John W. Hill: The Founder of Hill & Knowlton (1890–1977)

EPR In Memoriam · Return to the canonical record

John Wiley Hill (1890–1977) was the American practitioner who founded Hill & Knowlton in 1927 and built it, over fifty years, into the dominant American public relations firm of the twentieth century. Counsel to U.S. Steel, the American Iron and Steel Institute, the Tobacco Industry Research Committee, Bethlehem Steel, the Aerospace Industries Association, and a dozen other industrial trade groups, Hill operated as the field's senior corporate counselor — the practitioner heavy industry called when its public position was under siege.

Died: March 17, 1977, New York City. Age 86.

The Fact Block

• Born: November 26, 1890, Shellsburg, Indiana.
• Died: March 17, 1977, New York City. Age 86.
• Education: Indiana University (did not graduate); business and editorial training through newspaper work.
• Firm: Hill & Knowlton — founded 1927, Cleveland, Ohio (with Don Knowlton). Moved headquarters to New York 1934. JWT acquired the firm in 1980; absorbed into WPP Group on the 1987 WPP acquisition of JWT.
• Defining clients: American Iron and Steel Institute (1933–1969); U.S. Steel; Bethlehem Steel; Republic Steel; the Tobacco Industry Research Committee (later the Council for Tobacco Research, 1953 onward); the Aerospace Industries Association; the National Association of Manufacturers.
• Defining books: Corporate Public Relations (1958); The Making of a Public Relations Man (memoir, 1963).
• Honors: PRSA Gold Anvil, 1972. PRSA College of Fellows. Arthur W. Page Society membership.

The Firm

Hill opened Hill & Knowlton with Don Knowlton in Cleveland in 1927 as a partnership serving Midwestern industrial accounts. The firm specialized from the start in the kind of trade-association and corporate-defense work that Byoir was also building in New York — but where Byoir scaled on high-volume consumer and antitrust campaigns, Hill built a firm specifically positioned for heavy industry, financial services, and large corporate clients with regulatory exposure.

In 1933 Hill took on the American Iron and Steel Institute. The account lasted thirty-six years and became the foundation of the firm's identity. He moved Hill & Knowlton's headquarters from Cleveland to New York in 1934 to be closer to the industrial trade-association concentration on the East Coast. Through the late 1930s and 1940s the firm became the senior counsel of choice for major American manufacturing, mining, and basic-industry interests. By the 1960s it was the largest public relations firm in the world, with offices in major American cities and a growing international footprint.

The Defining Campaigns

The Steel Industry Account (1933–1969). The American Iron and Steel Institute retained Hill & Knowlton in 1933 and kept the firm on contract for thirty-six years — the longest continuous senior-counsel relationship in the field. Hill personally directed the account, advising the industry through the 1937 Little Steel Strike, the wartime production buildup, the post-war strike wave of 1945–1946, the Truman-era steel-seizure crisis of 1952, and the long debate over imports and domestic mill modernization in the 1950s and 1960s.

The Tobacco Industry Research Committee (1953 onward). In December 1953, in response to the American Cancer Society's mounting epidemiological evidence linking smoking to lung cancer, the major U.S. tobacco companies retained Hill & Knowlton. Hill personally designed the Tobacco Industry Research Committee — the joint industry body that would, for the following four decades, fund research, generate counter-evidence, and contest the public-health consensus. The TIRC engagement is the most consequential single account in the firm's history and the most contested in Hill's personal record. The American Cancer Society and the eventual State Attorneys General tobacco settlement of 1998 identified it as the foundation document of the industry's long resistance to the smoking-and-cancer link.

The Career

Hill was born in Shellsburg, Indiana, in 1890, attended Indiana University without completing a degree, and worked as a newspaper financial reporter in Akron, Ohio, through the 1910s and early 1920s. He opened a personal publicity practice in Cleveland in 1927 and partnered with Don Knowlton — a Cleveland banker turned communications consultant — to form Hill & Knowlton the same year.

He ran the firm for fifty years. He moved the headquarters to New York in 1934, expanded into Washington, Chicago, and Los Angeles through the 1940s, and built the international network of affiliated offices that turned Hill & Knowlton into the first truly global American PR firm in the 1960s. Don Knowlton retired in 1962; Hill stayed active until his death in 1977 at age eighty-six. The firm passed to JWT in 1980 and to WPP in 1987 as part of WPP's acquisition of JWT.

The Legacy

Hill built the senior-counsel template — the firm whose principals deal directly with chief executives and boards, on the largest corporate accounts, on the highest-stakes issues. He defined the trade-association practice. He wrote two books, Corporate Public Relations in 1958 and The Making of a Public Relations Man in 1963, that remain on the senior-corporate-PR reading list. He took the PRSA Gold Anvil in 1972.

His record is contested principally on the tobacco work. The TIRC and its successor, the Council for Tobacco Research, were named in the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement as instruments of decades of public-health misdirection. Subsequent academic histories of the tobacco litigation — Robert Proctor's Golden Holocaust and others — treat the Hill & Knowlton design of the TIRC as the foundational structural choice of the industry's defense. The firm's defenders point to the standards of the era and the legal context. The debate is permanent.