Ellsworth, James Drummond

James Drummond Ellsworth was the first public relations executive on the payroll of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, serving from 1907 to 1930.

The son of a Congregationalist minister, Ellsworth was born in Massachusetts around 1863. He was raised in North Carolina, Iowa, and Illinois as his father moved from one congregation to another. In his youth, he was at various times a cowboy, lumberjack, and printer's devil. This last job ignited an interest in journalism—or at least in the rough-andready reporting practiced in small towns of the time—and he wrote for the Colorado Springs Gazette while studying at Colorado College. His efforts to help start a newspaper in the silver-mining town of Aspen failed when the steel bars used to turn the plates on the printing press were lost. But in his fourth year of college, he had an opportunity to take over the weekly Enterprise in Coal Creek, Colorado, as editor, manager, and printer. The paper had about 2,000 subscribers. Just 22 years old, Ellsworth was celebrated as the youngest editor in the state, and he never went back to college.

After a year and a half, Ellsworth moved to Denver and, over the next 4 years, landed successive reporting jobs with the Rocky Mountain News, the Denver Journal, and the Denver Times. In 1889, he moved back east and talked himself into a job with the Boston Herald. Over the next 12 years, he left the Herald four times for better pay or more interesting work at other papers, including one stint as ad manager and traveling salesman for a patent medicine company, but he always returned. In his last period at the Herald, he moonlighted as an opera singer's press agent, placing a piece about her in his own paper. She paid him $50 for it, substantially more than he was making at the paper.

When George Michaelis, one of the founding partners of the Publicity Bureau of Boston, approached Ellsworth about taking a job, he officially moved from journalism to publicity. The Publicity Bureau, established in 1900 by three former newspapermen “to do a general press agent business,” was the forerunner of today's public relations firms. Its early clients were Charles W. Eliot of Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Boston Elevated, and the Fore River Ship Yard.

In 1903, the American Telephone Company, then headquartered in Boston, hired a patent attorney—Frederick Fish—as its president. At the time, the company had a reputation for poor customer service, high-handed business practices, and exorbitant prices. Fish, an excellent lawyer, had no idea what to do about it, so he was receptive when Michaelis suggested that “the situation could not be made worse by a venture in publicity and it might be made better” (Ellsworth, 1936, p. 58).

Ellsworth was assigned to the AT&T account. His first step was to analyze newspaper clippings from across the country that the Bell Company's [Page 275]“Information Bureau” was carefully cataloguing. About 90 percent were antagonistic. After 6 months, the negative media reviews declined to 80 percent, then to 60 percent and steadily lower, until, according to Ellsworth's memoirs, they were less than 20 percent.

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