How Tech Giants Make History

Public relations can shape public opinion, and consent can indeed be manufactured. Few business leaders embraced this idea more fully than the executives of American Telephone & Telegraph Company (AT&T) and its affiliated entities in the years following Theodore N. Vail’s appointment as president in 1907. Vail’s vice president, Nathan C. Kingsbury, encapsulated their approach in a 1915 speech: “The one great purpose and end of modern publicity is the formation and control of public opinion.” He emphasized that public opinion governed almost every country, including the United States, and warned that corporations needed to take note.

Though Vail and Kingsbury are not widely remembered today, they pioneered a new way of protecting corporate interests in the early 20th century—one that would later be described by journalist Walter Lippmann as the “manufacture of consent.” Their strategy was a departure from the traditional corporate approach of staying silent in the face of criticism. Instead of remaining passive, they sought to actively shape public narratives. Over the following decades, AT&T’s publicists went beyond simply placing favorable articles; they also funded academic research and endowed research centers, all with the goal of convincing the public that AT&T and its affiliates—collectively known as the “Bell System”—were benevolent public servants. They argued that the company’s market dominance was a result of technological innovation and sound economic planning, rather than political maneuvering. In truth, politics played a significant role in creating the markets where Bell thrived, but the company’s publicists worked relentlessly to reverse this perception.

At the heart of the Vail-Kingsbury effort was the promotion of the idea that AT&T’s network of operating companies should be viewed as a unified “system” focused on providing “universal service,” not merely generating profit. These concepts were open to debate, but their core message positioned AT&T, then referred to as Bell in financial circles, as a technologically advanced and fiscally responsible communications network accountable not only to its shareholders, but also to the American public. Vail believed that all U.S. electrical communications networks—whether telephone, landline telegraph, or undersea cable—were best operated as monopolies under unified management. This bold idea, which Vail’s supporters called the “network mystique,” would eventually face significant criticism, even from within the Bell System itself…

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