Notes
INTRODUCTION
1. William Hard, “Who Wants to Be a Rich Man’s Son?” Collier’s, March 10, 1923, 13. Lasker’s authorized biographer, John Gunther, notes that Hard was a friend of Lasker’s, and that they sometimes dreamed up Collier’s articles together, probably including this one. See John Gunther, Taken at the Flood: The Story of Albert D. Lasker (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960); and “A Note on Sources.”
2. Albert Lasker letter to William Wrigley, February 6, 1923, Box 29, United States Shipping Board (USSB) records.
3. In 1986, the Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles granted a posthumous pardon to Frank without addressing the issue of his innocence or guilt.
4. Albert Lasker letter to Arthur Brisbane, February 14, 1923, Box 29, USSB records.
5. See, for example, Albert Lasker, letter to William Randolph Hearst, March 5, 1923, Box 29, USSB records: “There are only four or five men in the United States who are really deeply interested in the future of the American Merchant Marine. You are one of those men.”
6. Albert Lasker letter to Edward Lasker, June 1, 1923, Box 30, USSB records.
7. “Business: Coalition,” Time, June 14, 1926, www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,751559-1,00.html.
8. Sparkes, 390–391.
9. Sparkes, 346.
10. Sparkes, interview with Herbert Field, March 16, 1938, 15–18. Field’s original surname was Cohn, which he changed for business purposes.
11. Sparkes interview with “Hackett” (otherwise unidentified).
12. From Robert Eck, “A Face of Character,” typewritten collection of reminiscences about Lasker, March 30, 1994, 7.
13. Ibid., 5.
14. Sparkes interview with Sarnoff, January 11, 1938. See “A Note on Sources.”
15. Sparkes, 40.
16. Sparkes, 249.
17. Reminiscences of Mary Lasker, Columbia University Oral History Research Office Collection, 612. See “A Note on Sources.”
CHAPTER ONE
1. “For the Young People,” Galveston Daily News, May 2, 1889, 3.
2. James F. Harris, A Study in Theory and Practice of German Liberalism: Eduard Lasker, 1829–1884. (New York: University Press of America, 1984), 3.
3. Harris, A Study in the Theory and Practice of German Liberalism, 3.
4. Louis L. Snyder, “Bismarck and the Lasker Resolution, 1884,” Review of Politics, 29, no. 1 (1967): 42.
5. More accurately, Lasker was on the left end of the centrist political spectrum. To the left of him and his fellow progressives were the Socialists, Marxists, and others. See Carlton J. H. Hayes, “The History of German Socialism Reconsidered,” American Historical Review 23, no. 1 (1917): 62–101.
6. Snyder, “Bismarck and the Lasker Resolution, 1884,” 43.
7. A severe episode evidently occurred in 1875. See James F. Harris, A Study in the Theory and Practice of German Liberalism (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984) 14.
8. Most of these dates are approximate. Many are contradicted in East Texas: Its History and Its Makers, by T. C. Richardson, published in 1940 by the Lewis Historical Publishing Company of New York.
9. See the Handbook of Texas online entries for Weatherford (http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/WW/hew3.html) and Isaac Sanger (www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/SS/fsa66.html). The latter indicates that the Sangers “encountered anti-Semitic prejudice” in Weatherford.
10. Morris tells this story in “A Letter from a Texas Pioneer” in The Menorah Journal 24, no. 2, (Spring 1936): 197.
11. The date comes from ibid., 201. The “letter” is notably short on dates.
12. David G. McComb, Galveston: A History (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1986), 92–94.
13. See www.genforum.familytreemaker.com/cgi-bin/print.cgi?baum::746.html.
14. “A Letter from a Texas Pioneer,” 203.
15. Again, much in this sequence is approximate. See T. C. Richardson, East Texas: Its History and Its Makers (New York: Lewis Historical Publishing Company, 1940), 418–420.
16. The timing is confusing. Morris Lasker recalls that his letter reached Eduard on the very day that Eduard was acquitted of the charge of lèse-majesté. But Eduard was never tried for this crime. Perhaps Morris was confusing Eduard’s story with that of German socialist Ferdinand Lasalle, who was jailed for that alleged crime in 1874 and released in 1875. That timing is close for Morris’s story. See Hayes, “The History of German Socialism Reconsidered,” 73.
17. Box 99, Folder 2, John Gunther papers, University of Chicago.
18. Snyder, “Bismarck and the Lasker Resolution, 1884,” 54.
19. In 1880, Galveston had 22,248 residents, more than any other Texas city. From The Texas Almanac online, www.texasalmanac.com/history/highlights/html, accessed Feb. 17, 2005.
20. McComb, Galveston: A History, 47.
21. See Eric Larsen, Isaac’s Storm: The Drowning of Galveston (London: Fourth Estate, 1999), 13.
22. Ibid., 49.
23. Ibid., 63–64.
24. “A Letter from a Texas Pioneer,” 194.
25. Box 99, Folder 2, Gunther papers.
26. Elizabeth Hayes Turner, Women, Culture, and Community: Religion and Reform in Galveston, 1880–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press. 1997), 143.
27. Herman D. Allman, A Unique Institution: The Story of the National Farm School (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1935). http://campus.devalcol.edu/library/archives/uniqueinstitution/chapter8.htm.
28. Morris Lasker, letter to Albert Lasker, December 23, 1914.
29. Sparkes interview with Ralph Sollitt, November 5, 1937, 17.
30. Ibid., 18.
CHAPTER TWO
1. See “John H. Reagan and Early Regulation,” Texas State Library & Archives Commission, www.tsl.state.tx.us/exhibits/railroad/early/page1.html.
2. John Gunther’s Taken at the Flood: The Story of Albert D. Lasker (New York: Harper, 1960), 30.
3. Ibid., 18.
4. John Gunther interview with Loula Lasker, Box 104, Folder 20, John Gunther papers, University of Chicago.
5. Sparkes, 50.
6. Gunther interview with Loula Lasker.
7. Sparkes interview with Mrs. Charles Haynes (formerly Miss Ann Austin), May 12, 1938, 5.
8. Albert Lasker and Boyden Sparkes, My Interest in You, unpublished manuscript, 15. The “sheenie” reference comes from a recollection by Lasker that Sparkes chose not to include in his Galveston chapter.
9. Sparkes, 192.
10. Gunther, Taken at the Flood, 28. Given that Lasker’s children reviewed this biography, the charges seem to have had merit.
11. If this building project came hard on the heels of the great Galveston fire of November 1885—in which 568 buildings, including Morris Lasker’s first mansion, were destroyed—then Albert Lasker must have been closer to six years old than nine. See Gary Cartwright, Galveston: A History of the Island (New York: Atheneum, 1991), 149–150.
12. Sparkes, 21.
13. Sparkes, 178.
14. Lasker and Sparkes, My Interest in You, 28
15. Ibid., 30.
16. See “Ball High School,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_High_School.
17. Sparkes interview with Haynes, 4.
18. Sparkes, 57.
19. Sparkes interview with Haynes, 8.
20. Sparkes, 59.
21. Nathan Miller, New World Coming: The 1920s and the Making of Modern America (New York: Scribner, 2003), 99.
22. This is Ralph Sollitt’s version, as told to Sparkes (pp. 6–7). Sollitt was simply relating the story that Lasker had told him, although with obvious skepticism.
23. Philippe Lorin, Five Giants of Advertising (New York: Assouline Publishing, 2001), 8–9. John Gunther was taken in by this story as well (Taken at the Flood, 34–35).
24. Geoffrey C. Ward, Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 13–14.
25. Lasker and Sparkes, My Interest in You, 32.
26. Reminiscences of Albert Lasker, in the Columbia University Oral History Research Office Collection (hereafter “Albert Lasker oral history, CUOHROC”), 22.
27. Lasker later told Boyden Sparkes that he received his high school diploma only because the geometry teacher, a Mr. Underwood, agreed to give Lasker an individual “examination.” The interview took place at Underwood’s home. Underwood was smoking his pipe, and Lasker asked if he could try the pipe. Underwood agreed, Lasker became “deathly ill,” and the examination was abruptly canceled. Underwood gave Lasker a passing grade, and he was able to graduate.
28. In subsequent years, Debs would mount five campaigns for president of the United States as an avowed Socialist, the last—in 1920—from a federal jail cell in Atlanta.
29. See “The Debs Matter,” Galveston Daily News, September 16, 1896; and “Debs Is Exonerated,” Galveston Daily News, September 22, 1896.
30. This story also shows up in Lorin, Five Giants of Advertising, 7.
31. Gunther, Taken at the Flood, 3.
32. Albert Lasker oral history, CUOHROC, 5.
33. Gunther, Taken at the Flood, 35.
34. Mark Muhich, “Link to Isle Culture’s Origin Rediscovered,” reprinted with permission from the Galveston County Daily News, http://mgaia.com/images/ESLevy/LevyNews.htm.
35. J. S. Gallegly, Footlights on the Border: The Galveston and Houston Stage Before 1900 (The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1962), 219 and 228. Gallegly’s remarkable book lists every theatrical performance in Galveston and Houston from 1838 through 1900.
36. Sparkes, 234.
37. Albert Lasker oral history, CUOHROC, 10.
38. Ibid., 6. Certainly, the Galveston reporters—like their counterparts almost everywhere else in the world—were a hard-drinking, hard-partying bunch, and Albert seems to have fallen under their spell.
39. Sparkes interview with Sollitt, April 22, 1938, 4.
40. Albert Lasker oral history, CUOHROC, 10.
41. Ibid., 11.
CHAPTER THREE
1. John Gunther, Taken at the Flood: The Story of Albert D. Lasker (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960), 39. Gunther’s account of Lasker’s early years in Chicago is full of interesting details, mostly from unattributed sources.
2. Sparkes, 98.
3. Much of this description of Chicago in the second half of the nineteenth century is from Emmett Dedmon’s colorful Fabulous Chicago (New York: Random House, 1953); and Timothy B. Spears’s Chicago Dreaming: Midwesterners and the City, 1871–1919 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). Dedmon describes the Chicago Fire in great detail (95–109).
4. Spears, Chicago Dreaming, xvi.
5. Rob Paral, “Chicago’s Immigrants Break Old Patterns,” www.migrationinformation.org/usfocus/display.cfm?ID=160.
6. “Hold your heads up,” Debs wrote to his parents from prison. “Don’t be in the least anxious. I am only to be envied.” See Letter of Eugene Debs, vol. 1, J. Robert Constantine, ed. (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 82.
7. Quoted in Dedmon, Fabulous Chicago, 186.
8. Ibid, 203.
9. Ibid, 221–225.
10. See “The Wizard of Oz, An American Fairy Tale,” at http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/oz/ozsect1.html.
11. Spears, Chicago Dreaming, 16–17.
12. See the entire poem online at http://risa.stanford.edu/chicago.php.
13. “Rotten to the Core,” Chicago Daily Tribune, March 5, 1896, 12.
14. “Chicago Is Enveloped in Smoke,” Chicago Daily Tribune, December 2, 1898, 3.
15. “Chicago Real Estate,” Chicago Daily Tribune, May 29, 1898, 26. Schlesinger & Mayer hired architect Louis Sullivan to produce an ornate building; unfortunately, by the time it was completed in 1904, the company couldn’t afford it, and it was taken over by rival Carson, Pirie, Scott—a setting that was soon to serve as the backdrop for a dramatic episode in Albert Lasker’s life.
16. “Wheat Outlook Is Fine,” Chicago Daily Tribune, May 31, 1898, 10.
17. This was certainly a living wage. At this same time, Theodore Dreiser’s fictional Caroline Meeber (Sister Carrie) found employment at a cap factory, where she was paid $3.50 a week.
18. Description of the office based on Albert Lasker and Boyden Sparkes, Hammered Brass, unpublished collaboration, Installment 2, 2.
19. Reminiscences of Albert Lasker, in the Columbia University Oral History Research Office Collection (hereafter “Albert Lasker oral history, CUOHROC”), 46.
20. Sparkes, 102.
21. Lasker and Sparkes, Hammered Brass, 5.
22. Sparkes interview with Elmer Bullis, October 27, 1937, 102.
23. Historical Statistics of the United States, U. S. Department of Commerce, 1970 edition, 259–271.
24. Ibid., Q 518–523.
25. Ibid., Q 329–345, Q 331–345.
26. Ibid., Q 530–547.
27. Ibid., R 1–12, R 1–16.
28. Dedmon, Fabulous Chicago, 189.
29. Historical Statistics of the United States, R 232–257.
30. John Morrish, Magazine Editing (New York: Routledge, 1996), 7.
31. George P. Rowell, Forty Years an Advertising Agent (New York: Printers’ Ink Publishing, 1906). Of one highly successful competitor, Rowell wrote (on p. 446), “If he had any office I never knew where it was. For his correspondence he commonly used the stationery of his clients. He doubtless did have a billhead.”
32. Mark Tungate, Adland: A Global History of Advertising (Philadelphia: Kogan Page, 2007), 14.
33. Ralph M. Hower, The History of an Advertising Agency: N. W. Ayer & Son at Work, 1869–1949 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1939), 638–639.
34. Stephen Fox, The Mirror Makers: A History of American Advertising and Its Creators (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1984), 39.
35. Daniel Pope, The Making of Modern Advertising (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 121.
36. Albert Lasker oral history, CUOHROC, 21–22. But patent medicines, as we will see, were about to undergo a steep decline. For example: they represented 15 percent of Ayers’s billings in 1900, but only 3.4 percent of its billings in 1901, according to Hower, The History of an Advertising Agency, 639.
37. Lord & Thomas, “Pocket Directory, 1892–93,” 658.
38. From an advertisement in Printers’ Ink, August 1895. Quoted in Pamela Walker Laird, “The Business of Progress: The Transformation of American Advertising, 1870–1920.” Business and Economic History 22, no. 1 (Fall 1993).
39. Fox, The Mirror Makers, 14.
40. Albert D. Lasker, “A Call for Dedication to Fundamentals in Advertising,” undated speech, probably from the late 1920s.
41. Hower, The History of an Advertising Agency, 96–97.
42. From “A. D. Lasker Traces Advertising Agency’s Development,” Printers’ Ink, October 13, 1927, 142. Lasker also recounted this story in “Salesmanship in Print,” Printers’ Ink, July 29, 1926, 1.
43. Sparkes interview with Ralph Sollitt, 9.
44. Lasker and Sparkes, Hammered Brass, 8.
45. Sparkes interviews, 115.
46. Lasker and Sparkes, Hammered Brass, 8.
47. Albert Lasker oral history, CUOHROC, 39.
48. Sparkes, 119.
49. Ibid., 120.
50. Lasker and Sparkes, Hammered Brass, 17.
51. Sparkes, 354.
52. Lasker and Sparkes, Hammered Brass, 19.
53. Sparkes, 113.
54. Ibid., 130.
55. Lasker told Columbia’s oral historians that Thomas went with him to pay off the debt. If so, that underscores the affection that Thomas felt for his young protégé.
56. Albert Lasker, The Lasker Story: As He Told It (Chicago: Advertising Publications, 1963), 16.
57. Ibid., 20.
58. Sparkes, 135.
59. Albert Lasker oral history, CUOHROC, 34.
60. Sparkes, 132.
61. Albert Lasker oral history, CUOHROC, 37.
62. “A. D. Lasker Traces Advertising Agency’s Development,” 142.
63. These numbers changed with each retelling of the story. John Gunther’s numbers were substantially higher; he had Wilson’s monthly ad budget at $20,000—an implausibly large figure. See Gunther, Taken at the Flood, 46.
64. Sparkes, 225.
65. According to Don Belding’s 1952 recollections upon the occasion of Lasker’s death, these six copywriters were Robert P. Crane, Walker Evans Jr. (father of the celebrated photographer), Carl Johnson, William Merriam, Arthur Palmer, and George Spencer. In addition, the fledgling creative department included a “merchandising man,” Paul Faust, and an artist named Charles Church. From Don Belding’s papers in the Southwest Collection at Texas Tech University.
66. Albert Lasker oral history, CUOHROC, 39.
CHAPTER FOUR
1. Quoted in Albert Lasker, “Salesmanship in Print,” Printers’ Ink, July 29, 1926, 1.
2. Albert Lasker, The Lasker Story: As He Told It (Chicago: Advertising Publications, 1963), 13.
3. Ibid., 14.
4. Ibid., 25. Since Armour was then a valued Lord & Thomas client, Lasker probably kept this particular opinion to himself.
5. Ibid., 19; and Sparkes, 227.
6. Sparkes, 230.
7. Albert Lasker, “A Call for Dedication to Fundamentals in Advertising,” undated speech, probably from the late 1920s, 4.
8. Sparkes, 228.
9. Tommy Smith, “John E. Kennedy,” in The Ad Men and Women: A Biographical Dictionary of Advertising, ed. Edd Applegate (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994), 200–204.
10. According to an internal Foote, Cone & Belding memorandum dated November 8, 1977, the fiftieth anniversary issue of Printers’ Ink (1938) records that “in 1903 John E. Kennedy joined the Postum Cereal Company.” Since this is the same period that he was living in Wisconsin and working for Dr. Shoop’s Family Medicine, it seems unlikely that he could have joined the Post payroll fulltime.
11. This version of this key moment is from Lasker, The Lasker Story, 21.
12. Sparkes, 230.
13. Almost every recorded version of this proposed deal uses much higher figures. Lasker’s 1925 oral history (later published as The Lasker Story) sets Kennedy’s annual salary at $28,000, of which Shoop proposed to pay half of half, or $7,000. But the contract extension that Lord & Thomas offered to Kennedy on September 15, 1904, states that the firm was paying Kennedy “$16,000 per year for [his] full time service” in 1904. This lower figure is confirmed by a feature about the recently hired Kennedy in the July 1904 issue of Judicious Advertising. We infer that Shoop proposed to pay half of half of $16,000, or $4,000.
14. Sparkes, 231.
15. Lasker, The Lasker Story, 25.
16. Ibid.
17. Alternatively, Kennedy stated this principle as “salesmanship on paper.”
18. Adelaide Hechtlinger, The Great Patent Medicine Era: or, Without Benefit of Doctor (New York: Galahad Books, 1970), 208.
19. The quote belongs to Claude C. Hopkins, another Shoop alumnus, to whom we will return shortly. From Claude C. Hopkins, My Life in Advertising (Lincolnwood, IL: NTC Business Books, 1991), 76.
20. The description of Thompson is from a Lasker autographical excerpt regarding Kennedy, ghostwritten by Boyden Sparkes in 1938–1939.
21. Sparkes, 229. See note 13 regarding Kennedy’s salary. We have adjusted the figures attributed to Thompson in this quote (from $28,000 to $16,000) to reflect the numbers actually reported in Judicious Advertising, which is most likely where Thompson would have read the offending salary figures.
22. Sparkes, 229.
23. The Nineteen Hundred Washer Co. went through a series of mergers in subsequent decades. It acquired the Whirlpool brand name in 1922—a brand that became so powerful that in 1950, Nineteen Hundred renamed itself the Whirlpool Corporation.
24. Lasker, The Lasker Story, 29.
25. Sparkes, 231.
26. Sparkes, 411.
27. Lasker, The Lasker Story, 31. Emphasis added.
28. From Article III in The Book of Advertising Tests, from typescript copy dated 1912, 8.
29. Sparkes interview with Noyes. Noyes didn’t join Lord & Thomas until long after Kennedy had departed, so this was office hearsay.
30. Lasker, The Lasker Story, 34.
31. The 300 figure comes from Don Belding’s 1952 recollections upon the occasion of Lasker’s death. From Don Belding’s papers in the Southwest Collection at Texas Tech University.
32. Lasker, The Lasker Story, 34.
33. From the January 1905 issue of Judicious Advertising.
34. John Gunther, Taken at the Flood: The Story of Albert D. Lasker (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960), 62.
35. Lasker, The Lasker Story, 34–35.
36. There appear to be two episodes compressed into one, in many of Lasker’s retellings of this phase—as, for example, in a confused passage from Sparkes, p. 232. Apparently, the original staff of six recruited by Lasker was expanded to nine after Kennedy’s hiring. According to Don Belding’s subsequent recollections (see above), the new recruits included George Daugherty, Hugo Levin, and Lucius Crowell.
37. Ralph M. Hower, The History of an Advertising Agency: N. W. Ayer & Son at Work, 1869–1949 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1939), 97.
38. Daniel Pope, The Making of Modern Advertising (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 139.
39. Ibid., 143.
40. Albert Lasker, “Salesmanship in Print,” Printers’ Ink, July 29, 1926, 166.
41. Sparkes, 236.
42. Sparkes, 233.
43. Sparkes, 240.
44. Sparkes, 227.
45. Sparkes, 253.
46. Sparkes, 411 and 254.
47. Sparkes, 232.
48. Sparkes, 230.
49. Sparkes, 253.
CHAPTER FIVE
1. Unless otherwise noted, the account of Lasker meeting and marrying Flora Warner is from Sparkes, 160 ff.
2. Sparkes, 75.
3. Flora Warner frequently understated her age.
4. John Gunther, Taken at the Flood: The Story of Albert D. Lasker (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960), 54.
5. Albert Lasker and Boyden Sparkes, My Interest in You, unpublished manuscript, second installment, 36.
6. Lasker biographer John Gunther reports that the Warner family had some misgivings about Lasker, in part related to his drinking (Taken at the Flood, 53). Perhaps Arthur had brought home stories about Grand Rapids.
7. Lasker later said that the woman who befriended Flora in the Chicago Beach Hotel also contracted typhoid fever.
8. Chicago statistics from “Historical Information for the Chicago Metropolitan Area,” http://landcover.usgs.gov/urban/chicago/hist_ch.html; national statistics from “Achievements in Public Health, 1900–1999: Safer and Healthier Foods,” Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, Volume 126, January–June, 1892, 128.
9. Gunther, Taken at the Flood, 54.
10. “I can’t go through this,” a distraught Lasker told his ghostwriter at this point in his retelling of the story. “Why should I live that over? I put that out of my mind.” Sparkes, 207.
11. Gunther, who had access to other family members, tells a different story. He says that Flora was encouraged to have a child to “improve her circulation,” and then was forbidden to have more (Taken at the Flood, 54).
12. This story, through the departure of Daniel Lord and the partnership agreement with Lasker and Erwin, is from Sparkes, 210–215.
13. One of the first policy changes that Lasker made when he gained complete control of Lord & Thomas in 1912 was to do away with these contracts, on the theory that his agency would provide better service without them. The business “grew tremendously under that policy,” Lasker asserted, and most other agencies soon adopted it.
14. This chronology may be somewhat compressed, but Lasker later said the whole episode transpired over the course of only a few days. John Gunther gives a sanitized account of this momentous episode (Taken at the Flood, 57).
15. Lasker later said that his father “never forgave [him]” for not asking him for the money. At that point, Morris’s businesses—especially his flour mills—were profitable, and he had ample cash to make the loan. But Albert wanted to prove that he could “do it without [him].” Sparkes, 217.
16. The quotations in this section are all from Sparkes, 233–238.
17. “Ambrose L. Thomas Dead,” Chicago Tribune, November 11, 1906, 4.
18. Sparkes, 240. The December 1906 issue of Judicious Advertising says that Thomas and Lasker had just gotten out of the elevator on the seventh floor when Thomas, “without a word or a cry, collapsed and sank to the floor near a pile of rugs which he intended to inspect.”
19. Albert Lasker, The Lasker Story: As He Told It (Chicago: Advertising Publications, 1963), 48.
20. Sparkes, 249.
21. All after-the-fact psychological interpretation is risky. We are indebted to Kay Redfield Jamison’s books, especially Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament (New York: Free Press, 1993), for a clear delineation of the spectrum of manic-depressive disorders.
22. See Joshua Wolf Shenk, Lincoln’s Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005) for an account of Lincoln’s affective disorder. The first breakdown is described on pages 19–22. Curiously, just before Lincoln had his breakdown, he was caring for a typhoid fever victim, Ann Rutledge, for whom he had deep feelings.
23. Jamison, Touched with Fire, 5.
24. Ibid., 6.
CHAPTER SIX
1. The Van Camp brand ultimately was acquired by ConAgra Foods in 1995. These details are from http://conagrafoods.com/consumer/brands/getBrand.do?page=van_camps.
2. Bert Van Camp letter to R. W. Bullis, January 11, 1938, Schultz collection.
3. Printers’ Ink, July 28, 1938, 97–98.
4. Ibid.
5. Reprinted in Albert Lasker, The Lasker Story: As He Told It (Chicago: Advertising Publications, 1963), 42.
6. Albert D. Lasker and Boyden Sparkes, Hammered Brass, unpublished collaboration, 54.
7. This description of the evaporated milk production process, as well as the account details that follow, are from the Van Camp client account notes. These accounts were written mainly to help Lord & Thomas representatives sell business. While generally boosterish, they provide invaluable detail about how the agency actually did its work.
8. Sparkes, 246.
9. Lord & Thomas, Van Camp client account notes.
10. Ibid.
11. Sparkes interview with W. G. Irwin, 7.
12. J. George Frederick, “Advertising Canned Goods,” Judicious Advertising, November 1905.
13. Sparkes, 107.
14. From an AdAge.com biography of Curtis (www.adage.com/century/people/people088.html, accessed April 10, 2005), and a summary of his publishing ventures at www.scripophily.net/curpubcom.html.
15. Lasker, The Lasker Story, 39.
16. Hopkins provides this detail in his memoir. He also writes that Curtis told him this story himself; see Claude C. Hopkins, My Life in Advertising (Lincolnwood IL: NTC Business Book, 1991), 85.
17. Reprinted in John Gunther, Taken at the Flood: The Story of Albert D. Lasker (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960), 69.
18. Hopkins, My Life in Advertising, 8–9.
19. Many of the facts in this section about Hopkins’s life are from Rob Schorman, “Claude Hopkins, Earnest Calkins, Bissell Carpet Sweepers and the Birth of Modern Advertising,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 7, no. 2 (April 2008), www.historycooperative.org/journals/jga/7.2/schorman.html. To track down the elusive Hopkins, Schorman scoured city directories, courthouse records, and local newspaper files in southern and western Michigan and cross-referenced his discoveries with clues in early trade publications and Hopkins’s own writings. We are grateful to Schorman for his assistance.
20. Hopkins, My Life in Advertising, 7.
21. Ibid., 35.
22. Ibid., 46.
23. Ibid., 58.
24. Ibid., 63.
25. Given the fuzziness of the dates involved, it is possible that Hopkins and Kennedy met in Racine, or even overlapped. Alternatively, Kennedy may have been hired to replace Hopkins when Hopkins left Racine in 1902.
26. Hopkins, My Life in Advertising, 76.
27. Ibid., 95.
28. Lasker remembered Stack as “the biggest man” at Lord & Thomas when Lasker arrived in Chicago—presumably excepting Ambrose Thomas and Daniel Lord.
29. Hopkins, My Life in Advertising, 84.
30. Ibid., 100. The “milk” reference may be a reference to the all-milk diet then in vogue because of Thomas A. Edison’s endorsement of it. Alternatively, it may be Hopkins’s way of signaling that he had temporarily given up alcohol.
31. Samuel Hopkins Adams, “The Great American Fraud,” Collier’s, October 7, 1905, http://www.museumofquackery.com/ephemera/oct7-01.htm, accessed October 7, 2001.
32. Ibid.
33. www.bottlebooks.com/LIQUOZONE/LIQUOZONE%20EXPOSED.htm.
34. Ibid.
35. Lasker and Sparkes, Hammered Brass, 23.
36. Lasker, The Lasker Story, 41.
37. Ibid., 41.
38. This was an interesting replay of the discovery of John E. Kennedy, who also had written several campaigns that Lasker had noticed and admired.
39. This version of the story is from the Sparkes interview, 260–261.
40. Two years later, in a rare speech (before the Sphinx Club of New York, on January 14, 1909, as reported in the January 1909 issue of Judicious Advertising), Hopkins admitted that he had “longed to be a Jack London.”
41. Hopkins, My Life in Advertising, 100–101.
42. Although this is a story from Hammered Brass, and doesn’t ring true as Lasker’s speaking voice, it certainly sounds like the way Lasker would have chosen to introduce Hopkins to the Lord & Thomas staff. By way of corroboration, the same scene is remembered by the anonymous author of “A Midwestern Ad Man Remembers,” Advertising & Selling, May 20, 1937, 42.
43. The direct quotations are from My Life in Advertising, 82.
44. Hopkins, My Life in Advertising, 101–102.
45. Ibid., 105.
46. Ibid., 105–106.
47. Another family that came into the business at the founding was the Stuarts, who ultimately led the company for three generations. After Robert D. Stuart Jr. retired in 1983, the succeeding management sold the company to PepsiCo.
48. See J. George Frederick, “Selling Quaker Oats, Pettijohn’s, Apitezo, Quaker Rice, etc.,” Judicious Advertising, September 1906. This account implies strongly that Quaker was a small Lord & Thomas account that the agency hoped might grow.
49. Except where noted, this story comes from Hopkins, My Life in Advertising, 146–153.
50. According to Lasker and Sparkes, Hammered Brass, Quaker was already embarrassed that a dime would purchase 22 ounces of oats, but only 8 ounces of puffed rice. Lord & Thomas pointed out that this made the puffed product a luxury item, and that raising the price only recognized that reality. Copywriter Bob Crane, however, remembers that Quaker was eager to raise the price, and that “if we maintained the volume that they had at ten cents, after raising the price three cents a package, they would give us their entire business.”
51. Lord & Thomas, Quaker Oats client account notes.
52. Hopkins, My Life in Advertising, 148. Hopkins’s ads referred to Anderson as a “famous dietician”—which soon enough became true.
53. Ibid., 148.
54. The oats campaign, Hopkins later admitted, was far less successful, because his strategy of creating new oatmeal-eaters proved too expensive.
55. Hopkins, My Life in Advertising, 149.
56. Ibid., 150.
57. Safe Advertising, written by (but not attributed to) Claude C. Hopkins, and published in 1909 by Lord & Thomas, 33.
58. Hopkins (on page 135) may have gotten Johnson’s first name wrong; the head of the company in this period was Caleb Johnson.
59. From the Palmolive client account notes.
60. Hopkins, My Life in Advertising, 137.
61. Ibid., 138.
62. Lord & Thomas, Palmolive client account notes.
63. Where discrepancies arise, we have corrected Hopkins’s numbers to conform to those in the client account.
64. Palmolive client account notes.
65. Sparkes interview with David Noyes.
66. From “Our History,” on the Colgate-Palmolive Web site, http://www.colgate.com/app/Colgate/US/Corp/History/1806.cvsp.
67. Hugh Allen, The House of Goodyear: Fifty Years of Men and Industry (Cleveland, OH: Corday & Gross, 1943), 340–341. Much of this story comes from Hopkins, My Life in Advertising, 126–133. The House of Goodyear, however, contains some specifics that contradict or complement Hopkins’s rather loose account; we have favored Allen where those discrepancies arise.
68. Sparkes interview with Robert Crane.
69. “Corporate History by Year,” at the Goodyear corporate Web site, www.goodyear.com/corporate/yhistory.html.
70. Hopkins, My Life in Advertising, 128.
71. Allen, The House of Goodyear, 341. The Goodyear client account notes give very different growth numbers, and don’t correlate them with specific years. Car production figures are from the U. S. Census (www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/facts_for_features_special_editions/012439.html).
72. “Corporate History by Year.”
73. Hopkins, My Life in Advertising, 130.
74. Sparkes interview, 262.
75. “We arranged to absorb the business of the George B. Van Cleve Agency,” Lasker later wrote, “[and] Van Cleve and some of his men came with us.” Quoted in Lasker and Sparkes, Hammered Brass.
76. Sparkes, 280.
77. Ibid., 281.
78. Sparkes interview with Mark O’Dea. Seiberling didn’t like being contradicted, and the fact that Seiberling and Hopkins were very similar in appearance may have further complicated their relationship.
79. Sparkes, 282.
80. Ibid., 231.
81. Ibid., 261.
82. Mark Leland O’Dea, “An Ad Man Remembers,” eulogy following Hopkins’s death, 1932.
83. Sparkes, 256.
84. Ibid., 121.
85. Lasker, The Lasker Story, 44.
CHAPTER SEVEN
1. In 1934, Lasker said that he “vividly remembered” his first encounter with the growers, at a meeting that included a representative of the Southern Pacific Railway. That meeting didn’t occur until 1907, as explained in subsequent pages. Either Lasker wasn’t at the ill-fated 1904 meeting, or his memory failed him after three decades—or he chose in 1934 not to make reference to the false start in 1904.
2. Kevin Starr, Inventing the Dream: California Through the Progressive Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 162.
3. Much of this historical background is derived from two books: Rahno Mabel MacCurdy, The History of the California Fruit Growers Exchange (Los Angeles: CFGE, 1925; and Heritage of Gold: The First 100 Years of Sunkist Growers, Inc., 1893–1993 (Van Nuys, CA: Sunkist Growers, Inc., 1993). Heritage of Gold was based, in part, on the previous book.
4. From Claude C. Hopkins, Real Salesmanship in Print, first published by Lord & Thomas in 1911, 81. The publication was updated periodically; in this account, we draw on the revised printer’s galleys.
5. Don Francisco, “The Cooperative Advertising of Farm Products,” address delivered at the 57th Annual Convention of the CFGE, Sacramento, CA, December 10, 1924.
6. Albert D. Lasker, “The Relationship of the Freedom of Advertising to a Free Press,” address delivered at the Boston Conference on Retail Distribution, September 25, 1934.
7. In Brandon’s obituary in the Fargo (North Dakota) Forum, he is described as an “expert in fruit marketing” (Fargo Forum, November 29, 1937). His career with Lord & Thomas apparently spanned the two decades between 1904 and 1924.
8. The ad is reproduced in full (and in full color) in Heritage of Gold, 43. The cartoon is reproduced in The History of the California Fruit Growers Exchange, 60.
9. The California girl, incidentally, has long blond hair; the Iowa girl appears to have short brown hair under her winter hat.
10. Heritage of Gold, 44.
11. The History of the California Fruit Growers Exchange, 62.
12. It was not until 1952 that the CFGE officially changed its name to “Sunkist Growers, Inc.”
13. The History of the California Fruit Growers Exchange, 63.
14. Hopkins, Real Salesmanship in Print, 84.
15. Heritage of Gold, 45.
16. Hopkins, Real Salesmanship in Print, 88.
17. Ibid.; and Heritage of Gold, 46
18. Sparkes interview with Don Francisco, October 6, 1937.
19. Hopkins, Real Salesmanship in Print, 90.
20. Ibid.
21. Heritage of Gold, 48.
22. Starr, Inventing the Dream, 162.
23. Heritage of Gold, 50.
24. John Gunther, Taken at the Flood: The Story of Albert D. Lasker (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960), 160.
25. Sparkes interview with Don Francisco, October 6, 1937.
26. Ibid.
27. The ad is reproduced in full in Heritage of Gold, 50.
28. Extractor sales figures are from the Francisco interview; consumption figures are from Heritage of Gold, 55.
29. Lord & Thomas art director Charles Everett Johnson deserved the credit for the new, more sophisticated look, according to Don Francisco.
30. Francisco, “The Cooperative Advertising of Farm Products,” 27.
31. Ibid., 23.
32. The unsuccessful exception was the olive industry, which suffered from an unworkable exchange that combined growers and packers, which Francisco likened to “trying to drive a horse and a cow together.” A spate of olive-related poisonings in Detroit in 1921 also crippled the industry.
33. Francisco, “The Cooperative Advertising of Farm Products,” 44.
34. The History of the California Fruit Growers Exchange, 70.
35. Don Francisco, “The Marketing of Commodities,” in Associated Advertising, August 1920, 11, quoted in Daniel Starch, Principles of Advertising:A Systematic Syllabus of the Fundamental Principles of Advertising (Madison, WI: The University Cooperative Co., 1910), 105.
36. “Annual Report of the Federal Trade Commission for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1920,” www.ftc.gov/os/annualreports/.
37. The best source on the California Associated Raisin Company (CARC) is Victoria Saker Woeste, The Farmer’s Benevolent Trust: Law and Agricultural Cooperation in Industrial America, 1865–1945 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).
38. Sparkes interview with Don Francisco, October 11, 1937.
39. Reproduced in Woeste, The Farmer’s Benevolent Trust, 122.
40. Ibid., 128.
CHAPTER EIGHT
1. “Trial of Leo M. Frank on Charge of Murder Begins,” Atlanta Constitution, July, 29, 1913, 2.
2. “Girl Is Assaulted and Then Murdered in Heart of Town,” Atlanta Constitution, April 28, 1913, 1–2. Much of our account is taken from Leonard Dinnerstein, The Leo Frank Case (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968); and Steve Oney’s And the Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank (New York: Pantheon, 2003).
3. Dinnerstein, The Leo Frank Case, 3; Oney, And the Dead Shall Rise, 20–21.
4. Oney, And the Dead Shall Rise, 11, 27, 35, 37, and 60.
5. “Trial of Leo M. Frank on Charge of Murder Begins,” 2–3; Dinnerstein, The Leo Frank Case, 3; Oney, And the Dead Shall Rise, 48.
6. Oney, And the Dead Shall Rise, 22, 32, 35, and 37.
7. Sparkes, 42.
8. Dinnerstein, The Leo Frank Case, 13.
9. Ibid., 4.
10. “Frank and Lee,” Atlanta Constitution, May 2, 1913, 1.
11. Oney, And the Dead Shall Rise, 74, 75, and 97.
12. “Conley Says He Helped Frank,” Atlanta Constitution, May 30, 1913, 2; “Mary Phagan’s Murder Was Work of a Negro, Declares Frank,” Atlanta Constitution, May 31, 1913, 1–2.
13. Oney, And the Dead Shall Rise, 88.
14. “Frank Convicted, Asserts Innocence,” Atlanta Constitution, August 26, 1913, 1.
15. “Frank Sentenced on Murder Charge to Hang Oct. 10,” Atlanta Constitution, August, 27, 1913, 1.
16. “Troops on Alert for Mob,” New York Times, May 2, 1913, 5; “Politics Enmeshes a Murder Mystery,” New York Times, May 24, 1913, 6; “Indicted for Girl’s Murder,” New York Times, May 25, 1913, 4; “Says Employer Slew Girl,” New York Times, August 5, 1913, 2; “Frank Sentenced to Die,” New York Times, August 27, 1913, 3; “Says Frank Is Innocent,” New York Times, October 20, 1913, 1; “Frank Seeks New Trial,” New York Times, December 17, 1913, 6.
17. Dinnerstein, The Leo Frank Case, 95–98.
18. Sparkes, 286.
19. David Marx to Louis Marshall, August 30, 1913, in Oney, And the Dead Shall Rise, 346.
20. Ibid., 346 and 348.
21. Sparkes, 284.
22. The quotes in this section are from Sparkes, 43.
23. Sparkes, 286–287. John Gunther also credits Lasker’s sister Etta, who had friends in Atlanta, with getting her brother involved in the case (John Gunther, Taken at the Flood: The Story of Albert D. Lasker [New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960], 88).
24. Interview, Francie Lasker Brody, March 22, 2004.
25. Sparkes, 31.
26. Sparkes, 287.
27. From pamphlet entitled Morris Lasker, Pioneer, 1840–1916, New York Public Library, 1940 *PWZ (Lasker, M).
28. Oney, And the Dead Shall Rise, 367.
29. Sparkes, 43–45.
30. “Split Court Denies New Trial to Frank,” New York Times, February 18, 1914, 3.
31. Sparkes, 290.
32. Sparkes interview with Mark Sullivan, November 30, 1937.
33. Oney, And the Dead Shall Rise, 374–375.
34. New York Times, February 19, 1914, 1.
35. “Frank Alibi Upheld by New Witnesses,” New York Times, March 6, 1914, 2.
36. Sparkes, 290.
37. Dinnerstein, The Leo Frank Case, 94.
38. Sparkes, 49.
39. Dinnerstein, The Leo Frank Case, 95.
40. Albert D. Lasker to Herbert Haas, April 20, 1914, Leo Frank Collection, American Jewish Archives.
41. Albert Lasker to Louis Wiley, April 22, 1914, Leo Frank Collection.
42. Herbert Haas to Albert Lasker, April 30, 1914, Leo Frank Collection.
43. New York Times, March 19, 1914, 1; March 22, 1914, 3; March 25, 1914, 5; and April 27, 1914, 9.
44. Eugene Levy, “‘Is the Jew a White Man?’: Press Reaction to the Leo Frank Case,” 1913–1915, Phylon 35, no. 2 (1974): 212–222.
45. Albert Lasker to Herbert Haas, April 20, 1914, Leo Frank Collection.
46. “Burns Attacked by Mob,” New York Times, May 2, 1914, 1.
47. Quoted in Oney, And the Dead Shall Rise, 393.
48. Ibid., 421–423.
49. For a summary of Connolly’s career, see Dennis Swibold, “The Education of a Muckraker,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History, 53 (Summer 2003), 2–19, visitmt.com/history/Montana_the_Magazine_of_Western_History/summer2003/swibold.htm.
50. Oney, And the Dead Shall Rise, 444–445.
51. “Justice to Frank Doubted by Holmes,” New York Times, November 27, 1914, 1.
52. Oney, And the Dead Shall Rise, 451.
53. “Finds Mob Frenzy Convicted Frank,” New York Times, December 14, 1914, 4.
54. Albert Lasker to Jacob Billikopf, December 28, 1914, in Oney, And the Dead Shall Rise, 456.
55. Oney, And the Dead Shall Rise, 460.
56. Ibid., 451.
57. Ibid., 467.
58. Gunther, Taken at the Flood, 88.
59. Oney, And the Dead Shall Rise, 472, 476, and 477.
60. Sparkes, 49.
61. Oney, And the Dead Shall Rise, 502–503.
62. Ibid., 1.
63. “Soldiers Now Guard Him,” New York Times, June 22, 1915, 1 and 6.
64. Oney, And the Dead Shall Rise, 535.
65. Ibid., 557.
66. “Leo Frank’s Throat Cut by Convict; Famous Prisoner Near Death,” New York Times, July 18, 1915, 1; “The Hideous Mob Spirit,” New York Times, July 25, 1915, 14.
67. “Warden Is Overpowered,” New York Times, August 17, 1915, 1 and 4.
68. “Took Frank’s Life in ‘Resentment,’” New York Times, August 18, 1915, 3
69. “Grim Tragedy in Woods,” New York Times, August 19, 1915, 3.
70. Steve Oney, “Murder Trials and Media Sensationalism: The Press Frenzy of a Century Ago Echoes in the Coverage of Trials Today,” Nieman Reports (Spring 2004): 63–67, www.nieman.harvard.edu/reports/04-1NRSpring/63-67V58N1.pdf.
71. Gunther, Taken at the Flood, 90. Gunther dates this letter as December 26, 1915, but this would be over four months after the lynching of Frank, and therefore Lasker would not be spending time on the case. Most likely the letter should be dated December 26, 1914.
72. Albert Lasker letter to Morris Lasker, January 5, 1915.
73. Sparkes, 288.
74. Sparkes, 45–46.
75. Sparkes, 288.
76. Dinnerstein, The Leo Frank Case, 162.
77. Albert Lasker letter to (brother) Edward Lasker, October 17, 1922, Box 28, Shipping Board records.
CHAPTER NINE
1. Sparkes interview with W. G. Irwin, 6.
2. Sparkes, 290.
3. Sparkes, 291.
4. Lasker told this story twice to Sparkes (291–292; 432–433). This version combines those two stories.
5. Sparkes, 432.
6. Sparkes, 291.
7. Cortland Van Camp’s hardware business was a substantial local enterprise. According to surviving financial records, Van Camp Hardware & Iron Co. in 1912 had a capitalization of $1.6 million.
8. Sparkes, 291.
9. In fact, Frank Van Camp continued to ask Lasker for financial favors. After selling out in 1914, he moved to San Pedro, California, where he founded the Van Camp Sea Food Company. In July of that year, he asked Lasker for help in getting through a cash crunch. “When I had my last talk with you,” he wrote, “I remember your saying you would do me a favor if I gave you the opportunity and you were in position to do so. Well, here is the opportunity, and I hope you have a fat bank account.” (From a July 21, 1914, letter, a copy of which is in the Irwin papers.) Van Camp and his son, Gilbert, made a notable success of their tuna enterprise, inventing the purse seine method of tuna-fishing that helped transform tuna into an affordable food. In the 1950s, the company adopted the “Chicken of the Sea” brand name.
10. Sparkes, 433.
11. For more on Irwin and Cummins, see Jeffrey L. Cruikshank and David B. Sicilia, The Engine That Could: Seventy-Five Years of Values-Driven Change at Cummins Engine Company (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1997).
12. Letter from Merchants National Bank, October 10, 1912, to W. G. Irwin.
13. W. G. Irwin letter to G. W. Mann, March 4, 1914.
14. From W. M. Wilkes’s May 1914 “Salesmen’s Bulletin.”
15. W. G. Irwin letter to Frank Van Camp, January 6, 1916.
16. Albert Lasker letter to W. G. Irwin, July 16, 1917.
17. Albert Lasker letter to W. G. Irwin, July 25, 1917.
18. W. G. Irwin letter to Albert Lasker, October 13, 1917.
19. Albert Lasker letter to W. G. Irwin, October 17, 1917.
20. Albert Lasker letter to W. M. Wilkes, July 8, 1914.
21. See, for example, the write-up of Freda Ehmann in “California Olive Oil News” at www.oliveoilsource.com/olivenews4-8.htm (accessed September 19, 2005). Lord & Thomas recommended a three-year moratorium on advertising, which the olive industry accepted.
22. W. G. Irwin to Albert Lasker, November 13, 1917.
23. Albert Lasker letter to W. G. Irwin, December 20, 1916.
24. W. G. Irwin letter to Albert Lasker, December 12, 1917.
25. “TEB” letter to W. G. Irwin, April 6, 1918.
26. Albert Lasker letter to W. G. Irwin, July 16, 1917.
27. W. M. Wilkes letter to Albert Lasker, September 22, 1917.
28. Albert Lasker letter to W. G. Irwin, April 25, 1918.
29. Albert Lasker letter to W. G. Irwin, February 10, 1919.
30. The Lasker Story: As He Told It, 51. The exact timing of these various breakdowns and sabbaticals is fuzzy.
31. Albert Lasker letter to H. F. Vorhies, February 5, 1918.
32. Albert Lasker letter to W. G. Irwin, January 6, 1919.
33. Albert Lasker letter to W. G. Irwin, February 10, 1920.
34. Albert Lasker letter to W. G. Irwin, April 16, 1920.
35. Albert Lasker letter to W. G. Irwin, August 18, 1917.
36. W. G. Irwin letter to Albert Lasker, March 28, 1921.
37. W. G. Irwin to Albert Lasker, December 6, 1919.
38. Albert Lasker letter to W. G. Irwin, December 8, 1919.
39. W. G. Irwin letter to Albert Lasker, May 13, 1920.
40. Albert Lasker letter to W. G. Irwin, May 15, 1920.
41. Albert Lasker letter to W. G. Irwin, January 27, 1922.
42. Sparkes, 293.
43. Sparkes interview with W. G. Irwin, 8.
44. Sparkes, 292.
45. There is very little mention of Mitchell in the various Lasker collections. John Gunther says Lasker lost $1 million in a single year on his Mitchell investment, but this seems unlikely. In a conversation with Boyden Sparkes, Lasker said that he signed the papers to terminate his investment in Mitchell on the day his daughter Francie was born in 1916—a memorable day, because the negotiations were more complicated than he expected, and he didn’t arrive at the hospital until after Flora had delivered Francie. “Though my wife never mentioned it to me,” Lasker told Sparkes, “I think it is one thing I did that she never forgave me.” (Sparkes, 328) To his brother-in-law Arthur Warner, he wrote in 1923 that the Mitchell interlude was “one of the saddest experiences of my business career. I put in a fortune in money I loaned them, in addition to the stock I owned, in an attempt to extend the time, but it was impossible.” See Albert Lasker letter to Arthur Warner, February 15, 1923, Box 29, Shipping Board records.
46. Sparkes, 294.
47. Albert Lasker letter to H. F. Vorhies, February 15, 1918.
48. Albert Lasker letter to W. G. Irwin, February 5, 1921.
CHAPTER TEN
1. The Cubs did not become the Cubs until early in the twentieth century; before that, the Chicago Nationals were known variously as the Orphans, Spuds, and Colts. We’ll refer to them as the “Cubs.”
2. Reminiscences of Albert Lasker, in the Columbia University Oral History Research Office Collection (hereafter “Albert Lasker oral history, CUOHROC”), 69.
3. Peter Golenbock, Wrigleyville: A Magical History Tour of the Chicago Cubs (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 111; and Sparkes, 110.
4. David Pietrusza, Judge and Jury: The Life and Times of Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis (South Bend, IN: Diamond Communications, Inc., 1998), 157.
5. Ibid, 156.
6. Steven A. Riess, “The Baseball Magnates and Urban Politics in the Progressive Era: 1895–1920,” 41, http://www.la84foundation.org/SportsLibrary/JSH/JSH1974/JSH0101/jsh0101d.pdf.
7. Albert Lasker oral history, CUOHROC, 71. The “year” is an inference based on the date of the out-of-court settlement and Lasker’s recollection of when a desperate Weeghman approached him.
8. Lasker remembered that not only Weeghman attended this meeting, but also seafood wholesaler Walker. Sparkes, 284.
9. As Lasker later told the story to Boyden Sparkes, Weeghman’s option was expiring at ten o’clock the next morning. Given the intervening steps that had yet to occur, either Lasker compressed the timeframe in the retelling of the story, or the option was extended.
10. Albert Lasker oral history, CUOHROC, 72.
11. Eliot Asinof, Eight Men Out (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963), 127. This is the best reference on the 1919 World Series; it was made into a successful movie by director John Sayles.
12. Albert Lasker oral history, CUOHROC, 91. The description applies equally to Lasker himself.
13. Ibid., 74.
14. Ibid., 75.
15. Ibid., 76.
16. According to Jerome Holtzman and George Vass, The Chicago Cubs Encyclopedia (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997), 301, Wrigley invited the Chicago baseball writers to a dinner at his home in Pasadena, California, in the spring of 1918. At that function, he met and was greatly impressed by Veeck, who—writing under the pen name “Bill Bailey”—had regularly criticized the Cubs’ management in ways that struck Wrigley as both thoughtful and fair.
17. Albert Lasker oral history, CUOHROC, 78. Lasker also told Boyden Sparkes a story about giving Grover Cleveland Alexander a ride home the day after a game that “Alex” had lost in the ninth inning on a hit by a “third-rater.” Alexander admitted that he had made a mistake: “I forgot that any man with a bat in his hand can hit once in a while!” Sparkes, 415.
18. Lasker misremembered many of the details of this story. The authors are indebted to baseball historian Jacob Pomrenke, who directed us toward the Magee story online at www.baseballlibrary .com/baseballlibrary/ballplayers/M/Magee_Lee.stm (accessed February 8, 2005).
19. Sparkes, 317.
20. Wrigley, according to Lasker, had not yet “come that far along in baseball” to be involved in these discussions.
21. Albert Lasker oral history, CUOHROC, 79.
22. Sparkes, 317.
23. Albert Lasker oral history, CUOHROC, 80–81.
24. From www.baseballlibrary.com/baseballlibrary/ballplayers/M/Magee_Lee.stm (accessed February 8, 2005).
25. There was an interesting precedent to this episode in August 1919, when Bill Veeck learned that Cub pitcher Claude Hendrix might be involved in a plot to throw a game to the Phillies. Veeck took Hendrix out of the lineup, and went with star Grover Cleveland Alexander instead. (Alexander still lost, despite Veeck’s offer of a $500 bonus if he won.) Hendrix was released at the end of the 1919 season and never played professional ball again. See the Holtzman and Vass, Chicago Cubs Encyclopedia, 302.
26. See, for example, Robert I. Goler, “Black Sox,” Chicago History, 17, no. 3 and 4 (Fall/Winter 1988–189): 42, and http://www.chicagohistory.org/static_media/pdf/historyfair/chm-chicagoblacksox.pdf. The authors are indebted to the Chicago Historical Society for supplying copies of this and other relevant articles.
27. Albert Lasker oral history, CUOHROC, 81–82. Only a few years later, of course, America would learn that a member of President Harding’s Cabinet had been bribed.
28. Albert Lasker letter to W. G. Irwin, September 19, 1919.
29. Asinof, Eight Men Out, 199.
30. Ibid., 199.
31. Albert Lasker oral history, CUOHROC, 83.
32. The authorship of the “Lasker Plan” has been attributed to various people over the years. Stung by these allegations, Lasker maintained (in 1938) that he “thought [it] up single-handed, with nobody else present when I thought it up, and reduced it to paper before I showed it to another soul.” Sparkes, 414.
33. Sparkes, 318.
34. Shortly after Landis handed down his staggering judgment against Standard Oil, Lasker and his good friend Moritz Rosenthal—a member of the oil giant’s defense team—were lunching together at Rector’s, a Chicago restaurant. Landis happened to come into the restaurant. He sat down with Rosenthal and Lasker, introduced himself to Lasker, and then apologized to Rosenthal for having brought in the judgment against Rosenthal’s client. He congratulated Rosenthal for having done a fine job for his clients—Standard Oil directly, and the Rockefellers indirectly—and suggested that even though Rosenthal had lost, he should get at least $25,000 for his efforts. After Landis departed, Lasker later recalled, Rosenthal “laughed hysterically” at Landis’s naïveté: Rosenthal’s actual compensation from Standard Oil ran well into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Sparkes, 320.
35. Pietrusza, Judge and Jury, 76.
36. Ibid., 153–154.
37. Sparkes, 318.
38. “Owners of Five Clubs Talk Over Lasker Plan,” New York Times, October 5, 1920.
39. Sparkes, 317.
40. Ibid., 320.
41. “Owners to Discuss Baseball Changes,” New York Times, October 18, 1920.
42. Albert Lasker oral history, CUOHROC, 86.
43. Sparkes, 317.
44. Albert Lasker oral history, CUOHROC, 86.
45. Ibid., 88.
46. See, for example, “Reichow, the Original Landis Man, Pays Tribute to His Choice,” Sporting News, November 11, 1920, 1.
47. Austrian’s role in the unraveling of the Black Sox scandal was, like the ballplayers’ trial, murky at best. As attorney for the Chicago White Sox, Austrian elicited the confessions that ultimately got the offending ballplayers banned from baseball. But serving simultaneously as a member of New York gambler Arnold Rothstein’s defense team, Austrian not only got Rothstein off his legal hook, but also indirectly helped bring in a not-guilty verdict for the ballplayers. See Pietrusza, Judge and Jury, 187. See also Leo Katcher, The Big Bankroll: The Life and Times of Arnold Rothstein (New York: Harper, 1959), 145.
48. Albert Lasker oral history, CUOHROC, 91.
49. Sparkes, 319. When he told this story to Columbia, Lasker omitted the expletive.
50. “Baseball Conflict Shifts to Minors,” New York Times, November 10, 1920.
51. “No Backing Down, Says Lasker,” New York Times, November 11, 1920.
52. Albert Lasker oral history, CUOHROC, 89. The Sparkes interview (p. 419) makes the same point.
53. “Major Moguls Get Together and Cancel Their War Plans,” Sporting News, November 18, 1920, 1.
54. Albert Lasker oral history, CUOHROC, 95.
55. Pietrusza, Judge and Jury, 170.
56. Another reason the Black Sox were found not guilty is that Alfred Austrian conveniently “lost” their confessions and waivers of immunity, which didn’t turn up again for several years—thereby helping two of his clients at once: Charles Comiskey and Arnold Rothstein. See Riess, “The Baseball Magnates and Urban Politics,” 52.
57. Pietrusza, Judge and Jury, 187.
58. Ibid., 188.
59. Arthur R. Ahrens, “Chicago’s City Series: Cubs vs. White Sox,” Chicago History 5, no. 4 (Winter 1976–1977): 248.
60. There is confusion about the date of this overture. Most sources, including John Gunther (Taken at the Flood: The Story of Albert D. Lasker [New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960, 123), cite June 1925; but Golenbock cites 1921 (Wrigleyville, 175).
61. Sparkes, 415.
62. Gunther, Taken at the Flood, 121.
63. “Jewish Degradation of American Baseball,” Dearborn Independent, September 10, 1921.
64. Sparkes, 321.
65. Sparkes, 318.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
1. Reminiscences of Albert Lasker, in the Columbia University Oral History Research Office Collection (hereafter “Albert Lasker oral history, CUOHROC”), 117.
2. Sparkes, 71.
3. Sparkes interview with Will H. Hays, 14.
4. Albert Lasker oral history, CUOHROC, 120.
5. Albert Lasker, The Lasker Story: As He Told It (Chicago: Advertising Publications, 1963), 55.
6. “Unofficial but Authoritative,” Time, January 22, 1946.
7. Elmer Schlesinger letter to John C. O’Laughlin, May 26, 1916, “Schlesinger” folder, Box 11, John Callan O’Laughlin papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D. C.
8. John C. O’Laughlin letter to W. Murray Crane, July 11, 1916, “Lasker” folder, Box 8, O’Laughlin papers.
9. Elmer Schlesinger letter to John C. O’Laughlin, August 3, 1916, “Schlesinger” folder, Box 11, O’Laughlin papers.
10. Sparkes, 297–298.
11. Sparkes, 299.
12. Albert Lasker letter to John C. O’Laughlin, July 2, 1917, “Lasker” folder, Box 8, O’Laughlin papers.
13. Albert Lasker letter to John C. O’Laughlin, September 27, 1917, “Lasker” folder, Box 8, O’Laughlin papers.
14. Sparkes interview with Hays.
15. Albert Lasker oral history, CUOHROC, 120.
16. In a 1938 interview with his ghostwriter, Lasker also hinted at another motivation: “I felt if I could get to the Colonel, I could put to him my plight about myself. I had reached the point where I just felt I had to go to war, if for no other way than to enlist.” Sparkes, 301.
17. There is confusion about the date of this meeting. Lasker remembered it clearly as taking place just before his wedding anniversary—June 9—but also remembered discussion at the lunch table about Roosevelt’s son Quentin, who had just been killed in action in Europe, which happened in mid-July.
18. This version is from Lasker, The Lasker Story, 57. It sounds more authentic than the stilted version that Lasker later recounted for Columbia’s oral historians: “In your presence, Colonel, who would have the temerity to claim that distinction?” Albert Lasker oral history, CUOHROC, 121.
19. This version is from a September 27, 1918, letter from Lasker to John C. O’Laughlin, “Lasker” folder, Box 8, O’Laughlin papers. It provides the only reliable date for the September meeting, which Lasker later variously placed in June, July, and August. The book Roosevelt shared with the group was William S. Howe’s War and Progress: The Growth of the World Influence of the Anglo-Saxon (Boston: L. Phillips, 1918).
20. Lasker, The Lasker Story, 57.
21. Albert Lasker oral history, CUOHROC, 132.
22. Sparkes, 305.
23. Albert Lasker oral history, CUOHROC, 119
24. Sparkes, 309. In Taken at the Flood (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960), John Gunther adds that the pamphlet was aimed primarily at swaying opinion within the ranks of Republican operatives (p. 103).
25. According to Warren G. Harding’s biographer, such a deal probably was cut, at least informally. See Francis Russell, The Shadow of Blooming Grove: Warren G. Harding in His Times (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), 301.
26. Will H. Hays, The Memoirs of Will H. Hays (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1955), 176.
27. Sparkes, 304. Hays makes no mention of this episode in his own memoirs, although he briefly recounts the reconciliation between Taft and Roosevelt in March 1918 (Memoirs, 155).
28. For a description of this speech, which apparently contributed to Roosevelt’s rapid decline and death in January 1919, see Nathan Miller, Theodore Roosevelt: A Life (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1992), 563.
29. “I am not a member of any organized political party,” Rogers once quipped. “I am a Democrat.”
30. This passage, including all quotes, is from Sparkes, 305–307.
31. O’Laughlin, traveling along the Western Front that day, claimed to have heard the last shot fired in World War I. Letter to Albert Lasker, November 19, 1918, “Lasker” folder, Box 8, O’Laughlin papers.
32. Sparkes, 301.
33. Unlike Lasker, Hays was not one to share credit with his subordinates. In addition to nearly leaving Lasker out of his Memoirs, Hays completely omits Sollitt.
34. Sparkes, 303.
35. Lasker, The Lasker Story, 57.
CHAPTER TWELVE
1. He also accepted a place—alongside the ubiquitous John Callan O’Laughlin—on Hays’s platform committee. When Lasker succumbed to an unnamed illness in August 1919—possibly depression—and tried to resign from the committee, O’Laughlin talked him out of it: “Hays and I are agreed that it would be in the interest not only of the party but of the nation for you to serve on the committee, and I sincerely trust that through the shifting of other matters you can give the time to this most important duty . . . Certainly, I shall feel like a ship without a rudder if I haven’t your keen brain to rely upon.” From John C. O’Laughlin letter to Albert Lasker, August 28, 1919, “Lasker” folder, Box 23, John Callan O’Laughlin papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D. C.
2. Reminiscences of Albert Lasker, in the Columbia University Oral History Research Office Collection (hereafter “Albert Lasker oral history, CUOHROC”), 127. Lasker was nearly forty at the time; Lodge was approaching seventy.
3. Francis Russell, The Shadow of Blooming Grove: Warren G. Harding in His Times (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), 323–324.
4. John Gunther, Taken at the Flood: The Story of Albert D. Lasker (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960), 63. The first ad for the pageant appeared in the January 6, 1907, issue of the paper.
5. Richard Coke Lower, A Bloc of One: The Political Career of Hiram W. Johnson (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), viii.
6. Albert Lasker oral history, CUOHROC, 125.
7. The subcommittee is mentioned in a John Callan O’Laughlin letter to Albert Lasker, February 2, 1920, “Lasker” folder, Box 23, O’Laughlin papers.
8. One reason why Hays didn’t accept Lasker’s resignation is that by February 1920, Lasker had agreed to organize the “popular subscription work”—that is, Republican fundraising—for Hays. See Albert Lasker letter to O’Laughlin, February 3, 1920, “Lasker” folder, Box 23, O’Laughlin papers.
9. Albert Lasker oral history, CUOHROC, 125–126.
10. Sparkes, 311.
11. Lower, A Bloc of One, 147–152.
12. Albert Lasker oral history, CUOHROC, 129.
13. Sparkes, 312.
14. Albert Lasker oral history, CUOHROC, 130–131.
15. Ibid.
16. Albert Lasker, The Lasker Story: As He Told It (Chicago: Advertising Publications, 1963), 58.
17. MIC 3 Warren G. Harding Papers [microform], letter from Will Hays, June 1920: Ohio Historical Society.
18. MIC 3 Warren G. Harding Papers [microform], letter to John D. Works, 2 July 1920: Ohio Historical Society.
19. Albert Lasker oral history, CUOHROC, 133.
20. Sparkes, 314.
21. Albert Lasker oral history, CUOHROC, 133a. Lasker was correct in this belief. Herbert Hoover recalled that Harding “carried water on both shoulders” during the campaign—meaning that he both supported and opposed the League, as political circumstances demanded. When a group of Republican dignitaries signed a statement in support of the League, according to Hoover, they did so “in consequence of personal assurances from Mr. Harding.” See The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover, 1920–1933 (New York: Macmillan Co., 1952), 13.
22. “The only thing that worries me,” Wrigley wrote to Ralph Sollitt on August 24, “is that we don’t appear to have any money to advertise this wonderful man to the voters. We received about as much so far as I spend every week advertising a penny stick of [c]hewing gum.” From Box 6, Folder 5, Will H. Hays Collection, Manuscript Section, Indiana State Library.
23. Will H. Hays letter to John T. Adams, September 3, 1920, Box 7, Folder 1, Hays Collection.
24. “Will Boom Harding by Big Advertising,” New York Times, July 28, 1920.
25. The rumor had dogged previous generations of Hardings. See Russell, The Shadow of Blooming Grove, 26.
26. Ibid., 40. Francis Russell notes that even in the later years of the 1960s, Harding’s Ohio-based descendents remained sensitive about allegations of black ancestry.
27. Ibid., 405.
28. This story is derived from ibid., 402–403. Lasker did not mention this episode in any of his oral histories, and it was omitted from his authorized biography.
29. See, for example, Stephen Vaughan, “The Devil’s Advocate: Will H. Hays and the Campaign to Make Movies Respectable,” Indiana Magazine of History 101 (June 2005): 131–132.
30. John A. Morello, Selling the President, 1920: Albert D. Lasker, Advertising, and the Election of Warren G. Harding (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001), 56. According to an Albert Lasker letter to George Christian, August 30, 1920, the filmmaking impresario was a New Yorker named Grant.
31. The results from a Syracuse, New York, theater are described in “Will Boom Harding by Big Advertising.”
32. MIC 3 Warren G. Harding Papers [microform], letter from Albert D. Lasker to George B. Christian, 28 July 1920: Ohio Historical Society.
33. MIC 3 Warren G. Harding Papers [microform], letter from Albert D. Lasker to George B. Christian, August 7, 1920: Ohio Historical Society.
34. MIC 3 Warren G. Harding Papers [microform], letter from Albert D. Lasker to Walter Friedlander, August 7, 1920: Ohio Historical Society.
35. Russell, The Shadow of Blooming Grove, 156.
36. But there is evidence that Lasker learned to drive in his twenties. According to the August 15, 1908, edition of the Chicago Tribune, he was caught in a speed trap in Glencoe, Illinois, and fined $10 for exceeding the twenty-mile-per-hour speed limit. Lasker refused to drive the police officer who wrote the ticket to the station, “as is the usual custom,” so the officer had to drive himself. “While he was gone to be fined,” the Tribune noted, “three young women of his party took positions at each end of the course and warned autoists of the existence of the trap.”
37. Sparkes, 316.
38. Sparkes, 316.
39. Albert Lasker letter to J. Wellover, August 20, 1920, Hays Collection.
40. Harding evidently felt that the phrase wasn’t appropriate as a closing note for the speech, and added his own favorites—“Steady, America!”, and “Let’s assure good fortune to all”—after “wiggle and wobble.” Albert Lasker letter to Scott Bone, August 18, 1920, Hays Collection.
41. Ibid.
42. Albert Lasker letter to Will H. Hays, September 3, 1920, Hays Collection.
43. Will H. Hays, The Memoirs of Will H. Hays (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1955), 265. John Morello notes that fully two thousand of these Republican speakers were women. See Selling the President, 1920, 65.
44. Albert Lasker letter to Arthur Brisbane, August 18, 1920, Box 6, Folder 10, Hays Collection.
45. Richard M. Fried, The Man Everybody Knew: Bruce Barton and the Making of Modern America (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2005), 120.
46. In Selling the President, 1920, John Morello gives Lasker credit for the work of the “Harding-Coolidge Theatrical League,” which put some of the most famous stars of the silver screen in harness for the Harding campaign. This credit may be misplaced. Lasker seems to have been at least partly responsible for bringing circus master John Ringling, tenor Enrico Caruso, and others to the front porch, and for securing testimonials from World War I flying ace Eddie Rickenbacker and others. But Lord & Thomas and Lasker didn’t embrace the testimonial approach to advertising until the later 1920s, so this was not part of the agency’s stock-in-trade. See, for example, Albert Lasker letter to Will Hays, August 21, 1920, Box 6, Folder 11, Hays Collection.
47. Albert Lasker letter to Will Hays, August 18, 1920, Box 6, Folder 10, Hays Collection.
48. Collier’s, October 30, 1920, 25.
49. Sparkes, 316–317.
50. Russell, The Shadow of Blooming Grove, 418–419.
51. Ibid., 409.
52. Sparkes interview with Hays, 22.
53. “Had Harding’s Good Wishes,” New York Times, November 13, 1920, 16.
54. Albert Lasker oral history, CUOHROC, 135–136.
55. Gunther, Taken at the Flood, 113–114.
56. Sparkes, 315.
57. Ibid.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
1. “Picks Ship Board Headed by Lasker,” New York Times, June 9, 1921, 13.
2. Robert K. Murray, The Harding Era: Warren G. Harding and His Administration (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1969), 92. This is the trip that Lasker declined to take with the Hardings and a small group of friends, as described in the previous chapter; had he gone, he might well have secured the Commerce position for himself.
3. Will Hays letter to Warren G. Harding, January 29, 1921, Box 8, Folder 13, Will H. Hays Collection, Manuscript Section, Indiana State Library.
4. MIC 3 Warren G. Harding Papers [microform], letter to Will Hays, 14 February 1921: Ohio Historical Society.
5. Mahan, an officer at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, was the author of the classic The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783 (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1890).
6. Murray, The Harding Era, 280.
7. Andrew Gibson and Arthur Donovan, The Abandoned Ocean: A History of United States Maritime Policy (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2000), 110.
8. Ibid., 113.
9. Murray, The Harding Era, 280.
10. Gibson and Donovan, The Abandoned Ocean, 114. “We built extravagantly,” Albert Lasker later wrote, “but war is the mother of extravagance.” MIC 3 Warren G. Harding Papers [microform], letter from Albert D. Lasker to Henry W. Elliott, August 2, 1921: Ohio Historical Society.
11. This meeting was presumably colored by an episode in mid-March when Harding—at the behest of Hays—sent a telegram to Lasker offering him one of four Assistant Postmaster Generalships “while other things are developing.” Lasker turned down the job. See Albert Lasker letter to John Callan O’Laughlin, March 25, 1921, from “Lasker” folder, Box 23, John Callan O’Laughlin Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D. C.
12. Under the pressures of wartime, the board was expanded from five to seven members.
13. Reminiscences of Albert Lasker, in the Columbia University Oral History Research Office Collection (hereafter “Albert Lasker oral history, CUOHROC”), 138.
14. John Callan O’Laughlin letter to Albert Lasker, December 27, 1920, from “Lasker” folder, Box 23, O’Laughlin papers.
15. Unless otherwise noted, this whole account comes from the Albert Lasker oral history, CUOHROC, 138–144. The details, most of which can’t be corroborated, should be taken with a grain of salt.
16. Lasker told this story to Boyden Sparkes. An audiotape of this interview was provided to the author by the Lasker Foundation.
17. “Schwab Wants Piez Ship Board’s Head,” New York Times, May 27, 1921, 8.
18. Sparkes, 352.
19. By this time, Lasker’s name was being bandied about publicly for the Shipping Board post. See “A. D. Lasker Is Mentioned,” New York Times, June 4, 1921, 3.
20. Bedford, then only in his mid-fifties, recovered from this attack, but died of heart disease in 1925. When Lasker finally met Bedford at a White House function in 1922—a year into his tenure at the Shipping Board—Lasker joked that Bedford had done him “more hurt than any living man.” Albert Lasker letter to W. C. Teagle, June 17, 1922, Box 27, Shipping Board (USSB) records.
21. This is from the actual text of Harding’s telegram. MIC 3 Warren G. Harding Papers [microform], telegram to Albert D. Lasker, June 2, 1921: Ohio Historical Society. The telegram makes no mention of the heart attack, but otherwise conforms to Lasker’s account.
22. Teagle refers to this telegram in a June 6, 1921, letter to Harding. MIC 3 Warren G. Harding Papers [microform], letter from Walter Teagle, June 6, 1921: Ohio Historical Society. Harding evidently encouraged Teagle to pressure Lasker to accept.
23. The date comes from “Lasker Sees President,” New York Times, June 8, 1921, 3. The conditions come from the Albert Lasker oral history, CUOHROC, 149.
24. “New Shipping Board Confirmed,” New York Times, June 10, 1921, 3.
25. Unnamed sources presented the course of action agreed privately by Harding and Lasker. Since Harding certainly didn’t speak to the Times on this subject, Lasker must have been the source.
26. “Board to Wipe Off $2,000,000 Loss on Merchant Ships,” New York Times, June 11, 1921, 1.
27. Albert Lasker letter to W. G. Irwin, June 16, 1921.
28. “Ship Strike at End; Sign Peace Today,” New York Times, June 14, 1921, 19.
29. “Ship Board Faces ‘Colossal Wreck,’” New York Times, June 25, 1921, 1.
30. James True, “The Shipping Board—A Selling Problem as Lasker Sees It,” Printers’ Ink, June 21, 1926. Note that in the previous five months, the Shipping Board’s inventory of vessels had gone up by almost 350.
31. Ibid.
32. “President Confers with Shipping Board,” New York Times, June 17, 1921, 18.
33. “Picks Ship Board Headed by Lasker,” New York Times, June 9, 1921, 13.
34. Sparkes, 424. According to an August 19, 1921, article in the New York Times, O’Laughlin resigned in mid-August 1921.
35. “Ship Board Gets Counsel,” New York Times, June 24, 1921, 3; “Ship Board Faces ‘Colossal Wreck. ’”
36. Murray, The Harding Era, 284.
37. “Ship Board Faces ‘Colossal Wreck. ’”
38. “The Shipping Board Job,” New York Times, August 15, 1921, 10.
39. Albert Lasker oral history, CUOHROC, 151.
40. Ibid., 152. Again, these accounting-related assertions and the related numbers should be taken with a grain of salt.
41. “Lasker Finds Fleet Squandering Money in Morass of Debt,” New York Times, July 19, 1921, 1.
42. Albert Lasker oral history, CUOHROC, 146.
43. Sparkes, 354.
44. “Ship Policy Fails, Lasker Declares,” New York Times, April 5, 1922, 11.
45. Albert Lasker letter to Jacob Ruppert, June 13, 1922, Box 27, USSB records.
46. Readers interested in the unabridged story of the Leviathan should start with Frank O. Braynard’s astounding six-volume set: World’s Greatest Ship: The Story of the Leviathan (New York: South Street Seaport Museum, 1974). Volume 1 details the birth, launching, and brief pre-war career of the ship; Volume 2 spans the years relevant to our story.
47. Much of the expense grew out of the need to keep a fifty-seven-man fire guard on duty at all times to protect the uninsured vessel against accidental fires and vandalism.
48. “The Shipping Board—A Selling Problem as Lasker Sees It,” 26.
49. One of those exceptions is alluded to in a cryptic letter from Harding to Albert Lasker. MIC 3 Warren G. Harding Papers [microform], letter to Albert D. Lasker, 14 June 1921: Ohio Historical Society.
50. The USSB records are full of such requests. See, for example, the Coolidge correspondence (May, 4, 1922), Box 5; the correspondence with Representative George Scott Graham (October 18, 1922), Box 26; and the correspondence with Senators James W. Wadsworth Jr. (November 21, 1922) and Charles Curtis (December 2, 1922), Box 24.
51. The proposed legislation was also known as the “Ship Subsidy Bill,” after its most controversial feature. We use “Merchant Marine” throughout.
52. “Harding Presents His Plan to Help American Shipping,” New York Times, March 1, 1922, 1.
53. Lasker’s fifty-nine-page opening statement is a masterful summary of the highly complex situation facing his Board, Congress, and the nation, touching on many subtleties omitted from this chapter owing to space constraints. MIC 3 Warren G. Harding Papers [microform], Merchant Marine Act of 1922, testimony of Albert D. Lasker, April 1922: Ohio Historical Society.
54. “Ship Policy Fails, Lasker Declares.”
55. See, for example, the tally sent to George B. Christian. MIC 3 Warren G. Harding Papers [microform], letter from Albert D. Lasker to George B. Christian, 13 June 1922: Ohio Historical Society.
56. See the Anheuser-Busch Web site at www.anheuser-busch.com/press_room/73rdAnn_Repeal_040606.html, accessed January 4, 2007.
57. “Busch Protest to Harding,” New York Times, June 14, 1922, 18.
58. Ibid.
59. “Pokes Fun at ‘Wet’ Regime on Liners,” New York Times, June 14, 1922, 18.
60. Busch shot back at Lasker in a letter dated June 14, 1922: “The temperature in my office is well above 90, and the law prohibits me from making here in America a glass of wholesome beer such as my grandfather, Adolphus Busch, made famous over the world as an American product. Yet as I write, I contemplate the Shipping Board approving vouchers for the disbursement of American government money from the Treasury in payment for German and British beers and wines to be sold by our government at a profit. The prospect does not, I assure you, tend to lower the temperature.” Box 4, USSB records.
61. “Harding Prohibits Liquor on Our Ships and on Foreign Craft in American Ports; Backs Sweeping Ruling by Daugherty,” New York Times, October 7, 1922, 1.
62. Albert Lasker letter to R. P. Crane, October 14, 1922, Box 28, USSB records.
63. MIC 3 Warren G. Harding Papers [microform], letter from Albert D. Lasker, October 9, 1922: Ohio Historical Society.
64. Lasker was right in this regard. Foreign governments immediately began talking about reprisals against American interests, and a myriad of knotty legal problems began to present themselves. If Spanish ships carrying liquor were prevented from stopping in Puerto Rico, for example, Puerto Rican coffee exports to Spain most likely would be destroyed.
65. “Lasker Sees Blow to Our Shipping,” New York Times, October 7, 1922, 2. Lasker immediately began casting about for ways to make U. S. liners competitive without alcohol. “I want to put fine jazz bands, and generally arrange to give entertainment on our ships such as was never given before,” he wrote to a friend several weeks after Daugherty’s opinion came down. See Albert Lasker letter to Paul Block, November 4, 1922, Box 28, USSB records. See also Lasker’s speech to a gathering of Chicago publishers two weeks after Daugherty’s action. “Until two weeks ago last Friday,” Lasker said straight-faced, “Moses was thought to be the greatest law-giver of all times. Oh no, it is Daugherty, for Moses only made the Red Sea dry.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
1. “The Presidency: The Kitchen Cabinet,” Time, May 12, 1923.
2. Mark Sullivan, Our Times: Volume VI, The Twenties (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1935, 100). The date is from “Harding’s Florida Trip to Be a Golfing Cruise; Gillett and Lasker Among Houseboat Guests,” New York Times, February 28, 1923, 1.
3. Sparkes, 323.
4. Sparkes, 325.
5. Sparkes, 326.
6. “President Host to Chief Justice Taft,” New York Times, February 3, 1922, 14.
7. Albert Lasker letter to Dr. Julius Y. Cohen, April 10, 1922, Box 26, Shipping Board (USSB) records.
8. Sparkes, 324.
9. Sparkes, 328.
10. Sparkes, 327.
11. Sparkes, 327.
12. Albert Lasker letter to John R. Warner, February 24, 1923, Box 29, USSB records.
13. Sparkes, 323.
14. Albert Lasker letter to Mary Lasker, May, 11, 1923, Box 30, USSB records.
15. Albert Lasker letter to Mary Lasker, October 17, 1922, Box 28, USSB records.
16. Albert Lasker letter to Mary Lasker, May 7, 1923, Box 30, USSB records.
17. Albert Lasker letter to Mary Lasker, April 27, 1923, Box 29, USSB records.
18. Authors’ interview with Frances Lasker Brody, March 22, 2004.
19. Albert Lasker letter to (son) Edward Lasker, September 11, 1922, Box 27, USSB records.
20. Albert Lasker letter to Frances Lasker, September 20, 1922, Box 27, USSB records.
21. Albert Lasker letter to Mary Lasker, October 21, 1922, Box 28, USSB records.
22. W. G. Irwin letter to Albert Lasker, December 16, 1922, W. G. Irwin Collection.
23. Albert Lasker letter to Elsa Cohen, February 15, 1923, Box 29, USSB records.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
1. See, for example, Albert Lasker’s November 16, 1922, letter to Harding regarding the influential Kansas Representative Jasper N. Tincher, Box 28, Shipping Board (USSB) records.
2. Although La Follette gave few details about the proposed deal, this apparently referred to the Merchant Marine reserve, which Harding and Lasker eliminated in April 1922 in an effort to placate organized labor.
3. “La Follette Opens Subsidy Fight with Warning to Harding,” New York Times, December 16, 1922, 1.
4. Albert Lasker letter to Douglas Smith, December 7, 1922, Box 28, USSB records.
5. W. G. Irwin letter to Albert Lasker, February 24, 1923.
6. Transcript of an interview with the Journal of Commerce, April 18, 1923, Box 10, USSB records.
7. Albert Lasker letter to Robert Crane and Don Francisco, January 29, 1923, Box 29, USSB records.
8. Telegram, Albert Lasker to Schlesinger, February 20, 1923, Box 29, USSB records.
9. In February, Fleishhacker asked Lasker if he wanted to keep doing business with the raisin company. “I told him no,” Lasker wrote in a telegram to Schlesinger. “They had deceived me once, and I would not want to take another risk.” See Albert Lasker letter to Herbert P. Cohn, February 14, 1923, Box 29, USSB records.
10. Sparkes interview with Don Francisco, October 11, 1937.
11. In one of his 1937 interviews with Boyden Sparkes, Francisco said that Lord & Thomas had originally split the walnut account with McCann Erickson, with the rival agency handling the outdoor advertising and Lord & Thomas running the magazine advertising—an inherently awkward situation that was eventually resolved in McCann’s favor. But the real problem, Francisco suggested, was that his organization was undergunned, and couldn’t cater adequately to the general manager of the walnut growers: “We gave them fine advertising and good service, but we lacked manpower to give him the extra ten percent of contact and service that would have made him delighted.”
12. “Predicts Leviathan, Refitted, Will Pay,” New York Times, January 19, 1922, 15.
13. MIC 3 Warren G. Harding Papers [microform], letter from Albert D. Lasker and W. H. Benson, May 8, 1923: Ohio Historical Society.
14. “Assails Publicity of Shipping Board,” New York Times, January 21, 19, 3.
15. Sparkes interview with Ralph Sollitt, 49.
16. This headline, and all of the statistics in this section, are from Frank O. Braynard, World’s Greatest Ship: The Story of the Leviathan, Vol. 1 (New York: South Street Seaport Museum, 1974).
17. “Calls Leviathan Biggest of Ships,” New York Times, April 12, 1923, 20.
18. Braynard, World’s Greatest Ship, Vol. 2, 48.
19. A copy of George Christian’s invitation—which looks like an invitation to a society wedding—is in the Harding papers. MIC 3 Warren G. Harding Papers [microform], invitation from Albert D. Lasker to George B. Christian, May 1923: Ohio Historical Society.
20. Albert Lasker letter to Frank W. Mondell (Director, War Finance Corporation), May 22, 1923, Box 15, USSB records. But Lasker made exceptions—as, for example, when he invited C. C. Hopkins to bring along his wife. See Albert Lasker letter to Hopkins, May 29, 1923, Box 30, USSB records.
21. Albert Lasker letter to Fiorello H. La Guardia, June 7, 1923, Box 25, USSB records.
22. “Lasker Answers ‘Junket’ Critics,” New York Times, June 15, 1923, 1
23. Albert Lasker letter to T. H. Caraway, June 16, 1923, Box 30, USSB records.
24. Albert Lasker letter to Douglas Smith, June 14, 1923, Box 30, USSB records.
25. Sparkes interview with Sollitt. Sollitt recalled that Lasker turned the chore of picking the passengers over to him, and “didn’t have a thing to do with it,” but the guest list—dominated by Lasker’s business acquaintances and political cronies—would seem to undercut this assertion.
26. MIC 3 Warren G. Harding Papers [microform], Edward P. Farley biography: Ohio Historical Society.
27. Braynard, World’s Greatest Ship, Volume 2, 261.
28. Sparkes interview with Sollitt.
29. Ralph Sollitt later told Boyden Sparkes that Lasker had asked the Gibbs brothers to recommend the best captain they could find, and Hartley was their choice.
30. “Aboard the Steamship Leviathan,” New York Times, June 20, 1923, 1.
31. Sparkes interview with Sarnoff.
32. Ibid.
33. “Leviathan Breaks World Speed Record in 25-Hour Spurt,” New York Times, June 24, 1923, 1.
34. “Expensive and Yet Profitable,” New York Times, June 23, 1923, 10.
35. “The Presidency: The Kitchen Cabinet,” Time, May 12, 1923.
36. Albert Lasker letter to Hiram Johnson, May 22, 1923, Box 30, USSB records.
37. Albert Lasker letter to W. C. Teagle, April 12, 1923, Box 29, USSB records.
38. Albert Lasker, The Lasker Story: As He Told It (Chicago: Advertising Publications, 1963), 62.
39. From Edward Lasker’s unpublished autobiography, 28.
40. Robert K. Murray, The Harding Era: Warren G. Harding and His Administration (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1969), 444.
41. From Edward Lasker’s unpublished autobiography, 28–29.
42. Francis Russell, The Shadow of Blooming Grove: Warren G. Harding in His Times (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), 626
43. Reminiscences of Albert Lasker, in the Columbia University Oral History Research Office Collection, 139.
44. Albert Lasker letter to C. C. Hopkins, May, 29, 1923, Box 30, USSB records.
45. Albert Lasker letter to (brother) Edward Lasker, June 1, 1923, Box 30, USSB records.
46. Lasker, The Lasker Story, 63.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
1. Albert Lasker letter to C. C. Hopkins, May 22, 1922, Box 26, Shipping Board (USSB) records.
2. Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 2.
3. Stephen Fox, The Mirror Makers: A History Of American Advertising and Its Creators (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1984), 75–77.
4. Ayer billings figures are from Ralph M. Hower’s The History of an Advertising Agency, 577; Lord & Thomas figures are from exhibits in the Schultz collection. Additional agency billing totals (all partial) are available online.
5. Fox, The Mirror Makers, 84–86.
6. Richard M. Fried, The Man Everybody Knew: Bruce Barton and the Making of Modern America (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2005), 55–56.
7. Albert Lasker, The Lasker Story: As He Told It (Chicago: Advertising Publications, 1963), 63.
8. Ibid., 89.
9. Albert Lasker letter to Herbert P. Cohn, February 12, 1923, Box 29, USSB records. Certainly, Lasker once again had large ambitions for his agency. A January 3, 1924, letter from W. G. Irwin to Lasker indicates that Lasker recently had told Irwin that his goal was to double Lord & Thomas’s business.
10. Albert Lasker letter to Claude C. Hopkins, June 4, 1923, Box 30, USSB records.
11. A February 23, 1923, letter from Lasker to Hopkins (Box 29, USSB records) makes passing reference to Lasker’s dream of someday being Hopkins’s “manager”—probably in the sense of a newspaper’s managing editor—so that Hopkins could “win as outstanding a place in the editorial field as you did in advertising.”
12. Fox, The Mirror Makers, 113.
13. Heinrich Thomas and Bob Batchelor, Kotex, Kleenex, Huggies: Kimberly-Clark and the Consumer Revolution in American Business (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004).
14. Ibid., 56.
15. Lord & Thomas, International Cellucotton Products Company (Kotex Division) account notes.
16. Marchand, Advertising the American Dream, 311.
17. Taylor Adams, “How Lasker Maneuvered for Kotex Ad Acceptance in ‘Ladies’ Home Journal,’” Advertising Age, June 17, 1974.
18. Ibid.
19. Lasker, The Lasker Story, 104–105.
20. Wallace Meyer statement, September 21, 1960, Meyer Collection, State Historical Society of Wisconsin. From the Museum of Menstruation and Women’s Health Web site, www.mum.org/kotdispl.htm.
21. Thomas and Batchelor, Kotex, Kleenex, Huggies.
22. Sparkes, 223.
23. Tobacco timeline Web site, http://www.tobacco.org/resources/history/Tobacco_Historynotes.html#aacamel.
24. Ibid.
25. New York office–based Mark O’Dea sent a package of Blue Boar cigarettes to Lasker in the spring of 1923. “I don’t think I have smoked half a dozen cigarettes since I was born,” Lasker wrote in response, “therefore, I am no judge of the quality of cigarettes.” See Albert Lasker letter to Mark O’Dea, May 7, 1923, Box 30, USSB records.
26. From Sold American, American Tobacco’s official corporate history (no author listed), printed in 1954, 35.
27. Larry Tye, The Father of Spin: Edward Bernays and the Birth of Public Relations (New York: Henry Holt & Co, 1998), 27–28.
28. George Washington Hill letter to Albert Lasker, February 21, 1935, Schultz collection.
29. Sparkes interview with Coons, 23.
30. Or, in contemporary terms, that “addiction.”
31. Reminiscences of Albert Lasker, in the Columbia University Oral History Research Office Collection (hereafter “Albert Lasker oral history, CUOHROC”), 105.
32. Richard Kluger, Ashes to Ashes: America’s Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), 76.
33. Albert Lasker oral history, CUOHROC, 108.
34. Ibid., 108–109.
35. Ibid., 108. Although Lasker sometimes took credit for refining the testimonial, that technique was more often associated with J. Walter Thompson, which used celebrity-testimonial campaigns to promote Pond’s cold cream (1924) and Lux soap (1927), among many other products.
36. Ibid., 109.
37. Ibid., 110.
38. Ibid., 111.
39. Fox, The Mirror Makers, 115.
40. “Babies’ Blood,” Time, May 6, 1929, www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,732326,00.html.
41. Fox, The Mirror Makers, 116.
42. Some of these statistics are from the minutes of the Committee on Finance and Investment of the University of Chicago, July 7, 1943.
43. Edward Lasker, autobiographical manuscript, 40.
44. Sparkes interview with Hertz, 8.
45. Ibid.
46. Sparkes, 199.
47. BDO at this point was only two years away from its merger with the Batten agency, which created a powerhouse—BBDO—that was briefly the largest agency in the country.
48. This Young & Rubicam summary is drawn from Fox, The Mirror Makers, 132–137.
49. “Coalition,” Time, June 14, 1926, www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,751559,00.html.
50. Sparkes interview with Sollitt, 10.
51. Thomas F. Logan letter to David Sarnoff, December 26, year unknown, Sarnoff collection.
52. Sparkes interview with Sarnoff, 4.
53. Kenneth Bilby, The General: David Sarnoff and the Rise of the Communications Industry (New York: Harper & Row, 1986), 268.
54. Sparkes interview with Sarnoff, 6.
55. “Coalition.”
56. The Logan billings are from Elmer Bullis, interviewed by Sparkes, 12.
57. From the August 10, 1928, edition of the Brooklyn Standard Union, www.bklyn-genealogy-info.com/Newspaper/BSU/1928.Death.August.html.
58. This and following Sarnoff quotes are from Sarnoff’s interview with Sparkes, 7.
59. From John Gunther’s notes on an interview with Sarnoff, Box 105, Folder 12, John Gunther papers, University of Chicago.
60. Sparkes interview with Coons, 14.
61. Ibid., 19
62. Sparkes interview with Sollitt, 43.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
1. “Foreman-Lasker,” New York Times, October 13, 1927.
2. Walter Roth, “Demise of the Foreman-State Bank: Was It ‘Shylock in Reverse’?” Chicago Jewish History 27, no. 3 (Fall 2003).
3. John Gunther, Taken at the Flood: The Story of Albert D. Lasker (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960), 184.
4. Sparkes, 277.
5. Letter from Edward Lasker to John Gunther, December 17, 1959, Schultz Collection.
6. John Gunther papers, University of Chicago; Box 104, Folder 15, notes on Hertz intervew.
7. “Advertising Forecasts Better Business in ’29,” Wall Street Journal, January 4, 1929.
8. Sparkes, 41.
9. “Week-End in the Loop,” Fortune, September 1931.
10. “In Chicago,” Time, June 15, 1931.
11. Sparkes, 276.
12. Ibid.
13. “Chicago Bank Status Clears,” Wall Street Journal, June 10, 1931; and “3 More Chicago Banks Closed,” Wall Street Journal, June 11, 1931.
14. “Chicago First National,” Wall Street Journal, July 17, 1931.
15. Sparkes, 395.
16. Sparkes, 278.
17. Albert Lasker letter to Mary Lasker, October 29, 1935, Schultz Collection.
18. Sparkes, 128.
19. Very little is known about the specifics of Mary’s departure.
20. Edward Lasker’s unpublished memoirs, 69.
21. Letter from George Washington Hill to Albert Lasker, March 9, 1938, Schultz Collection.
22. Sparkes interview with Templin, 40.
23. Claude Hopkins claims in My Life in Advertising that he came up with this slogan, but Lord & Thomas’s account history contradicts this (Claude C. Hopkins, My Life in Advertising [Lincolnwood IL: NTC Business Book, 1991]).
24. Hopkins, My Life in Advertising, 154.
25. William J. Gies, “Pepsodent: Ancient History That Commercial Dental Journals Continue to Ignore,” Journal of the American Medical Association 68 (April 28, 1917): 1278.
26. “Irium-Plated Alger,” Time, April 10, 1944, www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,796571-1,00.html.
27. Hopkins, My Life in Advertising, 157.
28. Lord & Thomas, Pepsodent client account notes, January 1939.
29. This brief history comes largely from The Museum of Broadcast Communication Encyclopedia of Radio, Volume III, ed. Christopher H. Sterling (Michael C. Keith, consulting editor), 1424–1427.
30. “Sold American!” The First Fifty Years, copyright 1954 by the American Tobacco Company, 85.
31. “The American Tobacco Co.,” Fortune, December 1936, 154.
32. Ibid., 97.
33. All Templin comments are from the Sparkes interview with Templin, 45–47.
34. Charles Luckman, Twice in a Lifetime: From Soap to Skyscrapers (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), 123.
35. Michele Hilmes, Radio Voices: American Broadcasting, 1922–1952 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 85.
36. Elizabeth McLeod, The Original Amos ’n’ Andy: Freeman Gosden, Charles Correll and the 1928–1943 Radio Serial (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2005), quoted on Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amos_N_Andy#_note-0.
37. Sparkes interview with Templin, 50.
38. Hilmes, Radio Voices, 86.
39. Ibid., 86.
40. Lord & Thomas, Pepsodent client account notes, January 1939.
41. From the “Stray Facts” column in the Wall Street Journal, June 5, 1933, 3.
42. “Radio Spenders,” Time, March 18, 1935.
43. Hummert is considered by many to be the third of the three great copywriters whom Lasker discovered, along with John Kennedy and Claude Hopkins. Hill Blackett was also trained at Lord & Thomas; he took the Ovaltine account with him when he left Lasker’s agency.
44. See Jim Cox, Frank and Anne Hummert’s Radio Factory: The Programs and Personalities of Broadcasting’s Most Prolific Producers (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2003).
45. Sparkes interview with Templin, 55.
46. Luckman, Twice in a Lifetime, 131.
47. Sparkes interview with Noyes, 27.
48. Sparkes, 339.
49. Sparkes interview with Noyes, 28.
50. Luckman, Twice in a Lifetime, 136.
51. Bob Hope, as told to Pete Martin, Bob Hope’s Own Story: Have Tux, Will Travel (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1954), 233.
52. Luckman, Twice in a Lifetime, 140.
53. William Robert Faith, Bob Hope, a Life in Comedy (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, Perseus Books Group, 1982), 104.
54. Ibid., 105.
55. Luckman, Twice in a Lifetime, 148.
56. Ibid.
57. Sparkes interview with Templin, 40.
58. Luckman, Twice in a Lifetime, 151.
59. Ibid., 172.
60. Ibid., 174.
61. Ibid.
62. Lord & Thomas, Kleenex client account history, January 1939.
63. The celebrated Union ironclad warship, the U. S. S. Monitor—often described as a “hatbox on a raft”—may have loaned its name to the Monitor Top.
64. See the history of General Electric’s products at www.otal.umd.edu/~vg/amst205.F97/vj11/project5.html.
65. Sparkes interview with Francisco, 41–42. Francisco said that Lasker told GE’s president, Gerald Swope, that Lord & Thomas couldn’t do its best work if it wasn’t happy, and that the agency wasn’t happy because “you fellows are picking on us all the time.”
66. This story is from the finding aid to the Frigidaire Historical Collection, MS-262, at the Paul Laurence Dunbar Library at Wright State University. The finding aid is on line at www.libraries.wright.edu/special/manuscripts/ms262.html.
67. Sparkes, 337.
68. From “Memorandum on Copy Meeting with Frigidaire Division of General Motors Corporation,” documenting meetings on September 26 and 27, 1935. The power companies also approved of frequent defrosting, which consumed more power.
69. In his autobiography, With All Its Faults (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1969), Fairfax M. Cone makes an obscure reference to Lasker and Biechler “running the [Frigidaire] advertising as an adjunct to some other aspects of the business in which the two men were deeply engaged.” See p. 129.
70. Sparkes, 337.
71. Henry Guy “Ted” Little later became chairman of the Detroit-based Campbell-Ewald agency, where he oversaw the $60 million Chevrolet account: at the time, the single biggest account in the world. See Time, October 12, 1962, “The Men on the Cover,” www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,829288-5,00.html.
72. Sparkes interview with Noyes, 24.
73. All Noyes comments are from the Sparkes interview.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
1. Carey McWilliams, Southern California: An Island on the Land (Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, 1995), 132–133.
2. This story comes from the All-Year Club’s “Account History,” written in September 1937 by Lord & Thomas’s C. W. Tarr.
3. R. Germain, “The Early Years of Community Advertising,” Journal of Nonprofit and Public Sector Marketing, 1 (1), 85–106. See Exhibit 1 (domestic U. S.examples) and page 95 (Cuba).
4. H. A. Stebbins, “Getting Away from the Commonplace in Resort Advertising,” Printers’ Ink, August 7, 1919, 31–32.
5. From the introduction to Rob Leicester Wagner, Red Ink, White Lies: The Rise and Fall of Los Angeles Newspapers, 1920–1962 (Upland, CA: Dragonflyer Press, 2000).
6. McWilliams, Southern California, 136.
7. E. B. Weiss, “Advertising a Misadvertised Community,” Printers’ Ink, July 6, 1922, 117–122.
8. William C. Garner, “Leaves from a Community Advertiser’s Experience Book,” Printers’ Ink, July 23, 1925, 77–80.
9. Sparkes interview with Francisco and Crane.
10. Weiss, “Advertising a Misadvertised Community,” 117–122.
11. “The Early Years of Community Advertising,” Exhibit 3. “Californians, Inc.” is described in “A National Advertising Campaign for One of the Best-Advertised States,” Printers’ Ink, January 4, 1923, 17–18.
12. John Allen Murphy, “How to Raise the Money for Community Advertising,” Printers’ Ink, May 15, 1924, 105–114.
13. Garner, “Leaves from a Community Advertiser’s Experience Book.”
14. This campaign was written by Frank Hummert, then copy chief in the Chicago office.
15. McWilliams, Southern California, 137.
16. Sparkes interview with Francisco and Crane.
17. Carey McWilliams, California: The Great Exception (New York: A. A. Wyn, 1949), 174.
18. See James Bryce, The American Commonwealth, vol. II (London: Macmillan and Co., 1891), 403.
19. McWilliams, California, 176–180; Bryce, American Commonwealth, 387.
20. McWilliams, California, 182.
21. Greg Mitchell, The Campaign of the Century: Upton Sinclair’s Race for Governor of California and the Birth of Media Politics (New York: Random House, 1992), xii.
22. See, for example, Richard M. Fried’s The Man Everybody Knew: Bruce Barton and the Making of Modern America (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2005), 116–127.
23. See Leon Harris, Upton Sinclair: American Rebel (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1975).
24. Upton Sinclair, The Brass Check: A Study of American Journalism (Pasadena, CA: self-published, 1919), 436–437.
25. David Nasaw, The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000), 115–116.
26. Upton Sinclair, The Autobiography of Upton Sinclair (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1962), 260–261.
27. James N. Gregory, “Introduction” to Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994), vii; Kevin Starr, Endangered Dreams: The Great Depression in California (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 126–128.
28. Quoted in Harris, Upton Sinclair, 311.
29. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Politics of Upheaval, 1935–1936 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003), 112; Sinclair, Autobiography, 268.
30. Sinclair, Autobiography, 269; Harris, Upton Sinclair, 297.
31. Upton Sinclair, “I, Governor of California—And How I Ended Poverty; A True Story of the Future,” pamphlet, 1933.
32. Mitchell, Campaign of the Century, 6; McWilliams, Southern California, 298; Gregory, “Introduction,” viii.
33. Mitchell, Campaign of the Century, 7; Starr, Endangered Dreams, 138–139.
34. Schlesinger, Politics of Upheaval, 114–118; Harris, Upton Sinclair, 307; Starr, Endangered Dreams, 150.
35. Mitchell, Campaign of the Century, 189 and 291.
36. Sparkes interview with Francisco and Crane, 14.
37. Don Francisco letter to Albert Lasker, September 21, 1934, “Correspondence, Lord & Thomas” file, Don Francisco papers, Syracuse University.
38. Mitchell, Campaign of the Century, 202 and 344.
39. Ibid., 344.
40. Variety, October 29, 1934, as quoted by Don Francisco in his October 13, 1937, interview with Sparkes.
41. Irwin Ross, “The Supersalesmen of California Politics: Whitaker and Baxter,” Harper’s, July 1959, 55–61.
42. Ibid.
43. In The Brass Check, Sinclair had written of the Times: “This paper, founded by Harrison Gary Otis, one of the most corrupt and most violent old men that ever appeared in American public life, has continued for thirty years to rave at every conceivable social reform, with complete disregard for truth, and with abusiveness which seems almost insane.” See, for example, David M. Fine’s Imagining Los Angeles: A City in Fiction (Reno, NV: University of Nevada Press, 2000), 62.
44. Mitchell, Campaign of the Century, 5; Nasaw, The Chief, 501; Starr, Endangered Dreams, 143; Sinclair, Brass Check, 202; Sinclair, I, Candidate, 144–148.
45. Sinclair, I, Candidate, 139–140.
46. Sparkes interview with Francisco and Crane, 4.
47. Francisco letter to Ralph Sollitt, October 1, 1934, “Correspondence, Lord & Thomas” file, Francisco papers.
48. Sparkes interview with Francisco and Crane, 4–5.
49. Sinclair, “I, Governor”; Mitchell, Campaign of the Century, 295–297; Schlesinger, Politics of Upheaval, 118; Starr, Endangered Dreams, 148.
50. Sparkes interview with Francisco and Crane, 8–9.
51. Gregory, “Introduction,” viii; x; Starr, Endangered Dreams, 152.
52. Mitchell, Campaign of the Century, 530 and 574.
53. Sparkes interview with Francisco and Crane, 9.
54. I, Candidate; quotation from 144.
55. Godfrey M. Lebhar, Chain Stores in America, 1859–1969 (New York: Chain Store Publishing Corporation, 1952), 231.
56. Sparkes interview with Francisco and Crane, 16.
57. Lord & Thomas, “Discrimination vs. Business,” 27.
58. Lebhar, Chain Stores in America, 28–38.
59. Ibid., 53 and 66.
60. Ralph M. Hower, “Urban Retailing 100 Years Ago,” Bulletin of the Business Historical Society 12 (December 1938): 91–101; Richard S. Tedlow, New and Improved: The Story of Mass Marketing in America (New York: Basic Books), 186–199.
61. Tedlow, New and Improved, 198.
62. Lebhar, Chain Stores in America, 66.
63. Joseph Schumpeter, “The Creative Response in Economic History,” Journal of Economic History 7 (November 1947): 149–159.
64. Lebhar, Chain Stores in America, 129 and 159–162.
65. Ibid., 154–169.
66. Ibid., 129–147.
67. Ibid., 230.
68. “Discrimination vs. Business,” 4.
69. Ibid., 5.
70. Lebhar, Chain Stores in America, 233.
71. Jeffrey L. Cruikshank and David B. Sicilia, The Engine That Could: Seventy-Five Years of Values-Driven Change at Cummins Engine Company (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1997), 88.
72. Sparkes interview with W. G. Irwin, 10.
73. Lebhar, Chain Stores in America, 234; “Discrimination vs. Business,” 8.
74. “Discrimination vs. Business,” 8 and 15.
75. Ibid., 7.
76. Ibid., 6 and 9; Lebhar, Chain Stores in America, 235.
77. “Discrimination vs. Business,” 16–17.
78. California Chain Stores Association, “The Fifty Thousand Percent Chain Store Tax”; “Discrimination vs. Business,” 17–18.
79. “Discrimination vs. Business,” 18.
80. Ibid., 27–28.
81. Ibid., 23–24.
82. “The Fifty Thousand Percent Chain Store Tax.”
83. Lebhar, Chain Stores in America, 237–238; “Discrimination vs. Business,” 22.
84. “The Fifty Thousand Percent Chain Store Tax.”
85. Lebhar, Chain Stores in America, 240.
86. Sparkes interview with Noyes, June 23, 1938, 8.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
1. Mark O’Dea, who worked for Lasker from 1914 to 1930 and then went into competition with him, set up the speaking engagement for him. It was, O’Dea told Boyden Sparkes, the largest group of his peers that Lasker had ever addressed. Sparkes interview with O’Dea.
2. In the summer of 1935, Lasker wrote several letters to his children, then touring Europe, and mentioned Flora’s impending stay at Watkins Glen.
3. Sparkes interview with Edward Lasker (undated). Unless otherwise noted, the quotes in this section are from Sparkes’s conversations with Albert and Edward about Flora’s death.
4. From the Gunther papers at the Chicago Historical Society, Box 105, folder 12, notes on Sarnoff conversation.
5. Sparkes interview with Sollitt, 24.
6. Edward Lasker’s unpublished memoirs, Of Me I Sing, 17.
7. Sparkes, 200.
8. “Flora Lasker’s Heirs to Divide $1,359,000 Estate,” Chicago Tribune, December 16, 1937.
9. In his interview with Ralph Sollitt, Boyden Sparkes recounts Mary Lasker Foreman’s objections to the project.
10. Saturday Evening Post, June 9, 1934, 8
11. This and the following descriptions are from various conversations between Sparkes and Lasker.
12. Sparkes, 5.
13. Albert Lasker letter to “Partridges,” October 1, 1937.
14. Letter to Paul Patterson from his nephew, October 29, 1937, from the Arthur Schultz collection.
15. Albert Lasker letter to “D. L.” and “A. K.” (Partridges), April 14, 1938.
16. Except as noted, these details and quotes come from a rambling conversation with Sparkes, which most likely took place on either June 22 or June 24, 1938.
17. Letter, Joseph P. Kennedy to Thomas W. Lamont, May 4, 1938, from the Joseph P. Kennedy Papers Collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library.
18. Unless otherwise noted, all office details are from an undated six-page “Memorandum,” prepared by the Lord & Thomas administrative staff in 1938.
19. From Robert Eck’s “A Face of Character,” March 30, 1994, typewritten collection of reminiscences about Lasker, 6.
20. John Gunther, Taken at the Flood: The Story of Albert D. Lasker (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960), 205.
21. Sparkes interview with Crane and Francisco, October 11, 1937, 54.
22. Eck, “A Face of Character,” 6.
23. “Francisco to Manhattan,” Time, August, 1, 1938.
24. See, for example, Lasker’s July, 25, 1938, letter to Pepsodent’s Kenneth G. Smith.
25. “I like Doris Kenyon very much,” playwright Mary P. Hamlin wrote in 1931. “She is blond but she can act.” See the summary of Hamlin’s memoir and letters in the University of Rochester Library Bulletin 30, no. 1 (Autumn 1977), www.lib.rochester.edu/index.cfm?PAGE=3570.
26. “To Fight Movie Censors,” New York Times, April 24, 1916, 11.
27. Mick LaSalle, Dangerous Men. Pre-Code Hollywood and the Birth of the Modern Man (New York: Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, 2002), 139–140.
28. See 138 F. 2d 989, Lasker v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue, No. 8322, Circuit Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit, December 4, 1943.
29. Authors’ interview with Frances Brody, March 22, 2004.
30. The sable coat reference is from Eck, “A Face of Character,” 6.
31. From John Gunther’s first draft of Taken at the Flood, Box 99, Folder 13, John Gunther papers, University of Chicago.
32. Kenyon’s stepdaughter gives a colorful rendition of Lasker’s relationship with Kenyon, including the impotence reference. See the Doris Kenyon Web site at www.lind.org.zw/people/doriskenyon/doriskenyon.htm. Third wife Mary Lasker later also mentioned Lasker’s problems with impotence.
33. From Leonard Lyons’s February 2, 1939, syndicated column, The Lyons Den.
34. “Doris Kenyon to Sue,” New York Times, February 21, 1938, 21.
35. “Doris Kenyon Given Divorce,” Los Angeles Times, June 9, 1939, 22. The stated reason—cruelty—was either a legal convenience or it accurately reflected how Kenyon felt she had been treated during her brief marriage to Lasker.
36. Gunther, Taken at the Flood, 278.
37. Lasker first ran across Manton many years earlier, when Manton—as U. S. Second Circuit Judge in New York—issued a ruling regarding a 1921 Shipping Board case. See “U. S. Mail Line Fleet Regained by Lasker,” New York Times, August 28, 1921, 1.
38. John Gunther devotes a chapter to the Manton affair, and provides substantially more detail than we include here. See Taken at the Flood, 244–256.
39. “Letter Is Offered in Levy-Hahn Case,” New York Times, July 26, 1939, 3.
40. “Borrowing Judge,” Time, February 8, 1939, www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,771417,00.html?promoid=googlep. See also “Not a Pretty Story,” Time, June 5, 1939, www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,761412,00.html.
41. Manton appears to have had a notion of using Lasker’s influence to merge National Cellulose—the bottom-feeding firm in which Manton and Sullivan had an interest—with the far more reputable International Cellulose, with which Lasker had been associated for almost two decades. Lasker wanted nothing to do with any such deal. See “Hahn, as Witness, Backs Loan Deal,” New York Times, July 29, 1939, 10.
42. For the particulars of Dewey’s charges against Manton, including those involving Lasker, see “Dewey Letter on Manton,” and “Dewey Says Judge Manton got $400,000 from Litigants; Sends Charges to Congress,” New York Times, January 30, 1939, 1.
43. In his own defense, Manton argued that he took bribes from both sides in cases before his court, listened to the arguments, made up his mind, and returned the losing side’s bribe. This argument prompted Justice Learned Hand—Manton’s former colleague on the Circuit Court of Appeals, and his successor as chief judge—to refer to Manton as a “moral moron.”
44. “Lasker Held Dupe in Manton Deal,” New York Times, July, 25, 1939.
45. “Not a Pretty Story.”
46. “L. S. Levy Is Barred from U. S. Courts over Manton Loan,” New York Times, November 15, 1939, 1.
47. Sparkes memo to himself, August 30, 1939.
48. Albert Lasker letter to Sparkes, May 14, 1940.
CHAPTER TWENTY
1. John Gunther, Taken at the Flood: The Story of Albert D. Lasker (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960), 234.
2. Reminiscences of Mary Lasker, in the Columbia University Oral History Research Office Collection (hereafter “Mary Lasker oral history, CUOHROC”), 57.
3. Ibid., 59.
4. Ibid., 60.
5. Ibid., 47.
6. “Hollywood Is Redoing All the Hey-Hey Girls,” New York Post, March 6, 1935.
7. Paul Jodard, Raymond Loewy (New York: Taplinger Publishing Company, 1992), 37. The details of the commission are from Mary Lasker oral history.
8. Mary Lasker oral history, CUOHROC, 72.
9. In her Columbia oral history, Mary recalled that she had made the same request of her first husband, Paul Reinhardt. Reinhardt went to one session, declared ironically, “I have been analyzed,” and never went back. Mary Lasker oral history, CUOHROC, 530
10. Authors’ interview with Frances Brody, March 22, 2004.
11. Box 99, Folder 14, John Gunther papers, University of Chicago. Gunther also talked to George Daniels, who provided additional details (Box 104, Folder 10).
12. Gunther, Taken at the Flood, 260.
13. Parker Hall letter to William Benton, January 7, 1954, University of Chicago Library.
14. The University sold the estate (which was thirty-two miles from the main campus, as the crow flies) in seven transactions beginning in 1943 and ending in 1947—the year that Lasker’s fabulous golf course fell victim to a developer. University officials put the proceeds from these sales into a special account and later used them to build a new administration building and purchase a thirteen-story apartment building adjacent to the campus.
15. Gunther, Taken at the Flood, 262.
16. According to Gunther’s original manuscript, Lasker continued to see Daniels at irregular intervals in subsequent years.
17. Mary Lasker oral history, CUOHROC, 73.
18. Ibid., 80.
19. Authors’ interview with Frances Brody, March 22, 2004.
20. Mary Lasker oral history, CUOHROC, 49.
21. Ibid., 440.
22. Ibid., 449.
23. Sanger made reference to this influential early gift in an address delivered on October 25, 1950, at the thirtieth annual meeting of the Planned Parenthood Federation. Margaret Sanger Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College Library.
24. See Woodbridge E. Morris, MD, letter to Albert Lasker, November 21, 1939, Margaret Sanger papers.
25. Albert Lasker letter to Margaret Sanger, July 14, 1942, Margaret Sanger papers.
26. Albert Lasker letter to Margaret Sanger, February 9, 1940, Margaret Sanger papers.
27. Mary Lasker oral history, CUOHROC, 87.
28. See Madeline Gray, Margaret Sanger: A Biography of the Champion of Birth Control (New York: Richard Marek Publishers, 1979), 399.
29. Albert Lasker letter to Margaret Sanger, February 9, 1940.
30. Mary Lasker oral history, CUOHROC, 88.
31. Ibid., 467.
32. Ibid., 449.
33. See the Seversky biography on the “AcePilots” Web site, at www.acepilots.com/wwi/pio_seversky.html.
34. Mary Lasker oral history, CUOHROC, 99.
35. Review, New York Times, July 19, 1943, movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res= 9404EFDF1738E33 BBC4152DFB1668388659EDE (accessed January 3, 2008).
36. See Leonard Maltin’s introduction to Victory Through Air Power on Walt Disney on the Front Lines, a DVD collection of Disney wartime propaganda, 2004.
37. Fairfax Cone, With All Its Faults: A Candid Account of Forty Years in Advertising (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1969), 140–141. Cone gives a fascinating account of Lasker’s decision to shut down Lord & Thomas.
38. Albert Lasker letter to Leonard Masius, December 19, 1942.
39. Don Francisco letter to Ralph Sollitt, December 15, 1933, “Correspondence, Lord & Thomas” file, Box 2, Don Francisco papers, Syracuse University Special Collections.
40. Unless otherwise noted, this financial analysis comes from Lasker letter to Masius, December 19, 1942.
41. From a June 3, 1943, accounting from A. E. Rood to the firm of Appel & Brach. It is worth noting in this context that Lasker paid between half and two-thirds of his income in taxes.
42. From the Arthur Andersen auditors’ report dated December 31, 1942.
43. Gunther, Taken at the Flood, 269.
44. This complete break between old and new was necessitated by Lasker’s inability to get a reading from the Treasury Department—then swamped by tens of thousands of such inquiries, owing to the dramatic spike in the liquidation tax—as to the taxability of goodwill. Lasker simply couldn’t afford to risk a tax liability of unknown size.
45. With his Foote, Cone & Belding colleagues, coauthor Schultz spent years trying to rebuild this “lost” international network.
46. Andersen auditors’ report.
47. “End of a Name,” Time, January 4, 1943, www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,790682,00.html. The article concluded on an interesting note: “Dopesters figured that he took his identification with the name too personally to leave it to someone else.”
48. Cone, With All Its Faults, 142.
49. “Advertising Will Play Major Post-War Role, Lasker Says,” Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch, January 17, 1943.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
1. Reminiscences of Mary Lasker, in the Columbia University Oral History Research Office Collection (hereafter “Mary Lasker oral history, CUOHROC”), 612.
2. Ibid., 612.
3. Ibid., 105.
4. Ibid., 476.
5. Ibid., 128.
6. See The American Society for the Control of Cancer: Its Objects and Methods and Some of the Visible Results of Its Work, published by the Society in 1925, 65–67.
7. For details on the Smith gift, see “Appropriate,” Time, June 15, 1925; for details on the Lasker Foundation, see the University’s “Developing the Medical Center” historical summary at www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/spcl/excat/donors5.html. The medical context of the gift is described in great detail in “Donate $1,000,000 to Prolong Life,” New York Times, Jaunary 9, 1928, 1.
8. Mary Lasker oral history, CUOHROC, 77.
9. See “Important Events in NCI history” on the National Institutes of Health Web site at www.nih.gov/about/almanac/archive/2002/organization/NCI.htm.
10. Mary Lasker oral history, CUOHROC, 136.
11. Ibid., 479.
12. Ultimately, according to Mary, this gentlemen’s agreement wasn’t honored. Although Lever Bros.contributed $50,000 in 1944, the company gave only $25,000 for each of the next two years, and then stopped its contributions altogether. Mary Lasker oral history, CUOHROC, 484–485.
13. Another version of this story has Emerson Foote as the prime mover behind the name change. See Walter S. Ross, Crusade: The Official History of the American Cancer Society (New York: Arbor House, 1987), 37.
14. “Wartime Cancer Show,” Fibber McGee and Molly, April 28 1945.
15. Mary Lasker oral history, CUOHROC, 534.
16. Louis Lasagna, The Doctors’ Dilemmas (1962; rpt. Ayer Co. Publishing, 1970), 69.
17. Mary Lasker oral history, CUOHROC, 170.
18. Kline later became celebrated as the author of the best-selling From Sad to Glad (New York: Putnam, 1974).
19. Alfred Lasker letter to Ernst Mahler, August 2, 1951, from the Arthur Schultz collection.
20. Alfred Lasker letter to Charles Mendl, October 4, 1951, from the Arthur Schultz collection.
21. Mary Lasker oral history, CUOHROC, 710.
22. See Alfred Frankfurter’s introduction to The Albert D. Lasker Collection: Renoir to Matisse, published in 1957 by Chanticleer Press with a subsidy from Mary Lasker, xiv.
23. Mary Lasker oral history, CUOHROC, 714.
24. The Albert D. Lasker Collection, xvi.
25. Ibid., 109.
26. John Gunther, Taken at the Flood: The Story of Albert D. Lasker (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960), 312.
27. Nadine Brozan, “Woman in the News: Mary Lasker; Lobbyist on a National Scale,” New York Times, November 21, 1985.
28. Gunther, Taken at the Flood, 181.
29. Ibid., 225.
30. Transcript of a telephone conversation between Alfred Lasker and Robert Hutchins, May 14, 1942, University of Chicago Library.
31. Milton Mayer, Robert Maynard Hutchins: A Memoir (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 229. Mayer provides a remarkably dispassionate—even sympathetic—view of Lasker in this episode.
32. One of Lasker’s sisters became ill en route to Israel and had to return home for emergency surgery.
33. Unless otherwise noted, Lasker’s quotes regarding Israel are from the reminiscences of Albert Lasker, in the Columbia University Oral History Research Office Collection, 153–180.
34. J. R. Fuchs’s oral history interview with Oscar R. Ewing, Harry S. Truman Library & Museum, www.trumanlibrary.org/oralhist/ewing4.htm.
35. Gunther, Taken at the Flood, 336.
36. Ibid., 335.
37. Alfred Lasker letter to Charles Mendl, June 20, 1951.
38. Alfred Lasker letter to Harry Meyer, December 26, 1951.
39. Mary Lasker oral history, CUOHROC, 274.
40. Alfred Lasker, Last Will and Testament, February 1952.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
1. Sparkes, 341.
2. Sparkes, 345.
3. Sparkes, 39.
4. From “Advertising and Its Contribution to the General Welfare,” an undated speech (or perhaps article) from the 1930s.
5. Sparkes interview with Sollitt, November 5, 1937, 18.
6. Sparkes interview with Hertz, May 29, 1938, 7.
7. Sparkes interview with Sarnoff, January 11, 1938, 4–11.
8. Reminiscences of Mary Lasker, in the Columbia University Oral History Research Office Collection (hereafter “Mary Lasker oral history, CUOHROC”), 76.
9. Sparkes interview with Hummert, 32.
10. Sparkes interview with Bullis, October 27, 1937, 17.
11. Sparkes interview with Hummert, 37.
12. Sparkes interview with Sollitt, November 3, 1937, 14.
13. Sparkes, 209.
14. Sparkes interview with Sollitt, April 22, 1938, 10.
15. Sparkes, 3.
16. Mary Lasker oral history, CUOHROC, 50.
17. Sparkes, 252.
18. Alfred Lasker letter to W. G. Irwin, August 18, 1917, from the W. G. Irwin papers.
19. Richard M. Fried, The Man Everybody Knew: Bruce Barton and the Making of Modern America (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2005), 82–83. Barton visited rest-cure camps in upstate New York for a decade, took long “vacations” with his brother in Wyoming, and also sought relief at a clinic in Canada.
20. Fairfax Cone, With All Its Faults: A Candid Account of Forty Years in Advertising (Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1969), 70–80.
21. The few documented “manic” episodes that Lasker had—such as the wild night in Grand Rapids in 1900 with Arthur Warner that culminated in a youthful Lasker attempting to drive a carriage into a bar—seem to have been the result of drink, rather than mania. The three-day lecture that Lasker delivered to his associates in April 1925, apparently at a fever pitch, makes a stronger case for mania.
22. Sparkes interview with Crane and Francisco, 32.
23. Sparkes interview with Sullivan, November 30, 1937, 2.
24. Sparkes interview with Hertz, May 29, 1938, 3.
25. Sparkes interview with Noyes, June 23, 1938, 14.
26. Sparkes, 99–100.
27. Sparkes interview with O’Dea, December 3, 1937, 9.
28. John Gunther, Taken at the Flood: The Story of Albert D. Lasker (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960), 207.
29. Sparkes interview with Sollitt, November 16, 1937, 8–9.
30. Edward Lasker letter to John Gunther, December 16, 1959, 9.
31. Sparkes interview with Sollitt, November 5, 1937, 8.
32. Sparkes, 146.
33. Sparkes interview with Sollitt, November 16, 1937, 18.
34. Sparkes interview with Field, March 16, 1938, 9.
35. Sparkes interview with Irwin, 11.
36. Sparkes interview with Sollitt, November 5, 1937, 18.
37. Sparkes interview with Irwin, 1.