‘Healthy living’ proponents stir up a lot of controversy

Historians say it’s “unlikely that Gayelord Hauser and Dudley LeBlanc were close acquaintances or collaborators, although they did ironically occupy a similar, somewhat controversial, space within the realm of public health and dietary advice during the mid-20th century.”

It’s an amusing story that their names were sometimes linked, particularly in critical commentary surrounding their “unconventional approaches” to health and nutrition.

Benjamin Gayelord Hauser (shown below) was born in 1895 in Tübingen, a city in southern Germany below Stuttgart. (His given name was Helmut Eugen Benjamin Gellert Hauser.) Gayelord came to the United States in 1911, as a 16-year-old, accompanying an older brother who was a clergyman. They settled in Chicago.

Gayelord found fame and fortune as a self-help author and nutritional advisor to many Hollywood celebrities. While advocating a “natural way of eating,” he promised people they could add years to their life by eating five “wonder foods,” especially blackstrap molasses…(which is what got us here in the first place).

 

Dudley Joseph LeBlanc (shown below) was born in 1894, in the small community of Capitan in Louisiana’s Lafayette Parish. He became a popular Cajun state legislator, and he was also an entrepreneurial businessman.

 

Dudley established the Happy Day Company in 1938. Early products were Happy Day Headache Powders and honey-flavored Dixie Dew Cough Syrup.

 

Dudley’s flagship product Hadacol was an elixir that was marketed as a vitamin and mineral supplement, although it also contained 12% alcohol. Happy Day indeed. The product flew off pharmacy shelves, particularly in “dry” southern counties.

The American Medical Association didn’t look too highly on either Gayelord Hauser, who was dismissed as a “crank,” or Dudley LeBlanc, who was likened to a “quack” and a “charlatan.” Tsk, tsk.

Here are their stories:

Not long after arriving in the United States, Gayelord Hauser was stricken with “tuberculosis of the hip.” After several operations proved fruitless, his case was declared hopeless.

But Hauser didn’t give up. He consulted German-born Dr. Benedict Lust (shown below), a pioneer in the field of naturopathic medicine. Dr. Lust, believing in “the body’s inherent ability to heal itself using natural therapies,” recommended a regimen of warm baths, clay packs and herbal remedies. Hauser began to improve.

 

Dr. Lust referred his patient for “dietary treatments” in Switzerland. Hauser experienced a miraculous recovery there. He studied “food science” in some of the great European cities and returned to the United States to spread his message about “the power of food.”

 

In 1927, Hauser left the Midwest and set up operations in California, where his “natty good looks and brash, exuberant approach” soon made him popular among movie stars. 

Adele Astaire, Marlene Dietrich, Paulette Goddard, Gloria Swanson and Greta Garbo were some of Hauser’s earliest clients.

Hauser and Garbo were lovers and rumors were they were very nearly married. Their love letters were “wonderful, personal, romantic, intimate and expressed a very private side of the screen superstar who guarded her privacy above all else.”

Hauser began his prolific writing career in 1930 and was quite successful. His most famous book, “Look Younger, Live Longer” was published in 1950. It quickly vaulted up the bestseller list that year.

 

“In 1951, copies of ‘Look Younger, Live Longer’ were seized by the FDA (U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on grounds that they were being used to promote sales of blackstrap molasses as a cure-all,” said Dr. Stephen Joel Barrett (shown below), founder of Quackwatch, a network of websites that critiques unproven or questionable medical practices.

 

The FDA cited “many false claims in the book. Among them was a claim that blackstrap molasses could ‘add five years to your life’ and ‘regrow hair on baldspots,’” Dr. Barrett reported.

(Now a retired psychiatrist, author and consumer advocate, Dr. Barrett resides in Chapel Hill, N.C.)

 

Meanwhile, Dudley LeBlanc was well-entrenched as a Louisiana politician, having served in both the state house and the senate. A Democrat, he ran for governor three times but came up short in each try.

The product Hadacol, formulated in 1945 and advertised as a dietary supplement, was LeBlanc’s ticket to infamy. Writing for HistoryNet.com, Peter Carlson said: “Hadacol promised to cure indigestion, insomnia and irritability, and maybe even beriberi.”

That’s not the half of it. Here’s a “partial list” of other ailments that Hacacol was advertised to fix: “Anemia, arthritis, asthma, cancer, diabetes, epilepsy, gallstones, hay fever, heart trouble, high blood pressure, pneumonia, strokes and ulcers.”

Author S. Derby Gisclair (shown below) said LeBlanc “swamped the radio waves and newspapers with testimonials. In the days before strict regulatory oversight, the paid testimonials ranged from mildly amusing overstatements to outright lies, such as this whopper: ‘Two months ago I couldn’t read nor write. I took four bottles of Hadacol and now I’m teaching school.’”

 

An 80-year-old man in Mississippi said: “I was disable to get over a fence, disable to get up out of chair without help, but after I took eight bottles of Hadacol, I can tie up my own shoes and feel like I can jump over a six-foot fence.”

Gisclair wrote: “It seemed like Hadacol was advertising everywhere – billboards, newspapers, radio, magazines and local pharmacies. At one point it was reported that Hadacol was second only to Coca-Cola in dollars spent on national advertising.”

TIME magazine described LcBlanc as “a stem-winding salesman who knows every razzle-dazzle switch in the pitchman’s trade.” TIME went on to describe Hadacol as being a “murky brown liquid that tastes like bilge water and smells worse.”

That only seemed to spur on LeBlanc. He joked: “Good medicine is supposed to taste bad, isn’t it?”

Folks will get over it…like Mrs. J.P. Macure of New Orleans, who wrote “a glowing testimony of her use of Hadacol,” as reported by Mike Louviere (shown below) of the Orange (Texas) Leader newspaper.

 

“Before I took Hadacol, I was very nervous,” Mrs. Macure said. “My family was affected because I was so irritable. Then my sister suggested that I take Hadacol. After the second bottle, I felt like I had taken all the troubles of the world off my shoulders. My family thinks Hadacol is wonderful because my disposition is 100% better, and I am not the least bit irritable. That’s because I always have a bottle of Hadacol on the kitchen shelf. Hadacol is the most wonderful product on the market.”

Gisclair said that in 1949, LeBlanc wrote a little ditty known as “Hadacol Boogie” and handed it off to country music’s Bill Nettles and His Dixie Blue Boys to make a record. 

The tune is a “tongue-in-cheek testament” that Hadacol “makes you boogie-woogie all the time.” The song reached No. 9 on the country music charts that year.

Yet, Dudley LeBlanc, who was dubbed the “Hadacol Huckster,” knocked it out of the park in 1950 with his introduction of “The Hadacol Caravan.”

Gisclair described it as a “magical medicine show” with “a fleet of 130 tractor-trailer trucks that toured across Louisiana and neighboring states, transporting entertainers who played a series of one-night stands at ballparks, racetracks and fairgrounds.” Crowds numbered in the tens of thousands at each venue.

“You couldn’t buy your way into the show; admission was by presenting two Hadacol tokens or box tops for an adult, one  top for a child,” Gisclair said. Concessions were well-stocked with Hadacol liquid fuel. 

 

“The Hadacol Caravan spent an unheard of $75,000 per week on talent alone – roughly $3 million per month in today’s dollars,” Gisclair said. “There were jugglers, clowns, strongmen and magicians on the periphery, while onstage was an orchestra and chorus girls supporting a roster of comedians, singers, dancers and personalities.”

 

“Performers included Roy Acuff, Lucille Ball, Milton Berle, George Burns and Gracie Allen, James Cagney, Jimmy Durante, Judy Garland, Dick Haymes, Harry Houdini, Bob Hope, Carmen Miranda, Minnie Pearl, Cesar Romero, Mickey Rooney, Ernest Tubb and the Grand Ole Opry Band, Rudy Vallée and Hank Williams.”

 

“As was typical for that time,” Gisclair noted, “a separate jazz and blues show was staged for black customers. LeBlanc shelled out top dollar here as well, often featuring well-known or up-and-coming black entertainers such as Arthur ‘Peg Leg Sam’ Jackson, Bert Williams and T-Bone Walker.”

 “In 1951, LeBlanc added the Hadacol Special, an entourage of 17 plush railroad cars that he used to expand the Hadacol Caravan and his distribution network into the western states, playing a one-month stint in Los Angeles,” Gisclair said.

 

Shortly thereafter, in September 1951, LeBlanc sold his entire operation to a group of New York City businessmen “who got snookered,” in Carlson’s words. “They ended up bankrupt.”

“LeBlanc said, ‘If you sell a cow and the cow dies, you can’t do anything to a man for that.’”

LeBlanc resurfaced in the late 1950s, “now flogging another patent medicine, which he called ‘Kary-On,’” Carlson said. 

“His new joy juice resembled Hadacol, except for one key difference: hardly anybody wanted to buy it.”