Lee & Co.

IVY LEE announces the formation of the firm of IVY LEE and T. J. ROSS 15 Broad Street, New York

To Big Business and the Press last week went chastely printed cards with the above announcement. The cards did not state what business Messrs. Lee & Ross were engaged in, but it is unlikely that anyone had to ask. Every big businessman, every news editor and a good portion of the public have long been thoroughly aware of Ivy Ledbetter Lee as the highest priced pressagent in the land, the suave representative (at one time or another) of Schwab, Chrysler, the Armours, Harvard University, Princeton, Thompson-Starrett Co., Portland Cement, the Guggenheims, the Red Cross, the Republic of Poland, New York's Interborough subway, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the Waldorf-Astoria and--longest and most notably--the Pennsylvania Railroad and the Rockefellers.

Not so well known as Ivy Lee is able Thomas Joseph Ross, Jr., 39. Fourteen years ago he quit the New York Sun, on which he had been a steady-going "wheelhorse" reporter of the Frank Ward O'Malley period, to work for Publicist Lee. Not only did he rise to No. 1 man on the Lee staff, devoting most of his time to Pennsylvania Railroad and Chrysler, but he became a private relations counsel between his temperamental chief and the rest of the staff. When Mr. Lee would abruptly summon his staff to meet him in his uptown suite in the old Waldorf, demand to know why a certain letter had not been sent out as directed, then brokenly announce: "I'm through. I simply can't go on. You fellows divide up the accounts!" --it was Tommy Ross who quietly herded the office force back to work.

One day last fortnight appeared reasonable evidence that Ivy Lee, 56 and a millionaire, really considered retiring. A chosen few of the staff were called into their boss's elaborate, book-filled office.

While Mr. Lee looked on benignly, Chief-of-Staff Ross announced that henceforth he was a senior partner. Moreover, the rest of them were appointed junior partners : Burnham Carter, who joined the firm ten years ago and lately returned from a leave of absence in which he was secretary to Ambassador Guggenheim in Havana; Harcourt Parrish, oldtime AP and Louisville Courier-Journal man whom Ivy Lee rented out to Banker Melvin Alvah Traylor for the latter's effort to get the Democratic nomination last year; Joseph Ripley, onetime editor of the tradepaper American Press in which he wrote a flattering interview with Mr. Lee in 1926; James Wideman Lee II, 26, elder son, who has been working for his father since graduation from Princeton four years ago (absent last week in Europe); and Ivy Ledbetter Lee Jr., 24, graduated from Princeton last year.

Physician v. Poison. A writer in the New York Herald Tribune once called Ivy

Lee "A Physician to Corporate Bodies"--a title he liked so much that he reprinted the article as a pamphlet. Other writers, hostile to capitalism and pressagentry, have called him "Corporation Dog Rob ber," "Little Brother of the Rich," "Minnesinger to Millionaires," and even "Poison Ivy." Ivy Lee would state his own occupation as "adviser in public relations." Whatever the title, the noteworthy facts are that Ivy Lee first sold the "public relations" idea to Big Business, and made an unequalled personal success of it.

Like all good publicity men, Ivy Lee was once a newshawk. Son of a Methodist minister in Georgia, he came out of Princeton in 1898, broke in as a cub on Hearst's New York Journal, went to the Times and the World. A friendly lawyer hired him to publicize a local political campaign.

Next year he got a press job with the Democratic National Committee. There he met potent men. Also he saw that Business, which was currently quivering from the muckrake scars inflicted by Lincoln Steffens, Ida Tarbell, Upton Sinclair et al., was badly in need of having its public relations patched. To Ivy Lee it was simple. Let the big corporations "take the public into their confidence." Let them tell their story "candidly and fully" and the newspapers would print it.

The idea was startling to businessmen who felt they had reason to mistrust the Press; but Pennsylvania Railroad took a chance. The Lee scheme worked so well that when in 1914 the Rockefellers got into trouble with their Colorado Fuel & Iron strike, John D. Rockefeller Jr. took Arthur Brisbane's advice: he borrowed Pennsylvania's Ivy Lee. Since young Ivy Lee was new to a new game, his success was not signal. He made the grave error of accepting and circulating as true all facts & figures given him by the mine operators. Later he was revealed by a U. S. commission as having drafted a strike memorandum for the Governor of Colorado to send, as his own, to President Wilson. However his testimony before the Commission headed by the late great Senator Walsh was front-page news and the best advertisement he could have wished. He never lacked clients thereafter.

It is Ivy Lee's boast that he never asked an editor to print anything or to suppress anything (except once, when he asked that news of a huge donation to an endowment fund be withheld until other donations rolled in). News bulletins go out not under his name, but those of his clients. Sometimes he summons reporters to his office, gives them copies of a bulletin, elaborately invites further questions, rarely tells more than is in the written "handout." Some newshawks curse him for allegedly spoiling a Hearst scoop on Abby Rockefeller's engagement. When the Hearst man asked him to confirm it, Mr. Lee immediately gave it to all papers.

Ivy Lee has potent competitors--Thomas Roerty Shipp in Washington; Carl Byoir, and, most artful of all, Edward L. Bernays. It was bustling "Eddie" Bernays who got the Edison Mazda lamp put on a special postage stamp for the 50th anniversary of the electric light. Also he conceived the soap-sculpture fad for Procter & Gamble; and promoted "big breakfast" propaganda to boost bacon for Beech-Nut Packing Co. But no competitor can approach Ivy Lee in wealth and social stature. His friends are Rockefellers, Mackays, Guggenheims, John William Davis, the late Senator Dwight Morrow. His daughter Alice was presented at Court. He lives magnificently in swank East 66th Street.

He reads voraciously, talks learnedly on any and all subjects, draws much of his information from clippings, books and magazines which his employes are expected to mark for him every day. His usual clients regard him as all-wise, even when he persuades them to take courses against their will. For instance, he advised George Washington Hill to make a full report to American Tobacco stock-holders on the company's bonus system.

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