Chapter Eighteen

Selling and Unselling California

From 1900 to 1920, Los Angeles was essentially a tourist town. Like most tourist towns, it had its share of freaks, side-shows, novelties, and show-places. Ducks waddled along the streets with advertisements painted on their backs; six-foot-nine pituitary giants with sandwich-board signs stalked the downtown streets; while thousands of people carrying Bibles in their hands and singing hymns marched in evangelical parades . . . During the winter months, Los Angeles was, in fact, a great circus without a tent.¹

—Cary McWilliams

BY 1920, tourism was bringing some 200,000 visitors a year to Southern California.² But as McWilliams suggests, this trade was restricted mainly to the December–February period, mainly because people in other parts of the country were convinced that Southern California was unbearably hot during the summer. In 1921, a group of business leaders undertook to change this by organizing the “All-Year Club of Southern California, Ltd.” According to a Lord & Thomas account, the stakes were high:

During the summer, no tourists came, and with many residents taking their vacations elsewhere, there was a severe retail business slump every summer, rents went down, resorts and hotels and theaters closed their doors, throwing employees out of work, and every line of trade and industry suffered.

The organizers [of the All-Year Club], most of whom had come here from the east and middle-west, knew that the summer climate was really delightful by contrast with that of their former homes, with cool nights and rainless days. They decided that if the people in the rest of the country knew these things, some of them might be persuaded to come during the summer. Advertising, they believed, might be able to put over this idea.

Prior to World War I, communities, regions, and even nations had mounted advertising campaigns to attract tourists, conventions, industries, or settlers. The Rotary Club of Milwaukee, for example, spent $25,000 in 1916 to create goodwill and attract investment; and the Denver Tourist Bureau allocated $64,000 in 1916 to bring in both conventions and tourists. The following year, the government of Cuba used advertising to attract immigrants from the United States.³

The Santa Barbara Chamber of Commerce launched a campaign in the summer of 1919 to bring tourists to “California’s wonder play-place,” the “Sublimely Beautiful Santa Barbara.” It aimed its first newspaper ads at the sweltering populations of Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. Every Friday during the summer months, a stock ad ran in eighteen newspapers across the Southwest. Only a single line of copy changed from week to week: the mean temperature of Santa Barbara in the preceding week.⁴

Los Angeles, of course, would not be outdone by provincial Santa Barbara. By 1920, Los Angeles had surpassed San Francisco to become California’s largest city. The number of building permits issued annually increased sixfold between 1918 (six thousand) and 1921 (thirty-seven thousand).⁵ With the creation of the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1919, the City of Angels had become one of only three cities in American history to support two major orchestras.

The city’s biggest cheerleader in the early 1920s was Harry Chandler, then the publisher of the Los Angeles Times. Chandler, a native of New Hampshire, had moved to Los Angeles in 1883 to combat a persistent lung ailment. He married the boss’s daughter (Marion Otis, daughter of publisher and civic booster Harrison Gray Otis), and took over the paper in 1917. Under Chandler’s leadership, the Times engaged in fierce circulation wars with William Randolph Hearst’s Examiner, Los Angeles’s other major morning daily, and also promoted Los Angeles relentlessly.

More than a love of community motivated Chandler: along with several prominent colleagues, he was a major land speculator. (His group subdivided and sold house lots adding up to forty-seven thousand acres in the area.) So he was particularly partial to promotional schemes that might enhance property values in his adopted city. One such scheme, recounts journalist and author Carey McWilliams, came into his head sometime in the early months of 1921: “One winter day in 1921, a lady marched into [his] office . . . and complained bitterly that apartment-house owners in Los Angeles prospered in the winter but starved in the summer. Couldn’t something be done about it?”⁶

At Chandler’s urging, a group of eighteen prominent businesspeople—including representatives from railroad, hotels, banks, newspapers, real estate firms, and other industries—gathered in Los Angeles on May 23, 1921. Their goal was to build on the work of the Southern California Hotel Men’s Association’s publicity committee, which had been struggling to overcome the seasonality of their trade. Within a month of this gathering, the formation of the “All-Year Club” was announced, and a subscription drive—seeking to raise $300,000 a year for three years—was launched.⁷

Chandler’s group made several decisions that proved critical to the subsequent success of the All-Year Club. As one observer later noted:

The board of directors was made so representative that no interest in the city, or in Southern California, could hold out because it was not represented.

An initial policy was laid down. All funds were to be spent for advertising. None was to be used for patronage. The executive secretary was obliged to be in the position to show at all times that every dollar he was spending would pull the greatest possible load.⁸

The All-Year Club’s founders felt some urgency: the national economic recession of 1920–1922 had hit California hard. Well before the hoped-for $300,000 was raised, therefore, they authorized a $50,000 trial campaign, and (in May 1921) hired an agency that by then was well known in Southern California: Lord & Thomas. Lasker’s agency had successfully promoted oranges, raisins, and other perishable commodities; now it was being asked to promote California—and quickly. As former Sunkist marketer Don Francisco recalled: “When they started to do this, there was a depression throughout the country . . . It was felt that if they could bring in enough tourists to Southern California, we could bring in enough money and activity to [counteract] that depression. So they had to advertise in a great hurry, and we were chosen to handle it without anyone else being considered.”⁹

One of the agency’s first efforts on behalf of the All-Year Club was an ad entitled “That Vacation Land You’ve Never Seen,” written by “an Easterner.” (“Copy was headed ‘By an Easterner,’” records the Lord & Thomas account history, “because Southern Californians had a bad reputation for over-enthusiasm.”) The Easterner was Robert Crane, recently relocated from Chicago to Lord & Thomas’s Los Angeles office. His reason-why copy told of lofty mountains, fertile valleys, trout streams, and sea bathing, “all within a stone’s throw of the ninth largest city in size in the United States!” Crane cited U.S. Weather Bureau records from the previous forty-four years to underscore the region’s temperate median temperatures: June, 65 degrees; July, 79 degrees; August, 71 degrees, and September, 68 degrees.

The ad appeared in thirty-three newspapers in the “hot belt” states of the Southwest. It included a coupon offer of a free booklet; inquiries resulting from the coupon were turned over to the participating railroads for individual follow-up.

Initial results were positive. One hotel in Los Angeles—a subscriber to the All-Year Club—reported that its head count increased by one hundred people a day during the summer of 1921. Several real estate agencies reported sales to individuals who had been lured to the region by the Lord & Thomas advertising. Despite the recession, the Southern Pacific, Union Pacific, and Santa Fe Railroads sold an unprecedented number of tickets to Southern California in the summer of 1921.¹⁰ When a formal competition for the account finally was held, Lord & Thomas easily retained it.

One of the stronger endorsements of the All-Year Club’s efforts came from the supervisors of Los Angeles County, who in 1922 appropriated $50,000 to support the initiative. Only sixteen states nationwide then permitted local tax receipts to be used for community advertising. The fact that California was one of them was a huge boon to the All-Year Club—as well as to “Californians, Inc.,” the community advertising group organized in 1922 to promote San Francisco and Northern California.¹¹ Within two years, six neighboring counties in addition to Los Angeles were also kicking in tax dollars to the All-Year Club’s budget. By 1924, something like 40 percent of that $300,000 budget was coming from public sources.¹²

With the influx of public dollars, more systematic assessments began to be made, and again, the results were positive. An astounding 80 percent of the individuals who were contacted by the participating railroads (as a result of having requested the “couponed” informational pamphlet) wound up traveling to Southern California. Before the All-Year Club began its efforts, according to one study, Southern California had 126 winter tourists for every 100 summer tourists. By 1923, it attracted 200 summer visitors for every 126 winter visitors.¹³

For the rest of the decade, the All-Year Club and Lord & Thomas enjoyed steady success. The agency discovered—perhaps belatedly—that women played a critical role in determining their families’ vacation destinations. As a result, ad copy was written with women in mind, and an increasing percentage of the ad budget went into women’s magazines. Beginning in 1927, Lord & Thomas began to trade on the increasing allure of Hollywood by including testimonials from Douglas Fairbanks and other celebrities.¹⁴ The All-Year Club’s advertising budget exceeded a half-million dollars for the first time in 1929, and there seemed to be no end in sight to the dizzying success of Southern California, shared by Lord & Thomas.

Then came the stock market crash, the Great Depression, and—within a few short years—an extraordinary westward migration of desperate people seeking escape from the Dust Bowl. Californians now had a mixed message to sell. Yes, they badly needed tourist dollars, but they didn’t want even greater numbers of poor people to migrate westward.

A typical ad from 1932 included striking imagery of beautiful people playing golf under palm trees, with spectacular mountains rising in the background. The readers of the ad were advised to “bake out their troubles”:

Work . . . worry . . . taut nerves . . . fear of the future. They’ve been a pretty steady diet for the last two or three years. And yet, honestly, what has it all accomplished for you? Forget it for a while. Come on out and have some FUN. Regain your perspective and learn again that life, after all, is meant for LIVING.

In much smaller type, the ad also included a cautionary message:

Come to California for a glorious vacation. Advise anyone not to come seeking employment, lest he be disappointed; but for the tourist, attractions are unlimited.

In other words, the All-Year Club and its advertising agency found themselves in a nearly untenable situation. “Like most promotions of the sort,” wrote Carey McWilliams, “the All-Year Club has been too successful. Its seductive advertisements were partially responsible for the great influx of impoverished Okies and Arkies in the ‘thirties.’”¹⁵ If too few well-heeled tourists showed up, Lord & Thomas would be in trouble. If too many Okies and Arkies showed up, Lord & Thomas would be in more trouble.

On balance, though, the All-Year Club must be counted a great success for Southern California—and an even greater boon to Lord & Thomas. Even before being elevated to the head of Lord & Thomas’s Los Angeles office in 1924, Don Francisco had struggled to carve out a distinctive West Coast personality for his office. He had to persuade Californians that Lord & Thomas wasn’t simply another carpetbagging firm from the East—that it possessed strong local roots and had California’s interests at heart. As he later recalled:

After we got the All-Year Club, we would show that we were engaged in helping basic industry, like oranges, lemons, grapefruit, raisins, and the tourist industry. Beyond that, we went into a lot of civic things. We handled the Community Chest publicity and advertising, and we took an active part in the Chamber of Commerce, and [I] served for fifteen years on the Publicity Committee. Our men enrolled in Community Chest drives, and we took an active part in the Advertising Club.

I spent an awful lot of time of that, for years, probably too much. Mr. Lasker thought at first it was too much, but I think with the situation the way it was, it was not . . . We had a selling job to do.¹⁶

It was against this backdrop that California’s power-brokers turned to Lord & Thomas for a higher-stakes kind of help.

Since the later decades of the nineteenth century, California politics had been a volatile mix of radicalism and conservatism. In the late 1870s, for example, California was swept up in a wave of “Kearneyism,” named for vigilante and radical labor organizer Dennis Kearney, who seized control of the state’s Workingman’s Party in 1878. Among other things, the fiery Kearney called for state regulation of railroads and banks, an eight-hour day for laborers (the standard was ten), major tax reform, and the direct election of U.S. senators.

These proposals were radical enough for their day; in addition, Kearney loudly advocated the immediate deportation and exclusion of Chinese immigrants, as well as “a little judicious hanging” among the millionaires clustered atop San Francisco’s elite Nob Hill.¹⁷

Other socialist-leaning political movements followed. In 1901, the Union Labor Party elected a bassoon player named Eugene Schmitz mayor of San Francisco. In 1907, a group of Los Angeles–based reformers founded the Lincoln-Roosevelt League, with their prime target the Southern Pacific Railroad, about which California historian James Bryce observed: “No state has been so much at the mercy of one powerful corporation.”¹⁸ The League enjoyed a few years of California glory—culminating in the election of their candidate and Albert Lasker’s close friend Hiram Johnson to the U.S. Senate—then wilted and died.¹⁹

But despite California’s tendency to breed radical political movements, it remained a Republican stronghold throughout the early twentieth century. The GOP controlled the governorship, the state senate, and the state assembly for the first third of the twentieth century. Between 1860 and 1932, California registered five Republicans for every Democrat.

So when socialist writer and muckraker Upton Sinclair ran for governor of California in 1934, Republicans at first weren’t worried. Some concluded that “Sinclairism was Kearneyism and Johnsonianism all over again.”²⁰ But the Sinclair challenge was different. First, unlike Kearney, Schmitz, and Johnson, Sinclair affiliated with the Democratic Party, and then—to the astonishment of millions—he went on to capture his party’s nomination.

The backdrop of the Great Depression, too, mooted traditional political calculations. Desperate people might embrace dramatic change.

Finally, the 1934 governor’s race differed from previous socialist uprisings in the state because of the central role played in the contest by modern mass media: radio, motion pictures, newspapers, direct mail, and national fundraising. As the author of an exhaustive study of Sinclair’s 1934 election bid put it: “The prospect of a socialist governing the nation’s most volatile state sparked nothing less than a revolution in American politics. With an important boost from the image-makers of Hollywood, Sinclair’s opponents virtually invented the modern media campaign.”²¹

In this drama, Lord & Thomas played a key role. Certainly ad men had been employed in politics before, notably with Lasker’s work for Warren Harding in 1920 and Bruce Barton’s campaign for Calvin Coolidge four years later.²² What was different about California in 1934, though, was the degree to which Sinclair’s political opponents turned over the development of campaign strategies and tactics to Lord & Thomas and their allied media professionals—and the relentless sophistication with which those new allies plied their trade.

Born in Baltimore in 1878 and raised in New York, Upton Sinclair earned a bachelor’s degree from City College and began churning out “half-dime” novels for a pulp-fiction publisher. A year before joining the Socialist party in 1902, he published the first in a long list of novels, which in the coming decades would flow from his pen at an average rate of about two per year. He toiled mostly in obscurity until the publication of The Jungle (1906), which exposed the horrifically unsanitary conditions and ruthless labor exploitation in the Chicago meatpacking industry. Along with the pioneering journalism of Samuel Hopkins Adams and others, Sinclair’s impassioned polemics helped lead to the passage of the Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act.

Sinclair continued to churn out exposés and fictionalized accounts of capitalist scandal and power. Sometimes he highlighted a single social problem (such as venereal disease, in Damaged Goods, 1913) or an historic event (the Ludlow Massacre, in King Coal, 1917). But his chief delight lay in flaying the nation’s most powerful institutions. In domain after domain, he accumulated both impassioned followers and embittered enemies.²³

In The Brass Check (1919), for instance, Sinclair took on American journalism. “What is the Brass Check?” he asked. “The Brass Check is found in your pay-envelope every week—you who write and print and distribute our newspapers and magazines. The Brass Check is the price of your shame—you who take the fair body of truth and sell it in the market-place, who betray the virgin hopes of mankind into the loathsome brothel of Big Business.” To make sure no one missed the point, he added: “When I planned this book I had in mind a sub-title: ‘A Study of the Whore of Journalism.’”²⁴

Sometimes he got personal. In 1905, William Randolph Hearst—whose vast publishing empire included several of California’s most influential newspapers—recruited Sinclair and several other prominent muckrakers, leftists, and socialists to write for his newly acquired general-interest magazine, Cosmopolitan. Sinclair found Hearst a beguiling figure: his wealth, his political influence, and the salacious rumors that swirled around his personal affairs. So when two years later Sinclair published The Industrial Republic, a futuristic social novel, he made Hearst president of a newly socialist United States, depicted the publisher as a “traitor to his class,” and wrote of his obsession with Manhattan’s “tenderloin” district.²⁵ Hearst was not one to forgive.

Sinclair also accumulated enemies in Hollywood’s film industry, which by the 1930s enjoyed unprecedented popularity, profits, and power. At one point, for example, Sinclair received an overture from William Fox, one of Hollywood’s legendary moguls. “He had been robbed of a good part of his fortune during the recent panic,” Sinclair recalled, and was willing to pay Sinclair the princely sum of $25,000 to tell his story. After weeks of daily interviews with the deposed studio head, the job was done. But when Sinclair discovered that “Fox was using the threat of publishing my manuscript . . . to get back some of the properties of which he had been deprived”—in other words, as a tool of blackmail—he sent the manuscript to a publisher, who promptly printed twenty-five thousand copies. The book, Sinclair recalled proudly, caused “a bang that might have been heard at the moon if there was anybody there to listen.” As a result of these and other adventures, many of the most powerful men in Hollywood—as in so many American establishments—despised Upton Sinclair.²⁶

He had gotten a taste of the bully pulpit in 1923 when, after being arrested during a dockworkers’ strike in San Pedro, he addressed several large rallies. Once in front of a crowd, he proved himself a skilled orator.²⁷ A New York Times reporter described him as: “. . . a quiet, slight figure, with a pleasant smile constantly on his lips, suggesting inner certainty rather than humor or political winsomeness. Mr. Sinclair avoids emotional appeals and the stage tricks of fighting virility. In an even, bland voice, almost a monotone . . . he talks at once plainly and brilliantly.”²⁸

He also had dabbled in politics a few times with unimpressive results, running on the Socialist ticket for senator once and for governor twice, never capturing more than sixty thousand votes.

But the Great Depression’s devastating effects troubled him enormously. “In the state of California, which had a population of seven million at the time,” he later recorded, “there were a million out of work, public-relief funds were exhausted, and people were starving.” He began to sketch out a detailed program to “End Poverty in California” (EPIC).

One day at the end of August 1933, as he was in the midst of this work, a letter arrived at his home from a little-known Santa Monica Democrat who urged Sinclair to seek that party’s nomination for governor.²⁹ In his memoir, Sinclair claimed that he agreed to meet with a group of Democrats at a hotel on the beach; that they “argued and pleaded” for him to run; that he refused; and that after much soul-searching, he gave in to his overwhelming sense of social obligation. This account exaggerates the degree of soul-searching that was involved. Less than twenty-four hours after receiving the Santa Monica operative’s letter, according to his biographer, Sinclair quietly slipped into Beverly Hills and changed his registration from Socialist to Democrat.³⁰

Sinclair and his new Democratic allies moved quickly. The author-turned-politician published his program in a sixty-four-page booklet in which he used the literary device of telling the history of California a few years in the future—one in which, of course, he won the election and governed the state. The awkwardly titled “I, Governor of California—And How I Ended Poverty: A True Story of the Future” described how Governor Sinclair replaced the sales tax with steeply graduated income and property taxes; how he boosted taxes on inheritances and public utilities; and how he paid $50 to every widow, every “needy” person over the age of sixty, and every blind and physically disabled resident in the state. The centerpiece of the EPIC plan, however, was a network of cooperative colonies situated in idle factories and on unused farmland, taken over through eminent domain or punitive taxes and operated by the state. There, workers produced and exchanged the goods they needed to live on a noncash basis, a system that Sinclair dubbed “production for use.” The story concludes two years into Governor Sinclair’s term, when—with but one poor person remaining in the state of California—he resigns and heads home to write another novel.³¹

Proceeds from I, Governor—which sold nearly a million copies—helped fund a grassroots organization that spread like wildfire across the state. There were rallies, bake sales, speakers’ bureaus, and an eight-page fold-out magazine, EPIC News, which soon boasted a circulation of more than 500,000. Sinclair also offered up his message on the radio, a medium in which his earnest and self-deprecating manner played well.³²

Sinclair faced six opponents in the Democratic primary, held on August 28, 1934. What they didn’t know was that Sinclair’s grassroots organizers had registered some 350,000 new Democrats. Despite running in a six-man Democratic field, Sinclair not only came in first, but also attracted more votes than the uncontested Republican nominee, incumbent Governor Frank Merriam.³³

A collective shudder shook the state’s monied interests. California’s wealthy elite, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. observed, “saw in EPIC the threat of social revolution by a rabble of crazed bankrupts and paupers . . . [that would] drive all wealth and respectability from the state.” Director Billy Wilder, a recent immigrant from Austria, recalled that Sinclair “scared the hell out of the community. They all thought him to be a most dangerous Bolshevik beast.” The New York Times reported that, “a sense of Armageddon hangs in the bland California air.” Even Franklin Roosevelt, in faraway Washington, was uneasy. If he supported EPIC, he risked alienating the Democratic center. If he didn’t, he risked losing touch with the electorate’s clear drift leftward. Roosevelt could afford neither to embrace nor disown Sinclair.³⁴

Shortly after Sinclair’s victory in the primary, Charles Teague—head of the California Fruit Growers Exchange—approached railroads, utilities, and other major corporations throughout the state to help to defeat the Socialist-turned-Democrat. The group called itself “United for California”: a purposefully nonpartisan name, aimed at appealing to disaffected Democrats as well as Republicans. Headquartered in Los Angeles, United for California went public October 3, releasing a statement that the election of Upton Sinclair “would strike at the roots of our most cherished institutions—the home, the church, and the school.”³⁵

These and subsequent dramatic pronouncements were not Teague’s handiwork. As he pondered how best to counter the Sinclair menace, Teague took a bold and unprecedented step. He turned over the campaign to discredit Upton Sinclair and reelect Frank Merriam as governor of California to Albert Lasker’s Lord & Thomas.

Still heading the agency’s West Coast operations, if only just barely, was Don Francisco. Francisco was then relocating to New York, where he was slated to head up his firm’s operations in the East. He had spent several months in New York and had just returned to California in late September 1934—for what he thought was a final two-week visit—when he was summoned by Teague to an emergency meeting.

Teague told Francisco that United for California wanted Lord & Thomas to handle the propaganda side of the anti-Sinclair campaign and that they wanted Francisco to lead the charge. Francisco declined, mindful of his impending departure for New York and probably thinking that the assignment was a risky one for Lord & Thomas. But Teague persisted. In fact, as Francisco recalled, Sunkist’s head made it clear that this was not an invitation but a command: “He said, ‘Well, Mr. Lasker ought to do it, because if Sinclair wins, why, you haven’t any business out here, and neither have most of us. We’ll go to the dogs. Mr. Lasker, and Lord & Thomas, ought to be delighted to contribute your services to protect their business and their clients’ businesses.’”³⁶

Francisco placed an urgent call to Lasker in Chicago. If he hoped that Lasker would turn the job down, he was disappointed. Lasker was, Francisco later recalled, “tremendously interested” in the assignment, and instructed his first lieutenant to do Teague’s bidding. Reluctantly, Francisco got back in harness. “It’s a good cause,” he wrote to Lasker toward the end of September, “and because all our California clients are so concerned, it seems a strategic move to take the assignment at this time.”³⁷ He picked one of his most trusted lieutenants, Don Belding, to head up the campaign. He also recruited Don Forker, a former advertising manager for Union Oil who had moved over to Lord & Thomas, to handle the radio broadcasts.

The radio campaign began in mid-October, with “board of strategy” meetings held each night to evaluate the programs. Lord & Thomas spared no expense, with Forker hiring the best writers he could find and retaining a cast of thirty-five actors.³⁸ The writers produced four shows, some broadcast daily and others three times a week. Overtly or subtly, each series struck anti-Sinclair chords. The family soap-opera format of The Bennetts, for example, gave each member of the middle-class family an opportunity to talk about how Sinclairism threatened her or his traditional way of life: Sis feared she wouldn’t be able to finish college (because Sinclair opposed higher education) and that church choir practice would end if an atheist governor were elected; Dad fretted he would lose his job because his factory would close; Junior that he wouldn’t get to go to the movies anymore. Another series, Weary Sam and Willie, followed two hobos as they trekked from the Midwest toward California in pursuit of the handouts promised by EPIC.³⁹

Variety, the entertainment industry’s weekly bible, was impressed:

About everything is being adapted to radio in the Beat Sinclair campaign now in progress for the final weeks of the campaign. Every device known to the art of propaganda is being employed. The Lord & Thomas advertising agency is using four radio programs to undermine the Sinclair argument. The novelty of the presentation is sure-fire, and a check of the listening audience shows that a tremendous wedge is being driven in spots where other agencies of promotion have failed to make more than a superficial dent . . .

It is a cinch that if the Lord & Thomas promotion is successful in keeping Upton Sinclair out of Sacramento, this new textbook on campaigning will gain wide circulation.⁴⁰

Some of Teague’s money also went to a pair of press agents based in Sacramento. Clem Whitaker—tall, wiry, and talkative at age thirty-five—was a political reporter who had drifted into public relations. In 1933, his work on a state water referendum brought him into collaboration with a twenty-six-year-old redheaded widow named Leone Baxter, then manager of the Chamber of Commerce of Redding, California. The two (who would marry five years later) founded Campaigns, Inc., one of the nation’s first political consulting firms.⁴¹

They agreed to pitch in against Sinclair, and their method was as ingenious as it was devious. “Upton was beaten,” Whitaker recalled, “because he had written books.” With the election only two months away, the pair left their office, assembled stacks of Sinclair’s writings, and secluded themselves for three days, culling quotations on religion, marriage, sex, the press, communism, patriotism, education, and other topics that might be used against the author. They combined many of the most incendiary quotations with political cartoons to create the “blot of Sinclairism” series, which they then distributed to newspapers throughout the state. More than three thousand were printed. “Sure, those quotations were irrelevant,” Baxter later admitted. “But we had one objective: to keep him from becoming governor.”⁴²

California’s newspapers enthusiastically joined the effort to sink Sinclair. William Randolph Hearst wielded the most power: the combined circulation of his five California dailies exceeded the rest of the state’s papers combined. And although Hearst went after Sinclair with a vengeance, his treatment of the socialist candidate was muted compared with that of Harry Chandler of the Los Angeles Times, which also had been savaged by Sinclair.⁴³ Chandler made regular use of the Whitaker and Baxter quotations by printing anti-Sinclair “boxes” on the front page: Sinclair On Marriage, Sinclair On Religion, and so on.⁴⁴

A Times reporter turned a Sinclair jest into a catastrophe. “Suppose your plan goes into effect,” he asked the candidate during an interview. “Won’t it cause a great many unemployed to come to California from the other states?” According to Sinclair, “I answered with a laugh: ‘I told Mr. Hopkins, the Federal Relief Administrator, that if I am elected, half the unemployed of the United States will come to California, and he will have to make plans to take care of them.’”

The headlines in the next day’s Times read: “Heavy Rush Of Idle Seen By Sinclair—Transient Flood Expected—Democratic Candidate Cites Prospect in Event of His Winning Election.” In print, Sinclair’s words were altered to read: “If I’m elected governor, I expect one-half the unemployed in the United States will hop the first freight to California.” The Times, pouncing on the grist that the naive Sinclair had provided, estimated the number of indigent job-seekers that would flood into the state at roughly 5 million. The paper also ran follow-up stories with titles like “More Competition for Your Job.”⁴⁵ For Harry Chandler, it was payback time.

Meanwhile, Don Francisco’s stealthy legions were making good use of Whitaker’s and Baxter’s work. “It was obvious that in five or six weeks, we couldn’t possibly kill the EPIC program by economic propaganda,” Francisco recalled.⁴⁶ Instead, Lord & Thomas began churning out pamphlets that used Sinclair’s own words against him in ways designed to inflame particular constituencies. In just over a month, the agency produced almost 8 million such pamphlets. (“We work every night until 12 or 1 o’clock,” Francisco wrote to a Chicago colleague, “including Sundays.”⁴⁷) They were quick, effective, and dirty, as Francisco later admitted:

We had one pamphlet quoting all he had said against the Catholics, and another against the Jews, and the Seventh-Day Adventists, the Episcopalians, and one against Stanford, and the University of Southern California, and pamphlets of what he said against lawyers, and doctors. He said something against almost every group that there was . . .

And these we wrote very hastily, and put on the cover of each, “By his own words shall ye know him,” and just quoted his words without any side comment or explanation, giving the source, of course.

These we sent out to the various organizations. The one on what he said against the Catholics, we sent out to all the Catholic churches, and enclosed a card whereby they could order a big supply, which they usually did. And the next thing that happened was that the priests would preach against him, or the rabbi, or the minister, and we would see to it that the quotes from their sermons got into the papers . . .

Pretty soon, all the churches wanted to have a big meeting—which we encouraged—where they had the rabbi, the priest, the minister, and all the other people on the platform talking against Sinclair. We bought time on the air, so that the whole thing went out all over the state. And then we got the excerpts from the talks in the paper the next day . . .

Those pamphlets were the most effective weapon we had. Had Sinclair not said all those things against these different groups, particularly religious groups, he would have won.⁴⁸

In Hollywood, meanwhile, the movie studio heads were also attacking Sinclair. (He had promised that if elected, he would put the state of California into the business of producing and showing movies.) To organize their efforts against Sinclair, the studios turned to Will Hays, Lasker’s political mentor and Hollywood’s “movie czar” for the past dozen years. Hays raised about $500,000 from the major studios, which assembled this war chest by docking their well-paid stars and directors a day’s pay.

Producer and mogul Louis B. Mayer also played a leading role. With his blessing, MGM production chief Irving Thalberg cranked out a series of phony newsreels that portrayed “ordinary” people saying nice things about Merriam, and swarthy indigents with heavy eastern and southern European accents endorsing Sinclair. In one of the most infamous, a scruffy actor asks: Vell, his system verked vell in Russia, vy can’t it verk here?⁴⁹

Hordes of jobless, hungry, dirty, desperate men streaming into California became a leitmotif of the anti-Sinclair campaign. Don Belding later admitted that his agency “hired the scum of the streets to carry placards through the cities, ‘Vote for Upton Sinclair.’” More fake newsreels, staged on Hollywood sets, depicted trainloads of out-of-work men heading west for EPIC handouts. Sometimes the newspaper and movie studios worked together. The Los Angeles Herald and Express ran a two-column photo of a mob of “hobos,” but then someone recognized movie star Frankie Darro as the lead bum; the still had been lifted from the Warner Brothers film Wild Boys of the Road.

Don Francisco monitored all this activity with a mixture of satisfaction and anxiety. He knew that only a relentless, all-fronts assault would defeat Sinclair. But such an assault might well create a backlash of sympathy for Sinclair and the EPIC cause. In the final weeks before the election, Francisco wheeled out one final weapon from his arsenal, only to garage it again almost immediately:

There is a fellow here who had an automobile that looked like a locomotive, which pulled a trailer that looked like a boxcar, and I remembered that thing, and I had him hunted up, and I hired him for the last three weeks of the campaign.

On the side of the boxcar I put a big sign: “If elected Governor, I expect half the unemployed to hop the first train for California.” And then I got the fellows out of MGM studios to dress up a lot of hoboes, dummies, and have them sitting up on top of that car, and that was to run around Los Angeles and the suburbs the last three weeks . . .

Well, the night before it was to start . . . I saw this old cheesecloth banner of Sinclair’s on the way to Pasadena, and it looked as if a breath on it would blow it down, and I visualized a lot of people tacking that thing up, and compared with our big posters, it looked pretty pathetic. It made quite an impression on me.

The next morning, I came down, and they had this locomotive and freight car pulled up in the parking lot so I could look out the window at it. I looked on this thing, and on top of this pathetic sign I had seen, I felt pretty sorry for Sinclair. We had been going pretty hard against him.

So with that hunch, I had several men and girls from the office go along the sidewalk while this thing was going down the streets, to hear what comments were made. We heard a lot of people were getting a great laugh, but a lot of other people said, “That is a blow below the belt. That is going too far. I feel sorry for Sinclair.”

So just on that tip, we canceled it at noon.⁵⁰

Sinclair fought back hard. He quickly penned The Lie Factory Starts, a manifesto in which he tried to set twisted quotations straight and reveal the underhanded tactics of his detractors. He held rallies, rodeos, and registration drives. He took to the airwaves. But the dominos continued to fall against him. The newspapers refused to publish EPIC radio program schedules, while running special features on United for California’s radio lineup. Sinclair failed to secure a public endorsement from an anxious President Roosevelt. Meanwhile, Raymond Haight, a young attorney and Democrat, joined the race as the Progressive-Commonwealth candidate, aiming for the middle ground between the radical Sinclair and the conservative Merriam.⁵¹

Don Francisco spent election night—November 6, 1934—at a sumptuous “radio party” at the Midwick Country Club in Pasadena, watching as election returns were posted on a blackboard in the ballroom. The final count pleased him enormously: Merriam won the race with 1,138,620 votes to Sinclair’s 879,537. (Sinclair’s wife wept with relief at the news; her unwanted ordeal, including death threats against her husband, was over.) Haight polled 302,519 votes; if he hadn’t been on the ballot, California probably would have elected its first socialist governor. Timing, too, played a critical role in the outcome. “If the campaign had lasted a little longer,” Belding later speculated, “the public might have found out and the whole thing might have backfired.”⁵²

Francisco agreed: “Had the election been held a month before it was, [Sinclair] would have won, and had it been held a month or a month and a half after it was held, he would have won.”⁵³

The California gubernatorial campaign of 1934 marked the birth of modern media politics. To that extent, at least, Lasker’s agency and its local allies changed history. Upton Sinclair’s campaign was scuttled—unfairly and brilliantly—by the stealthy wizards of Lord & Thomas. For better or worse, the democratic process was transformed.

Following his defeat, Sinclair went back to what he knew best: writing books. True to form, his first post-election book was I, Candidate for Governor—And How I Got Licked. Although he demonstrated amply his animosity toward the newspaper and the movie moguls, he noted the work of Whitaker and Baxter only briefly, and without naming them (“They had a staff of political chemists at work, preparing poisons to be let loose in the California atmosphere on every one of a hundred mornings”). He wrote nothing about the advertising agency that orchestrated the campaign against him, which begs the question of whether he ever learned about Lord & Thomas’s central role.⁵⁴

Sinclair’s defeat solidified Lord & Thomas’s reputation as a force in California politics, and further raised Don Francisco’s profile. As a result, within two years, the agency was recruited to manage yet another major political contest in the land of sunshine, promise, and unconventional politics.

This time, the battleground was the state’s retail sector. Millions of independent retailers, supported by powerful wholesalers, sought to use a prohibitive tax to drive chain stores out of their state: a drama that was being played out across the nation, but that erupted in California in a characteristically colorful fashion.

The chains normally went into political battle as prohibitive favorites, but by the time California’s chain retailers approached Lord & Thomas to mount their defense, they were fighting for their economic lives. On July 21, 1935, the newly reelected Governor Merriam signed into law a chain store tax steep enough to cripple the state’s chain retailers. At the signing ceremony, Merriam issued an odd challenge: “The chain store operators feel that this legislation will prove discriminatory in its application. If so, the opportunity is theirs to prevent this act from becoming effective by invoking the referendum and submitting the question directly to the people.”⁵⁵

That they would do, thanks to a rapidly mobilized Lord & Thomas campaign. Once again, Don Francisco played the leading role. And once again, he was supported by Lasker, who developed a “keen interest” in the fight and authorized a massive marshalling of company resources for the cause.⁵⁶ And although Lasker mainly watched the chain store battle unfold from a distance, his behind-the-curtain approach permeated the strategy of this campaign as well. One opponent would deem it—with grudging admiration—“the velvet touch.”⁵⁷

Only near the end of the fight did Francisco and his small army take off their velvet gloves and administer their knockout punch. The Lord & Thomas strategy was improbable, counterintuitive, and inspired. It left an indelible imprint on retailing in California, and—by extension—across the nation.

The first stirrings of a retailing revolution came on the eve of the Civil War, when the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company opened its doors in Manhattan in 1858. By 1920, A&P was operating five thousand stores. F. W. Woolworth opened his first discount variety store in 1879; by 1920, his chain had more than eleven hundred stores.⁵⁸

The 1920s brought prosperity to the nation’s urban middle class, and the chains expanded rapidly to serve this growing consumer base. By the end of the decade, they controlled 17 percent of the nation’s retail stores and 39 percent of total retail sales. A mere half-dozen grocery chains, which collectively operated more than thirty thousand outlets, virtually controlled that sector. Nine chains dominated the variety-store business, and other chains ruled in shoes, drugs, and apparel.⁵⁹

Chain store success was driven by a combination of modern retailing practices and economies of scale. Whereas the neighborhood independents typically devoted little attention to their public faces, the chain outlets featured large, bold signs—uniform from one store to the next, and thus instantly recognizable—and visually striking window displays. Inside, the differences were even more striking. Independent dry-goods stores tended to be dark and cluttered environments in which customers required the assistance of the clerk to locate goods. In traditional grocery stores, proprietors selected meats and produce for their patrons. Most neighborhood shops were too cold in the winter and too hot in the summer. In sharp contrast, the display of goods inside chain outlets was “scientifically” engineered at the home office and replicated precisely from one outlet to the next. Lighting and climate were carefully considered. Clerks were trained to maximize stock turnover.⁶⁰ Goods were placed directly in front of the consumer—not only giving those consumers more control over their purchases, but also minimizing staffing requirements.

Of course, the mom-and-pop stores had some appeal. They were neighborhood institutions, with their owners often living above or behind the shop. The long hours “around the cracker barrel” were filled with socializing and gossip. Customers from the neighborhood usually bought on credit, running tabs that might be settled up every few weeks.

What tipped the balance in favor of the chains was price, pure and simple. According to marketing historian Richard Tedlow, the chains charged somewhere between 3 percent and 11 percent less than their independent competitors. They did this by eliminating waste, tracking inventory efficiently, and buying directly from farmers or manufacturers.⁶¹ The chains also leveraged their size in their advertising, buying millions of newspaper and magazine column inches at bulk rates. Gradually, they gobbled up market share in key retail sectors. Contemporary observers wondered how long it would be before “the independent would be crowded out altogether.”⁶²

Of course, the independents fought back.⁶³ But when it came to mobilizing for collective action, they faced an acute structural vulnerability. They were, by definition, fragmented into hundreds of thousands of independent proprietorships. They banded together in trade associations—one for grocers, another for druggists, another for hardware stores, and so on—but they remained relatively incoherent as a sector.

The anti–chain store tactic that took hold most firmly was elegant in its simplicity: a prohibitive tax. Most of these tax schemes stipulated an annual levy of one or two dollars for each store under common ownership up to the first five stores, with the tax rate escalating thereafter, until a maximum rate of several hundred dollars per store was reached at about twenty stores.⁶⁴ The chains lobbied hard against the bills, but by 1927, thirteen states had enacted anti–chain store tax laws.

Meanwhile, Congress in May 1928 instructed the Federal Trade Commission to launch an investigation of chain store competitive practices. Up to this point, the chains had been poorly organized, especially given their financial resources. In 1928 they transformed a grocery chain store association into the National Chain Store Association (NCSA), which immediately went to work on an ambitious national “educational” campaign.

Initially, it worked: only half a dozen of the 142 anti–chain store bills introduced in the next two years were signed into law.⁶⁵ But the anti-chain forces were improving their tactics, as well. One weakness in their approach had been in calling for higher taxes on chains of five stores or more, a threshold that raised legal questions about the definition of a chain. New bills proposed higher taxes beginning with the second store in a chain.

But was there a legal foundation for this kind of “graduated” tax? The chains took this question all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1931. In a sharply divided opinion, the highest Court found graduated taxes constitutional. In the majority opinion, Justice Louis Brandeis—an established tormenter of big business—argued that chains were, in fact, a fundamentally different kind of business enterprise. In the next two years, eighteen chain store tax bills were enacted into law.⁶⁶

This reenergized anti-chain forces on the state level, and California—with its fast-growing population, a left-leaning streak in its political culture, powerful agricultural interests, and ever-growing numbers of chain outlets—was ripe for battle. A newly formed “Anti-Monopoly League” introduced a chain store tax bill into the 1935 session of the legislature. It included a crippling multiplier: for the first store, an owner would pay $1 for a “license” to operate in California. That would double for the second store, double again (to $8) for the third, and so on until the fee reached $256 for the ninth store. After that—for the tenth store and any more—the “license” was $500 per store. Heavy majorities of California’s lawmakers endorsed the bill. Thirty-four of thirty-eight senators, as well as sixty-eight of seventy-six members of the Assembly, approved it.⁶⁷

All of this put Governor Merriam in a tough spot. The bill enjoyed strong popular support. Only a few months earlier, though, he had held onto his office against the Sinclair onslaught mainly through the intervention of the state’s well-heeled business interests, who uniformly opposed the proposed bill. Under heavy pressure from the Anti-Monopoly League, Merriam signed it. But even as he signed, he issued his none-too-subtle challenge to the chains: If you want to overturn this law, get a petition on the November ballot, and persuade the voters to back you.⁶⁸ Long shot or not, the chains were compelled to take up the challenge. Under the terms of the new law, a five-hundred-store chain would be compelled to contribute more than a quarter-million dollars to the state treasury (versus the $500 paid by 500 independents).organizing quickly into the “California Chain Stores Association,” they collected 150,000 signatures by the end of the summer, far more than needed to put a referendum question on the fall election ballot.⁶⁹

“The next thing, and probably the smartest thing they could have done,” recounted Chain Store Age editor Godfrey M. Lebhar, “was to recognize their own inability to shape up the kind of campaign the situation called for, or to carry it through. They realized they were in the position of a man who was desperately sick and needed the attention of the best doctor he could get.”⁷⁰ So they called in a specialized sort of doctor: Lord & Thomas.

Word had spread among leading corporate interests about Lord & Thomas’s decisive role in the Sinclair campaign. In addition, an old business connection helped steer the California Chain Stores Association toward Lord & Thomas. W. G. Irwin—Lasker’s former partner in the ill-starred Van Camp enterprise—had invested in the Purity Stores chain of West Coast grocery stores. Under the astute direction of Irwin’s protégé John Niven, the former general manager of Van Camp, Purity by the mid-1930s had grown to a hundred-store chain.⁷¹ As Irwin later explained: “So when this [chain store] fight came up, [Niven] immediately thought of Albert Lasker’s organization to handle the thing—there was a fellow with enough force to present people with the idea. And I think he was in a large measure responsible for selecting Don Francisco.”⁷²

The California Chain Stores Association vested Lord & Thomas with an extraordinary degree of control, with Francisco being given virtually complete autonomy. The reasons appear to have been twofold. First, discretion was in order; and second, there simply wasn’t enough time for the kinds of bureaucratic niceties—organizational meetings, negotiations, and so forth—normally associated with an ambitious campaign.⁷³

What happened over the next several months was so unexpected that Francisco had to caution his clients not to judge the campaign by its appearances. (On the face of it, an odd request: after all, what was a public relations campaign if not “appearances”?) Francisco knew that as the precious weeks ticked by, little would seem to be happening. During the first phase of the effort, approximately nine months long, advertising would play only a minor role. “Indeed, at the outset,” Francisco recalled, “it was seriously questioned whether the plan should include any advertising of this sort at all.”

This was because, under Lasker’s leadership, Lord & Thomas thought in terms of “advertising in the wider and truer sense of the term.” It was a campaign in which Francisco took great pride, and which he later used to illustrate the ways of modern promotion. “It is not enough to be right,” Francisco observed, “it is also necessary to seem right.” The task at hand was to reengineer the public image of California’s chain stores; a frontal assault was unlikely to succeed, and might even backfire—it would not “seem right.” Once again, Lord & Thomas had to operate behind the curtain.⁷⁴

A first step involved an honest self-appraisal on the part of the chain stores. Several long years into the Great Depression, the nation had lost its faith in corporate America—which, for millions of struggling Americans, the chains exemplified. California in particular posed “special handicaps to any attempt at interpreting business sympathetically,” Francisco observed, in his bland and understated way. “It was a stronghold for all sorts of political doctrines based on discontent.”

There were more practical matters to consider, as well. The estimated eighty thousand independent retailers in California had already demonstrated how quickly and effectively they could mobilize. The state was running a huge budget deficit, which made revenue derived from any sort of tax appealing to incumbents. The chain store tax also ran the risk of being lost amid the twenty other referenda on the fall ballot.⁷⁵

In addition, the chains had made mistakes. They had expanded rapidly and, in the process, had defined “success” almost exclusively in terms of profits. As a result, Francisco told his clients, your customers are not your friends. “Motorists may buy at your service station,” he stated bluntly, “but damn you because they think you are a monopoly. They may go out of their way to save a few pennies at your chain store, and then denounce you for paying low wages.” A first and necessary step toward transforming customers into friends was to “eliminate all practices that gave the critics the slightest justification for their attacks.”

This applied to dealings with stakeholders of every stripe, but Francisco insisted the chains pay special attention to employees.⁷⁶ The number of chain store employees was roughly half that of their independent counterparts—about forty-four thousand—but Francisco saw them as a sizeable army of “natural allies” to be mobilized. But this would require a change in corporate culture. Henceforth, the chain managers had to view workers not as numbers, but as “individuals with personalities, homes, families, birthdays, joys, sorrows, accomplishments, affiliations, interests.”

This was a strange new suit of clothes, but the chain store managers—under orders from headquarters—quickly donned it. They sent cards and letters to their employees to mark birthdays, illnesses, deaths, and other personal milestones. They gave out badges and awards. They sponsored “more parties and picnics, more orchestras and glee-clubs, more athletic teams and dances.” And, most tangibly, they shortened working hours and awarded more raises and promotions.⁷⁷ These weren’t just cosmetic changes, Lord & Thomas emphasized; they were “subtler and more important, a revision of manner and spirit.”⁷⁸

Chain store managers across the state invited their employees to view “The Spirit of ’36”—a Lord & Thomas-produced film that made the antitax case vividly—and then trained them in public speaking techniques so they could carry forth the message more effectively.⁷⁹ Two manuals were handed out at these staff meetings: one on public speaking techniques, and the second an eighty-page booklet—produced by Lord & Thomas, and distributed by the California Chain Stores Association—entitled The Fifty Thousand Percent Chain Store Tax. This was an ingenious and rhetorically powerful expression of the mathematics involved. Just as $3 is 300 percent more than $1, the proposed $500 tax on the tenth store in a chain was 50,000 percent more than a one-dollar tax on a single independent.

To put the story before the general public, Lord & Thomas once again exploited radio. In April 1936, the agency launched a Monday-evening radio program called California’s Hour. Although the program mostly featured middle-of-the-road musical selection, it also profiled each week a California community, with locals (recruited by the Boy Scouts) performing in a talent contest. This enormously popular program auditioned ten thousand would-be stars, garnered 170,000 ballots, and ingratiated itself with each week’s featured city or town. The program ran no editorials, although the topics of its three essay contests were less than subtle: “Why I trade at chain stores,” “How the chains benefit California,” and “Why I will vote ‘No’ on No. 22.” Entry forms, conveniently available at chain store outlets, came with background “information” about the chain store tax issue.⁸⁰

California’s Hour gave air cover to broadly based community outreach efforts. Chain store managers flocked to join local chambers of commerce, service clubs, and businessmen’s associations. Increasingly generous with their donations of cash and merchandise, chain managers repaired their public image, and built new reputations as community benefactors.⁸¹

California farmers received special attention from Lord & Thomas. They comprised only about half the population of the state’s small cities and towns, but they exercised an outsized political influence. In the mid-1930s, California grocery chains sold roughly $230 million in state-grown produce. Advocates of the chain store tax were telling the farmers that the chains’ low prices were putting downward pressure on crop prices.

The chains, scripted by Lord & Thomas, retorted that they were of “incalculable value to the California farmer and manufacturer.” Their large-scale purchase agreements stabilized the market, they argued, while their efficient operations cut out waste to the benefit of producer and consumer alike. The real culprit, they argued, was in the middle layers of the distribution chain. “Lurking in the background are the REAL enemies of the people—the middlemen, who are putting up the money for this vicious campaign against the chain store.” The “discriminatory legislation” was their desperate ploy to regain their “monopolistic grip” on the state’s agricultural sector.⁸² Lord & Thomas recruited one of the state’s more prominent growers to serve as the spokesman for its agricultural campaign, and outfitted him with an office and staff.

Quietly, Don Francisco also opened another agricultural front. In late February 1936, the California Canning Peach Association contacted him, distressed about slumping sales. Inspired by a “farmer-consumer merchandising drive” recently orchestrated by one of the state’s leading chains, Francisco emulated that model, but on a grander scale. He cajoled leading grocery chains nationwide, with their tens of thousands of retail outlets, to push canned peaches. Soon he convinced drug and restaurant chains statewide to join in as well. The arranged marriage worked beautifully: the California cling peach growers enjoyed surging sales and generous profits, while chains across the continent pitched in against California’s chain tax movement.

As the election approached, Francisco launched similar national chain marketing campaigns for California producers of beef and dried fruits. He met with key agricultural and chain interests in New York City and Urbana, Illinois, to explore their mutual interests. The chains agreed to end several long-standing practices that had incensed the farmers—“unreasonable” quantity discounts, loss-leader retailing, unearned advertising allowances, buyer brokerage fees—and the National Co-Operative Council was born.⁸³

Lord & Thomas was uniquely positioned to forge this alliance. Through the Sunkist and similar commodities campaigns, the agency had established deep connections throughout California’s farming establishment. It combined those connections with strong ties across the country, moving mountains of peaches, beef, and dried fruits, and changing the mechanics of retail commerce nationwide to the advantage of California’s growers.

For nine months, Don Francisco’s corps had pushed the chains to reform themselves. They had offered Californians a positive image of the chain store—as the exemplar of clean, modern, and efficient business practice; friend to the farmer and local community; creator of jobs; and steward of low prices. For the most part, the message had been positive, delivered in soft tones.⁸⁴

Now, with six weeks remaining before the election, it was time to abandon the velvet touch. Lord & Thomas began to blanket the media with the memorable slogan—“22 is a Tax on You!”—and attacked the other side directly. “We exposed the tax as a scheme engineered by selfish middlemen,” recalled Francisco. “We did not hesitate to attack the professional organizers, racketeering money-raisers and self-seeking politicians who worked against us.” California’s Hour went into high gear, putting on scores of farmers, business owners, attorneys, and women to describe how their livelihoods would be damaged if the tax passed.⁸⁵

Chain store employees throughout California were drafted to serve in a massive get-out-the-vote drive. “We adopted the standard technique for organizing precinct workers and applied it to chain store employees,” recalled Francisco. Each employee’s home was plotted on a map, and he or she was directed to round up neighbors and track polls.

When the votes were tallied on the night of November 3, 1936, Lord & Thomas celebrated its second stunning California political victory. The chain store tax measure was defeated by more than 300,000 votes: 1,369,778 to 1,067,443. All but one of the state’s fifty-eight counties voted against it. As soon as the outcome was clear, Francisco called Albert Lasker in Florida to share the good news with his boss.

Lasker remained on the periphery for much of the chain store tax battle. He received regular reports from the front and reassured his clients that Don Francisco’s velvet-touch strategy was not only the right one, but the only one under the circumstances.⁸⁶ He took great pride in his agency’s ability to shape the course of public policy.

Subsequent events, moreover, show that he took large lessons away from the chain store experience—and lessons that might be applicable on a grand scale.