Richard H Truitt. Encyclopedia of Public Relations. Editor: Robert L Heath, Volume 1, Sage Reference, 2005.

Carl Byoir created and ran, until his death in 1957, one of the largest and most successful public relations firms in United States history. The firm was unique in many ways, with little employee turnover and remarkably few client departures. There also was no new-business solicitation because Mr. Byoir (as everyone in the business called him) felt the firm would acquire new accounts by virtue of its reputation.

Other unusual characteristics of the organization captured the attention and loyalty of clients and bonded the employees. Today, long after the company’s sale to Foote Cone and Belding and then to Hill & Knowlton in the mid-1980s, the unique techniques of Carl Byoir & Associates are spoken of as “The Byoir Way” by practitioners. This was, in fact, the name of the firm’s elegant (and only) brochure, produced in 1977.

As an example of Byoir’s business plan, all accounts were charged a uniform annual retainer fee no matter what the size of their programs. At one point, for example, Byoir represented a tiny one-product firm that made stainless steel screw settings for space capsule heat shields. The company paid the standard annual fee of $36,000 plus the hourly charges of a few Byoir specialists who served the business from time to time.

The firm also represented the Minneapolis-Honeywell Heat Regulator Company (now Honeywell), which was Byoir’s biggest client, with 22 staff members serving the account full time. Honeywell also paid the $36,000 fee.

“That will represent our profit,” Mr. Byoir said. Operating costs, ranging up to well over $3 million a year in salaries and costs at Honeywell, were presented monthly in voluminous, highly detailed invoices, at no markup.

Another Byoir characteristic was the practice of permanently installing staff executives in client headquarters offices. At one point, 3 Byoir people worked full time at Hallmark Cards in Kansas City, 17 were located at various Honeywell locations (including one in Iran), and 6 were deployed around the country for the Road Information Program.

These workers were supported by a system of departments in the New York City headquarters devoted to such specialties as research, television, women’s interests, business news, and the like. Reflecting its news heritage, Byoir employed an editorial director, a former wire service editor, who personally cleared every piece of news and feature copy before it was released to the news media.

The firm had strict requirements about the news backgrounds of employees, and most applicants had to show proof of having experienced at least four years in a newsroom.

The combination of news savvy and close client contact brought much success to the Byoir organization, represented in part by the company’s skill in winning dozens of PRSA Silver Anvil awards. It also brought a collegial atmosphere that still exists long after the Byoir brand has more or less disappeared. Reunions of Byoir alumni are commonplace, and strong friendships among former staffers endure.

Most importantly, the Byoir firm, working with and in the interests of its clients, made monumental contributions to public understanding of the business function and to the documented successes of hundreds of industrial companies, associations, and public causes.

The man who created this firm in 1930 and was responsible for its news orientation and sound business base was, himself, both a newsman and a business pioneer.

Carl Robert Byoir was born on June 28, 1888, in Des Moines, Iowa. He was the last of six children born to Benjamin and Minna Gunyon Byoir, Jewish immigrants who had arrived in America in 1875 from Poland. Benjamin Byoir was not particularly successful in his efforts to run a retail clothing business or later to operate a restaurant in Des Moines, so Mrs. Byoir occasionally took in roomers for income.

Young Byoir was captivated by the contrast between the lifestyles of the rich who occupied the great houses standing along Grand Avenue in Des Moines and the grinding poverty and pitifully inadequate homes of the coal miners from nearby towns. He determined to acquire wealth of his own.

Carl Byoir began his career as a writer on the Iowa State Register while still a high school sophomore. After graduation, he joined the Waterloo Times-Tribune as city editor and became managing editor when the incumbent died unexpectedly.

But after a year, Byoir gave in to the urging of a close friend and joined him as a student at the University of Iowa. While there, he continued his enterprising ways, financing his education by continuing to write as a correspondent, selling campus items, and winning contests that offered cash.

Carl Byoir got himself elected as general manager of the college yearbook, the Hawkeye, and set about to create an advertising department that would build revenues for the book. In short order he devised a manual for his successors to guide them in producing the annual. When that proved useful, he set out to market the planning document elsewhere and succeeded, not only within the state of Iowa, but also at Yale, the University of Texas, and the University of Washington.

After college, Byoir joined the same friend who had lured him to Iowa and enrolled in Columbia Law School. While there, he became enchanted by the teaching methods of Dr. Maria Montessori, an Italian educator. Byoir felt the Montessori system would be appealing to American mothers and might also represent a rewarding business opportunity. So before graduating from Columbia Law in 1912, Byoir had joined with Dr. Montessori to set up a United States sales program. It flourished, and Byoir made a substantial profit when he sold the enterprise one year after graduation. Byoir then decided to go into business instead of law.

What followed was a series of business ventures related to publishing. Byoir held numerous advertising and circulation management jobs, mainly with Hearst and Cosmopolitan magazine. Before the age of 30, Byoir was an aggressive business operator with solid experience in advertising, promotion, and sales psychology.

Early in 1917, Byoir was summoned to Washington, DC, to serve as a major figure on the U.S. World War I Committee on Public Information, a pioneer governmental propaganda agency. This was the Creel Committee, a central agency established by President Woodrow Wilson to coordinate the wartime flow of news and information from the many sources in the nation’s capital.

Surrounded by bedlam and politics at the Creel Committee, Byoir set out to do what he did best. The very ambitious George Creel had arranged for a group of eminent historians and authors to write patriotic pamphlets for distribution by the Committee, but he had no plan for printing them.

Byoir solved the problem by calling on his experience producing the Hawkeye and also on several friends from New York who owned printing houses. Soon thereafter, Byoir was named the committee’s associate chairman.

The Byoir/Creel years probably mark the beginning of what is now known as institutional advertising. The use of paid and donated “informational” advertising by the government during World War I was monumental. Byoir himself would later use this tool to advantage with clients such as the A&P and the Eastern Railroads.

After the war Byoir and a number of other Creel Committee executives who had learned how to sway public opinion began to capitalize on the know-how they’d gained on the committee. Byoir moved to Cuba to try to get rid of his sinus problems and quickly established a promotional effort to build Cuban tourism. Key executives of the Byoir firm in later years, all of them journalists, began to join his undertaking. Gerry Swinehart, later to become chairman, joined the firm in Havana in 1930.

The Cuban tourist promotion account was Mr. Byoir’s first public relations contract, and it caused him to be identified as a political supporter of dictator Gerardo Machado. As one way of reducing his identification with Machado, Byoir moved his operation to New York and began to acquire new clients. He opened operations there in 1930 with five full-time staff. George Hammond, the longtime Byoir chairman who presided over the firm’s eventual sale to Foote Cone, joined in 1932.

Most of the firm’s early work was connected with tourism and travel. But knowing that he would need to expand his capabilities, Carl Byoir began to restructure his firm. He said that new accounts would not be directly solicited, and he said the firm would charge a minimum $36,000 fee per year plus actual expenses at cost. Tongues wagged at this huge fee in 1932, but the amount held firm until it was raised to $50,000 in the late 1970s.

Without a doubt, Carl Byoir is best known for the groundbreaking work his firm did for two of the firm’s most significant early clients, the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company and the Eastern Railroads Presidents Conference, and also for his involvement with the German Tourist Information Office.

A Byoir officer signed a contract in late 1933 with the German Tourist Office to promote American tourist travel to Germany. But Byoir himself quickly realized this was a mistake. One United States congressman remarked on the House floor that Byoir’s firm had a contract with agents of the German Propaganda Ministry “for the distribution in America of informative material on the ‘new Germany.'”

Congress ultimately began an investigation of Nazi propaganda activities in America. Mr. Byoir, stunned by public reactions to the investigation and also to the hints that he now supported another dictator (recalling his support of Cuba’s Machado), gave the Germans the agreed-upon three months’ notice of resignation early in 1934. Years later Congressman Wright Patman of Texas charged Byoir on the House floor with setting up “front organizations” to represent Nazi interests in the United States.

Within weeks, Mr. Byoir was fully cleared in an FBI investigation, but he never was able to completely erase the stain that attached to a Jew who had the temerity to promote German business interests while Hitler was in power.

Wright Patman showed up once again in Mr. Byoir’s life as the co-author of a 1936 amendment to the Clayton antitrust act that would seriously restrict the market practices of the country’s large chain stores and mail order houses. Business Week reported that Patman had “heard the cry of little wholesalers for protection against the giants.” The magazine delivered a powerful editorial opposing the bill.

Immediately, owners of the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company retained the Byoir firm to work for the repeal or defeat of state anti-chain store legislation in New York and elsewhere. Byoir responded with a research effort that established two key points: Customers loved the low prices of the grocery chains, but they also favored higher taxes on the chains.

Using this paradox as the foundation of his campaign, Byoir launched a publicity attack on the anti-chain store legislation proposals in many states. Byoir made his studies of “unfair taxes” available to many groups who distributed them in their own materials.

But perhaps the most significant aspect of the Byoir campaign was a large “Statement of Public Policy” ad that first appeared in September and October of 1938 in some 60 newspapers in New York and other Eastern states. This was Byoir’s first use of extensive newspaper advertising to obtain an objective rather than to build goodwill. Although the ad ran in papers with a circulation of more than 40 million, it was aimed at state legislators and members of Congress. It built huge public support for the A&P because of its low-keyed but effective revelation of the company’s concern for the interests of consumers, farmers, and laborers. One magazine said this stood in marked contrast to the chain’s previous stance. Byoir pointed out in a later speech that the A&P previously had failed to express its feeling accurately.

“At last business is beginning to realize that you can win public understanding and approval, no matter how big you are or how rich your success has made you, if you have done it in a fair and honest way,” Mr. Byoir said in a later speech. In mid-1940, after a spirited campaign and much debate, the congressional subcommittee that had conducted hearing on the bill voted to reject it.

Perhaps the most spectacular controversy of Mr. Byoir’s career centered on the struggle for public opinion between the Pennsylvania Motor Trucking Association and the Eastern Railroads Presidents Conference. Each organization was a regional arm of a national trade organization representing the trucking and the rail interests.

The issue was weight limitations. The truckers wanted to raise the limit from 45,000 to 60,000 pounds in Pennsylvania, and the railroads saw a major threat in the increase and a resulting loss of business. They reasoned that as weight limits increased, roads would wear out more quickly, and the truckers should bear the extra cost in terms of added taxes.

The Byoir firm was awarded the railroad account in 1949. By this time, Mr. Byoir had reorganized his firm to install Gerry Swinehart as president in charge of most of its operations. Mr. Byoir had suffered a slight heart attack in 1938, at age 50, and hoped to limit his involvement to counseling senior clients.

The Byoir firm set about to build a third-party organization to provide favorable information about the railroads, following other successful Byoir programs that used this technique. In this case, Byoir directed its opinion campaigns mainly through three existing Pennsylvania organizations of farmers, town supervisors, and railroad workers.

In January of 1953, a group of Pennsylvania trucking organizations filed suit in Philadelphia, charging that Byoir and the Eastern Railroads Presidents Conference had embarked on an illegal conspiracy. The defendants said their efforts were directed only toward attaining legislative relief from the growing trucker abuse of public-supported highways.

Mr. Byoir testified at a pretrial hearing, primarily about charges that he had created sympathetic opinion groups. He said that although he was active on only three Byoir accounts at the time (A&P, Libby Owens Ford, and RCA), he could not say, “no staffer had done anything that shouldn’t have been done.” But, he said, “if deception is involved, it’s no good. Integrity is the cement of our business.”

The trial was heard without jury, and in October of 1957, the judge announced against the Byoir firm and the railroads. In late 1959, a U.S. appeals court upheld the judge’s verdict.

But in 1961, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the decision, saying, “No violation of the Sherman Act can be predicated on mere attempts to influence passage or enforcement of laws.”

Mr. Byoir had died four years earlier from inoperable cancer.