ABSTRACT
The chapter examines the archives of public relations counsels to discover what their aims were. From the archives, this chapter finds that the overarching goal of public relations was to change how their clients—mostly corporations—related to their publics in order to produce more cooperative relationships. In practice, developing ‘cooperation’ meant transforming the publics to aid the goals of the wealthy client, resembling more subjugation than cooperation. To bring the public to cooperate with their clients, the major propagandists deemphasized epistemological deception, ethical falsification, and alienation because they were too easily reversed and would leave the client worse off than it began. Instead, the goal was to produce the kind of publics who would conduct themselves cooperatively of their own accord, without needing to be deceived. Propaganda is better described as governing client—public relations through subjectification than as a means of deception.
This chapter gives substance to this claim by cataloging the most common kinds of subjects that public relations counsels sought to create—consumers, laborers, managers, corporations, and political subjects (voters and politicians)—and how the propagandists talked about creating them. The bulk of this chapter is dedicated to reviewing the archival materials of public relations counsels like Lee, Bernays, Robbins, Kennedy, Baldwin, Barton, and others. The chapter also defines how this text makes use of Michel Foucault’s notions of government, conduct, subjectification, and subjectivation.
