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

  Now, though, Lasker confessed to Warner that he had come to win the hand of Warner’s cousin, Flora. Warner, laughing, said that Flora had been engaged for several years, and it was only a matter of time before she married her Buffalo beau. Lasker asked if this was a formal engagement; Warner admitted that it was not. In that case, Lasker replied, there was no problem:

  I said, “Oh, that makes no difference to me, if she isn’t [engaged], I’ll tend to that . . . But you have met other fellows. If you think I am earnest, and think I am going to get along in the world—if you think you are doing your cousin a favor—I want you to direct me to her.”

  He said, “Why, I know you are going to be a success, and I know I am doing my cousin a good turn. I love her as much as anybody can love anybody. I’ll do anything you ask me to do.”

  So we went out that night and had quite a time. And that night, that part of my life was buried, and never rose again.

  The following morning—Thursday, the Fourth of July holiday, 1901—Lasker arrived at Arthur’s house on Main Street. There he found a unique living arrangement: Arthur’s and Flora’s fathers were in business together, lived in identical and adjacent frame houses about fifteen feet apart, and drew from a communal financial pot. In a chair on the front porch of Flora’s house was a woman—a “lovely motherly looking old lady,” to Lasker’s eyes—Flora’s mother.

  Arthur and Lasker casually wandered over and inquired where Flora might be. The woman replied that she was out playing tennis and wasn’t expected back before lunch. Arthur leaned over and whispered something in her ear, and she got up and went inside. Shortly thereafter, a young boy emerged and sped off on his bicycle. And not too long after that, Flora arrived on her bicycle, wearing a long white tennis dress. She shook Lasker’s hand politely, excused herself, and went inside.

  Once in the house (Lasker later learned) a furious Flora confronted her mother. Who did this Lasker think he was, interrupting her tennis game? Flora’s mother scolded her, and sent her back outside to be hospitable to the nice young man who had come visiting all the way from Chicago.

  Over the next seven weeks or so, Lasker arranged to be in Buffalo four times on business, each trip lasting three or four days. He pressured Flora to break whatever engagements she had and to spend time with him:

  With Art’s connivance, we arranged it all around, he telling her, and I rehearsing with him what I wanted represented as my fine points. We put a little glamour to me, and a little mystery to me, and made me on the one hand very attractive, and—on the other hand—just put in enough about my being a boy of the world to a girl of that type [to] be intriguing.

  I would send her little things from the towns I went [to], that she couldn’t get otherwise, and I made no concealment that I was enamored beyond measure. And at the same time, made no forward move, wasn’t bold, held back, and was plainly bashful and worshiping in her presence, but plainly that behind that, that I could get aggressive if I wanted to.

  That is the only piece of salesmanship I ever did study, and I went at it as an actor would, to create a part. I saw she was very romantic, and I didn’t have any romance in me. But I put on an act that would appeal to a romantic girl.

  Calculating he may have been, but the more he learned about Flora, the more he loved her. Although she was Jewish, she had been educated in a Buffalo convent. Influenced by these two faiths, Flora had a strong moral streak. And although she had told him she was nineteen when they first met, she was in fact twenty-one, a year older than Lasker—a fact that caused her great embarrassment.3 She made him promise never to reveal this to anyone, even to the three children they eventually raised together.4

  A letter to his father from August 1901 suggests that Albert did not control the courtship quite as deliberately as his comments above would imply: “I am in that state of constant mental worry—a hell on earth—where I must take some immediate action. I won’t enter into any extravagant phrases as to how deeply I love—all I know is, I must end this mental torture or I don’t know what will happen.”5

  Lasker again asked for his father’s blessing. In remarkably plain logic and language—good reason-why advertising copy, in fact—he laid out his case before his father:

  In considering this matter please remember:

  First: I was never overly wild.

  Second: The girl shall know the whole situation.

  Third: My earning capacity is sufficient.

  Fourth: I know I am settled.

  Fifth: I propose a year’s engagement.

  Sixth: How I love this girl.

  Seventh: That I’m not worth a dam [sic] to anyone until I get this settled.

  Morris telegraphed his response to the Hotel Iroquois in Buffalo, where Albert was staying: Go ahead. I am with you. She must be a good girl or you could not love her so much. He also loaned his son $125 for an engagement ring. Albert promised to pay back the $125 before the wedding, should it take place.

  On the evening of August 30, Lasker took Flora to have their fortunes told by Julius and Agnes Zancig, a celebrated pair of fortunetellers on the midway at the fairgrounds. According to Lasker, both he and his beloved were under “equal strain” because of the large, unspoken topic on their both of their minds:

  There was a beautiful full moon, and the setting was quite exotic at the fair . . . And she looked up and said, “Couldn’t you just love a moon like that?”

  And I said, “Why, if you have love to spare, do you give it to an inanimate thing like the moon? Why don’t you give it to me?”

  And she turned to me and in all seriousness said, “Are you by any chance proposing?”

  “Indeed I am—I’m asking you to be my wife,” I said. “What is the answer?”

  And she said, “Why, I have never given it any thought. I’ll have to think it over.”

  And I said, “I can’t give you an option. I’m a young man trying to get along in the world. I have a career in front of me that I want to share with you, and if you get someone to tell you about it, you will see that I am hard-working, and have already taken too much time coming here . . . You will have to tell me yes or no, because I have to get along with my career.”

  At that moment, they arrived at the fortune-tellers’ door. They entered and sat down together for their reading. Agnes Zancig told Flora that she would have a long and serious illness from which she might never fully recover. And, she continued, Flora would be going on a long and joyous journey. Flora turned, looked at Lasker, and asked, “Are we?”

  And that was how Albert Lasker and Flora Warner became engaged. Lasker was thrilled:

  I had never called her anything but “Miss Warner,” up to that moment. And more than anything else in the world, I wanted to kiss her, to seal the bargain . . . We were both trembling, and mind you, she was a girl [in] the spirit of [the] mid-Victorian[s]. Never did anything without her parents making the decision, and here she had gotten herself engaged.

  And here I proposed that we go on the roller coaster, on which you come to a dark spot. And when we came there, I put my arm around her, because I had never thought of it, I put my lips to hers, and said, “May I, Miss Warner?”

  I want to say, there is all the romance there has ever been in life, before or since—that is all the romance.

  Fortunately, the Warners didn’t stand in the way of the match.6 Flora’s father, half Hungarian and half Austrian, actually knew Lasker’s celebrated Uncle Eduard, and that was enough of a reference for him. Morris Lasker traveled to Buffalo to meet his prospective daughter-in-law, and again gave his blessing.

  The wedding took place in Buffalo on June 9, 1902. The delay resulted from the fact that Albert had promised his father a long engagement, and also from the fact that Morris’s family was still in Europe, where he had sent them in his efforts to economize, and they couldn’t get back any sooner. Flora wanted a large wedding, to which Lasker very reluctantly agreed. But he was pleased that a large number of his Chicago colleagues came—inc
luding Ambrose Thomas, who in response to a request from Lasker had agreed to give him a 40 percent raise, to $5,000 per year. “You’re entitled to a lot more,” Thomas had said. “Say it now, if you want more.” Lasker declined.

  The couple had planned a two-week honeymoon. They went first to the Savoy Hotel in New York for several days. While in New York, though, Lasker began to get agitated about being away from his office for so long. “There was no organization,” Lasker later explained, “to keep my work going.” His anxiety rose to intolerable levels.

  Flora, aware of her husband’s mounting distress, suggested that they cancel their planned ten-day trip to the Delaware Water Gap and instead return immediately to Chicago. They arrived in Chicago in mid-June, and Lasker plunged back into his work. Almost immediately, he rushed off to Battle Creek, Michigan, to take part in a strange new kind of “gold rush”: the boom in packaged breakfast foods sparked by two local entrepreneurs named C. W. Post and W. W. Kellogg.

  Flora set up housekeeping at the Chicago Beach Hotel: a lakefront establishment that had been built to accommodate visitors to the 1893 World’s Fair. She lived an isolated existence. She knew no one in Chicago, and her husband traveled extensively. She made friends with some of the hotel’s residents, but she was alone a great deal of the time.

  Lasker grasped the difficulty of his wife’s situation, and about six weeks into their marriage, he suggested that she go home to Buffalo for a few days. He would keep his appointments in New York and Battle Creek, and then pick her up in Buffalo. She agreed, and they went off by train in different directions.

  Several days later, Lasker was working in his room at the Post Tavern in Battle Creek. The once-sleepy Michigan town had been transformed almost overnight by the national craze for packaged breakfast foods, and Lasker had positioned himself well:

  I was a big figure there, because in the boom, the hotels were overrun with people who wanted to sell cotton to the manufacturers, with people who wanted to sell machinery to the manufacturers, with people who wanted jobs as salesmen, who wanted to put in processes. And among them, of course, every newspaper in America had its representatives there, and magazines and streetcar companies and billboard companies—they wanted the advertising, and they would look me up when I came.

  Lasker often returned to his hotel room at night to find a stack of twenty or thirty telegrams waiting for him. On one particular night in August 1902, a friend was helping him open the telegrams. Lasker spotted one from Buffalo. Gripped by the premonition that it contained bad news, he asked his friend to open it. It was from Flora’s father. Come to Buffalo at once, it read. Flora has typhoid fever.

  This was decades before antibiotics became available to treat bacterial infections. And although the dreaded typhus bacillus killed only between 10 and 20 percent of those whom it infected, it incapacitated almost all who survived. Frantic, Lasker arrived in Buffalo the next day. But there was nothing the distraught husband—then only two months into his marriage—could do for his stricken wife, already bedridden. She would not get out of bed for sixteen months.

  Lasker was compelled to return to Chicago, leaving his beloved Flora behind. For more than a year, he lived alone at the Chicago Beach Hotel, visiting Buffalo almost every weekend during the long months of Flora’s illness.

  Typhoid fever has an incubation period of between seven and fourteen days, so Flora almost certainly contracted the disease in Chicago.7 A disease caused by poor sanitation or poor personal hygiene, typhoid fever swept across the nation at regular intervals, often striking Chicago with particular ferocity. (In 1891, for example, the typhoid death rate in Chicago was 166 per 100,000 persons—75 percent higher than the national average.8) The city was especially vulnerable because of its high concentration of food-processing industries, as well as its woefully inadequate water and sewer systems.

  Upton Sinclair’s novel, The Jungle—which highlighted the disgraceful and unsanitary conditions in Chicago’s meatpacking industry and led to sweeping reforms at both the local and national levels—was still three years from publication. Chlorination of the Chicago water supply, which would finally end the threat of typhoid fever and other scourges, was still fifteen years in the future. Meanwhile, Chicagoans from all walks of life took sick. Many died, and many more were disabled.

  Albert Lasker now faced thousands of dollars of unexpected medical bills. Mortified, he went back to Ambrose Thomas and asked for another raise—his second in two months. Thomas increased Lasker’s salary to an astounding $10,000 per year. This helped, but four months later, his father-in-law’s jewelry-case business failed, and Lasker found himself supporting the entire family.

  Throughout this period, Albert found it achingly difficult to be separated from Flora. But as her condition worsened, it was just as wrenching to be near her: “Complications set in. The poison got into her blood, her veins were distorted to many times their natural size, her glands were all distorted; for months her legs were up in the air. At the end of 14 months, Dr. Rosewell Park operated on her for adhesions which had formed all through her legs.”

  Flora’s initial bout with typhoid fever—which normally runs its course in three or four weeks—was followed by phlebitis, which brought on some of the complications that Lasker referred to: “The joints of both legs were affected, and became frozen, as in a severe case of arthritis . . . the bones of her toes and ankles had to be broken, one by one, reset, and locked in casts. She was one of the first patients in medical history to benefit from the modern orthopedic technique of traction; if this treatment had not been successful she might never have walked again.”9

  At about the same time that the leg surgeries were performed, Flora told Albert that her nurse—one of the most highly regarded nurses in Buffalo—was beating and otherwise abusing her at night. When Lasker reported these accusations to her physician, he was told that Flora was hallucinating, and that he should not worry about it. Shortly thereafter, however, the nurse was caught stealing silver from the Warner house. According to Albert, she subsequently made a shocking confession: “[She] admitted in the note that she had been a dope fiend, and had been giving my wife injections of dope, and it was those injections which the doctors didn’t know about which had evidently retarded her so. The nurse was evidently one of these people who seemed sane and wasn’t sane.”

  As a result of her immobility for more than a year, as well as the various complications of her illnesses, Flora gained more than seventy pounds. Even when she finally was able to get out of bed—in the fall of 1903—she was barely able to walk. Once she had been an accomplished tennis player and dancer; now she found it so painful and frustrating to shuffle around her bedroom that she preferred to stay in bed. The doctors told Lasker that unless he could get Flora walking again, the adhesions would return to her legs: “She just made up her mind she couldn’t walk. So, in desperation—I came only weekends—she said to me I had to do something about it. So I asked her to go driving, and I got a horse and buggy, and took her into the park. And I had arranged with the driver to stop by a bench . . . in a romantic little spot. It was the first time we had had alone together in 16 months.”

  Lasker had the driver drive 150 feet farther down the road, taking Flora’s crutches with him:

  We had a nice visit. And she said, “Oh—the carriage is down there; ask him back.”

  I said, “No, Flora; you have to walk there.” And that was the first big scene we ever had. She went into hysterics in the park . . . my heart was breaking. I was only a kid of 23. This was in November, and it was getting darker, and it was cold. But I knew we were at a turning point, because the doctors had said, “You are going to have a bedridden invalid all your life, if this isn’t done now, and done drastically.”

  I had told them my plan, and they had approved of it. Oh, how my heart broke . . . And the fact that her nerves had been shattered was first revealed to me then. And I remember how she had to drag herself, and at each step she upbraided me, and cried.
And I remember a man coming up and wanted to beat me. He came up and my wife cried to him to make me [stop], and he . . . thought I was a brute, and grabbed me, and I shoved him aside and I said, “Let me alone! I know what I am doing! This is my wife!”10

  Flora never fully regained the use of her legs. Lasker had married a young woman who moved, he said, like a fawn—full of grace, with a spring in her step. That woman was gone forever.

  Gone, too, was the relatively carefree young man whom she had married. “The minute my wife took sick,” he later said, “I reached full maturity. I never had a kiddish moment.” Up to now, Lasker had never cared much for money; now he desperately had to have it. “From then on, I had to concentrate on work, and from then on, I knew I was fooling myself that I would ever get out of advertising.”

  Flora—who returned to Chicago in November 1903—was determined to have children, despite medical advice to the contrary.11 As Lasker recalled: “She had this craze to have children . . . The doctors said she must not have a child, but she kept after me so much to have a child that I just felt I didn’t have to right [to say no], particularly when I was away from her almost all the time, and she was alone.”

  The extreme varicosity of the veins in Flora’s legs required that she remain on her back for most of her pregnancy. This worked against her long-term recovery, and preyed on Lasker’s mind.