Public relations can shape public opinion and consent can be manufactured. Few Big Tech moguls have placed more faith in these truisms than the men who ran the American Telephone & Telegraph Company (AT&T), its manufacturing arm, and its archipelago of operating companies, in the years following the installation of Theodore N. Vail as its president in 1907. Vail’s vice president, Nathan C. Kingsbury, put it well in a 1915 address: “The one great purpose and end of modern publicity is the formation and control of public opinion.” Public opinion “governed” almost every country in the world, Kingsbury added, including the United States, and corporations should take heed.
Vail and Kingsbury are little known today. Yet in the opening years of the twentieth century they pioneered a new way of defending corporate prerogatives that foregrounded what journalist Walter Lippmann would in 1921 call the “manufacture of consent.” The keystone of their strategy was the rejection of the longstanding corporate policy of staying silent in the face of adverse criticism. Instead of remaining mute, they would tell their story. Over the course of the next few decades, Bell publicists went beyond the placement of favorable magazine announcements to embrace the funding of academic research and the endowment of research centers. Their goal was to persuade the public that AT&T and its associated companies—or what Vail would dub the “Bell System”—was a magnanimous public servant that had earned its market dominance through technological prowess and economic foresight rather than political contestation. In reality, politics created the markets in which Bell would thrive. Yet for decades Bell publicists doggedly labored to persuade the public that it was the other way around.
Central to the Vail-Kingsbury project was the popularization of the idea that the archipelago of operating companies that AT&T controlled should be treated as a unified “system” dedicated not to profit-making but to “universal service.” The precise meaning of each of these evocative phrases would be long debated. At their core, they affirmed that Bell, then known in financial circles as AT&T, was a technically progressive and fiscally conservative communications network accountable not only to its shareholders, but to the American people. Every U.S.-based electrical communications network, Vail believed—he had in mind not only the telephone, but also the landline telegraph and the undersea cable—was best operated as a monopoly under common management, an audacious presumption that even Bell enthusiasts would come to disparagingly regard as a “network mystique.”