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

  One of these was a young man from Lansing, Michigan, named Don Francisco. Francisco was later described by Lasker’s biographer as “bland, cheerful, outgoing, and a good executive”—in other words, “altogether different” from Albert Lasker.24 A graduate of the Michigan Agricultural College, Francisco signed on after college as a Chicago-based fruit inspector for the CFGE. In that role, he checked shipments of fruit arriving in Chicago, protecting the growers from unfair claims of spoilage during shipping. In the summer of 1914, Francisco took a new job with the Exchange, circulating among the grocers and other retailers who sold Sunkist products:

  I started calling on retailers as a matter of curiosity, to see what kind of oranges people asked for, and how many they bought at a time, and how they selected them, and so on . . . I tabulated these findings that I made, and gave them to the [CGFE’s] advertising manager, and he was very much interested, and asked me to do this in other cities, on a larger scale . . .

  I picked up a lot of ideas on how the smart dealers increased their sales of oranges and lemons. And, as I would go about this work, I would pass on these ideas to other dealers . . . to tell the retailers how they could increase their sales.25

  One of the things that Francisco learned in his travels was that soda-fountain attendants hated to make fresh-squeezed orange juice or lemonade. Extracting the juice from the fruit made too big a mess and took too much time. As a result, many retailers simply priced these drinks out of reach or served a substitute beverage.

  To Francisco, this hinted at a far bigger problem. Wouldn’t people in their houses encounter exactly the same problems and look for something else to drink? Or, phrased more positively: wouldn’t it be good for orange sales if, instead of encouraging people to eat half an orange with a spoon, you could persuade people to consume the juice of a whole orange—or even two or three whole oranges?

  Working with manufacturers in 1915, Francisco first developed a heavy-duty electric juice extractor for use in soda fountains—“to make it simple for the clerk to prepare it,” Francisco later explained, “and convince the consumer that it was made from the real thing.”26

  At the same time, the ad hoc team developed both a scaled-down electric extractor and a simple glass extractor for home use. A glass company agreed to produce a million of these glass extractors—with the “Sunkist” name prominently displayed in raised glass letters along its sides—to be sold by fruit retailers for a dime apiece.

  Francisco, working closely with Lasker’s agency, had invented orange juice.

  All of this, of course, was a preamble to an advertising campaign, and Lord & Thomas happily pounced upon Francisco’s innovative work. In 1916, the agency introduced the classic campaign that later became known as “Drink an Orange.”

  “Nature’s finest beverage,” read the headline of an early ad in this series, “pure orange juice.” The ad depicted a woman spoon-feeding orange juice to a jolly, pink-cheeked baby. Orange juice, claimed the ad, “is regularly prescribed for the diet of tiny babies because physicians know its purity and food value.” The fruit from which this healthful juice was derived was produced by eight thousand growers “whose sole purposes in organizing [were] to produce better fruit and distribute it so economically that every family may obtain it at a reasonable cost.” The ad instructed readers to look for glass Sunkist extractors at their favorite store or to send sixteen cents in stamps to receive one direct from Sunkist.27

  Again, the response was astounding. The campaign resulted in sales of something like 70,000 commercial juicers, 140,000 electric juicers for home use, and more than 3 million glass juicers. Independent glassware manufacturers jumped into the market with their own juicers, extending the impact of the Sunkist push. On the strength of this campaign alone, orange consumption per serving in the United States soared from a half an orange to between two and three.28

  In 1916, at the request of the CFGE, Lord & Thomas opened a branch office in Los Angeles to service the burgeoning Sunkist account. Robert P. Crane was named head of the new office, and Don Francisco—now the CFGE’s advertising manager—also relocated to Los Angeles, in part to keep working closely with Crane. Francisco produced the growers’ newsletter, the Sunkist Courier, and helped develop new campaigns in support of oranges. Crane and Francisco also ended the premium program and shifted to advertising that emphasized the fruit itself—most often, beautiful full-color portraits of oranges or lemons—and increasingly focused on the health benefits of consuming citrus fruits.29

  Crane, meanwhile, rode herd on an increasingly far-ranging office. Two years earlier, in 1914, the runaway success of the orange campaigns had convinced the California raisin industry to hire Lord & Thomas. Then, in 1915, the CFGE began aggressively advertising lemons. As part of this campaign, Lord & Thomas pushed lemon pie, lemon in tea, lemon garnishes, and lemon juice as a hair rinse. Of particular concern to the CFGE was competition from imported Italian lemons, which in that year commanded about half of the U.S. market; accordingly, Lord & Thomas stressed the advantages of California lemons. By 1924, California lemons—mainly Sunkist—had captured almost 90 percent of the domestic market.30

  In 1917, the California Walnut Growers association signed on, and between 1917 and 1923, consumption of California walnuts increased from just under 40 million pounds to almost 50 million pounds.31 Similar stories could be told of avocados, apples, butter, eggs, grapes, honey, lima beans, milk, olives, peaches, pineapples, plums, prunes, and nectarines—all of which Lord & Thomas promoted in the early decades of the twentieth century.

  By and large, these promotions were not only successful, but were accomplished at a reasonable cost.32 In the case of oranges, for example, the incremental cost of advertising was about 4.5 cents per box of oranges and 7 cents per box of lemons (or between one-quarter and two-fifths of a cent per dozen). Advertising of oranges averaged about 1.07 percent of the freight-on-board (FOB) value of the Sunkist orange crop between 1908 and 1924.33 Stated differently, the CFGE during these years spent less than one cent per year per customer, while the FOB returns increased from $11.8 million to $50.5 million.34

  Advertising of fruits also brought benefits to consumers, and not only in the realm of improved diets. As growers invested more and more dollars in their collective brand, they were more inclined to protect that brand from self-inflicted wounds. Traditionally, for example, orange growers whose orchards suffered a heavy freeze rushed to harvest and ship their crops immediately, before the frost damage became visible. The frustrated consumers who ate the damaged product—tasteless and dry—would conclude that all California oranges must be inedible. By the mid-’teens, Sunkist’s growers had learned that their long-term interests lay in disposing of damaged goods. “In the Sunkist trademark,” Don Francisco observed, “they had a definite asset to protect.”35

  Lord & Thomas’s relationship with the California citrus industry, and specifically its ties to the CFGE, was remarkable for its durability and relative tranquility. The agency’s relationship with California’s raisin growers presents a far different picture. This story includes financial shenanigans, mutual accusations of betrayal, threats and counter-threats, and firings and rehirings.

  The saga begins in 1913, with the adoption by Congress of language (in the form of a rider on an appropriations bill) that prevented the Department of Justice from using antitrust laws to prosecute farmers who acted cooperatively to extract higher prices for their products. The Clayton Act, passed a year later, exempted certain kinds of agricultural cooperatives—for example, non-stock associations—from the antitrust restrictions of the Sherman Act of 1890, and the CFGE reorganized itself as a non-stock organization to bring itself into compliance with the provisions of the Clayton Act.

  Not so wise were the California raisin growers, who incorporated themselves in 1912 as the California Associated Raisin Company (CARC). CARC’s founders put a cooperative “face” on their enterprise, in part to persuade skeptical growers to sign up. But it wa
s in fact a traditional corporation, structured to provide ready infusions of capital because the company intended not only to gain control over the supply of raisins (i.e., horizontal control), but also over the processing and packing of raisins (vertical control). This vertical integration required a strong capital base, and CARC’s capital stock increased from $1 million in 1912 to $5 million in 1919.

  From the start, therefore, CARC was very different from the CFGE. Heavily influenced by local banking interests, it first paid dividends to its shareholders and paid its growers afterward. Stock ownership was not restricted to growers, and by 1919, more than half of CARC’s stock was held by nongrowers.36 As a result of these and other factors—especially its push toward vertical integration—CARC risked provoking the federal government into initiating antitrust action against it.37

  Meanwhile, CARC also faced many of the same issues confronted by CFGE, the most urgent being the need to stimulate demand. Shortly after its incorporation in 1912, CARC came up with the brand name “Sun-Made,” which played off the highly successful Sunkist brand; the company also invented the soon-to-be-familiar image of a pretty girl in a sunbonnet holding an overflowing basket of grapes. But these first steps failed to go far enough, largely because of continued overproduction by the growers. In 1913, the industry produced 132 million pounds of raisins but sold only 110 million pounds, creating a “carryover” of 22 million pounds that threatened to depress 1914 prices drastically. At this point, CARC took yet another cue from CFGE. Impressed by the orange growers’ successes, the California Associated Raisin Company hired Lord & Thomas to stimulate demand for its own commodity.

  Wylie M. Giffen, president of CARC and a veteran of the raisin wars that had led up to its founding, sold the idea of advertising to his board and also persuaded the board to allocate $100,000 for advertising beginning in 1914. Lord & Thomas’s Robert Crane made an immediate and obvious suggestion: change the brand name from “Sun-Made” to “Sun-Maid,” thereby strengthening the trademark potential of the name and its inherent pun.

  An orchestrated campaign to drive up raisin consumption opened on several fronts. CARC, which set up offices and hired sales forces across the country, began marketing a five-cent box of raisins through cigar stores and drug stores. The new package met with instant success: something like 16 million boxes were sold within three months of its introduction. “You’d see that five-cent package on every cigar counter and [in] every drugstore,” Don Francisco later recalled. “They were under foot all over town. You’d see the used cartons [where] hikers and fishermen went up to the mountains.”38

  Meanwhile, Lord & Thomas pushed what it referred to as “carrier foods,” including raisin bread, raisin pie, and raisin toast, among others. A typical ad (from the December 1915 Ladies’ Home Journal) depicted a young girl handing a grocer her shopping list: “Give me a loaf of California Raisin Bread. Also a package of Sun-Maid Raisins.” The accompanying text emphasized that raisin bread was “delicious, nutritious, digestible, and slightly laxative.” It suggested that housewives “serve it daily . . . at every meal,” so that their children could “satisfy, in the most healthful way, their natural desire for sweets.” In relatively small type at the bottom, the ad encouraged the reader to “send your grocer’s name and address” to receive a “beautiful book showing ways to use Sun-Maid Raisins—in cereals, sandwiches, salads, pies, puddings, cookies, cakes, sweetmeats, and frozen desserts.”39

  Through steady increases in advertising expenditures, CARC and Lord & Thomas pushed up per capita consumption of raisins. At least up until 1921, this joint effort eliminated the carryover of raisins from one year to the next, and thereby protected growers’ income. This was a remarkable achievement, in light of the fact that between 1914 and 1920, the statewide raisin crop nearly doubled, from 91,000 tons to 174,000 tons.40

  Then came 1922, when the raisin industry got into trouble again—and this time, took Lord & Thomas along for the ride—a story we’ll return to later.

  Chapter Eight

  Fighting for Leo Frank

  ON THE MORNING of Sunday, April 27, 1913, at about 3:30 a.m., a night watchman named Newt Lee discovered the lifeless body of thirteen-year-old Mary Phagan in the basement of the Atlanta-based National Pencil Factory. Sawdust, pencil shavings, and soot covered the young factory girl. She had bruises and cuts on her face.1 A subsequent medical examination revealed that Phagan had been strangled and sexually abused.2

  Police investigating the crime scene discovered two notes—later to become known as the “murder notes”—amid the debris that littered the floor near the dead girl’s head. They read:

  he said he wood love me land down play like the night witch did it but that long tall black negro did boy his slef

  mam that negro hire down here did this I went to make water and he push me down that hole a long tall negro black that hoo it wase long sleam tall negro I wright while play with me3

  These notes pointed to Newt Lee as the murderer, because he matched the description of a “tall black negro.” Lee—also a suspect because he had discovered the body—was arrested immediately and taken to the local jail for questioning.

  At 7:00 that Sunday morning, in response to a request by the investigating officers, factory superintendent Leo Frank arrived at the scene. Born in Texas and raised in Brooklyn, Frank—then twenty-nine years old—had been living in Atlanta for five years. He had married a local Jewish woman and had recently been elected president of the Atlanta chapter of B’nai B’rith, cementing his position as a prominent member of the local Jewish community.

  Initially, he told police he did not know anyone named Mary Phagan, but it soon emerged that he was the last person known to have seen her alive.4 Shortly after noon on the previous day, Phagan had visited the factory to collect her paycheck before heading off to watch the Confederate Memorial Day Parade. According to Frank—his memory now refreshed—she came into his office, he handed her wages to her, and she left his office.

  Newt Lee had come in two hours early for his Saturday-to-Sunday shift, arriving at 4:00 p.m. Oddly, Frank instructed Lee to leave the factory and return at his usual starting time of 6:00 p.m. Then Frank telephoned Lee from home at around 7:00 p.m. to see if everything was in order—a call that Lee found strange, since Frank had never before called him from home.5

  Increasingly, the investigators became interested in Superintendent Frank.

  There were then three daily newspapers in Atlanta: the leading Atlanta Journal, the Atlanta Constitution, and the Atlanta Georgian. William Randolph Hearst had bought the anemic Georgian the previous year, and immediately set out to boost its circulation. The murder of Mary Phagan presented Hearst—as well as his competitors—with a golden opportunity.

  A reporter for the Constitution had the good luck to be at police headquarters when Lee’s emergency call came in, and he covered the murder exclusively in a Sunday morning extra edition. But the competition intensified on Monday, when the Journal “borrowed” and printed the murder notes: a stunning breach of police procedure that prevented any fingerprint analysis from being performed. Not to be outdone, Hearst’s Georgian published a morgue photograph of Phagan’s battered face crudely pasted onto a picture of a live girl’s torso, along with an inflammatory five-page article.

  On the Monday after the murder, Hearst offered a $500 reward for “Exclusive Information Leading to the Arrest and Conviction of the Murderer.” On Tuesday, a bidding war erupted between the Constitution and the Georgian, with the Georgian offering $1,800 by midday.6

  Albert Lasker, the lapsed journalist, later described the effect of this sensationalism on Atlanta readers:

  They [the Georgian] weren’t doing very well. So they had all their northern editors and they had to take what at that time was the big city yellow journal method. They had to find some sensation, and just imagine when, on a Sunday morning in a town that had surely not seen an ‘extra’ since the Civil War, they came out with an eight column streamer ab
out this murder...

  That [sensationalism] . . . grew up gradually in the north. It didn’t come overnight—but here it came overnight, and can you imagine the shock of that impact in the community, and how it excited them? Human beings [being] what they are? And so the stage was all set.7

  Yellow journalism sold papers. By the end of 1913, the Georgian had the largest circulation of any southern daily newspaper.8

  A shocked public demanded that the murderer be discovered and punished. Leo Frank, anxious about the sloppy police work in the case, hired the celebrated Pinkerton Detective Agency to perform an independent investigation. The factory superintendent had reason to be concerned. Among other things, the investigating officers had given away the murder notes, lost a board smeared with bloody fingerprints, and failed to issue a report on the bloody fingerprints on Phagan’s jacket.9

  On the morning of Mary Phagan’s funeral—Tuesday, April 29—Frank was taken into custody, largely because he had been the last person to see Mary Phagan alive and had appeared extremely nervous in the presence of the police. The coroner conducted the largest inquest in Georgia’s history, summoning every employee of the National Pencil Factory to give testimony.10 Over the course of this inquiry, two very different pictures of Leo Frank emerged. One was of a model citizen with a Cornell diploma and a responsible job, occupying a prestigious place in his community. The other was of a vicious fiend who preyed on working-class girls—Christian girls.