On June 18 and 19, 1923, a steady stream of distinguished-looking people made their way to Boston’s Commonwealth Pier. There, a small excursion boat waited to shuttle them to the Leviathan, lying at anchor off Boston Light. The 450 or so arriving guests included business leaders like RCA’s vice president and general manager David Sarnoff, sportswriter Ring Lardner, cartoonist Rube Goldberg, and W. G. Irwin. Mostly missing from the passenger complement were women, although the White House (and in particular, Florence Harding) had prevailed upon Lasker to allow a small number of spouses on board.
Also missing was Lasker himself. Although he had formally stepped down from the Board a week earlier, his fellow commissioners had named him “special representative to have charge of the Leviathan,” both on its trial run and its initial transatlantic run.26 So where was the special representative, who had done so much to make this event possible? Word circulated around the ship that a last-minute emergency had prevented Lasker from joining the cruise.
In fact, writes Leviathan historian Frank Braynard, Lasker was hiding aboard ship:
Relaxing in one of the former Kaiser’s suites, and determined to stay out of sight until the ship passed beyond the three-mile limit, was a cheerful Albert Lasker. He had come aboard on the starboard side opposite from where the excursion boat had unloaded her guests, was admitted through a port quietly opened, and hurried incognito to his suite without anyone noticing his arrival. All of this because he was fearful right up to the final moment that someone would serve him with an injunction ordering him to halt the trial trip.27
According to Ralph Sollitt, all of the Shipping Board commissioners aboard, including Lasker, were under lock and key. Sollitt was free to circulate because he wasn’t a member of the Board and therefore couldn’t be served with an injunction. “And then when the boat started,” Sollitt remembered wryly, “we released all of our Shipping Board.”28
June 19 was a notably hot day in Boston Harbor, and passengers and crew alike were relieved when the great ship got under way promptly at 2:00 p.m. For the first day of the southbound journey, Captain Herbert Hartley held the Leviathan to 19 knots, but after a dense fog lifted, he pushed her up to 22 knots.29
The trip was intended to be uneventful, and for the most part it was; as a result, the hundred-or-so reporters on board had little to write about. Nevertheless, they documented Captain Hartley’s every utterance—as, for example, when he reported that a black cat had slipped aboard in Boston, had been christened “Levi,” and was now the ship’s mascot. When asked if there were any other stowaways aboard, Hartley replied dryly that he figured that there were “about 500.”30
The outgoing wireless traffic sent by the reporters was enormous—so much so that the ship’s wireless operators soon fell hopelessly behind. Technical problems also arose. RCA’s David Sarnoff explained the problem—and his own role in solving it:
The ship got down into southern waters off the Florida coast on her trip south, and static was very bad, communication therefore slowed up, and the power of the ordinary ship-to-shore stations was not sufficient to be heard easily . . .
I went into the wireless room and saw the operators piled up with press stuff, and the newspapermen clamoring for immediate dispatch with their messages. So I took one of the keys of the transmission and instructed our high-power station at Chatham, Massachusetts—which was normally intended for trans-oceanic operation, and therefore had more power—to establish a circuit with the Leviathan so we could dispatch. They did so, of course, and then I sat down to help the operators get clear of the traffic. Well, there was so much of it I found myself sitting there all night clearing the traffic.31
The spectacle of a high-powered guest in a dinner jacket working the wireless key all night generated still more traffic. Sarnoff (who referred to himself and his fellow travelers as the “Unworthy Six Hundred”) found this hugely ironic and entertaining. He later pointed out that RCA and the government had split the proceeds from these radio transmissions fifty-fifty. “My impression [is that] the amount accruing to that ship was something like $30,000,” he recalled, “which I think paid the whole expense of the ship. I think that the press, which was kicking violently about the trip, paid for it.”32
Occasionally, Captain Hartley gave the reporters something meatier to report. On the 687-nautical-mile northbound run between Jupiter Light, Florida, and Cape Henry on the southern edge of Chesapeake Bay, despite challenging seas, the Leviathan set a new world record for sustained speed: 27.94 knots per hour. Gibbs told reporters that his ship could generate substantially more than the 85,000 horsepower that she used to break the record. No, he said in response to a question; the Leviathan would not go after the transatlantic speed record when it went into regular service. “Unless the others start some fancy business,” he added pointedly. “Then we will use our untouched reserves.”33
As the Leviathan steamed north, the New York Times editorialized that although many of the criticisms of the trial run were fair, they were essentially irrelevant. What Albert Lasker had accomplished, the Times noted with grudging admiration, was to generate enormous free publicity for his ship, displaying a gift for public relations that put him in a class with Henry Ford and Thomas Edison. Practically the entire nation knew how many millions had been spent making the Leviathan one of the most luxurious ships afloat and was well aware that, starting July 4, the great liner would begin offering regular service to and from Europe. “That travelers will be attracted from other lines by this is hardly questionable,” the Times concluded, “and, as that is what Mr. Lasker wants to do, he can afford to smile at his critics.”34
Lasker landed in New York on June 25 and immediately departed for Chicago. Although he was still the Shipping Board’s “special representative” for the Leviathan’s first scheduled run to Europe on July 4, his public service was rapidly drawing to a close.
“It is now rumored,” reported Time in May 1923, “that when Albert D. Lasker retires from the Chairmanship of the United States Shipping Board, as he plans to do in the next few weeks, he will go into the newspaper business.” Supposedly, Lasker planned to buy several papers and set himself up as a “Munsey, Hearst, or Scripps.”35
These rumors lagged behind reality; Lasker had considered going into the newspaper business, but decided against it. He had made another decision, as well—that he was done with Washington. As he wrote to his friend Hiram Johnson: “The lure of public life holds nothing for me; I leave it, delighted that I served the Government, thrilled with my experience, absolutely encouraged in the belief that our dream of an American merchant marine is going to come true, and utterly disgusted with much that I have learned and seen. Now my one thought is to go back and make more money and more money and more money—ain’t I an elegant patriot?”36
It bears noting that during his two years in Washington, Lasker suffered no known bouts of depression. In fact, he thrived in the political cauldron, gaining new perspectives on his life and summoning up new energy to tackle the continuing challenges of Lord & Thomas. He would later remember the Washington interlude as a happy time for Flora and a miserable time for himself; in fact, the opposite was closer to the truth. By rendering a legitimate service to his president, he escaped from the burden of responsibility imposed by his father and uncle. Because he had served his country, he could afford to joke about being an inelegant patriot.
Looking forward, he was free to do what he wanted, which for the moment meant making money. And when he looked backward, he could do so with humor and relief. “I’m afraid two things will keep me from ever going down into history in any favorable way,” he wrote to Walter Teagle in April 1923, “but rather will put me into the dub class, to wit—my golf and my chairmanship of the Shipping Board. I guess I am awful at both.”37
Against long odds, Albert Lasker escaped from his Shipping Board service with his reputation not only unscathed, but enhanced.
By the spring of 1923, it was clear that Warren G. Harding in
tended to run for a second term. Lasker pledged to support him if Harding would support Hiram Johnson—California’s iconoclastic “bloc of one” senator—in 1928. Harding extracted a major favor in return.
Lasker left for Europe on July 4, 1923, on the Leviathan’s first transatlantic crossing since her refitting. He was engaged (he later told his office staff) on a “secret mission” for Harding that had nothing to do with shipping.38 Lasker’s son Edward later revealed that Harding had asked Lasker to persuade Hiram Johnson—then vacationing in Europe, and Harding’s only likely opponent in the upcoming primary season—to stay out of the race for the Republican nomination.39
On June 20, 1923, Harding left on a fifteen-thousand-mile, two-month “Voyage of Understanding,” which was part vacation and part barnstorming. As Harding’s train slowly crossed the country, it stopped repeatedly as Harding gave speeches and photo ops—an eerie recreation of the grueling and ill-fated tour that Woodrow Wilson had undertaken three years earlier in support of his doomed League of Nations.
The Harding party boarded a ship in Spokane and sailed northward on a thousand-mile route to Alaska. Just before departing the continental United States, Harding once again clarified his position on the government’s role in commercial shipping. “I do not for one moment believe in government ownership and operation as a permanent policy,” he told reporters. “But I prefer that hazardous venture to the surrender of our hopes for a merchant marine.”40
Upon returning to the continental United States, Harding resumed his strenuous schedule of campaigning and speechmaking. While addressing a crowd of sixty thousand in Seattle, he suffered a major heart attack. After being rushed to San Francisco for medical attention and a recuperative stay at the Palace Hotel, Harding died of an apparent cerebral hemorrhage on August 2. The four doctors attending him failed to agree on the exact cause of death, thereby spawning a raft of conspiracy theories centered on murder and suicide. Albert Lasker’s son Edward, for one, was skeptical:
The day before his death, Harding’s wife Florence called mother in Glencoe and said that her husband had not heard from father about [Hiram] Johnson’s answer. Mother replied that Pop was due back in New York the next day on another American vessel, the George Washington, and she was sure that the first thing he would do would be to phone the President. After Harding’s death, there were all kinds of stories that he had killed himself. I have always believed it unthinkable that anyone worrying about his imminent campaign for reelection would commit suicide.41
Harding’s death created both a political vacuum and some very personal complications for Lasker. Although the newly elevated president, Calvin Coolidge, was Harding’s obvious heir apparent in the 1924 presidential sweepstakes, Lasker had little interest in Coolidge, and got involved publicly in Hiram Johnson’s short-lived presidential campaign in late 1923. Less publicly, he contributed $5,000 toward a $50,000 fund that was being collected to provide for Harding’s mistress, Nan Britton, and Elizabeth Ann, her daughter by Harding.42
The coda to Lasker’s tenure in Washington: a version of his Merchant Marine bill ultimately passed under President Franklin D. Roosevelt as the Merchant Marine Act of 1936. “It shows how long it takes to educate and agitate Congress on a new idea,” Lasker observed two years after the Act’s passage. He also noted the irony of a protective tariff originally supported by conservative Republicans finally becoming law during Roosevelt’s New Deal.43
Almost exactly two years after he promised Warren Harding two years of service, Albert Lasker packed his bags to return to Chicago. There, following more than a decade of substantial disengagement from his business, he intended to pick up the reins again at Lord & Thomas. He explained his thinking to Claude Hopkins in May: “I am delighted beyond all measure that I determined not to go into newspaper work or anything else, but to return home to our firm and our association. The decision took a long time at arriving at. I weighed everything that could be weighed, but I am sure now that my decision was right and will be permanent.”44
Two days later, he wrote to his brother Edward in a similar vein, although with notably less emphasis on “permanence”:
I am of course a little sad at leaving my very interesting work here, hectic though it has been, but I look forward with calm to going back to Chicago, where, for the first time since I have been a boy, I will have no entanglements on my mind, and a comparatively easy job to keep Lord & Thomas in hand. You must remember that heretofore I either was working frantically to build up Lord & Thomas, or I was involved with several other big businesses, or I got mixed up into charitable affairs or political matters; so that altogether I was constantly being driven by a thousand devils. Now I will be disassociated from everything but Lord & Thomas, and I won’t have to work frantically to build it up, because it is already built. I mean for a year or two to keep myself free from any other entanglement, no matter how interesting it may appear.45
Even though Lasker was returning to a “comparatively easy job,” he wasn’t returning home alone. He had invited his right hand and alter ego, Ralph Sollitt, to return with him, offering him a post in the senior ranks of Lord & Thomas.
“You have to go home with me,” Lasker announced one day to Sollitt.
“What do I know about advertising?” Sollitt asked.
“What does either of us know about shipping?,” Lasker replied. “Let’s go home.”46
Chapter Sixteen
Selling the Unmentionable, and More
DURING ALBERT Lasker’s two-year tenure at the Shipping Board, Claude C. Hopkins had taken the reins at Lord & Thomas. This added new complexities to their relationship.
Lasker appreciated the flexibility that Hopkins’s willingness to lead the firm gave him. “I can only afford to keep on here,” he wrote to Hopkins from Washington in May 1922, “because I know that you and Mr. [Herbert] Cohn and others on the job back there are making it possible for me to live.”1 And yet, Lasker returned to Lord & Thomas in September 1923 convinced that his agency urgently needed shaking up—even a rebirth. This sense of urgency came from dramatic changes in both the economy and his industry. A new economic wave was cresting, even bigger than the one that had propelled Lasker and Lord & Thomas to success in the first decade of the new century, and Lasker intended to catch it.
The “Roaring Twenties” ushered in a new era in consumerism. Older companies that had been created to serve mainly business customers—companies like General Electric and Westinghouse—now moved aggressively into the consumer market.2 The automobile companies founded in the first decade of the new century had gone through wrenching consolidations, and the survivors were now determined to find new customers. These older giants also were joined by a host of new companies in industries that aimed directly at consumers: pharmaceuticals, motion pictures, travel, special-interest publications, and many others. For all of these businesses, it was critical to reach consumers through national magazines and newspapers—and advertising agencies made that all-important connection.
Public policy, too, helped fuel a boom in advertising. During World War I, the Committee on Public Information—an arm of Woodrow Wilson’s federal government—had undertaken what journalist George Creel had described as “the world’s greatest adventure in advertising” to promote public support for the war. In the immediate aftermath of the war, manufacturers responded to the threat of an excess-profits tax by pouring money into their ad budgets, resulting in a doubling of advertising dollars between 1918 and 1920 (from $1.5 billion to nearly $3 billion).3 In that two-year period, N. W. Ayer’s billings increased from $6.5 million to $13.8 million, and Lord & Thomas’s increased from $5.7 million to $11.3 million.4
For the first time in a decade, though, Lord & Thomas was no longer setting the pace for its industry. In each of the first four years after Lasker took control of his agency in 1912, he had beaten out Ayer in terms of billings, establishing his agency as the nation’s largest. Beginning in 1916, however, Ayer reclaimed its former top-r
anking status, and it continued to top Lord & Thomas until 1923—the year Lasker returned.
Lord & Thomas couldn’t claim the top position in 1923. Instead, that distinction went to the New York-based firm of J. Walter Thompson, now led by the dynamic husband-and-wife team of Stanley and Helen Resor. Stanley Resor had bought out founder Thompson in 1916, and—with an eye toward increasing profitability by concentrating on national firms—jettisoned more than two-thirds of the agency’s three hundred accounts. A Yale graduate (and the first major agency head with a college degree), Resor was fascinated by psychology and the behavior of populations. Resor loved data, and—in 1922—acted on that passion by hiring marketing professor Paul Cherington away from the Harvard Business School to serve as JWT’s director of research. He also recruited John B. Watson, a behavioralist recently fired by Johns Hopkins University for engaging in an affair with one of his graduate students, to serve as Madison Avenue’s first resident psychologist.5
In only a few years under the Resors, Thompson swept past the competition. The revitalized agency offered an innovative style of copy and other services that most established agencies, including Lord & Thomas, couldn’t match. Helen Resor—an accomplished copywriter well before her marriage to Stanley in 1917—wrote an ad for Woodbury’s soap (“A skin you love to touch”) that Lasker considered one of the landmarks in advertising history, mainly because it opened the door to using sex as part of the sell.
The Man Who Sold America: The Amazing (but True!) Story of Albert D. Lasker and the Creation of the Advertising Century Page 30
