Sarah Lamm “Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soapbox” interview
Sarah Lamm’s film, “Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soapbox,” tells the story behind Dr. Bronner’s Magical Soap, a product as renowned for its packaging as it is for its efficacy — which is considerable in its own right. The soap is a multi-purpose cleaning agent — it’s reported to perform as a body and hand soap, as well as shampoo and toothpaste, and additionally as household and industrial cleaner and who knows what else. It’s a product that has been embraced by the counter culture — plenty of interviewees in the film can attest to using it in communes — and has most recently been lauded for its progressive practices in the realm of employment and production.
The soap’s unusual label doubles as a pamphlet for the beliefs of the soaps creator, Dr. Emmanuel H. Bronner, which center around the idea that there is one god featured in all religions (something Bronner called “All-One-God-Faith) and that this god was heralded to different generations of prophets through Halley’s Comet, but also includes Bronner’s “Moral ABCs,” a somewhat labyrinthine code of behavior totaling 30,000 words (that’s six soap labels) and pulling ideas from all the world’s religion. At the heart of Bronner’s somewhat confusing — and to some, totally insane — self-made religious philosophy was the very simple desire for world peace through the brotherhood of mankind and the proper stewardship of what he called “Spaceship Earth.”
Since his death, the company has been run by the family, who tries to stay true to Bronner’s ideals. Dr. Bronner’s vision was one of “Constructive Capitalism,” where profits were shared — not communism, however, which Bronner was not a fan of. Dr. Bronner’s ideas, though they spring forth from an eccentric and confusing source, were embraced by the family. Nowadays, the company makes $18 million and gives away 70 percent of its profits — the family have capped their salaries so that they may never make more than five times that of the lowest paid employee.
JM: What got you to the point where you made a movie about this product?
SL: I was a soap user and a curious one, but I was doing some live performance art projects and I decided to do an adaptation of the soap label for a short theater piece. I wrote to the company and asked them if they would donate soap to our theater and Ralph Bronner is such an extraordinarily enthusiastic person that he called me up in person and then wanted to talk to me about what I was doing and the he sent soap and sent literature, he sent $50 and said, “Go out to lunch on me,” and then he continued to call and check in and see what was going on, so our relationship developed over time over the phone. After September 11 happened, he called me up and wanted to send me on a mission to send soap out to Ground Zero, he wanted to give it away to the people who lived down there. That sort of solidified our peculiar friendship. And then he called again — it was a series of these funny phone calls from the soap guy, you know? He called again and said that he wanted to come to New York City and perform a show about his dad, and so I said that I know how to figure that out, but can we also start documenting this? So I picked up a video camera and started following him around.
JM: What was your background prior to this?
SL: I had done live theater and some kinds of oral history sorts of projects, but never a documentary film.
JM: What did you have to do to get yourself in the place where you were going to work on a documentary?
SL: I just sort of fell into it. The early phases were fairly simple, because basically if you can get together some mics and a digital video camera you can start shooting. Once I had gotten underway, I realized, okay, I’m going to have to figure out how to finish this project. I was lucky enough to meet a lot of supportive people and people are such fans of the soap that it was amazing how people were willing to help out, mostly based on the fact that they loved the product.
JM: Did you find that the movie organized itself through Ralph’s monologues, or was that an order you had to impose on it?
SL: Well, Ralph is a tough edit because he talks a lot and he has a lot of interesting stories and they all lead from one to the next to the other, and sometimes he’ll start a story and he won’t finish it and we’ll circle back around, you don’t even know where you are. Also, there were really a couple different things that it felt important to include. I never wanted to make it just a story about Dr. Bronner or just about Ralph or just about the soap, to me it feels like all of those things go together and they had to be woven together in a way, and so the structure of the film has a flow to it that, to me, felt instinctive, as opposed to necessarily linear. The film doesn’t open and say “In 1940, X happened,” it moves back and forth between footage of Ralph and footage of Dr. Bronner and they fit on top of each other like layers – and you move back and forth between present day and past. What was so incredible was that we got access to this archival footage about two years in — it was such a great surprise, because another filmmaker had begun a project about Dr. Bronner 25 years earlier and we got his film, and so it was amazing, because I would walk into the office where I shot Ralph and then I would have footage from 25 years prior with the exact same chair, the exact same painting on the wall behind it, it was amazing, it was great to be able to juxtapose those things.
JM: Ralph is as eccentric as his father, in his own way.
SL: He is, yeah, for sure, I think that’s very fair to say. What’s interesting to me about his story is that he suffered a lot from not having a dad or from having a dad who felt like it was more important to save Spaceship Earth than to take care of his own family, and yet Ralph has really managed to transcend that and take his father’s message to heart. My interpretation is that Ralph takes a lot of the suffering that he experienced as a young person and used it in a transformative way to help other people – and he’s really driven by that mission, and also driven by the idea that it’s up to him to tell his father’s incredible story. And he does so, he does it all day long, everyday. He’s really driven to tell it. He feels like the grandkids who run the day-to-day operations of the business are really great in what they do, but they’re not driven in the same way to tell everyone they meet the story of Dr. Bronner.
JM: There’s three sides to the story — the soap itself and getting the message across about soap, there’s the external packaging that carries the philosophies, and there’s the man himself that they’re trying to get across as well. That’s a lot to accomplish.
SL: It is and it was kind of a challenge in thinking about the structure of the film. I broke it down into three elements also, and there was a point where I wanted to call the film “The Father, the Son, and the Holy Soap” because it does seem important to tell the story of Dr. Bronner and what happened with him, but also to really make anybody understand the soap itself is a great product and the business aspect in terms of how they run the business today is really very forward thinking, very progressive — and then, of course, the very human story of the relationship between Ralph and his dad, which, to me, was always the way to get into the other topics. If it was just a documentary about how the soap company runs, it couldn’t sustain itself an hour and a half.
JM: What are some of the philosophies that are wrapped up in the soap — how do they affect the soap and the business, how does that all intertwine?
SL: The heirs have the very complicated task of trying to live up to Dr. Bronner’s somewhat complicated moral ABCs all the time — and also the complicated task of trying to explain what it all means to everyone. They’ve really distilled it down to two points and Ralph would tell you these if you had him on the phone for sure. The first one is that we’re all brothers and sisters and we must care for each other and the planet. The second is that we . . . how did he explain it? It has to do with profiteering and sharing the profits that we make with the planet and the people who make it. Those would be the two core principles that they are working with now.
JM: It gets far more complicated than that, though.
SL: Dr. Bronner was interested in a lot of other things. He was ahead of his time in really promoting alternative forms of energy and really encouraging people to think about their impact on the earth. But there was a time when he had birth control tips and techniques on the bottle, but the company has removed those now — but everything from birth control to his take on Stalin and Marxism, he was very against communism, particularly in Russia, he wanted to bring attention to that. He was also against psychiatry because he had been locked up in an insane asylum against his will and given shock treatment. He has a very complex philosophy, but at its center is the phrase “We’re all one or none.”
JM: What type of person was Bronner?
SL: He read a lot. He eventually went blind, but prior to that he read everything he could get his hands on and a lot of it was about world history and politics and philosophy. He was a chemist. He was constantly trying to clarify his, I don’t know if he would have called it a “manifesto,” but he was constantly trying to get into language his beliefs and move people to change their behavior based on them. So he was more, I don’t know if rabble rouser is the right term. Organizer. He would have people over and he would have salons and he would debate people, or he would go to talks, he would speak every Wednesday at the National Women’s Organization. He went to meetings. This was also a time when, historically, people were doing that, they would come together to talk about ideas, and that was his life more than tinkering. But he invented the soap. He was a fourth-generation master soapmaker and when he came to America, he was working with soap plants, helping them refine their processes. He invented the peppermint soap — he added peppermint oil to get the smell out of dirty diapers at home and hit on the idea after he escaped from the insane asylum that he could put the moral ABC, attach it to the soap, and because everybody needs soap, they would eventually read what he had to say. His big thing was that the soap was the messenger.
It’s funny, there’s this scene in the film where there’s this archival footage of Eldritch Cleaver talking about the soap and he talks about how at first he thought it was such an odd thing that Dr. Bronner printed his manifesto on the soap bottle and then he realized that it was actually a very intelligent thing to do, particularly because he was very interested in pamphleteering and had read a lot of Thomas Paine and was very interested in the political power of the pamphlet and I think it’s sort of interesting contemplate — does Dr. Bronner’s bottle of soap have a political power in some way and, if so, what is it?
JM: How did Bronner get his start in America?
SL: He came to America in 1929, I think he was 21, and he went to the midwest and was working for various soap companies, married a woman that Ralph described as a Catholic hotel maid, had three kids. She got ill and he was preaching this peace plan — the Nazis had taken over the family business in Germany and his family was all killed in the concentration camps — so it was in the mid ‘40s that he had either a psychic break, if you think that’s what happened, or he became passionately involved in his peace cause. It depends on which member of the family you talk to. His sister had hims committed to an insane in 1946 and he escaped. He took $20 out of his sister’s purse when she wasn’t looking and hitch-hiked to California and lived in a tenement hotel and mixed up drums of this soap. He lived in poverty until he started getting orders for this soap and then in the ‘60s, the counter culture movement really hit on the soap and became the product of the counter culture to the point that I actually met a guy who had been a curator at the Smithsonian and he has acquired a bottle of the soap for the permanent collection as an example of what a counter cultural product was. The business really took off, but Dr. Bronner didn’t have a typical business mind, and so it was in the later years, the company was really suffering from his interesting management styles. His sons, Ralph and Jim, got more involved and Jim Bronner in particular had to step in and deal with the finances and deal with some lawyers and pull it from the brink of bankruptcy, basically. When Dr. Bronner passed away, the company passed onto the heirs and now today, the grandsons run and they’ve really taken it so far in terms of practicing what Dr. Bronner was teaching — they’re the ones who steered it to all-organic and they’re doing pretty incredible work with what they were given.
JM: Was it very easy for them to continue this along the same lines? I know family things get weird. Was it unanimous and easy?
SL: I’m sure they wouldn’t say it was unanimous or easy, but I think the relationships that all the principals have now — and that’s Jim Bronner’s widow Trudie, her two children, and Ralph are the four main ones, and then there are a few other relatives who are working now — a pretty effective means of communication. One of the stumbling blocks that they had early on with the whole extended family was Dr. Bronner’s label and should they change it to coincide with the beliefs of the members of the family — and they had the intelligent response to decide as a group that they couldn’t touch the label at all because if they started tinkering with it here or there, it would turn into a nightmare because the family runs such a gamut in terms of their personal beliefs, everything from born again Christians on one side to a more alternative, I don’t know if you’d say Pagan, but it’s really a wider cosmological view, I don’t know what the phrase would be, a Wiccan sympathist, goddess deity appreciater. That strikes me as pretty smart. There were definitely some road bumps along the way, but overall as family businesses go, they’re pretty healthy.
JM: What is actually on the label nowadays that’s left over?
SL: Everything, they haven’t touched it since he died, the only two things that they’ve done is they removed the birth control advice, I think there were some genuine liability fears. Also, as they’ve had to make room on the label to advertise the fact that they’ve gone all organic and moved into Fair Trade, they’ve needed a little space, so they’ve also lost a kind of confusing line about Stalin and Marxism and Jewish people that was not anti-semitic, but some customers had interpreted it as being so and they were like “This is a pain, if there’s a line that could go, we can move this one.”
JM: How involved was Ralph in the movie as you were making it?
SL: It’s an independent production, so the family didn’t have any creative control in what the final product was going to be, which really speaks highly, I think, of their trust or their integrity. I’m still amazed that anyone would let any documentarian not just into their family story but into the story of their business and livelihood, but they just miraculously let me in. Ralph, in addition to letting us follow him, he really enjoyed recounting his life, so he shared his photographs and all kinds of family archival material — he had hours and hours of audio tape of Dr. Bronner in his garage. He was an amateur photographer, so he had really done a lot of documentation and he shared all of that stuff with me. He was just behind the project and was excited about it and is still excited about it — and, in fact, wants me to shoot a sequel.
JM: Now what would the sequel be?
SL: He has a grand vision that he would go and visit all the people that he loves in his life that he helps, that are doing extraordinary things to help the Earth and show what they’re doing.
JM: Is that something you see yourself doing? Do you have your own ideas about a project like that?
SL: I don’t know. At times he’s wanted me to make a TV show. He has big plans. I don’t know yet, I just had a baby, so I’m on vacation.
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Tags: All-One-God-Faith, documentaries, Dr. Bronner's Magical Soap, Emmanuel H. Bronner, Moral ABCs, Ralph Bronner, Sarah Lamm
