Secondly, Stanley’s Snake Oil didn’t contain any snake oil at all. The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 sought to clamp down on the sale of patent medicines and it was that legislation that led to Stanley’s undoing. After seizing a shipment of Stanley’s Snake Oil in 1917, federal investigators found that it primarily contained mineral oil, a fatty oil believed to be beef fat, red pepper and turpentine. That’s right — Stanley's signature product did not contain a drop of actual snake oil, and hundreds of consumers discovered they had been had.
It was probably around then that snake oil became symbolic of fraud. Snake oil salesmen and traveling doctors became stock characters in American Westerns. The first written usage of the phrase appeared in Stephen Vincent Benet's epic 1927 poem John Brown’s Body, when the poet refers to “Crooked creatures of a thousand dubious trades ... sellers of snake-oil balm and lucky rings.” About 30 years later, playwright Eugene O’Neill referred to snake oil in his 1956 play The Iceman Cometh, when a character suggested that a rival was “standing on a street corner in hell right now, making suckers of the damned, telling them there’s nothing like snake oil for a bad burn.”
As for what happened to Clark Stanley after it was found that his whole empire was based on a lie? He was fined $20 (that's about $429 in today’s dollars) for violating the food and drug act and for “misbranding” his product by “falsely and fraudulently represent[ing] it as a remedy for all pain.”
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