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

  —Cary McWilliams

  BY 1920, tourism was bringing some 200,000 visitors a year to Southern California.2 But as McWilliams suggests, this trade was restricted mainly to the December–February period, mainly because people in other parts of the country were convinced that Southern California was unbearably hot during the summer. In 1921, a group of business leaders undertook to change this by organizing the “All-Year Club of Southern California, Ltd.” According to a Lord & Thomas account, the stakes were high:

  During the summer, no tourists came, and with many residents taking their vacations elsewhere, there was a severe retail business slump every summer, rents went down, resorts and hotels and theaters closed their doors, throwing employees out of work, and every line of trade and industry suffered.

  The organizers [of the All-Year Club], most of whom had come here from the east and middle-west, knew that the summer climate was really delightful by contrast with that of their former homes, with cool nights and rainless days. They decided that if the people in the rest of the country knew these things, some of them might be persuaded to come during the summer. Advertising, they believed, might be able to put over this idea.

  Prior to World War I, communities, regions, and even nations had mounted advertising campaigns to attract tourists, conventions, industries, or settlers. The Rotary Club of Milwaukee, for example, spent $25,000 in 1916 to create goodwill and attract investment; and the Denver Tourist Bureau allocated $64,000 in 1916 to bring in both conventions and tourists. The following year, the government of Cuba used advertising to attract immigrants from the United States.3

  The Santa Barbara Chamber of Commerce launched a campaign in the summer of 1919 to bring tourists to “California’s wonder play-place,” the “Sublimely Beautiful Santa Barbara.” It aimed its first newspaper ads at the sweltering populations of Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. Every Friday during the summer months, a stock ad ran in eighteen newspapers across the Southwest. Only a single line of copy changed from week to week: the mean temperature of Santa Barbara in the preceding week.4

  Los Angeles, of course, would not be outdone by provincial Santa Barbara. By 1920, Los Angeles had surpassed San Francisco to become California’s largest city. The number of building permits issued annually increased sixfold between 1918 (six thousand) and 1921 (thirty-seven thousand).5 With the creation of the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1919, the City of Angels had become one of only three cities in American history to support two major orchestras.

  The city’s biggest cheerleader in the early 1920s was Harry Chandler, then the publisher of the Los Angeles Times. Chandler, a native of New Hampshire, had moved to Los Angeles in 1883 to combat a persistent lung ailment. He married the boss’s daughter (Marion Otis, daughter of publisher and civic booster Harrison Gray Otis), and took over the paper in 1917. Under Chandler’s leadership, the Times engaged in fierce circulation wars with William Randolph Hearst’s Examiner, Los Angeles’s other major morning daily, and also promoted Los Angeles relentlessly.

  More than a love of community motivated Chandler: along with several prominent colleagues, he was a major land speculator. (His group subdivided and sold house lots adding up to forty-seven thousand acres in the area.) So he was particularly partial to promotional schemes that might enhance property values in his adopted city. One such scheme, recounts journalist and author Carey McWilliams, came into his head sometime in the early months of 1921: “One winter day in 1921, a lady marched into [his] office . . . and complained bitterly that apartment-house owners in Los Angeles prospered in the winter but starved in the summer. Couldn’t something be done about it?”6

  At Chandler’s urging, a group of eighteen prominent businesspeople—including representatives from railroad, hotels, banks, newspapers, real estate firms, and other industries—gathered in Los Angeles on May 23, 1921. Their goal was to build on the work of the Southern California Hotel Men’s Association’s publicity committee, which had been struggling to overcome the seasonality of their trade. Within a month of this gathering, the formation of the “All-Year Club” was announced, and a subscription drive—seeking to raise $300,000 a year for three years—was launched.7

  Chandler’s group made several decisions that proved critical to the subsequent success of the All-Year Club. As one observer later noted:

  The board of directors was made so representative that no interest in the city, or in Southern California, could hold out because it was not represented.

  An initial policy was laid down. All funds were to be spent for advertising. None was to be used for patronage. The executive secretary was obliged to be in the position to show at all times that every dollar he was spending would pull the greatest possible load.8

  The All-Year Club’s founders felt some urgency: the national economic recession of 1920–1922 had hit California hard. Well before the hoped-for $300,000 was raised, therefore, they authorized a $50,000 trial campaign, and (in May 1921) hired an agency that by then was well known in Southern California: Lord & Thomas. Lasker’s agency had successfully promoted oranges, raisins, and other perishable commodities; now it was being asked to promote California—and quickly. As former Sunkist marketer Don Francisco recalled: “When they started to do this, there was a depression throughout the country . . . It was felt that if they could bring in enough tourists to Southern California, we could bring in enough money and activity to [counteract] that depression. So they had to advertise in a great hurry, and we were chosen to handle it without anyone else being considered.”9

  One of the agency’s first efforts on behalf of the All-Year Club was an ad entitled “That Vacation Land You’ve Never Seen,” written by “an Easterner.” (“Copy was headed ‘By an Easterner,’” records the Lord & Thomas account history, “because Southern Californians had a bad reputation for over-enthusiasm.”) The Easterner was Robert Crane, recently relocated from Chicago to Lord & Thomas’s Los Angeles office. His reason-why copy told of lofty mountains, fertile valleys, trout streams, and sea bathing, “all within a stone’s throw of the ninth largest city in size in the United States!” Crane cited U.S. Weather Bureau records from the previous forty-four years to underscore the region’s temperate median temperatures: June, 65 degrees; July, 79 degrees; August, 71 degrees, and September, 68 degrees.

  The ad appeared in thirty-three newspapers in the “hot belt” states of the Southwest. It included a coupon offer of a free booklet; inquiries resulting from the coupon were turned over to the participating railroads for individual follow-up.

  Initial results were positive. One hotel in Los Angeles—a subscriber to the All-Year Club—reported that its head count increased by one hundred people a day during the summer of 1921. Several real estate agencies reported sales to individuals who had been lured to the region by the Lord & Thomas advertising. Despite the recession, the Southern Pacific, Union Pacific, and Santa Fe Railroads sold an unprecedented number of tickets to Southern California in the summer of 1921.10 When a formal competition for the account finally was held, Lord & Thomas easily retained it.

  One of the stronger endorsements of the All-Year Club’s efforts came from the supervisors of Los Angeles County, who in 1922 appropriated $50,000 to support the initiative. Only sixteen states nationwide then permitted local tax receipts to be used for community advertising. The fact that California was one of them was a huge boon to the All-Year Club—as well as to “Californians, Inc.,” the community advertising group organized in 1922 to promote San Francisco and Northern California.11 Within two years, six neighboring counties in addition to Los Angeles were also kicking in tax dollars to the All-Year Club’s budget. By 1924, something like 40 percent of that $300,000 budget was coming from public sources.12

  With the influx of public dollars, more systematic assessments began to be made, and again, the results were positive. An astounding 80 percent of the individuals who were contacted by the participating railroads (as a result of having requested the “couponed” informational pamphlet
) wound up traveling to Southern California. Before the All-Year Club began its efforts, according to one study, Southern California had 126 winter tourists for every 100 summer tourists. By 1923, it attracted 200 summer visitors for every 126 winter visitors.13

  For the rest of the decade, the All-Year Club and Lord & Thomas enjoyed steady success. The agency discovered—perhaps belatedly—that women played a critical role in determining their families’ vacation destinations. As a result, ad copy was written with women in mind, and an increasing percentage of the ad budget went into women’s magazines. Beginning in 1927, Lord & Thomas began to trade on the increasing allure of Hollywood by including testimonials from Douglas Fairbanks and other celebrities.14 The All-Year Club’s advertising budget exceeded a half-million dollars for the first time in 1929, and there seemed to be no end in sight to the dizzying success of Southern California, shared by Lord & Thomas.

  Then came the stock market crash, the Great Depression, and—within a few short years—an extraordinary westward migration of desperate people seeking escape from the Dust Bowl. Californians now had a mixed message to sell. Yes, they badly needed tourist dollars, but they didn’t want even greater numbers of poor people to migrate westward.

  A typical ad from 1932 included striking imagery of beautiful people playing golf under palm trees, with spectacular mountains rising in the background. The readers of the ad were advised to “bake out their troubles”:

  Work . . . worry . . . taut nerves . . . fear of the future. They’ve been a pretty steady diet for the last two or three years. And yet, honestly, what has it all accomplished for you? Forget it for a while. Come on out and have some FUN. Regain your perspective and learn again that life, after all, is meant for LIVING.

  In much smaller type, the ad also included a cautionary message:

  Come to California for a glorious vacation. Advise anyone not to come seeking employment, lest he be disappointed; but for the tourist, attractions are unlimited.

  In other words, the All-Year Club and its advertising agency found themselves in a nearly untenable situation. “Like most promotions of the sort,” wrote Carey McWilliams, “the All-Year Club has been too successful. Its seductive advertisements were partially responsible for the great influx of impoverished Okies and Arkies in the ‘thirties.’”15 If too few well-heeled tourists showed up, Lord & Thomas would be in trouble. If too many Okies and Arkies showed up, Lord & Thomas would be in more trouble.

  On balance, though, the All-Year Club must be counted a great success for Southern California—and an even greater boon to Lord & Thomas. Even before being elevated to the head of Lord & Thomas’s Los Angeles office in 1924, Don Francisco had struggled to carve out a distinctive West Coast personality for his office. He had to persuade Californians that Lord & Thomas wasn’t simply another carpetbagging firm from the East—that it possessed strong local roots and had California’s interests at heart. As he later recalled:

  After we got the All-Year Club, we would show that we were engaged in helping basic industry, like oranges, lemons, grapefruit, raisins, and the tourist industry. Beyond that, we went into a lot of civic things. We handled the Community Chest publicity and advertising, and we took an active part in the Chamber of Commerce, and [I] served for fifteen years on the Publicity Committee. Our men enrolled in Community Chest drives, and we took an active part in the Advertising Club.

  I spent an awful lot of time of that, for years, probably too much. Mr. Lasker thought at first it was too much, but I think with the situation the way it was, it was not . . . We had a selling job to do.16

  It was against this backdrop that California’s power-brokers turned to Lord & Thomas for a higher-stakes kind of help.

  Since the later decades of the nineteenth century, California politics had been a volatile mix of radicalism and conservatism. In the late 1870s, for example, California was swept up in a wave of “Kearneyism,” named for vigilante and radical labor organizer Dennis Kearney, who seized control of the state’s Workingman’s Party in 1878. Among other things, the fiery Kearney called for state regulation of railroads and banks, an eight-hour day for laborers (the standard was ten), major tax reform, and the direct election of U.S. senators.

  These proposals were radical enough for their day; in addition, Kearney loudly advocated the immediate deportation and exclusion of Chinese immigrants, as well as “a little judicious hanging” among the millionaires clustered atop San Francisco’s elite Nob Hill.17

  Other socialist-leaning political movements followed. In 1901, the Union Labor Party elected a bassoon player named Eugene Schmitz mayor of San Francisco. In 1907, a group of Los Angeles–based reformers founded the Lincoln-Roosevelt League, with their prime target the Southern Pacific Railroad, about which California historian James Bryce observed: “No state has been so much at the mercy of one powerful corporation.”18 The League enjoyed a few years of California glory—culminating in the election of their candidate and Albert Lasker’s close friend Hiram Johnson to the U.S. Senate—then wilted and died.19

  But despite California’s tendency to breed radical political movements, it remained a Republican stronghold throughout the early twentieth century. The GOP controlled the governorship, the state senate, and the state assembly for the first third of the twentieth century. Between 1860 and 1932, California registered five Republicans for every Democrat.

  So when socialist writer and muckraker Upton Sinclair ran for governor of California in 1934, Republicans at first weren’t worried. Some concluded that “Sinclairism was Kearneyism and Johnsonianism all over again.”20 But the Sinclair challenge was different. First, unlike Kearney, Schmitz, and Johnson, Sinclair affiliated with the Democratic Party, and then—to the astonishment of millions—he went on to capture his party’s nomination.

  The backdrop of the Great Depression, too, mooted traditional political calculations. Desperate people might embrace dramatic change.

  Finally, the 1934 governor’s race differed from previous socialist uprisings in the state because of the central role played in the contest by modern mass media: radio, motion pictures, newspapers, direct mail, and national fundraising. As the author of an exhaustive study of Sinclair’s 1934 election bid put it: “The prospect of a socialist governing the nation’s most volatile state sparked nothing less than a revolution in American politics. With an important boost from the image-makers of Hollywood, Sinclair’s opponents virtually invented the modern media campaign.”21

  In this drama, Lord & Thomas played a key role. Certainly ad men had been employed in politics before, notably with Lasker’s work for Warren Harding in 1920 and Bruce Barton’s campaign for Calvin Coolidge four years later.22 What was different about California in 1934, though, was the degree to which Sinclair’s political opponents turned over the development of campaign strategies and tactics to Lord & Thomas and their allied media professionals—and the relentless sophistication with which those new allies plied their trade.

  Born in Baltimore in 1878 and raised in New York, Upton Sinclair earned a bachelor’s degree from City College and began churning out “half-dime” novels for a pulp-fiction publisher. A year before joining the Socialist party in 1902, he published the first in a long list of novels, which in the coming decades would flow from his pen at an average rate of about two per year. He toiled mostly in obscurity until the publication of The Jungle (1906), which exposed the horrifically unsanitary conditions and ruthless labor exploitation in the Chicago meatpacking industry. Along with the pioneering journalism of Samuel Hopkins Adams and others, Sinclair’s impassioned polemics helped lead to the passage of the Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act.

  Sinclair continued to churn out exposés and fictionalized accounts of capitalist scandal and power. Sometimes he highlighted a single social problem (such as venereal disease, in Damaged Goods, 1913) or an historic event (the Ludlow Massacre, in King Coal, 1917). But his chief delight lay in flaying the nation’s most powerful institutions. In domain af
ter domain, he accumulated both impassioned followers and embittered enemies.23

  In The Brass Check (1919), for instance, Sinclair took on American journalism. “What is the Brass Check?” he asked. “The Brass Check is found in your pay-envelope every week—you who write and print and distribute our newspapers and magazines. The Brass Check is the price of your shame—you who take the fair body of truth and sell it in the market-place, who betray the virgin hopes of mankind into the loathsome brothel of Big Business.” To make sure no one missed the point, he added: “When I planned this book I had in mind a sub-title: ‘A Study of the Whore of Journalism.’”24

  Sometimes he got personal. In 1905, William Randolph Hearst—whose vast publishing empire included several of California’s most influential newspapers—recruited Sinclair and several other prominent muckrakers, leftists, and socialists to write for his newly acquired general-interest magazine, Cosmopolitan. Sinclair found Hearst a beguiling figure: his wealth, his political influence, and the salacious rumors that swirled around his personal affairs. So when two years later Sinclair published The Industrial Republic, a futuristic social novel, he made Hearst president of a newly socialist United States, depicted the publisher as a “traitor to his class,” and wrote of his obsession with Manhattan’s “tenderloin” district.25 Hearst was not one to forgive.

  Sinclair also accumulated enemies in Hollywood’s film industry, which by the 1930s enjoyed unprecedented popularity, profits, and power. At one point, for example, Sinclair received an overture from William Fox, one of Hollywood’s legendary moguls. “He had been robbed of a good part of his fortune during the recent panic,” Sinclair recalled, and was willing to pay Sinclair the princely sum of $25,000 to tell his story. After weeks of daily interviews with the deposed studio head, the job was done. But when Sinclair discovered that “Fox was using the threat of publishing my manuscript . . . to get back some of the properties of which he had been deprived”—in other words, as a tool of blackmail—he sent the manuscript to a publisher, who promptly printed twenty-five thousand copies. The book, Sinclair recalled proudly, caused “a bang that might have been heard at the moon if there was anybody there to listen.” As a result of these and other adventures, many of the most powerful men in Hollywood—as in so many American establishments—despised Upton Sinclair.26