From: lessgovt@gmail.com   
      
   Ivy Ledbetter Lee (1877–1934) was an American publicity expert and a founder   
   of modern public relations. Lee is best known for his public relations work   
   with the Rockefeller Family.   
      
   His first major client was the Pennsylvania Railroad, followed by numerous   
   major railroads such as the New York Central, the Baltimore and Ohio, and the   
   Harriman lines such as the Union Pacific. He established the Association of   
   Railroad Executives,    
   which included providing public relations services to the industry. Lee   
   advised major industrial corporations, including steel, automobile, tobacco,   
   meat packing, and rubber, as well as public utilities, banks, and even foreign   
   governments   
      
   Lee pioneered the use of internal magazines to maintain employee morale, as   
   well as management newsletters, stockholder reports, and news releases to the   
   media. He did a great deal of pro bono work, which he knew was important to   
   his own public image,    
   and during World War I, he became the publicity director for the American Red   
   Cross.   
      
   Early life and career   
   Lee was born near Cedartown, Georgia, the son of a Methodist minister, James   
   Wideman Lee, author of several books and a contributor to John L. Brandt's   
   Anglo-Saxon Supremacy, or, Race Contributions to Civilization (1915), who   
   founded a prominent Atlanta    
   family. Ivy Lee studied at Emory College and then graduated from Princeton. He   
   worked as a newspaper reporter and stringer. He was a journalist at the New   
   York American, the New York Times, and the New York World.   
      
   Lee got his first job in 1903 as a publicity manager for the Citizens Union.   
   He authored the book The Best Administration New York City Ever Had (1903). He   
   later took a job with the Democratic National Committee. Lee married Cornelia   
   Bartlett Bigalow in    
   1901. They had three children: Alice Lee in 1902, James Wideman Lee II in   
   1906, and Ivy Lee, Jr. in 1909.   
      
   Together with George Parker, he established the nation's third public   
   relations firm, Parker and Lee, in 1905. The new agency boasted of "Accuracy,   
   Authenticity, and Interest." It made this partnership after working together   
   in the Democratic Party    
   headquarters, handling publicity for Judge Alton Parker's unsuccessful   
   presidential race against Theodore Roosevelt in 1904.   
      
   The Parker and Lee firm lasted less than four years, but the junior partner,   
   Lee, was to become one of the most influential pioneers in public relations.   
   He evolved his philosophy in 1906 into the Declaration of Principles, the   
   first articulation of the    
   concept that public relations practitioners have a public responsibility that   
   extends beyond obligations to the client. In the same year, after the 1906   
   Atlantic City train wreck, Lee issued what is often considered to be the first   
   press release, after    
   persuading the company to disclose information to journalists before they   
   could hear it elsewhere.   
      
   When Lee was hired full-time by the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1912, he was   
   considered to be the first public relations person placed in an    
   xecutive-level position. In fact, his archives reveal that he drafted one of   
   the first job descriptions of a VP-   
   level corporate public relations position.   
      
   In 1919, he founded a public relations counseling office, Ivy Lee & Associates.   
      
   During World War I, Lee served as a publicity director, and later as Assistant   
   to the Chairman of the American Red Cross.   
      
   Through his sister Laura, Lee was an uncle to novelist William S. Burroughs.   
      
   Ivy Lee died of a brain tumor in New York City at the age of 57.   
      
   Effect on public relations   
   Many historians credit Lee with being the originator of modern crisis   
   communications. His principal competitor in the new public relations industry   
   was Edward Bernays, and he has been credited with influencing Pendleton Dudley   
   to enter the then-nascent    
   field.   
      
   In 1914, he was to enter public relations on a much larger scale when he was   
   retained by John D. Rockefeller Jr to represent his family and Standard Oil   
   ("to burnish the family image"), after their bloody repression of the coal   
   mining strike in Colorado    
   known as the "Ludlow Massacre." Lee warned that the Rockefellers were losing   
   public support due to having ordered the massacre of striking workers and   
   their families (as well as the burning of their homes). He developed a   
   strategy that Junior followed to    
   repair it. It was necessary for Junior to overcome his shyness, go personally   
   to Colorado to meet with the miners and their families, inspect the conditions   
   of the homes and the factories, attend social events, and listen to the   
   grievances (all the while    
   being photographed for press releases). This was novel advice, and attracted   
   widespread media attention, which opened the way to wallpaper over the   
   conflict, and present a more humanized version of the wealthy Rockefellers.   
      
   Lee guided public relations of Rockefellers and their corporate interests,   
   including a strong involvement in the construction of the Rockefeller Center,   
   even after he moved on to set up his own consulting firm. He was the person   
   who brought the original,    
   unfunded plan for Metropolitan Opera's expansion to Junior's attention, and he   
   convinced Junior to rename the center after the family against the latter's   
   wishes.   
      
   Lee became an inaugural member of the Council on Foreign Relations in the US   
   when it was established in New York in 1921. In the early 1920s, he promoted   
   friendly relations with Soviet Russia. In 1926, Lee wrote a famous letter to   
   the president of the US    
   Chamber of Commerce in which he presented a convincing argument for the need   
   to normalize US-Soviet political and economic relations.   
      
   His supposed instruction to the son of the Standard Oil fortune was to echo in   
   public relations henceforth: "Tell the truth, because sooner or later the   
   public will find out anyway. And if the public doesn't like what you are   
   doing, change your policies    
   and bring them into line with what people want." The context of the quote was   
   said to be apocryphal, being spread by Lee as self-promotion, making it both   
   famous and infamous.   
      
   Lee is considered to be the father of the modern public relations campaign   
   when, from 1913 to 1914, he successfully lobbied for a railroad rate increase   
   from a reluctant federal government.   
      
      
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