Pioneers of Promotion examines the work of three nineteenth-century practitioners of press agentry and image making. Richard “Tody” Hamilton directed P.T. Barnum's publicity machine during the last phase of Barnum's career in the 1880s and 1890s; John M. Burke spent more than forty years crafting the public persona of Buffalo Bill Cody from the 1870s to the 1910s; Moses P. Handy oversaw the Department of Publicity and Promotion for the World's Columbian Exposition—the Chicago world's fair of 1893. Dobrow argues that the three men provided the template for the modern marketing industry, and that they have failed to receive sufficient recognition for this achievement. The book uses extensive primary source research to create a richly textured portrait of the background and professional lives of the three men and their employers. It also includes fifty-four illustrations, including sixteen color plates that provide vivid examples of the men's handiwork.

Tody Hamilton had a hit-and-miss career as a newspaperman and theater promoter before connecting with Barnum in in the early days of the Barnum and Bailey Circus. The aging Barnum delegated promotional duties to Hamilton, who became the driving force in the enterprise's elaborate system of posting handbills, placing stories in local newspapers, and staging publicity stunts. Most of the techniques he employed had been developed by Barnum himself during his days touring with a succession of attractions ranging from the Feejee Mermaid to soprano Jenny Lind. It is not clear what Hamilton added to the mix beyond tongue-twisting alliteration—for example: “Fabulous Fat Fanny Feeding Ferociously on Farinaceous Foods” (38)—but he implemented the strategy with enormous energy and helped revive the fame and fortune of Barnum just as it seemed the times had passed him by.

John Burke had spent an itinerant life promoting theatrical companies in locations as diverse as Tombstone, Arizona, and Washington, DC, before crossing paths with Buffalo Bill Cody just as the latter took to the stage to capitalize on his celebrity status, which he owed to a series of fanciful dime novels loosely based on his life as a frontier scout and buffalo hunter. Their relationship solidified in 1882 when Cody began touring with arena productions known as Buffalo Bill's Wild West and later Buffalo Bill's Wild West and World Congress of Rough Riders. Dobrow credits Burke with the crucial insight that made Cody a legend. Burke realized that even as boosterism and progress characterized the America's self-image and aspirations in the late 1800s, people also longed to commemorate and celebrate a past symbolized by the frontier West. Burke built his promotional campaigns for Cody around an insistence on the authenticity and educational value of the Cody's experience and its public display. He promoted and policed Cody's image through a myriad of publications, energetic bill posting, celebrity endorsements, ingenious publicity stunts, and extensive networking with members of the press. This included the development of “press kits” containing background information, biographies, ready-to-print news stories, and photographs, as well as “press junkets” that offered reporters sneak previews plus food and drink. Burke's approach to these tasks was so comprehensive and detailed that Dobrow characterizes him as a press agent “virtuoso” (172).

Moses Handy was an experienced newspaper journalist who had served as reporter, editor, and owner of papers ranging from the Richmond Enquirer, Philadelphia Daily News, New York Tribune, and New York World. In 1890, he accepted the job of promoting the World's Columbian Exposition that would occur three years later in Chicago. Facing considerable skepticism both nationally and internationally about the viability of the project, Handy created an organization that was carefully departmentalized to generate local and international publicity; publish and distribute pamphlets and posters; lobby legislators, trade organizations, and foreign officials; and keep records of their progress (in January 1893, the department reported that 70,000 articles and 3,643,200 words about the fair had been published around the world). Handy also created extensive press facilities to host and facilitate the work of hundreds of reporters who arrived to cover the event. Eventually, 27.5 million people attended the fair even though it occurred during the onset of one of the worst economic depressions the country has ever experienced.

The accomplishments of Hamilton, Burke, and Handy are impressive and well-documented in the book, but Dobrow has not really developed his larger argument, which credits them with “laying the very cornerstone of the marketing industry itself” (9). He engages none of the relevant secondary sources beyond making the general statement that his subjects have been “largely forgotten by history” (xiv). He is overgenerous in crediting Burke with the invention of everything from celebrity endorsements (150) to mobile billboards (192) to taglines (272), all of which he used expertly but not alone and not before anybody else. The book offers no evidence that any of these men engaged in strategic planning, market research, product testing, or many other essential aspects of modern marketing.

In the narrower field of public relations history, Hamilton, Burke, and Handy are not exactly forgotten; references to them are not difficult to find in the literature. However, scholars have documented numerous tributary sources for the field beyond late nineteenth-century commercial entertainments. They have found precedents in areas as diverse as evangelical religion, political campaigns, social advocacy, and education. More attention to the work of Hamilton, Burke, and Handy will not reshape this historiographical narrative.

Their stories still exemplify the burst of entrepreneurial energy and experimentation with large-scale promotional techniques that occurred at that time. They remind us how much the genesis of mass marketing owes to scattered individuals far removed from corporate offices and early advertising agencies on the East Coast. Pioneers of Promotion provides a well-researched and detailed history of fascinating individuals and their efforts to shape public opinion during a formative period of mass communications in America.