Selling ‘It’s Toasted’: Albert Lasker and the Entrepreneurial Turn in American Politics

Photograph taken by Moffett Studio. There is no year of when the photograph was taken but it is currently in the repository of the University of Chicago Photographic Archive in the University of Chicago Library.

Advertising is business, but it’s also a test of imagination. Every ad campaign asks the same entrepreneurial question: how do you make people want something they didn’t know they wanted? Albert Lasker spent his career answering that question. At Chicago’s Lord & Thomas agency, he sold soap, toothpaste, and cigarettes with the restless drive of an inventor tinkering in a workshop. But in 1920, he turned that skill toward a different kind of product: a presidential candidate. By selling Warren G. Harding the way he sold Lucky Strike, Lasker proved that advertising wasn’t just about commerce—it was an entrepreneurial tool capable of reshaping American politics itself.

Historians often measure entrepreneurship by innovation, not just profit. Randall Holcombe draws a line between economic growth—simply producing more—and economic progress—finding new methods that change the game entirely.1 By this standard, Lasker was an entrepreneur par excellence. He didn’t just increase advertising revenues; he created new ways of persuading. His “reason why” campaigns gave consumers rational-sounding explanations to buy, a break from the vague slogans that dominated early ads.2

Robert Solow has argued that economic outcomes are shaped by context and institutions as much as individual genius.3 Lasker’s career shows the point. The United States in the early twentieth century was a perfect setting for entrepreneurial advertising: a national market, mass-circulation newspapers, and, just emerging, the phonograph and radio. The entrepreneur spots opportunities, but institutions provide the stage.

David Danbom’s work on farming in the Plains shows something similar: tractors and machinery didn’t just raise output, they reshaped rural life.4 Lasker’s tools—newspapers, celebrity endorsements, recorded speeches—worked the same way for political life. He didn’t invent media, but he bent it toward persuasion with entrepreneurial flair.

Lasker’s rise began in 1898 when he joined Lord & Thomas as a teenage copy boy. By 1912, he was running the agency, having absorbed every detail of the business.5 He quickly rejected empty puffery in favor of “reason why” advertising. Working with John Kennedy and Claude Hopkins, he made ads feel like arguments: here’s the product, here’s why it works, here’s why you need it.6

This style is clear in the Lucky Strike “It’s Toasted” ad, published in the Chicago Tribune in April 1917. “Think of a cigarette ‘served’ to you as appetizingly as the hot, buttered toast that comes to your breakfast table,” it read. The logic was technical—the tobacco was toasted to preserve flavor—but the imagery was homely, the morning kitchen table.7 Lasker’s genius was fusing rational claims with emotional comfort.

Lucky Strike ad from 1917. This ad is from a Chicago Tribune Newspaper and was accessed through their newspaper archive. Lasker's firm were responsible for the advertisements for Lucky Strike cigarettes between 1923-1947.

Ellen Mazur Thomson later described advertising of this era as evolving into a “science of publicity,” where persuasion was methodical, tested, and constantly refined.8 In Holcombe’s terms, this was progress—an innovation in how markets functioned, not just more of the same.

Lasker’s instincts extended beyond the ad office. In 1916, he bought into the Chicago Cubs and lobbied for reforms that led to the commissioner system after the 1919 “Black Sox” scandal.9 He treated baseball’s credibility problem like a branding issue. Wrigley Field itself became a kind of advertisement: clean, reliable, respectable.

This versatility marks him as more than a businessman. He was a serial entrepreneur, applying the same logic—persuade, package, reassure—to industries as different as baseball and tobacco.

By 1920, the Republican Party faced a problem. Its nominee, Senator Warren G. Harding of Ohio, was genial but uninspiring. The nation, weary from war and Woodrow Wilson’s idealism, craved stability. Harding had the demeanor but not the magnetism. That’s where Lasker came in.

As chair of the Republican National Committee’s publicity division, he treated Harding like a product launch.10 He orchestrated the “front porch” campaign, where Harding spoke from his home in Marion, Ohio, while carefully managed publicity carried his words across the country. Lasker arranged celebrity endorsements from Al Jolson, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks—Harding became, in effect, a celebrity brand.11

The rhetoric echoed Lasker’s commercial campaigns. A Chicago Tribune editorial-style ad from November 1920, “Harding The Man,” read like a cigarette ad transposed onto politics. Harding was “safe,” “surefooted,” “the typical American… successful but not arrogant, enterprising but careful.”12 The language reassured voters the same way “It’s Toasted” reassured smokers. In both cases, the product was stability dressed in familiar imagery.

Gabriel Kolko argued that big business supported regulation because it offered predictability and stability in uncertain markets.13 Lasker’s ads served the same function in politics: they stabilized Harding’s image, turning doubt into trust.

Phonograph recordings of Warren G. Harding between 1920 and 1921. This recoding is from YouTube but another is on C-Spans website.

On July 22, 1920, Harding’s nomination acceptance speech became available on phonograph.14 The sound was faint and the audience small, but it was revolutionary. Just as tractors changed farming, phonograph and radio began changing politics. Lasker immediately grasped its potential, and experimented with phonograph records of Harding’s speeches and sending them out for distribution.15

Murray Rothbard described how wartime intellectuals and technocrats used planning and statistics to expand state power.16 Lasker’s use of radio and phonographs was a private counterpart: entrepreneurial tools crossing into political persuasion. The boundary between market innovation and political influence blurred.

It would be easy to say that Lasker proves Kolko’s thesis or Rothbard’s warnings about collectivism, but Robert Bradley and Roger Donway remind us that such sweeping claims oversimplify.17 Not every businessman sought regulation, and not every planner dreamed of permanent control. Lasker’s case shows nuance: he wasn’t driven by ideology or statecraft. He was an entrepreneur applying tested tools of persuasion to a new field.

Solow would have us see the institutional stage; Holcombe would call it progress; Danbom would note the technological shift; Kolko would highlight stability; Rothbard would point to the blurring of private and public spheres. Lasker embodied all of these insights at once, not as theory, but as practice.

Harding’s presidency is remembered less for his ideas than for the scandals that followed. Yet his campaign was groundbreaking. By selling Harding like soap, Lasker helped create the template for modern political advertising.

And that’s the entrepreneurial lesson. Entrepreneurship isn’t just about factories or start-ups. It’s about spotting opportunities to apply new methods where they haven’t been tried before. Lasker did it with toothpaste, with baseball, with cigarettes—and in 1920, with the presidency. His ads promised comfort: “It’s toasted.”

His campaign promised stability: “Harding the man.” Both reassured anxious audiences, and both sold. That’s entrepreneurship: not simply selling more, but finding new ways to persuade. And it changed not only what Americans bought, but how they voted.

Footnotes

1. Randall G. Holcombe, “Progress and Entrepreneurship,” The Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics 6, no. 3 (Fall 2003). (7)

2. John A. Morello, Selling the President, 1920: Albert D. Lasker, Advertising, and the Election of Warren G. Harding, Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2001. (12)

3. Robert M. Solow, “Economic History and Economics,” American Economic Review 75, no. 2, 1985.

4. David B. Danbom, Sod Busting: How Families Made Farms on the Nineteenth-Century Plains, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. (144)

5. Morello, Selling the President, 1920. 45.

6. Ibid. (11–12)

7. “Lucky Strike Cigarette: It’s Toasted,” Chicago Tribune, April 4, 1917, Vol. 78, no. 81.

8. Ellen Mazur Thomson, “‘The Science of Publicity’: An American Advertising Theory, 1900–1920,” Journal of Design History 9, no. 4, 1996. (253)

9. Morello, Selling the President, 1920. (45)

10. Ibid. 36.

11. Ibid. 40.

12. “Harding The Man,” Chicago Tribune, November 1, 1920, Vol. 79, no. 262.

13. Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900–1916, New York: Free Press, 1963. (268)

14. The1920sChannel, Warren Harding Recorded Speeches (1920–1921), YouTube, 2021.

15. Morello, Selling the President, 1920. (66)

16. Murray Rothbard, “World War I as Fulfillment: Power and the Intellectuals,” in The Costs of War: America’s Pyrrhic Victories, ed. John V. Denson, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1999. (294)

17. Robert L. Bradley Jr. and Roger Donway, “Reconsidering Gabriel Kolko: A Half-Century Perspective,” The Independent Review 17, no. 4, 2013.

Bibliography

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Kolko, Gabriel. The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900–1916. New York: Free Press, 1963.

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The1920sChannel. Warren Harding Recorded Speeches (1920-1921). YouTube. 2021.

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