HIS OBLIGATIONS TO THE PUBLIC AS A SPECIAL PLEADER
It has been the history of new professions—and every profession has been at some time a new profession—that they are accepted by the public and become firmly established only after two significant handicaps are overcome. The first of these, oddly enough, lies in public opinion itself; it consists of the public’s reluctance to acknowledge a dependence, however slight, upon the ministrations of any one group of persons. Medicine, even to-day, is still fighting this reluctance. The law is fighting it. Yet these are established professions.
The second handicap is that any new profession must become established, not through the efforts and activities of others, who might be considered impartial, but through its own energy.
These handicaps are particularly potent in a profession of advocacy, because it is engaged in the partisan representation of one point of view. The legal profession is perhaps the most familiar example of this fact, and in this light at least a trenchant comparison may be drawn between the
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 bar and the new profession of the public relations counsel.
Both these professions offer to the public substantially the same services—expert training, a highly sensitized understanding of the background from which results must be obtained, a keenly developed capacity for the analysis of problems into their constituent elements. Both professions are in constant danger of arousing crowd antagonism, because they often stand in frank and open opposition to the fixed point of view of one or another of the many groups which compose society. Indeed it is this aspect of the work of the public relations counsel which is undoubtedly the foundation of a good deal of popular disapproval of his profession.
Even Mr. Martin, who on several occasions in his volume talks with severe condemnation of what he calls propaganda, sees and admits the fundamental psychological factors which make the adherents to one point of view impute degraded or immoral motives to believers in other points of view. He says:44
“The crowd-man can, when his fiction is challenged, save himself from spiritual bankruptcy, preserve his defenses, keep his crowd from going to pieces, only by a demur. Any one who challenges the crowd’s fictions must be ruled
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 out of court. He must not be permitted to speak. As a witness to contrary values, his testimony must be discounted. The worth of his evidence must be discredited by belittling the disturbing witness. ‘He is a bad man; the crowd must not listen to him.’ His motives must be evil; he is ‘bought up’; he is an immoral character; he tells lies; he is insincere or he ‘has not the courage to take a stand’ or ‘there is nothing new in what he says.’
“Ibsen’s ‘Enemy of the People,’ illustrates this point very well. The crowd votes that Doctor Stockman may not speak about the baths, the real point at issue. Indeed, the mayor takes the floor and officially announces that the doctor’s statement that the water is bad is ‘unreliable and exaggerated.’ Then the president of the Householders’ Association makes an address accusing the doctor of secretly ‘aiming at revolution.’ When finally Doctor Stockman speaks and tells his fellow citizens the real meaning of their conduct, and utters a few plain truths about ‘the compact majority,’ the crowd saves its face, not by proving the doctor false, but by howling him down, voting him an ‘enemy of the people,’ and throwing stones through the window.”
If we analyze a specific example of the public relations counsel’s work, we see the workings of the crowd-mind, which have made it so difficult
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 for his profession to gain popular approval. Let us take, for example, the tariff situation again. It is manifestly impossible for either side in the dispute to obtain a totally unbiased point of view as to the other side. The importer calls the manufacturer unreasonable; he imputes selfish motives to him. For his own part he identifies the establishment of the conditions upon which he insists with such things as social welfare, national safety, Americanism, lower prices to the consumer, and whatever other fundamentals he can seize upon. Every newspaper report carrying the flavor of adverse suggestion, whether on account of its facts or on account of the manner of its writing, is immediately branded as untrue, unfortunate, ill-advised. It must, the importer concludes, it must have been inspired by insidious machinations from the manufacturers’ interests.
But is the manufacturer any more reasonable? If the newspapers publish stories unfavorable to his interests, then the newspapers have been “bought up,” “influenced”; they are “partisan” and many other unreasonable things. The manufacturer, just like the importer, identifies his side of the struggle with such fundamental standards as he can seize upon—a living wage, reduced prices to the consumer, the American standard of employment, fair play, justice. To each the contentions of the other are untenable.
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Now, carry this situation one step further to the point at which the public relations counsel is retained, on behalf of one side or the other. Observe how sincerely each side and its adherents call even the verifiable facts and figures of the other by that dread name “propaganda.” Should the importers submit figures showing that wages could be raised and the price to the consumer reduced, their adherents would be gratified that such important educational work should be done among the public and that the newspapers should be so fair-minded as to publish it. The manufacturers, on the other hand, will call such material “propaganda” and blame either the newspaper which publishes those figures or the economist who compiled them, or the public relations counsel who advised collating the material.
The only difference between “propaganda” and “education,” really, is in the point of view. The advocacy of what we believe in is education. The advocacy of what we don’t believe in is propaganda. Each of these nouns carries with it social and moral implications. Education is valuable, commendable, enlightening, instructive. Propaganda is insidious, dishonest, underhand, misleading. It is only to-day that the viewpoint on this question is undergoing a slight change, as the following editorial would indicate:
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“The relativity of truth,”45 says M............