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Mary LaskerMary Lasker
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done, to speak of. It was astonishing!

Well, if it hadn't been for the fund-raising and publicity campaigns of the American Cancer Society in ‘45 and ‘46 which interested people in cancer problems, including Congressmen, the Public Health Service would never have been successful in obtaining the approximately 14 million dollars which they got from the Federal budget in fiscal ‘48, or in other words, in July of ‘47.

Now, this gave us the idea that if we could get going in one area we probably could get going in other areas within the Public Health Service.

Q:

In this effort of the American Cancer Society did Mr. Lasker employ his tremendous knowledge of what to do in the field of advertising to implement all of this?

Lasker:

No, he really scarcely believed that we were going to do anything. First of all, he couldn't believe that we were going to raise any money through the Cancer Society; he went along with me because he thought, you know, that it would be easier to go along. He was actually astonished when we raised four million dollars in '45 as a result of the work that Emerson Foote and the people that we employed with the money we supplied for the campaign. Then when he saw there was four million dollars that came in, a million dollars of which was for research, he realized that this was real and that you could arouse people about it, and it then engaged his





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