| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Karen S. Miller. The Voice of Business: Hill&Knowlton and Postwar Public Relations. (The Luther Hartwell Hodges Series on Business, Society, and the State.) Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1999. Pp. xii, 261. $39.95.

Karen S. Miller concludes that the world's most important public relations firm had little impact on either public opinion or political action in the 1940s and 1950s. Instead, she argues, the agency's primary effect was on its own clients. More than anything else, Hill&Knowlton (H&K) reinforced the beliefs and opinions of business leaders, providing them with a rationale for their behavior and, not coincidentally, convincing them that the agency's services were worth paying for. 1

By 1959, H&K had a payroll of 250, annual billings of more than $3 million plus expenses, and a client list that included some of the biggest corporations and trade organizations in the world. Agency executives boasted that the combined sales of their clients comprised ten percent of the gross national product. Under the guidance of founder John W. Hill, the agency had become the acknowledged international leader in the field of public relations. 2

Hill's objective was straightforward: to persuade the public that business leaders were best equipped to govern economic policy, thus fending off government regulation of the economy. Miller uses some of the tools of sociology to measure his effectiveness. Through a series of case studies, she demonstrates that H&K was often successful in defining the "frames" (or points of discussion) used in public discourse on issues affecting its clients. However, this ability to influence debate rarely translated to a meaningful impact on public policy, and Hill himself came to wonder about how much he had accomplished. . . .

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