Chapter Eleven

Venturing into Politics

ALBERT LASKER called himself an “ardent Republican.”¹ But with the notable exception of his early involvement in Robert B. Hawley’s successful congressional race back in Galveston, Lasker was not particularly ardent about his Republicanism as a young man. In the more than two decades since Hawley had won his congressional race, he once asserted, he had “never given any thought to politics, not bothered.”²

This wasn’t exactly true. And larger trends—as well as Lasker’s fascination with power and Big Ideas—almost guaranteed that he would try his hand at politics.

The backdrop was both complicated and fluid. In the 1912 presidential elections, the Republican Party had been split by the defection of Teddy Roosevelt’s “Bull Moose” Progressives, and the result was the election of the Democrat Woodrow Wilson to the White House and a Democratic Congress. By 1918, the Republicans were tired of being outmaneuvered and disenfranchised. Eager to reverse their fortunes, they went looking for new blood.

They found it in Indiana. There, two years earlier, Republican state chairman Will H. Hays had engineered an astounding sweep: electing a Republican governor and two Republican senators and carrying all of Indiana’s Congressional districts. And so in February 1918, anxious Republicans huddling in St. Louis elected the thirty-eight-year-old Hays chairman of the Republican National Committee.

Chairman Hays set up shop in New York City—on the third floor of the Knox Building, at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 40th Street—and began crisscrossing the country in a highly visible effort to sell war bonds. During this extended tour, he met with party elders in key states and asked whom he should include in his brain trust. During a stop in Indianapolis, his friend W. G. Irwin strongly encouraged him to enlist Albert Lasker to handle the Republican Party’s public relations in the upcoming off-year congressional elections.

Hays already knew a lot about Lasker. Both in 1910 and 1914, he had brought him into Indiana to make speeches on behalf of local candidates. Hays agreed that it would make sense to involve Lasker in a bigger effort. “I wanted to get the best person, the biggest person in the world, to sit with me on that program,” he later recalled.³

Sometime in June 1918, Hays, Irwin, and Lasker met, and Hays leaned heavily on Lasker to head up public relations for the Republicans. “Nothing could have interested me less,” Lasker later claimed.⁴ “I was just as interested as if he had asked me to become chief ballet dancer with the Russians.”⁵

But on a deeper level, the unexpected opportunity came at a good time. A half-decade after the Leo Frank debacle, he was still looking for a way to do something of significance on the national level. And Russian ballet dancers notwithstanding, Hays was offering Lasker the very job Lasker had tried and failed to land four years earlier.

Lasker’s first tentative ventures into politics since his Galveston days came as a result of Hays’s request that he speak at small gatherings in Marion and other Indiana towns. This connection served Lasker and his agency well. Lord & Thomas placed the advertising for the presidential campaign of William Howard Taft in 1912—a plum account.

Lasker’s next push into the political realm came in part through the efforts of a colorful character who played an important role in the next two decades of Lasker’s life: John Callan O’Laughlin. Originally a newspaper reporter with the Associated Press, O’Laughlin was covering St. Petersburg when war broke out between Russia and Japan in 1904. President Theodore Roosevelt pressed O’Laughlin into service as an intermediary to help broker a ceasefire between the warring nations in 1905—an intervention that subsequently earned Roosevelt the Nobel Peace Prize.⁶ O’Laughlin later worked as a Washington-based reporter for the Chicago Herald, served briefly as acting assistant secretary of state under Roosevelt, and then accompanied Roosevelt on his celebrated hunting expeditions to Africa and Europe.

How Lasker met up with O’Laughlin is unclear, although Lasker’s personal lawyer, Elmer Schlesinger, probably made the initial introductions. In the spring of 1916, Schlesinger enlisted O’Laughlin’s help in an unsuccessful effort to get Lasker appointed to the Federal Trade Commission—a job that Lasker was “extremely anxious” to get, according to Schlesinger.⁷

A few months later, in the wake of the Republican convention that nominated Charles Evans Hughes for President, O’Laughlin and Schlesinger tried to get Lasker named chairman of the Publicity Committee of the Republican National Committee. This meant bringing him to the attention of influential senators (including Ohio’s Warren G. Harding), and persuading them in turn to write letters to the Committee’s heads in support of Lasker’s candidacy. To Massachusetts senator W. Murray Crane, for example, O’Laughlin wrote:

Mr. Lasker is the head and owner of the Lord and Thomas Advertising Agency, the biggest advertising agency in the United States. He is a young man—only 42 or thereabouts—is a Jew, and a millionaire. You will remember the tremendous publicity in the Leo M. Frank case for which he was responsible. Through his advertising agency he is of course in touch with all the newspapers in the United States, and naturally they would be disposed to treat with consideration any suggestion he might make to them.⁸

The effort came to nothing, however, most likely because the Republicans were reluctant to offend other leading advertising agencies. Again, Lasker thanked O’Laughlin for his efforts and withdrew temporarily from the political fray.

“We have not heard the last of friend Lasker,” Schlesinger wrote to O’Laughlin. “We are going to land him in the kind of a job he wants some day.”⁹

Events on the world stage soon placed Lasker’s ambitions in a new context. America’s entry into World War I in April 1917 shifted his focus from politics to national service.

My feeling had been one of rather sympathy for Germany, but I recognized that that sympathy was entirely due to the fact that I came from a long line of Germans, [and] that I had cousins in the war on that side . . .

The minute we went into the war, she was my enemy, but at all times I felt that nothing was going to be settled with this war . . . I began feeling within myself—Golly, am I keeping out of going to that war because I am afraid? Is it the coward in me, the physical cowardice? . . .

And also I knew that . . . if they made a group of men utterly unfitted to serve in war, I was [one of them], because all my life . . . I was no good with my hands. My physical side and my brain never have coordinated. I have never been able to tell right from left. And if somebody tells me, even today, to go right, I have to see which hand I write with. And I know if they told me to turn right, in the confusion I might turn left . . .

I was one of the controlling heads of the Mitchell Motor Car Company and the Van Camp Company, and as such, had every reason to excuse myself on the grounds that I was making war supplies, but the whole thing just made me bitter with the world and with myself, and it was a mighty trying period for my wife.¹⁰

Briefly, Lasker thought about selling Liberty Bonds to support the war effort. Next he lobbied for an unpaid post in Washington. Finally, he used family connections to secure a position as an unpaid assistant to Secretary of Agriculture David F. Houston in Washington. The Department of Agriculture had launched a drive in the spring of 1917—the War Garden Conservation Program—to persuade American women to raise vegetables in their yards, and as those crops came in, many of these inexperienced gardeners had to be taught how to can and preserve them. Working part-time out of a large corner office in the Department of Agriculture building in Washington, Lasker orchestrated the publicity for the program, promoting “National Vegetable Canning Week” and similar efforts.

Lasker considered the entire effort an embarrassing failure: “Most of what the women raised exploded in their faces or rotted. It was just a tremendous waste of effort and money. And of course the next year nothing like that was encouraged. But it was all done in the good old name of ‘war.’ Valuable time and glassware that could have been used for the Allies!”¹¹

At least one good thing came out of it, however: a deeper friendship with O’Laughlin. By the end of that summer, they opened their letters to each other with the salutations “Dear Cal” and “Dear Al.” Few people got away with calling Albert Lasker “Al”; O’Laughlin was one of them.

Lasker retreated to Chicago, still looking for a way that he could contribute to the war effort. “The government wore me out in my effort to volunteer my services,” he observed wryly.¹² He thought about the pros and cons of volunteering to serve in the Army, conscious that service in uniform might one day be important to his still hazy political ambitions. “No matter what one does for the country at this time,” he wrote to O’Laughlin, “in after years one’s contribution will be more definitely measured if one serves in the army than if one serves otherwise.”¹³ Several branches of the Army, including the Motor Transport Service, approached Lasker to see if he would consider signing on with them. Still, Lasker hesitated: If they told me to turn right, in the confusion I might turn left.

O’Laughlin enlisted early in 1918 to serve on the staff of Acting Quartermaster General George W. Goethals, so by the time Will Hays tracked down his quarry in the early summer of 1918, Lasker was primed to hear about opportunities for government service—even of a partisan stripe.

Hays wanted more than selling; he wanted access to Lasker’s organizational talents: “Lasker, right after I was made chairman, set out to organize this country to make a party. [I] had to get a man for that, like I’d get a secretary, or treasurer, or anything else. They got the best man in every way—never in politics before—to do a selling job for a righteous commodity, a righteous cause, that really had the goods.”¹⁴

Hays understood Lasker well, putting several powerful inducements in front of him. First, of course, there was the “righteous cause.” Second, Hays said that Teddy Roosevelt himself wanted to meet with Lasker, in hopes of persuading him to take the job.

Perhaps Hays knew that Lasker was a “great worshiper of Roosevelt.”¹⁵ Perhaps he was simply banking on the fact that almost any American of that era would have been thrilled to get a personal audience with the immensely popular former president, Rough Rider, author, and big-game hunter. In either case, Lasker bit down hard on Hays’s hook, and—in the third week of September—Hays drove him out to the Roosevelt compound at Oyster Bay, Long Island.¹⁶

The legendary “TR,” sporting his trademark khakis, was waiting on the front porch at Sagamore Hill to greet his two visitors from the Midwest.¹⁷ “So this is Lasker,” he boomed, throwing an arm around his guest’s shoulder. “They tell me you’re the greatest advertiser in America!”

Lasker, thinking on his feet, demurred. “Colonel,” he shot back, “no man can claim that distinction as long as you live!”¹⁸

An intoxicating afternoon followed. Lasker and Hays lunched with Roosevelt, his wife, Edith, and a daughter-in-law. Roosevelt, “in his own impetuous way,” retrieved one of his favorite books and had the group read its preface out loud.¹⁹ Afterwards, Roosevelt took Lasker into his study for some one-on-one arm-twisting. Such a sustained overture from the overpowering Roosevelt (dynamic, in Lasker’s eyes, and everything that appealed to any red-blooded man) proved impossible to resist.²⁰ Before the afternoon was out, Roosevelt had talked Lasker into signing on.

Lasker relocated temporarily to New York and set up shop in Hays’s leased quarters. Together, in adjoining offices, Will Hays and Albert Lasker undertook to sell Republicans to Americans.

Hays gave Lasker a free hand on the “propaganda end” of the operation. “He never once interfered,” Lasker said.²¹ Once again, Lasker positioned himself well behind the scenes, arranging to have another staffer appointed as the campaign’s formal publicity manager. Retreating into the background gave him the freedom to be the “lone wolf” and “do that which I felt should be done.” It also ingratiated him to Hays’s staff, who appreciated his generosity in letting other people take the credit for work well done. “That always made people work very much harder for me,” Lasker explained, “because they saw I didn’t want anything out of it in self-aggrandization.”²²

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.