The following year, writing to Irwin from the Huntington Hotel in Pasadena, Lasker made it clear that he was unavailable, even for emergencies:
I have left word with all of my associates in my various interests not to communicate with me on business while I am away. I do not expect to either write or receive a letter for three months. I really need a rest, and my rest is considerably disturbed when I have correspondence to look after . . .
I am sure you will understand exactly how I feel. For instance, regarding Van Camps: I do not want to know whether we lose a million or what happens until I get back, because if I know about it, I will start worrying, and if I do not know about it, I have nothing to worry over.32
Again in 1920, Lasker spent thirteen weeks with his family in California—this time at a bungalow he had constructed on the grounds of the Huntington Hotel—and again was in communication only when he chose to be. “I am adhering strictly to my program of loafing while I am here,” he wrote to Irwin in February. “I expect . . . to come back so benefited by the trip that I will be full of a double dose of pep on my return.”33
It didn’t work. “Oh—this awful weather,” he wrote in a disconsolate letter to Irwin after returning to Chicago in mid-April. “It is enough to break one’s heart. It is horrible to come from glorious California to this rotten climate.”34 And even when Lasker was in Chicago—only a short train ride from Indianapolis—he sometimes made himself inaccessible. A letter to Irwin in August 1917, in the wake of negotiations with the Frenzels about the possible purchase of their stock, paints the picture: “I am staying out in my country place for a few weeks’ rest. I found I had been going at a pretty stiff pace, and was accelerated beyond the safety point. It was the first time I ever felt that way, and I thought I had better take warning of the signs . . .”35
Irwin generally tolerated Lasker’s long absences, nonnegotiable demands, and complaints about the weather. Occasionally, he tried to focus Lasker’s attention on the business. “I dislike very much to call upon you to cut short your vacation,” he wrote in the winter of 1921, “but it seems to me that this is a time that it is necessary that it be done.”36
The issue was the proposed sale of the business: an outcome that Lasker was now eager to effect. Even so, he told Irwin that he had no intention of curtailing his vacation. He had already spent ten days of his California sojourn on business, and wasn’t yet in any shape to attend to affairs in the Midwest.
Irwin understood the value of getting away from it all. (He took long summer vacations at the family compound at Lake Muskoka, Ontario.) He also was accustomed to the extended winter absences of Clessie Cummins—the talented but mercurial president of the Cummins Engine Company—and had grown used to picking up the slack created by the absence of a creative genius. He knew Lasker well and understood that his friend had to pace himself, fending off his recurrent depressions as best he could.
And it sometimes helped to have Albert Lasker far away from the day-to-day affairs of the Van Camp Packing Company.
Irwin, who had become increasingly involved in the operation of the business, soon realized that Van Camp was playing a losing hand. In December 1919, he took a tour of Campbell’s Soup’s state-of-the-art manufacturing complex in Camden, New Jersey. The tour was conducted by Dr. John Dorrance, the MIT-trained chemist credited with the invention of condensed soups. Irwin grasped instantly just how hard it would be for his slow-moving company to compete with Dorrance’s powerhouse. Van Camp’s sales volume—about $20 million a year, at that point—was roughly the same as Campbell’s, but this Camden facility was light-years ahead of any Van Camp plant. Dorrance casually let slip the news that his company was about to begin packing in the Midwest to minimize freight costs.
“We will have to have our costs right and as low as Campbell’s,” an anxious Irwin wrote to Lasker, once back in Indianapolis. “He makes good goods.”37 Even Lasker couldn’t ignore this. “I can well see the difference in our positions,” he wrote back. “We are fast getting to the point where we must do something.”38
Campbell’s Soup did invade the Midwest, and—in the spring of 1920—launched a price war against Van Camp and other local producers of soups and canned foods. “It means slim profits for us,” Irwin wrote gloomily to Lasker, “for whatever length of time he chooses to continue his present plan.”39
Lasker couldn’t decide what he wanted to do about Van Camp. On the one hand, he confessed to Irwin, he would gladly sell out for the $200 a share that Campbell, Heath had previously offered. On the other hand, Flora argued against selling out. “I remember that you once said you believed in woman’s intuition,” he wrote to Irwin. “She was quite bitter that I would consent to sell at all, and feels it is a mistake.”40
Meanwhile, the other Campbell—W. D. Campbell, of Campbell, Heath—continued his overtures to the Van Camp directors. When Irwin cut what appeared to be a final deal with Campbell in April 1921, Lasker—once again in Pasadena—expressed his gratitude. “I just can’t begin to express to you how happy I am that the deal has gone through,” he wrote. “No money is worth while if worry goes with it.”
As it turned out, many more months had to pass before the new Van Camp preferred stock could be sold. The depression of 1920–1922 was in full force, and investors were sitting tight. “I WANT TO GET OUT, AND I WANT TO GET OUT QUICK,” Lasker wrote to Irwin in January 1922. He was now deeply involved in the next phase of his life—running a federal government agency in Washington—and his family was in turmoil. The week before, his six-year-old daughter, Francie, had nearly died from pneumonia—the second such dangerous episode in a year. (“She almost slipped away from us,” Lasker confided.) And now the ailing Flora was headed to Johns Hopkins in Baltimore for several months of observation.41
Ultimately, Lasker accepted a financial drubbing as the cost of disengaging from Van Camp. Exactly how severe a beating is unclear, although he later claimed that he “lost everything [he] had in,” suggesting a write-off of perhaps a half-million dollars.42 He also did worse than he absolutely had to: before the final deal was sealed, Lasker bought back much of the preferred stock that he had sold to various friends and family members because he didn’t want them exposed to unnecessary risk.43
Lasker offered his own biting epitaph for Van Camp: “We managed to make a great failure of it, and [then] we sold out.”44
He likened his Van Camp experience to his involvement in the Mitchell-Lewis Motor Company—a Racine-based automaker in whose affairs he had immersed himself in this same time period, and which cost him something like $1 million:45
I learned a great lesson there, and in the Mitchell case—that not having experience in manufacturing, I could be poison to any manufacturing business where I had any say in the manufacturing end; that my specialty was publicity and distribution . . . At times when I became impatient with manufacturers because they have strong opinions on my end, I [was] constrained to remember my two great failures when I sat in their chairs.46
Lasker’s magic definitely faded when he got “down in the weeds.” But from start to finish, the Van Camp experience was about people and relationships more than manufacturing and money. He was drawn into Van Camp through his friendship with Frank Van Camp, who severely abused that friendship. Lasker, typically, not only forgave him but continued to help him financially as Van Camp set up a tuna-packing operation on the West Coast. Lasker even asked Van Camp to accompany him on his Mexican rest cure, underscoring their close and enduring ties.
By far the biggest benefit that Lasker derived from the experience was his friendship with W. G. Irwin. He considered Irwin one of the finest men he ever encountered, and the mutual respect that they developed for each other in the early ’teens evolved into a close friendship.47 Their written salutations grew increasingly warm (from “Dear Mr. Irwin” to “my dear Will”). They visited each other’s homes, and the Laskers made a special effort to welcome lifelong bachelor Irwin into their family’s inner circle. They
exchanged gifts, went to ball games together, and helped each other enter new worlds.
As he wrote to Irwin on the first occasion when the sale of Van Camp appeared to be going through: “My profit from the transaction comes from the close contact it has brought me into with you, and the very intimate association it has given me with you. Even though we shall not meet in connection with business, I hope we shall always keep alive the friendship which has existed between us and which, to me, shall ever mean much.”48
That friendship that not only survived but intensified, ending only with Irwin’s death in 1943.
Chapter Ten
Saving Baseball from Itself
ALBERT LASKER’S impulse to find, hone, and exploit a powerful idea manifested itself in many arenas—perhaps the least likely of which was professional baseball.
His first exposure to the game came in the early months of 1894, when the Chicago Cubs came to Galveston for what was then called “winter training.”1 In that simpler time, Chicago sportswriters didn’t bother to travel south to cover the Cubs in training; instead, the Chicago newspapers paid local stringers to write up the exhibition games. Lasker covered the games for multiple papers, earning a dollar per game from each for providing a box score and a few lines of commentary. “Through that,” Lasker recalled, “I became deeply interested not only in baseball, but also in the mechanics of how a big league team was run.”2
Perennially, the Cubs franchise that Lasker covered in Galveston had great potential; just as consistently, it failed to live up to it. The Cubs underperformed so badly, in fact, that in 1898—the year Lasker moved to Chicago—team owner Al Spalding fired legendary manager Cap Anson. These failures and tensions mattered little to Lasker, who was by now a diehard Cubs fan, attending games at Cubs Park and remaining loyal to his notably unsuccessful team.
The Cubs soon rewarded his loyalty many times over. In 1906, with manager and first baseman Frank Chance at the helm, the Cubs finally brought home the pennant. They finished the season with a 116-and-36 record: the best record in the history of baseball.3 The Cubs went 60 and 15 on the road, and won 50 of their last 57 games. Their “Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance” double-play combination was immortalized in a 1910 poem composed by a frustrated New York Giants fan.
In October 1906, the Cubs met the White Sox in the first World Series ever to feature two teams from the same city. Charlie Comiskey’s White Sox won the series in six, but the Cubs came back just as strong the following season. They took the pennant again, winning 107 games and finishing 17 games ahead of the second-place Pirates. In the World Series that year, they met a Detroit squad headed by the legendary hitter—and brawler—Ty Cobb. But the Cubs proved to have more fight than even Cobb. Frank Chance suffered a broken finger when hit by a pitch during his first at-bat in Game 3; he simply taped it up and kept playing. The Cubs won in five, and their fans—including a rising young ad man named Lasker—gloated.
The Cubs met the Tigers again in the 1908 World Series and again beat them in five games, thereby becoming the first team in baseball history to repeat as world champions. They won the pennant again in 1909, and it looked as if the team Frank Chance had built might go on winning forever.
But it was not to be. The erratic owner of the Cubs, Charlie Murphy, began selling off Frank Chance’s stars in 1912, thereby earning the eternal enmity of the team’s players and fans. Murphy was also despised by his fellow owners because he sold some of those stars to the “Federal League,” which had gone into business in that year. The players Murphy sold helped make that new league viable, and hurt the already established American and National Leagues.
The Federal League owner who benefited the most from Murphy’s lone-wolfish behavior was a Chicago entrepreneur named Charles Weeghman, who had made a modest fortune with a chain of low-priced luncheonettes and owned the Federal League entry in Chicago. Weeghman spent $250,000 on a stunning new ballpark at Clark and Addison, on Chicago’s North Side, which opened in 1914. He renamed his team the “Whales”—implying bigness—and named the new ballpark after himself.
In January 1915, the Federal League took the two older leagues to court, claiming that they were acting in restraint of trade. Because both the American and Federal Leagues were headquartered in Chicago, the venue was the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. There the disputing parties encountered Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who had achieved a national reputation as a progressive and a trust-buster. If the upstart Federals were hoping for a trust-busting victory in Landis’s court, they were disappointed. “Do you realize,” Landis at one point asked their lawyer, “that a decision in this case may tear down the very foundation of this game, so loved by thousands, and do you realize that the decision must also seriously affect both parties?”4 A blow to the game of baseball, he warned both sides, would be regarded by his court as a “blow to one of our national institutions.”5 Landis took the case under advisement and stalled for almost a year in hopes that the squabbling leagues could resolve their problems outside his courtroom.
In early twentieth-century America, football, basketball, and hockey were still college sports; with the possible exception of boxing, baseball was the only professional game in town. And for many fans in the early years of the twentieth century, baseball embodied America. Even then, it harkened back to a time when the nation was slower-paced, more rural, and—as the story would have it—more innocent. It provided a stage for acts of heroism in an era when frontiers had closed and wars were discovered to be bloody and brutal.
Baseball owners were happy to propagate these myths of innocence. But the reality was different, especially when it came to the business of baseball. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, for example, seventeen of the eighteen American and National League franchises had close ties to federal or state politicians, urban political machines, or gambling interests.6 Gambling had already elbowed its way into baseball, just as it previously had cast a pall over boxing, horse racing, football, and wrestling. Several club owners were either professional gamblers or openly kept company with gamblers. Baseball was far less innocent than its fans knew.
The disputing parties in Judge Landis’s court reached an out-of-court settlement in December 1915. The National and American Leagues paid $5 million to put the Federal League out of business and to absorb its players and assets. For the long-time owners, the deal restored a profitable monopoly. It also got Cubs owner Charlie Murphy off the baseball stage, with Cincinnati-based Charles P. Taft—owner of the National League’s Philadelphia franchise and Murphy’s original financial backer—taking over ownership of the Cubs on a caretaker basis. Since having one person own competing teams was clearly inappropriate, Taft then sold the Cubs to former Whales owner Charles Weeghman.
Under the terms of the sale, which closed on January 20, 1916, Weeghman merged the Whales into the Cubs and moved them north to Weeghman Park. Some feared that Cubs fans would refuse to follow their team all the way from their dingy West Side Grounds to the North Side. As it turned out, the team’s spectacular new ballpark—as well as some of Weeghman’s innovations, such as encouraging fans to keep baseballs that were hit into the stands—attracted large numbers of paying customers during the spring of 1916.
Many also feared that Weeghman’s ties to the underworld might taint the Cubs. He associated publicly with both Chicago-based gambler Jacob “Mont” Tennes and the notorious Arnold “The Big Bankroll” Rothstein, who ran substantial gambling operations out of New York. These fears, too, proved unfounded.
Weeghman’s real weakness lay in his lack of capital. Under the terms of his purchase, Weeghman and his associates set up a company with a capitalization of $1 million—of which half was stock representing the merged teams’ assets (principally Weeghman Park and the players’ contracts), and the other half was to be new money raised from additional investors. Weeghman’s option gave him a year to raise this additional $500,000.7
He secured pledge
s of $50,000 each from chewing gum magnate William Wrigley, meatpacker J. Ogden Armour, and seafood wholesaler William Walker, as well as lesser amounts from other investors. (Wrigley, Armour, and Walker had little interest in baseball but they had cash on hand—and Weeghman’s restaurant chain was a valued customer.) By the end of 1916, however, Weeghman had raised only $350,000, and his option was set to expire. Desperate, he approached a wealthy Chicago businessman—a friend of a friend—who was an avid Cubs fan.
That fan was Albert Lasker.
Lasker had never considered buying a baseball team, so when Weeghman approached him in January 1917, he was taken aback.8 He didn’t know Weeghman, and didn’t know the first thing about assessing or running a professional baseball club. In addition, Weeghman needed a commitment overnight. Lasker told him to keep looking, but also invited him to come back at nine the next morning if he failed to turn up another investor.9
That night, Lasker took this strange story home to Flora, who strongly encouraged her husband to buy into the Cubs: “She insisted that I buy that interest, saying that I worked so hard that this would give me an avocation. I saw that she was very determined. I don’t think she ever saw a ball game in her life. She was an invalid, and never took any part in my business affairs, but on this she was insistent. She persuaded me to do it.”10
The Man Who Sold America: The Amazing (but True!) Story of Albert D. Lasker and the Creation of the Advertising Century Page 20