In conversations after Harding secured the nomination, the candidate and Hays decided they would run a “front-porch” campaign reminiscent of William McKinley’s 1896 campaign. Harding wouldn’t travel the country; he would let the press—and the country, presumably—come to him. “You are going to out-McKinley McKinley, as sure as you are alive,” Hays told Harding.17
Harding was quite happy to stay home. “I think myself it develops an unfortunate side of our political activities,” he wrote to a supporter, “to have a presidential candidate chasing about the country soliciting support.”18 The strategy also sidestepped Harding’s liabilities as a campaigner. Although a powerful orator, Harding was prone to malapropisms. Keeping him on his big stone front porch at 380 Mt. Vernon Avenue, in small-town Marion, Ohio, would minimize those perils.
Having reliable allies in Marion was now a priority for Will Hays, and so, sometime in late June, he called Albert Lasker. Playing to Lasker’s vanity, Hays said that he had told Harding that the only other man from headquarters that the candidate absolutely had to meet: a brilliant image-maker named Lasker.
A day or two later, Lasker huddled privately with Harding in Marion. Harding asked him to stay on as chief propagandist for the Republicans. Lasker replied that as long as Harding staunchly opposed the League, he could count on Lasker’s support. He later recalled the candidate’s response:
Mr. Harding was a kindly man. While Mr. Hays was one of the fairest men I ever met, Mr. Harding was the kindliest. That was his weakness. Senator Harding revealed his whole character at our first meeting. After my declaration, he put his arms around me and looked me square in the eyes. He said, “Lasker, let’s at the start agree on one thing—that we’ll never fall out because we disagree.”
That was the key to him. Of course one must fall out on vital issues when there is major disagreement. But Mr. Harding, once he gave his friendship, would forgive anything in a friend.19
Lasker also noted that Harding neatly sidestepped the League question. “It confirmed my hunch,” he commented, “to be a little disturbed as to what his attitude [toward the League] might be.”20 So Lasker took steps to allay his concerns. One of his roles in subsequent months was to keep Harding “on message,” in modern political parlance. Speeches would land on Lasker’s desk in Chicago; Lasker would scrutinize them for equivocation about the League. Whenever Harding attempted to straddle the issue, Lasker would “minimize the straddle to nothingness.”21
Of course, Lasker did more than that for Harding. But by forcing the candidate to toe the isolationist line, Lasker exerted a powerful influence on the direction of the campaign—and by extension, on post-war America.
Meeting in San Francisco two weeks after the Republican Convention, the Democrats nominated Ohio governor James M. Cox for president, and a relative unknown—thirty-eight-year-old Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Franklin D. Roosevelt—for vice president. Even though the campaign would not formally start until August, giving the candidates on both sides an opportunity to recuperate and draw up battle plans, Lasker began his work in early July. For the duration of the campaign, he divided his time mainly between Chicago and Marion, spending about a day a week in Marion, with occasional side trips to the New York headquarters.
One of his first steps was to recruit William Wrigley into the Harding camp. Just as Wrigley’s fortune and connections had been tapped during the primaries to benefit Hiram Johnson, now they were marshaled on behalf of Harding.22 At Lasker’s urging, Wrigley was appointed chairman of the Committee on Public Information. “I know that you understand,” Hays wrote to a supporter, “that while Mr. Wrigley is chairman of the [committee], it is Mr. Lasker, of course, who does everything that Mr. Wrigley would do.”23
This preliminary work culminated in a strategy session with Harding in Marion on July 27, attended by both Lasker and Wrigley. The account of the meeting in the New York Times—and the fact that the meeting was written up at all—reflects Lasker’s behind-the-scenes influence: “The campaign will utilize all mediums of modern advertising, including billboard posters, newspaper and magazine advertisements, and motion pictures. Today’s conference was to obtain Senator Harding’s approval of the plan. It is understood that the Senator’s approval was not given until he, a newspaper and advertising man himself, had placed his O.K. on preliminary advertising copy.”24
The Times alluded to a “twelve-word slogan” that would capture Harding’s political beliefs and galvanize the campaign, but spokesman Scott C. Bone—former newspaperman and putative publicity director for the Republican National Committee—declined to reveal it. “That’s the secret,” Bone told reporters. But once it was revealed, he said, it would be everywhere: in the newspaper on your breakfast table, plastered across a billboard on your way to work, and so on.
Here again was Lasker’s hand at work: both in the plan itself and in its coy unveiling, calculated to maximize newspaper coverage and public interest. There never was a “twelve-word slogan.” One bland battle cry—probably favored by the bland candidate himself—gained some currency: “Steady America! Let us assure good fortune to all!” A second, slightly sharper call to arms—“Let us be done with wiggling and wobbling”—was Lasker’s personal favorite, and probably his creation; in the later stages of the campaign, he keyed much of the Harding advertising on this phrase.
Early in the campaign, an old rumor gained new currency. Warren G. Harding, according to the whisperers, had black ancestry—a story that had dogged Harding from his early childhood.25 His olive-colored skin and wiry black hair prompted taunts and fights in the schoolyard—his classmates called him “Nig”—and led to stealthy attacks throughout Harding’s career in the ruthless world of Ohio politics. The fact that his wife’s father had publicly opposed their marriage on the grounds of Harding’s alleged mixed blood didn’t help. This was one of the few subjects that could arouse the affable Harding to fury—even though he acknowledged that he couldn’t prove that he had no black blood. “How do I know, Jim?” he once agonized aloud to a friend. “One of my ancestors may have jumped the fence.”26
Lasker set out to prove the opposite anyway. He distributed photographs of Harding’s grandparents to prove the candidate’s “whiteness.” He hired a newspaper editor to “investigate” Harding’s roots. He commissioned Pennsylvania’s prestigious Wyoming Historical and Geological Society to produce a Harding family tree that showed nothing but white ancestry dating as far back as the seventeenth century—a document that was distributed to newspapers across the country.
Ultimately, a principled stand taken by Woodrow Wilson probably saved Harding. The Cox campaign asked the president’s blessing for an effort to make political hay out of Harding’s alleged mixed blood. Wilson said no. “We must base our campaigns on principles,” the enfeebled and wheelchair-bound President said, “not on backstairs gossip.”27 Wilson’s high road, combined with Lasker’s energetic counterattacks, made it impossible for Democrats to “play the race card” effectively.
There were other whispers about Harding that could not be dispelled, because they were too obviously true: the candidate had an outsized sexual appetite, and indulged himself freely.
Harding’s wife Florence (“the Duchess,” as he called her) was a determined woman, and she put her considerable energies to work on her husband’s behalf: first growing his small-town newspaper into a substantial enterprise and later advancing his political career. But physical affection, it seems, did not rank high on her agenda. Warren Harding, by contrast, was easygoing, affectionate, and—by the standards of the day—handsome. Thanks in large part to Florence’s efforts, he was also wealthy. The women in small-town Marion, and later in the nation’s capital, found this brew of charm and money all too intoxicating. Florence’s recurring illnesses, as well as Harding’s frequent out-of-town speechifying—and later his senatorial duties—made assignations easy.
One of the women seduced by Harding was Carrie Phillips, whose husband, James E.
Phillips, ran a successful dry-goods store in Marion. Harding and Carrie Phillips first became romantically involved in 1905, when Jim Phillips was recuperating in Michigan from a nervous condition and Florence was recovering from kidney surgery. For years, the betrayed spouses suspected nothing. The two couples even traveled to Europe together in the early months of 1909, and vacationed in Bermuda in 1911.
The affair made Harding, first elected U.S. senator from Ohio in 1914, politically vulnerable, but he took no steps to simplify his life. Indeed, when both Carrie and Florence failed to give him the attention he craved, he took up with Nan Britton, a twenty-year-old Marion woman who had been infatuated with him since she was a thirteen-year old girl. Moving Nan to New York City, Harding found her a job and helped pay her living expenses. They met secretly for a day here, a weekend there. In January 1919, in his inner sanctum at the Senate Office Building, they conceived a child.
Meanwhile, by the summer of 1920, Jim Phillips had discovered his wife’s infidelities. Furious, he refused to decorate his three-story brick building on Marion’s main street with the requisite red, white, and blue bunting that the town was using to celebrate its front-porch candidate. Because almost every other building on Center Street was so festooned, the Phillips house stood out in eloquent barrenness. With very little else to do, local reporters began asking about the missing bunting, and Hays asked Lasker to intervene.
Sometime in the summer of 1920, Lasker and Carrie Phillips had a heart-to-heart.28 Lasker told her the campaign would pay her $20,000 and a monthly sum as long as Harding remained in office. He proposed that she and her husband leave immediately for an all-expenses-paid, round-the-world trip, ostensibly to investigate the silk trade that represented a small part of Jim Phillips’s dry-goods business. The Phillipses left for Japan before the summer was out.
In their absence, the bunting went up, and a crisis was averted.
In the 1920 election, Albert Lasker played both defense and offense. When on the offensive, his model was the advertising world’s scheme man, dreaming up colorful stunts to capture the public’s fancy and the press’s attention.
Will Hays, too, had his scheme-man impulses. During the 1916 races in Indiana, Hays had hired a cameraman to make short films of key events, which he then sent to theaters around the state to boost his candidates’ chances.29 As early as May 1919, Hays began huddling with movie studio heads to plot out a plan for greatly expanding the use of motion pictures in the upcoming presidential campaign. After Harding secured the nomination, Hays put that plan in motion. On his instructions, and certainly with Lasker’s approval, a New York camera crew based in Marion recorded the endless staged encounters on the Hardings’ front porch. They also filmed the candidate as he made his way around his hometown: discharging his limited duties at the newspaper that had made him rich, and accompanying his country-doctor father on his rounds in a horse-drawn carriage.30
Using this footage, the Republicans produced newsreels featuring Harding that were distributed to movie theaters around the country: a way to get their front-porch candidate in front of millions of Americans. In most cases, these shorts were screened before the evening’s feature, with no hint that this was a purely political message. In some cases, a Republican operative on the spot then conducted a poll of the audience.31 The results of the instant poll would be used to gauge Harding’s standing in that area and also to measure the effectiveness of the short film that had been screened.
In July 1920, a short went out that included images of Harding playing golf. Almost immediately, polls and other anecdotal data suggested it was a disaster. It confirmed suspicions that the candidate—portly, affluent, and thoroughly at home on the links—was a member of a rich elite. The golf fiasco was discussed at length at the July 27 strategy session in Marion. At that meeting, Lasker suggested that Harding be placed in a new athletic context. The two principal owners of the Chicago Cubs—himself and Will Wrigley—were in the room. Why not stage some sort of event whereby Harding could be closely associated with the national pastime?
The day after the meeting, Lasker wrote to Harding’s private secretary, George B. Christian:
I shall tomorrow start negotiations on that baseball matter, and will undoubtedly bring it to a successful conclusion, so that the game will be held as we planned before mid-August. I believe we can work it up in such a way as to do a great deal of good. It will give the Senator an opportunity, if he deems it wise, for a fitting occasion to express his views on sturdy sports, and I am sure all the press associations will gladly carry same.32
But a staged baseball game in Marion, Ohio, was far easier to dream up than to pull off. Lasker and Wrigley could deliver the Cubs, but finding a second professional ball club willing to participate in an unvarnished political event proved difficult. The Cleveland franchise expressed interest but then bowed out, citing schedule conflicts. The New York Giants at first agreed to the contest, and then changed their minds. Lasker complained that Giants manager John McGraw “kicked it over at the last minute because of his political alignment.”33
Meanwhile, the problem wasn’t going away. As Lasker explained in a letter to a friend and major shareholder in the Cincinnati Reds: “What I wanted to talk to you about was arranging a baseball game between Cincinnati and the Cubs at Marion, Ohio . . . Our candidate has been shown in pictures playing golf, and, confidentially, it has drawn a perfectly surprising amount of unfavorable reaction from the country. We get hundreds of letters from people, saying it’s a rich man’s game, a mollycoddle’s game, etc.”34
But the Reds, too, said no. Finally, an exhibition game was arranged between the Cubs and the Kerrigan Tailors, a local minor-league team. Newspapers dutifully parroted Lasker’s premise for the game: that one of the “hardships” of the front-porch campaign was that candidate Harding was unable to attend major-league games. On the morning of September 3, accompanied by a brass band hired by the New York filmmakers, the Cubs made their way to the front porch at Marion. There, Cubs president Bill Veeck promised Harding that his team would do their best to play a great game. Following Lasker’s script, Harding delivered a windy speech likening President Wilson to a “one-man team.”
By the time the Harding party got to the ballpark, seven thousand locals were primed for a ball game. To a rousing round of applause, Harding made his way out onto the field, donned a glove, and played a gentle game of catch with legendary Cubs pitcher Grover Cleveland Alexander. “He caught every ball,” the New York Times reported dryly, “although Alexander didn’t use his wicked twirls, but it was good for the movies.”
There was one more stunt planned: “Having ‘warmed up,’ Senator Harding stood in the pitcher’s box and struck out [Max] Flack, the Cubs’ right fielder. It was a technical strikeout, for both Flack and the umpire were generous, while the Marion catcher had to reach wide for the last two throws.”
What went out to the nation that night were accounts (and shortly thereafter, newsreels) of Harding—no mollycoddle!—playing catch with one of the greatest pitchers in the history of baseball. Soon, audiences in theaters around the country saw moving pictures of the candidate striding out to the mound and striking out the great pitcher’s hard-hitting teammate—then enjoying the best year of his career!
Harding and Lasker quickly became close friends. “He was the kindest of men,” Lasker said, “and utterly honest.” For his part, Harding prized loyalty above all other qualities, and he knew that Lasker was tenaciously loyal.
Despite their very different backgrounds, the candidate and the promoter had a great deal in common. They had both become emotionally unstable at about the same point in their lives. (Through the early years of the twentieth century, Harding had retreated to the Battle Creek Sanitarium on five occasions to cope with his “nervous exhaustion.”35) Neither drove a car.36 Both had wives with physical infirmities who lived life at an emotional distance—and at the same exerted powerful influences on their spouses. Lasker shared with Harding a lov
e of baseball, and they frequently stole off to talk baseball. They also played the occasional game of poker at Marion: another of Harding’s passions. Soon it was understood that when Lasker was in Marion, he would take his meals with the Hardings without waiting for an invitation.
This, inevitably, brought him closer to Florence “Nell” Harding: “I can’t tell you why, but she took an instant liking to me . . . She was a woman who . . . catalogued people, and there they stood. And if she liked you, there you stood for always . . . She made up her mind [that] I was going to be good medicine for Warren G. Harding, and she was good medicine for me right away.”37
No one outside the Republican power structure appears to have understood Lasker’s role in the campaign—or even much noticed his presence. Throughout, Lasker maintained a low profile. “I’d sneak in and out [of Marion] so the newspaper boys couldn’t see me,” he later explained. “I think they more or less thought I came on paid advertising—paid publicity.”38 In fact, he was carrying—and also inventing—some of the campaign’s most important messages.
In the later weeks of the summer of 1920, candidate Harding came under increasing pressure to begin making appearances around the country. If he did, of course, he would be pressed to clarify his positions on key issues of the day. This presented risks, and neither Hays nor Lasker had any intention of letting Harding off his short leash. Nor was Harding much inclined to slip it. “He listened politely to suggestions,” reported the Times, “and then vetoed nearly every request for him to leave Marion during the next six weeks.” The only concession that the campaign made to the growing demand for statements from the candidate was to move up a League of Nations–related speech ten days: from September 8 to August 28.
The Man Who Sold America: The Amazing (but True!) Story of Albert D. Lasker and the Creation of the Advertising Century Page 24