The Big Fella

by Jane Leavy

  She came from a good family.

  Her owner, A. R. Landers, proprietor of the Allan Landers Commercial Egg Farm in Norfolk, Nebraska, was a baseball fan and, more to the point, a Yankee fan, of whom his son Jack would later say, “He threw a mean ball.”

  Landers, a college man, got his start with eighteen pullets and an eighty-dollar stake from his father-in-law, Doc Campbell, an old-time practitioner who made house calls in his buggy, with a hot brick to keep his feet warm in the snow. By October 1927, Landers had twenty-five hundred high-producing layers, working round the clock, and a ten-thousand-egg incubator where the future champion was hatched. The eight-month-old pullet had not yet laid a single egg when Landers went to his chicken coop and spent an hour among fifty of his finest cod-liver-oil-fed, blood-tested birds, to decide which to enter in the egg-laying contest taking place in Omaha that year. “I picked out this particular chicken because she was alert, quick, working all the time and”—like the Babe himself—“eating everything in sight.”

  She had, in fact, worked her fingernails to the bone, what with her industrious digging and scratching in order to keep fit, which was more than you could say for the Big Fella.

  Lady Norfolk, as the bird had come to be known in deference to the Norfolk Chamber of Commerce, quickly distinguished herself among the 255 contestants representing thirty-two states at the American Milling Company henhouse. The makers of the high-octane Sucrene Egg Mash that had stimulated her to production—“heavily laden with protein, meat scraps, wheat flower middlings, finely ground oats, corn meal, wheat standard middlings, wheat standard bran and salt”—were moved to rename her Lady Amco of Norfolk.

  By September, when she eclipsed the American record held by Lady Lindy, who had laid 149 eggs in 1926, the comparison with Ruth became inevitable. After all, he had had a good month, too. Wire services began issuing bulletins about Lady Babe’s daily progress. Like Ruth, Landers declared, “She represents perfect co-ordination of the bodily functions, the nervous system and the mind.”

  And so, despite the objections of her hometown newspaper, Lady Amco of Norfolk became Lady Amco of Norfolk, the Babe Ruth of Layers. “She isn’t Babe Ruth as the United Press persists in calling her,” an October 17 article in the Norfolk Daily News protested. “She isn’t Lady Amco as the Omaha Bee accommodatingly calls her in order to give a little free advertising to an Omaha product. She’s Lady Norfolk.”

  Squawks of protest were also heard from Colorado, where a white Leghorn hen named Lady Skyline was said to be 45 eggs ahead of Lady Amco—but that competition wasn’t officially sanctioned. Claimants from Vancouver and Scotland also cried foul. Word came from Australia that a chicken down under had laid 165 sanctioned eggs. No matter, Lady Amco kept batting them out.

  The world-record-breaking egg, known as the Coolidge egg, was laid at 10:35 A.M. on Tuesday, October 11. Amco immediately put out a press release announcing that the Coolidge egg would be flown by airmail to the White House and the next one to New York for the other Babe. Then, deus ex machina, that very afternoon came word that Ruth would be appearing in Omaha later that week in a hastily arranged exhibition game.

  George A. Danforth, superintendent of the competition, examined the bird and pronounced her good to go, ensuring a highly publicized and heavily marketed tête-à-tête between the two “Record Busters.”

  The Coolidge egg departed Omaha as planned on that Tuesday evening from the same airport Charles Lindbergh used in his days as a barnstorming airmail pilot. Lindbergh’s landmark transatlantic flight had proved to be a boon for private aviation. Less than a month later, Charles A. Levine, a New York businessman, became the first passenger to cross the Atlantic by airplane. Two months after that, the United States Post Office turned over all airmail service in the country to private contractors. And a month after that, American Railway Express began air cargo express operations, delivering packages coast-to-coast in thirty-two hours. The Associated Press was one of its first clients, sending a package of news photographs from New York to Chicago.

  The Coolidge egg left Omaha on a Boeing B-40 airmail plane en route to Chicago, where it changed planes for a National Air Transport flight to New York. Oddly, the country’s first airmail route, established in 1918 between New York and Washington, had recently been discontinued. Which meant that when the egg got to New York, it had to catch a train to the nation’s capital, arriving late on the afternoon of October 13, two days after it was laid, and just as the president returned from the annual observance of Founder’s Day at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh.

  “Here was a story of a non-stop egg coming to a stop against a palate of such a nature that everyone would want to read about it,” the United Press declared. “The egg arrived. But it reached the White House in the mail last night after all the reporters had gone home and the man named Smith, who opens the White House packages, could distinguish nothing about the package to show it contained the egg.

  “Smith deferred opening the packet until the morning. And when he untied the package it was too late to include the egg in Mr. Coolidge’s breakfast.

  “Smith went, therefore, to the White House egg basket. He gingerly put Babe Ruth’s championship egg in it where Mrs. Coolidge or the White House cook would be sure to find it.”

  Unfortunately, by lunchtime, the regular White House egg man had added a dozen plebeian Potomac eggs to the basket and none of the president’s many advisers could say which was which. Also, the wire services had begun to express concern about “just how long an un-iced and uneaten egg will be a good egg.”

  By then, reporters had begun putting words in the bird’s mouth, quoting an indignant and defiant chicken from Omaha: “I’m going to keep on laying until my illustrious namesake gets here.” The little white Leghorn went on to say that she was sure that the Babe would not be “so choice in what he eats as Mr. Coolidge in that he thinks that one of my eggs won’t keep three days without ice.”

  The summit at the henhouse was recorded by newsreel cameras and still photographers and slavishly reported by three wire services, the Omaha World-Herald and Omaha Morning Bee, the Lincoln Evening Journal, as well as the New York Times, which published a two-column profile of the bird accompanied by a photo of Landers and his prizewinning fowl. Egg-laying competitions were serious business—and big business for the National Egg Layers’ Association, not to mention feed manufacturers like the American Milling Company and Nebraska farmers, then ranked fourteenth in the nation behind big egg-producing states like Missouri and Texas.

  Harold Chenoweth, a Nebraska filmmaker who made industrial films—one-reelers, they were called—and who worked on retainer for Paramount News, shot the footage, bringing along his four-year-old son, Bob, for the momentous occasion. Decades later Bob would find his father’s footage moldering in his sister’s garage and have it painstakingly restored with help from UCLA film school. Of the hundreds of hours of film Bob donated to the University of Nebraska, twenty-eight seconds of the meeting of the Babes survive.

  It shows a quiescent bird, spent perhaps by the effort of having just laid her 171st egg in as many days, lying quietly in Danforth’s arms, blithely ignoring the crowd of Amco officials, reporters, and well-wishers, including one four-year-old boy in knickers and a newsboy cap sneaking into the frame.

  The lady even showed a little leg.

  Then came the handoff. With Chenoweth’s camera grinding away, Danforth presented the Babe to the Babe. Immediately, the lady got her back up. Apparently, it ruffled her feathers to be used as a promotional prop. Ruth appeared equally ruffled by what one reporter described as “her sudden dash for liberty.”

  “Whoa,” Ruth exclaimed, as she made a break for it. “There she goes.” Only his quick reflexes and athletic dexterity prevented a tragedy. Handlers ascribed her nerves to the large number of visitors.

  “One a day for 171 days!” Ruth added, when she was back safely in his arms. “Gosh, how I wish I could do as well!”

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sp; II

  This was no ordinary meeting between man and bird. In modern parlance, it was a media event, and a triumph of what is now called synergy. In 1927, synergy was a medical term employed to describe the cooperative interaction between organs. The industry—and the language—of public relations was still in its infancy then, incubating in Manhattan under the stewardship of Ivy Lee, Bruce Barton, and Edward Bernays, the founding fathers of PR, and the most celebrated of the city’s five thousand “Merchants of Glory” counted by the New Yorker in 1926.

  In the fall of 1927 everyone was in the thrall of propaganda, a word that had not acquired a pejorative connotation. Everyone who could afford a “propagandist” or “builder-upper” hired one. Everyone else was reading about them in Bruce Barton’s number one bestseller, The Man Nobody Knows, a retelling of the life of Jesus Christ as the first super-salesmen leading his twelve apostles into “a kingdom of heaven” where nobody needed to know what they wanted. The book sold seven hundred thousand copies between 1925 and 1927 and earned Barton an invitation from Cecil B. DeMille to act as a consultant on Hollywood’s first biblical spectacular, King of Kings.

  There was no one better to be tied to in the fall of 1927 than Babe Ruth. Arriving in Kansas City, Ruth might have seen in a local paper the “Exploit-O-Grams” column reprinted from the Film Daily touting the success of the MGM exploiter who had arranged for Lillian Gish, star of the new film Annie Laurie, to donate box seats for the game at Muehlebach Field to twenty-five local orphans.

  Ruth probably hadn’t seen the story in the May 1927 issue of Studebaker Wheel magazine detailing his January fishing trip with Glenn E. Thomas, the Long Beach, California, car dealer who had brought along his publicist and cameraman on their excursion to the Rainbow Angling Club.

  The interconnectedness of things was becoming more literal every day: wires and cables and track, electrical grids and radio frequencies, highways and tunnels, regularly scheduled airline flights and airmail delivery routes were bringing everything and everyone into a new kind of proximity, uniting the United States in ways never before possible.

  A parallel system of opportunistic connectivity, benefiting a multiplicity of interests, was also proliferating. That was the motivation behind the meet-and-greet at the Omaha henhouse. All the clucking, pecking, and flapping of wings by 255 participating pullets could not obscure the tour de force of modern marketing in the photo taken of the Babes with AMCO spelled out in big letters over Ruth’s shoulder, and the NY on his jacket, and the bird clucking what some interpreted as approval.

  The business of public relations is as old as the urge to profit and to win. What was new in 1927 was the marriage between mass production and the mass distribution of goods and mass communication and mass psychology—a union employed on behalf of the Big Sell. Walsh had arrived in New York as a young advertising man just as the machinery of the wartime economy was being reinvented to serve consumers. And just as the original Mad Men were demonstrating how to manufacture desire for whatever or whomever they had been hired to sell.

  These Merchants of Glory were the answer to the rhetorical question Bernays posed in his 1928 book, Propaganda: “Who are the men, who, without our realizing it, give us our ideas, tell us whom to admire and whom to despise, what to believe about the ownership of public utilities, about the tariff, about the price of rubber, about the Dawes Plan, about immigration; who tell us how our houses should be designed, what furniture we should put into them, what menus we should serve on our table, what kind of shirts we must wear, what sports we should indulge in, what plays we should see, what charities we should support, what pictures we should admire, what slang we should affect, what jokes we should laugh at?”

  Ivy Lee, a former journalist who remade John D. Rockefeller as a philanthropist, imposed decorum on the messy business of hucksterism with his 1906 “Declaration of Principles,” which stressed the need for “accuracy, authenticity and interest” in public relations. He also wrote what is widely considered the first press release when he persuaded Pennsylvania Railroad officials to release a factual account of that year’s wreck at Gap, Pennsylvania, rather than try to suppress the facts, as was the custom.

  Bruce Barton, the Congregational pastor’s son, infused salesmanship with spirituality and wholesomeness, creating the mythic housewife Betty Crocker for General Mills, and “the silent majority” for Calvin Coolidge.

  Bernays, who honed his skills on behalf of the U.S. war effort as a member of the Creel Committee, was the philosopher king of promotion. The nephew of Sigmund Freud, he appropriated his uncle’s theories about unconscious desires and put them to work in the service of his clients. Bernays understood that a direct appeal was not enough to make consumers buy what they had never needed and didn’t know they desired. And so he put psychoanalytic principles to work for Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Enrico Caruso, Sergei Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, Ivory Soap, A. G. Spalding & Bros., and the United States Brewers’ Association, which hired him after the repeal of Prohibition to improve the image of German brewers, including Jacob Ruppert.

  His methods were agnostic. The same techniques and sales pitches worked equally for fatty foods, presidential candidates who looked—as Alice Longworth Roosevelt said of Coolidge—like he’d been “weaned on a pickle,” and physical culturists like Evening Graphic publisher Bernarr Macfadden, who’d had the poor judgment to advocate sex for pleasure rather than procreation.

  Bernays pioneered the use of celebrity pitchmen, a term that entered the lexicon in 1926, when he put Charlie Chaplin in advertisements for Dodge Sixes—new 6-cylinder-model cars. He created panels of experts, the precursor of the modern catchphrase “nine out of ten doctors say,” to testify to the bona fides of cigarettes and beer, and organized foundations that identified his clients with the public good.

  Bernays also mastered the art of staged productions he called “overt acts”—the media events of today. He served up the first pancake breakfast at the White House for Coolidge and members of the Ziegfeld Follies, prompting the Times to observe: “President Nearly Laughs.”

  The most notorious of his gala productions was the smoke-in he organized during the 1929 Easter Parade on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, when he armed a cadre of women with Lucky Strike cigarettes he called “Torches of Freedom.” Every smoke ring they blew into the crowd was a declaration of independence and an argument for their right to smoke in public. High above their heads, a pilot spelled out “Smoke Lucky Strikes” in skywriting. A taboo evanesced in the skies over Manhattan and a new market opened.

  Bernays had little use for exercise and once claimed his only experience in participatory sports was as a golf caddy at the Lake George Golf Club in 1901. But after Time magazine dismissed the Evening Graphic as “the most abnormal sheet in U. S. journalism” in February 1927, ridiculing its publisher as “BodyLove” Macfadden, his disquieted editorial board summoned Bernays.

  He moved swiftly. First, he nixed Macfadden’s plan for a nationwide tour of a nude statue of his twelve-year-old-daughter, which he had envisioned “as an example of what adherence to high standards in physical culture in parents could produce in off spring,” urging instead establishment of a foundation to promote a national curriculum for physical education. Then, in lieu of a proposed barefoot hike from the Macfadden Building at Sixty-fifth Street to City Hall to “demonstrate how healthy living preserved the vigor of a 59-year-old man,” Bernays sent Macfadden to London to address the House of Commons. His speech, hailed on the front-page of the Evening Graphic, was picked up by wire services and other dailies.

  Upon his return, Macfadden was received at Gracie Mansion and on Capitol Hill, not as a kook but as the senior statesman of fitness. It was a classic demonstration of the Bernays system for “injecting news into an event that the public relations counsel creates for public appearance”—and for generating free advertising.

  Their alliance lasted just long enough for Bernays to collect twelve thousand dollars and to c
onclude that his client was “unfathomable.” Nonetheless, when he published a list of the fourteen most influential opinion makers in the country, he included Macfadden along with baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis.

  Christy Walsh was watching. He didn’t subscribe to Bernays’s highfalutin terminology; as he told an audience of potential 1939 World’s Fair sponsors a decade later: “We were known as press agents until someone started using fancy titles like ‘Public Relations counselor.’” But he borrowed liberally and overtly from Bernays’s methodology. What else would you call that stunt he pulled in July 1926, when he stationed the Babe on a dusty runway beneath an airplane flying a hundred miles an hour dropping baseballs at his head, if not an “overt act”?

  When Walsh wanted to help elect the Catholic governor of New York president in 1928, he paraded a chorus line from Murderers’ Row carrying “Yankees for Al Smith” signs around major-league ballparks, bought radio time for a national address by Ruth, and stationed him atop a skyscraper in a dark suit and bowler with a campaign pin stuck in his lapel and a stogie protruding from his mouth. The photo left the unfortunate impression that Ruth was endorsing a gangster for president. He would steer clear of politics for the next sixteen years.

  Walsh loaned Ruth’s name generously, but not indiscriminately, to Madison Avenue’s new celebrity endorsement campaign. He understood that if Ruth was going to sell shoes and caps and sweaters to kids, he had to be able to sell the Babe as a champion of children, which wasn’t difficult given the genuine affinity between them. But it didn’t hurt when Ruth became a national spokesman and fund-raiser for Father Flanagan’s campaign to prevent “profiteering in homeless boys” in 1926 (an association Walsh conceived of after Ruth got himself in a legal jam in Michigan by fishing out of season). A visit to Boys Town, just outside Omaha, was scheduled between the confab at the henhouse and the exhibition game later that afternoon.