Charlatan: America's Most Dangerous Huckster, the Man Who Pursued Him, and the Age of Flimflam - Hardcover

Brock, Pope

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0307339882 ISBN 13: 9780307339881

Publisher: Crown, 2008

Synopsis

In 1917, after years of selling worthless patent remedies throughout the Southeast, John R. Brinkley–America’s most brazen young con man–arrived in the tiny town of Milford, Kansas. He set up a medical practice and introduced an outlandish surgical method using goat glands to restore the fading virility of local farmers.

It was all nonsense, of course, but thousands of paying customers quickly turned “Dr.” Brinkley into America’s richest and most famous surgeon. His notoriety captured the attention of the great quackbuster Morris Fishbein, who vowed to put the country’s “most daring and dangerous” charlatan out of business.

Their cat-and-mouse game lasted throughout the 1920s and ’30s, but despite Fishbein’s efforts Brinkley prospered wildly. When he ran for governor of Kansas, he invented campaigning techniques still used in modern politics. Thumbing his nose at American regulators, he built the world’s most powerful radio transmitter just across the Rio Grande to offer sundry cures, and killed or maimed patients by the score, yet his warped genius produced innovations in broadcasting that endure to this day. By introducing country music and blues to the nation, Brinkley also became a seminal force in rock ’n’ roll. In short, he is the most creative criminal this country has ever produced.

Culminating in a decisive courtroom confrontation that pit Brinkley against his nemesis Fishbein, Charlatan is a marvelous portrait of a boundlessly audacious rogue on the loose in an America that was ripe for the bamboozling.

About this title

About the Author

POPE BROCK is the author of the critically acclaimed Indiana Gothic, the story of his great-grandfather’s murder in 1908. Brock has written for numerous publications, including Rolling Stone, Esquire, GQ, and the London Sunday Times Magazine. He lives in upstate New York with his twin daughters, Molly and Hannah.

Reviews

Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley

One day in the fall of 1917, a Kansas farmer named Bill Stittsworth, 46 years of age, showed up at the clinic that had recently been opened in the hamlet of Milford by a medical quack named John R. Brinkley. "His visit didn't seem like the Annunciation," Pope Brock writes in this hugely amusing if somewhat sobering book, "any more than he looked like the archangel Gabriel." Stittsworth reluctantly admitted that he was suffering the condition for which Viagra is now prescribed. As Brinkley tried to dream up a solution, the farmer looked wistfully out the window, "pondering the livestock," and said: "Too bad I don't have billy goat nuts."

Precisely what happened thereafter "is in dispute," but two nights later Stittsworth returned to the clinic, "climbed onto the operating table," and awaited Brinkley. "Masked, gowned, and rubber gloved, Brinkley entered with a small silver tray, carried in both hands, like the Host. On it were two goat testicles in a bed of cotton. He set the tray down, injected anesthetic," and Brinkley was on his way. Two weeks later Stittsworth "reappeared with a smile on his face." As he told other farmers about his good fortune, men -- and then women -- began to queue up for injections of billy goat magic, with the result that Brinkley soon "became a pioneer in gland transplants" at exactly the moment when America was ready for them.

Brock says, accurately, that "there has probably never been a more quack-prone and quack-infested country than the United States," and the period between the two world wars -- the years when Texas Guinan welcomed customers to her New York speakeasy with the gleeful cry, "Hello, suckers!" -- turned out to be a high-water mark of quackery, as the widespread longing for health and eternal youth coincided with the age of science: "Mankind had found wisdom at last. Science! Technology! These were the new church. Adam was out, apes were in. Rationality ruled. Rationality had made the airplane possible, and instant coffee. Few realized that it also made possible the golden age of quacks." Brock continues:

"In this dizzy world of wonders anything was possible, and it all conspired to make the average citizen as guileless as the wide-mouthed shad. One measure of the scientific gullibility of the age is the number of mythical animals that were now positively declared to exist. During this period between the world wars, sightings were reported and searches launched for, among others, the snoligostus, the ogopogo, the Australian bunyip, the whirling wimpus, the rubberado, the rackabore, and the cross-feathered snee. . . . Advances in medicine and hygiene had already increased the average lifetime from forty-one years in 1870 to more than fifty-five by the early 1920s. Now the sky was the limit -- biblical life spans, some researchers said, could become a reality -- all thanks to the homely gonad and the brave new science of endocrinology."

John R. Brinkley was just the man to seize the day. A farm boy from the North Carolina mountains, he had found his way into quackery by the time he reached his 20s, and though a brief flirtation with "electric medicine from Germany" -- "injecting colored water into rear ends" -- got him into jail in South Carolina in 1913, he just headed west and bounced right back. He had an "uncanny grasp of psychology, both mass and individual," and he "understood that the relationship between a man and a woman is often less fraught than that between man and member." He was a strange guy, "a sort of down-home egghead, crisply confident and alert to a thousand details," who occasionally "got liquored up" and turned briefly violent, but he could turn on the blarney and the charm as fast as you please.

The people of Milford thought he was the Second Coming. The astonishing success of his clinic, which by 1918 was a 16-room operation called the Brinkley Institute of Health, brought a great wave of prosperity to this dreary little crossroads. He was way ahead of his time, using advertising and radio and anything else he could exploit to spread the word about the magic he could perform. In 1929 he dreamed up something called Medical Question Box, in which listeners to his radio station could send in their health grievances: "Brinkley would read some of the letters, diagnose each case, and suggest treatment -- all on the radio." He told them what drugs to buy from pharmacists who were in on the scam: "The pharmacists kicked back one dollar to Brinkley on each jar sold (at about six times normal retail) and kept the rest."

Of course he had enemies, the most influential and determined of whom was Morris Fishbein. He was the editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, which at the time was far short of the prestige it enjoys today, but it gave him a platform sufficiently visible for him to become "the great quack buster of his day, and later the hellhound on Brinkley's trail." The first time word reached him about Brinkley's antics, Fishbein turned his attention to "the greatest cause of his career: the professional extermination of John Brinkley, M.D.," but it took him a long time to bring that off, and Brinkley didn't go down without one hell of a fight.

Brinkley was like a Shmoo, the round-bottomed inflatable toy of my youth. Bop it this way or that, it always rolled right back with a big smile on its silly face. You couldn't keep John Brinkley down, at least not for long. In 1922 when he went to Los Angeles, "the most quack-intensive town in the nation," he found a "vast sucker pool" and aimed to cash in on it by building a 36-room hospital at immense expense, but then the California medical board "found his résumé riddled with lies and discrepancies" and denied him a license. Never mind. He simply went back to Milford, telling his wife, "The harder they hit me, the higher I bounce," and expanded his operation there. An advertisement said, "It is modern throughout, private rooms with bath, and the latest and most modern equipment, telephone in every room, private rooms, reading rooms, lounging rooms, large spacious lobby and dining room, modern drug store and barber shop."

His radio station in Milford, KFKB, was determined by Radio Digest in 1930 to be "the most popular radio station in the United States." That same year he lost his medical license, so he decided to run for governor of Kansas as a write-in independent. He almost certainly would have won had not the rules been switched at the last minute, eliminating as many as 50,000 of his votes on specious grounds. Never mind. He bounced right back and went to Mexico, where he set up a radio operation that by 1932 was up to an astonishing 1 million watts, making it "far and away the most powerful on the planet," so powerful that "on clear nights Brinkley reached Alaska, skipped across to Finland, was picked up by ships on the Java Sea. In later years Russian spies reportedly used the station to help them learn English."

The programming on Brinkley's Mexican station wasn't just pitches for health schemes and the extreme right-wing views to which he had become susceptible. In order to attract and keep listeners, he brought in country and Tex-Mex musicians; among those tuning in were the young Chet Atkins, Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash and others who eventually became famous and influential country musicians themselves. Stations that broadcast into the United States from Mexico were known as "border busters," and Brinkley's XERA was the biggest of all, inadvertently leading the way to the "full-scale cultural upheaval" that country music brought about.

That was a nice side product, but it couldn't distract attention from the mounting numbers of Brinkley's patients who died in or after leaving his clinic. In 1930 the Kansas City Star "published the names of five people who had expired at Brinkley's hospital since the fall of 1928" -- "His signature was on their death certificates" -- and his license was revoked that same year after it was shown that 42 people, "some of whom weren't ill when they arrived, had died either by his own hand or under his supervision." His final numbers are unknown, but they are high; "though perhaps not the worst serial killer in American history, ranked by body count he is at least a finalist for the crown."

This, needless to say, is where Pope Brock's tale turns dark and cautionary, a reminder of the high price of gullibility and ignorance. These are aspects of human nature that just don't go away; even today, in the age of supposed medical enlightenment and sophistication, "rejuvenation is a global bazaar of infomercials and Web addresses, tools and toys for every need." John R. Brinkley may be long dead (since 1942), but his heirs in quackery continue to flourish.

Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Reviewers across the board bought what Pope Brock is selling. The author reeled them in with the incredible Brinkley, a quack who was one of a kind yet revealed so much about the era in which he lived. Critics were mesmerized by Brock’s ability to connect Brinkley’s life to other episodes in American history and fill them with vitality. Yet the true potency of Charlatan derives from Brock’s storytelling skill: many critics spent much of their reviews retelling the highly entertaining tales from the book. Like the work to which it was most often compared, Erik Larson’s Devil in the White City (**1/2 May/June 2003), Charlatan will surely prove to be popular with those who love American history as well as with those simply in search of a good yarn.
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

John Brinkley, who grew up poor in rural North Carolina but attended Rush Medical College in Chicago, got his start touring as a medicine man hawking miracle tonics and became famous for transplanting goat testicles into impotent men. Brinkley built his own radio station in 1923, hustling his pseudoscience over the airwaves and giving an outlet to astrologers and country music. His nemesis was Dr. Morris Fishbein, the buoyant, compulsively curious editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association whose luminary friends included Sinclair Lewis, Clarence Darrow and H.L. Mencken. Fishbein took aim at Brinkley in JAMA, lay publications and pamphlets distributed by the thousands. Even after the Kansas State Medical Board yanked his medical license in 1930, Brinkley ran twice for governor of Kansas and almost won. Finally, Brinkley sued Fishbein for libel and lost in a spectacular showdown. Brock (Indiana Gothic) did tremendous research on this rollicking story, but the result is at times unfocused, overwritten and digressive, borrowing just a little too much from the overblown rhetoric of its subject. 8 pages of b&w photos not seen by PW. (Feb. 5)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1

In the period before the First World War, the Reinhardt brothers, Willis and Wallace, owned a thriving chain of anatomical museums: the London Medical Institute, the Paris Medical Institute, the Heidelberg, the Copenhagen, and so forth. Located in Des Moines, Fort Wayne, East St. Louis, and other towns throughout the Midwest, they were devoted to the documentation and cure of "men's secret diseases." Most had big display windows facing the street, and what the Reinhardts put in those windows was the talk of the industry. Their most celebrated exhibit, in Minneapolis, was entitled "The Dying Custer."

He lay like Saint Sebastian, bristling with arrows, in a lavish three-dimensional tableau. Redskins, corpses, and plaster vultures added richness to the scene, but what kept passersby bunched at the window, staring in for minutes on end, was the slow, rhythmic heaving of Custer's chest. They gazed till their own breathing fell into sync--it was irresistible--and that gave the Reinhardts' message time to go to work. True, Custer's connection to impotence may have been largely metaphorical, but to a certain fretful portion of the populace it struck home. Power gone, youth destroyed--but not yet, not quite yet. Inside this building there was even hope for Yellow Hair.

Mixing terror and hope was the Reinhardts' stock-in-trade. Their window in Gary, Indiana--again designed by their visionary house artist, Monsieur Brouillard--featured a diorama of a doctor and nurse trying to save a syphilitic baby with the help of a wheezing resuscitator. But displays alone, no matter how artful, didn't make the Reinhardt twins tops in their field. From their headquarters at the Vienna Medical Institute in Chicago, where they rode herd on some three dozen franchises, they enforced levels of standardization and quality control remarkably ahead of their time. Starting with their training of salesmen: nobody worked for the Reinhardts without first graduating from the "instantaneous medical college" at the home office. This was followed by more training at the Gary branch, where each recruit was given a white coat, asked to grow a Vandyke, and made to practice his patter as if it were Gilbert and Sullivan. Only then were real customers released upon them. Serving as exhibition guides, the floor men were expected to nail twenty percent of all prospects--eight out of an average forty walk-ins a day--or look for another job. The manager of each institute sent headquarters a daily financial report in triplicate.

Admission was free at all these places. The abba-dabba juice was not. Bottles of it were on sale at the exit, a fabled elixir guaranteed to soothe, stimulate, inflate, reinstate, backdate, laminate, and in general make "the withered bough quicken and grow green again," while at the same time curing and/or preventing the clap; it adapted to the needs of the customer. What was in it? What was in any of them? What was in Dr. Raphael's Cordial Invigorant, America's first big virility tonic in the 1850s, whose royal Arabian formula was made vastly more potent by the "magical influence of modern Astrologers"? What was the recipe for Baume de Vie, Elixir Renovans, the Syrop Vitae of Anthony Bellou, the Glorious Spagyric of Jone Case, or any of the others in lands and ages stretching back to the dawn of time? For the record, the Reinhardts' tonic contained three ingredients--alcohol, sugar, and a dash of "Aqua Missourianas quantitat sufficiat ad cong II"--but this is pedantry.

Big as they were, the Reinhardts still had plenty of competition. Independents with similar rackets were out there grubbing in the twilight, men like Dr. Burke of Knoxville, Tennessee, who in 1907 was running his own small shop with the help of an assistant, Dr. John Brinkley.

Young Brinkley was a likely lad of twenty-two. To call him a doctor was, in the strictest sense, inaccurate, but if the white coat reassured people, the healing had begun. In truth he was the floor man and he worked on commission. Brinkley would study a prospect as he came through the door, then materialize--not too soon--at his elbow. The young physician chatted, he chuckled, he took a grave interest; he showed the man around. Soon the two were passing along the main line of exhibits: a stage-by-stage depiction of the male member in syphilitic decline. It spoke for itself. With each new cabinet the organ grew more deformed and the colors changed. Perhaps leprosy was mentioned by way of comparison.

In the last room the customer met The Boy.

It was known by that name throughout the trade, and every "free educational anatomical institute" worth its salt had one. The scene was replayed countless times: while the salesman hung back, or bent to tie his shoe, the customer approached a rectangular pillar walled in glass. It was pitch-dark inside. The mark moved toward it cautiously, perhaps glancing back at his guide for the go-ahead, peered in close trying to see what was in there--and then the lights blazed on full, and the grinning wax face of an idiot sprang into view. Horrifying as it was, the warning above it was even worse:

LOST MANHOOD

The customer knew then that he wasn't just looking at a vile mask with dripping yellow eyes. He was looking at the future. He was looking at himself.

After this bit of venereal kabuki--"the convincer," in quack talk--the rest was usually easy. As Dr. Burke sat at a desk, possibly lost in a medical tome, Dr. Brinkley brought the poor sinner forward and introduced him. Burke gave him an "instant consultation" ("Are you ever thirsty?" "Do you sometimes suffer from fatigue?"--warning signs all) and produced a bottle of peerless tonic, which the man was assured would save his organ and probably his life. The price was almost as big a shock as The Boy, between ten and twenty dollars, but who in his right mind would economize at a time like this? Moments later the customer was standing in the alley with the hooey in his hand and the door shut firmly behind him.

How much satisfaction Brinkley felt at such moments is unknown. The greatest quacks never gloat for long; when deception is the drug, there's no building up a supply. Besides, he had so much ambition that working in two tatty rooms with a substandard Boy could have been depressing at times.

On the other hand, he might have taken pride in having gotten so far so young. Brinkley came from the tiny town of Beta, North Carolina, tucked in the Great Smokies not far from the Tennessee line. Like his neighbors, he grew up on a hilly little farm that produced mostly rocks. He ate mush and greens and lashed gunnysacks to his feet for winter boots. The thick forests and hard climbs, the rainy days when bowls of fog gathered in the valleys, the strangers scarce as hen's teeth: all this conspired to make the outside world seem little more than a rumor, so it was natural that most people, if they started out there, stayed put.

Not Brinkley. "Kind of a recklesslike boy," one neighbor called him. "Lively as a cricket," another said. And all the while he burned with a bitter fire, and he dreamed. ("I thought of John Brinkley freeing the slaves," he said later, "John Brinkley illuminating the world, John Brinkley facing an assassin's bullet for the sake of his people, John Brinkley healing the sick.") But with the slaves freed, the world lit, and nobody caring enough about him to kill him, he chose number four--sort of. First he married Sally Wike, a spitfire from a neighboring farm, as eager as he was to escape the prison of the mountains. Then "he got up a little play," as Mrs. Ann Bennett, who boarded them briefly, recalled it, "and he and his wife and some more people went on the road from town to town, you know, giving little plays."

He sang and he danced and he healed. Barely twenty, Brinkley got his precocious start touring as a type of medicine man known as a Quaker doctor. Though, in the general run of Quakers, specialty numbers were almost unknown, some itinerant quacks in those days liked to impersonate them, trading on their legendary rectitude. Some folks saw through the act, but it hardly mattered. Fooling some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time was plenty.

They usually performed at night. A platform was unfolded and torches placed at each corner as the audience gathered, drawn by handbills and word of mouth. While there is no specific record of a Brinkley performance, there was a set pattern to most Quaker-doctor shows. First a fiddler or a dancer got the crowd warmed up. A short morality play followed, in which a noble head of house or ringleted female died pathetically for lack of a miracle tonic, identified by name. Finally the physician himself (Brinkley) shot onstage in a dinner-plate hat, cutaway coat, and pious pants that buttoned up the sides, theeing and thouing, singing and selling, waving a bottle of Ayer's Cathartic Pills. Or maybe Burdock Blood Bitters or Aunt Fanny's Worm Candy. One thing was for sure, whatever it was cured whatever you had.

With his unerring nose for where the money was, Brinkley had already become an American archetype: the quack on the boards. For in our nation with its special genius for swindle--where swampland, beefsteak mines, and tickets to nonexistent attractions practically sell themselves--medical fraud had always been the king of cons. At the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago, a man dressed as a cowboy appeared onstage and strangled rattlesnakes by the dozen. He called what came out of them snake oil. People bought it.

Of course quacks have flourished in all ages and cultures, for nothing shows reason the door like cures for things. Unlike most scams, which target greed, quackery fires deeper into Jungian universals: our fear of death, our craving for miracles. When we see night approaching, nearly all of us are rubes.

Still, there has probably never been a more quack-prone and quac...

Edition details

• Publisher: Crown
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0307339882
• ISBN 13: 9780307339881
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336