'Poison' Ivy Lee, America's first foreign lobbying tycoon

Foreign governments tend to follow a playbook. As a recent Quincy Institute brief on foreign lobbying noted, “countries use firms based in Washington to lobby active members of Congress in pursuit of various aims — such as receiving U.S. weapons, currying American favor in regional conflicts, and more general reputation laundering.” This playbook, which gives dictators like Saudi de-facto ruler Mohamed bin Salman an influential mouthpiece in Washington, has received more attention since 2016.

But it is hardly new. As Casey Michel argues in his forthcoming book “Foreign Agents: How American Lobbyists and Lawmakers Threaten Democracies Around the World,” the blueprint for this playbook was first pioneered by America’s original public relations tycoon: Ivy Lee.

Given the nickname “Poison Ivy” by muckraker Upton Sinclair, Lee earned a reputation for himself spreading pro-industrialist messages and papering over scandals for railroad and oil magnates in the early 20th century. Instead of running from controversy, Lee’s genius was advising clients to court public opinion through press releases and relationships with journalists and lawmakers to drive the narrative. In his world, absolute facts don’t exist, only differences of perspective.

As his celebrity grew, Lee eventually turned abroad, meeting with and advising foreign clients from Rome to Moscow. As Michel details, Lee counseled Benito Mussolini on how to harness the new technology of movies to improve the Italian dictator’s reputation in the U.S., boasting to the New York Times that Mussolini was a “people’s leader” who “takes pride in being accessible to the common folk of the realm.” In Moscow, Lee met with top Soviet officials and advised them to launch an advertising campaign in the American press. The public relations tycoon even published a 206-page book arguing for the U.S. to formally recognize and engage the Soviet Union on the dubious claim of its strong “capitalistic enterprise” and democratic society, which the U.S. eventually did in 1933.

Ultimately, Lee flew too close to the sun — even for laggardly American regulators. One of his clients was I.G. Farben, a German conglomerate with close ties to the Nazi regime and would later produce the poison gas used in concentration camps. Lee advised I.G. Farben to cultivate relationships with American press correspondents and craft “suitable pro-Nazi replies.” Lee earned a fortune by counseling these clients, and was even rewarded for his work in Germany by meeting Hitler himself. This didn’t pass the sniff test for lawmakers back in Washington, who brought him in for a hearing and uncovered the full breadth of his work for the Nazis.

Hearings such as these into Nazi propaganda in the U.S. led to the creation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. FARA, as it is interpreted today, is a transparency statute that requires foreign agents to report their political activities, disbursements, and promotional materials such as memos and flyers with the Department of Justice.

This transparency has certainly helped our understanding of foreign influence today. As the Quincy Institute’s recent foreign lobbying brief detailed, in the past two years, FARA registrants recorded nearly 130,000 political activities — emails, in-person meetings, phone calls, or dinner parties — with lawmakers, journalists, and other key targets.

Because of FARA, we also know that lobbying on behalf of adversaries — Ivy Lee’s bread and butter — is no longer in fashion. Most U.S. adversaries, such as Russia, Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela, engage in little traditional lobbying anymore (opposition groups in those countries registering under FARA are far more common). Instead, authoritarian partners of the U.S. dominate the foreign lobbying roster, greasing the wheels for arms packages and whitewashing human rights abuses. Of the top 20 most active countries lobbying in the US, 13 are rated “not free” by Freedom House, and most are close U.S. partners — countries like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the UAE.

Foreign influence extends beyond data reported to FARA — it can also be seen through investment in influential tax-exempt non-profit organizations such as think tanks. In a chapter dedicated to the role of nonprofits, Michel recounts a time in which he was pitched to go on an all-expenses paid trip to Baku by the Azerbaijan House in Houston. His host added one slight qualifier: “So long as you don’t write anything negative about our country.” A version of this practice appears alive and well; just this May, a delegation of prominent politicians from Maine visited the Nagorno-Karabakh region and sang Azerbaijan’s praises.

This is why, as Michel convincingly argues, more regulation is necessary for the foreign lobbying industry. “Time after time, the private sector has gleefully chosen profit over patriotism, acting as a handmaiden to the illiberal, autocratic forces goosestepping around the world,” he writes.

One of Michel’s suggested remedies, the Fighting Foreign Influence Act, could be a sweeping start by requiring think tanks to disclose high-dollar gifts from foreign governments and banning former officials from lobbying for foreign governments. Michel points out that banning the revolving door has been a commonsense proposal since as early as the mid-19th century. After Russia paid a former senator to secretly push through the Alaska purchase, congressional investigators concluded that “no man whose former high public position has given extraordinary influence in the community has the right to sell that influence, the trust and confidence of his fellow-citizens, to a foreign government.” Those same words ring true today. Since 2000, nearly 100 members of Congress have lobbied for foreign governments.

In many corners, Ivy Lee remains heralded for his innovation. Lee’s own “Publicity Book,” not published until 2017, offers insights into his tactics. As the publisher writes, “Although the book was written just as ‘talkies’ were consuming the screen, the guidance it offers is just as valuable, perhaps even moreso, as YouTube and Twitter consume our screens, 90 years later.” Indeed, modern day Ivy Lees continue to influence policy on behalf of foreign dictators by hosting lawmakers for dinner parties, pitching op-eds in newspapers and magazines, and using middlemen to escape scrutiny.

To reckon with the foreign influence industry is to reckon with the lasting legacy of Ivy Lee. As Michel writes, “A century after Ivy Lee first birthed the industry, public relations firms continue to service dictators around the world transforming them from despots into democrats, opening doors and enhancing their regimes that much further in the process.” Poison Ivy’s world keeps spinning.