The Quack — Fake Healthcare for Gullible Public

1915

"Every age has its quacks, its fakers, its fortune-tellers with their countless vicitms," says Leslie's Weekly.

"Newspapers expose the quacks, the postoffice department denounces the fakers and get-rich-quick schemers but the newspapers are filled with the advertisements of quack medicines and the postoffices with the prospectuses of the get-rich-quick schemers.

"The campaign of education goes on, however. The public is learning. Analyses of quack medicines show them, in many instances, to be made up of water, salt and other cheap ingredients. A bottle that costs a few cents sells for a dollar.

"The gullible public swallows the quack medicines and the manufacturers of the so-called 'remedies' revel in millions.

"The sick always want to get well. Anything that deadens pain, even for a moment, is promptly accepted as a remedy, though, in the end suffering is intensified and sickness prolonged.

"The last resort is the doctor, the practiced, experienced physician — the one who should have been consulted first. Often he comes too late. The quack medicine may have done its work, but the doctor must take the blame.

"It is not strange that the sick get impatient to recover their health, nor that they can be so easily imposed upon, but experience should teach its valuable lesson. Yet it doesn't, for if it did quacks would disappear, the fakers would fade away and the get-rich-quick schemers be heard of no more.

"But for the credulity of mankind — a credulity often based upon ignorance — we should have a healthier, wealthier and a happier people.

"As we have quack remedies for human ills, so we have quacks prescribing for all the ills of society and taking the places of elder statesmen who ought to be first.

"So the loud-mouthed demagogue, the persuasive pleader for the rights of 'the common people', the fakers of politics, the 'sockless Simpsons' and the 'Mother Joneses,' are knocking at the door of the White House, intruding upon the makers of party platforms and publishing their preposterous vaporings in the columns of a sensational press.

"The statesmen must take a back seat until the people have tried the quack remedies and witnessed the results. We are witnessing some of the natural results in the revival of the soup houses, the crowding of municipal lodging places and all the employment agencies, while engines are still and factories cutting down their payrolls.

"In our legislative halls the quacks and the fakers are pressing new and still newer remedies upon legislators. As a result we are having experimental legislation at the expense of the taxpayer. If one experiment fails, try another, just as one quack remedy is replaced by a worse one. The taxpayer foots the bills, until patience ceases to be a virtue and then, in their wrath, they will rise, cast out the quacks and beseech the elder statesmen to resume the reins of government.

"Experience still continues to the best schoolmaster."

Whole Country Now Infested By Chain Letters, Get Rich Quick

1935

POSTAL INSPECTORS AFTER "SEND-A-DIME" PEOPLE

Whole Country Is Now Infested by Letters — All Want to Get Rich Quick Without Work.

There isn't a scheme that comes up without its followers. The "Send-a-Dime" chain letter, which originated at Denver, Colo., is flooding the country at the present time and each day finds the number of letters received growing greater.

According to Albert Lea postoffice heads the letters have caused no large amount of extra work. Letters of this nature are coming in, however, but it has required no extra help to get them distributed to the homes in the city and county. But in many larger cities the letters are so numerous that extra help is being put on. According to dispatches this morning dime chain letter investigations are expected to culminate today with number of arrests by postoffice inspectors in several Iowa cities. Assistant Postmaster John A. Ryan, Des Moines, said Tuesday night. There are nine or ten inspectors in Iowa who have been tracing a number of chain letter originators and have obtained sufficient evidence to bring charges of fraud, Mr. Ryan said.

He indicated, however, that most of the investigations had centered in points outside of Des Moines and that the chain letter activities involving alleged fraud were headquartered in several others of the larger cities. Mr. Ryan declined, however, to name the cities where the fraud evidence had been found or the individuals for whom warrants had been issued. He added that chain letter mailings in Des Moines apparently were on the decline. Leading the drive which was expected to result in Iowa arrests yesterday, federal investigators arrested three business men Tuesday in Denver, Colo., the fountain-head of all variegated chain letter manias. The three men pleaded not guilty to a charge of using the mails to defraud in a $1 chain letter. They said they would fight the charge vigorously. The men are R. M. Barnholt, H. L. Harris and Edward W. Hughes.

Although expressing disapproval of the chain letter craze, members of some Ministerial associations said Tuesday night that no action had been taken for members to denounce the fad from the pulpit. At Burlington, Ia., the Des Moines County Ministerial association Tuesday adopted a resolution opposing "the rapidly spreading gambling mania." Members will preach sermons on the subject, stressing chain letter evils, Sunday.

An innovation of the chain letter fad occurred late Tuesday in Mason City with the arrival of telegrams requesting the recipient to wire five dollars to the first person of a list of five and then send similar telegrams to five "kindred spirits." At Mason City the first class mail volume was noticeably heavier Monday and Tuesday. A variety of the fad which was reported to have helped augment Mason City mail was a new kind of the "send-a-dollar" letter.

This letter was also reported as having been received at the Des Moines municipal airport by Wallace Fagan, United Air Lines employe. Under this scheme the letter is supposed "to prevent chiseling." It lists the names of 10 persons and directs the person receiving it to hand copies to two other persons. A dollar is to be collected on the delivery of each letter and the money sent to the first name on the list.

Every variety of chain letter of which the human mind can conceive was believed to be in the mails by Tuesday night.

One Des Moines stenographer received a letter which concluded: "Please do not break the chain. If you answer this, I can guarantee you a husband in 1946."

A chain letter which Miss Carolyn Landfear, 3809 Center street, received — and she said she had received dozens of them — elevated itself into the realm of poetry, attempting to convince her by unmetered verse that although she may have been fooled on many makes and charities, that this letter was the real thing and she should "join the parade."

Several stationers are selling chain letter forms and one newsboy in Des Moines was doing a thriving business hawking the blanks on a street corner.

—The Evening Tribune, Albert Lea, MN, May 8, 1935, page 3.

Note: "Post office" was spelled as one word and "employee" ended with one "e" back in this time period. It seems kind of weird and I don't know when it changed. Post office as one word? It's against nature!