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

  Although this new formal connection complicated their warm relationship, it didn’t tie either Lasker’s or Hutchins’s tongue. In 1939, for example, Hutchins approached his board with a radical proposal: to do away with football. Lasker disapproved. “Football is what unifies a university,” he declared at one board meeting. “What will take its place?”

  “Education,” Hutchins replied, and the board voted its approval.29

  Lasker gave his beloved Mill Road Farm to the University in the early months of 1940, but by that time the bonds between Lasker and Hutchins already were weakening. The first reason was Hutchins’s strongly isolationist stance toward the war in Europe, which was then heating up. Lasker—once an outspoken isolationist—now believed that U.S. involvement in World War II was inevitable. But the proximate cause of the rupture between Lasker and his friend was an article published in the March 1942 edition of the Saturday Evening Post, entitled “The Case Against the Jew.” Its author was Hutchins’s close friend and sometime ghostwriter, Milton Mayer. Although Mayer was a half-time employee in the University’s public relations office, he also freelanced for the Post and other publications. No one at the University—certainly including Hutchins—had anything to do with “The Case Against the Jew.”

  Lasker, who didn’t get past the article’s incendiary title, was furious at Mayer’s seemingly anti-Semitic stance. The fact that Mayer was himself Jewish, and that the article (upon closer scrutiny) actually “made a case” for Jews, failed to calm Lasker. He decided to resign as a University trustee, and in an April 16 phone call, he informed Hutchins of his intent. In that conversation and in subsequent talks and correspondence, Hutchins tried to persuade his angry friend and ally to change his mind, but Lasker was adamant. Although the two men parted company on amicable terms—with Lasker joking that Hutchins could still count on being the “tenant of his furniture” at Mill Road Farm in the coming summer—their close friendship was over.30

  Years later, when Lasker and Hutchins met by chance at a social gathering, Lasker confessed that he finally had read “The Case Against the Jew,” and decided that it was a good piece of work. “It wasn’t a bad article,” Lasker admitted. “But the title was unfortunate.”

  “Wasn’t it,” Hutchins replied coolly.31

  The second episode that sparked Lasker’s renewed awareness of his Jewish identity during these last years of his life was a sixteen-day trip to Israel in May 1950, immediately after his seventieth birthday. A year earlier, Lasker had donated $50,000 to help establish a children’s health clinic in Jerusalem, and this trip was scheduled to allow him to attend its dedication. He and Mary sailed to France together on the Queen Mary, and—while Mary stayed in Paris with her close friend Anna Rosenberg, scouting up available works of art—Lasker went on to Israel with his two sisters and his friend Emery Reves, a well-known writer and literary agent.32

  “I went there with an open mind,” Lasker later said. “I had never been a Zionist, but I had never been an anti-Zionist. I had been a non-Zionist.”33

  In fact, Lasker had been a close observer of the process that led to the creation of the Jewish state in May 1948. Early in that year, for example, he indirectly lobbied President Truman to intervene in the fighting then raging between the Jewish and Arab residents of Palestine. “Unless the President gets this Palestine matter settled pretty soon,” he warned one of Truman’s closest advisers, “the Jews will clobber him in the election this fall.”34

  Now, two years later, the Lasker party was criss-crossing the young country and meeting with its leaders. (Lasker had long conversations with Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and President Chaim Weizmann, among others.) But he also met and mingled with less-exalted Israelis, encountering Jews from a startling range of nationalities: Afghans, Turks, Rumanians, Bulgarians, Yemenis, Algerians, Moroccans, Russians, and Germans, many dressed in their native garb and speaking their own languages.

  Reminiscing with Columbia’s oral historians shortly after his return, Lasker’s mind was still full of the sights and sounds of the infant Jewish state. Always the marketer, he declared that Israel faced unique marketing challenges. It had to present its most dire problems to the international Jewish community, because it was dependent on their “charity money.” At the same time, it had to present its best face, so that potential donors would have cause for hope.

  Lasker had been struck by the outstanding quality of Israel’s leaders—“realists but idealists”—and likened them to America’s founding fathers. This was no coincidence, he asserted:“When a great revolution that is going to affect the world for decades and maybe a century or more takes place, it gives opportunity for men who would have remained hidden, to rise. It’s because the times call, that these men of ability get chosen for leadership.”

  Israel was a “miracle,” Lasker concluded—a tiny Jewish state of 800,000 people that had beaten back Arab forces representing more than 30 million people. It was a place where Jewish immigrants were never refused, where Jews didn’t have to keep looking back over their shoulders, and where they could finally belong.35 He was struck by the life on the kibbutzes he visited, marveling that at the end of the workday, farmers of both genders traded their blue jeans for khakis or dresses and spent the next several hours in various cultural pursuits. Again, he was reminded of a long-ago home: “Here in this ancient [biblical] country you have a strange feeling. It is a pioneer country. I had the same feeling there that I had as a boy in the ’80s and ’90s in Texas. It is a pioneer people, with all the released energy of pioneer people who are going to open up a new country against that Biblical background of worn land.”

  “For the first time in my life,” Lasker later observed, “I know what the expression, ‘the Jewish people’ means. These are my people, and I am part of them.”36 For Lasker, then nearing the end of his life, traveling to Israel was a journey home.

  Shortly after Lasker returned from Israel, he began experiencing severe abdominal pains. He first thought that he was suffering from liver trouble caused by a rich Continental diet on his trip. Soon, though, it became clear that his condition was serious, and on July 5, he underwent an exploratory operation. The surgeons found a tumor, and—within a few weeks—the lab results pointed to a malignant cancer. Mary, well aware of Lasker’s intense fear of the disease that had claimed his brother Harry’s life, kept the diagnosis from him. Lasker never learned, even during his terminal battle against the illness, that he was fighting colon cancer.

  Lasker recovered from this first surgery, returning home in mid-August. Because his lymph nodes had been removed, there seemed to be some chance that he would make a full recovery. He regained most of his strength, and in November, he and Mary once again began their intensive lobbying in support of medical research. They met with the Director of the Bureau of the Budget on November 9, but were able to extract only small increases in funding. The following month, Mary met face-to-face with President Harry Truman, who agreed to appoint one of his executive assistants as the White House liaison for health issues.

  The Laskers visited Europe one last time in the spring of 1951, during which Albert experienced an ominous spike in his blood pressure. (“I overdid [it] in Paris,” he explained to a friend, “having too much fun.”37) When an executive at International Cellulose retired in December, Lasker wrote him a tongue-in-cheek note of reassurance:

  A hearty welcome to the Retired Men’s Club, of which I have been an active member for almost ten years now. I understand that during the coming year you are going to quit your business activities, and I want to be among the first to give you a hearty welcome into the charmed circle of which I found myself a member when I retired.

  I did so with much trepidation, only to learn to my amazement that the richest years of my life lay before me, for in the almost ten years since I have retired, I have found interests and usefulness that I never knew before which have given me cause for great satisfaction. I am sure that in full measure the same kind fate await
s you.38

  By February 1952, Albert’s colon cancer had returned. Mary moved into the hospital to be able to spend most of her time at his side. Once again—now from a hospital room—the two campaigners followed the progress of appropriations bills through the House and Senate. This time, the results were far more positive. Mary later recalled that the positive reports coming in from Washington were “one of the few things that gave Albert pleasure in the last few weeks of his life.”39

  As May drew to a close, Lasker quietly slipped into a coma. On May 30, a month past his seventy-second birthday, he died at 8:00 a.m., with Mary at his side.

  In his will, Lasker made it clear that he had already provided for his children and grandchildren, and that they were not expecting anything from his estate. He made a number of $50,000 and $100,000 bequests to individuals—including $50,000 to his psychiatrist—and bequeathed his art collection and half of his remaining estate to Mary, with the balance going to the Lasker Foundation. He also requested (but did not require) that the directors of the foundation spend its resources down within twenty years.40

  In the years to come, Mary continued the battles that the two had begun, especially her campaign against the disease that took her husband’s life. The Lasker Foundation carries forward its charitable work, and the Lasker Awards—which Mary renamed the “Albert Lasker Awards” in 1954 in his honor, and are today known as the Lasker Prizes—continue to keep Albert Lasker’s name and memory alive.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  The Lasker Legacy

  IN THE CLIMACTIC SCENE of the Wizard of Oz, Dorothy, the Tin Man, the Scarecrow, and the Cowardly Lion are quaking in the great hall of the wizard’s palace. A huge, disembodied head looms over them, bellowing at them, ordering them to go away: Do not arouse the wrath of the Great and Powerful Oz! Peals of thunder accompany his bellicose threats.

  But Dorothy’s intrepid terrier Toto scampers over to a corner of the hall, grabs a hanging curtain in his teeth, and pulls. The parting fabric reveals a thoroughly ordinary-looking man shouting into an oversized microphone as he shakes a sheet of metal to simulate the sound of thunder. He sees the four travelers at the same instant that they see him.

  “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!” he blusters into his microphone. But it’s too late: His cover is blown.

  “You humbug,” the Scarecrow shouts angrily.

  “Yes, that’s exactly so,” the Wizard says, instantly deflated. “I’m a humbug.”

  Albert Lasker shared some traits with the Great Oz. Both hawked patent medicines early in their lives. Both built astounding careers based in part on substance, and in part on humbug. Both counted on appearing larger than life, and neither wanted the curtain that separated them from their publics to be parted. But behind their respective curtains, both were warm and generous. They enjoyed people. They would have enjoyed each other.

  There is a second connotation to our “man behind the curtain” description of Lasker. He believed, strongly, that his business benefited from his relative invisibility. He didn’t need the limelight; his clients and their products did. His business goal, he declared, was “to always put the client’s interest before my own.”1 And although Lasker’s ego could best be described as privately boundless, he only once sought to establish himself as a public figure—during his stint in Washington—and quickly retreated from that role, thus thwarting his wife Flora’s dream of a run for the U.S. Senate.

  “I was never made for public life,” he concluded. “Never. Never could have been a success at it.”2

  Lasker’s periodic depressions pushed him out of the spotlight. So did his growing disenchantment with the advertising world, and so did his increasingly cynical estimation of his own accomplishments. “I have been too superficial all my life,” he concluded in the spring of 1938.3Yes, the wizard admitted; I am a humbug.

  And yet he wasn’t. “The settling of the country,” he wrote, “the machine age, the coming of the automobile, telephone, movies, radio, the advances in fine arts and all the sciences, demanded that our capacity to accept and use new ideas be developed to a point never before seen on the pages of history.”4

  In an almost bewildering variety of contexts, Lasker made that happen. He helped people accept and use new ideas.

  Who was the man behind the curtain, and what was his legacy?

  David Sarnoff, Albert Lasker’s closest friend among the prominent business leaders of the twentieth century, likened Lasker to an orchestra in which things sometimes drifted out of balance. At times the brasses get a little too loud, he observed. And sometimes there are sounds that are “not always as musical as they really are, or would be, when taken as part of a symphony.”

  But Lasker had a deeper capacity for friendship, Sarnoff observed, than anyone else he had ever met. In character and integrity, Sarnoff continued, no one ranked higher. And yes, Sarnoff volunteered—anticipating a question that successful Jews of the day sooner or later faced—Lasker loved to make money. “I know no one who will fight harder than Lasker to make money,” he said. Then he added, “But I know of no one who will fight less to keep money after he has made it. He is, without doubt, the most generous man I know.”

  Ralph Sollitt, Lasker’s closest business confidante, said that although Lasker made “oodles of money all his life,” his friend and boss was “never interested in making the money.”5 Money, said Sollitt, was Lasker’s way of keeping score in business. When business lost its appeal, so did the scorekeeping.

  Was the man behind the curtain a genius? Yes, said rental car magnate John Hertz: “There isn’t any question about him being a genius.”6

  Was Lasker a genius? David Sarnoff equivocated:

  I should say that I do not regard Albert Lasker—this is hard to say—a profound thinker. I never have. I don’t regard Albert Lasker a philosopher. I don’t regard Albert Lasker a fellow who meditates or contemplates over things. But I regard him as a genius impelled by his emotions. He has that facility of putting his finger on the meat of the cocoanut. . . .

  He does not waste any time in contemplation, or asking himself whether he is right or wrong. That he knows, he assumes, and he knows, and he is generally right about it . . . He belongs to the vocal aggressive type, confident in their own judgment, [who] use their energy and their time either to shout or impose their views upon somebody else.7

  Coming from a friend, it sounds like a harsh verdict. But Sarnoff went on to explain that after the shouting stopped, he always understood his own business challenges far better than he had previously. Give Lasker all the facts, and sufficient time to assimilate them, and he’d rather have Lasker’s judgment than anyone else’s.

  Was Lasker a genius? Mary Woodard Reinhardt, who became his third wife, had another suitor when she and Lasker first met. Frustrated by Lasker’s arrival on the scene, this other suitor approached Roy Durstine—cofounder of the archrival agency Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn—in search of dirt on Lasker. Durstine’s response was not helpful. Lasker is a business genius, he told his visitor. He not only knows how to tell a client how to do advertising, but he knows how to advise him about changing his business and how to make money out of his business. “My friend,” Mary Lasker observed dryly, “found no comfort at all from this.”8

  Lasker had a unique capacity to get to the kernel of the nut, as Frank Hummert (who worked at Lord & Thomas between 1920 and 1927) put it.9 And certainly, his mind moved faster than most people’s. “He thinks so fast himself,” observed longtime associate Elmer Bullis, “that he just feels everybody ought to think as fast as he does, and reply as rapidly, and people are not built that way . . . He thinks like a shot.”10

  Lasker was a great salesman, who learned early how to sell himself. When he chose to set out and win people, he was intensely seductive. People who began a meeting hostile to Lasker soon found themselves eating out of his hand. As Frank Hummert observed:

  He has that marvelous control over people. You can put twe
nty people in this room who are antagonistic to Lasker, and probably with good reason, and at the end of [a half an hour], why, Lasker will walk out of there the friend of everybody in the place, and they will think he is wonderful, because he will pull one rabbit out of the hat after another. You have never seen him operate. It is hard to explain. I have seen that sometimes. He knows just when to charge, and when to retreat, and when to stand still. That is a wonderful exhibition, his control of men.11

  But ultimately, he remained elusive, even to those whom he pursued. Sollitt, who understood him better than most, cautioned ghostwriter Boyden Sparkes against becoming attached to Lasker. “You will be sick when the book is ended,” he said, “because you are just going to find him more engaging all the time, and the queerest combination of qualities and personalities in all your experiences that you ever went in.” The energy and excitement might feel directed at you, Sollitt warned, but it wasn’t: “He has to go through this, all of which makes this certain theater that he lives in all the time, for himself.”12

  Lasker was both actor and audience, judge and jury. “Everything is drama with me,” he said. “It is all a play.”13 And the character who was most interesting to him, by far, was Albert Lasker. He was the only character in the play, he told his autobiographer, whose motives he could thoroughly explore and understand.