Ivy Lee

Ivy Ledbetter Lee (July 16, 1877 – November 9, 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 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.

During WWI, he became the publicity director for the American Red Cross.

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.

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.

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.

Together with George Parker, he established the nation's third public relations firm, Parker and Lee, in 1905.

The agency boasted of "Accuracy, Authenticity, and Interest."

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 executive-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 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 ordering the massacre of striking workers and their families (and 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 which attracted widespread media attention, and 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 establish 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 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.

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 age 57.

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 the early 1920s, he promoted friendly relations with Soviet Russia.

Lee became an inaugural member of the Council on Foreign Relations in the US when it was established in New York in 1921.