By Rachel Grant, Membership Co-Chair
Name: Karen Miller Russell
University Affiliation and Position: University of Georgia, Jim Kennedy Professor of New Media and Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor
Book Title: Promoting Monopoly: AT&T and the Politics of Public Relations, 1876-1941
1. Describe the focus of your book.
AT&T had one of the best known and respected U.S. publicity departments by the mid-20th century, despised by critics but praised and emulated by other corporations. Publicity was integral to the growth of the telephone industry, and AT&T was central to the development of corporate public relations. I wanted to understand why PR was so important to AT&T and how exactly it used PR strategies and tactics to promote its views. I learned that the company’s desire to promote and protect the telephone monopoly propelled the creation of a PR program that in turn shaped the U.S. legal, political, media, and cultural landscape.
2. How did you come across this subject? Why did it interest you?
Everyone who knows anything about U.S. public relations history knows about Arthur Page, but most scholars have vastly underestimated AT&T’s commitment to public relations before the company hired him in 1927. I started off writing a biography of Page, but gradually realized that publicity started as soon as the telephone was invented, and that a formal system was in place before 1910. I decided that I needed to schedule a second trip to the archives to explore the earlier years and found a lot more than I expected.
3. What archives or research materials did you use?
I conducted research using the Page collections at the Wisconsin Historical Society and the Page Society in New York, and most importantly at the AT&T corporate archive in New Jersey, which was not available to many of the previous scholars studying Page. That’s where I found evidence of a previously forgotten corporate publicist, William A. Hovey, whose work included visits to antagonistic newspaper editors in 1886 and publicity for the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. I also used databases including Newspapers.com to explore the company’s earliest attempts to influence press coverage. That allowed me to explore AT&T’s influence on local papers.
4. How does your book relate to journalism history? How is it relevant to the present?
In 1903 AT&T hired the Publicity Bureau to promote both its service and its political perspectives. The AT&T archive included a list of newspapers that printed stories provided by the company, and I used newspaper databases to track them down. AT&T’s representatives used every strategy they could think of, from paying for advertising in hopes of influencing editorial coverage (it worked) to golfing with an editor in hopes that a personal relationship would result in AT&T’s perspective at least being included in the newspaper (it did). It’s a pretty good precursor to discussions about sponsored content and native advertising.
5. What advice you have for other historians working/starting on book projects
My advice for other historians is twofold: (1) don’t believe received wisdom, and (2) read everything. Received wisdom suggested that James Ellsworth, who started at the Publicity Bureau and moved to AT&T in 1908, was a bit of a huckster, successful though not terribly ethical, and that his importance was simply that he preceded Arthur Page at AT&T. The more research I did, the more my opinion of him changed, and I ended up writing three chapters on Ellsworth and only two on Page. Ellsworth deserves the credit for creating and institutionalizing the publicity function at AT&T and its regional operating companies (the “baby Bells”). He innovated advertising and then film as corporate publicity tools, and he was responsible for the development of the company’s employee benefits program. Page certainly was an important pioneer in corporate PR, but his legacy has unfairly and inaccurately overshadowed Ellsworth’s contributions.
As for reading everything, I discovered William Hovey because a telephone engineer mentioned him on a single page in his memoir about Bell Telephone’s earliest years. I asked the archivist at AT&T’s history center if they had anything on this man – not very optimistically, because the earliest years of the company are not always well documented – and he replied that they had two folders that included his name. When I started reading about Hovey and realized what he had done at AT&T, I gasped so loudly that the archivists asked me what was wrong. Believe me, nothing was wrong! It’s not every day that you find the earliest known U.S. corporate publicist.