John Wiley Hill (1890–1977) founded what became Hill & Knowlton in Cleveland in 1927 and built it, with his partner Donald Knowlton, into the first multinational public relations firm and the defining corporate PR operation of the twentieth century. He served the American Iron and Steel Institute, the Tobacco Industry Research Committee, Republic Steel, and the American Petroleum Institute at moments that shaped American labor policy, public health, and industrial regulation. He wrote two of the field's foundational textbooks. He built the strategic model of corporate PR — industry association counsel, congressional and regulatory engagement, financial-community positioning, crisis management — that every corporate communications function still runs today. When Hill died in 1977, the firm he founded had grown into the largest PR firm in the world.
Published Jul 4, 2026.
Cleveland Origin
John Hill was born in 1890 in Shelbyville, Indiana. He worked as a reporter at the Cleveland Plain Dealer and other Cleveland newspapers before leaving journalism in 1927 to open a one-man financial-and-industrial public relations practice. His first clients were Cleveland banks and industrial companies. In 1933, in the depth of the Depression, he partnered with Donald Knowlton, a former public relations director of Union Trust Company of Cleveland that had failed in the banking crisis. The firm became Hill and Knowlton. It grew steadily through the New Deal and the Second World War on the strength of industrial-sector work: steel, chemicals, banking, insurance, railroads, oil.
Hill relocated the firm to New York in 1938 and built the strategic model that separated Hill and Knowlton from the consumer-publicity firms of the era: retainer-based counsel to trade associations and industry groups rather than product-by-product publicity campaigns. American Iron and Steel Institute was the anchor. It stayed with the firm for four decades.
The Corporate PR Model
Hill's operating theory, laid out in his 1958 book Corporate Public Relations and expanded in his 1963 memoir The Making of a Public Relations Man, was that public relations should be a management function reporting to the chief executive, not a publicity function reporting to marketing. He argued that a corporation's most consequential audiences were not consumers but employees, investors, regulators, legislators, and the press that covered all four. He built Hill and Knowlton's practice around that architecture. It is the same architecture that structures modern corporate communications, investor relations, government affairs, and internal communications functions inside every Fortune 500 today. Harold Burson, who founded Burson-Marsteller in 1953, credited Hill with formalizing PR as a management discipline decades before the rest of the industry accepted it.
The First Multinational PR Firm
Hill and Knowlton opened its first international office in Frankfurt in 1954, followed by London, Paris, Milan, Sydney, and Tokyo through the late 1950s and 1960s. By 1970 it was the first US PR firm operating on every populated continent. The multinational structure existed to serve US industrial clients — steel, oil, banking, tobacco — whose overseas government-relations, regulatory, and media exposure had outgrown what a single-country firm could handle. Every subsequent global PR firm built on Hill's architecture. Burson-Marsteller, Edelman, Ogilvy PR, Ketchum, FleishmanHillard, Weber Shandwick all followed the multi-office, multi-country, multi-sector model he established.
The Contested Clients
Hill's client roster included work that has become part of the historical record of American public health and regulatory policy. In 1953 the firm was retained by the Tobacco Industry Research Committee to represent the major cigarette manufacturers in response to the emerging medical evidence linking smoking to lung cancer. The engagement continued in various forms through 1968. Historians of the tobacco settlement litigation, the federal Master Settlement Agreement, and the FDA regulatory record have documented the campaign extensively. Hill discussed the engagement openly in his memoir. He argued that the firm's role was to insist on further scientific research and to represent the manufacturers in the public debate. Later historical analysis, informed by internal industry documents released through litigation, produced a different assessment. Both records are now part of the public case history of the practice.
The engagement is part of any complete account of Hill's career and of the ethical evolution of corporate public relations across the second half of the twentieth century. The debate over what a PR firm owes when a client's product is later shown to cause serious public harm — tobacco, opioids, fossil fuel emissions, ultra-processed food — traces directly to the questions the Tobacco Industry Research Committee engagement first put on the table.
Retirement, Succession, and Sale
Hill formally retired in 1962 but continued in a senior advisory role until 1971. Donald Knowlton had died in 1959. The firm passed to a succession of chief executives through the 1970s. It was acquired by JWT Group Inc., the parent of the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency, in 1980. When WPP Group acquired JWT in 1987, Hill and Knowlton passed with it. It remained inside WPP through the 2020s. In 2025 WPP restructured its public relations businesses and the firm now operates as part of the Burson organization.
What Hill Represents
Every corporate communications function inside a Fortune 500 company today — the chief communications officer role, the reporting line to the CEO, the integration of investor relations and government affairs and crisis management under one strategic doctrine — is built on the model John Hill wrote down in 1958. The multinational PR firm structure is his. The trade-association counsel practice is his. The idea that a public relations firm should be measured by its capacity to advise management on decisions before they become news is his. He built the discipline that the AI Communications era is now rewriting for the answer-engine environment. The mechanics change. The structural claim — that communications is a management function, not a downstream service — does not.
The Record
John W. Hill died in New York City in March 1977. He was 86. He is survived in the professional record by Hill & Knowlton, its multinational descendant firms, and the corporate public relations discipline he formalized. His two books, Corporate Public Relations (1958) and The Making of a Public Relations Man (1963), remain on the reading list of every serious graduate program in strategic communications.
The EPR In Memoriam canonical record. Related: Daniel J. Edelman (1920–2013) · Ivy Lee (1877–1934) · Carl Byoir (1888–1957) · Harold Burson (1921–2020) · Jack O'Dwyer (1933–2018).
Who founded Hill & Knowlton?
John W. Hill founded the firm in Cleveland in 1927. He partnered with Donald Knowlton, a former Union Trust Company PR director, in 1933, at which point the firm took its lasting name.
When did John W. Hill die?
March 1977 in New York City. He was 86.
What books did John W. Hill write?
Corporate Public Relations (1958) and The Making of a Public Relations Man (1963). Both remain foundational reading in the field.
Is Hill & Knowlton still in business?
Yes. The firm was acquired by JWT Group in 1980 and passed to WPP Group with the JWT acquisition in 1987. Following WPP's 2025 restructuring, Hill & Knowlton now operates as part of the Burson organization.
Why is John W. Hill controversial?
Hill & Knowlton represented the Tobacco Industry Research Committee from 1953 through 1968, at the moment medical evidence was establishing the link between smoking and lung cancer. The engagement is now central to the historical debate over what public relations firms owe when a client's product is later shown to cause serious public harm.
