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

  The baby was delivered at the family’s rented home in Woodlawn, near the University of Chicago’s campus, in September 1904. She was a healthy girl, whom her parents named Mary. Flora appeared no worse off physically, but her physician warned her that if she attempted to have another child, he would no longer attend her.

  Upon returning to Chicago, Flora attempted to make friends and establish a social circle. Inevitably, conversations turned to the subject of livelihoods: What does your husband do for a living? When Flora told them that Albert was in “advertising,” her newfound friends were baffled. The concept of modern-day advertising simply hadn’t penetrated the public consciousness yet. Does he paint billboards?, one of them asked Flora. Does he wear a sandwich board?, asked another. Another invoked the disreputable realm of elixirs, painkillers, and other magic compounds: Is he connected with the patent-medicine business?12

  Flora went downtown one day to open a charge account at Marshall Field. The clerk asked where her husband worked. “Lord & Thomas,” she replied. This was reference enough for the department store, and the account was opened. She recounted the episode to her husband that evening, and, combined with Flora’s stories about her friends’ reactions to his profession, it provoked a strong response in him:

  Well, I had never thought of being employed by anybody, or working for anybody, and I [had] distinctly two reactions . . . One was that I was going to work all the harder and make it a business of which my wife wouldn’t be ashamed, and one which wouldn’t confuse people as to the type of man she had married. And the second thing was that never again should they ask my wife who her husband worked for . . . And of course during the time of her sickness, that wasn’t a pressing thing. But I had made up my mind that when she returned, I would be in business for myself—either as a partner in Lord & Thomas, or in some other work.

  He had a strong hand to play. Only five years into his tenure at Lord & Thomas, he was one of the agency’s most valuable assets—he was generating more business than the rest of the agency’s sales force combined. Years later, he estimated that with the notable exception of the Ayer agency’s legendary Henry N. McKinney—“he occupied the first ten places, and I occupied the eleventh”—he was the most successful ad salesman in the world.

  Traditionally, in the last quarter of the year, the salesmen of Lord & Thomas (and almost every other sizeable agency) fanned out across their territories in an effort to sign up their existing clients for the ensuing year.13 As Lasker made his rounds in the final months of 1903, one-year renewal contracts in hand, he met with little resistance, since his clients were thrilled with the results he had produced for them. His last stop was in Indianapolis, where he had a meeting scheduled with Frank Van Camp, the head of the Van Camp Packing Company. The meeting took place in Lasker’s room at a downtown Indianapolis hotel. After Van Camp signed his contract, Lasker asked him to accompany him to the mailbox in the hotel lobby. Van Camp, puzzled, watched Lasker drop the envelope containing the signed contract into the mailbox.

  Then Lasker explained why he had wanted Van Camp to watch him put the contract in the mail: “You are the last account that Lord & Thomas has entrusted to me that [remained to be] signed up for 1904, so nothing that I can say to any of them or you can change your relationships, because you are legally bound to them. Now I feel I owe it to unfold something to you . . . I am going home tonight to resign, and [go] into business for myself.”

  Lasker felt that Ambrose Thomas had made implicit promises to him that hadn’t been kept—including a partnership in the agency. He felt that all he could honorably take away from Lord & Thomas was the experience that he had gained in the previous five years. On the other hand—he said pointedly—if any of the clients whom he had just re-signed felt unhappy with Lord & Thomas at the end of the upcoming contract period, he would be happy to take them on in 1905.

  Lasker also mentioned that he had discussed his plans with a senior colleague, Charles R. Erwin, but with no one else at Lord & Thomas. In truth, his discussions with Erwin were far advanced. Lasker “dreaded” going into business alone; he wanted a partner to share the risk, and he believed Erwin could lend credibility to the new venture: “He was a man of fine appearance, who could give confidence to anyone. Lovely shock of hair . . . And he was a good deal older than I was, [and] he understood a great deal of figures. I still had the feeling that the head of the house had to do what Mr. Lord did—open the mail, go to the bank if we needed it. I never had any contact with that end, so it all seemed very important to me.”

  Lasker offered Erwin a fifty-fifty partnership in his proposed new agency—and Erwin immediately accepted. “That is the only thing I ever did in business of which I am ashamed,” he later admitted. “I don’t believe that I had the right to win one of my coworkers away.”

  In response to these revelations, Frank Van Camp volunteered very little.

  The next morning, back in Chicago, Lasker approached Ambrose Thomas’s secretary, Kate Grady, and asked to see Thomas. Grady told Lasker that Thomas was in a meeting with Mr. Van Camp and could not be disturbed.

  It is difficult to imagine the anxiety Lasker must have felt upon hearing this news. That anxiety must have increased exponentially, hour by hour, as Thomas and Van Camp remained behind closed doors all morning. Finally, Thomas sent word to Lasker to meet him at the bar in Chicago’s Wellington Hotel at the end of the day.

  Standing at the bar, drink in hand, Thomas revealed that Frank Van Camp had called an emergency meeting, taken the train to Chicago, and repeated everything that Lasker had said to him. Moreover, Van Camp had informed Thomas that he fully intended to jump to Lasker at the end of the upcoming year, and that he suspected that every other one of Lasker’s accounts would do the same. The only thing for Thomas to do, Van Camp said—the only way to hang on to Lasker and his accounts—was to make Lasker a partner.

  Thomas told Lasker that he had decided to take Van Camp’s advice and make both Lasker and Erwin partners in the firm. He had already approached cofounder and partner Daniel Lord and induced him to resign to make room for Lasker and Erwin. They had put a value of $200,000 on the business, which meant that Lord’s half-interest could be acquired for $100,000, with $30,000 down. Stunned, Lasker accepted the proposal.14

  Then came the hard part: finding $30,000. Lasker scraped together $10,000 in loans from friends and family members—not including his father—and Erwin came up with $5,000.15 This left them $15,000 short. In an astounding display of bravado, Lasker then demanded that Ambrose Thomas make him a gift of the remaining $15,000, arguing that going into business on his own would cost Lasker far less than $15,000, and that Thompson was trading a more or less inactive partner (Lord) for two active partners (Lasker and Erwin).

  On February 1, 1904, Albert Lasker became a one-quarter partner in Lord & Thomas. His peculiar road to partnership created tensions between himself and his mentor. One Saturday night in the early months of 1906, for example, Lord & Thomas held a firmwide dinner at the Stratford Hotel. At the end of the evening, Lasker rose and toasted Ambrose Thomas. “Whatever the business is,” he proclaimed, “it owes to Mr. Thomas, because of his tolerance, and the fact that he gives everyone opportunity. The remarkable progress we are making is through the confidence and encouragement he lends to all of us.”16

  After the dinner, Charles Erwin suggested that the three partners head down to the hotel bar for a nightcap. Even though it was now past midnight, Lasker and Thomas agreed. After downing several drinks, Lasker recalled, Thomas suddenly addressed him in the “meanest tone” that the elder man had ever used on him:

  “Why did you make that talk tonight?” Thomas demanded. “You know you never meant a word of it.”

  Lasker, “hurt to the quick,” protested strenuously that he had. And then he fought back:

  Mr. Thomas, ever since we started the new firm, you have changed. Instead of being to me, in a personal way, like you were before, you have done nothing but be offensive. You hav
e done nothing but humiliate me with myself, and I can’t stand another humiliation.

  This is Saturday night. I’ll not be down to work on Monday. You can have my stock. This time, I’m going to start up in business across the street. I can’t stand it anymore. I owe you a great debt, but I don’t owe you my self-respect.

  At this point, Thomas turned to Erwin and demanded that he back him up. Instead, the normally placid Erwin rose to the defense of his younger partner. If Lasker quit, Erwin concluded, he would be out the door with him.

  Thomas backed down immediately. He apologized to Lasker, and sometime after 2:00 a.m.—tired, tipsy, but with the hatchet mostly buried—Thomas and Lasker boarded the same Illinois Central train to return to their homes in Woodlawn.

  For the next six months or so, into the late fall of 1906, Thomas was wary around his junior partner. Lasker later remembered this interlude as the most difficult period in his relationship with Thomas, even worse than the months of abuse that had preceded it: “He tried to show his extreme[ly] tender feeling for me, until I could no longer be natural in the office, and hated going to the office . . . That isn’t what I wanted from Mr. Thomas. He always was the boss, and the chief, to me. I was perfectly willing for him to order me to do something. I even preferred to have him cross with me. I felt unnatural.”

  Once again, Lasker decided to leave the firm. He resolved to hand over his interest in Lord & Thomas to his senior partner and—acting on his long-deferred dream—go into the newspaper business. The best way to make his break, he concluded, was to ask Thomas if they could walk to work together the next morning: November 10, 1906. On that walk, Lasker would quit. The pretext that Lasker gave to Thomas over the phone was that he wanted to show him a red rug that he had seen that day at Carson, Pirie, Scott on State Street. Lasker proposed to buy the rug to decorate Thomas’s new office, he said, but wanted to make sure Thomas approved of the choice. Could they stop at the furniture store on the way into work, Lasker asked? Thomas agreed.

  From Lasker’s point of view, the walk couldn’t have gotten off on a worse note. Thomas told Lasker that the younger man needed to take some time off. “No one can work the way you are working,” he said solicitously. Then he suggested that Lasker take Flora, their two-year-old daughter Mary, and a nurse to Japan for six months, at the firm’s expense. Lasker had always dreamed of visiting Japan.

  Presented with this extraordinarily generous gesture, Lasker lost his resolve. Curtly, he told Thomas he didn’t need a vacation.

  Now they arrived at Carson, Pirie, Scott. They took the elevator to the rug department on the seventh floor, and sat on a sofa while a salesperson went off to retrieve the red rug. Thomas again urged Lasker to take an extended vacation. “If you don’t take this vacation,” the fifty-five-year-old Thomas continued, addressing his twenty-six-year-old partner, “we will bury you by the time you are thirty-six.”

  Those were the last words Thomas ever uttered. At that moment, he gasped for air, and fell dead onto Lasker’s shoulder, the victim of a massive heart attack.17 A physician who happened to be nearby tried unsuccessfully to revive the stricken executive, while members of the sales force threw up a screen to conceal the scene from curious onlookers. Lasker wandered back home while the store manager took responsibility for notifying Thomas’s family. “I couldn’t take any part in it,” Lasker later admitted.18

  In the wake of Thomas’s death, there was no way Lasker could abandon Lord & Thomas. By the terms of the partnership agreement, Thomas’s interest in the firm now was divided equally between the two surviving partners.19 At the age of twenty-six, Lasker was the leader and half-owner of the second-largest advertising agency in the United States, with billings in excess of $3 million. The “Lord & Thomas” name remained unchanged. (Lasker wanted to take advantage of the agency’s accumulated goodwill, and even at this early age, he saw advantages in adopting a low profile.) Charles Erwin became the new president of the company, but no one was confused about who was running the firm.

  The business pressures that Lasker was already finding onerous before the fall of 1906 now became unbearable. And now, pressure began mounting from another direction, as Flora continued to suffer from a range of ailments. Early in 1907, her condition worsened, with the glands in her neck swelling to an alarming degree. Phlebitis, her continuing affliction, was not well understood, but it was known to be a sudden killer.

  In April 1907, Lasker—heretofore a sometimes fragile but generally high-functioning individual—experienced a total collapse. He looked at his world and couldn’t stop crying:

  I had a terrible breakdown . . . I just couldn’t work . . . I couldn’t keep going anymore . . .

  My wife, of course, was never well—she was an invalid all through our 35 years of married life—and this was a tremendous burden on her, in her condition, because I could do nothing but cry. Literally. I lost control to do anything but cry.

  I had done nothing but work from the time I was 12. I married, and my wife was ill, and I never had taken off any time to play, excepting the type of play that did me hurt. And the reason I did that type of play, I imagine, was that it was so digested, concentrated, and I could do a lot of [it] in a hurry.

  I just had a good old-fashioned breakdown. And in fact, my life ever since has been a struggle from breakdowns, because I never fully—I always say I got over all my breakdowns except my first one.20

  Lasker operated at a high energy level. He was frequently expansive, irritable, highly verbal, intensely creative, and insomniac—all symptoms of a condition that today would be called hypomania. He never ascended to the level of mania that is generally associated with manic depression, or—again in today’s vocabulary—a bipolar I disorder, although he sometimes behaved erratically, especially under the influence of alcohol.21 Most likely, he was afflicted by a bipolar II (or “unipolar”) disorder.

  Recent research suggests that there is an increased risk of bipolar II disorder among people whose family members suffer from the disorder. Eduard Lasker, Albert’s uncle, clearly had depressive episodes. Morris, too, may have experienced depressions; his rollercoaster financial affairs may have had their root, in part, in some sort of affective illness.

  Finally, that diagnosis is supported by Lasker’s age when the ailment overtook him. Bipolar I—the depression that is accompanied by wild, manic excess—usually first manifests itself in the teenage years, while the unipolar form of the illness often stays masked until the mid- or late twenties. Lasker was stricken at age twenty-seven. Abraham Lincoln, whose depressive symptoms closely resemble Lasker’s, was twenty-six when his first attack overtook him. Both Lasker and Lincoln had their second major breakdown a half-decade after their first.22

  In both Lincoln’s and Lasker’s case, the ailment was episodic. “Most people who have manic-depressive illness are, in fact, without symptoms (that is, psychologically normal) most of the time,” writes psychiatrist Kay Redfield Jamison.23 Jamison also puts forward the provocative hypothesis that bipolar illness is often bound up with creativity. Although her study of madness and creativity focuses on artists, it is intriguing to examine Albert Lasker (and indeed, Abraham Lincoln and others outside the “artistic” realm) through this same lens: “It is the interaction, tension, and transition between changing mood states, as well as the sustenance and discipline drawn from periods of health, that [are] critically important; and it is these same tensions and transitions that ultimately give such power to the art that is born in this way.”24

  Lasker assumed that he had succumbed to the pressures of his life. Those pressures surely were mounting in the winter of 1906 and spring of 1907. But recent psychological research suggests that the search for causality in depression may be fruitless. Certainly, having a surrogate father die in one’s arms and being forced to watch a beloved wife deteriorate were crushing burdens. Most likely, though, Lasker’s illness arrived on its own timetable. And now Lasker—the man who did everything in a hurry, in “concentrated�
� form—was immobilized.

  No effective therapies for depression existed at that time. Sigmund Freud’s “talking cure” was known only to a small medical community and was still highly controversial. Electroconvulsive therapy didn’t come into common usage until the 1930s, and the efficacy of lithium and other drugs in treating mental illness remained unknown until the 1950s. In 1907, the only option for an individual who couldn’t stop crying was to retreat from the world.

  So that is what Lasker did. Putting the business in the hands of Charles Erwin, Lasker left for Europe with Flora, in search of peace of mind for himself and expert medical care for his wife.

  The Laskers’ first stop was a sanatorium on the edge of Germany’s Black Forest. The ruhe (“retreat”) was owned by a cousin—a physician also named Albert Lasker. He had built several guesthouses on the property, where he offered a restful environment for people who had suffered nervous breakdowns. The American Lasker found the place congenial enough, but far from therapeutic: “I just rested in bed and took the baths, and walked through the forest, do you see? And then, because I wanted to get my money’s worth, we did considerable traveling on the Continent, which sent me home not much recovered from what I had started.”

  By now, Lasker had been away from the office several months, and his anxiety was mounting. The Laskers, still suffering from their respective illnesses, cut short their trip and returned to Chicago.

  Perhaps the question is not why Albert Lasker crumpled in the spring of 1907, but rather, how he held up as long as he did.

  From the outset, his mental health was fragile. After relocating to Chicago, he was isolated—in part by his brilliance, and in part because he had physically removed himself from everyone he loved and who loved him. Leaving Galveston, he not only cut himself off from parents to whom he felt closely bound, but also denied himself a gradual transition to adulthood. Overnight, he was thrown into an adult world, largely populated by rootless men and heavy drinkers. He drank heavily himself, further insulating himself from the world.