Ep 224 Snake Oil: The Great American Fraud

In 1917, federal agents finally caught up with Clark Stanley, the self-styled "Rattlesnake King," who had spent decades selling his snake oil liniment for 50 cents a bottle. When chemists analyzed his concoction, they found zero trace of snake. Instead, Stanley's "snake oil" was a blend of mineral oil, beef fat, capsicum, camphor, and turpentine. His fine: $20—about $523 today. But Stanley's legacy outlasted his business: he helped transform "snake oil" from a literal remedy into a lasting metaphor for worthless, pseudoscientific cures, and turned "snake oil salesman" into a permanent insult for fraudsters.

The Anti-Expertise Era

Stanley's success was no accident. It grew from a specific historical moment in the United States, roughly from the 1820s through the 1840s, when distrust of professional expertise became official policy. The 1828 election of Andrew Jackson reflected a rising "common man" ideology that openly disdained intellectual elites—and physicians ranked high on that list. Many states had implemented medical licensing systems in the early 1800s, but by 1845 only three states still had them. The rest had repealed their licensing laws.