"Public Relations: The Invisible Sell"

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Public relations is Dale Carnegie writ large: it is the professional winning of friends and influencing of people--only not for oneself, but for one's clients, and not by glad-handing or overtly campaigning for their favor, but by creating "situations of reality" in which their acquiescence and approbation are spontaneously aroused. The public relations man is the stage manager of real-life dramas which contain not a hidden moral, but a hidden commercial.

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Today the public relations counselor disapprovingly frowns at the mention of the press agent whose motto reads, "Anything goes, so long as you spell the name right." Nonetheless he owes much of his imaginative vitality to his rude forebears. Indeed at the lower echelons of public relations you will find the direct descendants of the press agents, who have learned that a quick and agile mind and some good publicity ideas can quickly be parlayed into cash.

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When Paul Garrett arrived in Detroit twenty-five years ago to begin General Motors' public relations program, the first question fired at him was: "How do you make a billion dollars look small?" Garrett said damned if he knew, and furthermore damned if he thought that was his job. Public relations, he argued, was not an "act," but a continuing effort on the part of management to win the confidence of the people with whom it came in contact. Hence you will find General Motors engaged in a host of activities in which altruism and self-interest come together in a creamy blend.

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This brings us to an impressive demonstration concerning the making of public opinion that took place in Cincinnati in 1947.

For six months Cincinnati became the focus for an unprecedented crusade--a powerful, well-planned, and well-financed attempt to teach it what to think. Specifically, Cincinnati was the target of an all-out effort to make a typical American city "United Nations conscious."

The crusade was a thorough and intelligent one. It was launched at every level of city life. On blotters, matchbooks, streetcar signs, and billboards, Cincinnatians read "Peace Begins with the United Nations---the United Nations Begins with You." Local radio stations broadcast UN facts and news daily--one of them on 150 spots a week. The newspapers played up the theme. Every schoolchild in the city was given literature about the United Nations to take home; the PTA, the Council of Churches, and the Catholic Church all climbed enthusiastically aboard the bandwagon. Club women rallied round with letters and telegrams pledging their support tot he American delegation to the UN. In the lsat three months as the campaign reached a crescendo, 225 meetings were held; hundreds of documentary films shown, 59,558 pieces of literature distributed.

Then they took a poll of the results.

At the end of six months only half as many people considered the United Nations a means of preventing war as thought so at the beginning.

There was almost no change in the number who thought that the United States should take an active part in world affairs.

There was a drop in the number of those who were in favor of having the United States join an international police to keep peace.

Fewer people thought there should be some sort of international control of atom bombs.

There was almost no change in the numbers who knew what the main purpose of the United Nations was, or who had heard of the veto power, or who knew how the UN worked.

In a word, the campaign was a gigantic frost.

Why? The answer may be shocking, but it is simplicity itself: people in Cincinnati just didn't give a damn about the United Nations one way or another. For all the matchbooks and the meetings, the UN was something far off, vague, abstract, unconnected with daily life. Hence the propaganda went in one ear and out the other, and save for the pleasant friction stimulated in transit, it left no imprint at all.

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It is not that bad, of course. But if we step back to view that whole big thing called Public Relations and then attempt to weigh what it has meant to our values and beliefs, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the net effect of the Invisible Sell has been to further a cynical judgment of the motives behind human behavior.

That is one side of the coin, but there is another, and shinier. If public relations has cheapened the face value of good conduct, at the same time it has enormously increased the prevalence of good conduct. For regardless of its motive or its incessant self-advertisement, good conduct is more prevalent on the business scene, and public relations can rightly take much of the credit. The reason is a curious one. It is that something called Good Public Relations has come to be regarded as an indispensable attribute of business--as much a sign that a business is "modern and progressive" as a shiny new glass office building (which is also, of course, a good public relations move.) Quite simply, business has sold itself the bill of goods it originally meant to sell the public.

"If you ask me," said one shrewd public relations man, "the aim of a big corporation should be invisibility. But no. It insists on being as visible as possible. Its directors get nervous unless people say what wonderful public relations the company has. So it has to have wonderful public relations. It has to act lovable. It has to be progressive. It has to become socially responsible--not because the management necessarily thinks that way, but because that's what Good Public Relations is."