The Man Who Sold America: The Amazing (but True!) Story of Albert D. Lasker and the Creation of the Advertising Century
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Working behind the scenes also freed up Lasker to be of more direct assistance to Hays as the chairman tackled a series of pressing problems. One was a desperate shortage of funds. Mining magnate William Boyce Thompson had agreed to advance up to $300,000 to underwrite the Republicans’ activities, on condition that he eventually would be paid back. Hays’s audacious response, as described by Lasker, sounds like a page out of the playbook of Lasker’s favorite copywriter and ad-campaign strategist, Claude Hopkins: “Hays very shrewdly announced that the Republicans for this off-year congressional campaign would not accept contributions of over a thousand dollars from anyone. As it was then very difficult for Republicans to get as much as a thousand-dollar contribution, this was making no financial sacrifices and was mighty good public relations.”23
Hays’s staff drew up a list of wealthy individuals who might be inclined to make a thousand-dollar contribution. They went to work, and donors soon started arriving at the Knox Building. Shortly after Lasker took up his post in New York, a buzzer summoned him into Hays’s office. “Lasker,” Hays said, as his top propagandist came into his office, “I want you to meet our first thousand-dollar contributor—Mr. R. S. Hawley.” It was the same Robert S. Hawley for whom Lasker had campaigned decades earlier. Hawley had left politics, entered international trade, and risen to become the head of the Cuban Cane Sugar Company. As Lasker and Hawley reunited after twenty-two years, each was astonished to encounter the other in the innermost sanctum of the Republican Party.
Lasker also ran interference for Hays. At one point, for example, an expatriate American named Brown traveled all the way from Paris to seek an audience with Hays. Hays decided that this unexpected visitor should be turfed out to Lasker. The Republicans’ chief publicist listened carefully to Brown’s ideas, which boiled down to a cautionary tale for America about getting embroiled in postwar Continental intrigues, and encouraged Brown to write them up in a pamphlet. Ultimately, Lasker paid something like $30,000 out of his own pocket to have the pamphlet—entitled After the Peace, What?—printed and distributed. “We put out millions and millions of those brochures,” Lasker later recalled.24
“Millions and millions” certainly overstates the real numbers. But the main point remains: Lasker learned that saturating the landscape with pamphlets had a very powerful effect, in this new game of politics, and he filed the technique away for future campaigns.
Yet another challenge faced by Hays and Lasker was the continuing phenomenon of Teddy Roosevelt. Still only in his late fifties, still ambitious and energetic despite being blind in one eye and deaf in one ear, Roosevelt was positioning himself for yet another run at the White House. Lasker concluded that an informal deal had been cut, and that Roosevelt would be nominated in 1920.25 But Hays, as national chairman, couldn’t appear to favor Roosevelt over other possible contenders—nor did he have time, in a midterm election year, to cater to the high-maintenance Roosevelt. He therefore turned over this delicate assignment to a very willing Albert Lasker. Hays told Lasker that whenever Roosevelt called, Lasker should immediately go see him in the former president’s combined office-and-residence suite at Manhattan’s Leighton Hotel, and carry out whatever assignments Roosevelt might give him.
Minor skirmishing between the Democrats and Republicans continued all summer, but the real hostilities broke out in the fall. On October 25, with the congressional election less than two weeks away, President Wilson—better known for his powerful intellect than his political instincts—committed a major blunder. He issued a letter that asked Americans to vote Democratic to strengthen his hand in the conduct of the war. Although he letter didn’t quite impugn the patriotism of Republicans, it came very close. Hays shot back gleefully: “A more ungracious, more unjust, more wanton, more mendacious accusation never was made by the most reckless stump orator, much less by a President of the United States for partisan purposes.”26
Lasker had Hays arrange a meeting at the Union League Club between Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. The two former presidents and former political allies—Roosevelt had anointed Taft as his successor in 1908—had only recently ended a bitter six-year feud that dated back to the 1912 election. In advance of the meeting, Lasker composed a statement blasting Wilson, which he wanted Taft and Roosevelt to release jointly. Given the need for an immediate turnaround, Lasker insisted that Hays attend the summit conference in case it went off the rails:
There were the four of us—Roosevelt and Taft, Hays and me. I will always remember the first words they said to each other—again showing breeding. The two men came in and they put their arms around each other, and the one said, “Hello, Will,” and the other said, “Hello, Teddy,” and then they immediately got to work.
By the time they finished, there wasn’t much left of the document that I wrote. I think the only thing left was, “Our fellow countrymen.”27
Later that day, Roosevelt asked Lasker to help with a major speech he would be giving at Carnegie Hall in a few days.28 At the New Amsterdam Theater, Roosevelt had seen a performance by a brilliant young actor whom he thought should be brought into the Republican fold. “That man is destined someday to become a great power in our national life,” Lasker recalls Roosevelt declaring. “That man someday is going to fashion the views of millions, and as the head of our propaganda department, I want you to meet him and cultivate him.”
Roosevelt proved prescient: the young actor turned out to be Will Rogers, the “Cowboy Philosopher,” who through his writing, acting, and stand-up monologues, went on to be a major force in American culture for years to come.
Rogers said that he’d be happy to help Roosevelt out. “In the work I do,” he told Lasker, “I’m going to hit each side a lick where it ought to be hit, and boost each side where it ought to be boosted.” He emphasized, however, that he was a Democrat.29 If the Democrats came to him for help, he continued in his trademark drawl, he’d most certainly help them. Accepting these terms, Lasker asked Rogers to take a look at the opening of Roosevelt’s speech, which Lasker disliked. Rogers supplied a gentle jab at President Wilson that Roosevelt wound up delivering at Carnegie Hall.30
When the counting was finished after the November 5 election, the Republicans had seized control of Congress, winning a two-vote majority in the Senate and a thirty-four-vote majority in the House. For Wilson, the outcome was a disaster; for Hays and Lasker, it was a triumph.
Hostilities in Europe ended six days after the election.31 If the Armistice had occurred the week before the election, Hays admitted, Wilson would have won a resounding victory.
Lasker derived two unexpected bonuses from his short period of service with Hays in New York. The first, of course, was his friendship with Hays. Diminutive in stature, soft-spoken, and self-effacing, the “Chairman” (as Lasker came to refer to him) looked more like a school superintendent than a kingmaker. He was only a year older than Lasker, and yet he struck Lasker as distinguished and worldly—a larger-than-life figure. By most measures, Lasker had seen far more of the world. But the mild-mannered Hays had tapped into the rushing artery of national political power, and that elevated him out of the ranks of ordinary men. “I had [had] no opportunity to meet great national figures in politics,” Lasker later recalled of his life before 1918.32 Yes, he had done business with the leading manufacturers of the Midwest and further afield. He had taken their measure, and concluded that he was at least their equal. But Hays consorted with past and future presidents, the shapers of history.
Lasker’s second bonus was his friendship with Ralph V. Sollitt. Sollitt had been a professor and administrator at the University of Indiana, where he had met Hays. Hays, impressed with Sollitt—an accomplished lawyer and a skilled orator, as well as an academic—asked him to serve in New York as his executive secretary.33 Lasker realized immediately that Sollitt had special qualities:
I remember no man in my life as beloved by everyone he met as Sollitt. Sollitt was beloved in the university; in the Republican Party every
national figure loved him. The little people around the office loved him—the scrub women, everyone from the highest to the lowest . . .
A great friendship sprang up between Sollitt and me until we became the same as brothers in the blood, and I wouldn’t know the difference between him and blood brothers.34
For decades afterward, both Hays and Sollitt remained important figures, and key mooring points, in Lasker’s life. Hays engaged Lasker in the making of a president, and years later introduced Lasker to the woman who would become his second wife. Sollitt served Lasker in multiple executive capacities, including an interlude in Washington and a difficult stint at the helm of Lord & Thomas. “All the years I was gone from Lord & Thomas,” Lasker later commented, “and all the things that didn’t go forward that should have gone forward . . . will be made up many times over to Lord & Thomas by the coming of Ralph Sollitt.”35
But just ahead for the trio of Hays, Lasker, and Sollitt were much larger adventures, which would further cement their friendship and mutual respect.
Chapter Twelve
Electing a President
STUNG BY HIS ELECTORAL disaster in November 1918, Woodrow Wilson sailed for Europe in early December to attend the Paris Peace Conference.
Teddy Roosevelt, certain to be nominated by the Republicans at their 1920 convention, fell ill and was hospitalized. On January 6, 1919, at the age of sixty-one, he died of a blood infection from an abscessed tooth—there were no antibiotics yet—and his death left his party without a clear favorite in the presidential race that was soon to begin.
After the 1918 electoral victory, Albert Lasker retained his title as head of the Republicans’ public relations department, but this was a job in name only.1 Determined to come to grips with his business and personal challenges, he moved back to Chicago. For a year or so, he put politics on hold, occasionally stopping by the Knox Building for strategy sessions.
The excitement of the election of 1918, however, persisted. He harbored no ill will toward Woodrow Wilson. He was, however, worried about Wilson’s judgment and intentions. The news filtering back from Europe in the early months of 1919 included sketchy details about two documents that Wilson and the European heads of state were hammering out: the Versailles Treaty, formally bringing hostilities to an end; and a “Covenant of the League of Nations,” aimed at creating an unprecedented union of nation states. At least in theory, members of the League could invoke its charter to drag U.S. soldiers and sailors into local squabbles overseas—without the prior consent of Congress.
Lasker was an uncompromising isolationist, and in the early months of 1919 he complained to Hays that Senate Republicans weren’t speaking out forcefully enough against the League of Nations. In response, Hays organized a dinner at the Shoreham Hotel in Washington so that the senators could hear directly from Lasker. The evening did not go well, from Lasker’s perspective:
I presented my views, and when I finished, [Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot] Lodge traced with fine logic what [he and his isolationist colleagues] had been doing. Although later, when I went into the Administration in Washington, Lodge and I became very good friends, I shall never forget the sarcasm and contempt he put into his remarks as he addressed me. The contempt was for an outside young whippersnapper like myself coming down [to Washington] to criticize.2
In fact, Lodge and his fellow isolationists were then plotting an all-out assault on Wilson and his League. Lodge, who chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, used a protracted series of committee hearings over the summer to pick apart the proposed treaties. The embattled Wilson embarked on a twenty-seven-day, ten-thousand-mile cross-country barnstorming tour in September, designed to bring pressure to bear on his enemies in the Senate. The strain of twenty-six major speeches and countless whistle-stop orations—as many as ten a day—proved too much for Wilson. On September 23, as his train passed through Pueblo, Colorado, he suffered a debilitating stroke.3
Although Wilson was incapacitated, his League was not dead. Many in positions of power continued to advocate for some kind of international organization that could help avoid a repeat of the horrors of World War I. It was against this muddied backdrop that, in the early weeks of 1920, Joseph Medill McCormick—U.S. senator from Illinois—came to see Lasker in his office.
Lasker had known him for years. McCormick, an heir to Cyrus McCormick’s farm-machinery fortune, had played an active role in his family’s paper, the Chicago Tribune, and—with Lasker’s help—had helped boost the Tribune’s circulation. (Among other stunts, Lasker and McCormick in January 1907 devised America’s first beauty pageant for promotional purposes.4) McCormick was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1916 as a Republican, and two years later Lasker helped him make the leap to the Senate.
In the subsequent four years, McCormick had emerged as a leader among the fourteen “Irreconcilables”—the senators who had declared that they would never be reconciled to a League of Nations. As the 1920 presidential election neared, the Irreconcilables decided that they needed a candidate. They settled on Hiram Johnson, U.S. senator from California.
Johnson had been governor of his home state, and somewhat reluctantly agreed to run on the Progressive ticket in 1912 as Teddy Roosevelt’s (losing) vice presidential candidate. He returned to California and the governor’s job, but halfway through his second term, in 1916, he was elected to the Senate. An odd blend of free-thinking populist and zealous isolationist, Johnson fancied himself a “bloc of one.”5 The Irreconcilables didn’t believe that Johnson could win; the goal, Lasker later explained, was “simply to display the strength of our [isolationist] element in the Party.”6 McCormick asked Lasker to help raise money and garner visibility for Johnson. Although he had never met the candidate, Lasker agreed to raise funds for Johnson’s Midwestern effort and set up a regional headquarters in Chicago.
Increasingly involved in the Johnson effort, Lasker went to Will Hays and offered to resign from the Republican National Committee.7 Hays turned Lasker down, but did grant him a leave of absence for the prenomination season.8 Lasker then jumped into the Johnson campaign with his characteristic passion: “I got into the fray, and gave it all my time, and a considerable amount of money, and this is referred to in Harold Ickes’ book, Autobiography of a Curmudgeon. He refers to the fact that we managed that campaign—he from the political end in helping Hiram Johnson, and I from the publicity end and in raising money. I also established the main headquarters in Chicago.”9
One way that Lasker raised the money for Johnson was to get William Wrigley involved in the effort. The chewing gum magnate and co-owner of the Chicago Cubs contributed something like $30,000 to the campaign and also made space available for its headquarters.10
To the surprise of the politicos, Johnson won five of the first six primaries he entered—several by impressive margins—thereby establishing himself an unlikely frontrunner for the Republican nomination.11
The Republican Convention took place in June 1920 in Chicago. The three leading contenders were General Leonard Wood—the late Teddy Roosevelt’s friend and fellow Rough Rider—Hiram Johnson, and Illinois governor Frank Lowden. They arrived at the convention with 124, 112, and 72 committed delegates, respectively. The genial Senator Warren Harding, favorite-son candidate from Ohio, had a scant 39.
Although Hiram Johnson had scored significant victories, the hard truth was that he could never be nominated in Chicago. He had, in Lasker’s opinion, “too much of a will of his own.”12 He was too tough to do business with. “You could agree with Johnson on a hundred things,” Lasker commented, “and if you disagreed on the hundred and first, it was all off between you.”13
The Republicans in the smoke-filled room decided to offer the presidential nomination to Pennsylvania senator Philander C. Knox, and make Johnson Knox’s running mate. Knox and Johnson were friends, and both Irreconcilables, and the power brokers thought the Bloc of One might bite. He did not. Johnson felt, as Lasker put it, that “he had made t
he good fight,” and that Knox should be his vice presidential candidate.
Next, the operatives settled on Harding. At 2:00 a.m., Harding strode into Johnson’s suite: the first time Lasker had ever met the senator from Ohio. Harding wanted to talk to Johnson privately, so they went into the bedroom. As Lasker later recalled: “They talked for five or ten minutes, and when Harding left, Johnson was livid with anger. He said, ‘I like Harding. I like him very much, but I can’t conceive of him being president of the United States. He’s done nothing to deserve it. He tells me they have just agreed upstairs to make him president, and he came down here to ask me, wouldn’t I run as vice president? Of course I indignantly refused.’”14
The next day, the convention nominated Harding; his running mate was Massachusetts governor Calvin Coolidge. Lasker was deeply disillusioned. “I thought I was completely out of politics,” he later recalled. “I was discouraged and disheartened.”15
In addition, Lord & Thomas once again was calling. “I wanted to get back to my business,” he explained several years later, “because the business had been running in a rather loose way.”16 That was an understatement; Lasker had rarely been to the office for the previous year and a half, and in his absence, the agency was adrift.