Chapter Three

Success in Chicago

ALBERT LASKER arrived in Chicago on May 30, 1898, with $75 in his pocket—the money his father had given him to launch his new life.¹

May 30 was Decoration Day (now called Memorial Day), and to a young man from a striving but still modest Southwestern city, the boisterous streets of Chicago—lined by soaring buildings festooned at street level with flags and bunting—were an astonishing and confounding spectacle. As he elbowed his way down Wabash Avenue to the offices of Lord & Thomas, Lasker wondered if the circus was in town.² When he arrived at the agency, he found the doors locked for the Monday holiday.

Still, there was much to impress him in the neighborhood. The Trude Building, home to Lord & Thomas, was located on the southwest corner of North Wabash Avenue and East Randolph Street. Most of the rest of the large city block to the immediate southwest was occupied by Marshall Field’s magnificent department store, then growing into one of the largest and most important businesses in the Midwest.

A soaring sixteen stories tall, the Trude Building was owned by Alfred S. Trude, Chicago’s leading criminal lawyer, who maintained his offices there. So did an organization called the Social Democracy of America, whose recently named chairman was Eugene Debs—the very man who had given Lasker his first Galveston newspaper scoop less than two years earlier. Another tenant was the Chicago Business College, which enrolled several hundred students each year.

Towering skyscrapers, sidewalks packed with prosperous-looking crowds, the elevated railway clattering by on Wabash, the smell of money and commerce in the air even on a national holiday—this was nothing like provincial Galveston.

By the time Albert Lasker began exploring his newly adopted city, almost three decades had passed since the terrible fire of October 1871, which had burned 2,124 acres of the city’s center.³ In that conflagration, hundreds of people had been burned to death or asphyxiated. Some 17,450 homes had been destroyed, and destruction of property totaled more than $200 million. In the wake of the fire, stunned local leaders looked to New England and the East Coast (where many transplanted Chicagoans had come from) for the capital needed to rebuild. Their exaggerated claims about Chicago’s magnificent prospects—yarns that began to be spun while the embers of the ruined business district still smoldered—reinforced the city’s reputation for unabashed boosterism and first earned it an unflattering nickname: the Windy City.

And yet, Chicago was an important economic engine—for the Midwest, and for the nation—with seemingly unlimited prospects. Perched at the southwestern tip of Lake Michigan (and, by extension, the vast inland waterway of the Great Lakes) and home to one of the largest and most active rail hubs in the country, Chicago was one of the nation’s most important transportation centers. Thanks to the railroads, thousands of prairie towns supplied raw materials to Chicago’s factories and also served as a ready market for the city’s manufactured goods.⁴

Following the great fire, Chicago had reestablished itself as a magnet for immigrants. Some of those newcomers were Easterners who saw more opportunity in a wide-open “frontier” city than in settled cities like Boston, New York, and Philadelphia (the nation’s “second city” until overtaken by Chicago in the census of 1890). Others arrived on trains from those small towns on the prairie, desperate to escape from the drudgery and boredom of life on the farm. Still others poured in from the crowded cities of Europe, taking mostly low-paying jobs in the mills and malodorous stockyards. (As early as 1870, Chicago had the highest percentage of immigrants—48 percent—of any place in North America.⁵) Chicago became a city of newcomers, homesick and ambitious, eager to get on with their new lives.

This surfeit of immigrant labor, compounded by the Panic of 1873, drove down wages and touched off the first of the riots that would punctuate Chicago’s history for the next quarter-century. A rebellion by socialists in response to railroad wage cuts in 1877 was brutally suppressed by the police. Bombs were set off in train stations and on the front steps of homes of several judges in January 1886; the following month, workers called a strike against the McCormick reaper factory. Three months later, a large rally supporting striking workers in the downtown Haymarket area came to a bloody end when a Nihilist bomb killed seven police officers and injured another sixty bystanders. Police opened fire on the crowd and killed a number of the protesters.

The terrified downtown business community—not convinced that the city’s police force could protect them and their property—offered six hundred acres of prime Highland real estate to the federal government to establish a permanent military presence there. Washington agreed, and Fort Sheridan was hurriedly constructed. The next time the city erupted in protest—in the spring and summer of 1894, when factory workers went on strike against railroad-car manufacturer George Pullman—federal troops descended on the city and helped quash the rebellion. Eugene Debs, the head of the American Railways Union, was thrown into jail.⁶

Throughout the 1880s and into the 1890s, Chicagoans were publicly proud of their democratic, antipatrician traditions—and privately embarrassed about their city’s reputation for boorishness and provincialism. Theirs was, in the words of novelist Henry B. Fuller, “the only great city in the world to which all its great citizens have come for the avowed purpose of making money.”⁷ In Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son, one of author George Horace Lorimer’s fictional characters proclaims, “We don’t have much use for poetry in Chicago, except in streetcar ads.”⁸ Both assertions were uncomfortably close to the truth. The plutocrats who built their grand homes on Prairie Avenue hungered for financial success and little else; when they aspired to sophistication, they were mocked by their eastern cousins.

Chicago aggressively pursued the World’s Columbian Exposition—the World’s Fair—of 1893 in part to prove to the world that it was a world-class metropolis. The assertion was greeted with a mixture of scorn and indifference in places like New York. Charles A. Dana, editor of the New York Sun, suggested that New Yorkers should pay no attention to the “nonsensical claims of that windy city.” Ward McAllister, the self-appointed arbiter of New York society and social mentor of Mrs. William Astor—grande dame of that society—contributed a series of columns to the New York World giving tips to Chicagoans about how to throw a proper party. It would be, McAllister suggested, a difficult climb for most of the Midwestern poseurs, who should not:

. . . pretend to rival the East and Old World in matters of refinement. Their growth has been too rapid for them to acquire both wealth and culture . . . The leaders of society are the successful Stock Yards magnates, Cottolene [a brand of lard shortening] manufacturers, Chicago gas trust speculators and dry goods princes. These gentlemen are undoubtedly great in business but perhaps in some cases unfamiliar with the niceties of life and difficult points of etiquette which constitute the society man or woman.⁹

The World’s Fair, which officially opened on May 1, 1893, proved a smashing success, drawing some 27.5 million visitors. It was visually distinguished by an invention by Pittsburgh bridge-builder George Ferris: a 260-foot-high vertical steel wheel that accommodated sixty people in thirty-six cars, and rotated every ten minutes to give its riders a breathtaking view of the city. The fair was architecturally bold, unabashedly commercial, and larger than life: the Manufacturers Building, which displayed manufactured goods, was the largest building in the world at that time.

Slowly, Chicago was coming into its own. Architects John Wellborn Root and Daniel H. Burnham figured out how to anchor “rafts” of steel rails and concrete in the muck that underlay most of the city and perfected the art of steel-beam construction; these advances allowed for the design and construction of ever-taller buildings downtown. Their twenty-two-story Masonic Temple at the corner of Randolph and State, completed in 1891, was briefly the tallest building in the world.

For the first time, a community of local artists and writers began to emerge and flourish in Chicago. In 1898, for example, a forty-two-year-old author named L. Frank Baum printed in his own workshop a book of verse in a limited edition of ninety-nine copies. The following year, he published a collection of nursery rhymes entitled Father Goose, illustrated by William Wallace Denslow. Father Goose was the most popular children’s book of 1899, selling an astounding 175,000 copies, and its success led to another collaboration between author and illustrator, who worked together in Denslow’s studio in the Fine Arts Building, six blocks south of the Trude Building. In 1900, they published the result of that joint effort: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.¹⁰

With the city’s growing success, of course, came excess. Chicago was known internationally as a “shock city,” likely to present rude surprises to the unwary traveler. To a disproportionate degree, it was populated by rootless and unmarried men.¹¹ Not surprisingly, a robust red-light district—the Levee—sprang up, with hundreds of brothels, pawnshops, dance halls, and saloons crowded into a few square blocks. In Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser depicted the life of a young country girl corrupted by Chicago’s evil ways, and in Chicago, Carl Sandberg famously wrote that “They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I/have seen your painted women under the gas lamps/luring the farm boys.”¹²

Its city government, too, was famously corrupt. One alderman declared that only three of the sixty-eight members of his board weren’t “ready and willing to steal a hot stove.” He was forced by his colleagues to issue a public retraction, but a subsequent study by the Civic Federation concluded that in fact, fifty-seven of the sixty-eight aldermen were demonstrably engaged in graft. Ambrose Thomas—Albert Lasker’s future employer—served briefly on the city’s Board of Assessors but then quit, telling a newspaper reporter that “the present system is rotten to the core and should be changed . . . this will continue until the whole system is radically changed and put on a good businesslike footing.”¹³

Amid the boosterism and the relentless striving, concerns were starting to be raised about the costs of the city’s rapid industrialization. A Chicago Tribune special report focused on one particularly distressing aspect of life in the city:

Filthy streets, dirt-imbued water, and sickening Stock-Yards odors are not the only uncorrected municipal evils the people of Chicago are enduring with what patience they have left under the present administration. There is the smoke.

From hundreds of chimneys in the downtown district, columns of soot-laden fumes rise all day long. The sun is shut out of the streets by the clouds. The lungs of the people are filled with the tiny black flakes. The clothing and faces and hands are soiled, and the fabrics on sale in the marts are damaged if not ruined.¹⁴

One of the several dozen buildings singled out for criticism in the article was the Trude Building, which although “not so generous in its delivery of smoke” as some other prime offenders, “continually smudges the vicinity with soot and smoke.” Meatpacking magnate-turned-banker Samuel W. Allerton, interviewed for the story, suggested that Chicago had to “take off its coat and get down to work, like a businessman, or we are going to lose.” The noxious odors and smoke, he predicted, would deter people from moving to Chicago, and drive away people who were there already.

Meanwhile, though, Chicago’s near-term prospects continued to allure. The real estate market was rebounding, buoyed by U.S. naval victories against Spain and the recent announcement that the Schlesinger & Mayer department store was planning to build a million-dollar marble-faced edifice at State and Madison.¹⁵ And perhaps most important of all, the wheat crop promised to be the best in years. The thirteen leading wheat-producing states produced 340 million bushels in 1897; this year, it looked as if they would produce more than 400 million bushels—enough, the Tribune noted approvingly, to pay the entire anticipated cost of the Spanish-American War.¹⁶

Albert Lasker, locked out of Lord & Thomas, wandered the streets that Decoration Day, and then went back to his boardinghouse. The next day, he returned to the agency’s offices. His new employer occupied two floors of the Trude Building. Taking the elevator to the twelfth floor, Lasker stepped out onto a bare wooden floor awash in light from the walls of windows on three sides of the building. In front of him he saw a cashier’s cage joined to a railing that ran all the way to the west wall, with a swing gate near the cage. A handsome man with iron gray hair and a silk cap sat at an oak desk next to this barrier. Lasker later learned that the man’s name was Paxton, and that he (like Lasker) was being paid $10 a week.¹⁷

Cubicles ringed the floor, with partitions made of oak wainscoting about four feet high, with a horizontal band of frosted glass above the oak. In the corner were two offices about twice the size of the cubicles: the offices of Mr. Lord and Mr. Thomas. On the floor above was a small print shop and a large area housing floor-to-ceiling files, in which were stored copies of every major newspaper in America for the previous several months.¹⁸

Here on the twelfth floor, behind the railing, were several desks for “overflow”—human overflow—and it was toward one of these desks that Lasker was first steered. Paxton then escorted him to Daniel Lord’s office. The co-owner of the agency had a large bald pate and luxuriant mutton-chop whiskers that framed a ready smile. He was a New Englander who had started in business in New York in 1868, then relocated to Chicago to work on a Presbyterian newspaper, the Interior, before launching his first advertising agency under the name “Lord, Brewster & Company.” (Brewster departed sometime in the 1870s, and Ambrose Thomas took his place in 1881.)

Now, seventeen years later, Lord was responsible for the agency’s finances, which in those days mainly meant keeping a watchful eye on clients to be sure they were on a solid enough financial footing to pay their next bill.¹⁹ Thomas was in charge of day-to-day operations, so Lord escorted the new hire into Thomas’s office.

“From the moment I saw him,” Lasker later said of Thomas, “I loved him . . . He was a short-set man, [a] born horse trader, full of Yankee shrewdness and full of kindness. And still with the Yankee twang.”²⁰ Born in 1849 in Lewiston, Maine, Thomas had relocated to Boston as a young man to work in the advertising department of the Boston Traveler. He moved on to the Evans & Lincoln agency in Boston, then launched his own agency, enjoying immediate success. But seeing more opportunity in the “Northwest,” Thomas moved to Chicago in February 1881.

After introductions were over, Thomas told his young charge to spend a couple of days talking to people in the office to learn the business. Toward that end, he introduced Lasker to Elmer Bullis, who maintained the firm’s directory of newspapers and magazines and wrote up estimates for clients, and Charles Touchlin, who was in charge of the agency’s school accounts.

Both men happily shared their knowledge with Lasker. Touchlin even took his young protégé into his home and rented him a room. “The Touchlins had a little brick house on the South Side, at Sixty Second and Monroe; it seemed far in the country,” Lasker later recalled. “Mrs. Touchlin was sweet, extremely pretty and graciously considerate of my comfort. I ate breakfasts and dinners with the Touchlins, paying $6 a week for board, lodging, and my laundry.”²¹ The importance of this warm embrace to Lasker—then on his first extended trip away from home, already suffering from overwhelming bouts of homesickness—can’t be overstated.

Bullis, too, helped anchor the uprooted young man. The seasoned advertising veteran lived a few blocks north of the Touchlins, and on many occasions during Lasker’s early months in Chicago, the three men gathered at the end of the day on the front stoop of Touchlin’s house, talking shop, watching the passersby, and waiting for cooling breezes on warm summer evenings.²²

No doubt they also talked about the evolution of advertising and the firm they worked for. The industry was still young, and it was evolving quickly. Advertising had once been the exclusive province of circuses and patent-medicine vendors, a tarnished legacy that contributed to its unsavory reputation. Gradually, though, a number of factors converged to make advertising a necessity—and therefore increasingly acceptable.

One factor was the flood of complicated and specialized manufactured goods that began pouring out of America’s factories toward the end of the nineteenth century. The tonnage of raw steel produced in the United States increased from 4.4 million short tons in 1891 to 11.2 million in 1900; much of that steel went into a profusion of goods that needed new avenues of distribution.²³ Previously, regional markets were enough to sustain a shovel maker or even a carriage maker; now, though, producers of more expensive products needed broader markets to survive.²⁴

Another factor was the development of a national transportation network—principally the railroads, which in the 1870s expanded their total trackage by an astounding 41,453 miles. The railroads’ total ton-miles nearly doubled in the decade in which Albert Lasker reported for work: from 76,207 in 1890 to 141,597 in 1900.²⁵ Intracoastal shipping—port to port on the seacoasts and on the Great Lakes, the Mississippi, and other inland waterways—also prospered. (Great Lakes dry-bulk tonnage alone increased from 35,298 in 1900 to 80,015 in 1910.²⁶) Other kinds of networks grew up alongside the transportation infrastructure: the census found 54,000 phones in the United States in 1880, 234,000 in 1890, and 1.4 million in 1900.²⁷

Lagging notably far behind was the nation’s road system, which consisted of only 154,000 miles of surfaced roads in 1904. Cars, trucks, and other self-propelled vehicles weren’t yet a factor in commerce. By 1900, Chicago had issued only 189 permits for cars (90 electric-powered, 55 gasoline-powered, and 44 steam-powered). In a city of nearly 2 million people, ten women held driver’s licenses.²⁸

An army of intermediaries also arose to help distribute the flood of new manufactured goods: department stores, mail-order houses, and the like. Chicago was the epicenter of that activity—home not only to Marshall Field, but also to national catalog giants Montgomery Ward & Co. ($8.7 million in sales in 1900) and Sears, Roebuck and Co. ($10 million in sales in 1900). In 1900, Montgomery Ward built an impressive new headquarters at the intersection of Michigan and Madison, and by 1904, the company was mailing out more than 3 million copies of its six-hundred-page, four-pound catalog annually.

The final factor contributing to the rise of advertising—and, of course, made possible by that advertising—was the emergence of national magazines and newspapers. The circulation of daily newspapers in the United States jumped from 254,000 in 1860 to 2.2 million in 1900.²⁹ The circulation of the Saturday Evening Post—which began life as a newspaper and evolved in the late 1800s into one of the nation’s leading magazines—grew from 90,000 in 1855 to 1 million in 1908, and 2 million by 1913. The Ladies’ Home Journal, launched in 1883, attracted 25,000 subscribers in its first year; by 1893, it boasted 700,000 subscribers. The page of Journal advertising that commanded $200 in 1883 sold for $4,000 ten years later.³⁰

As advertising became a necessity, a new trade arose to meet that need. The nation’s first two agencies were both founded in 1842: one by a Philadelphian named Volney B. Palmer, and the other by a New Yorker named John Hooper. Both considered themselves “newspaper agents,” rather than advertising agents, meaning that they worked for newspapers rather than the companies who advertised in them. The next seminal figure in the industry was an entrepreneur named George P. Rowell, who produced the first comprehensive directory of newspapers in the United States and cemented his reputation late in life by producing a charming volume of reflections on the early years of the industry.³¹

Rowell also earned a footnote in advertising history by turning down a job applicant named J. Walter Thompson, who—by assembling a stable of several dozen prestigious magazines under exclusive contract to him—built the biggest agency in New York. Other agencies in New York, including Charles Austin Bates’s firm, Calkins & Holden, and the George Batten Newspaper Advertising Agency, competed for both local and national accounts. But by the end of the nineteenth century, the nation’s leading advertising agency was indisputably the Philadelphia-based N. W. Ayer & Son. (In a deft marketing ploy, Francis Wayland Ayer, the agency’s founder, named it for his father, thereby implying both continuity and a salutary family influence.³²) Its total billings increased from $132,000 in 1877 to $1.4 million in 1900.³³ And again, this success reflected a huge and rising tide: In the second half of the nineteenth century, the total volume of advertising in the United States increased from $50 million to $500 million, and advertising expenditures grew from .7 percent to 3.2 percent of the gross national product.³⁴

It was no coincidence that Daniel Lord and Ambrose Thomas both hailed from Maine; indeed, a number of other major advertising figures of the day did as well. Mail-order advertising had taken root there, largely owing to the outsized influence of a publisher in Augusta named E. C. Allen, whose magazines combined popular fiction and mail-order ads and were among the most widely circulated in the country in the 1880s.³⁵ Mail-order advertising reached a frenzied pitch toward the end of the century—about the same time that Lasker arrived at Lord & Thomas—driven largely by the roaring success of the patent medicine companies.³⁶

As Lasker was soon to discover, Lord & Thomas—and indeed, most advertising firms in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—served mainly as intermediaries between advertisers and publishers, and were little more than brokers of magazine and newspaper space, sometimes taking responsibility for the appearance and production of the ad. Early promotions for Lord & Thomas emphasized these limited roles. A Lord & Thomas display ad in the agency’s 1892–1893 “Pocket Directory” of U.S. newspapers boasted of the agency’s skill at producing ads with “proper display, typographically.”³⁷ An 1895 advertisement for the firm stressed a sensible division of labor between agency and client: “If you employ us to prepare and place your advertising you will find it more profitable than taking up your own time with the details.”³⁸ In his book The Mirror Makers, Stephen Fox tells the story of the time that Daniel Lord ventured to tell an advertiser how to improve his ad. “Young man,” that client told Lord, “you may know a lot about advertising, but you know very little about the furniture business.”³⁹

Originally, the more successful advertising firms had spheres of influence within which they dominated their trade. J. Walter Thompson, for example, controlled space in the nation’s leading women’s magazines. Ayer controlled agricultural publications. Lord & Thomas’s original niche was religious publications. These boundaries were somewhat permeable, of course; but an advertiser who believed that a product would sell well to a religious audience was likely in the 1880s to hire Lord & Thomas to broker the advertisement.

Gradually, advertising became a competitive free-for-all, with agencies focusing less on selling space and more on winning clients. When the Bissell Carpet Sweeper Company introduced its breakthrough cleaning device, for example, representatives from Thompson, Ayer, and Lord & Thomas traveled en masse to Bissell’s headquarters in Grand Rapids, Michigan. There, as a group, they would meet with the appropriate executive—perhaps Melville Bissell himself—who would dictate the specifications for the ads he planned to place in the coming year. (He might even have the “cuts,” or text and rudimentary artwork for the ads, on the table in front of him.) The agencies would then bid for the Bissell account. Whenever possible, they would steer ads toward the publications they controlled, on which they would receive the highest commission: 15 percent of the cost of the ad.

Even in this rough-and-tumble competitive environment, however, the winning advertising firm did little more than broker space in publications. Like its competitors, Lord & Thomas rarely wrote the copy for the ads it placed. “As a matter of fact,” Lasker recalled, “the agencies at that time were painfully shy in accepting responsibility for creative work.”⁴⁰

Agencies such as the National Advertising Company and Ayer began providing copy to their customers in the late 1880s, and Ayer hired its first full-time copywriter in 1892. But copywriting at these and other leading agencies remained a distinctly secondary activity—well behind rustling up business.⁴¹

Lord & Thomas, certainly, remained “shy.” When Lasker started working there, the agency’s creative staff consisted of a graphic artist and a half-time writer who worked mornings for Lord & Thomas and afternoons for Montgomery Ward. Lasker was not much impressed by the writer. “We did Hannah & Hogg whiskey,” he said, “and he got his pay mostly in sampling the whiskey.”⁴²

Much later in his life, Lasker liked to say that he became an advertiser because of a staggering gambling debt incurred early in his three-month probationary period at Lord & Thomas. He claimed that he was deep in debt to dangerous characters and had to borrow money from Ambrose Thomas to pay them off, effectively rendering him an indentured servant until he paid Thomas back.

This account of his fall from grace fudged a key detail. Lasker did indeed incur a large gambling debt—about nine months after he arrived at Lord & Thomas—and that misstep helped bind him to the firm. In the previous half-year, however, his departure for New York was delayed several times by spectacular successes in a trade that he found increasingly intriguing.

Lasker was only a few weeks into his apprenticeship when his first stroke of good fortune occurred. Lord & Thomas had received an order from Rubens & Marble, a local manufacturer of knit underwear for infants, for twenty-four lines of space in one of the magazines within the agency’s sphere of influence. The clothing manufacturers included a check with their order. Under normal circumstances, the matter would have ended there. But Elmer Bullis—perhaps responding to Lasker’s ambition and charm, or perhaps looking to give his young colleague some experience in the art of selling—suggested that Lasker go and talk to the head of Rubens & Marble to explore whether the company could be convinced to increase its advertising budget. This appeared to be a most unpromising gambit, but Lasker was grateful for the opportunity—and remained so for the rest of his life. Decades later, he would say that Bullis, “was the fellow who was interested in him, and watched for a chance and when a prospect came up . . . gave him his chance.”⁴³

And so Lasker headed over to the corner of Adams and Clark Streets. Rubens & Marble had been founded in 1890 by a Mr. Rubens, a German immigrant who had come up with a new design for a baby shirt that could be folded two different ways and buttoned in the back. At this first meeting, Rubens, a thin, graying gentleman with a thick German accent—Lasker likened him to a wasp⁴⁴—posed a series of probing questions about the advertising business. Not satisfied with Lasker’s answers, he complained aloud, “They think because this is a baby business, they have to send children over here!”⁴⁵

But Lasker, himself not too far removed from Germans and Germany, repeated his entire pitch to Rubens—in German.⁴⁶ The crusty old clothesmaker was won over by the boyish salesman. Over dinner with Lasker that night, he increased his advertising budget to $800. This unexpected success “electrified” the office (Lasker’s term) when he walked in with the order.

Another piece of luck soon came Lasker’s way. A very junior representative from Collier’s Weekly arrived one day at the office, looked around, and then walked over and introduced himself to Lasker. Lasker inferred that the young man was inexperienced, didn’t want to expose his ignorance to the office graybeards, and preferred to deal with someone who looked even younger than he did. The young publisher’s rep had been approached by a company interested in advertising liquor in Chicago, and needed someone to manage the account. With no effort, Lasker had landed another account.

It was these early successes that convinced Lasker to delay his move to New York. “I was quite a hero by this accident,” Lasker later recalled, “and I was having fun.”

Ambrose Thomas took note of Lasker’s unexpected talents. He began inviting him into his office for chats, and liked what he heard. When the three-month probationary period ended, Thomas asked Lasker to stay, and Lasker—influenced by the substantial raise that Thomas put on the table—readily agreed. Lasker was becoming quite attached to Thomas. This affection was mutual, even though Thomas was often taken aback by his young colleague’s unconventional views and methods. When Morris Lasker came to visit his son in Chicago, some eighteen months after Albert began working at Lord & Thomas, Thomas told Morris that his son was “either a genius, or crazy.”⁴⁷

Thomas, therefore, was responsive when one of his associates, Charlie Stoddard, suggested that Lasker be given another opportunity. A Cincinnati-based manufacturer of liqueurs and cordials, Rheinstrom Brothers, was planning to spend a major sum—a princely $10,000!—on advertising. The high-powered New York agent Charles Austin Bates was meeting with the Rheinstroms in two days. Barring a miracle, Bates surely would get the business. Another Lord & Thomas representative had already met with the Rheinstroms but had failed to impress them. Why not send Lasker down there, Stoddard suggested, and see if he has better luck? The train trip would be free—a standing deal between Lord & Thomas and the railroads—and the potential reward was enormous. Finally, Stoddard pointed out, the fact that both Lasker and the Rheinstroms were Jewish might help.

Lasker found the idea of capitalizing on his Jewish heritage offensive. But there was another consideration: his younger brother Harry was traveling through Cincinnati at that time, on a layover between Virginia Military Institute and Galveston. The Rheinstrom pitch presented a free way to meet up with Harry, so Lasker hopped on the first sleeper to Cincinnati.

The Lasker brothers met for a very early breakfast the next morning. Albert was anxious about the task that lay ahead of him: “I remember, really, literally and figuratively shaking so my whole body was perspiration, my hands were clammy, every nerve of my body as if I had St. Vitus Dance—it couldn’t have been tougher. It was hard for me to talk, because I then realized that I let them fool themselves that there was any chance, and here was I, a kid [who] didn’t know anything about advertising. I felt I was going to disgrace myself.”⁴⁸

He made his way by streetcar to the Rheinstrom company headquarters on the Cincinnati riverfront. It was an imposing three-story brick building with big double doors. As Lasker entered, he noticed a man with a reddish mustache standing at the bookkeeper’s counter, opening and sorting the mail. Lasker knew that he must be the firm’s owner, and approached him.

When Rheinstrom barked out a gruff, “What do you want?” Lasker could only hand him a card mutely. Rheinstrom’s response was immediate and fierce. “I wouldn’t expect a young boy like you to have any sense and consideration, but your firm ought to. You have had a man here, I have told them I am not interested, and here you come on a Monday morning before I have opened my mail and you want to talk to me about advertising? Get out.”⁴⁹

Lasker fled to his hotel. There he talked the matter over with Harry, and formulated another plan: “I said, ‘The fellow is a German, Harry . . . and he will go home and eat a good lunch, and I am going to take a chance that at two o’clock, he is going to leave to go back to his office after his nap. I am going to look at his home number.’”

A little before 2 p.m., Lasker phoned Rheinstrom and blurted out his revised pitch: “Don’t hang up the telephone; you may be affecting the course of your whole life. I am the young man who came to see you from Lord & Thomas, I am not asking for an order, but I will lose my [place]—at least let me talk to you for a few minutes. Treat me as you want to treat your young son, or your young nephew.”

Rheinstrom told Lasker to come back down to the office, no doubt intending to grant only a perfunctory interview to the nervous young man from Chicago. But what Rheinstrom didn’t know was that, on his way back to the distillery, Lasker suddenly discovered that his fear had left him. He decided that he could represent Lord & Thomas as well as anybody, because at least as far as he could tell, nobody in his office really knew anything much about the business they were in: “So little was known about the principles of advertising [that] I had as good a right to talk about them as anyone.”⁵⁰ Several hours later, Rheinstrom was sold.

Fireworks burst within him, Lasker wrote later. He had looked failure squarely in the eye and realized that he very much wanted to succeed at this new venture. He had to admit it: he was having fun, and the sums that he was now bringing into the office were beyond anything he might have imagined. “I was on the way to building up a clientele of $25,000 a year,” he later recalled, “and that was enormous. That was respectability.”

Soon after agreeing to hire Lord & Thomas, Rheinstrom took Lasker into a back room to meet his brother Ike. Ike looked Lasker over, and asked if he was by any chance related to a Morris Lasker of Galveston, Texas. Rheinstrom Brothers was one of Morris’s clients, and this connection, had it been revealed earlier, might have been every bit as persuasive as Lasker’s four-hour pitch. But that kind of success “would have been bitter in my mouth,” he later admitted.

Lasker had now firmly established himself as an advertising salesman at Lord & Thomas. But he never got over the fright he felt when meeting new clients. Long after he had earned a reputation as a pioneer and giant in the advertising field, he would shake with fear before that first meeting.

This was more than stage fright. Throughout his life, Lasker lived with a fear of getting called out as a humbug—of being discovered as unqualified for the task in front of him. Contemplating a job with the Shipping Board in the early 1920s, for example, Lasker confessed to “a feeling of deep inadequacies, a feeling that I was going to be very unhappy because I was untrained and inadequate, a feeling that I was a four-flusher attempting to do something that I knew I wasn’t competent to do.”⁵¹

Perhaps because of the enormous stress he was putting on himself, Lasker resumed the bad habits that he had picked up back in Galveston, including drinking with newspaper reporters. There are hints, too, that he kept company with an actress he had met in Galveston who occasionally performed in Chicago.

Weekend antics were a welcome, even necessary antidote to the increasingly demanding, high-stakes work that he did during the week. When he wasn’t drinking with the newspaper crowd, he was gambling with his work colleagues; it was in fact Charles Touchlin who introduced Lasker to the Griddle Club and arranged for Lasker to become a member.

The Griddle, located on the top floor of an old four-story building, was a favorite gathering place. It was here, one evening, that Lasker met an affable man who invited him to join a poker game. Lasker had left the Touchlins’ house that evening with $50 in his pocket. He sat down at a round table in the back room of the club, and was dealt in. The cards did not break his way, but he kept at it—and then kept at it some more. By the end of the evening, Lasker owed $500. It was a third of his annual salary, and more than many at Lord & Thomas earned in a year.

Lasker realized that he had been taken in by a card shark, but this excuse would not appease his father. Desperate to keep his secret from his family, Lasker approached Ambrose Thomas the next morning. He begged his employer to lend him the $500, saying that learning of the debt would “kill” his father.

Thomas’s expression through much of this appeal was unpromising. He sat with his chin in his hand, eyes fixed on the ceiling.⁵² Lasker, seeing his future collapsing in front of him, envisioning a much-dreaded return to Galveston in disgrace, pulled out even more stops. “I will promise you this,” Lasker went on. “I don’t want any salary . . . I will go out on the road and I will work as no one ever worked for you. I will work so there can’t be any temptations.”⁵³

Thomas declined Lasker’s offer to work for free, keeping him at his recently increased salary of $30 per week.⁵⁴ The card shark was paid off.⁵⁵

The misadventure at the Griddle Club proved to be a turning point. Lasker learned that he was valuable. He had escaped the long shadow of his father, and an exciting path was open to him. For this lesson, $500 was a modest price to pay.

Several months after the gambling incident, Lasker learned of a territory that was opening at the agency. Determined to work his way up—both to repay his debt more quickly and to satisfy his growing ambition—he applied for the job.

The territory comprised Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan. It had been the turf of William R. Emery, the salesman who had failed to impress the Rheinstrom Brothers in Cincinnati. Lasker asked Ambrose Thomas for the opportunity to “practice” on the sleepy accounts.⁵⁶ In fact, there wasn’t much real risk in Lasker’s proposition, given that Emery hadn’t been particularly productive in recent years, so Thomas was inclined to grant Lasker’s request. But the decision wasn’t his alone: he had to convince Daniel Lord to go along with the plan. Lord told his partner that he was skeptical—Lasker was only nineteen years old, and looked even younger than his years. He also observed that Lasker needed some help with his wardrobe. Years later, Lasker told the story to his office staff: “Ambrose Thomas was tactful. By repeating some of Mr. Lord’s points in opposition, he gave me valuable steering. The first thing I did when I left the office that day was to hustle to the tailoring establishment of H. M. Stephenson. I knew Marshall Field had his clothes made there, and that Wilton Lackaye, the actor, came from New York to have fittings. I asked for haste in the making of two blue suits of serge.”⁵⁷

Newly fitted out, Lasker was ready to conquer new lands. Near the top of his list was Kalamazoo, Michigan, where several food-processing companies looked like promising clients. Lasker headed to Kalamazoo armed not only with his extraordinary energy but also with a new feeling of calm determination: “That was my territory, do you see? I had this tremendous feeling of responsibility. It just fell on me like a mantle, and I grew to maturity on that ride, and I have been mature ever since and have never been without responsibility. Mr. Thomas trusted me.”⁵⁸

Lasker felt a strong “presentiment,” as he rode northward on the train, that he was destined to remain with Lord & Thomas for a long time. His first working day in Kalamazoo must have reinforced this conviction. His predecessor, William Emery, had been working closely with several potential clients and had built up substantial good will toward Lord & Thomas. (Emery was, in Lasker’s subsequent estimation, “a fine man, but he wasn’t a closer.”⁵⁹) Thanks to Emery’s spadework, Lasker was able to sign a $3,000 contract with the Kalamazoo Pure Food Company on his first day in the north woods—and he landed almost $50,000 of additional orders over the next several months. The boyish salesman from Chicago quickly became (as he later put it) “the talk of the line.”

All of this was enormously gratifying, even intoxicating. But Lasker understood better than anyone else that he had already harvested most of the low-hanging fruit left behind by William Emery. Meanwhile, he was beginning to suspect that advertising agencies, certainly including his own, were leaving an enormous amount of money on the table.

Emboldened by his successes, Lasker pushed Ambrose Thomas to think more broadly about the creative aspects of advertising. But Thomas and his partner Lord were content to continue on as the middlemen they always had been. “That was the line,” Lasker later reflected. “They felt fine if they could do good copy, but it never occurred to them that copy could make a tremendous difference . . . If you put your name on it, mentioned your goods, had a pretty picture—that was advertising.”⁶⁰

Lasker pushed for a broader conception of advertising. In part, this was self-interest. He realized that if he kept doing business the way Lord & Thomas was accustomed to, he was trapped. “I quickly saw,” he said, “that I would get nowhere under the status quo, because it took so much of my time to handle the business Lord & Thomas already had in the territory when I took hold.”⁶¹ And much of that business was only marginally profitable. He once spent an entire day driving fifteen miles in a sleigh to a school in Indiana that had an advertising budget of $300 a year. Such an account would land a 10 percent commission for Lord & Thomas—thirty dollars, minus expenses.

Lasker felt sure that he could build the business, and boost Lord & Thomas’ commissions, if he could improve the agency’s copywriting. Before the year was out, therefore, Lasker asked Ambrose Thomas to put him in charge of a few accounts that were not making any money so he could practice copywriting. With little to lose, Thomas agreed.

Lasker teamed up with newspaperman Eugene Katz, whom he had met in Galveston and who had relocated to Chicago. Together, they made an unorthodox proposal to one of Lord & Thomas’s clients: the Louisville, Kentucky–based Wilson Ear Drum Company. Wilson, which manufactured a primitive hearing aid out of paper cones, was then paying a 6 percent commission—well below the industry standard of 10 percent, and even further below the 15 percent that industry-leading N. W. Ayer almost always commanded. Lasker, determined to close these gaps, proposed that his firm write the copy and develop the artwork for future ads. If the new ads showed good results, the advertiser would then agree to pay a 15 percent commission.

Company owner George Wilson, agreed. Lord & Thomas’s graphic artist—whom Lasker later said looked like the “deafest man you ever saw”—had a picture taken of himself cupping his hand to his ear. The headline read, “You Hear! When you use Wilson’s Common Sense Ear Drums.”

“Much to [George Wilson’s] surprise and ours,” Lasker later recalled, “it worked.”⁶² Wilson increased its monthly ad budget from $2,000 to $6,000, and—more important—agreed to pay the 15 percent commission that Lasker demanded. Instead of making $1,440 annually on the account, Lord & Thomas would now earn $10,800.⁶³

From that point on, Lord & Thomas offered two tiers of service. Clients who wrote their own copy and wanted only space brokering would pay a 10 percent commission; clients who wanted their copy written by Lord & Thomas would pay 15 percent.⁶⁴

Gradually, Lasker built up a cadre of six copywriters. Both Ambrose Thomas and Daniel Lord encouraged him in these experiments; on the other hand, they resolutely stayed away from the side of the business that eventually became known as “creative.”⁶⁵ This hands-off stance gave Lasker room to operate, but it also put more pressure on him to resolve his uncertainty about the substance of advertising. What, exactly, was good advertising?

Lasker felt compelled to discover the essence of advertising. “If somebody had handed me the money to pay back the five hundred dollar debt,” he said a half-century later, “I couldn’t have quit. I had to find out what advertising was about.”⁶⁶