The Man Who Sold America: The Amazing (but True!) Story of Albert D. Lasker and the Creation of the Advertising Century

by Jeffrey L. Cruikshank

  By the time Eduard Lasker visited Galveston in 1883, the city was almost fully recovered from the devastating effects of the Civil War and had been free of yellow fever for a decade. It was the largest city in Texas—twenty-two thousand residents—and jockeyed with Houston to be the state’s commercial center.19 The city’s main role in the later years of the nineteenth century was as a transshipment point for the agricultural goods of Texas: Galveston’s merchants bought products from farmers and resold them to customers in Europe and elsewhere. Products flowed in the other direction as well, with Galveston’s traders importing supplies for merchants to sell to the farmers.20

  By far the most important product to pass through Galveston was cotton. The city was America’s fifth-largest cotton exporter in 1882, but like many Southern cities, Galveston failed to industrialize, in part because of its geographical situation. Galveston—an island connected to the mainland by bridges—sits on a narrow, low-lying, twenty-five-mile-long sandbar that juts out into the Atlantic Ocean and divides Galveston Bay from the Gulf of Mexico. The island has been battered by powerful storms as long as records have been kept, and northern investors were reluctant to put their factories and people in harm’s way.21

  Because Galveston couldn’t attract capital, local industry languished. In 1880, the year Albert Lasker was born, Galveston’s biggest industry was printing, which employed a modest 107 people and represented a capital investment of only $287,000.22

  The harbor presented another obstacle to Galveston’s growth. It wasn’t deep enough to accommodate large vessels; as a result, many ships had to anchor well offshore and be loaded and unloaded by barges—a cumbersome and expensive process. Huge sums were spent dredging the sand on the harbor floor in an effort to deepen the ship channels and make the port more competitive.

  At the same time, though, Galveston possessed natural advantages. Principal among them were its spectacular white-sand beaches, which began to attract tourists after the Civil War. In 1877, a Galveston company built a network of streetcar lines to transport bathers to the beaches. In 1881, the same company completed construction of an elaborate two-story “pavilion” on the beach—the first building in Texas with electric lights—and two years later, the opulent Beach Hotel opened.23

  This was the setting in which Morris Lasker built his wholesale grocery business during his first decade in the city and in which he founded the Lasker Real Estate Company, which soon became the umbrella for his increasingly varied business interests. He owned and operated the Texas Star Flour Mills, founded several decades earlier by Austrian immigrants, which was by the 1890s the largest enterprise on Galveston Island. The Texas Star Mills were the first in Texas to adopt an eight-hour day, which earned Lasker the goodwill of working people (and the enmity of manufacturers) around the state. He also bought interests in flour mills in Waco, Wichita Falls, and Wolf City. Morris also dabbled in railroad building—a savvy investment for a coastal trader.

  Briefly, Morris Lasker entered the political arena. In April 1895, he was elected to succeed deceased Texas state senator Miles Crowley. While serving out Crowley’s term in the Senate, he helped introduce and pass a bill regulating fishing and oyster-harvesting practices, and also cosponsored a major drainage bill.24 Unlike his brother Eduard, however, Morris found political life distasteful and declined to stand for reelection. But his growing stature in the Galveston business community, as well as other parts of the state, kept him an influential figure in Texas politics well after his departure from the Senate.

  Influence led to more influence. Morris became president of the Galveston Cotton Exchange, established the Island City Savings Bank of Galveston, and served as vice president and chairman of the Finance Committee of the First National Bank of Galveston. He received $5,000 a year for each of his bank presidencies, and $3,000 a year for his lesser banking roles, all of which added up to a princely income. Lasker took to wearing a silk hat on Sundays: a distinction reserved for the very wealthy.25

  Although a sharp-eyed businessman, Morris Lasker also was community minded. Along with a business partner, for example, he donated $30,000 to set up the first classes in “manual training and domestic science” in the Galveston public schools. In 1912, he gave $15,000 to an orphanage, which was subsequently renamed the “Lasker Home for Homeless Children” in his honor.26 Morris also proved to be a steady hand when calamity struck. In1900, a devastating hurricane—one of the worst natural disasters in U.S. history—struck Galveston, killing more than forty-two hundred citizens and washing away much of the city. Morris Lasker was one of a handful of local men elected to direct recovery efforts.

  Although not a particularly observant Jew, Morris was always connected to the Jewish community, both locally and farther afield. Toward the end of his life, one of the causes dearest to his heart was the National Farm School, located twenty-six miles north of Philadelphia. This institution trained immigrant Jews—many fleeing the bloody Russian pogroms of the late 1800s—as farmers, and equipped them to build better lives for themselves. Lasker donated almost $100,000 to the school in 1916 to erect a “Domestic Building” in his name.27

  A few years earlier, Morris wrote to Albert about the school, saying that he had been pondering how his son could best equip himself for his “aim to benefit mankind, and thus to receive the only truest satisfaction in life, and real compensation for living.” If Albert got involved in the affairs of the school, Morris continued, “the field for doing good through that idea could be developed to nearly an unlimited extent.”28

  Although he never got Albert involved with the National Farm School, Morris exercised enormous influence over his son. He directed his career choice, withheld and then granted permission for him to get married, loaned him money for a wedding ring, and was the voice of conscience that whispered in his son’s ear. Ralph Sollitt, one of Albert Lasker’s closest friends and business associates, said that Morris’s words exerted a powerful and abiding influence on Albert: “I have never seen any of the letters from his father . . . but my goodness, I heard by the hour what was in those letters. . . . The effect was tremendous, they were words from the oracle, and [if] the father wanted him to go to Atlanta and tilt with windmills, he did it . . .”29

  Morris also exerted his influence by example. Charismatic, demanding, endlessly energetic, and frequently absent, he was a challenging father whose children viewed him with a combination of fear, awe, and love. They rebelled against his harsh rules, but struggled to live up to his ideals. As Sollitt further observed: “Either from his father or from this Jewish thing that is in him; the deep thing with him is that he ought to do good in the world. And his whole life has been this struggle somehow or other, to find out how to do this good . . . A man has to justify his existence, and after all business didn’t really justify his existence.”30

  The other enduring influence on Albert’s life was his Uncle Eduard, so frequently held up to Albert and his siblings as a paragon of hard work and selfless public service. For many years, Eduard’s name remained iconic in the German-Jewish expatriate community. When Albert sought to marry, for example, consent came more easily from the young woman’s family because Albert was a blood relative of the hallowed Eduard Lasker.

  Throughout his life, therefore, Albert measured himself against one man who had gone toe-to-toe with the Iron Chancellor, and another who had braved the privations and horrors of the Civil War, epidemics, and hurricanes and made several fortunes in a foreign and sometimes hostile land.

  Orator and entrepreneur, statesman and pioneer, depressive and overachiever: These conflicting legacies would advance Albert Lasker’s career, shape his emotions, and dictate his dreams.

  Chapter Two

  The Galveston Hothouse

  IN LATE APRIL 1892, the Galveston Free Press heartily endorsed the candidacy of George Clark—an attorney from Waco with extremely close ties to the railroads—for governor of Texas.

  Clark was running for the Democratic nomination ag
ainst incumbent James Stephen Hogg. A notable milestone of Hogg’s first term had been the creation of the Texas Railroad Commission—a powerful body modeled on the Interstate Commerce Commission that administered the state’s railroad-related laws. The legislation that created the Railroad Commission allowed the governor to appoint its three members. Clark ran against the Commission as a “constitutional monstrosity,” and called for the popular election of Commissioners.1

  Citing Clark’s progressive and tolerant spirit, the editorial writer enjoined Texans to support him:

  The office of the governor already has enough power without being given that of the appointment of three railroad commissioners who are invested with authority to make and unmake the greatest corporations in the state. Such power held in the hands of the governor invites suspicion, favoritism, and, worst of all, corruption . . . Judge Clark will add a spirit of tolerance and progressiveness foreign to the nature of the present executive. By all means let Judge Clark head the ticket and Texas will experience a change that will be “what she has sought and mourned because she found it not.”2

  The editorial was remarkable not so much for its arguments—although they were cogent and sensible enough—but for the fact that its author, Albert D. Lasker, was still nine years away from being old enough to vote. On the day that these opinions appeared in print, Albert Lasker—writer, editor, and owner of the Galveston Free Press—was a day short of his twelfth birthday.

  The Free Press, which Lasker published for more than a year, was a four-page weekly that commanded a yearly subscription price of $1. In addition to editorials, the newspaper ran theater reviews, social notes, and other local news. It also contained advertisements for local businesses, all written and laid out by Lasker. The only aspect of newspapering that Lasker did not undertake personally was the collection of payments from subscribers and advertisers. This, Lasker felt, was beneath his dignity. To dun deadbeats, Lasker hired a boy even younger than he was.

  The formula worked. From the operations of the Galveston Free Press, Lasker netted around $15 a week, at a time when $60 a month was a respectable salary for an adult in Galveston.

  Albert Lasker was one of six children. He had an older brother, Edward, a younger brother, Harry (his mother’s favorite, whom Albert loved to torment), and three younger sisters—Florina, Etta, and Loula.

  The Galveston of Lasker’s childhood was a lively, sociable, and relatively liberal Southern port. The city’s most fashionable residences faced the Gulf. The Lasker house was almost at the geographic center of the Galveston peninsula, although several blocks from the water. It was a stately red Victorian on the corner of Broadway and 18th Street that Lasker’s first biographer described as “a castle—or prison—out of Grimm . . . a crenelated, gabled house . . . built of bright red sandstone, with sturdy masonry, a white window trim, round copings . . . iron balconies, Corinthian columns, triangular porches, and ornate glass bulges set at improbable angles.”3 It sat atop a small hill, and was usually surrounded by well-tended flowers.4

  The opulent façade bespoke the very comfortable lifestyle within. Lasker recalled a childhood home in which there were “always lots of servants, and lots of maids, and a butler.”5 Albert’s sister Loula was somewhat more precise: there were three servants and a full-time gardener, of whom the maid was white, and the other three staffers were African American.6

  Nettie Lasker, although the junior partner in her marriage, was nevertheless a commanding presence. “I used to think when I was a girl that she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen,” recalled one of Lasker’s schoolmates. “She had that cameo loveliness, that expression. Deep brown eyes, and a beautiful figure, and was very stylish.”7 On Saturday mornings, the family walked to the local synagogue in their best outfits, herded along by Nettie. Mortified by her husband’s lack of attention to his dress, Nettie compensated by making sure that the rest of the family was immaculately turned out.

  Through the florid hand of a ghostwriter in the 1930s, Lasker later recalled these outings as among the worst memories from his childhood. As they paraded down the street in their Saturday finery, they drew jeers and taunts—including the racial insult of “sheenie”—from their schoolmates:

  We wore Eton collars; sensitive, quiet Edward, three years my senior, had a watch in his breast pocket, and the chain of gold which advertised this fact seemed to me a kind of badge he wore as my father’s first born. Our flaring bow ties were silken plaids. Truculent, round-headed Harry, who had come into the world two years after me, had his arms immersed in hand-made lace to the elbows of his jacket, although not of his free will. The vamps of his shoes were of patent leather; the rest of the uppers were the natural shade of kid. My suit had tight little pants that ended gracelessly at the knees. On our heads we wore bowler hats, an indictable offense in the sight of other boys, I guess, but the high crime was what we carried in our hands, silver mounted walking sticks. We would have been better off with baseball bats . . .8

  On every day but Saturday, the Lasker children mixed easily with the youth of Galveston, but Lasker later said that this weekly encounter with intolerance taught him to “live without having intolerance to any human being in the world.”9

  Albert’s childhood was rife with contradictions both subtle and pronounced. In the local business community, his father’s status commanded respect, but the family’s religion kept them at the margins of society. Life at home also carried contradictions; while the family was well off financially, at least in the early years of Lasker’s’s life, the children were not always happy. John Gunther, Lasker’s friend and biographer, condemned Morris as a “complete tyrant, a dictator,” and claimed that neither Morris nor Nettie ever gave Albert the unconditional love that he craved.10 Through his early adulthood, Albert struggled to live up to his father’s expectations. As a child, though, he feared his father, and lied to him to avoid confrontations.

  Morris first beat Albert when he was about nine. The boy was spending all his afternoons at the building site for his family’s new home—the grand manse on Broadway and 18th.11 Albert would fetch and carry when he could, and talk with the workmen. One summer afternoon, when the crew had completed the framing-in of the roof, they took Albert aside and explained solemnly that it was a Texas tradition that the builders be treated to a barrel of beer when they reached this milestone. Albert rushed home to convey this news to his father, who immediately arranged to have a keg delivered to the construction site. When Albert reappeared there shortly thereafter, he was greeted as a hero. As the workmen gathered around the keg, one of them handed Albert a mug, and told him to help himself. An hour later, thoroughly drunk, the boy stumbled home. Even through his first-ever alcoholic haze, he resolved that he would not breathe a word to his mother about what had happened.

  But Nettie saw immediately that something was wrong with her slurring and staggering little boy. In a panic, she summoned their next-door neighbor, a physician. Albert later recalled what happened next:

  I can hear my mother frantically telling the doctor that I must have had sunstroke or something had gone wrong with the brain. The old doctor came over to me, smelled my breath, and said, “Has anyone given this child liquor?” And then my mother remembered the [keg] of beer, and my father came home and he gave me a tremendous licking, and he made me do something that he never did . . . before, or after. He made me eat for a whole day in the kitchen where the negro servants ate.12

  The punishment rankled. Even at that tender age, Albert had a keen sense of justice, and he felt that his severe “licking” and subsequent humiliation were unfair.

  Thus began a cycle of pranks, lies, and punishments that came to define Lasker’s relationship with his father. When the Galveston Free Press got into financial trouble—apparently, its twelve-year-old publisher incurred a printing bill he couldn’t pay—he led the printer to believe that his father would cover all of his obligations. When asked by Morris if he had made such a representation to the pri
nter, Albert lied. The truth came out, and Albert got another “licking” in the attic.

  The family’s privileged lifestyle was threatened, quite suddenly, by the Panic of 1893. Across the country, entrepreneurs were crushed by the economic upheaval, so Morris’s story is unusual only in its details. He had decided to go into real estate, founding the Lasker Real Estate Company in 1880. Seeing great potential in central Texas and the Panhandle, he went to London in 1888 to solicit partners in an ambitious development venture. A London banker bought Morris’s pitch, and loaned him $250,000: a huge sum, which he invested in San Angelo—a brand-new town some four hundred miles northwest of Galveston—as well as in a Houston subdivision.13

  Then disaster struck. The mighty Reading Railroad failed, sparking a collapse of other railroads and banks across the United States. The panic quickly spread across the Atlantic, hitting banks in London especially hard. Texas’s all-important cotton crop became almost worthless as mills in England and the United States locked their doors. All across cotton country, land values collapsed.

  By this time, Morris had interests in flour mills and other commercial properties throughout Texas, and he had placed mortgages on all of these properties to pay for his development projects. He was severely overleveraged, and cash was short. Rather than force his family to live in reduced circumstances, Morris sent his wife and younger children to Germany for a year. By this time, Morris’s oldest son, Edward, was away at school in North Carolina, so only Albert remained at home in Galveston with his father.

  It was a bad arrangement, with surreal consequences for Albert. While he slept, or pretended to sleep, his father would stealthily enter his bedroom and pace. Albert recalled: “I would see a wraith-like, nightgowned figure. It would be my father, sleepless from worry . . . Sometimes for hours I would be aware of the pat, pat, pat of his bare feet pacing the room. Sometimes I would become wide-awake from more disturbing sounds. Behind him he would smack the palm of one hand against the hairy back of the other, then re-clench them, and groan.”