This fear was the wellspring of his involvement in advocacy—for example, in the Leo Frank case—in politics, and in philanthropy. His philanthropic activities, shaped and advanced by Mary Lasker, were enormously influential. The Laskers took on causes, such as national health insurance and birth control, that politicians didn’t dare embrace. They helped advance the concept of leverage in philanthropy—“seeding” worthy causes with their own money, and counting on larger infusions of private and public dollars to carry the cause forward. These were Big Ideas, which Albert loved to shape, manipulate, and disseminate.
Albert also exerted his considerable personal influence with the media to persuade broadcasters to tackle taboo subjects. Cancer isn’t a disgrace, the wildly popular radio character Fibber McGee told his friend Charley, with an astonished national audience hanging on every shocking word. It’s a disgrace to think it’s a disgrace. Lasker changed the way people understood the world—and thereby set the world on a better course.
Albert Lasker loved a wager. At the same time, he cheerfully and unabashedly hedged his bets.
W. G. Irwin told the story of walking down the streets of Chicago with Lasker one day in search of confirmation of the rumor that an armistice had been signed ending World War I. “Well,” Lasker fretted aloud, “I am going to lose some money. I made a bet last week on this thing, that it wouldn’t end this year.”
A half a block later, he brightened up, and announced with a smile, “But I’m all right. I made a bet before that it would.”37
So he was hedger of bets—someone who enjoyed the game, but at the same time, remained outside the game. This was true in almost all of his endeavors: He retained the eye of the outsider.
This was in part because he was a German (of sorts), a southerner, a westerner, and a Jew: all perspectives that placed him outside of the mainstream. His mental and emotional problems also contributed to his outsider status, and all these differentiating factors, it seems, combined to help him see things objectively and dispassionately. Notably, when he became an insider—as at Mitchell Motor, Van Camp’s, and Pepsodent, and arguably during his government service—his genius declined precipitously. He lost his ability to put his finger on the meat of the cocoanut, to get to the kernel of the nut. He became merely another stakeholder.
So he succeeded most notably as an outsider. But he was also, paradoxically, the quintessential insider. Impish, funny, breezy, flamboyant, exuberant, exaggerated, generous—and dark—he embodied something at the very heart of America.
And this made him the perfect person to sell America.
A Note on Sources
One Lasker biography already exists: John Gunther’s Taken At the Flood, published by Harper & Brothers in 1960, eight years after Lasker’s death. Gunther was an internationally renowned travel writer who achieved literary significance in 1949 with the publication of Death Be Not Proud, a moving account of his son’s death from a brain tumor. He had known Lasker socially and undertook his biography at the request of Lasker’s widow, Mary.
Taken At the Flood is an engaging piece of work by a skilled journalist who had the great advantage of being able to talk to many of the people who played important roles in Lasker’s life. We have drawn on Gunther’s work extensively and have also dug through his Lasker-related papers at the University of Chicago. Citations in the notes are “John Gunther papers.” Gunther’s original manuscript was closely edited not only by Mary Lasker, but also by all three of Lasker’s children: Mary, Edward, and Francie. Another half century has passed, and all of the principals are now dead, so we have reinstated details that the Lasker family removed from Gunther’s manuscript. But for readers interested in seeing another side of Albert Lasker, Taken At the Flood remains an indispensable resource.
In addition, we have drawn extensively upon a very special resource in coauthor Schultz’s collection: hundreds of pages of verbatim transcripts generated in the late 1930s for a Lasker autobiography that was never completed. From the biographer’s standpoint, having uncensored access to a long-dead subject’s mind is a windfall—almost literally, a gift from the beyond—and we have taken full advantage of it. Much of the material in the following pages, especially Lasker’s first-person observations about his own life, has never before seen the light of day. The ghostwriter’s name was Boyden Sparkes; we abbreviate these citations as “Sparkes” (denoting a Lasker interview) or “Sparkes interview with _________.” Where dates and page numbers are available, we have provided them.
Both Albert and Mary Lasker gave interviews to Columbia University’s oral historians. By historical coincidence, Mary Lasker’s reminiscences take up almost exactly where Albert’s conversations with Boyden Sparkes left off, and are therefore invaluable. We have drawn heavily on these interviews, and thank Columbia for their permission to do so.
Also interesting, and not entirely fact-based, is The Lasker Story: As He Told It, a little volume published in 1963 by Advertising Age. It is an edited transcript of a marathon lecture that Lasker delivered extemporaneously to his Lord & Thomas colleagues in April 1925.
As with most unstructured oral histories, these various first-person accounts raised almost as many questions as they answered. To sort out Lasker fact from Lasker fiction, we consulted a number of archives that provided additional perspectives on Albert Lasker and his times, including W. G. Irwin’s extensive correspondence, repositories in Texas, the Harding presidential collection in Ohio, the Will Hays papers in Indianapolis, Margaret Sanger’s papers at Smith College, the American Jewish Archives, the Don Francisco papers at the Syracuse University Library, the Joseph P. Kennedy collection at the Kennedy Library, the Roosevelt archives at Hyde Park, and the official records of the Shipping Board in Washington. This latter collection contains a wealth of personal and family materials; we are fortunate that no one ever bothered to cull out these personal papers from the government’s official record. In fact, to our knowledge, no one has looked at this material since Albert Lasker happily fled the nation’s capital in the late summer of 1923.
Notes
INTRODUCTION
1. William Hard, “Who Wants to Be a Rich Man’s Son?” Collier’s, March 10, 1923, 13. Lasker’s authorized biographer, John Gunther, notes that Hard was a friend of Lasker’s, and that they sometimes dreamed up Collier’s articles together, probably including this one. See John Gunther, Taken at the Flood: The Story of Albert D. Lasker (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960); and “A Note on Sources.”
2. Albert Lasker letter to William Wrigley, February 6, 1923, Box 29, United States Shipping Board (USSB) records.
3. In 1986, the Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles granted a posthumous pardon to Frank without addressing the issue of his innocence or guilt.
4. Albert Lasker letter to Arthur Brisbane, February 14, 1923, Box 29, USSB records.
5. See, for example, Albert Lasker, letter to William Randolph Hearst, March 5, 1923, Box 29, USSB records: “There are only four or five men in the United States who are really deeply interested in the future of the American Merchant Marine. You are one of those men.”
6. Albert Lasker letter to Edward Lasker, June 1, 1923, Box 30, USSB records.
7. “Business: Coalition,” Time, June 14, 1926, www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,751559-1,00.html.
8. Sparkes, 390–391.
9. Sparkes, 346.
10. Sparkes, interview with Herbert Field, March 16, 1938, 15–18. Field’s original surname was Cohn, which he changed for business purposes.
11. Sparkes interview with “Hackett” (otherwise unidentified).
12. From Robert Eck, “A Face of Character,” typewritten collection of reminiscences about Lasker, March 30, 1994, 7.
13. Ibid., 5.
14. Sparkes interview with Sarnoff, January 11, 1938. See “A Note on Sources.”
15. Sparkes, 40.
16. Sparkes, 249.
17. Reminiscences of Mary Lasker, Columbia University Oral History Resear
ch Office Collection, 612. See “A Note on Sources.”
CHAPTER ONE
1. “For the Young People,” Galveston Daily News, May 2, 1889, 3.
2. James F. Harris, A Study in Theory and Practice of German Liberalism: Eduard Lasker, 1829–1884. (New York: University Press of America, 1984), 3.
3. Harris, A Study in the Theory and Practice of German Liberalism, 3.
4. Louis L. Snyder, “Bismarck and the Lasker Resolution, 1884,” Review of Politics, 29, no. 1 (1967): 42.
5. More accurately, Lasker was on the left end of the centrist political spectrum. To the left of him and his fellow progressives were the Socialists, Marxists, and others. See Carlton J. H. Hayes, “The History of German Socialism Reconsidered,” American Historical Review 23, no. 1 (1917): 62–101.
6. Snyder, “Bismarck and the Lasker Resolution, 1884,” 43.
7. A severe episode evidently occurred in 1875. See James F. Harris, A Study in the Theory and Practice of German Liberalism (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984) 14.
8. Most of these dates are approximate. Many are contradicted in East Texas: Its History and Its Makers, by T. C. Richardson, published in 1940 by the Lewis Historical Publishing Company of New York.
9. See the Handbook of Texas online entries for Weatherford (http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/WW/hew3.html) and Isaac Sanger (www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/SS/fsa66.html). The latter indicates that the Sangers “encountered anti-Semitic prejudice” in Weatherford.
10. Morris tells this story in “A Letter from a Texas Pioneer” in The Menorah Journal 24, no. 2, (Spring 1936): 197.
11. The date comes from ibid., 201. The “letter” is notably short on dates.
12. David G. McComb, Galveston: A History (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1986), 92–94.
13. See www.genforum.familytreemaker.com/cgi-bin/print.cgi?baum::746.html.
14. “A Letter from a Texas Pioneer,” 203.
15. Again, much in this sequence is approximate. See T. C. Richardson, East Texas: Its History and Its Makers (New York: Lewis Historical Publishing Company, 1940), 418–420.
16. The timing is confusing. Morris Lasker recalls that his letter reached Eduard on the very day that Eduard was acquitted of the charge of lèse-majesté. But Eduard was never tried for this crime. Perhaps Morris was confusing Eduard’s story with that of German socialist Ferdinand Lasalle, who was jailed for that alleged crime in 1874 and released in 1875. That timing is close for Morris’s story. See Hayes, “The History of German Socialism Reconsidered,” 73.
17. Box 99, Folder 2, John Gunther papers, University of Chicago.
18. Snyder, “Bismarck and the Lasker Resolution, 1884,” 54.
19. In 1880, Galveston had 22,248 residents, more than any other Texas city. From The Texas Almanac online, www.texasalmanac.com/history/highlights/html, accessed Feb. 17, 2005.
20. McComb, Galveston: A History, 47.
21. See Eric Larsen, Isaac’s Storm: The Drowning of Galveston (London: Fourth Estate, 1999), 13.
22. Ibid., 49.
23. Ibid., 63–64.
24. “A Letter from a Texas Pioneer,” 194.
25. Box 99, Folder 2, Gunther papers.
26. Elizabeth Hayes Turner, Women, Culture, and Community: Religion and Reform in Galveston, 1880–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press. 1997), 143.
27. Herman D. Allman, A Unique Institution: The Story of the National Farm School (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1935). http://campus.devalcol.edu/library/archives/uniqueinstitution/chapter8.htm.
28. Morris Lasker, letter to Albert Lasker, December 23, 1914.
29. Sparkes interview with Ralph Sollitt, November 5, 1937, 17.
30. Ibid., 18.
CHAPTER TWO
1. See “John H. Reagan and Early Regulation,” Texas State Library & Archives Commission, www.tsl.state.tx.us/exhibits/railroad/early/page1.html.
2. John Gunther’s Taken at the Flood: The Story of Albert D. Lasker (New York: Harper, 1960), 30.
3. Ibid., 18.
4. John Gunther interview with Loula Lasker, Box 104, Folder 20, John Gunther papers, University of Chicago.
5. Sparkes, 50.
6. Gunther interview with Loula Lasker.
7. Sparkes interview with Mrs. Charles Haynes (formerly Miss Ann Austin), May 12, 1938, 5.
8. Albert Lasker and Boyden Sparkes, My Interest in You, unpublished manuscript, 15. The “sheenie” reference comes from a recollection by Lasker that Sparkes chose not to include in his Galveston chapter.
9. Sparkes, 192.
10. Gunther, Taken at the Flood, 28. Given that Lasker’s children reviewed this biography, the charges seem to have had merit.
11. If this building project came hard on the heels of the great Galveston fire of November 1885—in which 568 buildings, including Morris Lasker’s first mansion, were destroyed—then Albert Lasker must have been closer to six years old than nine. See Gary Cartwright, Galveston: A History of the Island (New York: Atheneum, 1991), 149–150.
12. Sparkes, 21.
13. Sparkes, 178.
14. Lasker and Sparkes, My Interest in You, 28
15. Ibid., 30.
16. See “Ball High School,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_High_School.
17. Sparkes interview with Haynes, 4.
18. Sparkes, 57.
19. Sparkes interview with Haynes, 8.
20. Sparkes, 59.
21. Nathan Miller, New World Coming: The 1920s and the Making of Modern America (New York: Scribner, 2003), 99.
22. This is Ralph Sollitt’s version, as told to Sparkes (pp. 6–7). Sollitt was simply relating the story that Lasker had told him, although with obvious skepticism.
23. Philippe Lorin, Five Giants of Advertising (New York: Assouline Publishing, 2001), 8–9. John Gunther was taken in by this story as well (Taken at the Flood, 34–35).
24. Geoffrey C. Ward, Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 13–14.
25. Lasker and Sparkes, My Interest in You, 32.
26. Reminiscences of Albert Lasker, in the Columbia University Oral History Research Office Collection (hereafter “Albert Lasker oral history, CUOHROC”), 22.
27. Lasker later told Boyden Sparkes that he received his high school diploma only because the geometry teacher, a Mr. Underwood, agreed to give Lasker an individual “examination.” The interview took place at Underwood’s home. Underwood was smoking his pipe, and Lasker asked if he could try the pipe. Underwood agreed, Lasker became “deathly ill,” and the examination was abruptly canceled. Underwood gave Lasker a passing grade, and he was able to graduate.
28. In subsequent years, Debs would mount five campaigns for president of the United States as an avowed Socialist, the last—in 1920—from a federal jail cell in Atlanta.
29. See “The Debs Matter,” Galveston Daily News, September 16, 1896; and “Debs Is Exonerated,” Galveston Daily News, September 22, 1896.
30. This story also shows up in Lorin, Five Giants of Advertising, 7.
31. Gunther, Taken at the Flood, 3.
32. Albert Lasker oral history, CUOHROC, 5.
33. Gunther, Taken at the Flood, 35.
34. Mark Muhich, “Link to Isle Culture’s Origin Rediscovered,” reprinted with permission from the Galveston County Daily News, http://mgaia.com/images/ESLevy/LevyNews.htm.
35. J. S. Gallegly, Footlights on the Border: The Galveston and Houston Stage Before 1900 (The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1962), 219 and 228. Gallegly’s remarkable book lists every theatrical performance in Galveston and Houston from 1838 through 1900.
36. Sparkes, 234.
37. Albert Lasker oral history, CUOHROC, 10.
38. Ibid., 6. Certainly, the Galveston reporters—like their counterparts almost everywhere else in the world—were a hard-drinking, hard-partying bunch, and Albert seems to have fallen under their spell.
39. Spa
rkes interview with Sollitt, April 22, 1938, 4.
40. Albert Lasker oral history, CUOHROC, 10.
41. Ibid., 11.
CHAPTER THREE
1. John Gunther, Taken at the Flood: The Story of Albert D. Lasker (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960), 39. Gunther’s account of Lasker’s early years in Chicago is full of interesting details, mostly from unattributed sources.
2. Sparkes, 98.
3. Much of this description of Chicago in the second half of the nineteenth century is from Emmett Dedmon’s colorful Fabulous Chicago (New York: Random House, 1953); and Timothy B. Spears’s Chicago Dreaming: Midwesterners and the City, 1871–1919 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). Dedmon describes the Chicago Fire in great detail (95–109).
4. Spears, Chicago Dreaming, xvi.
5. Rob Paral, “Chicago’s Immigrants Break Old Patterns,” www.migrationinformation.org/usfocus/display.cfm?ID=160.
6. “Hold your heads up,” Debs wrote to his parents from prison. “Don’t be in the least anxious. I am only to be envied.” See Letter of Eugene Debs, vol. 1, J. Robert Constantine, ed. (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 82.
7. Quoted in Dedmon, Fabulous Chicago, 186.
8. Ibid, 203.
9. Ibid, 221–225.
10. See “The Wizard of Oz, An American Fairy Tale,” at http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/oz/ozsect1.html.
11. Spears, Chicago Dreaming, 16–17.
12. See the entire poem online at http://risa.stanford.edu/chicago.php.
13. “Rotten to the Core,” Chicago Daily Tribune, March 5, 1896, 12.
14. “Chicago Is Enveloped in Smoke,” Chicago Daily Tribune, December 2, 1898, 3.
15. “Chicago Real Estate,” Chicago Daily Tribune, May 29, 1898, 26. Schlesinger & Mayer hired architect Louis Sullivan to produce an ornate building; unfortunately, by the time it was completed in 1904, the company couldn’t afford it, and it was taken over by rival Carson, Pirie, Scott—a setting that was soon to serve as the backdrop for a dramatic episode in Albert Lasker’s life.
The Man Who Sold America: The Amazing (but True!) Story of Albert D. Lasker and the Creation of the Advertising Century Page 48
