In what Eugene Grace mistakenly thought was just a silly nuisance of a legal suit, led to the worse public relations nightmare for the Bethlehem Steel Corporation during its entire history. Cyrus Eaton, a minority stockholder of Youngstown Sheet and Tube Company, filed suit in Youngstown, Ohio, against Bethlehem Steel to prevent the planned merger between Bethlehem Steel and the Youngstown company. Eaton noted that while the stockholders of Bethlehem Steel received no dividends, during the years 1925-28, as the Steel executives were paid enormous bonuses. This was done without the knowledge of the stockholders.

The case was heard before Judge David G. Jenkins at the Common Pleas Court. During the proceedings, Judge Jenkins ordered Grace to reveal the amount of his bonus for the year of 1929. Grace testified it was $1,623,753 or equal to $261,000,000 in today's dollars.

When the bonus figures of Grace and the other Steel executives became public, the nation was stunned at the astronomical amounts. In response, the question, "Is any man worth a million?" was echoed across the country in newspapers and magazines.

The Bethlehem Steel/Youngstown court battle was considered the most expensive in legal history with a cost of 2.5 million in fees along with the sad occurrence of a suicide of a Sheet and Tube lawyer, during the trial. Grace and Charles M. Schwab decided they needed to call in the master of public relations, Ivy Lee.

Ivy Ledbetter Lee was born in 1877 near Cedartown, Georgia. His father, James W. Lee was a Methodist minister. Ivy Lee attended Emory University and Princeton College. He began his career as a newspaper reporter for the New York American, the New York Times, and the New York World. When in 1903, he secured his first public relations job with Citizen's Union, an independent political organization in New York City, Lee discovered he had a gift for publicity.

He married Cornelia Bartlett Bigalow in 1901 and they had three children. Lee founded one of the first public relations firms in the United States with his partner George Parker in 1905. He became a pioneer in public relations and produced his "Declaration of Principals" which espoused that public relations practitioners have a public responsibility that extends beyond obligations to the client. As admirable as this principal sounds, Lee often deviated from following this principal. He would spend his final years working furiously to clean up his reputation, because he put his client before the public.

In 1906, Lee was hired by his first big client, the Pennsylvania Railroad which needed his expertise to handle informing newspapers of the cause of the derailment of two trains in Atlantic City, resulting in drowning of 53 passengers.

In 1914, Lee was hired by John D. Rockefeller to become the publicity point man during the coal mining rebellion in Colorado known as the "Ludlow Massacre." Striking miners at the Colorado Fuel and Oil Company were shot by the Colorado Militia and two women and 11 children were asphyxiated by the resulting fire. However Lee indicated in his press releases that the women died from an overturned stove which earned him the nickname, "Poison Ivy." Lee successfully converted Rockefeller's image from a robber baron to a kindly philanthropic gentleman.

In 1914, Charles M. Schwab met Lee through business associates. Their meeting became a favorite story that was repeated often through the years. When they met, Lee told Schwab that he could increase managerial productivity at Bethlehem Steel by 50 percent. Schwab agreed to listen to Lee's idea which was simply that a manager should write down the five most important tasks that he hoped to accomplish during the day. The tasks should be prioritized. The manager then should look at his list every 15 minutes until each task was accomplished.

Schwab liked the concept and asked Lee to instruct his top executives on the technique. Two weeks later, Schwab sent Lee a check for $25,000 adding a note writing that the lesson was the most profitable he had ever learned. Schwab and Grace would remember to call upon Lee 16 years later for assistance with their bonus scandal.

Lee advised them to stop being defensive and take a proactive approach of preparing 18-page letter explaining that the bonuses were not hidden from the stockholders and were actually a great benefit to the corporation. The letter claimed that the incentive of a bonus assured rapid growth of the company. Schwab and Grace settled the case in 1931, agreeing to a cap on future bonuses with full disclosure to the stockholders.

Using his talent to do good during World War I, Lee served as a publicity director, and later as assistant to the chairman of the American Red Cross.

He wrote four books about his philosophy on public relations and his career. Although Lee often advised his clients to tell the truth and educate the public with the goal of humanizing corporations, his critics accused him of spreading union-bashing and strike-breaking propaganda to benefit his corporate clients.

In 1934, the U.S. Congress investigated Lee's work on behalf of the IG Farben Chemical Company. Lee admitted to sending to U.S. newspapers a series of pro-Nazi press releases and to having met with Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels, in 1933, in Germany.

Ivy Lee died of a brain tumor at age 57 in 1934. He was in the middle of his own scandal, but ran out of time before he could prepare his own press releases. Some of Lee's other clients were M.I.T., the American Telephone Company, American Tobacco Company, General Mills, Westinghouse and Chrysler.