The Note from the Saloon
One Monday morning in 1939, the senior partners of Lord & Thomas gathered in their conference room for the weekly state-of-the-agency meeting, and every man present knew something the agenda would not acknowledge. Their boss — Albert Lasker, sixty years old, the most powerful advertising executive in American history, a man who had spent four decades bending the desires of a continent — had just suffered the very public disintegration of his second marriage, a catastrophic union with a Hollywood starlet that collapsed before the honeymoon luggage was unpacked. The salacious details had circulated through Chicago's business clubs and New York's gossip columns. Everyone in that room had read every word. The door from Lasker's private office swung open. He walked in, surveyed the faces of his lieutenants, and said: "Gentlemen, in his life, every man has a right to make one mistake. I have made mine." Then the meeting began.
The moment is vintage Lasker — the theatrical timing, the ruthless compression of private anguish into public performance, the refusal to permit anyone else's discomfort to exceed his own. It is also, in miniature, a lesson in the craft he perfected and the temperament that made him both irresistible and impossible: the conviction that any situation, no matter how messy, could be reframed with the right words delivered at the right moment. Albert Davis Lasker did not invent advertising. But he did something more consequential: he invented the idea that advertising was a form of persuasion rather than a form of notification, and then he built a machine — Lord & Thomas of Chicago — that proved it. In the process, he reshaped American breakfast, American politics, American attitudes toward women's bodies, and the very architecture of consumer capitalism. He made more money from advertising than anyone before or since. He suffered three nervous breakdowns. He dissolved his own empire at the height of its power. And then he spent his final decade trying, with considerable success, to disappear.
By the Numbers
Albert D. Lasker
$750MTotal ad placements under his direction at Lord & Thomas
44 yearsCareer span at Lord & Thomas (1898–1942)
$50MAnnual billings when he dissolved the agency in 1942
$40M+Personal fortune accumulated from advertising
95%His ownership stake in Lord & Thomas at dissolution
480 acresMill Road Farm estate in Lake Forest, Illinois
95Lasker Award laureates who later won the Nobel Prize
Galveston, the Cotton Desk, and the $500 Debt
He was born in Freiburg, Germany, on May 1, 1880, but only by medical accident. His mother, Nettie Davis Lasker, had been unwell during the pregnancy, and his father, Morris — a Prussian Jew who had immigrated to the United States in 1856 and built himself into the president of several Galveston banks — took her across the Atlantic for treatment. Six weeks after the birth, the family returned to Texas. Albert was the third of eight children, and he grew up on an island that was, in those years, the commercial gateway to the American interior: a booming port city that rivaled New Orleans, a place where cotton brokers and shipping magnates brushed against immigrants and roughnecks, where money moved fast and social hierarchies were negotiated daily. The atmosphere of Galveston in the 1880s and 1890s — mercantile, polyglot, improvised — left its mark.
Morris Lasker was not a man who tolerated drift. He was, by every account, domineering, prosperous, civic-minded, and deeply suspicious of his son's romantic ambitions. Albert, who showed entrepreneurial instincts before he showed facial hair, started a four-page weekly newspaper called the
Galveston Free Press at twelve. He wrote the copy, solicited the advertisements, collected the bills. It paid its way. By fifteen he was reviewing plays for the
Galveston Morning News. One night, having already seen the show scheduled at the opera house, he wrote his review in advance and hopped a train to Houston to visit a young woman who had "arrested his wandering eye." The next morning's paper carried his conventional review of a performance that had never taken place — because the opera house had burned down. The front page reported the fire; the back page carried the phantom critique. It was his first lesson in the distance between narrative and reality, and he seems to have found it instructive rather than chastening.
What Albert wanted was to be a reporter in New York. What Morris wanted was for his son to have a respectable profession. The compromise was brokered through parental leverage and a business favor: Lord & Thomas, a Chicago advertising agency with whom Morris had connections, would hire Albert for three months. If it didn't take, Morris would give his blessing. Albert boarded the train reluctantly, planning to endure his sentence and escape to journalism. Then he incurred a gambling debt of $500 — a sum he did not possess — and found himself shackled to the ad business by the oldest chain in commerce: money owed.
"From that moment on," Lasker later recalled, "I put aside my dream of being a reporter."
It was 1898. He was eighteen. He would stay at Lord & Thomas for forty-four years.
Salesmanship in Print
When Lasker arrived in Chicago, the advertising industry barely qualified as an industry. Agencies were space brokers. They took copy that clients had already prepared — often nothing more than descriptive announcements, the commercial equivalent of a classified ad — and placed it in newspapers and magazines, collecting a markup on the space. The creative act, such as it was, belonged to the client. The agency's value proposition was distribution, not persuasion. Lasker, who had a salesman's instinct and a reporter's eye for the telling detail, found this intolerable. He could sell space better than anyone at the firm. Within a year, he was outselling seasoned veterans. But he couldn't articulate what advertising actually was, and the inability gnawed at him. He asked everyone. The answers were unsatisfying: it was sloganizing, it was keeping your name before the public, it was news. None of these explanations cohered into a theory.
The answer arrived in 1904, from a saloon.
A note was delivered to Ambrose Thomas's office at Lord & Thomas. Lasker was sitting across the desk. Thomas read it, made a face, and threw it over. The note read: "I am in the saloon downstairs. I can tell you what advertising is. I know you don't know. It will mean much to me to have you know what it is, and it will mean much to you. If you wish to know what advertising is, send the word 'yes' down by the bellboy. Signed — John E. Kennedy."
Thomas thought it was the note of a lunatic. Lasker, characteristically, was curious. They sent down the word: Yes.
John E. Kennedy was one of the most handsome men Lasker had ever seen — a six-foot former Canadian Mounted Policeman with a student's forehead and an athlete's bearing, a man who had been writing breezy advertisements for patent medicines and the Hudson's Bay Company and who had arrived at a definition of his own craft that no one in the business had yet articulated. He and Lasker sat in Lasker's office until midnight.
"Do you know what advertising is?" Kennedy asked.
Lasker offered his best guess: "It's news."
Kennedy shook his head. "No. News is a technique of presentation, but advertising is a very simple thing. I can give it to you in three words: salesmanship in print."
When I left that room, I knew what advertising was, and I know what it is today. It is exactly what he told me it was that day, and the whole complexion of advertising for all of America was changed from that day on.
Three words. They were, in their way, as consequential as any phrase coined in twentieth-century commerce. Salesmanship in print meant that every advertisement should do what a salesman did on a doorstep — not merely announce a product's existence but argue for its purchase, give the customer a reason why he should part with his money. It was a shift from the passive to the active voice, from description to persuasion, from information to drama. Lasker hired Kennedy at an extraordinary salary. Within months, they tested the concept on the 1900 Washer Company (later Whirlpool). The campaign was so successful that within four months, Lord & Thomas's advertising spend for the client went from $15,000 a year to $30,000 a month. Within six months, the agency was one of the three or four largest in the nation.
By 1905, Lasker was head copywriter. By 1912, at thirty-two, he was sole owner of Lord & Thomas — the biggest advertising agency in the world.
The Genius Machine
Lasker's method was to find brilliant, damaged, difficult people and put them to work on problems they could not resist. His rare ability to harness "troubled geniuses," as the biographers Jeffrey Cruikshank and Arthur Schultz note in
The Man Who Sold America, "grew in part from the fact that he himself had been driven by 1,000 devils."
After Kennedy — who burned bright and faded — came Claude C. Hopkins, the greatest copywriter of the early twentieth century, a man whose obsessive attention to testing and measurement would have made him a natural data scientist had he been born a century later. Hopkins was quiet, sensitive, stingy, and fresh off a public disgrace: he had made a fortune writing advertisements for Liquozone, a supposed germicide that turned out to be flavored water. When muckrakers exposed the fraud, Hopkins was ruined — and also a millionaire, which made him difficult to recruit by conventional means.
Lasker studied the problem. He learned from a mutual friend that Hopkins's wife wanted an electric automobile but Hopkins thought them too expensive. So Lasker arranged a lunch. He showed Hopkins a Van Camp contract worth $400,000, contingent on satisfactory copy. He told Hopkins the copy his own people had produced was terrible. If Hopkins would agree to help, Lasker would buy his wife the electric car.
Hopkins agreed. The partnership lasted seventeen years. Together, they built the "reason-why" approach into the most formidable creative engine in advertising. Among their joint innovations: the technique of visiting a client's factory to find the one production detail that could be dramatized into a selling proposition. During a tour of the Quaker cereal plant, they noticed that raw grains were placed inside long rifle-like tubes and blasted with hot compressed air, puffing them to eight times their normal size. The kernels shot out with a bang. Lasker and Hopkins renamed the product Puffed Wheat and created a campaign: "Food Shot from Guns!" The advertising industry ridiculed it. The press called it "the theory of an imbecile." Sales of Puffed Wheat and Puffed Rice shot up 300 percent.
The pattern repeated across dozens of accounts. Lasker did not write most of the copy himself — he was a strategist, a client handler, a closer — but he shaped every campaign with an instinct for the single vivid idea that could reframe a product in the consumer's mind. He was not interested in market research. He thought surveys only proved "there is salt in the ocean." What he trusted was his own intuition, tested against the reactions of a tobacco clerk in a building lobby or a housewife on the street. "Give him an equal knowledge of the facts," said David Sarnoff of RCA, "and I'd rather have his judgment than anybody else's I know."
Drink an Orange
Consider what Albert Lasker did to the American breakfast table.
When Lord & Thomas acquired the California Fruit Growers Exchange account in 1908, the citrus industry was in crisis. California growers were producing so many oranges that they were cutting down trees to limit supply. Oranges were perceived as a luxury — something you ate at Christmas, not something you consumed daily. The market was oversupplied, fragmented, and collapsing.
Lasker was twenty-eight. His first move was to convince approximately 2,000 fiercely independent growers to unite under a single brand name: Sunkist. His second was to create a campaign built on a single radical idea: don't eat an orange, drink one. "Drink an Orange" was the slogan. The advertisements persuaded consumers to squeeze oranges and drink the juice at breakfast as a healthy way to start the day. Before the campaign, the average consumption per serving was half an orange. After, it jumped to two and a half oranges per serving — a 400 percent increase. Lasker had not merely advertised a product; he had invented a behavior. Orange juice as a breakfast staple — as natural and inevitable as it seems today — was a manufactured habit, and Albert Lasker manufactured it.
The Sunkist campaign was a template for everything that followed: find a product whose potential exceeds its current use, reframe the product in terms of the consumer's life rather than the manufacturer's process, and attach it to a ritual. Palmolive soap was a laundry product when its makers approached Lord & Thomas; Lasker told them the laundry category was too crowded and asked what else they had. They mentioned a bar of soap made from palm and olive oils. Lasker saw the name buried in the ingredients — Palm-Olive — and built the entire campaign around it: "Keep That Schoolgirl Complexion." Van Camp's evaporated milk became "You Can Now Have a Cow in Your Pantry." In each case, the product was reimagined not as an object but as a solution to a problem the consumer hadn't known she had.
The Taboo Breaker
Lasker's willingness to wade into culturally sensitive territory set him apart from every competitor. It also made him, in retrospect, a more morally complicated figure than the "father of modern advertising" honorific typically allows.
In 1921, Kimberly-Clark was stuck with enormous quantities of surplus cellulose wadding, a material originally developed as surgical dressing during World War I. The company had developed a product — sanitary napkins — but could not sell them. The problem was not the product but the shame. Menstruation was unmentionable in polite society; the product had to be purchased from male druggists behind a counter, and most women would rather suffer in silence. Lasker's solution was systematic: he renamed the product Kotex, redesigned the packaging, introduced self-service displays so women could purchase it without speaking to anyone, and — most remarkably — arranged for public schools to offer classes explaining puberty and menstruation to young girls. It was advertising as social engineering, and it worked. Kotex became a household name.
Three years later, the same company introduced Kleenex, initially marketed as a makeup remover. When Lasker's team discovered that consumers were using it to blow their noses, they pivoted: the "disposable handkerchief" was born. The word Kleenex became generic.
Then came Lucky Strike.
George Washington Hill, the volcanic president of American Tobacco, was spending $1 million a year on advertising when Lasker took the account. Soon Hill was spending $25 million. The campaigns Lasker and Hill devised together — "Nature in the Raw Is Seldom Mild," "It's Toasted," and the devastating "Reach for a Lucky Instead of a Sweet" — made Lucky Strike the best-selling cigarette in America. But the coup that most transformed the culture was Lasker's campaign to break the taboo against women smoking in public. He enlisted female opera stars and Hollywood actresses to endorse Luckies, positioning the cigarette as a weight-control device and a symbol of emancipation. It worked spectacularly. Whether it should have worked — whether the liberation of women's desire to smoke was a liberation at all — is a question Lasker never publicly addressed.
There wasn't a living American in so many ways each day partially responsible for people doing as many things as I was. That is provable.
The boast was not idle. By the mid-1930s, Lasker's campaigns had touched Palmolive, Pepsodent, Goodyear, Frigidaire, Studebaker, RCA, Quaker Oats, Sunkist, Sun-Maid raisins, Kotex, Kleenex, and Lucky Strike. He had helped found the Pepsodent Company and taken a one-third ownership stake, using his advertising skill to transform it into a top-selling product. He was among the first to see the power of radio advertising and is credited with creating the soap opera genre — serialized dramas sponsored by consumer goods companies, designed to deliver captive audiences to advertisers. The list of American products he launched or revitalized is, as his biographers observe, "unparalleled in the history of advertising."
The Smoke-Filled Room
Lasker's ambitions extended well beyond commerce. In 1918, he was recruited as assistant chairman of the Republican National Committee, and by 1920 he was the first advertising man to apply modern marketing techniques to a presidential campaign. The candidate was Warren G. Harding, a handsome, amiable Ohio senator whose chief qualifications were that he looked presidential and offended no one. Lasker had been introduced to the campaign by Will Hays, the Republican National Chairman, on the recommendation of Indiana business interests who knew Lasker's reputation.
What Lasker brought was unprecedented: billboards, national magazine advertisements, newspaper campaigns, and — for the first time in presidential politics — motion pictures. He and his friend William Wrigley Jr., the chewing gum magnate who shared both Lasker's genius for marketing and his most useful commodity (enormous wealth), bankrolled and orchestrated a "front porch campaign" in Marion, Ohio, that was really America's first comprehensive presidential marketing campaign. When Harding's fondness for golf threatened to make him look effete — golf was perceived as a rich man's game during the Progressive Era — Lasker arranged for the Chicago Cubs to play an exhibition game in Marion against a local semi-professional squad. Baseball was the antidote to elitism. Harding won in a landslide.
As a reward, Harding appointed Lasker chairman of the United States Shipping Board in 1921, tasking him with developing a national maritime policy and salvaging what Lasker himself called "the most colossal commercial wreck the world ever knew" — the federal government's bloated fleet of wartime merchant ships. He served until 1923, acquiring a ringside seat to the corruption and mediocrity of the Harding administration. The experience soured him on Republican politics. He eventually joined the Democratic Party and served Franklin Roosevelt as assistant secretary of the navy.
But politics was always a secondary fascination. "Always," as American Heritage noted, "his heart was in advertising."
Driven by 1,000 Devils
The energy that powered all of this was not free. Lasker's intensity — the "1,000 devils" that drove him — exacted a price measured in breakdowns, insomnia, heavy drinking, and impulsive behaviors that ranged from the reckless to the comic. Once, under the influence of alcohol, he attempted to drive a horse-drawn carriage into a bar.
At twenty-seven, in 1907, he experienced a complete mental and emotional collapse. "I could do nothing but cry," he said. The pattern set by this first breakdown persisted for most of his life. He suffered at least three major depressive episodes. He slept poorly. He experienced dramatic mood swings. The high-pressure world he inhabited — the endless client demands, the colossal egos of men like George Washington Hill, the weight of running an agency that defined its industry — ground against a temperament that was constitutionally incapable of moderation.
I always say that I got over all my breakdowns, except the first one.
His subordinates admired him and dreaded his arrival. "He's the only man I felt I'd like to murder every now and then," said Herbert Field, who had been pushed out of a senior position almost twenty years earlier, before adding: "There isn't a finer man living." Another former associate, who had also left under duress, put it with the kind of perfect contradictory precision that characterized everyone's relationship with Lasker: "I'd like to kick him in the back. I've never met a man as colorful and vital and as personable as Mr. Albert Lasker. Never."
He was, by every account, a dictator. He hated committees. He hated the telephone. He never joined an advertising club, avoided competitors, and dropped enormous accounts — General Electric among them — when they annoyed him. During the Depression, he cut everyone's salary by a quarter and fired fifty people at once, though his own salary was $3 million a year. And yet he put extraordinary effort into training people, paid well, and inspired a loyalty that survived even his most tyrannical episodes. His staff appreciated, as
David Ogilvy later noted, his "detail-orientation tempered by his ability to see the big picture, his magnetism, his ability to anticipate consumers, and how hard he worked."
The pattern — volcanic intensity, creative brilliance, interpersonal wreckage, depressive collapse, recovery, repeat — defined his professional life. It also shaped his personal one. His first wife, Flora Warner, whom he married in 1902, contracted typhoid fever shortly after their wedding and was permanently disabled. The marriage endured for thirty-four years, producing three children — Mary, Edward, and Frances — but was shadowed by Flora's illness and by Lasker's accumulating psychological weight. When Flora died in 1936, much of the joy went out of his life. His disastrous 1938 marriage to actress Doris Kenyon lasted less than a year. Then, in April 1939, he met Mary Woodard Reinhardt in a New York restaurant.
The Third Marriage and the Second Act
Mary Woodard was born on November 30, 1900, in Watertown, Wisconsin, the daughter of a banker father and a civic-minded mother who campaigned for public parks and instilled in her daughter an interest in urban beautification that would, decades later, result in 10,000 azaleas planted on Capitol Hill. She attended the University of Wisconsin and Radcliffe, where she graduated cum laude in 1923 with a major in art history, then studied at Oxford, settled in New York, and married art dealer Paul Reinhardt. After divorcing Reinhardt in 1934 — in the teeth of the Depression — she launched "Hollywood Patterns," a successful line of inexpensive fabrics decorated with photos of movie stars, and became secretary of the Birth Control Federation of America. She was, in short, a woman of formidable intelligence, independent means, and causes.
Albert was fifty-nine when they met; Mary was thirty-eight. He was impressed by her acumen as a businesswoman; she shared his interest in art and public health. A mutual friend later explained their connection with unusual simplicity: "They both had character and intelligence, and above all, love, that simple and scarce thing. You couldn't be around them and not know it." They married on June 22, 1940.
The marriage transformed them both. He taught her about business and politics — the mechanics of fundraising, the art of "friend-raising," the levers of government. She taught him about art and entertaining. Together, they discovered a shared outrage: that 40 percent of World War II enlistees were being rejected for health reasons, and that practically no research was being done into the major causes of death in America. Cancer was so feared that the word was seldom uttered outside family circles. Almost no federal money went to medical research. The National Institute of Health — then singular — was a bureaucratic afterthought.
In 1942, the Laskers established the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation. In that same year, Albert made a decision that stunned the advertising world: he dissolved Lord & Thomas entirely. He owned 95 percent of an agency that had placed $750 million in advertisements under his direction, an agency whose annual billings had reached $50 million. He gave the firm to three employees — Emerson Foote, Fairfax Cone, and Don Belding — for $100,000 and told them to change the name. The agency was reorganized as Foote, Cone & Belding.
Why did he do it? The explanations are multiple and probably all partially true. He was exhausted. The breakdowns had accumulated. He wanted to devote himself to philanthropy. He could not bear the thought of Lord & Thomas continuing under his name without his presence. And Mary had given him something he had lacked since Flora's death — a purpose beyond commerce.
The Crusade to Cure America
Albert Lasker applied to medical philanthropy the same instincts he had applied to orange juice: find the systemic problem, reframe it, and sell the solution to an audience that doesn't yet know it needs it.
The Laskers' first act was to remake the American Cancer Society. It had been the American Society for the Control of Cancer — a staid organization of doctors with no public profile and no fundraising capacity. Albert renamed it, reimagined its structure, brought lay people onto the board, doubled and then quintupled its annual fundraising. He engineered a skit at the end of the popular Fibber McGee and Molly radio show in which the two characters discussed a friend's potential cancer diagnosis. It was the first time the word "cancer" had ever been spoken on the radio. The dread began to lift — not because the disease had become less lethal, but because someone had applied salesmanship to silence.
The Lasker Awards, established in 1945, were initially modest — $1,000 prizes given through the American Public Health Association. They would grow into what the National Institutes of Health calls "America's Nobels." To date, ninety-five Lasker Award laureates have gone on to win the Nobel Prize. The awards' prestige — and their role in directing public attention to the importance of medical research — became the fulcrum of the Laskers' larger project.
Albert knew that even his fortune could not fund medical research at the scale required. But he also knew where to find the money. He had served on the Shipping Board under Harding; he understood the federal government's capacity to move capital. He taught Mary how to lobby — how to charm legislators, how to present expert witnesses at congressional hearings, how to coordinate media campaigns with legislative pushes. "Without money, nothing gets done," Mary would say, distilling Albert's lesson into her own operating principle.
Albert died of cancer on May 30, 1952, in New York City. He was seventy-two. Very few people paused to read the obituaries, though the newspapers and magazines in which they appeared carried his monument on nearly every page. In his final years, he had developed what his biographers describe as "an absolute passion for anonymity." Little by little, he became invisible. The curtain he created between himself and the pages of history became almost impenetrable.
Mary doubled down. Over the next four decades, she became one of the most effective citizen lobbyists in American history. The NIH budget grew 150-fold — from roughly $3 million in 1945 to $460 million by 1961, and past $1 billion by the late 1960s. She lobbied presidents from Truman to Nixon. She enlisted Ann Landers to motivate 500,000 readers to send letters to legislators. She was the driving force behind the National Cancer Act of 1971, which launched the federal "war on cancer." Jonas Salk called her "a matchmaker between science and society." She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal. Congress named the Mary Woodard Lasker Center for Health Research and Education at the National Institutes of Health in her honor. A pink tulip bears her name.
Mary Lasker died on February 21, 1994, at ninety-three. Her favorite warning, delivered to anyone who questioned the cost of medical research, had by then entered the lexicon of American public health: "If you think research is expensive, try disease."
The Fifty-Six-Room Disappearance
There is a photograph of Mill Road Farm, the Lake Forest estate Albert Lasker built after he was denied membership at the area's exclusive country clubs because he was Jewish. Twenty-five thousand square feet. Fifty-six rooms. A swimming pool measuring 100 by 40 feet. An 18-hole golf course designed by one of the country's premier golf course architects, built on 480 acres purchased in 1921 from meatpacking king Louis Swift at $1,000 an acre. The total cost was $3.5 million — over $56 million in today's dollars. Lasker maintained a standing offer of $500 to anyone who could break par. Only one professional ever did.
The estate required a staff of more than fifty, making Lasker one of the largest employers in the Lake Forest area. It was, by every account, exquisite — "incomparably the best place in the Middlewest," Mary said upon first seeing it, "all quite unpretentious looking at the same time, not at all grand looking." The paradox of the phrase is the paradox of the man: the most extravagant domestic establishment between Chicago and the Pacific, described by its mistress as unpretentious. But Mary meant something specific. The house was a country place, not a palace. It was built to welcome, not to intimidate. It was the home of a man who wanted to belong to a community that had excluded him, and who responded to the exclusion not with grievance but with construction.
Albert Lasker made no speeches in his final years and wrote almost nothing for publication. The oral history he gave to Columbia University's Allan Nevins and Dean Albertson over seven months in 1949 and 1950 was not intended for public release. He hired a ghostwriter, Boyden Sparkes, to produce an autobiography — not for publication. He gave interviews to Advertising Age, which published them posthumously in twenty-six installments. He did not seek monuments. He did not endow a school of advertising or lend his name to a building at a business school. The only institution that bears his name is devoted not to advertising but to medicine — the foundation he created with Mary, which has spent eighty years shining a spotlight on the science that saves lives.
The man who had sold America orange juice and sanitary napkins and a president of the United States, who had broken taboos and created industries and reshaped the relationship between commerce and desire, ended his days collecting French Impressionists and funding cancer research and playing golf on a course he built because no one would let him play on theirs. The 1,000 devils had not been silenced, but they had been, at last, redirected.
On his desk, in his final years, there was a framed front page of the Galveston Free Press — the four-page weekly he had started at twelve, the paper where he wrote every word, sold every ad, collected every bill. The boy who wanted to be a reporter had become the father of modern advertising, and the father of modern advertising had become, in the end, a man who wanted mostly to be left alone with the work that mattered.
