“Flimflam” is such a delicious word. If its usage has faded to the less colorful “scam” or “Internet hoax,” you will nevertheless devour Charlatan, Pope Brock’s tale of fools and fanatics. With a vast and wild cast of characters, and filled with issues and topics that resonate through the years and are as close as the nearest computer, Charlatan begs comparison with Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City and deserves to be a best-seller.
At its center are two of the most complex, colorful and compelling (if largely forgotten) figures of the 20th century, huckster John Brinkley and his pursuer, Dr. Morris Fishbein, vividly brought to life by Brock. Let’s let him set the stage:
“(M)edical fraud has 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.”
As the snake-oil salesmen were creatively shameless in their promises, people were eager to pay good money for all manner of bad items that promised to cure everything, fix everything, regrow hair or revitalize, well, everything. This crowd was joined by misguided medical practitioners, including Dr. Benjamin Rush, for whom a Chicago hospital and street are now named.
He was, Brock writes, “by common consent the father of American medicine, who for many years after his death remained the nation’s best-known physician. … He was also a virtual death machine, as grossly misguided as he was sincere. Rush favored bombing the body with mercury-laced calomel … blistering with hot irons (pain to no purpose), tobacco-smoke enemas, and bleeding by the pint.”
And he was not even close to Brinkley as an evildoer.
By the time he was in his 20s, Brinkley’s quackery (his medical diploma was likely bogus) had landed him in jail in South Carolina, and he had few prospects for success. After a short stint in the Army in Texas (he was kicked out after two months), Brinkley headed to the small Kansas town of Milford with his wife. And there, one day in fall 1917, a 46-year-old farmer named Bill Stittsworth showed up, admitting a manhood problem for which the modern solution is often Viagra or Cialis. As Brinkley tried to come up with a solution, the farmer looked out the window at some frolicking livestock and said, according to Brock, “`Too bad I don’t have billy-goat nuts.'”
Eureka! Though it remains unclear whose idea it was to transplant a goat’s glands into Stittsworth (his or Brinkley’s), the medical procedure was accomplished. The farmer was satisfied and word began to spread. Within a year Brinkley had opened a 16-room clinic and was in the process of becoming the wealthiest and most famous “doctor” in the country. One of the innovative ways he did this was to use the new medium of radio.
To explain how innovative this was, Brock tells us that “in 1924 more than 400 of the 526 radio stations then operating in America” still did not accept advertising. “Radio czar Herbert Hoover, the secretary of commerce, declared it `inconceivable that we should allow so great a possibility for service to be drowned in advertiser chatter.'”
Brinkley didn’t just use the radio for self-promotion. In 1928 he created the Medical Question Box, to which listeners could send in their health troubles. Brinkley read a letter on the air, diagnosed the case and offered suggestions for treatment. He told listeners to buy from a network of pharmacists who would kick back a portion of their sales. Radio Digest in 1930 deemed his KFBK “the most popular radio station in the United States.”
Observing this with increasing outrage was Morris Fishbein, the influential editor of the Chicago-based Journal of the American Medical Association and legendary quack-buster who viewed Brinkley as “a menace to humanity.”
Fishbein was also “buoyant, compulsively curious … a modern Mr. Pickwick, if that gentleman had trained in medicine and marinated in the borscht belt for some years.” He was an adviser in the trial of Leopold and Loeb, for the prosecution and the defense. He was a pal of H.L. Mencken’s and Sinclair Lewis’, who wrote to his wife, “Fishbein is a wonder!” And he played regular poker games with Carl Sandburg, Ben Hecht and Clarence Darrow. He was also a man whose ego was a match for Brinkley’s.
“Fishbein plied his harpoon in many waters, but Brinkley was his Moby Dick.” And the battle between these two is arrestingly tense, even as it culminates in 1939 in a Texas courtroom, because of Fishbein’s doggedness and Brinkley’s resilience.
In 1930, after Kansas revoked his medical license, Brinkley ran for governor as a write-in independent. In what would become a model of modern campaigning because of his use of airplanes to crisscross the state and employing the media (especially radio) to reach voters, Brinkley barely lost, and that due to a specious rules change.
He then took off for Mexico, where he set up a million-watt radio station operation, “far and away the most powerful … on the planet,” able to reach Alaska. On XER (later XERA, and later home to “Wolfman Jack”), he not only pitched health schemes and spouted his increasingly right-wing views, but he hired a vast array of musicians. Such performers as Gene Autry, Jimmie Rodgers, the Carter Family, Cowboy Slim Rinehart and Patsy Montana, “a sparkling yodeler, soon to become the first million-selling female country artist,” gave many in the nation their first taste of country music.
It might be easy to see Brinkley as nothing more than an entrepreneurial rogue. Fishbein did not, Brock does not and neither should you. It is impossible to know how many people died as a result of Brinkley’s operations (or from the potions and practices purveyed on his radio stations). The Kansas Board of Medical Examiners put the number at 42 before pulling his license. And Brock minces no words, calling him one of the worst serial killers in history.
Brock is a magazine writer whose one previous book, Indiana Gothic: A Story of Adultery and Murder in an American Family (1999), was set in the early 1900s and concerning his own family. Here he has what may be the story of his lifetime, and, though not the stylist Erik Larson is, he takes full advantage, driving his narrative with care and pace.
A famous old quote — generally attributed to P.T. Barnum but more likely first uttered by Chicago’s own gambling boss Mike McDonald — has it that, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” If Brinkley, who died in 1942, could get a look at a contemporary society in which “rejuvenation is a global bazaar of infomercials and Web addresses, tools and toys for every need,” he’d probably have a good laugh. Fishbein, who died in 1976, not so much.