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

  “And what was that?” Lasker asked.

  “I want to get the son of a bitch off the bench,” Austrian replied.49

  Ban Johnson resolved to fight the Lasker Plan. “War,” he proclaimed defiantly, “is the best cleanser.”50 But his American League allies quailed at the prospect of internecine fighting. Lasker, smelling victory, gave Johnson one more kick in the ribs. “We have made our proposal,” he told reporters, “and it’s up to the five American League clubs to come in, or we’ll forget all about them and go ahead with the twelve-club league.”51

  On November 12, with the American League teams in attendance and Johnson barred from the meeting, the major and minor league owners wrangled over the Lasker Plan. One major change emerged from all this: Lasker’s three-man commission was dumped in favor of a single commissioner—a “czar” of professional baseball. Lasker was delighted; he thought it was a far better solution. “We would have proposed it in the first place,” he explained, “but we didn’t believe we could possibly get it through.”52

  The owners voted to accept Landis as the so-called “high commissioner.”53 In a show of spite, the five American League owners who were still loyal to the deposed Ban Johnson insisted that the deal had changed significantly, and should no longer be referred to as the “Lasker Plan.” Lasker quickly acquiesced. “It was much more important to save the faces of the five American League clubs,” he concluded, “and let them feel that they had chastised me, than to have a formal resolution passed that this was the ‘Lasker Plan.’”54

  Landis accepted the job, although he briefly held on to his judgeship. (For the duration, his $7,500 judge’s salary was deducted from his $50,000 commissioner’s pay—although his $7,500 tax-free baseball expense account more than made up the difference.55) Formally installed on January 12, 1921, he moved quickly to rid baseball of the elements that he considered undesirable. He suspended the eight arraigned Black Sox on March 13, banned a number of small-fry gamblers, and forced owners to divest themselves of outside holdings that might bring baseball into disrepute. In the first week of August, when the Black Sox jury found the players not guilty of conspiring to defraud the public—a difficult charge to prove—Landis banned the eight players for life.56 His statement reinforced his reputation as a “hanging judge,” and cemented his position as the all-powerful czar of the national pastime: “Regardless of the verdict of juries, no player that throws a ball game; no player that undertakes or promises to throw a ball game; no player that sits in a conference with a bunch of crooked players and gamblers where the ways and means of throwing games are planned and discussed and does not promptly tell his club about it, will ever play professional baseball.”57

  “At no point,” a later commissioner observed, “did [Landis] temper justice with mercy.”58 Banning the Black Sox effectively wrecked the franchise of Charlie Comiskey, one of Landis’s original backers for the commissioner’s job. (The White Sox languished in the bottom half of their division for the next fifteen years.59) And his merciless net swept up at least one player—third baseman George “Buck” Weaver—who was probably innocent of wrongdoing. No matter: Landis was, as his biographer phrased it, both judge and jury. He saw himself as protecting baseball from its owners and players, and saving it for America’s kids.

  In the spring of 1925, William Wrigley’s lawyers began encouraging him to take formal control of the Cubs.60 Wrigley phoned Lasker and asked him if he would sell him his interest in the Cubs, thereby making the chewing-gum magnate the club’s majority owner.

  Lasker was eager to sell. His interests had moved on: he was now passionately interested in golf, and especially in the design and construction of challenging courses. He also disapproved of the way Wrigley was “consorting” with the players. “I didn’t go around with any of the players,” he later explained. “While I had a world to say [about the team’s direction], it was behind the scenes with Veeck.”61 Wrigley showed no such restraint.

  In addition, Lasker felt drained by the drama that he had orchestrated. He later referred to it as the “bitterest, most complex, and most fatiguing struggle” of his life.62 He was ready to leave that field of battle behind.

  A final factor may have been the negative publicity associated with his brief interlude in baseball’s limelight. Anti-Semitic tracts published in the fall of 1921 singled out him and Austrian by name. For example, the Dearborn Independent, little more than a mouthpiece for the viciously anti-Semitic Henry Ford, sneered at the “Jew lawyer, Austrian,” and his “Jewish friend, Lasker,” and suggested that the only remedy for baseball’s woes was expunging its Jews: “If baseball is to be saved, and there are those who seriously doubt it ever can be restored, the remedy is plain. The disease is caused by the Jewish characteristic which spoils everything by ruthless commercial exploitation . . . There is no doubt anywhere, among either friends or critics of baseball, that the root cause of the present condition is due to Jewish influence.”63

  So when Wrigley made his approach, Lasker agreed to negotiate, and revived a formula he frequently used to recast a business relationship. He offered to pay Wrigley $200 a share for his interest in the Cubs—or he would accept $150 a share from Wrigley for his own holdings. When Wrigley began objecting to the $150 purchase price as “too steep,” Lasker reiterated his offer to buy out Wrigley for the steeper price. Trapped by Lasker’s logic, Wrigley agreed to pay Lasker’s asking price.64 The parting was amicable; Lasker remained on the Cubs board (and retained his box seats) until Wrigley’s death in 1932.

  For the rest of his life, Lasker took great pride in his contribution to restructuring major league baseball. He was also proud that he’d largely invented the model of an industry “czar”—an outsider who could rescue an industry from its own excesses.65 Hollywood embraced this model a few years later, in the early 1920s, when it needed a savior of its own, and a new friend of Lasker’s—Republican political wizard Will Hays—needed a job.

  Chapter Eleven

  Venturing into Politics

  ALBERT LASKER called himself an “ardent Republican.”1 But with the notable exception of his early involvement in Robert B. Hawley’s successful congressional race back in Galveston, Lasker was not particularly ardent about his Republicanism as a young man. In the more than two decades since Hawley had won his congressional race, he once asserted, he had “never given any thought to politics, not bothered.”2

  This wasn’t exactly true. And larger trends—as well as Lasker’s fascination with power and Big Ideas—almost guaranteed that he would try his hand at politics.

  The backdrop was both complicated and fluid. In the 1912 presidential elections, the Republican Party had been split by the defection of Teddy Roosevelt’s “Bull Moose” Progressives, and the result was the election of the Democrat Woodrow Wilson to the White House and a Democratic Congress. By 1918, the Republicans were tired of being outmaneuvered and disenfranchised. Eager to reverse their fortunes, they went looking for new blood.

  They found it in Indiana. There, two years earlier, Republican state chairman Will H. Hays had engineered an astounding sweep: electing a Republican governor and two Republican senators and carrying all of Indiana’s Congressional districts. And so in February 1918, anxious Republicans huddling in St. Louis elected the thirty-eight-year-old Hays chairman of the Republican National Committee.

  Chairman Hays set up shop in New York City—on the third floor of the Knox Building, at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 40th Street—and began crisscrossing the country in a highly visible effort to sell war bonds. During this extended tour, he met with party elders in key states and asked whom he should include in his brain trust. During a stop in Indianapolis, his friend W. G. Irwin strongly encouraged him to enlist Albert Lasker to handle the Republican Party’s public relations in the upcoming off-year congressional elections.

  Hays already knew a lot about Lasker. Both in 1910 and 1914, he had brought him into Indiana to make speeches on behalf of local candidates. Hays agr
eed that it would make sense to involve Lasker in a bigger effort. “I wanted to get the best person, the biggest person in the world, to sit with me on that program,” he later recalled.3

  Sometime in June 1918, Hays, Irwin, and Lasker met, and Hays leaned heavily on Lasker to head up public relations for the Republicans. “Nothing could have interested me less,” Lasker later claimed.4 “I was just as interested as if he had asked me to become chief ballet dancer with the Russians.”5

  But on a deeper level, the unexpected opportunity came at a good time. A half-decade after the Leo Frank debacle, he was still looking for a way to do something of significance on the national level. And Russian ballet dancers notwithstanding, Hays was offering Lasker the very job Lasker had tried and failed to land four years earlier.

  Lasker’s first tentative ventures into politics since his Galveston days came as a result of Hays’s request that he speak at small gatherings in Marion and other Indiana towns. This connection served Lasker and his agency well. Lord & Thomas placed the advertising for the presidential campaign of William Howard Taft in 1912—a plum account.

  Lasker’s next push into the political realm came in part through the efforts of a colorful character who played an important role in the next two decades of Lasker’s life: John Callan O’Laughlin. Originally a newspaper reporter with the Associated Press, O’Laughlin was covering St. Petersburg when war broke out between Russia and Japan in 1904. President Theodore Roosevelt pressed O’Laughlin into service as an intermediary to help broker a ceasefire between the warring nations in 1905—an intervention that subsequently earned Roosevelt the Nobel Peace Prize.6 O’Laughlin later worked as a Washington-based reporter for the Chicago Herald, served briefly as acting assistant secretary of state under Roosevelt, and then accompanied Roosevelt on his celebrated hunting expeditions to Africa and Europe.

  How Lasker met up with O’Laughlin is unclear, although Lasker’s personal lawyer, Elmer Schlesinger, probably made the initial introductions. In the spring of 1916, Schlesinger enlisted O’Laughlin’s help in an unsuccessful effort to get Lasker appointed to the Federal Trade Commission—a job that Lasker was “extremely anxious” to get, according to Schlesinger.7

  A few months later, in the wake of the Republican convention that nominated Charles Evans Hughes for President, O’Laughlin and Schlesinger tried to get Lasker named chairman of the Publicity Committee of the Republican National Committee. This meant bringing him to the attention of influential senators (including Ohio’s Warren G. Harding), and persuading them in turn to write letters to the Committee’s heads in support of Lasker’s candidacy. To Massachusetts senator W. Murray Crane, for example, O’Laughlin wrote:

  Mr. Lasker is the head and owner of the Lord and Thomas Advertising Agency, the biggest advertising agency in the United States. He is a young man—only 42 or thereabouts—is a Jew, and a millionaire. You will remember the tremendous publicity in the Leo M. Frank case for which he was responsible. Through his advertising agency he is of course in touch with all the newspapers in the United States, and naturally they would be disposed to treat with consideration any suggestion he might make to them.8

  The effort came to nothing, however, most likely because the Republicans were reluctant to offend other leading advertising agencies. Again, Lasker thanked O’Laughlin for his efforts and withdrew temporarily from the political fray.

  “We have not heard the last of friend Lasker,” Schlesinger wrote to O’Laughlin. “We are going to land him in the kind of a job he wants some day.”9

  Events on the world stage soon placed Lasker’s ambitions in a new context. America’s entry into World War I in April 1917 shifted his focus from politics to national service.

  My feeling had been one of rather sympathy for Germany, but I recognized that that sympathy was entirely due to the fact that I came from a long line of Germans, [and] that I had cousins in the war on that side . . .

  The minute we went into the war, she was my enemy, but at all times I felt that nothing was going to be settled with this war . . . I began feeling within myself—Golly, am I keeping out of going to that war because I am afraid? Is it the coward in me, the physical cowardice? . . .

  And also I knew that . . . if they made a group of men utterly unfitted to serve in war, I was [one of them], because all my life . . . I was no good with my hands. My physical side and my brain never have coordinated. I have never been able to tell right from left. And if somebody tells me, even today, to go right, I have to see which hand I write with. And I know if they told me to turn right, in the confusion I might turn left . . .

  I was one of the controlling heads of the Mitchell Motor Car Company and the Van Camp Company, and as such, had every reason to excuse myself on the grounds that I was making war supplies, but the whole thing just made me bitter with the world and with myself, and it was a mighty trying period for my wife.10

  Briefly, Lasker thought about selling Liberty Bonds to support the war effort. Next he lobbied for an unpaid post in Washington. Finally, he used family connections to secure a position as an unpaid assistant to Secretary of Agriculture David F. Houston in Washington. The Department of Agriculture had launched a drive in the spring of 1917—the War Garden Conservation Program—to persuade American women to raise vegetables in their yards, and as those crops came in, many of these inexperienced gardeners had to be taught how to can and preserve them. Working part-time out of a large corner office in the Department of Agriculture building in Washington, Lasker orchestrated the publicity for the program, promoting “National Vegetable Canning Week” and similar efforts.

  Lasker considered the entire effort an embarrassing failure: “Most of what the women raised exploded in their faces or rotted. It was just a tremendous waste of effort and money. And of course the next year nothing like that was encouraged. But it was all done in the good old name of ‘war.’ Valuable time and glassware that could have been used for the Allies!”11

  At least one good thing came out of it, however: a deeper friendship with O’Laughlin. By the end of that summer, they opened their letters to each other with the salutations “Dear Cal” and “Dear Al.” Few people got away with calling Albert Lasker “Al”; O’Laughlin was one of them.

  Lasker retreated to Chicago, still looking for a way that he could contribute to the war effort. “The government wore me out in my effort to volunteer my services,” he observed wryly.12 He thought about the pros and cons of volunteering to serve in the Army, conscious that service in uniform might one day be important to his still hazy political ambitions. “No matter what one does for the country at this time,” he wrote to O’Laughlin, “in after years one’s contribution will be more definitely measured if one serves in the army than if one serves otherwise.”13 Several branches of the Army, including the Motor Transport Service, approached Lasker to see if he would consider signing on with them. Still, Lasker hesitated: If they told me to turn right, in the confusion I might turn left.

  O’Laughlin enlisted early in 1918 to serve on the staff of Acting Quartermaster General George W. Goethals, so by the time Will Hays tracked down his quarry in the early summer of 1918, Lasker was primed to hear about opportunities for government service—even of a partisan stripe.

  Hays wanted more than selling; he wanted access to Lasker’s organizational talents: “Lasker, right after I was made chairman, set out to organize this country to make a party. [I] had to get a man for that, like I’d get a secretary, or treasurer, or anything else. They got the best man in every way—never in politics before—to do a selling job for a righteous commodity, a righteous cause, that really had the goods.”14

  Hays understood Lasker well, putting several powerful inducements in front of him. First, of course, there was the “righteous cause.” Second, Hays said that Teddy Roosevelt himself wanted to meet with Lasker, in hopes of persuading him to take the job.

  Perhaps Hays knew that Lasker was a “great worshiper of Roosevelt.”15 Perhaps he was simply banking o
n the fact that almost any American of that era would have been thrilled to get a personal audience with the immensely popular former president, Rough Rider, author, and big-game hunter. In either case, Lasker bit down hard on Hays’s hook, and—in the third week of September—Hays drove him out to the Roosevelt compound at Oyster Bay, Long Island.16

  The legendary “TR,” sporting his trademark khakis, was waiting on the front porch at Sagamore Hill to greet his two visitors from the Midwest.17 “So this is Lasker,” he boomed, throwing an arm around his guest’s shoulder. “They tell me you’re the greatest advertiser in America!”

  Lasker, thinking on his feet, demurred. “Colonel,” he shot back, “no man can claim that distinction as long as you live!”18

  An intoxicating afternoon followed. Lasker and Hays lunched with Roosevelt, his wife, Edith, and a daughter-in-law. Roosevelt, “in his own impetuous way,” retrieved one of his favorite books and had the group read its preface out loud.19 Afterwards, Roosevelt took Lasker into his study for some one-on-one arm-twisting. Such a sustained overture from the overpowering Roosevelt (dynamic, in Lasker’s eyes, and everything that appealed to any red-blooded man) proved impossible to resist.20 Before the afternoon was out, Roosevelt had talked Lasker into signing on.

  Lasker relocated temporarily to New York and set up shop in Hays’s leased quarters. Together, in adjoining offices, Will Hays and Albert Lasker undertook to sell Republicans to Americans.

  Hays gave Lasker a free hand on the “propaganda end” of the operation. “He never once interfered,” Lasker said.21 Once again, Lasker positioned himself well behind the scenes, arranging to have another staffer appointed as the campaign’s formal publicity manager. Retreating into the background gave him the freedom to be the “lone wolf” and “do that which I felt should be done.” It also ingratiated him to Hays’s staff, who appreciated his generosity in letting other people take the credit for work well done. “That always made people work very much harder for me,” Lasker explained, “because they saw I didn’t want anything out of it in self-aggrandization.”22