ABSTRACT
This chapter presents two historical snapshots of the practice of public relations in public administration at the American federal level of government. The big bang moment of American government public relations was associated with the intellectual ferment and political reform movements of the Mordecai Lee Progressive Era, in the years between 1900 and 1920. A major conceptual development by the ideologues and reformers of that period was the importance of publicity. Government public relations had evolved to having two purposes: the nineteenth-century pragmatic mission of disseminating information, and the Progressive purpose of vague democratic accountability by non-political administrators. The synergy of public relations and public administration then led to a third rationale: government public relations as a tool for bureaucracy to institutionalize itself. Committee on Public Information (CPI) was a kind of exclamation point for the Progressives focus on publicity.
