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

  He had gotten a taste of the bully pulpit in 1923 when, after being arrested during a dockworkers’ strike in San Pedro, he addressed several large rallies. Once in front of a crowd, he proved himself a skilled orator.27 A New York Times reporter described him as: “. . . a quiet, slight figure, with a pleasant smile constantly on his lips, suggesting inner certainty rather than humor or political winsomeness. Mr. Sinclair avoids emotional appeals and the stage tricks of fighting virility. In an even, bland voice, almost a monotone . . . he talks at once plainly and brilliantly.”28

  He also had dabbled in politics a few times with unimpressive results, running on the Socialist ticket for senator once and for governor twice, never capturing more than sixty thousand votes.

  But the Great Depression’s devastating effects troubled him enormously. “In the state of California, which had a population of seven million at the time,” he later recorded, “there were a million out of work, public-relief funds were exhausted, and people were starving.” He began to sketch out a detailed program to “End Poverty in California” (EPIC).

  One day at the end of August 1933, as he was in the midst of this work, a letter arrived at his home from a little-known Santa Monica Democrat who urged Sinclair to seek that party’s nomination for governor.29 In his memoir, Sinclair claimed that he agreed to meet with a group of Democrats at a hotel on the beach; that they “argued and pleaded” for him to run; that he refused; and that after much soul-searching, he gave in to his overwhelming sense of social obligation. This account exaggerates the degree of soul-searching that was involved. Less than twenty-four hours after receiving the Santa Monica operative’s letter, according to his biographer, Sinclair quietly slipped into Beverly Hills and changed his registration from Socialist to Democrat.30

  Sinclair and his new Democratic allies moved quickly. The author-turned-politician published his program in a sixty-four-page booklet in which he used the literary device of telling the history of California a few years in the future—one in which, of course, he won the election and governed the state. The awkwardly titled “I, Governor of California—And How I Ended Poverty: A True Story of the Future” described how Governor Sinclair replaced the sales tax with steeply graduated income and property taxes; how he boosted taxes on inheritances and public utilities; and how he paid $50 to every widow, every “needy” person over the age of sixty, and every blind and physically disabled resident in the state. The centerpiece of the EPIC plan, however, was a network of cooperative colonies situated in idle factories and on unused farmland, taken over through eminent domain or punitive taxes and operated by the state. There, workers produced and exchanged the goods they needed to live on a noncash basis, a system that Sinclair dubbed “production for use.” The story concludes two years into Governor Sinclair’s term, when—with but one poor person remaining in the state of California—he resigns and heads home to write another novel.31

  Proceeds from I, Governor—which sold nearly a million copies—helped fund a grassroots organization that spread like wildfire across the state. There were rallies, bake sales, speakers’ bureaus, and an eight-page fold-out magazine, EPIC News, which soon boasted a circulation of more than 500,000. Sinclair also offered up his message on the radio, a medium in which his earnest and self-deprecating manner played well.32

  Sinclair faced six opponents in the Democratic primary, held on August 28, 1934. What they didn’t know was that Sinclair’s grassroots organizers had registered some 350,000 new Democrats. Despite running in a six-man Democratic field, Sinclair not only came in first, but also attracted more votes than the uncontested Republican nominee, incumbent Governor Frank Merriam.33

  A collective shudder shook the state’s monied interests. California’s wealthy elite, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. observed, “saw in EPIC the threat of social revolution by a rabble of crazed bankrupts and paupers . . . [that would] drive all wealth and respectability from the state.” Director Billy Wilder, a recent immigrant from Austria, recalled that Sinclair “scared the hell out of the community. They all thought him to be a most dangerous Bolshevik beast.” The New York Times reported that, “a sense of Armageddon hangs in the bland California air.” Even Franklin Roosevelt, in faraway Washington, was uneasy. If he supported EPIC, he risked alienating the Democratic center. If he didn’t, he risked losing touch with the electorate’s clear drift leftward. Roosevelt could afford neither to embrace nor disown Sinclair.34

  Shortly after Sinclair’s victory in the primary, Charles Teague—head of the California Fruit Growers Exchange—approached railroads, utilities, and other major corporations throughout the state to help to defeat the Socialist-turned-Democrat. The group called itself “United for California”: a purposefully nonpartisan name, aimed at appealing to disaffected Democrats as well as Republicans. Headquartered in Los Angeles, United for California went public October 3, releasing a statement that the election of Upton Sinclair “would strike at the roots of our most cherished institutions—the home, the church, and the school.”35

  These and subsequent dramatic pronouncements were not Teague’s handiwork. As he pondered how best to counter the Sinclair menace, Teague took a bold and unprecedented step. He turned over the campaign to discredit Upton Sinclair and reelect Frank Merriam as governor of California to Albert Lasker’s Lord & Thomas.

  Still heading the agency’s West Coast operations, if only just barely, was Don Francisco. Francisco was then relocating to New York, where he was slated to head up his firm’s operations in the East. He had spent several months in New York and had just returned to California in late September 1934—for what he thought was a final two-week visit—when he was summoned by Teague to an emergency meeting.

  Teague told Francisco that United for California wanted Lord & Thomas to handle the propaganda side of the anti-Sinclair campaign and that they wanted Francisco to lead the charge. Francisco declined, mindful of his impending departure for New York and probably thinking that the assignment was a risky one for Lord & Thomas. But Teague persisted. In fact, as Francisco recalled, Sunkist’s head made it clear that this was not an invitation but a command: “He said, ‘Well, Mr. Lasker ought to do it, because if Sinclair wins, why, you haven’t any business out here, and neither have most of us. We’ll go to the dogs. Mr. Lasker, and Lord & Thomas, ought to be delighted to contribute your services to protect their business and their clients’ businesses.’”36

  Francisco placed an urgent call to Lasker in Chicago. If he hoped that Lasker would turn the job down, he was disappointed. Lasker was, Francisco later recalled, “tremendously interested” in the assignment, and instructed his first lieutenant to do Teague’s bidding. Reluctantly, Francisco got back in harness. “It’s a good cause,” he wrote to Lasker toward the end of September, “and because all our California clients are so concerned, it seems a strategic move to take the assignment at this time.”37 He picked one of his most trusted lieutenants, Don Belding, to head up the campaign. He also recruited Don Forker, a former advertising manager for Union Oil who had moved over to Lord & Thomas, to handle the radio broadcasts.

  The radio campaign began in mid-October, with “board of strategy” meetings held each night to evaluate the programs. Lord & Thomas spared no expense, with Forker hiring the best writers he could find and retaining a cast of thirty-five actors.38 The writers produced four shows, some broadcast daily and others three times a week. Overtly or subtly, each series struck anti-Sinclair chords. The family soap-opera format of The Bennetts, for example, gave each member of the middle-class family an opportunity to talk about how Sinclairism threatened her or his traditional way of life: Sis feared she wouldn’t be able to finish college (because Sinclair opposed higher education) and that church choir practice would end if an atheist governor were elected; Dad fretted he would lose his job because his factory would close; Junior that he wouldn’t get to go to the movies anymore. Another series, Weary Sam and Willie, followed two hobos as they trekked from the Midwest toward California in pur
suit of the handouts promised by EPIC.39

  Variety, the entertainment industry’s weekly bible, was impressed:

  About everything is being adapted to radio in the Beat Sinclair campaign now in progress for the final weeks of the campaign. Every device known to the art of propaganda is being employed. The Lord & Thomas advertising agency is using four radio programs to undermine the Sinclair argument. The novelty of the presentation is sure-fire, and a check of the listening audience shows that a tremendous wedge is being driven in spots where other agencies of promotion have failed to make more than a superficial dent . . .

  It is a cinch that if the Lord & Thomas promotion is successful in keeping Upton Sinclair out of Sacramento, this new textbook on campaigning will gain wide circulation.40

  Some of Teague’s money also went to a pair of press agents based in Sacramento. Clem Whitaker—tall, wiry, and talkative at age thirty-five—was a political reporter who had drifted into public relations. In 1933, his work on a state water referendum brought him into collaboration with a twenty-six-year-old redheaded widow named Leone Baxter, then manager of the Chamber of Commerce of Redding, California. The two (who would marry five years later) founded Campaigns, Inc., one of the nation’s first political consulting firms.41

  They agreed to pitch in against Sinclair, and their method was as ingenious as it was devious. “Upton was beaten,” Whitaker recalled, “because he had written books.” With the election only two months away, the pair left their office, assembled stacks of Sinclair’s writings, and secluded themselves for three days, culling quotations on religion, marriage, sex, the press, communism, patriotism, education, and other topics that might be used against the author. They combined many of the most incendiary quotations with political cartoons to create the “blot of Sinclairism” series, which they then distributed to newspapers throughout the state. More than three thousand were printed. “Sure, those quotations were irrelevant,” Baxter later admitted. “But we had one objective: to keep him from becoming governor.”42

  California’s newspapers enthusiastically joined the effort to sink Sinclair. William Randolph Hearst wielded the most power: the combined circulation of his five California dailies exceeded the rest of the state’s papers combined. And although Hearst went after Sinclair with a vengeance, his treatment of the socialist candidate was muted compared with that of Harry Chandler of the Los Angeles Times, which also had been savaged by Sinclair.43 Chandler made regular use of the Whitaker and Baxter quotations by printing anti-Sinclair “boxes” on the front page: Sinclair On Marriage, Sinclair On Religion, and so on.44

  A Times reporter turned a Sinclair jest into a catastrophe. “Suppose your plan goes into effect,” he asked the candidate during an interview. “Won’t it cause a great many unemployed to come to California from the other states?” According to Sinclair, “I answered with a laugh: ‘I told Mr. Hopkins, the Federal Relief Administrator, that if I am elected, half the unemployed of the United States will come to California, and he will have to make plans to take care of them.’”

  The headlines in the next day’s Times read: “Heavy Rush Of Idle Seen By Sinclair—Transient Flood Expected—Democratic Candidate Cites Prospect in Event of His Winning Election.” In print, Sinclair’s words were altered to read: “If I’m elected governor, I expect one-half the unemployed in the United States will hop the first freight to California.” The Times, pouncing on the grist that the naive Sinclair had provided, estimated the number of indigent job-seekers that would flood into the state at roughly 5 million. The paper also ran follow-up stories with titles like “More Competition for Your Job.”45 For Harry Chandler, it was payback time.

  Meanwhile, Don Francisco’s stealthy legions were making good use of Whitaker’s and Baxter’s work. “It was obvious that in five or six weeks, we couldn’t possibly kill the EPIC program by economic propaganda,” Francisco recalled.46 Instead, Lord & Thomas began churning out pamphlets that used Sinclair’s own words against him in ways designed to inflame particular constituencies. In just over a month, the agency produced almost 8 million such pamphlets. (“We work every night until 12 or 1 o’clock,” Francisco wrote to a Chicago colleague, “including Sundays.”47) They were quick, effective, and dirty, as Francisco later admitted:

  We had one pamphlet quoting all he had said against the Catholics, and another against the Jews, and the Seventh-Day Adventists, the Episcopalians, and one against Stanford, and the University of Southern California, and pamphlets of what he said against lawyers, and doctors. He said something against almost every group that there was . . .

  And these we wrote very hastily, and put on the cover of each, “By his own words shall ye know him,” and just quoted his words without any side comment or explanation, giving the source, of course.

  These we sent out to the various organizations. The one on what he said against the Catholics, we sent out to all the Catholic churches, and enclosed a card whereby they could order a big supply, which they usually did. And the next thing that happened was that the priests would preach against him, or the rabbi, or the minister, and we would see to it that the quotes from their sermons got into the papers . . .

  Pretty soon, all the churches wanted to have a big meeting—which we encouraged—where they had the rabbi, the priest, the minister, and all the other people on the platform talking against Sinclair. We bought time on the air, so that the whole thing went out all over the state. And then we got the excerpts from the talks in the paper the next day . . .

  Those pamphlets were the most effective weapon we had. Had Sinclair not said all those things against these different groups, particularly religious groups, he would have won.48

  In Hollywood, meanwhile, the movie studio heads were also attacking Sinclair. (He had promised that if elected, he would put the state of California into the business of producing and showing movies.) To organize their efforts against Sinclair, the studios turned to Will Hays, Lasker’s political mentor and Hollywood’s “movie czar” for the past dozen years. Hays raised about $500,000 from the major studios, which assembled this war chest by docking their well-paid stars and directors a day’s pay.

  Producer and mogul Louis B. Mayer also played a leading role. With his blessing, MGM production chief Irving Thalberg cranked out a series of phony newsreels that portrayed “ordinary” people saying nice things about Merriam, and swarthy indigents with heavy eastern and southern European accents endorsing Sinclair. In one of the most infamous, a scruffy actor asks: Vell, his system verked vell in Russia, vy can’t it verk here?49

  Hordes of jobless, hungry, dirty, desperate men streaming into California became a leitmotif of the anti-Sinclair campaign. Don Belding later admitted that his agency “hired the scum of the streets to carry placards through the cities, ‘Vote for Upton Sinclair.’” More fake newsreels, staged on Hollywood sets, depicted trainloads of out-of-work men heading west for EPIC handouts. Sometimes the newspaper and movie studios worked together. The Los Angeles Herald and Express ran a two-column photo of a mob of “hobos,” but then someone recognized movie star Frankie Darro as the lead bum; the still had been lifted from the Warner Brothers film Wild Boys of the Road.

  Don Francisco monitored all this activity with a mixture of satisfaction and anxiety. He knew that only a relentless, all-fronts assault would defeat Sinclair. But such an assault might well create a backlash of sympathy for Sinclair and the EPIC cause. In the final weeks before the election, Francisco wheeled out one final weapon from his arsenal, only to garage it again almost immediately:

  There is a fellow here who had an automobile that looked like a locomotive, which pulled a trailer that looked like a boxcar, and I remembered that thing, and I had him hunted up, and I hired him for the last three weeks of the campaign.

  On the side of the boxcar I put a big sign: “If elected Governor, I expect half the unemployed to hop the first train for California.” And then I got the fellows out of MGM studios to dress up a lot of hoboes, dummies, and have
them sitting up on top of that car, and that was to run around Los Angeles and the suburbs the last three weeks . . .

  Well, the night before it was to start . . . I saw this old cheesecloth banner of Sinclair’s on the way to Pasadena, and it looked as if a breath on it would blow it down, and I visualized a lot of people tacking that thing up, and compared with our big posters, it looked pretty pathetic. It made quite an impression on me.

  The next morning, I came down, and they had this locomotive and freight car pulled up in the parking lot so I could look out the window at it. I looked on this thing, and on top of this pathetic sign I had seen, I felt pretty sorry for Sinclair. We had been going pretty hard against him.

  So with that hunch, I had several men and girls from the office go along the sidewalk while this thing was going down the streets, to hear what comments were made. We heard a lot of people were getting a great laugh, but a lot of other people said, “That is a blow below the belt. That is going too far. I feel sorry for Sinclair.”