whatever the reason, Hill held
many of the characteristics and beliefs of his clients” (p. 22). The
ideological environment in which Hill and his clients operated during the early
Cold War fostered their mutual successes, and more recognition of this
could have better situated H&K and its impacts. On another track, did H&K
agents take into account issues of population diversity with which advertising
agents were learning to wrestle, or did they dismiss those outside the
mainstream middle classes as either irrelevant to decision-making processes,
or, as with labor,
opponents? A clearer sense of how H&K saw “the public’s” identity would have
enriched our picture of why they operated as they did. Surely they knew that
their field, like advertising, was moving toward stronger feedback loops with
audiences. Was it paternalism, elitism, or just inertia that kept H&K’s vision
narrow? None of these areas is essential for Miller’s story
, but I do think that brief forays would have made the book,
and her otherwise sterling analyses, more accessible to a larger audience and
more meaningful to all. Nonetheless, The Voice of Business is a must
read for all those interested in how and why
business organizations project ideas into the public arena when they seek to
influence public policy,
consumption, and popular attitudes.