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

  The fact that Frank was Jewish was never far from people’s minds, and the more difficult Frank’s circumstances became, the more aggressively Atlanta’s Jewish population defended him. To some extent, their efforts paid off. The Georgian, for example, reversed its course and emerged as “pro-Frank,” in large part because of the Atlanta Jewish community’s unhappiness with Hearst’s initial anti-Frank coverage.11

  Nevertheless, the tide was running against Frank. On May 24, he was formally indicted for the murder of Mary Phagan. To the delight of Hearst and his competitors, the case kept throwing up bizarre new twists. On the day that Frank was indicted, for example, an African American sweeper at the factory named Jim Conley confessed to having written the murder notes for him. Police had arrested Conley two days after Frank’s arrest when he was observed washing blood from a shirt.

  The big surprise to most Atlantans following the case was that a black factory sweeper could read and write. Conley had remained mum about those abilities, he told investigators, because he was hoping to extort a large sum of money from Frank to keep the murder quiet. Within a week, Conley produced three affidavits swearing that he not only had written the notes, but also that he helped Frank move the body to the basement. Despite glaring inconsistencies in Conley’s accounts and his suspicious behavior, police considered his testimony to be conclusive evidence that Frank was guilty. “The Mary Phagan murder is no longer a mystery,” they declared.12

  Frank, now fearing for his life, stopped talking to the press. Predictably, the newspapers punished him for his lack of cooperation, dubbing him the “Silent Man in the Tower”—as the Fulton County Jail was popularly known—and hinting that his silence was somehow incriminating.13

  Frank’s trial lasted a month, making it the longest criminal trial on record in Georgia. On August 25, 1913, he was convicted of the murder of Mary Phagan. Breaking his silence, he simply declared: “I am as innocent as I was one year ago.”14

  Frank was sentenced to hang on October 10. His lawyers immediately moved for a new trial, arguing that the guilty verdict was both unlawful and contrary to the weight of the evidence.15

  Although the murder and trial dominated the newspapers and conversations of Atlanta for four months, they received minimal coverage outside of Georgia. Three short articles appeared in the New York Times in May of 1913, focusing on tangential aspects of the case. The Times also reported on the sentencing of Leo Frank, his motions for a new trial, and the efforts of several Cornell alumni to free him.

  The first significant coverage of the Frank case in the Times, four columns’ worth, ran on February 18, 1914, when the Supreme Court of Georgia denied Frank a new trial.16 Frank’s story now became an obsession for the Times, which produced more than a hundred articles—about the case, the prisoner, and his fight to stay alive—over the next year and a half. When the Times weighed in, other publications took note, so Times owner Adolph Ochs was largely responsible for stirring up a national media frenzy about an obscure local case that had already been decided and its verdict upheld.

  And it was Albert Lasker who persuaded Ochs to take up the seemingly lost cause of Leo Frank.

  Atlanta’s Jewish community felt that anti-Semitism had played a major role in the decision of the jury that convicted Frank. One of the factors contributing to this sentiment, they believed, was a scurrilous weekly newspaper, The Jeffersonian, written by a politician-turned-publisher named Thomas E. Watson.

  The Frank case opened new vistas for Watson, just as it had for Hearst and his competitors. Watson began by asking his readership rhetorical questions—“Does a Jew expect extraordinary favors and immunities because of his race?”—and quickly escalated from there.17 His simplistic editorials, touching a nativist nerve, became wildly popular. Watson intensified his attacks on Frank, depicting him as a northern Jew whose main goal was to savagely exploit young southern women.

  Lasker, himself a master manipulator of public opinion, was appalled. “This paper [The Jeffersonian],” he later said, “was devoted to hatred of Catholics and Negroes, and when the Frank case came up, he jumped in and added Jews.”18

  Rabbi David Marx, a close friend of Frank’s and one of his most passionate defenders, considered the trial an American version of the Dreyfus Affair—the celebrated court martial of a French Jew that fifteen years earlier had torn apart that country. “The feeling against the Damned Jew is so bitter,” Marx wrote, “that the jury was intimidated and feared for their lives, which undoubtedly would have been in danger had any other verdict been rendered.”19

  Hoping to gain support for a movement to free Frank, Marx visited New York City. While there, he contacted Louis Marshall, a highly successful lawyer, champion of Jewish rights, and president of the American Jewish Committee. Although he was concerned about Frank’s plight, Marshall refused to make Frank’s case an official cause of the Committee.20 He believed that a behind-the-scenes appeal for financial and legal aid would minimize southern resentment toward northern—and Jewish—intervention, and therefore be more successful.

  Marx then attempted to meet with Adolph Ochs, hoping to focus media scrutiny on the case. Marx’s timing wasn’t good—at the time, Ochs was traveling in Europe. But in any case, the Frank case was not a cause that Ochs normally would choose to embrace—he had gone to great lengths to prevent the Times from appearing to be a “Jewish paper.”

  The missing ingredient, soon to be supplied, was Albert Lasker.

  During this period, Lasker’s recurring emotional distress was interfering with his ability to work. He fell back into depression in 1912, and took almost half of the year off for an extended trip to Mexico. He became “tired,” he said—so much so that he disappeared from Lord & Thomas’s expanded offices in the Maller Building at Addison and Wabash and hid himself away from his colleagues: “I had gotten so tired that I had three floors below built a hideaway office with a private phone going out, where I could see people by appointment without any stenographer or secretary. It was the only time in my life I did anything eccentric.”21 Given his state of mind, Lasker probably would have ignored the Frank case entirely, had it not been for a letter from his father in the later months of 1913.

  It is not clear how Morris Lasker became entangled in Leo Frank’s cause, but by November 1913, he was serving as a clearinghouse—in the Jewish community of Galveston, and beyond—for news related to Frank. Morris did not share Louis Marshall’s or Adolph Och’s fastidiousness about Jews advancing a Jewish cause. On the contrary: he believed that Jews had to take action when confronted with a challenge like the Frank case. And he felt, further, that his increasingly influential son ought to be among those leading the way.

  Albert initially hoped to sidestep the whole affair. After getting his father’s letter, he contacted Arthur Brisbane—the celebrated editor of Hearst’s New York newspaper, the Evening Journal—and called in a favor. He told Brisbane: “It will satisfy my father entirely if I’ll say to him that Brisbane is looking into it first. The great Brisbane with his trained mind, and second, it equals getting a review from the Hearst papers. Would you do that for me? Send me a long telegram, I’ll send it to my father and the whole thing will be dismissed, and I’ll have satisfied my father.”22

  In New York, Brisbane met at length with David Marx, and the following evening, he sent Lasker a telegram. “Spent four hours with a rabbi,” Brisbane wired. “The thing concerns us both. I am taking the train for Atlanta tonight and expect you to meet me there the day after tomorrow morning.”

  Lasker’s escape plan had backfired. He later described this trip to Atlanta with Brisbane:

  He and I went and talked to the District Attorney. We went and talked first to every one of the prosecution, and then we went and talked to the defense, and we talked to the prisoner. Both he and I took a tremendous prejudice against the prisoner. Like so many, all this publicity had gone to his head—he became a megalomaniac . . .

  But we were determined in our minds that he
was innocent and that this was a big frame-up. Then we were dejected, Brisbane and I, what we were about to do. I never got back to my desk in nine months.

  Lasker soon decided that his skills as a “propagandist” might prove decisive:

  [The Frank case] struck deeply into me for several reasons. First, it was the first thing my father had ever asked me to do. He had never asked me anything in his life, and I felt when he asked me to tend to it that it was just an old man being imposed upon, and then putting the burden on me. I was resentful.

  When I found . . . that there was no legal base for finding [Frank] guilty, then I felt guilty in my feeling of resentment toward my father, and I felt I had an obligation. Then also, I was a reporter and a propagandist, and when I made up my mind this was a legal crime that they were committing . . . I wanted to both run down the facts and spread them to the public—with the same instinct that has kept me going in my whole career . . .

  Then of course I was deeply moved directly and personally because of the anti-Semitism involved.23

  Lasker was not a particularly observant Jew. In fact, according to his youngest daughter, Francie, he was “very antireligion.” He didn’t need a middleman between himself and his God, he used to tell his children.24 Although he had encountered anti-Semitism in his childhood and throughout his professional career, he had either ignored it or deflected it.

  At the same time, he was proud of his Jewish heritage, and was an active member of the Chicago Jewish community. Throughout his adult life, he raised money for the Associated Jewish Charities of Chicago. Every Wednesday night and Saturday afternoon, he sat down to a poker game with his local cronies—the “Partridges”—all of whom were Jewish. (They also made a point, Francie recalls, of playing poker together every year on Christmas Eve.) And in an unguarded moment, Lasker might even admit that he was prejudiced in favor of the Jews:

  The Jews are a superior people, I have a hard time hiding that; I feel we should be patient with non-Jews, that we should be understanding because we have gone through all that suffering ourselves that makes you cultured and civilized . . .

  I deeply believe that no Christian civilization can last that removed from it the Jews. That it is the Jew that brings them the pollen.25

  Lasker understood that the three most salient facts about Frank—that he was a mill superintendent, a northerner, and a Jew—all counted against him. “I would say it was split three ways,” he concluded, “in three equal parts.”26 But it was the anti-Semitism that spurred Lasker to action. He possessed a keen sense of justice, and he had a boundless admiration for his uncle Eduard, who had fought for religious tolerance in Germany. And of course there was his father’s example, as well as his request. “Broadminded in all things, his benefactions, the extent of which only himself knew, were restricted by no creed, race, or factional lines,” the Galveston News editorialized at the time of Morris’s death in 1916. “He was always ready to help the helpless.”27

  By the time Lasker got back to Chicago from his unscheduled Atlanta trip, he had decided to help Leo Frank.

  Late in 1913, Lasker quietly donated $1,000 to Frank’s cause. He also arranged for his father and his friend Julius Rosenwald—the chairman of Chicago-based Sears, Roebuck and Company—to make equal (and equally quiet) contributions. In response, Frank sent a personal note to each of them, thanking them.28

  Lasker decided that he had to raise the stakes, in part by focusing an intense media spotlight on Georgia. David Marx and Louis Marshall had been trying to get on Adolph Ochs’s calendar as soon as he returned from Europe. Lasker joined Marx’s and Marshall’s cause, and—toward the end of 1913—he secured the all-important meeting with Ochs, as well as an audience with Mark Sullivan, the influential editor of Collier’s Weekly:

  I came up north [after visiting Atlanta with Brisbane] and I called on two men—Adolph Ochs and Mark Sullivan . . . If I could get those two to crusade I didn’t have to take care of any other thing, that it would be quite spontaneous combustion. I have got the type of mind that works that way, if you start a fire it will spread—the thing to do is get the fire started away from a firehouse—[so] instead of scattering, I made up my mind to concentrate on them.29

  Lasker, ever the salesman, delivered a powerful pitch to the skeptical head of the Times:

  “Mr. Ochs,” I said, “they are about to hang a man in Atlanta, Georgia, who in any event isn’t legally guilty, and that is legal murder, and you have a duty, Mr. Ochs.”

  Mr. Ochs, far from being intrigued, was annoyed . . . First, I saw in that interview that no man could love a thing more preciously than he loved America, and he said such a thing couldn’t happen in America, and he really acted as if he thought that I was a traitor to our country.

  The second thing was, he was a southerner, and he loved the South, and his idea of southern fairness and southern fair play was shocked—that I brought that charge against the South.

  The third reason was that he was a Jew, and Frank was a Jew, and I was a Jew, and he thought I was coming to him and trying to use his paper, which he really tried to keep free of any entanglements . . .

  He was very impatient with me . . . Seeing I was getting nowhere, I turned to him and said, “Mr. Ochs, when this man dies, and afterward, you will [be an] accessory to the fact of this legal murder, because you can’t get away from [the fact] that I came here and notified you.

  “I don’t propose to you to bring to you any proof but the record of the trial, and the record of the Supreme Court; if you read that, and tell me as an American, that this man is legally guilty, then I will say to you not only that I won’t put any more pressure on you, but I will withdraw from the case, because I have more confidence in your objective judgment than I have in my own . . .”

  Well, that appealed to him . . . He said, “You come in tomorrow morning at eleven o’clock.” . . .

  I came in at eleven o’clock the next morning and Mr. Ochs was there with tears streaming down his cheeks. He said, “I have read that record. I stayed up until four o’clock in the morning, and I read every word of it. I never believed that could happen in America. Of course, this man is legally not guilty.”

  He said, “So far as calling the nation’s attention to it, you leave that to me. I am sending my best man down there today.”

  On February 17, 1914, the Georgia Supreme Court denied Frank’s appeal for a new trial. For the first time, thanks to the Times, the story commanded a national audience.30 From February to May, the Times reported on all major and minor developments in the Frank case, treating many as front-page news. Behind the scenes, Lasker exulted: “They had that case all quieted. The Supreme Court had dropped it; there was nothing left but to execute him. The northern papers had hardly printed anything about him. And in four weeks, I had it every day in every paper, [and] it was on every breakfast table in the country. So it wasn’t a bad job.”31

  At the same time that he was wooing Ochs and the Times, Lasker was also cultivating Mark Sullivan. “He came to Collier’s with reluctance,” Sullivan later recalled, “because his advertising agency was throwing business [our] way.”32 Lasker used the same strategy with Sullivan that he had used with Ochs, putting the documents in front of Sullivan and trusting that the editor would respond with moral outrage. It worked: “I was deeply stirred by it,” Sullivan said.

  Lasker knew that there were still at least two more fronts to be opened. First, he had to break down the government’s case against Frank. On Ochs’s advice, Lasker retained a celebrated detective, William J. Burns, to poke holes in the prosecution’s case. With great fanfare, Burns arrived in Atlanta on March 14, 1914.33 Entirely without fanfare, Lasker had slipped into Atlanta a few days ahead of him. This visit constituted the “second front” in Lasker’s overall campaign, whereby he would rehabilitate Frank’s image. Frank could no longer afford to play the “Silent Man in the Tower.” He had to swing public sentiment in his favor—no small challenge, given that he had been convicted of rapi
ng and murdering a child.

  The day after the Georgia Supreme Court denied Frank’s appeal, Frank made what the Times called “a remarkable statement to the public,” which included declarations of his innocence and his unshaken faith in God. The statement, scripted by Lasker, focused on truth, and incorporated a core slogan: a technique that characterized all of Lasker’s advocacy and political campaigns. “I stake all on the truth,” Frank said in his statement. “The truth will out . . . The truth is on the march.”34

  The Times did its part, reporting that the previously inaccessible Frank had decided to open up to the media:

  Until then Frank himself was a riddle. He had spoken only through his attorneys and had received no visits from reporters. Silence seemed wisest, and he was as hard to spy as an Irish banshee. But suddenly word was given that Frank was ready to see questioners, and to answer all the queries they could put. Since then he has been under daily cross-examination, and his air of mystery has given way to definite impressions of Frank as an individual.35

  Overnight, with a lot of help from Lasker, the Silent Man in the Tower began exhibiting an unexpected eloquence. In those daily media sessions, Frank reiterated Lasker’s slogan. “I, again, say that truth is on the march,” he told the assembled reporters. “Truth is coming like a dawning day, and the first pink signs of it can be seen in the East.”

  Lasker was rarely on the scene. He visited Atlanta two or three times, staying three or four days each time. “I did my work up North, and I surely did it well, too.”36 On the same trip that he advised Frank to start speaking with reporters, for example, Lasker and Hearst editor Arthur Brisbane persuaded the Atlanta Journal to publish an editorial—on March 10, 1914—asserting that Frank was not guilty. According to a historian of the Frank case, this editorial created a sensation, and proved to be the “most dramatic appeal for Frank.”37