The Man Who Sold America

Jeffrey L. Cruikshank is an author or coauthor of many books, including Shaping the Waves: A History of Entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School. Arthur W. Schultz is a veteran ad agency executive who once headed Foote Cone & Belding, the successor agency to Albert Lasker's Lord & Thomas.

We're living in the Age of Persuasion. Leaders and organizations of all kinds--public and private, large and small--fulfill their missions only by competing in the marketplace of images and messages. To win in that marketplace, they need advertising. This has been true since the advent of mass media, from mass-circulation magazines and radio through the age of television and the Internet.

Yet even as they use advertising to capture consumers' imaginations and build their brands, few people know of the ingenious and tormented man who built the modern advertising industry and shaped a new consumer sensibility as the twentieth century unfolded: Albert D. Lasker.

Drawing on a recently uncovered trove of Lasker's papers, Jeffrey Cruikshank and Arthur Schultz have written a fascinating biography of one of the past century's most influential, intriguing, troubled, and instructive figures. Lasker's creative and powerful use of "reason-why" advertising to inject ideas and arguments into ad campaigns had a profound impact on modern advertising, foreshadowing the consumer-centered "unique selling proposition" approach that dominates the industry today. His tactics helped launch or revitalize companies and brands that remain household names--including Palmolive, Goodyear, and Quaker Oats.

As Lasker rose in prominence, he went beyond consumer products to apply his brilliance to presidential politics, government service, and professional sports, changing the game wherever he went, and building a vast fortune along the way. But his intensity had a price--he was felled by mental breakdowns throughout his life. This book also tells the story of how he fought back with determination and with support from family and friends in an age when lack of effective treatment doomed most mentally ill people.

The Man Who Sold America is a riveting account of a man larger than life, who shaped not only an industry but also a century.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Chapter 1: The Orator and the Entrepreneur
Chapter 2: The Galveston Hothouse
Chapter 3: Success in Chicago
Chapter 4: Salesmanship in Print
Chapter 5: Growing Up, Breaking Down
Chapter 6: The Greatest Copywriter
Chapter 7: Orange Juice and Raisin Bread
Chapter 8: Fighting for Leo Frank
Chapter 9: Into the Tomato Business
Chapter 10: Saving Baseball from Itself
Chapter 11: Venturing into Politics
Chapter 12: Electing a President
Chapter 13: The Damnedest Job in the World
Chapter 14: A Family Interlude
Chapter 15: A Defeat and Two Victories
Chapter 16: Selling the Unmentionable, and More
Chapter 17: Retrenching and Reshaping
Chapter 18: Selling and Unselling California
Chapter 19: The Downward Spiral
Chapter 20: Changing a Life
Chapter 21: Finding Peace
Chapter 22: The Lasker Legacy
A Note on Primary Sources
Notes
About the Author