Spin, Corporate

Lee and Bernays

Ivy Ledbetter Lee, one of America's first corporate public relations professionals, played a key role in what would later become known as corporate spin. A former newspaper man, Lee represented many clients in the early 1900s, disseminating facts and information to the public through cultivating an open relationship with the press. During this time, public relations experts were typically called in to “fix” negative public sentiment about an organization or to garner publicity aligned with an organization's views.

Perhaps the most famous of Lee's corporate spin activities is his representation of the Rockefeller family in a 1914 incident known as the Ludlow Massacre. During a coal miners' strike at the Rockefeller-owned Colorado Fuel and Iron Company in Ludlow, Colorado, 14 individuals were killed by company guards. Among the dead were striking miners, miners' wives, and their children. As the Rockefeller family abdicated any connection to wrongdoing, Lee began defending his client and sharing the “facts” of the massacre with the public. Before the U.S. Federal Commission on Industrial Relations, he asserted that the truth [Page 862]was open to public interpretation, and he propagated facts through the eyes of the Rockefeller family rather than offering an accurate, objective chronicling or an honest depiction of the family's activities. Lee's ability to disseminate facts to the public with minimal concern for ethics, little regard for the public interest, and a maximum concern for representing his client laid the foundations for what would later become known as corporate spin.

If Lee is thought to have initiated corporate spin, many would argue that Edwards Bernays perfected it. Through representing numerous corporate clients in more than six decades of counseling on public relations activities, Bernays is often credited as being both the father of public relations and the father of spin. In service to his clients and their interests, Bernays implemented unprecedented public relations campaigns. He sold Ivory Soap by offering soap sculpture contests. He increased bacon sales by having physicians recommend a daily “American” breakfast that included bacon on behalf of the Beechnut Packing Company, a bacon producer, and he created a worldwide celebration of the electric light bulb called Light's Golden Jubilee on behalf of General Electric Corporation.

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