The Attention Merchants

by Tim Wu

  It should be no wonder, then, that sometime in the 1890s, the restless Claude Hopkins made his way to Racine, Wisconsin, to become the advertising manager of Dr. Shoop’s Restorative, a patent medicine outfit that specialized in nerve tonics and other nostrums.9 As he later explained, “The greatest advertising men of my day were schooled in the medicine field. It is sometimes hard to measure just what advertising does. Not so in a medicine. Advertising must do all.”

  Like the Parisian posters, patent medicine advertisers understood the importance of using startling images and evocative words to turn the head. The Snake Oil Liniment advertisements featured Clark Stanley’s enigmatically captivating face framed between a cowboy hat and goatee; here was an early instance of the stylized visages that were typical of early branding and which persist in the likes of Aunt Jemima and the Quaker Oats Quaker man—surrogates, perhaps, for the humans whose reputation had been, in a preceding age of commerce, the cornerstone of trustworthiness. “CLARK STANLEY’S SNAKE OIL LINIMENT” is whimsically spelled out in letters formed of snakes, with encouraging claims of efficacy on either side: “A Wonderful, Pain-Destroying Compound” and “The Strongest and Best Liniment for cure of all pain and lameness.” An ad for another medicine, “Kickapoo’s Indian Sagwa” similarly evokes the power of exotic remedy with the image of a Native American clutching the bottle and wearing a serenely knowing expression.10

  But their secret was to be more than merely eye-catching: the medicine ads brazenly promised to make wishes come true.*1 And what more basic and seductive human wish than to be cured of one’s infirmities? Clark Stanley described his snake oil as good for “rheumatism, neuralgia, sciatica, lame back, lumbago, contracted muscles, toothache, sprains, swellings, etc.” Some patent medicines, like “The Elixir of Life” sold by a Dr. James W. Kidd, of Fort Wayne, Indiana, went so far as to promise immortality, deliverance from the greatest fear of all. In an advertisement for the elixir, Dr. Kidd reports that he “is able, with the aid of a mysterious compound known only to himself…to cure any and every disease that is known to the human body.”11

  The power of promising cure, let alone eternal life, would have been only too familiar to Claude Hopkins, the former preacher. His copy for Dr. Shoop’s, now over a century old, is worth reading carefully, as it follows a still familiar formula of anticipating doubts and the likelihood that the sufferer may have been let down many times before. One might even detect the influence of Matthew’s Gospel, specifically the story of “a certain woman, which had an issue of blood twelve years, And had suffered many things of many physicians, and had spent all that she had, and was nothing bettered, but rather grew worse” (9:25–26). Hopkins may have had the parable in mind when he wrote

  Some sick one may say:—“But I’ve tried about all medicines, consulted many physicians, and spent a great deal of money. Nothing can help me.”

  Tell him that the physician who compounded this remedy knows better than he. This physician, who by thousands of bedsides has watched his remedy cure the most difficult cases, knows best what it will do.

  Dr. Shoop knows that he has discovered the way. He has solved the problem after the arduous labor of a lifetime. He knows it because he has made thousands of successful tests—made them in large hospitals, where the results were public; made them through many other physicians who confirm his opinion. And in his private practice he has successfully treated more than one hundred thousand patients suffering from chronic troubles.

  Dr. Shoop has seen his treatment cure in many thousand cases where all other treatments failed. And he has never known his remedy to fail in any disease told of in this book, where any other treatment afterward succeeded.

  A few more signal tricks rounded out the medicine advertising approach. Perhaps chief among these was the “secret ingredient.” Every patent medicine needed something to set it apart from all the others making similar claims, some kind of mysterious element that was not and perhaps could not be fully explained. It fired the imagination, feeding hope where reason offered thin gruel. Carbolic smoke; swamp root; baobab fruit; and in the case of Clark Stanley’s liniment, the secret was, of course, the magic of snake oil itself.12

  It is easy to ascribe the success of such hokum to the gullibility of another age, until we stop to reflect that the techniques successfully used to sell patent medicine are still routinely used today. The lotions and potions of our times inevitably promise youthfulness, health, or weight loss, thanks to exotic ingredients like antioxidants, amino acids, miracle fruits like the pomegranate and açaí berry, extracted ketones, or biofactors. There is scarcely a shampoo or lotion for sale that does not promise an extraordinary result owing to essence of coconut, or rosemary extracts, or another botanical. As devotees of technology we are, if anything, more susceptible to the supposed degree of difference afforded by some ingenious proprietary innovation, like the “air” in Nike’s sports shoes, triple reverse osmosis in some brands of water, or the gold-plating of audio component cables. For all our secular rationalism and technological advances, potential for surrender to the charms of magical thinking remains embedded in the human psyche, awaiting only the advertiser to awaken it.

  Hopkins did work wonders—for Dr. Shoop’s at least. Advertisers like Clark Stanley had relied on their own traveling roadshows and advertisements in major periodicals, like the relatively new Ladies’ Home Journal or Harper’s magazine. To create a national campaign for the small regional brand, Hopkins took inspiration from the success of two former peddlers, Aaron Montgomery Ward and Richard Sears, whose mail-order catalogues (Montgomery Ward’s and Sears’s) built a thriving business on the back of a federally subsidized carrier. Thus did the U.S. Post Office first become a platform for commercial harvesting of attention. Hopkins began to post more than 400,000 pamphlets for Dr. Shoop’s every day, reaching millions with this pioneering effort at “direct mail” advertising, or what we now call “spam.”

  If Hopkins ever suffered from uncertainty, he never expressed it. “I had a proposition which no reasonable person could refuse. As most people are reasonable, I knew that most people in need would accept it. My offer was impregnable.” But Dr. Shoop’s would not hold on to Hopkins for long. As his fame as a scheme-man spread, Hopkins was lured to Chicago by a wealthy promoter named Douglas Smith. Smith had bought the rights to a Canadian germicide (Powley’s Liquid Ozone), which he renamed Liquozone, and he offered Hopkins a share of the profit if he could do for Liquozone what he had done for Dr. Shoop’s, but on an even grander scale.

  Once again, Hopkins used the mails to flood the nation with pamphlets. Given the margins—Liquozone cost next to nothing to make—and the size of mailings, he did not need to persuade many that his product could relieve a host of ailments, both minor (like dandruff) as well as fatal (including malaria, anthrax, diphtheria, and cancer). In another stroke of genius, Hopkins pioneered the idea of a free sample. “Do as millions have done—stop doubting—give Liquozone a test.”13 The average consumer who did so would go on to spend 91 cents on the medicine before realizing its uselessness.14

  By the early 1900s, Hopkins could also sense the beginnings of a mounting reaction and hostility toward patent medicines, which, after all, typically didn’t do what they claimed, apart from some narcotic or placebo effects. Business continued booming but skepticism was rising among the suckers. Such was Hopkins’s genius, however, that his work now began riding the growing backlash like a riptide: his product would be advertised as the anti–snake oil. Liquozone was the real thing. In the words of his direct mail literature:

  We wish to state at the start that we are not patent medicine men, and their methods will not be employed by us….Liquozone is too important a product for quackery.15

  By 1904, Hopkins and Smith saw revenues of $100 million (in current dollars), having sent out five million free samples. Liquozone even expanded to European markets, proving the new advertising approach lost nothing in translation. In promising to alleviate all of life�
�s sufferings, Hopkins was speaking a universal language.

  By 1905, thanks to Liquozone, Claude Hopkins had become America’s leading scheme man, and a wealthy one besides. For all his odd ways, he had built his success on a deep understanding of human desire. Unfortunately for him and Liquozone, the backlash Hopkins had begun to sense was about to arrive in full force.

  In 1900, Samuel Hopkins Adams, a crime reporter at the New York Sun, was yearning to make his mark. Approaching the age of thirty he had made for himself a perfectly fine middle-class life, but after nine years at the Sun he was growing restless. “Newspaper reporting is a good job for five years,” he would later write, “but after that a man should move along.”16

  Like many reporters at the time, Adams wanted to do a different kind of writing, one that would expose important truths and change the world, a mission that called for pieces of greater length than the usual news story. It is a common enough mid-career urge: having taken care of life’s immediate needs, some of us yearn to chase villains, right wrongs, fight on the side of the angels. In contemporary parlance, we’d say Adams became an investigative reporter. In the far more evocative term of that era, he had decided to become a “muckraker.” “He believed in morality and Puritan righteousness,” his biographer would write. “What Adams lacked was a subject.” This he would now find in patent medicine.

  By the turn of the century, the industry was generating annual revenues of $45–$90 million, approximately $1.3–$2.9 billion adjusted for inflation, in a nation of just 85 million. Despite its inherent fraudulency, however, it escaped scrutiny for a variety of reasons.

  For one, there was no regulatory state of the kind we now take for granted—no FDA to test medicines before they were sold to the public. Efforts to charge sellers of potions with violating common law had largely failed: their promises were gratuitous, and quaffing a product was an assumption of risk by nineteenth-century legal standards. In addition, the press had long displayed little interest in offending an industry that was perhaps its greatest single source of advertising revenue.*2 That changed in 1905, when the editor of Collier’s Weekly, one of the new muckraking magazines, commissioned Adams to investigate mischief in the patent medicine business. Adams took on the subject with the fervor of a man finding his life’s calling. Undertaking an extremely thorough investigation, Adams relied on some of the skills he’d picked up as a crime reporter. “Find out where the foe is before you strike,” he said. “Don’t hit out with your eyes shut.”17 He purchased many patent medicines, including Hopkins’s Liquozone and Clark Stanley’s Snake Oil, and hired chemists to analyze them.

  On October 7, 1905, Collier’s published his exposé under the hard-hitting title “The Great American Fraud.”18 The cover, itself a masterpiece of attention capture, was terrifying. It featured a shadowed skull, with bags of money behind it, patent medicine bottles for teeth, and on its forehead the indictment:

  THE PATENT MEDICINE TRUST:

  PALATABLE POISON FOR THE POOR

  Accusing the entire industry of fraud, Adams opened his story this way:

  GULLIBLE America will spend this year some seventy-five millions of dollars in the purchase of patent medicines. In consideration of this sum it will swallow huge quantities of alcohol, an appalling amount of opiates and narcotics, a wide assortment of varied drugs ranging from powerful and dangerous heart depressants to insidious liver stimulants; and, far in excess of all other ingredients, undiluted fraud. For fraud, exploited by the skillfulness of advertising bunco men, is the basis of the trade.

  The article went on to detail the pernicious ingredients of the patent medicines, the deaths and addictions users suffered, the complicity of a press dependent on advertising revenue, and numerous other shady business practices. The exposé ran to eleven articles, and unfortunately for Douglas Smith and Claude Hopkins, the third was entirely dedicated to Liquozone, which Adams called a particularly noxious offender for “the prominence of its advertising and the reckless breadth of its claims.”

  Liquozone, concluded Adams, is “a fraud which owes its continued existence to the laxity of our public health methods and the cynical tolerance of the national conscience.” Even the name was a sham. “Liquid oxygen doesn’t exist above a temperature of 229 degrees below zero,” pointed out Adams. “One spoonful would freeze a man’s tongue, teeth and throat to equal solidity before he ever had time to swallow.” Douglas Smith was accused of creating an “ingenious system of pseudoscientific charlatanry.” For his part, Hopkins had buttressed Liquozone’s claims with dozens of endorsements by doctors. Adams rebutted each one, either on the merits or by showing the endorser did not exist or was in fact a veterinarian.

  Naturally, Adams also commissioned a chemical assay, which showed that Liquozone was nothing more than highly diluted sulfuric acid with coloring added. Perhaps his most impressive, if inhumane, undertaking was to test Liquozone’s curative claims on laboratory animals. Guinea pigs were infected with anthrax, half of them treated with Liquozone, the other half serving as the control group. Within twenty-four hours all of the guinea pigs, treated and untreated, were dead. When repeated with diphtheria and tuberculosis, the experiment produced similar results.19 The lab concluded that Liquozone not only “had absolutely no curative effect but did, when given in pure form, lower the resistance of the animals, so that they died a little earlier than those not treated.”

  Coming in a more trusting age, when such revelations had greater power to shock, Adams’s article caused an astonishing outcry. A variety of actors, including various women’s organizations, and a crusading physician named Harvey Washington Wiley, began to push for legislation, long stalled in Congress, to impose basic labeling rules for foods and medicines. In 1906, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle encouraged demands for industry reform generally, with its depiction of nauseating and immoral practices in the meat industry. By that time President Theodore Roosevelt had joined the campaign; he’d later give a speech praising Collier’s Weekly for having “hit the patent medicine concerns very hard and greatly reduced the amount they spent in advertising.”20 Roosevelt added his weight to the assault on Congress, and the Food and Drugs Act was finally passed that year, despite strong congressional reluctance amid fierce industry lobbying.

  The regulation took a distinctly American form that has proven influential to this day. Rather than banning patent medicines or their advertising, it imposed a “truth in labeling” requirement that made “misbranding” illegal and also required that any “dangerous” ingredients be listed. As understood by the government, this criminalized any false claims about potential therapeutic benefits. These new laws, along with advances in legitimate medicine, marked the beginning of the collapse of the patent medicine industry. The end did not come all at once. But even more than legislation, the precipitating factor was the public disenchantment with industry advertising. Even those who dared violate the new law with false claims met with a stony public, desensitized to tricks that had once been so seductive and had already been pushed to the logical extreme by Hopkins. Once the bubble popped, the astonishing alchemy that had made worthless decoctions into precious elixirs could never work again. Thus did Snake Oil go from being a cure-all to a byword for fraud. The ultimate effect was eventually to drive nearly all producers out of business. After peaking in 1907, this once mighty American industry began a death spiral, finally to become a fringe business by the 1930s.

  We can also see patent medicine as a victim of its own success. In some version, folk medicines had been around for centuries, and when their claims were more modest, and their advertising less importunate, they may have delivered some of what they promised at least by virtue of the placebo effect, which, as scientists have shown, can be quite significant. But the industry had caught the spirit of late nineteenth-century capitalism, and for patent medicine, this translated into too great a fraud, too much profit, too much damage to public health. And so the industry collapsed of its own weight. But the means that
it had invented for converting attention into cash would live on in other forms, finding new uses in the hands of both government and other commercial ventures.

  Few of the patent medicine sellers would enjoy second acts. Clark Stanley, the Rattlesnake King, continued with Snake Oil for a time but eventually fell afoul of the new laws. A Rhode Island prosecutor, acting on behalf of the Bureau of Chemistry, indicted him for violating the Food and Drugs Act in 1916. The bureau tested a sample of Snake Oil and found it to contain “a light mineral oil (petroleum product) mixed with about 1 percent fatty oil (probably beef fat) capsicum, and possibly a trace of camphor and turpentine.”21 As the government charged, Snake Oil was “falsely and fraudulently…represented as a remedy for all pains and lameness…when, in truth and in fact, it was not.”

  In 1907, in the aftermath of the Collier’s piece, passage of the new law, and the collapse of Liquozone, Hopkins, who remained ultimately a sensitive soul beneath his stoic exterior, suffered a serious breakdown. Exposed as a fraud, his business in ruins, Hopkins was, according to one acquaintance, “disgraced and disheartened.” He decided to give up all forms of salesmanship and never to “enter the vortex of advertising again.” Instead, he planned to use his writing skills to become an author. “I intended to keep busy, but I would write in the future for fame and not for money.”22 After consulting a French doctor, Hopkins retreated to a cottage on the shores of Lake Michigan to convalesce. As he would tell it, “I basked in the sunshine, sleeping, playing, and drinking milk.” And that might have marked the end of Hopkins’s advertising career—but for events taking place thousands of miles away.