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 the 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.

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 love 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.

This was an event that Lasker was already stage-managing toward another end. His most important job in the campaign was to develop and disseminate a strong core message for the Republicans—one that would motivate, but not necessarily inform. Again, this strategy meshed neatly with the candidate. Harding was by nature a conciliatory man; when challenged, he tended to retreat into generalities. But on the subject of the League of Nations, Lasker wanted unequivocal statements of opposition. Toward that end, he pushed hard to get the candidate and his campaign to adopt a central message: no more wiggling and wobbling. Lasker felt that the implied criticisms in the phrase (indecisiveness, evasiveness, even dishonesty) could be applied to both President Wilson and candidate Cox:

In the course of the campaign, we want to show how Wilson wobbled from watchful waiting to peaceful penetration in Mexico, and how Mr. Cox is trying to wiggle from the Wilson League to a position where he is for a League with reservations, and he is trying to wiggle from being wet in wet states to dry in dry states, also how the Democrats both in legislature and administration have wiggled and wobbled on all responsibilities, whereas a Republican administration means surety.³⁹

Harding agreed to include the phrase in his League of Nations address on August 28.⁴⁰ Lasker told his operatives it was important that they call the attention of reporters and editors to the phrase without making it appear that the “publicity end of the campaign had anything to do with the expression and the thought appearing in the speech.”

Lasker had a great deal riding on “wiggle and wobble” gaining currency, since he had to begin exploiting the phrase even before Harding could utter it. He had to order a “wiggle and wobble” billboard campaign in mid-August to allow enough time for an October 2 unveiling of billboards nationwide—an enormous effort. He also wanted to mail the speech to Republican editors in advance of August 28, so that they would have time to “thoroughly digest it and get their bearings.”⁴¹ In the last week of August, therefore, he pressed both Will Hays and George Christian to make absolutely sure that Harding would use the slogan—preferably multiple times.

Harding did indeed utter the phrase near the conclusion of his speech, but that was far from the end of Lasker’s concerns. Most worrisome, Hays had concerns about whether the message was compelling enough, and whether Lasker could get it to catch fire. Lasker admitted to no such doubts:

Regarding your phone message on “WIGGLE AND WOBBLE.” Don’t worry, I will put it over with editorial cooperation and speakers cooperation if I can get it; if I can’t I will put it over without, though it will be mid-October until you can notice results, because I shall have to rely entirely on the force of the display advertising in the weekly magazines like the Saturday Evening Post, and the billposting. These two media alone will put it over . . .

It would be better, of course, to get cooperation from speakers, editors, cartoonists, and in booklet work. The trouble is, I guess, that the editors and cartoonists won’t take it up until it is already popular, and since I have secured no speakers’ cooperation it has been hard to get it to catch on merely from the only speech where the candidate has used it. We will therefore have to rely almost entirely on its catching on through the display advertising which runs in October. But don’t you be afraid—I will get it over.⁴²

Lasker was frustrated that the Republican National Committee’s designated speakers did not seize upon the catchphrase. These speakers were critically important, in part because radio was still in its infancy. (The 1920 election returns were the first ever to be broadcast live, but the campaigns themselves made little use of the new medium.) In the time-honored tradition, the way most Americans heard political messages in the summer and fall of 1920 was through the legions of speakers who fanned out across the country—some five thousand Republicans (and a somewhat smaller number of Democrats)—spreading the word in person.⁴³ But Lasker didn’t control the speakers; all he could do was push his phrase and hope that they picked it up.

“Wiggle and wobble” wasn’t the only thing on Lasker’s mind in this period. Throughout the relatively short campaign, Lasker performed a host of duties, ranging from the momentous to the offbeat. In the former category, he commissioned and placed ads in the third week of August that would be put in the hands of 22 million women, who in that month had finally won the right to vote, and would be exercising that right in the fall election. He used his considerable clout with newspaper editors to secure favorable editorials.⁴⁴ To increase the odds that those editorials might include a picture of Harding, he shipped 15 million pictures of the candidate to papers across the country, at a cost of $200,000.⁴⁵ He facilitated the appearances of movie stars, opera signers, and circus magnates on the front porch in Marion, all designed to generate favorable (and tightly controlled) press coverage and newsreel footage.⁴⁶

In the offbeat category, he arranged for the purchase of twenty-five “animated busts” of Harding, at $100 apiece, for use in store windows. (“Mrs. Harding,” Lasker explained to Hays, “was very anxious we should give them a try-out.”) When the newspaper reporters marooned in Marion demanded that the Republicans supply them with a car to get around in—and perhaps out of—Marion, Lasker bought them a new Marmon with his own money.⁴⁷ When the Marion-based press corps threw a banquet for Harding toward the end of September, Lasker arranged the catering.

By October, Lasker’s work was largely done. The billboards went up: Let us be done with wiggle and wobble. The ads were prepared—Let us be done with wiggle and wobble—and the necessary magazine and newspaper space was reserved. The October 30, 1920, edition of Collier’s, for example, contained a full-page ad headlined “Harding and Coolidge,” with cameo photos of each that looked as if they belonged on folding money. The copy was standard fare, with unsubtle criticisms of Woodrow Wilson and his League of Nations:

This country will remain American. Its next President will remain in our own country. American affairs will be discussed by American public servants in the City of Washington, not in some foreign capitol . . .

Let’s be done with wiggle and wobble.⁴⁸

In the final days running up to the elections, the negotiations with baseball’s owners concerning the Black Sox scandal kept Lasker close to home in Chicago. Gradually, he delegated more and more of his responsibilities in the campaign.

Three days before the election, on Halloween night, Nell Harding called Lasker into a room with herself and her husband and closed the door. “Albert,” she asked anxiously, “are we going to win?”

Lasker burst out laughing. Everyone who was anyone knew that Harding was a shoo-in. The only question was, how big a landslide would Harding rack up? “I will guarantee that you are going to win,” he told the worried wife of the future president.⁴⁹

It was a rout of epic proportions. Harding carried thirty-seven of the forty-eight states, racking up a huge electoral margin and garnering more than 60 percent of the popular vote. The Republicans gained more than fifty seats in the House of Representatives. Lasker and other Harding confidantes celebrated the victory at the Mt. Vernon Avenue headquarters; Harding, for his part, sneaked out and enjoyed an election night tryst with Nan Britton in a deserted house down the street.⁵⁰

Given the nation’s eagerness to shrug off Woodrow Wilson, Cox and Roosevelt were almost certainly beaten from the start. But the Republicans, with the help of Lasker, adroitly exploited that impulse. They spent extravagantly, more than $6 million, while the Democrats raised only $1.3 million.⁵¹ And much of that $6 million went where Albert Lasker steered it.

By most accounts, Will Hays was the leading political genius of his generation. He found in Albert Lasker a complementary kind of genius, who brought a new dimension to politics. “Lasker jumped into politics like a duck takes to water,” Hays said. “He is the super-salesman of the generation.”⁵²

By the fall of 1920, the Black Sox scandal was exploding on the front pages of papers across the nation. The Hardings invited Lasker to travel with them to Texas and thence to faraway Panama on a mid-November vacation; Lasker begged off, saying that he had to stay in Chicago and fight for his plan to save baseball.⁵³ He declined to attend the Harding inauguration, and stayed away from the new president. “I figured a president was very busy,” he explained, “[and] that you shouldn’t see him unless you had something you wanted to take up with him.”⁵⁴

One of the more remarkable outcomes of the 1920 presidential race was that Lasker wound up being a personal friend not only of the winner, but also of the loser, James Cox. During the campaign, Cox had come to believe that Lasker was a nearly diabolical figure. The day after the election, though, he phoned Lasker. “I’m Jim Cox,” he began. “Remember me?”⁵⁵ Cox went on to say that although he held Lasker largely responsible for his crushing electoral defeat, he believed that he and Lasker might overcome their differences, and perhaps even become friends.

Flattered by this unexpected overture, Lasker canceled a meeting with President-elect Harding to meet with Cox. The strange bedfellows did indeed become strong friends. Every year for many years afterward, Lasker threw an elaborate birthday party for Cox at his country estate.

The presidential campaign of 1920 was the last front-porch campaign, the last to rely heavily on legions of political speakers as proxies for the candidate, and the last before radio came into its own as a medium for mass communication. It wasn’t, as some have asserted, a revolutionary new approach to American politics.

But the 1920 campaign was all new ground for Albert Lasker. He sized up a new territory, searched out the Big Ideas, spotted the most interesting and talented individuals in the new landscape, and established enduring friendships with those individuals. He genuinely liked and admired people like Will Hays, Ralph Sollitt, Warren Harding, and Jim Cox, and being considered the “super-salesman” of the generation by the likes of Will Hays must have been immensely gratifying.

During the campaign, Lasker realized a number of things about himself. He had been lucky enough to “start at the top” in politics—first through his recruitment by Will Hays in 1918, then in the Johnson campaign, and finally in the Harding campaign. He had found himself in the “high command” almost overnight. But he had never played the role of foot soldier, didn’t really understand politics from the inside out, and could never become a master at the game of politics.⁵⁶

He also decided that he didn’t have the temperament for politics. “Every little thing worried me to death,” he reflected, “and as so many little millions of things happened, a man who worries to death over every little thing hasn’t much to contribute.”⁵⁷

Lasker knew that he had not personally elected Warren G. Harding; he also knew that the Harding victory was circumscribed by the candidate’s serious limitations. At the end of the day, billboards, mysterious slogans, and staged baseball games were inconsequential.

So Lasker remained unfulfilled. He wanted to do something of consequence—something that would be a real and lasting contribution to humanity, enabling him finally to step out from behind the long shadows of his uncle and his father. And therefore, the question remained: To what task could he apply his prodigious talents that would be meaningful?