This book parts that curtain to reveal the man behind it—the real and extraordinary Albert Davis Lasker: the man who sold America.
Chapter One
The Orator and the Entrepreneur
ALBERT LASKER’S ninth birthday party—on May Day, 1889—provides a glimpse of life in Victorian Galveston, Texas, as lived by a fortunate and precocious child.
That afternoon, at 5:00 p.m., in response to a written invitation from “Master Albert Lasker,” more than fifty children assembled on the rolling lawn of his father’s house. His parents, Morris and Nettie, supervised games for the first hour of the party: the ritual May Pole dance followed. Next came the crowning of the May Queen, which (according to a reporter in attendance) was of great interest to the girls, whose hearts went “pit a pat” with anticipation: “A large chair, garlanded with beautiful flowers, and arranged in the center of the lawn, answer the purpose of a throne, upon which the queen reigned during her coronation, Master Albert Lasker encircling her brow with a floral wreath, after making a very flowery speech full of spring poetry and beautiful sentiment.”1
Albert Lasker’s story is rooted in the bustling port city of Galveston. There he was raised and schooled. There he got his first exposure to the tantalizing and disreputable world of journalism, and also to its staid and slightly more respectable cousin: advertising. There he first stretched his entrepreneurial wings and developed passions—including baseball, drama, poker, politics, and power—that would endure.
But the broader story of Lasker’s life begins in the small Prussian town where his father, aunts, and uncles were born, and in Germany, where Albert was born in 1880 while his parents were visiting Europe. His business acumen, his entrepreneurial drive, and his desire to make a difference in the world can all be traced back to the traditions and values of his extended family.
Those characteristics also reflect the conflicting legacies of his father Morris and his uncle Eduard. Born ten years apart, these two brothers pursued strikingly different paths. Eduard established himself as one of the most renowned and controversial German politicians of the nineteenth century; Morris made his mark as a pioneer and entrepreneur in the American Southwest. Eduard died a bachelor; Morris fathered six children.
But they shared more than a name. Both were ambitious. Both experienced major triumphs and devastating defeats, and both suffered from extended periods of profound mental distress. And although their two lives were very different, the shadows of both can be seen in Albert Lasker’s life.
Eduard Lasker was born to Daniel and Rebecca Lasker in 1829. The family lived in Jarocin, a largely Catholic town that had a sizeable Jewish community of around 160 families. Daniel was the proprietor of a nail shop and also part-owner of a glass store and a refinery. But as Jews, his family remained distinctly second-class citizens.
The family had a strong tradition of scholarship; many of Daniel’s ancestors had been respected rabbis and teachers. Eduard was a highly intelligent child, with a special talent for Talmudic studies, and the family hoped that he, too, would become a rabbi. But Eduard drifted away from the religious life and at age sixteen left home to attend the University of Breslau, where—during the revolutions of 1848—he became a political activist. At one point he quit school to publish several issues of a radical periodical, Der Sozialist.2 After several years of law study in Breslau, Eduard left for London in 1853, his personal protest against the stifling political climate of Prussia, which was then halfway through the twenty-one-year rule of the deeply conservative King Frederick William IV.
Exile changed Eduard. The more time he spent away from his native country, the more nationalistic his tendencies became. Convinced that his talents should be put to use in the service of his state, he returned to Prussia in 1856, and took a job as a court lawyer in Berlin.
In 1861, following Frederick William’s death, his younger brother William ascended to the throne. A year later, he appointed as his prime minister the aristocratic and conservative politician Otto van Bismarck. Over the next three decades, Bismarck pursued an aggressively nationalistic strategy of German unification and also sought to expand Prussia’s influence over the unifying states. Successful on both counts, Bismarck not only created the German empire but also helped define its character. Pessimistic and defensive, he saw chaos along the unruly fringes of his emerging empire, and repressed it whenever and wherever he could.
In 1865, Eduard made his first foray into politics, winning a seat in the Landtag, the Prussian lower house of government. Two years later, he was also elected to the national German parliament, the Reichstag. Eduard supported Bismarck’s unification policies, but strongly opposed most of Bismarck’s domestic and economic policies. Eduard advocated a state guided by the rule of law rather than by administrative fiat, and this philosophy soon placed him on a collision course with the autocratic Bismarck.
Unyielding—even rigid—in his public life, Eduard was a study in contradictions in his private life. “His personal appearance is . . . flawed by a lack of dignified calm,” wrote one of his peers. “He is always in rapid motion.”3 At other times, though, he was nearly immobilized by depression. His drastic mood swings did not impede him in politics, where he won recognition as a skillful orator and forceful personality. “Without a doubt,” a colleague commented in 1874, “he was the best known and most popular member of the Reichstag when I entered that body.”4
As a politician and statesman, he achieved remarkable success, especially in a society that actively marginalized Jews. But as the decades passed, Eduard found himself increasingly isolated on the left fringe of Prussian politics.5 He became a frequent target of attacks by Bismarck, who referred to him as “the sickness of Germany.”6 Bismarck even instructed his own son, Herbert, to run against Eduard in an election in Lasker’s home district in 1879. Eduard trounced Herbert, which only further antagonized the Iron Chancellor.
This victory was the high-water mark of Lasker’s political power. Although he remained in the Reichstag, he slid into political eclipse, and his physical and mental health deteriorated. For several years, his friends had been worrying about a “nervous fever” that periodically seemed to overtake and disable him.7 In the spring of 1883, in an effort both to restore his mind and body—and to renew his relationship with his younger brother Morris—Eduard set off on an extended tour of the United States.
Eduard and Morris, separated by ten years, grew up in two different families. Their mother Rebecca died soon after Morris’s birth, and Morris was raised by a stepmother with whom he clashed regularly. Twelve years later, Morris lost his father to the cholera epidemic of 1852, and for the next four years he lived with an elder sister and her husband while attending the local school.
Although a highly intelligent child, Morris did not share Eduard’s intellectual ambitions. At sixteen, he boarded a ship bound for America. His relatives in Jarocin wouldn’t hear from him again for twenty years.
After a brutal, storm-buffeted Atlantic crossing that lasted thirteen weeks, Lasker’s ship limped into Fortress Monroe, Virginia. The young adventurer traveled twenty miles south to Portsmouth, where he got a job clerking in a dry goods store. Next he traveled north to New York, where he scraped by until the financial panic of 1857 wiped out his meager savings.8
Morris then again headed south—first to Florida and then Georgia, where he met and became friendly with a young man named Philip Sanger. Lasker spent three years in Georgia and the surrounding states, peddling goods in the country and serving as a distributor for importers based in the coastal towns and cities. He endured many long hours traveling by wagon to small towns and backwoods homesteads, and took advantage of those slow hours to read voraciously. Years later, he would tell his children of the times his horse and cart wound up in a roadside ditch because he was focused more on the book in his hand than on the road ahead of him.
Morris also told them of a Christmas dinner he ate on a plantation in North Carolina. In the rigid Southern
social hierarchy of that time, peddlers ranked above the slaves who labored on those plantations, but far below their customers. Forbidden to eat with the family, Morris was offered a seat in the kitchen. He happened to overhear the daughter of the family lamenting the lack of Latin and Greek tutors to help her prepare for an upcoming exam. After the meal, he boldly made his way into the dining room and offered his services as a tutor—a proposal that the family accepted.
Perhaps in telling that story, Morris Lasker hoped to teach his children the value of an education. Perhaps he was also telling them that an adventurer in a new world needed to see things in new ways, apply his skills creatively, and even break the rules.
Tantalized by tales of limitless opportunity in faraway Texas, Morris decided to travel into the wilder reaches of his adopted nation. He hopped a train to New Orleans and then boarded a steamer to Shreveport, Louisiana. From there, he took an overland stage to McKinney, Texas, about thirty-five miles north of a small outpost called Dallas. He carried a letter of introduction to the firm of Baum & Sanger, written by Philip Sanger to his brother Isaac, a joint owner of the company.
But when Morris arrived in McKinney—probably in the early months of 1860—he was told that Baum & Sanger had moved to Weatherford, a small frontier town some sixty miles west of Dallas. Weatherford had only been in existence about four years, but because it was well situated on the crest of a divide between the Trinity and Brazos river valleys, it already boasted a thriving business community.9 Here the firm of Baum & Sanger was carving out a strong position by offering fair prices and ready barters to its customers.
Lasker quickly found employment at Baum & Sanger. On his new employee’s first day on the job, Isaac Sanger instructed him in his routine—walking to the post office and picking up the mail, then minding the store while Sanger went out for breakfast.
A few days later, that daily walk to the post office almost got Morris killed. A local competitor, determined to ruin Baum & Sanger, had secretly been writing letters to a Mrs. Hendricks, proclaiming his passion for her and begging her to write to him at Post Office Box 10—Baum & Sanger’s box.
When Mr. Hendricks discovered the letters, he burst into the store just after Morris had retrieved the mail and Sanger had departed for breakfast. Hendricks demanded that the young clerk confirm the store’s mail box number. “Number 10,” Morris innocently replied—at which point the wild-eyed man pulled out a Bowie knife and ordered Morris to “get on his knees and pray,” as he had but seconds left to live.
Hendricks charged; Morris leapt for the door. Luckily, just at that moment, a local army officer walked into the store. He subdued the enraged husband and soon convinced him that Morris—who had only recently arrived in town—couldn’t possibly be guilty of any wrongdoing.
It was a startling introduction to life on the frontier.10
Morris quickly demonstrated his worth to Baum & Sanger. But larger events were overtaking him: the smoldering regional divisions that had afflicted his adopted country for decades were now intensifying into civil war. Casting the first ballot of his life, Lasker voted against secession. But Texas voted overwhelmingly to leave the Union, and when the terrible national conflict began, Lasker joined the 2nd Texas Cavalry Regiment, under the command of Colonel John G. Ford. The young German immigrant recorded almost nothing about this period of his life, but we know he saw active service in the battles to retake the port cities of Galveston and Sabine Pass from Union troops and also participated in successful campaigns in Louisiana.
At the end of the war, Lasker renewed his acquaintance with Isaac Sanger, who tried to convince him to peddle dry goods for him and offered to loan him enough goods to get started. While Lasker was considering this offer, however, he met up with a man looking for a partner to invest in a store in Galveston. Lasker bought in, and that move paid off handsomely, quickly turning his $150 investment into $1,500. But Lasker became worried about his partner’s ethics, so in the early months of 1866, he abandoned Galveston and again went into business with the Sangers in the town of Millican, some 135 miles inland.11
Several profitable months later—probably in the spring or early summer of 1867—he sold his interest with the intention of returning to Galveston, where he planned to set up a wholesale grocery business. But this plan was disrupted by an outbreak of yellow fever. Although many plagues had swept through Galveston and other Southern coastal cities, none was as virulent as yellow fever, a mosquito-borne virus that often proved fatal. A particularly wet spring and summer, as well as the presence of large numbers of people in the city (including occupying federal troops) who had never before been exposed to the “yellow jack,” caused a terrifying infection rate and death toll. One-third of Galveston’s population fled the city. Of those who stayed, three-quarters caught the disease, and more than a thousand died between July and September.12
Morris Lasker hoped to wait out the epidemic in Millican, but yellow jack soon engulfed that town as well. Both Elias Baum—cofounder of Baum & Sanger—and his wife Dorethea died there. The postmaster closed the post office, fleeing along with most of the rest of the town’s population. “ . . . ’Twill be useless to send mail matter to this place from this date,” he wrote to his superiors, “as no one will be here to receive it.”13
Lasker and the Sangers decamped to Bryan, about twenty miles to the northwest, but the disease followed them there. Two of the Sanger brothers fell ill and died almost immediately, leading to the extended family’s effective imprisonment—euphemistically described as a “quarantine”—in their own store. (A waiter from a nearby hotel brought meals to the door, and cautiously retrieved the used dishes.) The local people were so terrified, Lasker later recalled, that they “made it very difficult for us to complete the necessary arrangements for [the Sanger brothers’] burial.”14
Finally the first hard frosts of fall arrived, killing the mosquitoes and temporarily ending the scourge. Morris Lasker packed his bags, bade goodbye to the Sangers, and once again made his way to Galveston.15
In 1876, Morris married the niece of a wealthy Galveston businessman who was also in the wholesale business. Nettie Davis, a stunningly beautiful young woman with deep-set brown eyes, was one of nine children of German and Russian immigrants living in Rochester, New York. While visiting her relatives in Galveston, she caught Morris’s eye. Her father was a tailor who found it difficult to support his large family, and when Lasker asked for her hand, permission was quickly granted. Morris was then thirty-five years old; Nettie was just seventeen.
About the time that Morris and Nettie had their first child (Edward, born in 1877), Morris decided that it was time to reestablish contact with his German relatives.16 Those relatives, including older brother Eduard, had long since concluded that Morris was dead. Morris sent a letter to Eduard, regaling him with tales of his business success and his settled family life.
From that point on, Eduard and Morris made efforts to stay in touch. Morris visited his ancestral home a few years later; according to family legend, he appeared at his family’s door in knee-high cowboy boots, a bright red shirt, and a sombrero. He had a hard time convincing his family that this gaudy stranger was indeed the long-lost Morris.
Nettie suffered from bouts of poor health, and when she became pregnant with her second child in the fall of 1879, Morris decided that she and the family should spend the last months of her pregnancy in Germany, near a spa, so that she would be closer to skilled doctors if anything went wrong.
The precaution was unnecessary: Albert Davis Lasker was born uneventfully on May 1, 1880, at the home of an uncle in Freiburg.17 When Nettie was sufficiently recovered, the family made the long journey back to Galveston.
Eduard Lasker’s first visit to the United States, which began in the summer of 1883, lasted more than half a year. Eduard was surprised and pleased to find that in the United States he was considered a major German political figure. He received a warm ovation from German Americans at the opening session of Con
gress. He gave speeches to enthusiastic groups across the country, and in September served as one of several dignitaries who helped inaugurate the Northern Pacific Railroad’s transcontinental service to San Francisco.
He also visited his younger brother in Galveston. There he became reacquainted with his three-year-old nephew, Albert, whom he had only seen as a newborn.
This was to be the last time that uncle and nephew would meet. The fifty-five-year-old Eduard returned to the East Coast, where he resumed his ambitious schedule of speaking engagements, addressing, among others, an audience at New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital on New Year’s Eve on the subject of the Jewish philanthropy. On the evening of January 4, 1884, he suffered a massive heart attack on a New York City street and died.
“German liberalism loses one of its most distinguished leaders,” lamented the New York Tribune. But on instructions from Otto von Bismarck, not a single emissary of the German government, federal or state, attended his funeral in Berlin. The U.S. House of Representatives attempted to send a message to the Reichstag, offering condolences on the death of Lasker, whose passing was mourned by “lovers of liberty throughout the world.” Bismarck returned the message to the German ambassador in Washington, noting coolly that he disagreed with the judgments it contained. A minor diplomatic uproar ensued, which Bismarck shrugged off with a caustic question: “Am I to make myself my enemy’s postman?”18
The Man Who Sold America: The Amazing (but True!) Story of Albert D. Lasker and the Creation of the Advertising Century Page 2