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Dr. Bronner’s eccentric philosophy of peace, love and cleanliness finally wins over the most important convert: his son.

“DON’T BE SMART, RALPH.”
To quote his father, Ralph Bronner raised his voice to the high volume at white Emanuel Bronner usually spoke.
“He used to say that to me a lot. He’d be talking about the labels, on the soap bottles being a message to all nations, and I’d say ‘So what language should it be in?’ and he’d say, ‘DON’T BE SMART, RALPH.”

Emmanuel Bronner is the Dr. Bronner of Dr. Bronner’s soaps. If you’re into health food or backpacking or acoustic guitar, (“You’d be amazed,” Ralph said, “how many people who love health food love *folk music”), you’ve probably heard of them. If you’re not, likely you haven’t.

The elder Bronner died two years ago at 89. He was, by industry accounts a brilliant chemist whose genius was showcased on a stage of soap. He was also, in the tradition of John Harvey Kellogg and others, an entrepreneuring, crusading eccentric, a breed more or less obsolete today.

The term “obsessive” hardly does justice to the extend of his mania, focused mostly on getting out his world peace message that all religions are one, all people are one. His soap, through labels crammed with as many as 3,000 words, carries that message.
He was also a father.

Ralph Bronner is 63. His white van sits in the driveway of this suburban Milwaukee home, but soon it will be on the rad again, criss-crossing America. He hits health food conventions, health food stores and other small shops, showing retailers that there are real people behind the Dr. Bronner’s name, that, as Ralph always says, “It’s not like Dr. Pepper.”
“He’s been from Yakima, Wash., to Clearwater, Fla.; from Portland, Maine to San Diego, Calif., never as a salesman nor as part of a marketing plan, -because there is no marketing plan – but as a spokesman for the soap and for All-One-God-Faith, which is not just the name of the Dr. Bronner philosophy, but also a compromise name of the company.”
“Dad wanted to call it ‘With Bombs and Guns we’re all one or none,’ Ralph said, “but now that he’s gone, we call it Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps, because that’s what we’re known for.”
He said he gives shopkeepers pamphlets and drops off some free bottles of liquid soap. “then I disappear into the night.”
Ralph has fun up some 300,000 miles and gone through two previous vans going about his father’s business. The license plate on the van, “All 1 God,” is a tribute from son to father, a sigh of the triumph of love over enormous odds.
“RALPH, DON’T INTERRUPT”

Ralph’s mother, Paula, was a maid at a Milwaukee hotel when she met Emanuel at a Germanic club dance there. Sickly, in and out of hospitals, she died in 1943 when Ralph, his brother Jim and sister Ellen were very young. He has no memory of her. During her illness, the family went on welfare and the children were sent to a series of foster homes.
“I was in 15 different homes before I was 7,” Ralph said. “One day I’d wake up on a chicken farm in Indiana. A little while later, I’d be with a couple in Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin, or at the St. Joseph’s Orphanage in Chicago.”
Finally, having bounced all over the Midwest, the children were placed with a Bavarian immigrant family in Milwaukee who raised them. Emanuel, working as a soap consultant then, was mostly poor but sporadically rich when a manufacturer would buy something he had invented. He would show up from time to time in a black 1941 Buick and give the kids thrilling rides on the hood of the car.

“I’ll never forget that car,” Ralph said. “It always smelled of apples and peppermint Lifesavers.”
Emanuel also had begun speaking publicly about a plan for world peace and apparently mad a great impression on some in his audiences. On March 9, 1945, according to the next day’s Chicago Tribune, a man was found under the elevated tracks in the 1600 block of Clybourn Avenue. He had been crucified.

The injured man, Fred Walcher, was hoping to call the attention of world leaders to Bronner’s peace plan, and idea that came to him after hearing Bronner’s speech. When police and press came to his hospital room, there was Bronner, handing out pamphlets and the authorities began to take an interest in the soap consultant.
After an incident in which Bronner created a disturbance in the dean’s office at the University of Chicago, he was jailed. A week later his sister signed the necessary papers, and he was taken to Elgin State Mental Hospital, strapped to a concrete slab and given electroshock treatments he would blame for the blindness that would accompany the last 30 years of his life.
For the next decade, Ralph and Emanuel had little contact. Ralph would come to view his father as a “ranting man who was wasting his talent as a chemist.”

Emanuel was in Elgin for six months. On his third try, he escaped. He had no money except for $20 stolen from a purse, but he found a classified ad seeking a companion to share the drive to Los Angeles. That would be good, he though. No one knew him there. By the time thy go to Las Vegas, Bronner figured he could reveal the fact that he was an escaped mental patient.

As Bronner watched the car drive hoff, he was lucky, go to L.A., spent his nights sleeping on the roof of a YMCA and his days fighting forest fires for pay. Thus, Dr. Bronner – the doctorate was self-awareded honor of his deep knowledge of soapmaking – began his climb to become what later media reports would often term him, the Pope of Soap.
‘RALPH, YOU ARE NO SON OF MINE IF YOU DON’T GO TO RUSSIA AND TELL THE LEADERS ABOUT THE ALL-ONE-GOD-FAITH”

Spring vacation 1956. Ralph was a student at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. He hadn’t often seen his father since Emanuel had moved to California, but when he got a letter asking that he “come deal with the bills”, he felt obligated to fly out. “He was living in a 10 – story apartment building, the last of it’s kind, in a seedy part of