By the 1930s, the law of supply and demand dictated that medicine showmen move on to other occupations. Rural consumers had other ways to get both headache remedies and shows. Drugstores, once rare, were now common, making proprietary and ethical drugs widely available. Formerly isolated farmers drove cars on paved roads to movie theaters, which exhibited the country’s most popular entertainment. No single factor ended medicine shows, however. There were actually many reasons why medicine shows became extinct.
Federal regulations governing medicine manufacture and advertising were the legislative wedge that was the beginning of the end of medicine shows. Such laws were a long time in coming, because the United States Congress had an institutional resistance to regulating the country’s laissez-faire economy, or interfering with states’ rights. As Georgia Congressman Herbert Spencer said, “The Federal Government was not created for the purpose of cutting your toe nails or corns.”1 Even Adam Smith, in the eighteenth century, argued against regulation of patent medicines. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, however, social Darwinism was countered by statesmen and philosophers who had a more humanitarian outlook. Legislation was the solution, in the minds of many social progressives, to the rapaciousness of the robber barons.
The first federal legislation to regulate medicine passed the Senate in 1892. A drug was deemed adulterated under the law if it fell below “the professed standard under which it was sold,” a standard so vague it was unenforceable. Manufacturers, who were accustomed to setting their own standards, groused that the law was unconstitutional, unenforceable and irrelevant. Charles Fletcher, the maker of Castoria, fumed:
If the business were an underhanded one, or if in the preparation of these articles injurious substances were being used, or if there were anything in the nature of fraud in respect to a large proportion of the well-known proprietary articles, there might be some excuse for special legislation against the manufacturers. No such excuse now exists.2
Fletcher and his cohorts in the Proprietary Association, which was formed in 1881, lobbied successfully against the bill. The legislation died in the House, but opponents of quackery soldiered on.3
Various regulatory bills died aborning over the next several years, suffocated by the combined efforts of the Proprietary Association and the advertising industry. “When Missouri pharmacists sought a formula disclosure bill, ‘it brought down on us,’ asserted one druggist, ‘all the patent medicine men in the state like a flock of wild pigeons.’”4 Employing a similar flying-pest metaphor, a member of the Proprietary Association complained that “the crop of bills that has swept over the country … has been like unto the locusts that spread over Egypt.”5
By 1905, however, there were deep divisions within the Proprietary Association. One faction continued to resist all regulation, while another more compliant group was prepared to make concessions. In a combined effort to dampen their opponents’ fervor, both factions voted to self-regulate alcohol content and refrain from “all over-statements” in their advertisements. Individually, proprietary makers continued to lobby members of Congress against regulations; but ultimately, their efforts were destined to fail.6
In 1906, after a long, acrimonious struggle between the Proprietary Association and Congress, President Theodore Roosevelt signed into law the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. The law merely required that all addictive drugs be listed on labels. Manufacturers, who had feared more stringent legislation than that which actually passed, cheerfully listed such ingredients as laudanum, cocaine, opium, morphine, and alcohol.
The law did not enjoin against adding narcotics to children’s syrups, and consumers in 1906 were not in the label-reading habit. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup, for example, was a syrup for teething babies that was advertised with idealized mother-and-child imagery. Anyone, teething or not, would have been soothed by Winslow’s syrup: It was loaded with morphine. When a Collier’s writer, Samuel Hopkins Adams, asked his maid how she could leave her small children alone at night, she replied, “Sure, they’re alright. Just one teaspoonful of Winslow’s an’ they lay like dead until morning.”7
The 1906 law applied to labeling, but not to advertising. Onstage, pitchmen were still free to make outrageous claims for their remedies. The statute’s language that referenced “false and misleading” labels was amended in 1912 to read “false and fraudulent.” Fraud is difficult to prove because it entails intent. Witnesses have been known to dissemble about their frame of mind in sworn testimony. Still, the law was a demoralizing setback for those in the trade, who had previously operated with no constraints at all.
Stung by the legislative defeat, the Proprietary Association decided once more to regulate itself. By 1914, narcotics for children and abortifacients had been taken out of production. The industry recovered its morale and puffed itself with an air of respectability. Association-member firms concentrated on remedies for non-life-threatening maladies such as halitosis, body odor, and fatigue. Small-time operators continued to do as they pleased, making claims for cancer and consumption cures. Association members took pains to distance themselves from their erstwhile brethren.8
The proprietary-medicine industry continued to flourish during the first two decades of the twentieth century, but the 1930s brought a flurry of proposed anti-quackery legislation. A propaganda war ensued between manufacturers on one hand and the newly formed Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) on the other. The FTC’s interest was the elimination of false advertising claims and the FDA addressed itself to which kinds of drugs should be available over the counter. While the two agencies fought the quacks, they also wrangled with each other over jurisdiction. Allied with these federal agencies were the AMA and the American Pharmaceutical Association. In 1929, the first militant consumer’s group, Consumer’s Research, had joined the fray. All parties were egged on by a horde of muckraking journalists, who modeled their work on The Jungle, Upton Sinclair’s exposé of the meat-packing industry. Gradually, the tumult reached the ears of consumers.
Card advertising Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup.
By 1936, thirty-nine states had passed laws regulating drugs, but Congress equivocated on the issue until the Elixir Sulfanilamide fiasco. The elixir, diethylene glycol, was a lethal compound that had been tested for appearance, taste, and odor, but not toxicity. Sold as an anti-infection drug for children, it destroyed young kidneys and resulted in scores of lingering, painful deaths. The drug, which was more effective as a solvent, was taken off the market, but not every bottle was seized. It was rumored that the elixir was a cure for gonorrhea, and several afflicted people poisoned themselves with the under-the-counter supply. Even though Elixir Sulfanilamide was a prescription, not a proprietary drug, Congress was spurred to action and passed the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act of 1938.9
For the first time, makers of proprietaries were compelled to list all active ingredients, make only supportable claims, refrain from creating medicines for life-threatening illnesses, and reveal all relevant facts. The element of fraud was not necessary to prove a violation. Medical devices, long big sellers in the medicine-show trade, were also regulated. Legislation, in combination with more sophisticated consumers, helped to bring the curtain down on medicine shows.10
Eventually, medicine shows no longer served a purpose. As the twentieth century wore on and transportation and communication developed, rural America broke out of its isolation and the “rube” became extinct. Without him, there could be no traveling medicine show. Toward the end of his career, Thomas Kelley noted the change:
Progress is on the march to shatter the rural customs of yesterday; the natives are wiser now, here, there and everywhere in North America. Soon there will be no such thing as a rube and if you think otherwise, you are only kidding yourself. A few more years and you are going to see an automobile in every barnyard, which will take the farmers and their families to the city lights of twenty and thirty miles away in less time than it formerly took to hitch up the old grey mare and drive to the crossroads…. The world is changing…. the presentation of theatrical entertainment is soon to change as sure as there is tea in China.11
Specifically, what Kelley predicted was the ascendance of motion pictures as the primary form of mass entertainment; he was, of course, correct. When motion pictures first came on the scene, they were one-reel shorts that were used as “chasers” in vaudeville houses to clear the auditorium for the next show. Kelley knew that motion pictures would expand to six and seven reels—a full evening’s entertainment. He asked, “What chance has a med-man, with big expenses, tons of equipment, and seven to nine performers, against a fellow who comes along carrying his entire show in a tin can?”12
Indeed, the growth of the movie industry mushroomed. The first movie theater opened in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, in 1905, and by 1909 there were another 4,000 venues. By 1910, five million people a day were going to nickelodeons in any one of 12,000 locations. Medicine shows were not the only live entertainment threatened by these electric light-and-shadow plays. Vaudeville, burlesque, and legitimate theater all felt the squeeze. Theater operators had to charge $1.50 for live shows, but could easily meet expenses with a five-cent ticket for a film. One theater manager said, “The picture business is bound to grow because it furnishes satisfying entertainment to the masses at the lowest possible price of admission. In my opinion the best movement the regular manager can make is to enter the moving picture field themselves.”13
Motion pictures were more convenient for both manager and audience. The former had less upkeep and audiences had many showings of early short films from which to choose. Americans were tiring of variety shows and melodrama, preferring the naturalism of the new medium. Cliff Mann’s family adjusted to the trend:
Well, I figured we might as well get in on the money, adapt movies to the medicine show. We could bring movies to those people, if that’s what they’d rather see. In 1936, the last summer I traveled with my family’s outfit, I talked Uncle Jude into building me a little projection room on a two-wheeled trailer. He bought me a sixteen-millimeter projector, some film and a big sheet. We took our traveling movies and our medicine down to those little towns in south Texas that still didn’t have a movie theater, and we flashed films on the sheet in a tent. At first we just showed the movies between our regular shows, but the movies got to be more popular than the live entertainment.14
When Mann left his family to strike out on his own, he got a job sweeping a movie theater. He went on to manage movie theaters and used his experience with medicine-show ballyhoo to create promotions.15 The old life was good preparation for several new careers. Many medicine show advance men were absorbed into politics as campaign workers, doing much the same kind of preparatory work as before. Well-known performers who perfected their craft on the medicine show platform are too numerous to mention.
Medicine shows also faced competition from other outdoor entertainments. Amusement parks, devised around the turn of the century, caught on quickly with the public. They were an unintended consequence of electric trolleys, which were invented to get workers to their jobs. All classes of people began riding them for fun, and soon parks sprang up at the ends of trolley lines. Roller skating and bicycle riding were other inexpensive activities that took audiences away from performers.
The years immediately following World War I put yet another crimp in the medicine-show business. Farmers saw the price of wheat fall from two dollars a bushel to sixty-seven cents, and couldn’t pay the interest on their mortgages. Bankruptcies and foreclosures were epidemic years before the Great Depression.16 Farmers who were under a financial strain did not favor pitchmen with an unnecessary purchase. Medicine men were reduced to performing in the smallest, most isolated southern villages, and literally chased a dollar by following government agents who handed out agricultural adjustment checks.17 Local authorities grew more hostile to itinerant performers, charging as much as $1,000 for a license in some southern counties.18
Big traveling outdoor shows were dead by World War I. Cities were too congested with motor traffic to accommodate the grand horse-drawn parade. Ornamental wagons and calliopes held no charm for the ordinary family who got around in their own automobile.19 What this combination of factors didn’t kill, the Depression finished. Federal agents, who were charged with enforcing the 1938 Food and Drug Act, were all over the few remaining pitchmen. By the 1940s, there were only a few large medicine shows in operation, and even the street-corner pitchman was on his way to the history books. During World War II, gasoline rationing made touring impossible.20 A few small family shows held on, but not for long.
By 1920, radio took free programs right into farmers’ living rooms. In the South, “The percentage of drugs and medicinal products ranged so high among hillbilly advertisers that it almost seemed as if the format of the old-time medicine show had been transferred to the hillbilly radio show.”21 Wine of Cardui and Black Draught, two of many staple nostrums in nineteenth century farm houses, continued to sell briskly. The products were advertised heavily on country music stations, according to the theory that country folk still disdained physicians and preferred to doctor themselves. Alka Seltzer, an unknown product in 1933, was introduced to rural audiences on the National Barn Dance broadcasts, extending the old medicine-show idea to a new remedy and the new medium.22
Indeed, country performers have been the caretakers of the last vestiges of the medicine show. As late as 1984, a popular country music performer known as “Doc” Tommy Scott toured with a show that combined variety entertainment with pitches for a liniment aptly named “Snake Oil.”23 In the same year, the Los Angeles Times ran a story about Michael Roe, who toured Southern California in a cattle truck selling his homemade medications. Dressed in a vest and top hat and billing his pitch as the Survival Magic Show, Roe sold medicine made from herbs he gathered himself. Taking a page from Healy and Bigelow, Roe says he gets his formulas from “old Indians and Mexicans.” Roe complains that “People are over-entertained these days. You really need to get their attention before they’ll listen to you.”24
Cliff Mann would agree with Roe:
I’d like to go back to the medicine show days, roll it back to say, 1937. We lived slower then. People those days had time to visit each other, to walk barefoot down the street, to run see a tramp medicine show, We’ve gotten off the track. People need to be a little dumb, not so worldly. It was better when a feller was a little more trusting and didn’t think he knew everything. Because he don’t anyway.25
The medicine-show concept is evident in the structure of television programming, in which commercials are sandwiched between entertainment. Infomercials take the concept one step further: Trading on the current fascination for the private lives of celebrities, these half-hour-long (or longer) pitches blur the line between program and commercial. As faux talk shows, infomercials feature celebrities who willingly discuss their complexion, marital, and weight problems on-camera in order to entice the viewer to buy a product.
Another latter-day incarnation of the medicine show is the health expo—events that are held in hotels and convention centers. While FDA officials fume, sellers of everything from herbs to healing crystals, and yes, even electric belts, hawk their wares from portable booths. Some pitches, according to a 1985 FDA report, contain claims that sound as if they were written a century ago. One pitchman was heard to extol a fluid that would “cure cancer, kidney stones, multiple sclerosis, inflammatory illness, viral infections and bacterial organisms.” A laboratory analysis found that the fluid was hydrogen peroxide. Like “an endangered species of migratory birds,” a handful of pitchmen still work flea markets, and county and state fairs.26
Thomas Kelley said, “There is no such thing as a dyed-in-the-wool rube anymore. They see too much, hear too much; they’ve smartened up.”27 Perhaps not. Modern life, Cliff Mann argues, has not eliminated naiveté:
People now are brainwashed from the time they are born. They’re used to being persuaded by propaganda from the press, television and radio. Result, if you can convince people they’ll be thinner, healthier, richer or live longer, they’ll buy it. If you told people they’d be healthier by eating a certain kind of dirt, they’d eat it.28
Herbal medicine is at least as popular today as it was a hundred years ago. As advertising critic Debra Goldman notes, “In a society obsessively focused on the future, herbal medicine harkens to the past, reaching back to medieval moms who soothed their babies’ colic with dillweed.” Today’s advertising slogans for so-called natural products sound like ones used by scores of nineteenth-century pitchmen: “Quality Health from God’s Pharmacy,” “Trust the Leaf,” “Put your faith in nature and your trust in Nature’s Herbs.” Goldman remarks that such ad copy “works as well on 1990s saps as it did on the 1890s kind.”29
In the opinion of many former pitchmen, the only thing that has changed is the medium. Mae Noell says,
Modern TV has perpetuated the old format. Just as we did in the old days, TV gives free entertainment sandwiched between sales talks. The difference is that we sold medicine whereas TV sells everything. Now, the announcer says, “we’ll be right back, after this important message.” Back then, we said, “right after this lecture we will present Terry the little wooden headed doll, so don’t go away!” And like the old time medicine show, TV does “hold” the people as it comes back with more and more entertainment. But it jes’ ain’t the same!30
The great American medicine show has passed away. Its legacy is the convention of television programming that we take for granted: commercials sandwiched between cheesy dramas, situation comedies, and everything else that passes for entertainment on the tube.
Performers who made their livelihood selling remedies and telling jokes have, for the most part, gone to their reward. Today, there are very few people left who ever saw a medicine show. Sadly, there is almost no film of medicine shows, and a mention of them usually draws a blank stare. Even though many successful performers got their start in medicine shows, the shows themselves never got much respect. Ever the black sheep of the entertainment world, medicine showmen were on a social par with thieves, prostitutes, and drunks. Of course, some of them were thieves, prostitutes, and drunks, but they were talented ones, and even law-abiding medicine men were painted with the same brush. Despite their bad reputation, medicine pitchmen and performers were very hardworking and highly skilled. Anyone who had the nerve to get on a medicine-show platform had to deliver entertainment and sell the goods. Some of the best vaudeville and minstrel performers would have been hard-pressed to compete with medicine men on the basis of versatility. Medicine shows were a cultural sponge that absorbed every interesting thing that took place on a stage.
If not for the medicine show, life in rural America would have been much more dreary than it was. Medicine shows went where many circus, vaudeville, and legitimate stage productions couldn’t or wouldn’t go. Medicine show performers were determined to prosper in an unforgiving environment, and they succeeded for the better part of a century. They embodied the romance of the road, and had the quintessentially American attitude that anything is possible.
The medicines they sold were mostly worthless and usually harmless. Perhaps the shortcomings of the medicines were balanced by the salutary effects of a good time. Medicine show audiences were either determined or forced to doctor themselves, and would have bought patent remedies one way or another.
Medicine shows were perfectly suited to isolated rural audiences that liked uncomplicated entertainment. As America became more citified, tastes and leisure time choices changed. Paved roads and motor cars enabled farmers to break out of their isolation. Bicycles, amusement parks, movies, roller skates, and beach resorts were all within reach of the ordinary consumer. No one had to wait for entertainment to come to them. The shows that did go to the audience reached right into the living room; radio and television delivered the top acts of the day, every day. There was no longer a reason to gather in a tent or open field for amusement.
The melodramas and pratfalls of an earlier era were no longer interesting to audiences who now had a wider view of the world. Movies and radio were capable of creating sophisticated fantasies that were not possible on the medicine platform. The rube and the medicine man disappeared together.
Rural Americans not only joined their city cousins as the new century progressed, they also became more global in outlook. World War I was a sobering event that altered the American mind-set and the American economy. Later, the Great Depression rendered medicine shows uneconomical for both producers and consumers. The array of over-the-counter remedies in modern drugstores made the traveling nostrum seller irrelevant.
The twentieth century is gone, and medicine shows have receded further into history. When the twenty-first century brings us holograms, 500 channels that interact on our home computer, and other wonders not yet dreamed of, the old shows will seem impossibly archaic. Technology will bring its changes, but one thing will stay the same—entertainment sells!