Page:The Great American Fraud (Adams).djvu/9

 ron that she is well, she is well—for his purposes. In the case of such diseases as naturally tend to cure themselves, no greater harm is done than the parting of a fool and his money. With rheumatism, sciatica and that ilk, it means added pangs; with consumption, Bright's disease and other serious disorders, perhaps needless death. No onus of homicide is borne by the nostrum seller; probably the patient would have died anyway; there is no proof that the patent bottle vas in any way responsible. Even if there were—and rare cases do occur where the responsibility can be brought home—there is no warning to others, because the newspapers are too considerate of their advertisers to publish such injurious items.

With a few honorable exceptions the press of the United States is at the beck and call of the patent medicines. Not only do the newspapers modify news possibly affecting these interests, but they sometimes become their active agents. F. J. Cheney, proprietor of Hall's Catarrh Cure, devised some years ago a method of making the press do his fighting against legislation compelling makers of remedies to publish their formulae, or to print on the labels the dangerous drugs contained in the medicine—a constantly recurring bugaboo of the nostrum-dealer. This scheme he unfolded at a meeting of the Proprietary Association of America, of which he is now president. He explained that he printed in red letters on every advertising contract a clause providing that the contract should become void in the event of hostile legislation, and he boasted how he had used this as a club in a case where an Illinois legislator had, as he put it, attempted to hold him for three hundred dollars on a strike bill.

"I thought I had a better plan than this," said Mr. Cheney to his associates, "so I wrote to about forty papers and merely said: 'Please look at your contract with me and take note that if this law passes you and I must stop doing business.' The next week every one of them had an article and Mr. Man had to go."

So emphatically did this device recommend itself to the assemblage that many of the large firms took up the plan, and now the "red clause" is a familiar device in the trade. The reproduction printed on page 6 is a fac-simile of a contract between Mr. Cheney's firm and the Emporia Gazette, William Allen White's paper, which has since become one of the newspapers to abjure the patent-medicine man and all his ways. Emboldened by this easy coercion of the press, certain firms have since used the newspapers as a weapon against "price-cutting," by forcing them to refuse advertising of the stores which reduce rates on patent medicines. Tyrannical masters, these heavy purchasers of advertising space.

To what length daily journalism will go at the instance of the business office was shown in the great advertising campaign of Paine's Celery Compound, some years ago. The nostrum's agent called at the office of a prominent Chicago newspaper and spread before its advertising manager a full-page advertisement, with blank spaces in the center.

"We want some good, strong testimonials to fill out with," he said,

"You can get all of those you want, can't you?" asked the newspaper manager.

"Can you?" returned the other. "Show me four or five strong ones from local politicians and you get the ad."

That day reporters were assigned to secure testimonials with photographs which subsequently appeared in the full-page advertisement as promised. As for the men who permitted the use of their names for this