Chapter Twenty-Two

The Lasker Legacy

IN THE CLIMACTIC SCENE of the Wizard of Oz, Dorothy, the Tin Man, the Scarecrow, and the Cowardly Lion are quaking in the great hall of the wizard’s palace. A huge, disembodied head looms over them, bellowing at them, ordering them to go away: Do not arouse the wrath of the Great and Powerful Oz! Peals of thunder accompany his bellicose threats.

But Dorothy’s intrepid terrier Toto scampers over to a corner of the hall, grabs a hanging curtain in his teeth, and pulls. The parting fabric reveals a thoroughly ordinary-looking man shouting into an oversized microphone as he shakes a sheet of metal to simulate the sound of thunder. He sees the four travelers at the same instant that they see him.

“Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!” he blusters into his microphone. But it’s too late: His cover is blown.

“You humbug,” the Scarecrow shouts angrily.

“Yes, that’s exactly so,” the Wizard says, instantly deflated. “I’m a humbug.”

Albert Lasker shared some traits with the Great Oz. Both hawked patent medicines early in their lives. Both built astounding careers based in part on substance, and in part on humbug. Both counted on appearing larger than life, and neither wanted the curtain that separated them from their publics to be parted. But behind their respective curtains, both were warm and generous. They enjoyed people. They would have enjoyed each other.

There is a second connotation to our “man behind the curtain” description of Lasker. He believed, strongly, that his business benefited from his relative invisibility. He didn’t need the limelight; his clients and their products did. His business goal, he declared, was “to always put the client’s interest before my own.”¹ And although Lasker’s ego could best be described as privately boundless, he only once sought to establish himself as a public figure—during his stint in Washington—and quickly retreated from that role, thus thwarting his wife Flora’s dream of a run for the U.S. Senate.

“I was never made for public life,” he concluded. “Never. Never could have been a success at it.”²

Lasker’s periodic depressions pushed him out of the spotlight. So did his growing disenchantment with the advertising world, and so did his increasingly cynical estimation of his own accomplishments. “I have been too superficial all my life,” he concluded in the spring of 1938.³Yes, the wizard admitted; I am a humbug.

And yet he wasn’t. “The settling of the country,” he wrote, “the machine age, the coming of the automobile, telephone, movies, radio, the advances in fine arts and all the sciences, demanded that our capacity to accept and use new ideas be developed to a point never before seen on the pages of history.”⁴

In an almost bewildering variety of contexts, Lasker made that happen. He helped people accept and use new ideas.

Who was the man behind the curtain, and what was his legacy?

David Sarnoff, Albert Lasker’s closest friend among the prominent business leaders of the twentieth century, likened Lasker to an orchestra in which things sometimes drifted out of balance. At times the brasses get a little too loud, he observed. And sometimes there are sounds that are “not always as musical as they really are, or would be, when taken as part of a symphony.”

But Lasker had a deeper capacity for friendship, Sarnoff observed, than anyone else he had ever met. In character and integrity, Sarnoff continued, no one ranked higher. And yes, Sarnoff volunteered—anticipating a question that successful Jews of the day sooner or later faced—Lasker loved to make money. “I know no one who will fight harder than Lasker to make money,” he said. Then he added, “But I know of no one who will fight less to keep money after he has made it. He is, without doubt, the most generous man I know.”

Ralph Sollitt, Lasker’s closest business confidante, said that although Lasker made “oodles of money all his life,” his friend and boss was “never interested in making the money.”⁵ Money, said Sollitt, was Lasker’s way of keeping score in business. When business lost its appeal, so did the scorekeeping.

Was the man behind the curtain a genius? Yes, said rental car magnate John Hertz: “There isn’t any question about him being a genius.”⁶

Was Lasker a genius? David Sarnoff equivocated:

I should say that I do not regard Albert Lasker—this is hard to say—a profound thinker. I never have. I don’t regard Albert Lasker a philosopher. I don’t regard Albert Lasker a fellow who meditates or contemplates over things. But I regard him as a genius impelled by his emotions. He has that facility of putting his finger on the meat of the cocoanut. . . .

He does not waste any time in contemplation, or asking himself whether he is right or wrong. That he knows, he assumes, and he knows, and he is generally right about it . . . He belongs to the vocal aggressive type, confident in their own judgment, [who] use their energy and their time either to shout or impose their views upon somebody else.⁷

Coming from a friend, it sounds like a harsh verdict. But Sarnoff went on to explain that after the shouting stopped, he always understood his own business challenges far better than he had previously. Give Lasker all the facts, and sufficient time to assimilate them, and he’d rather have Lasker’s judgment than anyone else’s.

Was Lasker a genius? Mary Woodard Reinhardt, who became his third wife, had another suitor when she and Lasker first met. Frustrated by Lasker’s arrival on the scene, this other suitor approached Roy Durstine—cofounder of the archrival agency Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn—in search of dirt on Lasker. Durstine’s response was not helpful. Lasker is a business genius, he told his visitor. He not only knows how to tell a client how to do advertising, but he knows how to advise him about changing his business and how to make money out of his business. “My friend,” Mary Lasker observed dryly, “found no comfort at all from this.”⁸

Lasker had a unique capacity to get to the kernel of the nut, as Frank Hummert (who worked at Lord & Thomas between 1920 and 1927) put it.⁹ And certainly, his mind moved faster than most people’s. “He thinks so fast himself,” observed longtime associate Elmer Bullis, “that he just feels everybody ought to think as fast as he does, and reply as rapidly, and people are not built that way . . . He thinks like a shot.”¹⁰

Lasker was a great salesman, who learned early how to sell himself. When he chose to set out and win people, he was intensely seductive. People who began a meeting hostile to Lasker soon found themselves eating out of his hand. As Frank Hummert observed:

He has that marvelous control over people. You can put twenty people in this room who are antagonistic to Lasker, and probably with good reason, and at the end of [a half an hour], why, Lasker will walk out of there the friend of everybody in the place, and they will think he is wonderful, because he will pull one rabbit out of the hat after another. You have never seen him operate. It is hard to explain. I have seen that sometimes. He knows just when to charge, and when to retreat, and when to stand still. That is a wonderful exhibition, his control of men.¹¹

But ultimately, he remained elusive, even to those whom he pursued. Sollitt, who understood him better than most, cautioned ghostwriter Boyden Sparkes against becoming attached to Lasker. “You will be sick when the book is ended,” he said, “because you are just going to find him more engaging all the time, and the queerest combination of qualities and personalities in all your experiences that you ever went in.” The energy and excitement might feel directed at you, Sollitt warned, but it wasn’t: “He has to go through this, all of which makes this certain theater that he lives in all the time, for himself.”¹²

Lasker was both actor and audience, judge and jury. “Everything is drama with me,” he said. “It is all a play.”¹³ And the character who was most interesting to him, by far, was Albert Lasker. He was the only character in the play, he told his autobiographer, whose motives he could thoroughly explore and understand.

So he was self-absorbed. At the same time, he was enormously generous. To his friends, he was selfless to a fault—giving without demanding anything in return. “Albert Lasker,” Warren G. Harding said to him with admiration, “you are the only, single, solitary man I have around me that doesn’t want something.”¹⁴

His generosity was not simply passive. When the preferred stock in Van Camp Packing that he had sold to friends and family members began to look shaky, Lasker bought all that stock back at its original price. He supported his wife Flora’s family surreptitiously for many years. Throughout his life, he was one of the biggest contributors to the Associated Jewish Philanthropies of Chicago, with a rough rule of thumb of giving as much as he spent to live. (“If I spent $10,000 to live,” he explained, “I gave $10,000. If I spent several hundred thousand, I gave several hundred thousand.”¹⁵) He gave George Andrews, his barber of twenty-five years, the necessary funds to set up a three-store chain, and also paid off the mortgage on Andrews’s house. He made huge loans to his speculator friends in the wake of the Crash of 1929 with almost no hope of getting any of that money back. He gave each of his children $5 million while they were still young adults. He paid well more than necessary to wriggle out of his marriage to Doris Kenyon (although in this case, guilt may have played as large a role as generosity). At the urging of his son Edward, he gave his third wife, Mary, $1 million to make her financially independent—a gift on which he paid an additional $350,000 in taxes.¹⁶

He saw himself as greedy: “One key to my character is greed. Not greed for money, but greed for experiences. I sip of them, and go on to something else.” This was not a trait he was proud of: “I have destroyed myself with greed.”¹⁷ And yet it was a philosophy of life that he prescribed for young people just starting out in their professional lives: Never mind about saving your money; save your experiences.

Dating back to 1907, and perhaps earlier, Albert Lasker battled a severe emotional illness that at irregular intervals immobilized him. Lacking any effective help from the outside, Lasker developed a number of tactics to stave off his attacks as long as possible. He understood that he was particularly sensitive to changes of weather and season, and structured his life in ways that minimized their negative effects on him. His four-month winter sojourns—first to Southern California, and later to Miami—weren’t simply vacations; they were emotional vaccinations against the gray reality of Chicago.

His succession of increasingly grand country homes outside Chicago also served as a barricade against emotional upset, whose signs he had long since learned to recognize. “I am staying out in my country place for a few weeks’ rest,” he wrote to his friend W. G. Irwin in the summer of 1917. “I found I had been going at a pretty stiff pace, and was accelerated beyond the safety point. It was the first time I ever felt that way, and I thought I had better take warning of the signs.”¹⁸

Lasker mounted a heroic struggle; but when the barricades fell, so did Lasker. We know almost nothing about his stays at spas, hospitals, and therapeutic communities—in Germany, Illinois, Mexico, Maryland, Minnesota, and Arizona, probably among others—but they must have been searing interludes.

He sought out creative genius in many walks of life. He hoped to understand it, affiliate with it, and perhaps to derive comfort from consorting with like minds—people who could put their finger on the meat of the cocoanut and get to the kernel of the nut. Over the years, his taste in genius evolved. Early in his life, for example, he embraced baseball stars, sportswriters, business magnates, and master politicians. Later he embraced painters and painting, including Henri Matisse, Salvador Dalí, and Raoul Dufy, to name only a few.

The lives of Hamilton, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Churchill argue for a more complete understanding of the intersection of manic depression and politics. The life of Albert Lasker—and of others in his industry—argues for a more complete understanding of affective illness in advertising. Bruce Barton, founder of the formidable Barton, Durstine & Osborn, suffered from a chronic insomnia that forced him to take frequent “rest cures” (and led some of his colleagues to consider him lazy).¹⁹ At least one of Lasker’s three chosen successors, Emerson Foote, suffered from debilitating psychological problems and was compelled to leave Foote, Cone & Belding in 1950 because of his deep depressions. Fairfax Cone, another of Lasker’s three agency “heirs,” suffered from a mysterious malady in the 1930s—an affliction that he asserted was physical rather than emotional. Yet his autobiographical musings raise questions about whether his self-diagnosis should have been so straightforward:

Advertising people were supposed to live under just the kind of pressure that results in mental breakdown . . .

Agency people are continuously perched on the edge of anxiety . . .

The advertising agency man and the media salesman live much of the time under a tight wire that stretches thinly between hope and despair . . .

I had moments of fear and hours of depression because I never knew when the fatigue would become overpowering. Fortunately, no one among my business associates knew that it still existed; I had learned to cover up.²⁰

The other side of bipolar illness, of course, is mania—or in Lasker’s case, hypomania.²¹ Lasker was nothing if not intense. He was “radium,” by his own accounting. He was brilliant and exhausting. “I don’t remember ever seeing him yawn,” his longtime colleague Robert Crane reflected.²² He possessed what columnist Mark Sullivan called a “furious energy.”²³He wears people out, said Ralph Sollitt. “He wears everybody down,” said rental car magnate John Hertz.²⁴ “If he gets close to you,” David Noyes observed, “he overwhelms you.”²⁵ Hearst editor Arthur Brisbane, Lasker’s ally in the doomed campaign to save Leo Frank, coined the phrase “human dynamo” to describe his friend. The phrase stuck.

This tidal wave of energy could be a burden on friends and subordinates, but it had its clear upsides. Clients often told him that he “revitalized” them, and that the effect sometimes persisted for weeks after one of his visits. This wasn’t something that he did consciously. “All that I can figure out that I have is this tremendous energy, [and that] I can energize other people,” he said. “And that makes me a sham, because that isn’t a very high talent.”²⁶

But he wasn’t a sham, or a humbug. Lasker put his energy and creativity to extraordinary uses, across an amazing range of contexts.

Lasker presented many faces of leadership, not all of them pleasant or consistent.

To his subordinates, he could be alternately inspirational, baffling, and demoralizing. He could be cheerful, playful, irascible, generous, or petty—and he could shift from mood to mood with bewildering speed. He had a powerful work ethic, and within the bounds of his sometimes fragile emotional state, drove himself hard. Equally, he drove the people around him, including Lord & Thomas personnel and his subordinates at the Shipping Board.

Part of Lasker’s success in managing creative talent grew out of the sheer range of opportunities he put in front of them, and—at least in the lower ranks of the organization—a purposeful prohibition against office politics. As copywriter Mark O’Dea later commented: “There was no great interference [with the copywriters]. There was a brilliant creative organization, so much going on all the time, so many interesting jobs, and there seemed to be no resistance toward anyone going ahead. In fact, I went right ahead—my salary went up amazingly, and I was given every opportunity. Other men had the same opportunity. A grand organization, [which] seemed to be particularly free of politics.”²⁷

Lasker was far less successful at managing his managers, which guaranteed that he was fated to burn through a series of leaders at Lord & Thomas. William Benton, who later emerged as a major figure in the advertising industry in his own right, once was asked by Lasker how Lord & Thomas was different from the Batten agency, where Benton had worked previously. Benton had a ready (and courageous!) answer for his boss: “There’s a big difference. In the other agency, my boss hired second-rate men, and then gave them every opportunity to become first-rate. Here you hire first-rate men, browbeat them, humiliate them, refuse to give them parity, and drive them so hard they become second-rate.”²⁸

But the underlying dynamic was far more complicated than that. Lasker was drawn to excellence, and according to Sollitt, this presented its own problems: “When he finds anybody that has any type of excellence, he is so delighted with it that he has a great tendency to magnify it far beyond its desserts.” Inevitably, though, the time would come when Lasker would allow himself to see people as they actually were:

Nearly all of the people with whom he has been associating to my knowledge, in the business, he has striven harder than they could possibly strive to make them bigger and better than they were, and then has had this heartbreak when he found out that they weren’t as fine . . .

You will hear it said by people that he has a tendency to take these young men—or not necessarily young men—but these men of talent and he just squeezes them dry, like an orange, and then after he squeezes them dry, he throws them aside.

Well, that isn’t true. Some of those people think that for a while, and that is simply because of their reaction to his reaction when he finds out that they are not as great as he thought they were, and as he so deeply hoped that they would be.²⁹

This is a constant refrain in the history of Lord & Thomas: gifted managers comparing themselves with Lasker and despairing of their own inadequacies. David Noyes told the story of a Lord & Thomas directors’ meeting at Mill Road Farm sometime in the middle 1930s. During lunch on the second day, with Lasker seated at the head of the table, New York office manager Sheldon Coons rose to address the group. Awkwardly, he confessed that he and West Coast head Don Francisco had stayed up almost until dawn discussing their complex relationship with Lasker. Coons said that he and Francisco viewed themselves as accomplished and effective professionals—right up until the moment that they returned to Chicago and encountered Lasker. “We come into your office,” Coons said, now addressing Lasker directly, “and feel so damned inferior, and it hurts so much, that when we get back to the office, it takes a month to recover.”

Lasker rose to his feet—slowly, and with a grim look on his face, according to Noyes. He began by correcting Coons’s choice of adjective: “What you mean is that in my presence, you feel inadequate, not inferior. That is part of my desire, part of my management [style]. I want you to feel inadequate. All the great men of the world have felt inadequate—the greatest writers, the greatest poets. It is this constant striving that has made them great, and it has always been my policy to make my associates, especially the best of them, feel inadequate.”

So Lasker (who so often felt inadequate himself) deliberately fostered insecurities and anxieties in his top lieutenants. Toward that end, he played favorites and didn’t hesitate to use one Lord & Thomas executive to throw another off balance. Edward Lasker said that his father manipulated his subordinates the same way he raised his children: “When he was displeased with one of the children, he very definitely let that child feel that the other two were the favorites. This was also true in business. When Coons was in the doghouse, Noyes was one of the greatest advertising men who ever lived, and vice versa.”³⁰

Despite his willingness to knock people off balance, Lasker hated confrontation. He was loath to fire people, generally leaving the dirty work to others. In the case of people to whom he owed a special debt, he simply declined to pull the trigger. Longtime colleague Elmer Bullis, for example, had been an underperformer for years, and then got into some sort of unspecified trouble at Lord & Thomas in the later 1920s. But Lasker—who remembered that Bullis had given him his first break in advertising, decades earlier—couldn’t bring himself to dismiss his former mentor.³¹

All in all, this is not a picture of a flexible, empathetic, decisive manager of people, at least in conventional terms. But Lasker didn’t care. He resolutely declined to define himself as a conventional business leader. “I was always a poor executive,” he readily admitted. Unlike the heads of Ayer and J. Walter Thompson, who in Lasker’s eyes were good business leaders, he lacked the right motivation to build a great business. “I have always been a poor executive,” he reiterated, “because what I was after was neither volume, money, nor organization.”³²

Learning from Albert Lasker and defining his legacy, present many challenges.

For one thing, he exaggerated, embroidered, and sometimes fabricated his life’s narrative. You will find it “intensely interesting,” Sollitt observed with dry understatement, “to discover what is the actual truth about a lot of things.”³³ Lasker generated so much electricity—and static—around himself that the reality of his life tended to be hidden from its observers. Finally, Lasker tried consciously to obscure his own role in almost all that he did—to remain the man behind the curtain and let others command the limelight.

At the same time, Lasker was intensely proud of his contributions to advertising. So what were those contributions, and how durable have they been?

Lord & Thomas was already a pioneer before Lasker arrived on the agency’s doorstep in 1898. Earlier in that decade, the agency had become one of the first in the United States to analyze and plan campaigns for its clients, rather than simply taking orders for ad placements.

Lasker took Lord & Thomas in new and profitable directions. He realized that by persuading clients to increase the creative content of their ads, and then by preparing those ads in-house, Lord & Thomas could earn its full 15 percent commission. Working with John Kennedy, he puzzled out the fundamentals of “reason-why” advertising—one of his two major contributions to the field. If advertising was “salesmanship in print,” then ads had to sell. They had to give people a compelling reason to buy this particular product or service.

The second of Lasker’s great contributions to the field was his use of research to test and validate various advertising approaches. Working first with Kennedy and later with Claude Hopkins, Lasker systematically tracked the impact of his ads, tweaked and revised them, and then tested their impact again. The mail-order business, in particular, sharpened these instincts. “There is no better training in the advertising business than mail order,” observed one-time colleague Herbert Field, “and he had it in the nth degree. He finally became the best judge of copy of any man I knew.”³⁴

With the other advertising greats of the early twentieth century—and of course, with the manufacturing geniuses and publishing magnates of that era—Lasker deserves enormous credit for building markets enough to achieve economies of scale, and thereby bringing an incredible range of goods within the reach of ordinary consumers. The refrigerator that cost $150 in the 1920s cost under $100 a decade later, and at the same time was a significantly better product. Advertising campaigns like the “Meter-Miser” (for Frigidaire) may have begun as flights of marketing fancy, but they actually compelled manufacturers to perform better. Even in the realm of commodities, consumers derived indirect benefits from advertising. If a brand was worth investing in, then it was worth defending. If you are paying a penny a case to advertise Sunkist oranges as the very best—with the ultimate goal of commanding a premium for your product—then you would be a fool to dump frost-damaged goods on the market and damage the Sunkist brand.

Perhaps inevitably, Lasker the marketer went from being a revolutionary to a conservative. He was a “fundamentalist,” in the eyes of his final first lieutenant, David Noyes: a leader who resisted departures from the tried-and-true formulas that he himself had helped invent decades earlier. As a result, credit for the move into radio belongs mainly to others. But even in this strange new context, Lasker asked good questions of his staff and demanded good answers—including, first and foremost, proof of radio’s efficacy in selling products. When that evidence became irresistible, he embraced the new medium, and pushed his clients toward it.

Many of the products that Lasker helped introduce, and most of the companies that made them, have long since vanished. Sunkist, Sun-Maid, Kotex, Kleenex, Palmolive, and Puffed Rice are enduring exceptions; the Hupp, Mitchell, and Studebaker car companies, Van Camp’s pork and beans, and Pepsodent are the rule.

On a more fundamental level, though, it doesn’t much matter whether individual brands or manufacturers have survived. Lord & Thomas taught us to drink orange juice, use sanitary napkins and Kleenex, and brush our teeth. Lasker’s agency also trained us to tune in to the radio for soap operas and variety hours, and persuaded us to tolerate the ads that supported those entertainments. Accepting the bargain served up by Lasker and his competitors—commercials in return for “free” entertainment—preconditioned us to accept the same deal with technologies that emerged years or decades after Lasker’s departure from the scene, including television and the internet.

On the public relations side, Lasker’s legacy is clear and profound. He learned politics at the knee of Will Hays, the grand master of Republican politics in the World War I era. The techniques he refined in the congressional elections of 1918 and the presidential race of 1920 stuck with him; more than a decade later, his West Coast office kept socialist Upton Sinclair out of the California governorship and shortly thereafter persuaded Californians to repeal a punitive tax on chain stores. “A few simple ideas were hammered home steadily, steadily, steadily,” said W. G. Irwin.³⁵ Again, this formula sounds self-evident to the modern ear, but it was far from obvious in the day when it was invented.

But in Lasker’s mind, all of these general contributions to the advertising industry, and specific contributions to individual companies, products, and politicians, didn’t amount to a legacy. Throughout his life, Lasker wanted to do something of significance, and feared he hadn’t. His whole life, said Sollitt, was aimed at doing something good—and business wasn’t a big enough stage: “Business didn’t really justify his existence.”³⁶

This fear was the wellspring of his involvement in advocacy—for example, in the Leo Frank case—in politics, and in philanthropy. His philanthropic activities, shaped and advanced by Mary Lasker, were enormously influential. The Laskers took on causes, such as national health insurance and birth control, that politicians didn’t dare embrace. They helped advance the concept of leverage in philanthropy—“seeding” worthy causes with their own money, and counting on larger infusions of private and public dollars to carry the cause forward. These were Big Ideas, which Albert loved to shape, manipulate, and disseminate.

Albert also exerted his considerable personal influence with the media to persuade broadcasters to tackle taboo subjects. Cancer isn’t a disgrace, the wildly popular radio character Fibber McGee told his friend Charley, with an astonished national audience hanging on every shocking word. It’s a disgrace to think it’s a disgrace. Lasker changed the way people understood the world—and thereby set the world on a better course.

Albert Lasker loved a wager. At the same time, he cheerfully and unabashedly hedged his bets.

W. G. Irwin told the story of walking down the streets of Chicago with Lasker one day in search of confirmation of the rumor that an armistice had been signed ending World War I. “Well,” Lasker fretted aloud, “I am going to lose some money. I made a bet last week on this thing, that it wouldn’t end this year.”

A half a block later, he brightened up, and announced with a smile, “But I’m all right. I made a bet before that it would.”³⁷

So he was hedger of bets—someone who enjoyed the game, but at the same time, remained outside the game. This was true in almost all of his endeavors: He retained the eye of the outsider.

This was in part because he was a German (of sorts), a southerner, a westerner, and a Jew: all perspectives that placed him outside of the mainstream. His mental and emotional problems also contributed to his outsider status, and all these differentiating factors, it seems, combined to help him see things objectively and dispassionately. Notably, when he became an insider—as at Mitchell Motor, Van Camp’s, and Pepsodent, and arguably during his government service—his genius declined precipitously. He lost his ability to put his finger on the meat of the cocoanut, to get to the kernel of the nut. He became merely another stakeholder.

So he succeeded most notably as an outsider. But he was also, paradoxically, the quintessential insider. Impish, funny, breezy, flamboyant, exuberant, exaggerated, generous—and dark—he embodied something at the very heart of America.

And this made him the perfect person to sell America.