CHAPTER 5
A LONG LUCKY RUN
George Washington Hill owned two dachshunds: one was named Lucky; the other was named Strike. He was born in 1884, the son of Percival Hill, president of the American Tobacco Company. The father gave the son the Lucky Strike brand to manage as his own, and Hill took to it the way some take to a sports team. He smoked Luckies incessantly, and his Rolls-Royce had packs of them taped to the rear windows. “I would not call him a rounded man,” said Albert Lasker. “The only purpose in life to him was to wake up, to eat, and to sleep so that he’d have strength to sell more Lucky Strikes.”1
In 1925, the elder Hill died, leaving the American Tobacco Company entirely in the hands of George Washington, who was determined to make Lucky Strike, his pet brand, America’s leading cigarette, and to spend as much as necessary to do it. Whatever the merits of the product, his money was good, and he believed in the power of advertising. By 1931 he would be spending nearly $20 million per year on it, up from $400,000 in 1925; it was at the time an unprecedented outlay, and possibly the most spent on advertising a single product up until that time.2
Both in its rich success and a number of its excesses, the Lucky Strike campaign of the late 1920s would mark a kind of culmination of advertising’s might and arrogance at decade’s end. Hill’s man for the job was Lasker of Lord & Thomas, the firm that had rescued Claude Hopkins from patent medicine’s collapse and then largely absorbed his methods of the hard sell. (An aged Hopkins was by this point retired, living in a forest mansion and writing his memoirs.) To round out the team, Hill also hired Edward Bernays, who had just released his most acclaimed work, Propaganda, espousing his ideas of how the techniques government had developed during the war could now be applied to the purposes of business. The two got down to work, though not always together.
What might make Lucky Strike stand out? In 1917, the brand had gotten its start with an idea conceived by Hopkins.3 “It’s toasted” was the slogan, the “secret” step supposedly yielding a better flavor. In the mid-1920s, Lasker built on the concept with a campaign borrowing from patent medicine’s playbook: the brand was presented as a health tonic—specifically, a cure for the problem of sore throats caused by most cigarettes. With a new claim that toasting “removes harmful irritants that cause throat irritation,” including “harmful corrosive acids,” the Lucky Strike slogan became: “Your throat protection—against irritation—against cough.” There was even a secret process involved: “the ‘TOASTING’ process includes the use of the Ultra Violet Ray…heat purifies and so ‘TOASTING’—that extra, secret process—removes harmful irritants that cause throat irritation and coughing.”4 To drive home the hygienic benefit, Lasker ran a “precious voice” campaign, with testimonials from opera stars and other singers. What could be more persuasive than the Metropolitan Opera’s lead soprano attesting that she smoked Luckies to protect her livelihood?5
The testimonials were, of course, paid for, but it is still startling that Lasker was able to coax the singers into the effort. Even by the late 1920s, there were inklings that cigarettes might be bad for you. So, to preempt the truth, Lasker deployed another old patent medicine trick: he tried to co-opt medical authority. The American Tobacco Company sent doctors free cartons of Luckies in exchange for a vague nod that they might be less abrasive than other brands.6 Whether or not the doctors knew what they were agreeing to, Lord & Thomas went ahead with ads that portrayed them as, in effect, touting the health benefits of smoking Lucky Strikes. One advertisement features a doctor in a white coat holding up a packet, with the copy: “20,679 physicians say ‘LUCKIES are less irritating’…Your throat protection.”7
To sell the smoking of cigarettes as a healthful habit had a certain genius to it and might have had a long fruitful run, but at some point George Washington Hill, like so many others, got converted to the feminine principle of the 1920s. He decided, abruptly, that the real secret to Lucky Strike’s success would be persuading women to smoke them, especially in public. In his diary, Bernays recalled the day that the boss had this epiphany. “Hill called me in. ‘How can we get women to smoke on the street? They’re smoking indoors. But, damn it, if they spend half the time outdoors and we can get ’em to smoke outdoors, we’ll damn near double our female market. Do something. Act!’ ”8
In the late 1920s, it was still taboo for women to smoke in public; in some cities, including, for a brief while, New York, it was even against the law.9 But to the monomaniacal Hill, the idea was sheer commercial opportunity. “It will be,” he told Bernays, “like opening a new gold mine right in our front yard.”
Good soldiers both, Lasker and Bernays soon caught the spirit of women’s liberation, or at least noticed its utility. Lasker allowed that, after his wife had been asked to refrain from smoking in a restaurant, he was determined “to break down the prejudice against women smoking.” But it was Bernays, the public relations man, who took more seriously the idea of a commercial cause in social-activist clothing. He was in fact a critic of advertising in the Hopkins mold, and believed that ideally one should seek to make it obsolete. “The old-fashioned propagandist,” wrote Bernays, “using almost exclusively the appeal of the printed word, tried to persuade the individual reader to buy a definite article, immediately.” In contrast, Bernays believed it possible to create demand at an even more fundamental level, by changing customs and norms. He asked:
What are the true reasons why the purchaser is planning to spend his money on a new car instead of on a new piano? Because he has decided that he wants the commodity called locomotion more than he wants the commodity called music? Not altogether. He buys a car, because it is at the moment the group custom to buy cars. The modern propagandist therefore sets to work to create circumstances which will modify that custom.
The skilled propagandist could be not merely an engineer of demand, then, but a maker of manners, bringing a multiplier effect to the commercial use of attention capture.
Bernays sought to overthrow the taboo against women smoking outside the home by framing it as an abridgement of their freedom. Relying on some back-of-the-envelope Freudian analysis, including the idea of cigarettes as phallic objects and a source of oral satisfaction, he presented smokes as vital to a fuller life. And he hired a group of attractive women to march in the 1929 New York City Easter Day Parade, brandishing their Lucky Strikes, or “torches of freedom.”10 He had paid Ruth Hale, a prominent feminist, to sign the letter inviting the women to the march. “Light another torch of freedom! Fight another sex taboo!” it thundered.11
The historical record is somewhat muddled as to the real effect of the stunt, precisely because of Bernays’s natural tendency to take credit as the mysterious puppet master behind the scenes.12 Perhaps seduced by an irresistible story, many have accepted his version of events, in which the “Torches of Freedom” parade marks a kind of social turning point. No less astute a critic of propaganda than Noam Chomsky allows that Bernays’s “major coup, the one that really propelled him into fame in the late 1920s, was getting women to smoke.”13
It is of course impossible to assign—or deny—definitive credit for something as complex as a change in social norms. Suffice it to say that contemporary reporting of the “Torches of Freedom” event was relatively thin. The New York Times buried its account of the protest halfway through its story on the presumably more urgent subject, the Easter Parade itself: “About a dozen young women strolled back and forth [on Fifth Avenue] while the parade was at its peak, ostentatiously smoking their cigarettes….One of the group explained that the cigarettes were ‘torches of freedom’ lighting the way to the day when women would smoke on the street as casually as men.”14 The Washington Post would not mention the demonstration until 1991, by which time the event had gathered significance by reason of the story’s propagation; in the end, Bernays’s signal triumph may have been the particularly good job he did capturing the attention of historians.
At roughly the same time that the boss called in Bernays, Lasker was also tasked with engineering greater demand among women for Lucky Strike. This was the beginning of the “Reach for a Lucky” campaign. Far cruder and more conventional than Bernays’s effort, it also likely sold more cigarettes to women than all the torches of Easter. Lasker started from advertising’s most tried and true premise, borrowed from patent medicine: cigarettes needed to be a cure for something—if not sore throats, then what? Noticing that women often expressed concern about their weight, he came up with the idea of selling Lucky Strike as a remedy for excess weight, a diet aid. The original slogan “Reach for a Lucky instead of a Bon-Bon” soon became “Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet,” and would long be remembered simply as “Reach for a Lucky.”15
In a typical ad, a glamorous flapper is puckering up, blowing smoke perhaps, with her eyes shut tight; the copy reads, “To keep a slender figure, no one can deny…Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet.” A number of others invoke “The Shadow which pursues us all”; in these, a matronly silhouette ominously frames the profile of a lithe young woman. For good measure, Lasker added Hopkins’s coda to nearly all these ads: “It’s toasted.”
Lasker may never have been at J. Walter Thompson, much less the Women’s Department, but his imitation of their approach worked wonders. Sales of Luckies exploded, increasing by 8.3 billion units in 1928 alone. As other brands followed suit, rates of smoking among women tripled from the 1920s to the mid-1930s.
In this way, George Washington Hill got what he wanted. By the end of the decade, Lucky Strike had overtaken Camel as the nation’s leading cigarette for no evident reason than its advertising spending. To succeed, propaganda must be total. But along the way, the campaign crossed some lines, resorting to the sort of dangerous misrepresentations that had made patent medicines so successful. Just as before, the success had been based purely on advertising, and won at the expense of public health. Perhaps predictably, then, “Reach for a Lucky” and campaigns like it began to provoke a wave of public resentment that would reach full force by the beginning of the 1930s. For the American Tobacco Company, it would begin when the Federal Trade Commission called in Hill and Lasker to have a talk about those medical testimonials.
By 1928, Claude Hopkins, now in retirement, would announce that his trade had reached its own end of history. “Human nature does not change,” he wrote, and the principles of scientific advertising “are as enduring as the Alps.” Nothing bolstered this assertion like the institutional sophistication of the modern agency itself, which had ably sold itself, apart from much else. No longer peddling primitive space ads in penny papers, the advertising executive was now deftly marrying word and image across the spectrum of print media on behalf of burgeoning giants of manufacture and service, wielding the power of life and death over consumer products.16 As the 1920s closed, advertising had grown itself from a dubious activity and negligible industry into a major part of the economy. American companies went from spending an estimated $700 million in 1914 to almost $30 billion a year by 1929, then about 3 percent of gross domestic product.17 Advertising was now as big as many of the industries it served.
With Stanley and Helen Landsdowne Resor, now married and at the head of it, J. Walter Thompson was, by that time, the largest agency in the world.18 The firm leased space in the art deco Graybar Building attached to the Grand Central Terminal in New York (a block from Madison Avenue), completing its move to the center of American corporate life.
The rewards to those who had made the climb were ample indeed. The Resors acquired both a mansion in Connecticut and a vast ranch in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where they hired the pioneer of modern architecture Ludwig Mies van der Rohe to build their vacation home, his first American commission.19 As for Albert Lasker, the president of Chicago’s Lord & Thomas, his estate on five hundred acres included a working farm, an eighteen-hole golf course, and a movie theater, among its twenty-six structures.20 Even the abstemious former preacher Claude Hopkins was eventually moved to acquire a pile in the Michigan wilderness, as well as an oceangoing yacht. His wife, writes David Ogilvy, persuaded him “to employ an army of gardeners on their estate, and to buy splendid Louis XVI furniture. She filled their vast house with an endless procession of guests. Her cook was famous. And she played Scarlatti to Hopkins for hours at a time.”
With its acquired wealth and grandeur, the industry began to see itself differently, in a way more attuned with its origins, which its cloak of science had served to conceal. No, not the origins in patent medicine, redolent of swindle and charlatanism—that lineage advertising was glad to have disowned, even if it would never disown the methods. Rather, it was now that advertising began to see itself in the image of the original propaganda body, the Church; its work as a mission; and its masters as capitalism’s new priestly class. The agencies were educating the masses, doing a sort of missionary work on behalf of the great new companies fulfilling the broadest needs and deepest desires of the nation. President Coolidge captured the new image in a 1926 speech: “Advertising ministers to the spiritual side of trade. It is a great power that has been entrusted to your keeping which charges you with the high responsibility of inspiring and ennobling the commercial world. It is all part of the greater work of regeneration and redemption of mankind.”21
Many of the most talented copywriters, as we’ve seen, came from families steeped in organized religion. Some saw surprisingly little difference between the two callings. In The Man Nobody Knows, a 1925 bestseller by adman Bruce Barton, himself the son of a Methodist preacher, Jesus Christ is depicted, not ironically but with earnest reverence, as an early advertising man and small-business owner, managing his team of disciples who “mastered public attention” and came up with winning slogans such as “the meek shall inherit the earth.” Barton reached even deeper when he wrote that “advertising” was a force “as old as the world…‘Let there be light’ constitutes its charter. All Nature vibrates with its impulse. The brilliant plumage of the bird is color advertising addressed to the emotions.”
Whether or not advertising was as exalted a purpose as some had proclaimed, by the end of the 1920s it had unquestionably changed the tenor of daily life across the industrialized world. For it was then that a conspicuous feature of modern existence, albeit one that we are all now well used to, was born: namely, the fact of being constantly cajoled and sold to, the endless stream of appeals that take such effort to ignore, promising as they do the answers to all our problems, the satisfaction of all our yearnings. Now is when advertising was first woven into the fabric of most Americans’ lives, as bit by bit the major brands planted themselves in the collective consciousness, like so many mighty trees—as if Cadillac or Coca-Cola could never have been just names but were somehow imbued with meaning from the beginning of time. The built environment created by advertising began to seem like a natural ecosystem; the incessant barrage of commercial propositions became a fact of life.
It is therefore all the more stunning to imagine that the industrialization of human attention capture as we know it had really only begun. The possibilities of electronic media and the Internet still lay in the future. Thanks to the rise of advertising, the world seemed cluttered with come-ons, but these were still confined to newspapers, magazines, posters, billboards, and leaflets. And yet unbeknownst to most of those making the most grandiose claims for advertising, some of its best days were already behind it.
When, in 1932, Claude Hopkins died of heart failure, at the age of sixty-six, The New York Times described him as “the man who had written $100 million worth of copy.” Despite his success, however, when Hopkins was near death, he claimed with his peculiar piety that “money means nothing to me, save that my Scotch instinct rebels at waste.”22 He had also ended his autobiography on a strange note: “The happiest are those who live closest to nature, an essential to advertising success.” It was an odd sentiment from one foremost in the effort to replace nature with advertising. Perhaps the old preacher had one further prophecy in him.