In a long article about the attitude of the public towards the railroads, the Railway Age reaches the conclusion that the most important problem which American railroads must solve is “the problem of selling themselves to the public.” Some public utilities maintain public relations departments, whose function it is to interpret the organizations to the public, as much as to interpret the public to them. The significant thing, however, is not the accepted importance of public opinion in this or the other individual industry, but the fact that public opinion is becoming cumulatively more and more articulate and therefore more important to industrial life as a whole.
The New York Central Railroad, for example, maintains a Public Relations Department under Pitt Hand, whose function it is to make it clear to the public that the railroad is functioning efficiently to serve the public in every possible way. This department studies the public and tries to discover where the railroad’s service can be mended or improved, or when wrong or harmful impressions upon the public mind may be corrected.
This Public Relations Department finds it profitable not only to bring to the attention of the public the salient facts about its trains, its time tables, and its actual traveling facilities, but also to build up a broadly coöperative spirit that is indirectly of great value to itself and benefit to the public. It coöperates, for example, with such movements as the Welcome Stranger Committee of New York City in distributing literature to travelers to assist them when they reach the city. It coöperates with conventions, to the extent of arranging special travel facilities. Such aids as it affords to the directors of children’s camps at the Grand Central Station are especially conspicuous for their dramatic effect on the general public.
Even a service which is in a large measure non-competitive must continually “sell” itself to the public, as evidenced by the strenuous