The multitude in the imagination of the founders of PR

Just to get things going once again on the old blog, I revisit a recent entry from Jon's blog dealing with his toughts on the Vancouver's 2010 Winter Olympics. Not knowing where to start, I'm posting an excerpt from an interview with Stuart Ewen by David Barsamian, which appeared in the May 2000 issue of Zmag (also available here) :

DB: One of the early public relations spinmeisters, Ivy Lee warned that “the crowd is now in the saddle. The people now rule. We have substituted for the divine right of kings the divine right of the multitude.”

SE: Ivy Lee was a journalist who came from a conservative Southern background and was very religiously attached to private wealth, and so from around 1904-1905 on he moved from being a journalist to telling the story of business. Ivy Lee was the representative of the railroad industry and of Standard Oil. He spoke for some of the most powerful interests in the society. When he went to them, he said, Look, you’ve got a situation where ordinary people assume that this is a democracy and that their concerns matter. If we don’t start behaving, or at least producing a story that speaks effectively on our behalf, the people are going to grab our power from us. So the history of corporate PR starts as a response to the threat of democracy and the need to create some kind of ideological link between the interests of big business and the interests of ordinary Americans.

Interestingly, 1904 was the year when the Olympic Games first came to the US. Coincidence?