Welcome to Criminalia, a production of Shondaland Audio in partnership with iHeartRadio. Hey, before the show starts today, we have a little bit of fun news to share.
We have had a secret.
We have been working very diligently for the past many months on creating something that a lot of you have been asking for, and that is a book of cocktails and cocktails that are told right alongside the stories that.
We talk about, plus additional ones that we have not talked about.
That's right. This book is about half stories you have heard, although they've been abridged, alongside their cocktails and brand news stories that we are telling, and brand new cocktails that we have never had before.
We are on pre order now so you can order up and wait for it to hit in October.
That's right. It is going to be out on October fifteenth, and you can order it now just about anywhere books are sold. Check out your local bookstores and see if they're going to have it. All right, let's jump into the episode.
In the mid eighteen nineties, Harry Kramer's Sterling Remedy Company, found in Attica, Indiana, introduced a product called Cascarettes candy cathartic cascarettes were laxatives, and the product blew away its competition, and a lot of that had to do with how it was marketed, which was really a stroke of brilliance kind of. Harry advertised the product as candy, and historians believe he may have been the first to have marketed
medicine in that way. They were brown tablets, so nothing special there, but they had a quote pleasant taste, almost as pleasant as chocolate. In just a few years. By eighteen ninety nine, they'd become so popular that more than five million boxes were purchased annually. Harry, an entrepreneur who was adept at advertising and maybe that's an understatement, was only thirty eight years old at the time. So let's meet this advertising sensation. Welcome to Criminalia. I'm Mariage from Markie.
And I'm Holly Frye. Cascarettes were wildly successful, but they were not the first product developed and marketed through Harry's Sterling Remedy Company. We'll come back to how successful those laxatives were and why. But they may not have been so popular if he hadn't first started producing a chewing gum to help people quit smoking. Tobacco called No to Back.
It was advertised to everyone, and initially no Toback was manufactured and marketed with less than one hundred dollars in capital, so that's less than the equivalent roughly of four thousand dollars today, and this product was considered the quote original guaranteed tobacco habit cure. The product tagline, which Harry Kramer wrote himself on a rented typewriter because he was not wealthy, was quote don't tobacco spit and smoke your life away.
His advertising for the gum ran on a small budget, but it appeared in newspapers across the country and it brought in big results. The alleged cure built up a successful money making mail order business for Harry. No tobac contained licorice gentchen violet, which is an anti fungal and
might be carcinogenic. Guayak gum. Guayak has been used as a food additive for a very long time, and possibly ammonium chloride salt, a key ingredient in Scandinavian salt licorice, unlike today's nicotine gum, which is formulated with nicotine to help you kick your cravings. No tobac would have only provided a temporary distraction from smoking cigarettes, pipes and cigars. It contained no ingredient to actually help you with your nicotine addiction. It just gave you something else to do.
The success of No to Back buoyed the development and launch of Cascaretes. When it came to his products, Harry's advertising was the real success story here, and that's true for all the things he produced. According to the Saint Genevieve fair Play newspaper out of Missouri, in nineteen oh four, his daily newspaper advertising investment quote grew to over three hundred thousand dollars a year, and he has counted as one of the greatest authorities on the science of advertising
in the world. His delight to see the working of the enormous advertising machine which he set in motion a few years ago, and his ambition is best illuminated by an expression made use of to a friend recently. He said, my boy, we'll get right when we make money faster than we can spend it for advertising. And that quote is Harry in a nutshell. And by the way, that three hundred thousand dollars is roughly equivalent to more than eleven million dollars in today's money.
Like not to back, cascarettes were developed by Sterling Remedy Company. A cascara based laxative was absolutely not a new light bulb Idea Druggists had been prescribing it as a remedy for constipation and related ill since shortly before Harry's product hit the market, starting in roughly eighteen seventy seven. They'd also sold options such as castor oil, sasparilla, and quote fig liver syrups. Cascara came from the bark of a tree, a bitter tasting bark of a species of buckthorn tree
native to the Pacific Northwest, northern California, and Idaho. The keyword there is bitter. Indigenous people living on the Pacific coast and in the Northern Rockies used it as a natural laxative, often mixed with aloe and the roots of rhubarb.
By the end of the nineteenth century, buckthorn bark was being shipped out of the Pacific Northwest to pharmaceutical companies around the United States and around the world in such high quantities that it endangered the tree's survival, and a lot of that bark was going right to the factories belonging to the Sterling Remedy Company in both Chicago and New York. The company backed its product launch with a five hundred thousand dollars advertising push. It's roughly equivalent to
eighteen million dollars today. Consider that number in contrast to the relatively meager capital they had backing No to back, Harry had come a very long way in a very short time, and that advertising push included incentives to retail druggists as well. By nineteen oh nine, the Neuralgelene Company purchased the Sterling Remedy Company, and by nineteen fourteen Caskeretes
were also being produced in Wheeling, West Virginia. Harry, although he did not own the company anymore, remained invested until roughly nineteen eighteen.
According to marketing materials from the Sterling Remedy Company and eventually also Jeline, there was a singular use for cascarettes. They were a laxative for relieving constipation the end right, Well, actually, no, We are talking about a product made and sold in a time when patent medicines were very popular, regardless of whether or not they worked as claimed. So did it work or was Harry's advertising prowess behind the success? Well both.
Actually we'll talk more about bowels and marketing materials, but first we're going to take a break for a word from our sponsors, and we will meet you right back here.
Welcome back to Criminalia. So did cascaretes work?
Let's find out, So let's talk about efficacy first. Researchers at Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital once declared quote, cascareicides increase intestinal motility and lead to propulsive contractions. In simple terms, that means that the ingredient moved your bowels. Cascara used to be FDA approved as an over the counter drug to relieve constipation, but in the early two thousands, though it was banned by the FDA from being sold as
a drug. Modern research discovered the plant may have potentially carcinogenic properties, at least in lab rats, but they reported there was inadequate data on human toxicity and if there's ambiguity, that's enough to take a product off the shelves. In addition, their testing also didn't provide enough evidence to prove the active ingredient as a drug worked as advertised.
However, legally, despite all of this, Cascara products can still be marketed as supplements. The difference between drug and supplement matters. Unlike when Harry was making in mark marketing cascaretes. Today, the FDA mandates testing and other measures of proof of
an over the counter drug safety and efficacy. Dietary supplements, which the FDA treats as food rather than medicine, aren't Since the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of nineteen ninety four, the FDA isn't authorized to approve dietary supplements for their safety and effectiveness before they're marketed, and products can hit the shelves without the FDA even knowing about it.
What that means for Cascara is that while these products aren't approved by the FDA as over the counter drugs, they may still be sold in the United States as dietary supplements or short term relief of constipation, and these supplements are available in various forms, including tea syrup, powder, or tablets.
While cascara wasn't the active ingredient that was novel in this product, the idea to make the bitter bark taste LiLine candy was who would choose a bit of remedy over a sugar coated version right. The candy Cathartic was packaged in pocket sized rectangular metal boxes which contained six octagonal tablets and sold for a dime a box. Quote. You don't know until you try how much good is crowded into a little ten cent box, stated one of
Harry's advertising slogans. His Caskerets would go on to become one of the most successful and booming and prosperous over the counter pharmaceuticals during a time when he was competing with many often shady and unregulated proprietary medicines that made a lot of bunk but often attractive claims.
His product worked, and he was a master at letting everybody know it. Nicknamed Cascarett Kramer. From the turn of the twentieth century until about the First World War, Harry ran a massive national advertising campaign that included every American as a potential customer, men, women, old, young everyone. His biggest hits came from his campaign that targeted the candy
part of the Candy Cathartic at moms and kids. Much of the marketing that Harry prepared for this particular campaign had little to do with caskeret's laxative properties, although his copy always told you what his products could do. Rather, it was the sugar coated alternative that helped the medicine go down that he really emphasized. They were a sweet substitute for the notoriously gross castor oil that was a popular go to laxative commonly administered by American mothers. Kids,
he claimed wouldn't even realize they were taking medication. Quote. They are harmless and safe for the little folks, even nursing infants, his advertising claimed, would benefit if nursing moms took cascarettes.
At the time when this sort of thing wasn't a thing. Harry often paid to have his longer form written advertisements run in the regular news columns of newspapers. Basically, he wrote marketing copy masquerading as health news. In the eighteen nineties, the back pages of most small town American newspapers were filled with advertisements for all kinds of patent medicines, and in addition to his fake news advertisements in the newspapers, Harry also ran small trade ads, many of which were
illustrated in these back pages as well. He hit all the editorial and advertorial spots he could. Readers of the Hood River Sun in eighteen ninety nine were met with this short ad for cascarettes, and well, I say short, but this is short for Harry. Quote after eating a bloated belly, belching of gas from the stomach, a foul, ill smelling scurf on the tongue, dizziness, headache, a sour rising and spitting up of half digested food, its bowel bloat.
His copy continued and continued to get more gross. Quote. When the bowels stop working, they become filled with putrid, rotting matter, forming poisonous gases that go through the whole body. If you don't have a regular natural movement of the bowels at least once a day, your fate is bowel bloat. There's only one way to set it right. Clean yourself out gently but thoroughly, and tone up your bowels with cascaretes ten cents, twenty five cents, fifty cents all druggists.
Harry also promised quote to any needy mortal suffering from bowel troubles and too poor to buy cascarettes, we will send a box free address company Chicago or New York, mentioning advertisement and paper.
Constipation, though, wasn't just considered infrequent bowel movements. Around the turn of the twentieth century, the American public didn't just associate it with gas and abdominal discomfort. While his product was advertised as a cure for constipation, constipation was considered to be a sort of root of all health evils, and that meant that Cascarets Candy Cathartic was actually a cure for anything and everything that was wrong with you.
Cascarettes Candy Cathartic, Harry asserted in his advertising could cure everything, and the list included, of course constipation, but also unrelated complaints like heartburn, colds, bad breath, appendicitis, ulcers, eggzema, and even headaches.
And more amazingly, Cascaretes stated Harry could help cure even sunstroke, a heat related illness. His advertisements claimed you could acquire because you weren't well, you weren't pooping. Specifically, one ad he wrote claimed quote, the summer's awful heat will kill those not fit to resist it, those whose bodies are
full of poison because they have neglected their bowels. Dizziness, heat, headaches, six stomachs, restless nights, terrible pains, cramps in the bowels, sudden death on the street, all result from this neglect. Keep yourself clean, pure and healthy inside disinfected as it were, with cascarettes candy Cathartic, the greatest antiseptic bowel tonic ever discovered, and you will find that every form of summer disease
will be effectively prevented by cascarettes candy Cathartic. Harry was persuasive, and that sudden death on the street because of constipation, I mean, yikes. Will take two boxes.
On that note, we're going to take a break for a word from our sponsors, and when we're back, we'll talk about harry so called medical manifesto and the business that he got into after the success of Cascaretes.
Welcome back to Criminalia. Harry's career did not end with his successful cascarettes product, and he went on to invest in mineral springs. But first, as promised, let's talk about this medical manifesto of sorts.
In the April twenty fifth, nineteen oh seven edition of the Indianapolis News, Harry ran a full page ad and we have seen it referred to as his medical manifesto. And though coming from a man with no medical training whatsoever, which made us both laugh and cry, he gets into some pretty deep talk about bowels and disease for something that's technically an advertising statement. This piece was called the Curse of Constipation, and it was considered a quote warning
that all should read and heed. Here's part of what Harry had to say about your bowels in the full page ad and hang in there with us because it is a little wordy quote. Constipation is in the curse of mankind. From a simple bit of carelessness, this dreadful destroyer of life gets a hold on his victim and
slowly but surely tortures him to a horrible death. It is a fact that all people, at some time or another become constipated, and if the warning be not instantly heated and the system put back into working order without delay, the victim is marked for death, a long lingering one, often so disguised that no one would dream of its original cause. It is also true that nearly every disease
recorded by medical science has its beginning in constipation. Yes, great learned men have said that if people would learn to keep their bowels in order, there would be no disease. Professor B. Howard Rand, the great professor of chemistry in the famous Jefferson Medical College, always said to his students,
trust in God and keep your patience bowels open. Harry went on in this manifesto to describe in great detail how cascaretes quote begin to cure the moment you begin to chew them, giving tone and strength to the walls of your intestine. He continued, they gave quote, a ruddy complexion, bright eyes, clear active brain, everything that makes life worth living.
Cascaretes became so well known from the heavy marketing and advertising Harry put behind the product that the brand name entered the American popular vocabulary of the time. If you were in the market for a laxative, for instance, you probably would have asked your druggist for Cascaretes rather than using the non brand word purgative or cathartic. For many consumers, the words had just become interchangeable. How the brand seeped
into American culture too, is amazing. In nineteen oh four, a polo team in Anderson, Indiana, took the name Anderson Cascaretes, and in New York City night shift bank employees were nicknamed Cascaretes because they quote work while you sleep. So there's a nickname with a lot to unpack.
The success of Cascaretes allowed Harry enough clout to attract investors to establish his next big thing, the Indian Mineral Springs Health Resort, which was later renamed the Hotel Madlavia near Fall Creek Gorge and Warren County, Indiana. We would be remiss if we didn't note that Harry campaigned to rename that town to Kramer, and the residents agreed. The mineral spring was discovered in eighteen eighty four by Civil
War veteran Samuel's story. Samuel had suffered with severe arthritis, but he noticed his joint stiffness and pain improved when he spent time in the mud. Harry's lavish hotel capitalized on that story and offered its guests soothing mud baths. His resort, Spa all So, featured an elaborate Chinese garden in the backyard where you would find mineral waters bubbling out of the hills. Mineral waters believe to relieve a long list of bodily ailments.
Doctors at the facility offered what was called a therapeutic quote magno mud cure. This treatment, which was just mud infused with water or water infused with mud, depending on who described it, was intended to relieve aching joints and muscles. Although the resorts therapies for kidneys and livers weren't as heavily advertised, those treatments provided at the spa also allegedly improved their function.
The Hotel Midlavia Health Spa attracted the rich and famous, including big names of the time such as boxing champion John L. Sullivan, Indianapolis poet James Witcomb Riley, and songwriter Paul Dresser. Newspapers touted at as quote one of the finest sanitariums in the United States, and it was. It was ranked with the great mineral baths at French Lick, Indiana, Bedford, Pennsylvania,
and Hot Springs, Arkansas. In advertising his health Spa, Harry very smartly made sure he placed his ads and often his face along with them, in as many small town American newspapers as he could manage, just as he did with his other products. Printer's Inc. The first American trade magazine on print advertising, declared Harry to be quote a man of almost superhuman energy. He writes his own advertisements, all of which are characterized by wonderful originality and a
desire to get out of the beaten track. In fact, not only did Harry often include his own face in his advertisements, he had long included tongue in cheek illustrations that highlighted funny conversations and situations between kids and moms in his Cascarettes ads.
On February twenty ninth, nineteen twenty, however, a fire that ignited in a linen closet earned Hotel Madvevia to the ground, leaving many patients, some who were afflicted with rheumatic symptoms like painful, stiff and tender joints, to barely escape with their lives. Local reports noted that more than fifty thousand dollars in jewels belonging to those patients were lost in
the fire. Initially, Harry planned to rebuild, but with the discovery of penicillin in nineteen twenty eight, plus the demise of American health spas due to the Great Depression, people just couldn't afford to visit them, and he never did. Long after his death, a retirement home and restaurant were built on the site, but they too tragically burned down in nineteen seventy four.
And that is Harry Lewis Kramer, who was born in Kuka, Iowa, in eighteen sixty one, and who grew up to be what historians have called one of the most energetic and revolutionary advertisers of his day. He retired in Lafayette, Indiana, and he died of a heart attack at age seventy four in nineteen thirty five. As the story goes, he was stricken while visiting the DMV. Many of us have imagined that we have passed at the.
DMV, so many DMV jerkes.
Would you like a little sip of something that cures what ails?
You send a little sugarcoated perhaps?
Uh yes. In fact, in getting particularly towards the end of Harry's story, I wanted to do something that incorporated this idea of mud and also had a chocolatey note to it, and also felt a little bit like a health drink. This involves something we have never used before on the show. I'm calling it mud Cure. Come along with me into your tin. You're shaking tin. You are going too poor. Four ounces of a vanilla protein shake like any of those little bottled kinds you get right.
I actually had one that has a cake flavor to it, so you have some leeway here, because I also wanted something that was a little like a milkshake but is not as indulgent and as the healthy version. Four ounces of protein shake. Then you were gonna add about one and a half barspoons of like a hot cocoa mixed powder. If you really like chocolate, you can go up to two.
If you don't like chocolate, drop it to one, but you want a little in there, an ounce and a half of tequila and a half ounce of vanilla liqueur, and then three dashes of angusterra bitters because remember cascara very bitter. I hit this with my frother first to get everything really well incorporated. Because you're working with a powder, it does incorporate pretty easily, because that's how hot chocolate powder is designed. But with the frother, it just made
it really rich and creamy. So I did that, and then I shook it with ice also a little bit, and then I poured it over fresh ice and sprinkled it with a little additional hot cocoa powder as kind of a garnish. This may be one of the most dangerous drinks I've ever created, because you can't tell it there's a bunch of tequila in it.
I totally want to sprinkle a little bit of like grainbow sprinkles or chocolate sprinkle on the top of it.
Absolutely could. It feels like it would work, because the thing that's nice about it is it's cold and deserty, but it's not heavy like a milkshake. Would be heavier obviously than some drinks, because a protein shake has some weight to it, but it's still much lighter than what it tastes like it should be, if that makes sense.
It's not ice cream.
It's not ice cream, but it tastes as good as ice cream. And it is a little bit dangerous but also very refreshing. If you want to do a mocktail version of this, obviously you're not dumping tequila in it. I would do alo juice there. And if you want to keep it a little on the thicker side, I would dial back. Instead of an ounce and a half, I would go to an ounce. You can use an
ounce and a half. You're just gonna have like a thinner texture and it'll be a little bit softer in flavor throughout, and then instead of vanilla liqueur, you just use a little vanilla syrup. The rest of it is the same. If you don't want to use bitterers, because some people that are absolutely zero alcohol don't, you can drop a little salt in there, or if you want
to do a saline mixture, that's fine too. The mocktail is also delicious, and it feels healthy at that point because there's not much bad stuff in it at all.
So I put my sprinkles on top, then it's nice.
Yeah. Even the syrup is only a half ounce, it's not a lot. And if you do like a low sugar or a sugar free one, you're golden both versions. If you wanted to use in lieu of cream or milk in your coffee, delicious, great for your after dinner coffee because it's got a little mocha note. It's like I said, you can't taste that tequila, but the bitterers do something really cool where they they make it so you taste the flavors more than their sweetness, if that.
Makes sense, does make sense?
Yeah, Like you taste the cocoa powder rather than this tastes like a pat an envelope a packet of hot cocoa mix. You taste the chocolatey note, but it's not as heavy. That is what we're calling mud Cure this week. Yummy delicious. I don't know, I was just feeling kooky, but it's very good for you because of that protein shake.
I like how it combines a couple of Harry's product interests.
Yes, I'm sure Harry could market it as some sort of oh absolute healthcare. Harry cracks me up. We hope he cracks you up too. We want to thank you for hanging out with us while we talk about Harry and delicious protein shake based cocktails. We will be right back here again next week with another story of snake oil and another cocktail to go with it. Criminalia is
a production of Shondaland Audio in partnership with iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from Shondaland Audio, please visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.