CHAPTER III
THE FUNCTION OF A SPECIAL PLEADER
Public opinion has entered life at many points as a decisive factor. Men and movements whose interests will be affected by the attitude of the public are taking pains to have themselves represented in the court of public opinion by the most skillful counselors they can obtain. The business of the public relations counsel is somewhat like the business of the attorney—to advise his client and to litigate his causes for him.
While the special pleader in law, the lawyer for the defense, has always been accorded a formal hearing by judge and jury, this has not been the case before the court of public opinion. Here mob psychology, the intolerance of human society for a dissenting point of view, have made it difficult and often dangerous for a man to plead for a new or unpopular cause.
The Fourth Estate, a newspaper for the makers of newspapers, says: “‘Counsel on public relations’ and ‘director of public relations’ are two terms that are being encountered more often every day. There is a familiar tinge to them, in a way, but in justice to the men who bear these titles and to the concerns which employ them, it should be said that they are—or can be—dissociated from the old idea of ‘publicity man.’ The very fact that many of the largest corporations in the country are recognizing the need of maintaining right relationships with the public is alone important enough to assure a fair and even favorable hearing for their public relations departments.
“Whether a man is really entitled to the appellation ‘counsel on public relations’ or whether he should merely be called ‘publicity man’ rests entirely with the individual and the firm that employs him. As we see it, a man who is really counsel or director of public relations has one of the most important jobs on the roster of any concern; but a man who merely represents the old idea of getting something for nothing from publishers is about passé....
“So there is made plain the difference between two terms, the old and the new, both of which have occasioned much natural curiosity among newspaper men. When Napoleon said, ‘Circumstance? I make circumstance,’ he expressed very nearly the spirit of the public relations counsel’s work. So long as this new professional branch live up to the possibilities that their title suggests, they are bound to accomplish general constructive good. Maybe they, at last, will make us forget that ingratiating though insidious individual, the publicity man.”
As indicative perhaps of the growing importance of the profession, an article by Mary Swain Routzahn, in charge of the Department of Surveys and Exhibits of the Russell Sage Foundation, on “Woman’s Chance as Publicity Specialist” published in the New York Globe of August 2nd, 1921, discusses the profession as one of recent development, but of such importance as to deserve the serious consideration of women who are interested in making a professional career for themselves.
The public relations counsel is first of all a student. His field of study is the public mind. His text books for this study are the facts of life; the articles printed in newspapers and magazines, the advertisements that are inserted in publications, the billboards that line the streets, the railroads and the highways, the speeches that are delivered in legislative chambers, the sermons issuing from pulpits, anecdotes related in smoking rooms, the gossip of Wall Street, the patter of the theater and the conversation of other men who, like him, are interpreters and must listen for the clear or obscure enunciations of the public.
He brings the talent of his intuitive understanding to the aid of his practical and psychological tests and surveys. But he is not only a student. He is a practitioner with a wide range of instruments and a definite technique for their use.
First of all, there are the circumstances and events he helps to create. After that there are the instruments by which he broadcasts facts and ideas to the public; advertising, motion pictures, circular letters, booklets, handbills, speeches, meetings, parades, news articles, magazine articles and whatever other mediums there are through which public attention is reached and influenced.