Charlatan: America's Most Dangerous Huckster, the Man Who Pursued Him, and the Age of Flimflam Book

This is the best book I have ever read about goat testicles. As if that weren't enough to make you want to read it, let me add that it's about a quack doctor who pioneered advances in advertising, public relations, radio, and modern political campaigning. For many years, his biggest problem was that other, inferior con men would steal the new ideas he came up with.

J. R. Brinkley would today be hailed as a genius, except that he was a con man, bigamist, demagogue, and anti-Semite. Also, he had terrible taste in art, and in his free time he enjoyed dressing up like an admiral.

"Are You a Manly Man Full of Vigor?" -advertisement Brinkley placed in newspapers in Greenville, South Carolina, in 1913. The actual treatment, for which he charged $25, involved injecting colored water into the patient's buttocks.

" 'I have a scheme up my sleeve and the whole world will hear of it.' "'Brinkley in 1917. He created "glandular rejuvenation" by transplanting goat testicles into humans.

"Do we want some reviewer to say, 'This book is better than goat glands?'" -Carl Sandburg, trying to promote his work Rootabaga Stories

"The harder they hit me, the higher I bounce." -Brinkley after being hounded out of California

"I wear goat glands and am proud of it." -Senator Wesley Staley, 1922

"Every man proposes to me the second he meets me." -much-married "nonsinging diva" Ganna Walska, the inspiration for Susan Alexander in Citizen Kane

"Yes, but what does he propose?"'pretty much every other woman on the planet at that time

"Busier than an electric fan"'a Collier's reporter describing Brinkley's career in 1922

"You accused me of selling diplomas for $200. . . . That is a deadly insult. I never charged less than $500."'Dr. Date Alexander, the diploma-mill king who sold Brinkley a fake MD degree

"We people in Kansas get fat on his medicine. . . . We're going to keep him here so long as he lives." -Governor Jonathan Davis, refusing to allow Brinkley to be extradited to California

"On Sundays he gave sermons lifted from other people."'The author, describing Brinkley's burgeoning radio career.

"I DEFY THE AMERICAN MEDICAL ASSOCIATION!"'full-page ad Brinkley took out in several newspapers in 1930

"[I can] think of three ways to get rich before breakfast."'Brinkley after being forced to cancel his show Medical Question Box, which a Johns Hopkins doctor called "the greatest possible danger" to the public health

"Your condition is your own fault. . . . Wishing you a merry Christmas." -Brinkley's answering letter to a mutilated patient

"He was richer than a crème brulée . . . [His estate was] sixteen acres of naked self-regard, part Versailles, part Barnum & Bailey."'The author, describing Brinkley's "wallowing in wealth" after the gubernatorial election of Kansas was stolen from him

"With the lava of war spreading across Europe, and American involvement probable, the world needed heroes. It also needed a place where the craven and selfish could go till it was all over, and that was what Brinkley hoped to provide. No one had looked out for him like this when he was trying to beat the draft." -The author, describing Brinkley's last scam

As if this guy weren't interesting enough, he also hired June Carter for her first job when she was a child, plus ZZ Top wrote a song that mentions him:

I also enjoyed learning about the Hot Girl of Escanaba, Michigan: