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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 Los Angeles, in a room stacked high with thousands of photo stats of materials about his philosophy,” Ralph said. “He was sleeping on blankets over big drums containing mineral salts, which he made and sold.” He also believed in them. Ralph remembers that his father insisted he bring mineral salts to restaurants to put on ice cream and watermelon, to neutralize the sugar.

The reunion of father and son pretty much confirmed Ralph’s feeling that Emanuel was hopelessly the bend. When Bronner opened the door, he was wearing a leopard-print bathing suit. Later when businessmen asked to meet with him, Ralph was asked if he had not been put off by such a greeting. It could have been worse, he said. “Sometimes Dad wore nothing at all.”

For his vacation, Ralph go to prepare and send out thousands of dollars worth of billings, not the “few” bills he expected. He also had made the mistake of taking tying his high school, so Bronner had him type for the printers the jambalaya of messages that would appear on this soap labels. Here is just a tiny taste, seasoned liberally by Bronner’s fondness for the exclamation point:

Small minds decay! Average minds delay! Great minds teach All-One today! Win victory, & all stand by you; give up? All deny you! Remember the only difference between the brave and the coward, the brave has an ideal to fight for, such as teaching the moral ABC, that at once unites the human race, in All-One-God-Faith! As teach Abraham & Israel, sigh of the messenger of God’s law, Halley’s comet, the Blazing Star of Buddha – Bethlehem – Mohammed!

The labels also contained mention of Lenin, Rabbi Hillel, Carl Sagan, the importance of planting trees, the threat of Halley’s comet hitting the Earth, some love poetry, a revision of Rudyard Kipling’s “If” and always the caution “Dilute! Dilute! OK!

The whole message is parceled out over various labels in the product line, with the entirety of I coming to some 20,000 words. Bronner, looking at the text as the final truth, tinkered with it incessantly, always finding a few worlds, maybe a hyphen, that wasn’t quite precise.

“He’d ask me to retype the whole thing, over and over,” Ralph said. “There’s only so much you can do with white-out. Later when anyone would come to visit him, he’d have them read it to him, capitals, punctuation, every bit, searching for mistakes.”

Finally Ralph had had it. He called the All-One-God-Faith document “crap.” “I was cruel and cocky from college,” he said. He already had made fun of the soaps, using samples his father sent to him to load quirt guns for dormitory fights with his friends.

Ralph returned to Wisconsin (which he had grown to love), where he later would marry, have children, teach in an inner-city Milwaukee school and make his home in the area rather than join the soap business in California.
“Dad was impossible to work for,” Ralph said. He recalls arguing for two days over the precise meaning of “You reap what you sow (was it ten times of a million?).”

“Finally,” Ralph said, “I threw something against the wall and walked out.” Another time they argued about the birth-control recipe. It called for lemons, and Ralph said it couldn’t be a universal recipe because lemons weren’t universally available. His father looked stunned, “THEY’RE NOT?!? Ralph said how about Eskimos, could they get lemons? Again Bronner looked stunned for a moment, and then said in triumph, “THEY COULD GO TO A FISH FRY.”

“ALL ONE, RALPH”

In the late 60’s, a funny thing happened. The soap started to sell. The young people of that decade discovered that his Pure Castile 18 in 1 soap was good for shampooing their hair, washing their bell bottoms, defeating their cats and scrubbing down their VW buses. Sitting in a sudsy tub with no other reading material in hand, they’d pursue the labels, and the words would speak to some of them.
“People would soak off the label for framing,” Ralph said. He has a letter from a Dr. Bronner’s fan claiming, “Your label is my bible.” When he’d visit California, he’d be amazed to find hippies gathered around Bronner, “like a guru.”
Such indications of devotion to a product and a philosophy began to make him look at his father’s life’s working in an entirely new light.

“There are other labels with messages,” Ralph said. Celestial Seasonings has some pretty safe sayings, but we’re the only one to say “Stalin was a greater mass murderer than Hitler.”

Emanuel Bronner had come to America after a falling-out with his strict Orthodox Jewish father in Germany. The senior Bronner wanted his son to stick to the family trade, soap making, and not get involved in politics. Young Emanuel, however, often brought up political issues with other workers at the soap factory.

The last communication Emanuel had from his parents came from the concentration camp in which they died. It was a post card that said, “You were right. Your Loving Father.”
“his father had always told Dad not to enjoy himself, “ Ralph recalled. “When Dad started to make money, he’d send me a check from time to time with ‘enjoy or you’re not my son’ written on it.”

Bronner went blind and, later, began to show the tell-tale signs of Parkinson’s disease. He also became calmer and easier to deal with. Ralph spent more time helping out with the business. Now being run by Ralph, his sister-in-law, Trudy is the CEO, and her eldest son, David is the president. Ralph’s brother Jim dies in 1998; sister Ellen died many years before. The business has grown so that it now has sales of $5 million a year, and as Ralph put it, “We live the label.”

That means more than just using the soaps faithfully. IT means paying for wells to be dug in impoverished villages in Ghana, giving gigantic bonuses to the 15 employees at the factory, donating a 1,200-acre plot near Mt. Palomar Observatory in Southern California to the Boys and Girls Club. Bronner had bought the land thinking that viewing the stars made one aware of God’s majesty – and also it was a good place to keep track of Halley’s Comet.

“RALPH, WHY AM I ALIVE?”

“He’d ask me that in the last years of his life,” Ralph said, “and I’d tell him it was so he could hear what he had done. I ‘d tell him about all the glowing letters and comments about the soap and his message.” Ralph recalled after attending the speeches his father gave on his usual subjects (fluoridation, communism, etc.), “He’d go on and on and then switch from fluoridation to peace or to some remembrance of the family. Slowly, people would get up and leave. Dad was blind; he didn’t know. After a while there’d be only a couple of people left, and someone would have to tell Dad it was time to go. He just didn’t know when to stop.”

Seven years ago, Ralph visited Elgin. “I looked at the picnic tables and imagined Dad sitting there,” he said.
He was asked if he ever had longed for a father who was more normal. “Normal?” Ralph said. “Many of my neighbors up and down the street are normal. They want to get rid of their crabgrass. They want the Packers to win. They bithch about the government.” Ralph’s eyes glistened, and he put out a hand to steady himself.
“I don’t love normal.”

* Ralph plays guitar and has helped run a non-profit coffee house for over 33 years.