Ivy Lee and Edward Bernays developed what most people know as modern public relations at the turn of the twentieth century, but the idea of public relations have been around since the beginning of time. The Ancient Greeks believed in the philosophy “vox populi” or the voice of the people which started the foundation of public relations’ two-way communication. With the invention of the printing press, printing books and pamphlets gave the public information and opinions to what was going on in their world, which were similar to a press release in their day. We discussed in class how in the American Revolution, Hamilton, Madison, and Jay wrote the Federalist papers to encourage people to ratify the Constitution and before and during the Civil War how abolitionists wrote to abolish slavery and include former slaves and women in the rights of an American citizen. In 1906, Lee published his "Declaration of Principles" which gave practioneresponsibilitiesies to the client and established a sense of ethics. Bernays then gave public relations the direction it needed to advance the occupation.

The most interesting part about the history is how public relations was used in the time of World War I and II. Before World War I, American leaders and the public for the most part followed George Washington's words of his farewell speech in that America should not get involved in European wars and affairs. During the war, President Wilson established the Committee for Public Information (CPI) which created over 75 million pamphlets and books and also produces films for the movie theaters informing the general public of what was going on and why America should be involved. This process repeated in the 1940s with the Office of War Information in order to control the information from the battlefield and to create psychological warfare against the enemy. During this time is when public relations got the negative word of "propaganda" attached to it because of the Nazi Propaganda Minisiter Joseph Goebbels.

After September 11, the American people wanted to do whatever they could to help the victims of the attack, and when the American Red Cross said they wanted blood, the public gave it to them and "within the first 48 hours, the nation's blood supply had tripled"(86). The problem with this was that the blood had a shelf life of only six weeks and soon with the overflow of blood and the lack of need for it caused the blood to be useless and forced to be thrown away. Some of the blood could not be used because the red blood cells had died, but the plasma was still used. What should have been done as we discussed in class was to listen to similar companies' advice. In PR we cannot just focus on our company or client, but we have to understand what similar companies or clients are doing so that we can learn from what they did correctly or how to handle mistakes or crisis differently.