The Man Who Sold America

by Cruikshank, Jeffrey L.

• ISBN13: 9781591393085
• ISBN10: 1591393086
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-08-12
• Publisher: Harvard Business School Pr

Summary

We live in an age of persuasion. Leaders and institutions of every kind--public and private, large and small--must compete in the marketplace of images and messages. This has been true since the advent of mass media, from broad circulation magazines and radio through the age of television and the internet. Yet there have been very few true geniuses at the art of mass persuasion in the last century. In public relations, Edward Bernays comes to mind. In advertising, most Hall-of-Famers--J. Walter Thomson, David Ogilvy, Bill Bernbach, Bruce Barton, Ray Rubicam, and others--point to one individual as the "father" of modern advertising: Albert D. Lasker. And yet Lasker--unlike Bernays, Thomson, Ogilvy, and the others--remains an enigma. Now, Jeffrey Cruikshank and Arthur Schultz, having uncovered a treasure trove of Lasker's papers, have written a fascinating and revealing biography of one of the 20th century's most powerful, intriguing, and instructive figures. It is no exaggeration to say that Lasker created modern advertising. He was the first influential proponent of "reason why" advertising, a consumer-centered approach that skillfully melded form and content and a precursor to the "unique selling proposition" approach that today dominates the industry. More than that, he was a prominent political figure, champion of civil rights, man of extreme wealth and hobnobber with kings and maharajahs, as well as with the likes of Albert Einstein and Eleanor Roosevelt. He was also a deeply troubled man, who suffered mental collapses throughout his adult life, though was able fight through and continue his amazing creative and productive activities into later life. This is the story of a man who shaped an industry, and in many ways, shaped a century.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. 1
The Orator and the Entrepreneur	p. 9
The Galveston Hothouse	p. 21
Success in Chicago	p. 35
Salesmanship in Print	p. 53
Growing Up, Breaking Down	p. 67
The Greatest Copywriter	p. 89
Orange Juice and Raisin Bread	p. 113
Fighting for Leo Frank	p. 125
Into the Tomato Business	p. 143
Saving Baseball from Itself	p. 155
Venturing into Politics	p. 169
Electing a President	p. 179
The Damnedest Job in the World	p. 197
A Family Interlude	p. 215
A Defeat and Two Victories	p. 223
Selling the Unmentionable, and More	p. 239
Retrenching and Reshaping	p. 263
Selling and Unselling California	p. 289
The Downward Spiral	p. 315
Changing a Life	p. 335
Finding Peace	p. 351
The Lasker Legacy	p. 367
A Note on Sources	p. 381
Notes	p. 383
Index	p. 417
Acknowledgments	p. 433
About the Authors	p. 435
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

The Collier’s reporter who interviewed Albert Lasker in Washington in February 1923 was struck by his subject’s rapid-fire delivery and his elusive logic.
Lasker’s brain was a “furious express train,” which seemed to run along six or seven tracks simultaneously. The train raced ahead at a breakneck pace, “with every chance that when it reaches the terminal station it will go straight through the back wall.”

For Lasker—a 43-year-old advertising executive from Chicago who had temporarily transformed himself into a Washington bureaucrat—this was nothing new; he had always lived his complicated life at a breakneck pace. But the second month of 1923 was proving unusually challenging even for the hyperactive Lasker. Now, as the back wall of the terminal station approached, he wondered how he might get off some of the tracks he found himself on.

For example:
He was engaged in a bitter and bruising battle on behalf of the President of the United States, trying to implement a coherent national maritime policy. Two years of hard work were on the line. He was losing.
Meanwhile, his advertising agency, Lord & Thomas—which over the previous quarter-century Lasker had built into one of the largest and most influential agencies in the U.S.—was in financial peril.
At the same time, Lasker was suffering from a nasty case of the flu, which was causing him much discomfort. His only trips outside his Washington townhouse in the first week of February were to the White House, where he spent three successive evenings with President Harding and his wife Florence. The First Couple, too, had been felled by the flu. They seemed to find the presence of a friend and fellow flu sufferer—one who was a little farther down the road to recovery—comforting.