Jerry Mander, a longtime Bolinas resident who used Madison Avenue’s tools to ameliorate the consequences of capitalism, died of cancer and kidney disease on April 11 in Hawaii. He was 86 years old.
A passionate advocate for the environment, Indigenous people, women’s rights and ordinary working folk, Jerry was a prolific author and progressive America’s favorite ad man.
A fierce critic of technology and economic globalization, Jerry authored or edited nine books, including “Four Arguments for The Elimination of Television,” and he became a friend and advisor to towering figures in the environmental
movement.
“He was brilliant,” said Annie Leonard, a close friend and former executive director of Greenpeace. “He could look at the world and analyze it and communicate things that were happening in a way that very few people could.”
Jerry came of age at the dawn of the hippie movement in San Francisco. He lived for a time above the renowned City Lights bookstore, a haven for beat poets and writers, and crossed paths with some of the leading figures of the times. He did publicity for the 1966 Trips Festival, a seminal event organized by Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters and ’60s luminary Stewart Brand. The Grateful Dead performed for an audience that had freely partaken of LSD. To help promote the event, Jerry hired fledgling rock impresario Bill Graham to hand out fliers; Mr. Graham later ran The Fillmore Auditorium and became perhaps the most celebrated rock ‘n roll promoter in history.
Jerry came to San Francisco from the East Coast, where he had earned degrees in economics at the Wharton School and Columbia University. He started out doing publicity for various artists and arts organizations, including the San Francisco Film Festival, avant-garde dancer Anna Halprin and The Committee, a comedy troupe with a political edge that regularly performed at civil rights and Vietnam war protests alongside celebrities such as Joan Baez and Norman Mailer.
During his collaboration with The Committee, Jerry designed a newspaper ad ridiculing the Pentagon after it announced that it planned to airdrop toys to war orphans in Vietnam. The full-page advertisement in the San Francisco Chronicle announced a “War Toy of the Week” contest. Beneath a photo of a toy machine gun, a headline read: “Give Now! Help American Efforts in Vietnam! You May Win $100!” Within days, The Committee’s lobby was overflowing with war toys, which the group said it intended to drop on the Pentagon.
The ad caught the attention of visionary San Francisco advertising executive Howard Gossage, who recruited Jerry to work for his firm, which became Freeman, Mander & Gossage. During his 15 years there, Jerry did corporate work but also began a close collaboration with the Sierra Club and its executive director, David Brower, who was alarmed by a federal plan to dam the Colorado River and flood the Grand Canyon. Proponents of the plan argued that tourists in rowboats would enjoy getting closer to the canyon walls.
Jerry adapted remarks from a witness at a congressional hearing on the plan and turned them into a memorable headline for another full-page ad: “Should We Also Flood The Sistine Chapel So Tourists Can Get Nearer The Ceiling?”
At Gossage’s suggestion, Jerry included coupons with the text that readers could clip to show support for progressive organizations or use to pressure politicians and policymakers.
The ad appeared in the New York Times, The Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, generating enormous publicity for the Sierra Club.
“There was a gigantic response,” Jerry said in a 2022 interview with the Ecological Options Network. “We didn’t have Tweets in those days. You sent coupons to the powers that be. They got giant mailbags filled with these coupons.”
The dam project was eventually cancelled, and the coupons became a regular feature of Jerry’s text-heavy newspaper ads, which included detailed arguments for his positions.
After leaving his firm, he founded the nation’s first nonprofit public-interest ad agency, Public Interest Communications, which later became the Public Media Center. He developed a reputation as the Ralph Nader of advertising, representing clients such as Greenpeace, Earth Island Institute, the Abortion Rights Action League and Planned Parenthood.
The son of working-class immigrants from Poland and Romania, Jerold Irwin Mander was born in the Bronx on May 1, 1936, and grew up in Yonkers, New York. His father wanted him to go into the family garment business, making lining for men’s clothing. Jerry wanted to pursue a flashier career in advertising. After receiving his master’s degree in international economics from Columbia, he ventured off to San Francisco.
In 1965, Jerry married Anica Vesel, a feminist author and professor. The couple had two sons, Yari and Kai, and in 1977 they moved to Bolinas. Before they purchased a house on the Big Mesa, Jerry rented a room in the home of Ilka Hartmann, a photographer and activist who shared his interest in Native American affairs. Ilka collaborated with Jerry on an article he wrote for the Village Voice about Shoshone activists in Nevada who engaged the U.S. government in a battle over grazing rights.
Ilka later introduced Jerry to Native American activist Dennis Banks, who once invited him to participate in a forum in Sacramento. As the event began, Jerry still hadn’t shown up, so Ilka phoned to see where he was.
“He said he couldn’t come because his son had a baseball game—that’s how committed he was to being a father,” Ilka said. “I respected him for that.”
In 1980, when Kai and Yari were just 11 and 12 years old, their parents brought them to Hawaii to participate in a protest. The Navy had been conducting war exercises and bombing an island of spiritual importance to Hawaiians. Along with a group of local protesters, the family boarded a boat at around 3 a.m. and went under cover of darkness to the island, which was littered with shrapnel and explosives.
“We had to swim from the boat to this ‘Gilligan’s Island’ kind of uninhabited island, and stay in tents for three days, knowing we were not authorized to occupy it,” Kai said. “My father was usually writing about things and supporting others to be active. This was the first time I’d seen him really putting his body on the line.”
Despite the danger, Kai said, the experience was exhilarating and opened him to the possibilities of protest.
“Things like that can actually make a difference,” he said. “It took awhile, but the bombing did eventually stop because of these sorts of efforts.”
In 1996, Jerry founded the International Forum on Globalization, a think tank that warned that World Trade Organization-brokered trade agreements would erode worker rights, drive down wages, damage the environment and undermine democracies by concentrating corporate power. To mobilize against them, the I.F.G. convened environmental and social justice leaders from around the world.
“Jerry identified all of these great minds and brought them all together,” said Debbie Barker, the co-director of I.F.G. “These people were all giants and superstars in their own countries and fields. We would have two days of nonstop panels with speakers from around the world. It really created awareness.”
Along with trade unions and international N.G.O.s, the I.F.G. played an important role in rallying protesters at a W.T.O. meeting in Seattle, the scene of massive protests in 1999 that came to be known as the “Battle in Seattle.”
Shortly before, the I.F.G. held a teach-in at Benaroya Hall, home of the Seattle Symphony, filling the 2,500-seat auditorium. Among those attending was Annie Leonard of Greenpeace, who had read Jerry’s writings as a college student. The teach-ins violated all the communications rules that she had embraced: engage people in give-and-take, keep things simple.
“Who wants to be talked at for 10 hours a day?” she said. “I don’t know how Jerry pulled it off. He had this ability to know when something would work even if it broke every single rule. He expected a lot of the audience. He was not willing to dumb stuff down.”
Jerry became a close friend and advisor to two men who founded global mountaineering companies, grew disenchanted with capitalism and became major environmental philanthropists: Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia, and Doug Tompkins, the co-founder of The North Face.
“Jerry was the advisor and the intellectual engine behind a lot of the stuff that Yvon and Doug were interested in,” said Peter Buckley, another noted environmental philanthropist and the C.E.O. of Esprit-Europe, a clothing brand that Tompkins and his wife, Susie Tompkins Buell, founded after selling the North Face.
Jerry recruited the Grateful Dead to play at the opening of the first North Face store, in the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco. Later, he became the program director of the Foundation for Deep Ecology, the environmental nonprofit that Tompkins established.
“Jerry set the tone and he was all in,” said Quincey Tompkins Imhoff, Tompkins’s daughter and the foundation’s former executive director. “My dad had the utmost respect for him.”
Jerry served on the board of directors for Patagonia and the Whole Earth Catalog, a ’60s counterculture compendium of product reviews and ideas that Steve Jobs once described as Google 35 years before Google existed.
Skepticism of technology was a central theme of Jerry’s most famous books, “Four Arguments for The Elimination of Television” and “In the Absence of the Sacred.” The dot.com boom was in full swing when Jerry’s third wife, Koohan Paik-Mander, went to a forum on technology at Stanford University, where he was speaking on a panel. The place was packed with people who believed computers would create a sort of techno utopia. Jerry offended the crowd by warning that computers could become instruments of corporate power and surveillance.
He was roundly booed.
After things settled down, Koohan introduced herself and asked Jerry to appear in a documentary she was filming. He said no to the film, but eventually said yes to marriage. They remained partners for 27 years.
“What is remarkable to me about Jerry wasn’t just his magnificent brain,” Koohan said. “His achievements were rooted in his heart. Everything he did was poetry. He was an artist.”
She once told him he was a poet.
“No,” Jerry replied. “I’m an ad man.”