The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [4]
Less scrupulous entrepreneurs and con men exploited the trend with their own American patent medicine blends that went far beyond the British concoctions in both claims and popularity. At the turn of the nineteenth century, Connecticut physician Samuel Lee, Jr., mixed up a batch of soap, aloe, and potassium nitrate and pressed them into “Bilious Pills,” which he touted as a cure against indigestion and flatulence. Within a decade, they were sold as far away as the Mississippi River. Soon after, Thomas W. Dyott amassed a fortune of a quarter of a million dollars with concoctions such as the hot-selling Robertson’s Infallible Worm Destroying Lozenges. These tycoons found a ready clientele with the rapid industrialization of the early 1800s, when laborers crowded into disease-ridden tenements. The Civil War brought new patients in the form of soldiers suffering from wounds and disease, many of whom received tonics along with their rations.
In truth, most patent medicines were little more than laxatives or emetics (to induce vomiting), often containing up to 50 percent alcohol. Consumers didn’t seem to care. By the turn of the twentieth century, they were big business, with anywhere between 20,000 and 50,000 different concoctions on offer and total sales of $80 million. For every fortune, however, a dozen vendors went bankrupt. The winners were those who created the best story, the coolest shaped container, or the catchiest advertisements to cement their names in consumers’ minds. Some relied on tales of exotic ingredients from Africa or the Far East. Others drew upon American Indian lore, pegging their origins, for example, to a secret formula given by an Indian chief to a trapper in exchange for rescuing his son from a bear.
No one exploited these gimmicks more relentlessly than a new breed of traveling salesmen who staged elaborate presentations known as “medicine shows.” A fixture of American life for nearly a century, these roving productions traveled the country in the hundreds during their height, from 1880 to 1900. After a “ballyhoo” of musical bandwagons, magicians, and comedians to warm up the crowd, salesmen reeled in buyers with their pitches, often whipping up fears of disease before magically “healing” a planted crowd member. One of the most notorious showmen, Clark Stanley, publicly killed hundreds of rattlesnakes to advertise his Snake Oil Liniment, which was eventually discovered to be little more than camphor and turpentine—forever making the term “snake-oil salesman” synonymous with fraud.
But most customers convinced themselves that the elixirs they bought from these traveling road shows actually worked. As one 1930s-era pitch doctor explained, the key was to hypnotize the buyer into thinking he’d come up with the idea to buy the product himself: “First, attention; second, interest; third, suggestion; fourth, imagination; fifth, desire; sixth, decision,” he explained. After years of shows, medicines such as Kickapoo Indian Sagwa and Hamlin’s Wizard Oil sold themselves, bringing crowds flocking whenever their wagons rolled into town. It was this kind of success that Civil War colonel and pharmacist John Pemberton was seeking when he moved to Atlanta from nearby Columbus, Georgia, in 1870. Pemberton was an early devotee of Samuel Thomson’s “every man his own doctor” philosophy, stirring local herbs and flowers into his own concoctions in a lab behind his pharmacy shop. He sold