In desperation, Albert—barely eighteen years old—announced in the spring of 1898 that he was going to enlist in the Army to fight in the war that had just broken out with Spain. Morris seems to have ridiculed the notion. Albert soon gave up on the idea of enlisting, but remained determined to escape from his father, from his office, from Galveston. He found himself in increasingly open rebellion against a powerful authority figure, and he wanted to prove himself somewhere where he wouldn’t be in Morris’s shadow.
Morris finally came up with a solution that was acceptable to them both. Years earlier, he had been instrumental in helping a Chicago advertising agency, Lord & Thomas, out of a difficult situation involving a major local debt to the agency. Daniel Lord, who had traveled to Galveston to protect his agency’s interests, was both relieved and grateful. He promised Lasker that if he could ever return the favor, he would.
Now, full of concern about his son’s future and determined to keep him out of the newspaper business, Morris remembered that promise. He had only a vague understanding of what the advertising business was, but he guessed that it had to be better than journalism. He bargained hard with his son: “You go and try that,” he insisted, “and if that doesn’t work, I’ll give you my blessing to go into reporting.”40
Out of devotion to his father, Albert agreed. “He didn’t know,” he would later say, “what a hurt it was to me.” From hanging out with the hard-drinking crew in the newsroom, Albert had learned to despise the business side of the shop. “To ask a reporter to become an advertising man was as if a father had asked a daughter to enter a life of shame! I thought, ‘My father doesn’t know what he’s asking of me, but I’ll do this. I’ll go for a few weeks.’”41
Lord & Thomas agreed to give Albert a three-month trial, at a starting salary of $10 a week. Albert quickly agreed to these terms, secretly pleased at the three-month limit.
In the spring of 1898, he boarded the train for Chicago with but one goal: do his time, satisfy his father, and then be turned free, with his father’s blessing, to pursue his real passion—journalism—in New York.
Chapter Three
Success in Chicago
ALBERT LASKER arrived in Chicago on May 30, 1898, with $75 in his pocket—the money his father had given him to launch his new life.1
May 30 was Decoration Day (now called Memorial Day), and to a young man from a striving but still modest Southwestern city, the boisterous streets of Chicago—lined by soaring buildings festooned at street level with flags and bunting—were an astonishing and confounding spectacle. As he elbowed his way down Wabash Avenue to the offices of Lord & Thomas, Lasker wondered if the circus was in town.2 When he arrived at the agency, he found the doors locked for the Monday holiday.
Still, there was much to impress him in the neighborhood. The Trude Building, home to Lord & Thomas, was located on the southwest corner of North Wabash Avenue and East Randolph Street. Most of the rest of the large city block to the immediate southwest was occupied by Marshall Field’s magnificent department store, then growing into one of the largest and most important businesses in the Midwest.
A soaring sixteen stories tall, the Trude Building was owned by Alfred S. Trude, Chicago’s leading criminal lawyer, who maintained his offices there. So did an organization called the Social Democracy of America, whose recently named chairman was Eugene Debs—the very man who had given Lasker his first Galveston newspaper scoop less than two years earlier. Another tenant was the Chicago Business College, which enrolled several hundred students each year.
Towering skyscrapers, sidewalks packed with prosperous-looking crowds, the elevated railway clattering by on Wabash, the smell of money and commerce in the air even on a national holiday—this was nothing like provincial Galveston.
By the time Albert Lasker began exploring his newly adopted city, almost three decades had passed since the terrible fire of October 1871, which had burned 2,124 acres of the city’s center.3 In that conflagration, hundreds of people had been burned to death or asphyxiated. Some 17,450 homes had been destroyed, and destruction of property totaled more than $200 million. In the wake of the fire, stunned local leaders looked to New England and the East Coast (where many transplanted Chicagoans had come from) for the capital needed to rebuild. Their exaggerated claims about Chicago’s magnificent prospects—yarns that began to be spun while the embers of the ruined business district still smoldered—reinforced the city’s reputation for unabashed boosterism and first earned it an unflattering nickname: the Windy City.
And yet, Chicago was an important economic engine—for the Midwest, and for the nation—with seemingly unlimited prospects. Perched at the southwestern tip of Lake Michigan (and, by extension, the vast inland waterway of the Great Lakes) and home to one of the largest and most active rail hubs in the country, Chicago was one of the nation’s most important transportation centers. Thanks to the railroads, thousands of prairie towns supplied raw materials to Chicago’s factories and also served as a ready market for the city’s manufactured goods.4
Following the great fire, Chicago had reestablished itself as a magnet for immigrants. Some of those newcomers were Easterners who saw more opportunity in a wide-open “frontier” city than in settled cities like Boston, New York, and Philadelphia (the nation’s “second city” until overtaken by Chicago in the census of 1890). Others arrived on trains from those small towns on the prairie, desperate to escape from the drudgery and boredom of life on the farm. Still others poured in from the crowded cities of Europe, taking mostly low-paying jobs in the mills and malodorous stockyards. (As early as 1870, Chicago had the highest percentage of immigrants—48 percent—of any place in North America.5) Chicago became a city of newcomers, homesick and ambitious, eager to get on with their new lives.
This surfeit of immigrant labor, compounded by the Panic of 1873, drove down wages and touched off the first of the riots that would punctuate Chicago’s history for the next quarter-century. A rebellion by socialists in response to railroad wage cuts in 1877 was brutally suppressed by the police. Bombs were set off in train stations and on the front steps of homes of several judges in January 1886; the following month, workers called a strike against the McCormick reaper factory. Three months later, a large rally supporting striking workers in the downtown Haymarket area came to a bloody end when a Nihilist bomb killed seven police officers and injured another sixty bystanders. Police opened fire on the crowd and killed a number of the protesters.
The terrified downtown business community—not convinced that the city’s police force could protect them and their property—offered six hundred acres of prime Highland real estate to the federal government to establish a permanent military presence there. Washington agreed, and Fort Sheridan was hurriedly constructed. The next time the city erupted in protest—in the spring and summer of 1894, when factory workers went on strike against railroad-car manufacturer George Pullman—federal troops descended on the city and helped quash the rebellion. Eugene Debs, the head of the American Railways Union, was thrown into jail.6
Throughout the 1880s and into the 1890s, Chicagoans were publicly proud of their democratic, antipatrician traditions—and privately embarrassed about their city’s reputation for boorishness and provincialism. Theirs was, in the words of novelist Henry B. Fuller, “the only great city in the world to which all its great citizens have come for the avowed purpose of making money.”7 In Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son, one of author George Horace Lorimer’s fictional characters proclaims, “We don’t have much use for poetry in Chicago, except in streetcar ads.”8 Both assertions were uncomfortably close to the truth. The plutocrats who built their grand homes on Prairie Avenue hungered for financial success and little else; when they aspired to sophistication, they were mocked by their eastern cousins.
Chicago aggressively pursued the World’s Columbian Exposition—the World’s Fair—of 1893 in part to prove to the world that it was a world-class metropolis. The assertion was greeted with
a mixture of scorn and indifference in places like New York. Charles A. Dana, editor of the New York Sun, suggested that New Yorkers should pay no attention to the “nonsensical claims of that windy city.” Ward McAllister, the self-appointed arbiter of New York society and social mentor of Mrs. William Astor—grande dame of that society—contributed a series of columns to the New York World giving tips to Chicagoans about how to throw a proper party. It would be, McAllister suggested, a difficult climb for most of the Midwestern poseurs, who should not:
. . . pretend to rival the East and Old World in matters of refinement. Their growth has been too rapid for them to acquire both wealth and culture . . . The leaders of society are the successful Stock Yards magnates, Cottolene [a brand of lard shortening] manufacturers, Chicago gas trust speculators and dry goods princes. These gentlemen are undoubtedly great in business but perhaps in some cases unfamiliar with the niceties of life and difficult points of etiquette which constitute the society man or woman.9
The World’s Fair, which officially opened on May 1, 1893, proved a smashing success, drawing some 27.5 million visitors. It was visually distinguished by an invention by Pittsburgh bridge-builder George Ferris: a 260-foot-high vertical steel wheel that accommodated sixty people in thirty-six cars, and rotated every ten minutes to give its riders a breathtaking view of the city. The fair was architecturally bold, unabashedly commercial, and larger than life: the Manufacturers Building, which displayed manufactured goods, was the largest building in the world at that time.
Slowly, Chicago was coming into its own. Architects John Wellborn Root and Daniel H. Burnham figured out how to anchor “rafts” of steel rails and concrete in the muck that underlay most of the city and perfected the art of steel-beam construction; these advances allowed for the design and construction of ever-taller buildings downtown. Their twenty-two-story Masonic Temple at the corner of Randolph and State, completed in 1891, was briefly the tallest building in the world.
For the first time, a community of local artists and writers began to emerge and flourish in Chicago. In 1898, for example, a forty-two-year-old author named L. Frank Baum printed in his own workshop a book of verse in a limited edition of ninety-nine copies. The following year, he published a collection of nursery rhymes entitled Father Goose, illustrated by William Wallace Denslow. Father Goose was the most popular children’s book of 1899, selling an astounding 175,000 copies, and its success led to another collaboration between author and illustrator, who worked together in Denslow’s studio in the Fine Arts Building, six blocks south of the Trude Building. In 1900, they published the result of that joint effort: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.10
With the city’s growing success, of course, came excess. Chicago was known internationally as a “shock city,” likely to present rude surprises to the unwary traveler. To a disproportionate degree, it was populated by rootless and unmarried men.11 Not surprisingly, a robust red-light district—the Levee—sprang up, with hundreds of brothels, pawnshops, dance halls, and saloons crowded into a few square blocks. In Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser depicted the life of a young country girl corrupted by Chicago’s evil ways, and in Chicago, Carl Sandberg famously wrote that “They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I/have seen your painted women under the gas lamps/luring the farm boys.”12
Its city government, too, was famously corrupt. One alderman declared that only three of the sixty-eight members of his board weren’t “ready and willing to steal a hot stove.” He was forced by his colleagues to issue a public retraction, but a subsequent study by the Civic Federation concluded that in fact, fifty-seven of the sixty-eight aldermen were demonstrably engaged in graft. Ambrose Thomas—Albert Lasker’s future employer—served briefly on the city’s Board of Assessors but then quit, telling a newspaper reporter that “the present system is rotten to the core and should be changed . . . this will continue until the whole system is radically changed and put on a good businesslike footing.”13
Amid the boosterism and the relentless striving, concerns were starting to be raised about the costs of the city’s rapid industrialization. A Chicago Tribune special report focused on one particularly distressing aspect of life in the city:
Filthy streets, dirt-imbued water, and sickening Stock-Yards odors are not the only uncorrected municipal evils the people of Chicago are enduring with what patience they have left under the present administration. There is the smoke.
From hundreds of chimneys in the downtown district, columns of soot-laden fumes rise all day long. The sun is shut out of the streets by the clouds. The lungs of the people are filled with the tiny black flakes. The clothing and faces and hands are soiled, and the fabrics on sale in the marts are damaged if not ruined.14
One of the several dozen buildings singled out for criticism in the article was the Trude Building, which although “not so generous in its delivery of smoke” as some other prime offenders, “continually smudges the vicinity with soot and smoke.” Meatpacking magnate-turned-banker Samuel W. Allerton, interviewed for the story, suggested that Chicago had to “take off its coat and get down to work, like a businessman, or we are going to lose.” The noxious odors and smoke, he predicted, would deter people from moving to Chicago, and drive away people who were there already.
Meanwhile, though, Chicago’s near-term prospects continued to allure. The real estate market was rebounding, buoyed by U.S. naval victories against Spain and the recent announcement that the Schlesinger & Mayer department store was planning to build a million-dollar marble-faced edifice at State and Madison.15 And perhaps most important of all, the wheat crop promised to be the best in years. The thirteen leading wheat-producing states produced 340 million bushels in 1897; this year, it looked as if they would produce more than 400 million bushels—enough, the Tribune noted approvingly, to pay the entire anticipated cost of the Spanish-American War.16
Albert Lasker, locked out of Lord & Thomas, wandered the streets that Decoration Day, and then went back to his boardinghouse. The next day, he returned to the agency’s offices. His new employer occupied two floors of the Trude Building. Taking the elevator to the twelfth floor, Lasker stepped out onto a bare wooden floor awash in light from the walls of windows on three sides of the building. In front of him he saw a cashier’s cage joined to a railing that ran all the way to the west wall, with a swing gate near the cage. A handsome man with iron gray hair and a silk cap sat at an oak desk next to this barrier. Lasker later learned that the man’s name was Paxton, and that he (like Lasker) was being paid $10 a week.17
Cubicles ringed the floor, with partitions made of oak wainscoting about four feet high, with a horizontal band of frosted glass above the oak. In the corner were two offices about twice the size of the cubicles: the offices of Mr. Lord and Mr. Thomas. On the floor above was a small print shop and a large area housing floor-to-ceiling files, in which were stored copies of every major newspaper in America for the previous several months.18
Here on the twelfth floor, behind the railing, were several desks for “overflow”—human overflow—and it was toward one of these desks that Lasker was first steered. Paxton then escorted him to Daniel Lord’s office. The co-owner of the agency had a large bald pate and luxuriant mutton-chop whiskers that framed a ready smile. He was a New Englander who had started in business in New York in 1868, then relocated to Chicago to work on a Presbyterian newspaper, the Interior, before launching his first advertising agency under the name “Lord, Brewster & Company.” (Brewster departed sometime in the 1870s, and Ambrose Thomas took his place in 1881.)
Now, seventeen years later, Lord was responsible for the agency’s finances, which in those days mainly meant keeping a watchful eye on clients to be sure they were on a solid enough financial footing to pay their next bill.19 Thomas was in charge of day-to-day operations, so Lord escorted the new hire into Thomas’s office.
“From the moment I saw him,” Lasker later said of Thomas, “I loved him . . . He was a short-set man, [a] born horse trader, fu
ll of Yankee shrewdness and full of kindness. And still with the Yankee twang.”20 Born in 1849 in Lewiston, Maine, Thomas had relocated to Boston as a young man to work in the advertising department of the Boston Traveler. He moved on to the Evans & Lincoln agency in Boston, then launched his own agency, enjoying immediate success. But seeing more opportunity in the “Northwest,” Thomas moved to Chicago in February 1881.
After introductions were over, Thomas told his young charge to spend a couple of days talking to people in the office to learn the business. Toward that end, he introduced Lasker to Elmer Bullis, who maintained the firm’s directory of newspapers and magazines and wrote up estimates for clients, and Charles Touchlin, who was in charge of the agency’s school accounts.
Both men happily shared their knowledge with Lasker. Touchlin even took his young protégé into his home and rented him a room. “The Touchlins had a little brick house on the South Side, at Sixty Second and Monroe; it seemed far in the country,” Lasker later recalled. “Mrs. Touchlin was sweet, extremely pretty and graciously considerate of my comfort. I ate breakfasts and dinners with the Touchlins, paying $6 a week for board, lodging, and my laundry.”21 The importance of this warm embrace to Lasker—then on his first extended trip away from home, already suffering from overwhelming bouts of homesickness—can’t be overstated.
The Man Who Sold America: The Amazing (but True!) Story of Albert D. Lasker and the Creation of the Advertising Century Page 5