The Man Who Sold America: The Amazing (but True!) Story of Albert D. Lasker and the Creation of the Advertising Century
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10. Sparkes interview with Don Francisco, October 11, 1937.
11. In one of his 1937 interviews with Boyden Sparkes, Francisco said that Lord & Thomas had originally split the walnut account with McCann Erickson, with the rival agency handling the outdoor advertising and Lord & Thomas running the magazine advertising—an inherently awkward situation that was eventually resolved in McCann’s favor. But the real problem, Francisco suggested, was that his organization was undergunned, and couldn’t cater adequately to the general manager of the walnut growers: “We gave them fine advertising and good service, but we lacked manpower to give him the extra ten percent of contact and service that would have made him delighted.”
12. “Predicts Leviathan, Refitted, Will Pay,” New York Times, January 19, 1922, 15.
13. MIC 3 Warren G. Harding Papers [microform], letter from Albert D. Lasker and W. H. Benson, May 8, 1923: Ohio Historical Society.
14. “Assails Publicity of Shipping Board,” New York Times, January 21, 19, 3.
15. Sparkes interview with Ralph Sollitt, 49.
16. This headline, and all of the statistics in this section, are from Frank O. Braynard, World’s Greatest Ship: The Story of the Leviathan, Vol. 1 (New York: South Street Seaport Museum, 1974).
17. “Calls Leviathan Biggest of Ships,” New York Times, April 12, 1923, 20.
18. Braynard, World’s Greatest Ship, Vol. 2, 48.
19. A copy of George Christian’s invitation—which looks like an invitation to a society wedding—is in the Harding papers. MIC 3 Warren G. Harding Papers [microform], invitation from Albert D. Lasker to George B. Christian, May 1923: Ohio Historical Society.
20. Albert Lasker letter to Frank W. Mondell (Director, War Finance Corporation), May 22, 1923, Box 15, USSB records. But Lasker made exceptions—as, for example, when he invited C. C. Hopkins to bring along his wife. See Albert Lasker letter to Hopkins, May 29, 1923, Box 30, USSB records.
21. Albert Lasker letter to Fiorello H. La Guardia, June 7, 1923, Box 25, USSB records.
22. “Lasker Answers ‘Junket’ Critics,” New York Times, June 15, 1923, 1
23. Albert Lasker letter to T. H. Caraway, June 16, 1923, Box 30, USSB records.
24. Albert Lasker letter to Douglas Smith, June 14, 1923, Box 30, USSB records.
25. Sparkes interview with Sollitt. Sollitt recalled that Lasker turned the chore of picking the passengers over to him, and “didn’t have a thing to do with it,” but the guest list—dominated by Lasker’s business acquaintances and political cronies—would seem to undercut this assertion.
26. MIC 3 Warren G. Harding Papers [microform], Edward P. Farley biography: Ohio Historical Society.
27. Braynard, World’s Greatest Ship, Volume 2, 261.
28. Sparkes interview with Sollitt.
29. Ralph Sollitt later told Boyden Sparkes that Lasker had asked the Gibbs brothers to recommend the best captain they could find, and Hartley was their choice.
30. “Aboard the Steamship Leviathan,” New York Times, June 20, 1923, 1.
31. Sparkes interview with Sarnoff.
32. Ibid.
33. “Leviathan Breaks World Speed Record in 25-Hour Spurt,” New York Times, June 24, 1923, 1.
34. “Expensive and Yet Profitable,” New York Times, June 23, 1923, 10.
35. “The Presidency: The Kitchen Cabinet,” Time, May 12, 1923.
36. Albert Lasker letter to Hiram Johnson, May 22, 1923, Box 30, USSB records.
37. Albert Lasker letter to W. C. Teagle, April 12, 1923, Box 29, USSB records.
38. Albert Lasker, The Lasker Story: As He Told It (Chicago: Advertising Publications, 1963), 62.
39. From Edward Lasker’s unpublished autobiography, 28.
40. Robert K. Murray, The Harding Era: Warren G. Harding and His Administration (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1969), 444.
41. From Edward Lasker’s unpublished autobiography, 28–29.
42. Francis Russell, The Shadow of Blooming Grove: Warren G. Harding in His Times (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), 626
43. Reminiscences of Albert Lasker, in the Columbia University Oral History Research Office Collection, 139.
44. Albert Lasker letter to C. C. Hopkins, May, 29, 1923, Box 30, USSB records.
45. Albert Lasker letter to (brother) Edward Lasker, June 1, 1923, Box 30, USSB records.
46. Lasker, The Lasker Story, 63.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
1. Albert Lasker letter to C. C. Hopkins, May 22, 1922, Box 26, Shipping Board (USSB) records.
2. Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 2.
3. Stephen Fox, The Mirror Makers: A History Of American Advertising and Its Creators (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1984), 75–77.
4. Ayer billings figures are from Ralph M. Hower’s The History of an Advertising Agency, 577; Lord & Thomas figures are from exhibits in the Schultz collection. Additional agency billing totals (all partial) are available online.
5. Fox, The Mirror Makers, 84–86.
6. Richard M. Fried, The Man Everybody Knew: Bruce Barton and the Making of Modern America (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2005), 55–56.
7. Albert Lasker, The Lasker Story: As He Told It (Chicago: Advertising Publications, 1963), 63.
8. Ibid., 89.
9. Albert Lasker letter to Herbert P. Cohn, February 12, 1923, Box 29, USSB records. Certainly, Lasker once again had large ambitions for his agency. A January 3, 1924, letter from W. G. Irwin to Lasker indicates that Lasker recently had told Irwin that his goal was to double Lord & Thomas’s business.
10. Albert Lasker letter to Claude C. Hopkins, June 4, 1923, Box 30, USSB records.
11. A February 23, 1923, letter from Lasker to Hopkins (Box 29, USSB records) makes passing reference to Lasker’s dream of someday being Hopkins’s “manager”—probably in the sense of a newspaper’s managing editor—so that Hopkins could “win as outstanding a place in the editorial field as you did in advertising.”
12. Fox, The Mirror Makers, 113.
13. Heinrich Thomas and Bob Batchelor, Kotex, Kleenex, Huggies: Kimberly-Clark and the Consumer Revolution in American Business (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004).
14. Ibid., 56.
15. Lord & Thomas, International Cellucotton Products Company (Kotex Division) account notes.
16. Marchand, Advertising the American Dream, 311.
17. Taylor Adams, “How Lasker Maneuvered for Kotex Ad Acceptance in ‘Ladies’ Home Journal,’” Advertising Age, June 17, 1974.
18. Ibid.
19. Lasker, The Lasker Story, 104–105.
20. Wallace Meyer statement, September 21, 1960, Meyer Collection, State Historical Society of Wisconsin. From the Museum of Menstruation and Women’s Health Web site, www.mum.org/kotdispl.htm.
21. Thomas and Batchelor, Kotex, Kleenex, Huggies.
22. Sparkes, 223.
23. Tobacco timeline Web site, http://www.tobacco.org/resources/history/Tobacco_Historynotes.html#aacamel.
24. Ibid.
25. New York office–based Mark O’Dea sent a package of Blue Boar cigarettes to Lasker in the spring of 1923. “I don’t think I have smoked half a dozen cigarettes since I was born,” Lasker wrote in response, “therefore, I am no judge of the quality of cigarettes.” See Albert Lasker letter to Mark O’Dea, May 7, 1923, Box 30, USSB records.
26. From Sold American, American Tobacco’s official corporate history (no author listed), printed in 1954, 35.
27. Larry Tye, The Father of Spin: Edward Bernays and the Birth of Public Relations (New York: Henry Holt & Co, 1998), 27–28.
28. George Washington Hill letter to Albert Lasker, February 21, 1935, Schultz collection.
29. Sparkes interview with Coons, 23.
30. Or, in contemporary terms, that “addiction.”
31. Reminiscences of Albert Lasker, in the Columbia University Oral History Research Office Collec
tion (hereafter “Albert Lasker oral history, CUOHROC”), 105.
32. Richard Kluger, Ashes to Ashes: America’s Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), 76.
33. Albert Lasker oral history, CUOHROC, 108.
34. Ibid., 108–109.
35. Ibid., 108. Although Lasker sometimes took credit for refining the testimonial, that technique was more often associated with J. Walter Thompson, which used celebrity-testimonial campaigns to promote Pond’s cold cream (1924) and Lux soap (1927), among many other products.
36. Ibid., 109.
37. Ibid., 110.
38. Ibid., 111.
39. Fox, The Mirror Makers, 115.
40. “Babies’ Blood,” Time, May 6, 1929, www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,732326,00.html.
41. Fox, The Mirror Makers, 116.
42. Some of these statistics are from the minutes of the Committee on Finance and Investment of the University of Chicago, July 7, 1943.
43. Edward Lasker, autobiographical manuscript, 40.
44. Sparkes interview with Hertz, 8.
45. Ibid.
46. Sparkes, 199.
47. BDO at this point was only two years away from its merger with the Batten agency, which created a powerhouse—BBDO—that was briefly the largest agency in the country.
48. This Young & Rubicam summary is drawn from Fox, The Mirror Makers, 132–137.
49. “Coalition,” Time, June 14, 1926, www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,751559,00.html.
50. Sparkes interview with Sollitt, 10.
51. Thomas F. Logan letter to David Sarnoff, December 26, year unknown, Sarnoff collection.
52. Sparkes interview with Sarnoff, 4.
53. Kenneth Bilby, The General: David Sarnoff and the Rise of the Communications Industry (New York: Harper & Row, 1986), 268.
54. Sparkes interview with Sarnoff, 6.
55. “Coalition.”
56. The Logan billings are from Elmer Bullis, interviewed by Sparkes, 12.
57. From the August 10, 1928, edition of the Brooklyn Standard Union, www.bklyn-genealogy-info.com/Newspaper/BSU/1928.Death.August.html.
58. This and following Sarnoff quotes are from Sarnoff’s interview with Sparkes, 7.
59. From John Gunther’s notes on an interview with Sarnoff, Box 105, Folder 12, John Gunther papers, University of Chicago.
60. Sparkes interview with Coons, 14.
61. Ibid., 19
62. Sparkes interview with Sollitt, 43.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
1. “Foreman-Lasker,” New York Times, October 13, 1927.
2. Walter Roth, “Demise of the Foreman-State Bank: Was It ‘Shylock in Reverse’?” Chicago Jewish History 27, no. 3 (Fall 2003).
3. John Gunther, Taken at the Flood: The Story of Albert D. Lasker (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960), 184.
4. Sparkes, 277.
5. Letter from Edward Lasker to John Gunther, December 17, 1959, Schultz Collection.
6. John Gunther papers, University of Chicago; Box 104, Folder 15, notes on Hertz intervew.
7. “Advertising Forecasts Better Business in ’29,” Wall Street Journal, January 4, 1929.
8. Sparkes, 41.
9. “Week-End in the Loop,” Fortune, September 1931.
10. “In Chicago,” Time, June 15, 1931.
11. Sparkes, 276.
12. Ibid.
13. “Chicago Bank Status Clears,” Wall Street Journal, June 10, 1931; and “3 More Chicago Banks Closed,” Wall Street Journal, June 11, 1931.
14. “Chicago First National,” Wall Street Journal, July 17, 1931.
15. Sparkes, 395.
16. Sparkes, 278.
17. Albert Lasker letter to Mary Lasker, October 29, 1935, Schultz Collection.
18. Sparkes, 128.
19. Very little is known about the specifics of Mary’s departure.
20. Edward Lasker’s unpublished memoirs, 69.
21. Letter from George Washington Hill to Albert Lasker, March 9, 1938, Schultz Collection.
22. Sparkes interview with Templin, 40.
23. Claude Hopkins claims in My Life in Advertising that he came up with this slogan, but Lord & Thomas’s account history contradicts this (Claude C. Hopkins, My Life in Advertising [Lincolnwood IL: NTC Business Book, 1991]).
24. Hopkins, My Life in Advertising, 154.
25. William J. Gies, “Pepsodent: Ancient History That Commercial Dental Journals Continue to Ignore,” Journal of the American Medical Association 68 (April 28, 1917): 1278.
26. “Irium-Plated Alger,” Time, April 10, 1944, www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,796571-1,00.html.
27. Hopkins, My Life in Advertising, 157.
28. Lord & Thomas, Pepsodent client account notes, January 1939.
29. This brief history comes largely from The Museum of Broadcast Communication Encyclopedia of Radio, Volume III, ed. Christopher H. Sterling (Michael C. Keith, consulting editor), 1424–1427.
30. “Sold American!” The First Fifty Years, copyright 1954 by the American Tobacco Company, 85.
31. “The American Tobacco Co.,” Fortune, December 1936, 154.
32. Ibid., 97.
33. All Templin comments are from the Sparkes interview with Templin, 45–47.
34. Charles Luckman, Twice in a Lifetime: From Soap to Skyscrapers (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), 123.
35. Michele Hilmes, Radio Voices: American Broadcasting, 1922–1952 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 85.
36. Elizabeth McLeod, The Original Amos ’n’ Andy: Freeman Gosden, Charles Correll and the 1928–1943 Radio Serial (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2005), quoted on Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amos_N_Andy#_note-0.
37. Sparkes interview with Templin, 50.
38. Hilmes, Radio Voices, 86.
39. Ibid., 86.
40. Lord & Thomas, Pepsodent client account notes, January 1939.
41. From the “Stray Facts” column in the Wall Street Journal, June 5, 1933, 3.
42. “Radio Spenders,” Time, March 18, 1935.
43. Hummert is considered by many to be the third of the three great copywriters whom Lasker discovered, along with John Kennedy and Claude Hopkins. Hill Blackett was also trained at Lord & Thomas; he took the Ovaltine account with him when he left Lasker’s agency.
44. See Jim Cox, Frank and Anne Hummert’s Radio Factory: The Programs and Personalities of Broadcasting’s Most Prolific Producers (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2003).
45. Sparkes interview with Templin, 55.
46. Luckman, Twice in a Lifetime, 131.
47. Sparkes interview with Noyes, 27.
48. Sparkes, 339.
49. Sparkes interview with Noyes, 28.
50. Luckman, Twice in a Lifetime, 136.
51. Bob Hope, as told to Pete Martin, Bob Hope’s Own Story: Have Tux, Will Travel (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1954), 233.
52. Luckman, Twice in a Lifetime, 140.
53. William Robert Faith, Bob Hope, a Life in Comedy (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, Perseus Books Group, 1982), 104.
54. Ibid., 105.
55. Luckman, Twice in a Lifetime, 148.
56. Ibid.
57. Sparkes interview with Templin, 40.
58. Luckman, Twice in a Lifetime, 151.
59. Ibid., 172.
60. Ibid., 174.
61. Ibid.
62. Lord & Thomas, Kleenex client account history, January 1939.
63. The celebrated Union ironclad warship, the U. S. S. Monitor—often described as a “hatbox on a raft”—may have loaned its name to the Monitor Top.
64. See the history of General Electric’s products at www.otal.umd.edu/~vg/amst205.F97/vj11/project5.html.
65. Sparkes interview with Francisco, 41–42. Francisco said that Lasker told GE’s president, Gerald Swope, that Lord & Thomas couldn’t do its best work if it wasn’t happy, and that the
agency wasn’t happy because “you fellows are picking on us all the time.”
66. This story is from the finding aid to the Frigidaire Historical Collection, MS-262, at the Paul Laurence Dunbar Library at Wright State University. The finding aid is on line at www.libraries.wright.edu/special/manuscripts/ms262.html.
67. Sparkes, 337.
68. From “Memorandum on Copy Meeting with Frigidaire Division of General Motors Corporation,” documenting meetings on September 26 and 27, 1935. The power companies also approved of frequent defrosting, which consumed more power.
69. In his autobiography, With All Its Faults (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1969), Fairfax M. Cone makes an obscure reference to Lasker and Biechler “running the [Frigidaire] advertising as an adjunct to some other aspects of the business in which the two men were deeply engaged.” See p. 129.
70. Sparkes, 337.
71. Henry Guy “Ted” Little later became chairman of the Detroit-based Campbell-Ewald agency, where he oversaw the $60 million Chevrolet account: at the time, the single biggest account in the world. See Time, October 12, 1962, “The Men on the Cover,” www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,829288-5,00.html.
72. Sparkes interview with Noyes, 24.
73. All Noyes comments are from the Sparkes interview.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
1. Carey McWilliams, Southern California: An Island on the Land (Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, 1995), 132–133.
2. This story comes from the All-Year Club’s “Account History,” written in September 1937 by Lord & Thomas’s C. W. Tarr.
3. R. Germain, “The Early Years of Community Advertising,” Journal of Nonprofit and Public Sector Marketing, 1 (1), 85–106. See Exhibit 1 (domestic U. S.examples) and page 95 (Cuba).
4. H. A. Stebbins, “Getting Away from the Commonplace in Resort Advertising,” Printers’ Ink, August 7, 1919, 31–32.
5. From the introduction to Rob Leicester Wagner, Red Ink, White Lies: The Rise and Fall of Los Angeles Newspapers, 1920–1962 (Upland, CA: Dragonflyer Press, 2000).
6. McWilliams, Southern California, 136.
7. E. B. Weiss, “Advertising a Misadvertised Community,” Printers’ Ink, July 6, 1922, 117–122.
8. William C. Garner, “Leaves from a Community Advertiser’s Experience Book,” Printers’ Ink, July 23, 1925, 77–80.