Baltimore Evening Sun (13 November 1913): 6.

Be of good cheer, gents! We are coming! The moment the Legislature meets a bill will be introduced relieving the so-called “dry” counties of the speak-easy incubus. Less than three months more of squirrel whisky and nearbeer! Honest Pilsener will be on sale in licensed kaifs by February 1, 1914. Do not despair, brethren! We are on the way!

What has become of that committee of the Medical and Chirurgical Faculty which was to have inquired into the publication of quack medical advertisements in the Baltimore papers? If it was ever appointed, its deliberations have become as all-fired deliberate as those of the Honorary Pallbearers. And meanwhile, all of the local papers, including even the pious old Sunpaper, continue to show a licentious hospitality to such announcements. I mention the Sunpaper with painful regret, and even with half-way apologies. Four or five months ago, when I called attention to its advertisements of Chichester’s Diamond-Brand Pills, it stopped them forthwith. Perhaps it will now do the same with the disingenuous “reading-notice” advertisements of Delatone, a proparation for “removing hairy growths.” If Delatone is really capable of clawing off such flora “in 2 or 3 minutes,” then it is dangerous in lay hands, and in any events there can be no reasonable excuse for advertising it under the heading of “Toilet Tips.”

These Delatone advertisements are printed in cunning imitation of news articles, and the word “Advertisement” at the bottom, required by the new Postal act, is in very small type. In the case of the bogus “Home Beauty Parlor” department conducted by “Betty Dean” it is contracted to “(Adv).” This “Home Beauty Parlor” department purports to give free advice to fair readers who suffer from red noses, dry hair, crow’s feet, freckles, bunions, chapped lips and other such lesions and curses. In nearly every case the inquirer is offered a remedial prescription. The joker lies in the fact that each of these prescriptions contains a patent medicine sold by the anonymous advertiser--for example, parnotis, almozoin, quinzoin and kardene. The names of all such nostrums are printed in small letters, apparently to make the reader believe that they are common drugs.

This bogus “Home Beauty Parlor” department was formerly conducted by “Mrs. Mae Martyn.” Its fraudulence was exposed by the American Medical Association on December 11, 1909, and the change of name followed. But the same old nostrums are recommended. According to the Medical Association’s valuable book on “Nostrums and Quackery,” these preparations are sold to snared customers in 50-cent packages. Fifty cents worth of “almonzoin” costs about 3 cents to make; the same quantity of parnotis costs 2 cents. Those readers of the Sunpaper who are inclined to accept “Betty Dean’s” advice would do well to get this “Nostrums and Quackery” book. The American Medical Association, 535 Dearborn Avenue, Chicago, will send it postpaid for $1. It throws an interesting light upon various other remedies advertised in the Sunpaper. And still others, such as Lydis Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound, are dealt with in Sumuel Hopkins Adams’ book on “The Great American Fraud.”

But the Sunpaper, it must be said in justice, is not the worst offender. Both the Evening News and the Hot Towel carry all of the quacka advertisements that appear in the Sunpaper and many others that do not. For example, the News is the local press agent for the Marmole prescription of obesity, which was denounced by the American Medical Association on October 16, 1909. In addition, it carries the announcements of such things as Posiam, Swamp Root, Mayr’s Stomach Remedy, Eno’s Fruit Salt, Lavona, Herpicide and Munyon’s Paw-Paw. The Towel is even worse. It dearly loves a quack, whether medical or political. It has done yeoman service in the past for Munyon, Lydia Pinkham, Mae Martyn and other such frauds. And it has also had dealings with fortune-tellers, spiritualists and abortionists.

From an editorial in the Los Angeles Examiner of November 3:

R. L. Mencken, a distinguished writer from abroad, in his comments on America, says that our villages are hideous and the architecture of most homes a crime.

American formula for disposing of critics: First call them jokers, then misspell their names, and then accuse them of being foreigners.

The city of Chicago, having been magnificently “cleaned up” by vice crusaders two years ago, is now going back to segregation. The new Chief of Police out there, the Hon. James Gleason, announces “segregation and supervision” as his definite policy, and Mayor Carter H. Harrison is with him. So passes another affecting moral campaign, and one which produced far more mountebanks than most.

Why not recognize Huerta, supply him with arms and ammunition, and so help restore order in Mexico? Say what you will against him, he is undoubtedly the strongest man in the country today. The rest are shooting up the woods; he is in control of the capital, the treasury and the army. What if he did obtain his power by violence? Didn’t Washington and Lincoln do the same thing? Huerta, of course, is vastly more the barbarian, but that is because Mexico itself is more barbarous. More than 95 per cent. of the Mexican people are illiterate semi-savages, Indians, negroes and half-breeds. They are wholly unfit for self-government–they must be governed by some strong and ruthless man. Of what advantage would it be, even to these Mexicans, to bounce Huerta out of office and put a mollycoddle in his place? Besides, what have we got to do with the morality of the MExican Government–we who are governed ourselves by rogues and moutnebankis? Let us get rid of our own Sulzers and Murphys before we presume to lay down moral rules for the Latin Americans.

Immoral editorial note in the Philadelphia Record:

The old Latin maxim, in vino veritas (which, by the way, once adorned the entrance of a Chicago saloon), derives some corroboration from the testimony of the chief probation officer in Boston that inebriates have a higher average of veracity than sober men. At least, he said that he had investigated 80,000 cases of drunkenness entered on the police blotters, and 77,000 of the victims of drink were found to haved told the truth about themselves, and a judge commented that that was a far higher average of truthfulness than that among the sober men who were arrested.

But one of countless testimonies to the virtue of ethyl alcohol! Can as much be said for coffee, for coke, for buttermilk, for ginger-pop, for chloral hydrate, for hasheesh or for any other of the banal tipples of the chemicaly pure?

Boil your drinking water! Beware of Beethoven! Watch Anderson come back!