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JOSEPH MCNICHOLAS William S. Burroughs and Corporate Public Relations This profession in a few years has developed from the status of circus agent stunts to what is obviously an important position in the conduct of the world's affairs. Bernays on Public Relations, 1924 To speak is to lie—to live is to collaborate. William S. Burroughs, Nova Express The spring of 1914 was an awkward time in labor history. The power of the Progressive era, which had secured important reforms and exposed corporate corruption duting a period of relative prosperity , began to wane. A recession had reduced demand for manufactured goods, increased unemployment, and lowered the stock matket. Though radical otganizations pushed ahead for greater reform, more moderate workers quailed in the face of potential unemployment. While the labot atmosphere shifted, miners for the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company , an arm of the Rockefeller's Standard Oil Empire, sttuck for higher wages and better working conditions. Without pay, workers were evicted from their homes and began to live in latge shanty towns with their wives and children. After months of conflict, the Colotado state militia razed the strikers' camps, setting off a stampede and creating fires which killed twenty. The Ludlow Massacre , as it came to be called, was a nadir in labor relations. Radicals such as Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman offered the incident as proof of the heartless profiteering of capitalists in attempts to rally a slumping labor movement.1 But the Ludlow Massacre also represented Arizona Quarterly Volume 57, Number 4, Winter 2001 Copyright © 2001 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004-1610 122Joseph McNicholas a turning point in corporate histoty because it led to the development of modern corporate public relations as a strategy to avoid and defuse such conflicts or resolve them through less violent, more invisible means. Although labor histoty is punctuated with many accounts of excessive force against workers, the Ludlow Massacre stands out because it matked the eclipse of the "public be damned" attitude which had chatactetized robber barons such as Cornelius Vanderbilt. Rockefeller Jr., more careful with public opinion, hired publicist Ivy L. Lee to present the company in the best light. Lee undertook a campaign to change the public image of the incident as well as the opinions of lawmakers, stock holders, and, of course, the wotkets. His factually oriented "Bulletins," issued throughout 1914, were circulated to prominent citizens and to the newspapers about the labor negotiations and became famous in industrial circles for their success in de-escalating the conflict. The contents of these were also posted on public boards at the entrance to the mine so that the workers, too, could read them.2 He persuaded Rockefeller to apologize and he also widely disseminated friendly "regional" editotials on the topic (which had been written in Philadelphia and published in Colorado). The management eventually broke the strike. Later, Rockefeller Jr. visited the mines and allowed himself to be photographed in mining gear. He was a guest in the houses of the wotkers where he listened to their stoties and met their children. He attended local patties where he chatmingly danced with the wives of minets. In two years' time, the debacle that had been dubbed a "Massacre " had been transformed into a much photographed symbol of harmony between capital and labor. Lee's career soared in response. After orchestrating this seminal event in corporate history, Lee became one of the most influential men in the world of corporations in the eatly twentieth century. Following Lee, corporations, those invisible , eternal things, would not only hold property, generate wealth and create jobs, they would also speak and be heatd by others; they would have character, identity. In legal discourse, there had been precedent for nearly a century for considering a corporation to be an entity (rather than merely a collection of people). Chief Justice John Maishall declared during the Dartmouth College case of 1819 that "a corporation is an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of the law" (Hessen 9). And as corporate charters began to be Corporate Public Rehtions1 23 issued more automatically and their provisions less curtailed by state governments, the corporation was also extended...

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