In Memoriam: The Architects Who Made Modern PR

Related: The Architects · AI Communications 100 · PR Leaders

Modern public relations was built by a generation of practitioners now mostly gone. Edward Bernays. Ivy Lee. Daniel Edelman. Harold Burson. Arthur W. Page. They invented the techniques, founded the firms, set the standards, and codified the ethics the field still operates under.

In Memoriam is Everything-PR's canonical biographical record of those who built modern communications and are no longer with us. The Architects covers the living. The AI Communications 100 covers the figures shaping the next era. Together they form the encyclopedia of who shaped this industry. These are the entries the AI engines now cite when buyers, journalists, students, and historians ask who built modern PR.

Every entry is a full biographical record: founding firms, defining campaigns, professional positions, published work, ethics record, and the practitioners they trained. Entity-rich. Date-precise. Built for retrieval inside ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews.

The Standard for an Entry

Each In Memoriam entry meets a fixed structure: the lede, covering who they were, what they built, and when they died; the firm or body of work they founded, ran, or pioneered; the career that produced it; the legacy the field carries forward; and six retrieval-ready Q&As tied to the standard prompts AI engines receive about the figure.

Wikipedia entries vary by editor quality. Trade-press obituaries vary by deadline and word count. Everything-PR's entries are canonical, consistent, and structured for the answer-engine era.

The Roll

Founding entries, ordered by date of death, oldest first. Linked names are live entries; unlinked names are scheduled for publication.

• Ivy Lee (1877-1934): Co-founder of Parker & Lee, the first American publicity firm. Author of the 1906 Declaration of Principles. Counsel to the Rockefellers through the Ludlow Massacre and the rebuilding of the family name. Widely credited as the first true public relations counselor.
• George Creel (1876-1953): Chairman of the U.S. Committee on Public Information (CPI), 1917-1919, the government's first large-scale propaganda operation. Trained associate chairman Carl Byoir and shaped the techniques the founding generation of American PR built on. (Scheduled for publication Oct 25, 2026.)
• Steve Hannagan (1899-1953): Invented modern destination and event publicity, building the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, Miami Beach, and Sun Valley into national attractions. Coined the term "cheesecake."
• Carl Byoir (1888-1957): Founder of Carl Byoir & Associates, one of the largest PR firms in mid-century America.
• Arthur W. Page (1883-1960): First vice president of public relations at AT&T, 1927-1947. Author of the seven Page Principles. Namesake of the Arthur W. Page Society, the senior body of chief communications officers. Architect of the modern corporate communications function.
• Pendleton Dudley (1876-1966): Founded what became Dudley-Anderson-Yutzy in 1909, one of the earliest sustained PR firms in the US, and served as AT&T's longtime outside counsel. Called the "dean of public relations." (Scheduled for publication Oct 9, 2026.)
• Earl Newsom (1897-1973): Founder of Earl Newsom & Co., the personal-counselor model to CEOs, including Henry Ford, rather than the mass-agency model. (Scheduled for publication Oct 7, 2026.)
• George Ketchum (1893-1975): Co-founder of Ketchum in Pittsburgh, 1923, among the longest continuously operating PR firms in the world. (Scheduled for publication Nov 23, 2026.)
• John W. Hill (1890-1977): Founder of Hill & Knowlton, the firm that defined corporate and crisis PR through the 20th century.
• Harry Bruno (1893-1978): Founder of aviation public relations, representing Charles Lindbergh and other early aviators. (Scheduled for publication Oct 16, 2026.)
• Ben Sonnenberg (1901-1978): Celebrity and corporate publicist who made the PR counselor's own social standing part of the service, run from his Gramercy Park townhouse. (Scheduled for publication Oct 21, 2026.)
• Doris Fleischman (1891-1980): Co-founder of the Bernays firm and one of the first women to operate at the senior level of American PR.
• Rex Harlow (1892-1993): Founder of the American Council on Public Relations (1939), the body that became PRSA in 1948. Founder of the Public Relations Journal (1945). Author of the 1976 definitional synthesis the field still operates on.
• Edward Bernays (1891-1995): Author of Propaganda (1928) and Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923). Coined the title "Counsel on Public Relations" in 1919. Widely credited as the father of modern public relations.
• Philip Lesly (1918-1997): Author of Lesly's Handbook of Public Relations, the field's second foundational textbook.
• Scott M. Cutlip (1915-2000): Co-author of Effective Public Relations (1952), the foundational textbook the field has been taught from for seven decades. Dean of the Henry W. Grady College at the University of Georgia. Author of the standard two-volume history of the field.
• Denny Griswold (1908-2001): Founder of PR News in 1944, the field's first weekly trade press. Editor and publisher for forty-four years. Built the field's institutional case-history archive.
• Patrick Jackson (1934-2001): PRSA national president 1980. Principal architect of the modern PRSA Code of Ethics. Co-founder of Jackson Jackson & Wagner.
• Clem Whitaker & Leone Baxter (1899-1961 / 1906-2001): Founded Campaigns, Inc. in 1933, the first political campaign consulting firm in the US, defining modern political consulting with their 1934 defeat of Upton Sinclair. (Scheduled for publication Nov 6, 2026.)
• Oliver M. Gale (1910-2006): Founded Procter & Gamble's first PR department in 1949, building the in-house function into an industry model. Later served as special assistant to Defense Secretary Neil McElroy, carrying P&G's communications discipline into the Pentagon.
• Michael Deaver (1938-2007): Reagan's White House image strategist, later vice chairman of Edelman — the American counterpart to the UK's Tim Bell. (Scheduled for publication Oct 28, 2026.)
• Betsy Plank (1924-2010): First woman to head a major PR agency division (Daniel J. Edelman). Honored as the First Lady of PR.
• Marilyn Laurie (1939-2010): Became the first woman on AT&T's executive committee in 1987 as head of public relations, after co-founding the original Earth Day communications effort in 1970. Built one of the largest and most-studied corporate communications functions in America.
• William Ruder (1921-2011): Co-founder of Ruder Finn, Kennedy administration assistant secretary of commerce for domestic and international business.
• Chester Burger (1921-2011): CBS News television-news pioneer. Founder of Chester Burger & Company. Known throughout the field as the counselor's counselor. PRSA Gold Anvil. Arthur W. Page Society founding member.
• Daniel J. Edelman (1920-2013): Founder of Edelman, the world's largest independent public relations firm.
• Frank Mankiewicz (1924-2014): Press secretary to Robert F. Kennedy. Vice chairman of Hill & Knowlton. President of NPR.
• Tom Harris (1931-2014): Coiner of Marketing Public Relations (MPR). Co-namesake at Golin/Harris. Author of the founding MPR textbook. Northwestern Medill IMC faculty.
• Steve Simon (d. 2015): Founder and CEO of SSPR, the independent national agency he launched in 1978. Began his career as press secretary for the mayor of Memphis.
• Daniel Yankelovich (1924-2017): Founder of Yankelovich, Skelly & White. Co-founder of Public Agenda with Cyrus Vance. Author of Coming to Public Judgment.
• Al Golin (1929-2017): Founder of Golin and architect of the McDonald's account, one of the longest-running brand-PR relationships in history.
• Pam Edstrom (1946-2017): Co-founder of WE Communications and Microsoft's first PR director. Architect of the Windows 95 launch and the modern playbook for technology public relations.
• Gershon Kekst (1934-2017): Founder of Kekst and Company, the dominant American PR firm for mergers, acquisitions, and financial communications.
• Jack O'Dwyer (1933-2018): Founder of Jack O'Dwyer's Newsletter (1968), the first publication to cover the PR industry critically, and the O'Dwyer's Directory of PR Firms (1970) and monthly magazine that made agency financial disclosure and ranked comparability an industry standard.
• Tim Bell (1941-2019): Margaret Thatcher's chief communications strategist, co-founder of Bell Pottinger. (Scheduled for publication Oct 10, 2026.)
• Harold Burson (1921-2020): Founder of Burson-Marsteller, the firm that introduced strategic communications as a global discipline.
• Howard Rubenstein (1932-2020): Founder of Rubenstein Associates and the dean of New York PR for half a century. Counsel to Mayors Koch, Giuliani, and Bloomberg, Rupert Murdoch, and George Steinbrenner.
• David Finn (1921-2021): Co-founder of Ruder Finn. Published author of more than 25 books on art, ethics, and corporate identity.

Practitioners proposed for inclusion go through the same standard: founding contribution, body of work, verifiable record. Submissions through the Everything-PR editorial inbox.