The father of public relations looks back on a landmark life spent shaping trends, preferences, and general opinion A twentieth-century marketing visionary, Edward L. Bernays brilliantly combined mastery of the social sciences with a keen understanding of human psychology to become one of his generation’s most influential social architects. In Biography of an Idea, Bernays traces the formative moments of his career, from his time in the Woodrow Wilson administration as one of the nation’s key wartime propagandists to his consultancy for such corporate giants as Procter & Gamble, General Electric, and Dodge Motors. While working with the American Tobacco Company, Bernays launched his now-infamous Lucky Strike campaign, which effectively ended the long-standing taboo against women smoking in public. With his vast knowledge of the psychology of the masses, Bernays was in great demand, advising high-profile officials and counseling the tastemakers of his generation. His masterful and at times manipulative techniques had longstanding influences on social and political beliefs as well as on cultural trends. Biography of an Idea is a fascinating look at the birth of public relations—an industry that continues to hold sway over American society.

The Father of Spin is the first full-length biography of the legendary Edward L. Bernays, who, beginning in the 1920s, was one of the first and most successful practioners of the art of public relations. In this engrossing biography, Larry Tye uses Bernays's life as a prism to understand the evolution of the craft of public relations and how it came to play such a critical-and sometimes insidious-role in American life. Drawing on interviews with primary sources and voluminous private papers, Tye presents a fascinating and revealing portrait of the man who, more than any other, defined and personified public relations, a profession that today helps shape our political discourse and define our commercial choices.

Ofield Dukes is considered one of the nation's most successful African-American public relations practitioners and one of the most influential people of the Civil Rights period.This book-written by Dukes himself-takes the reader from Depression-era Detroit through the Korean War and up to Washington, D.C., where he served not only the Johnson White House, but every Democratic presidential candidate in the Sixties. Along the way he advised such notables as Coretta Scott King, author Alex Haley, Rep. Charles Rangel, as well as Martin Luther King, Jr. In fact, Dukes was instrumental in making King's birthday a national holiday. Duke's career was not limited to politicians and Civil Rights leaders. As a public relations counselor he worked with Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross and dozens of other Motown stars. And thanks in large part to Dukes, the "Motown Sound" spread feverishly from its Detroit-based operations to every corner of the U.S. Today, there are hundreds of public relations practitioners around the world who credit Dukes for their success, including the editors of this book, two of Duke's closest mentees. This book is dedicated to future generations of students and professionals in the hope that they, too, can be inspired by Ofield Dukes.

Courtier to the Crowd is the first full-length biography of the public relations pioneer Ivy Ledbetter Lee. This book traces the story of Lee through his early training in the family of a Methodist minister and in schools, in the newspaper office, as a fledgling publicist, and then as a pioneer public relations counsel for some of the greatest corporations in the world. Ivy Lee was born at a crucial moment in history. In the last half of the nineteenth century, the industrial revolution brought exploitative capitalism to a crisis. Unbridled competition was suffocating business from the inside, while public clamor for more control was stifling it from the outside. Lee understood that organization and cooperation were indispensable for success in the new order. And he realized that public acceptance was necessary in a democratic society. To win acceptance, the public had to be fully informed, but it also had to be fully understood. Lee¿s own success in persuading corporate adoption of these new methods of dealing with the business public made him one of the most influential and controversial men of his time. The use of these techniques eventually became known as the practice of public relations. Lee helped bring professional status to those who devoted their time to this kind of activity, and those who have followed in his footsteps regard him as a founder of ¿modern public relations.¿Lee often said he didn¿t know how to describe his work, perhaps because there was as yet no glossary for what he did. Looking back, says author Ray Hiebert, Ivy Lee was practicing social responsibility, conflict resolution, and with his international interests, public diplomacy long before those terms were conceived. These pages are a stimulating combination of history, biography, economics, theology, and journalism. The book should have a place on the shelf of every person who practices in the fields of public relations or journalism, and readily available as a source of information and guidance for corporate executives, businessmen, clergymen, politicians, lawyers, newsmen, and editors.