Dirty Rotten Scoundrels

Nothing is more boring than going through the Direct Marketing Association's Hall of Fame.

For every genius on that wall, someone else is there only because he or she bought booth space at conferences. And totally missing are the online and offline snake-oil salesmen that the DMA wants us to forget.

Take direct mail. The real pioneers were not the Montgomery Wards of legend but colorful rogues who swindled American rubes out of their hard-earned money.

Some prospered selling pornography, “abortifacants” and remedies “to enlarge small male organs” (ever-popular items that continue to do well today).

Others pursued the gold brick fraud, advertising cut-rate gold by mail and shipping what anyone stupid enough to fall for this ruse deserved: red bricks.

The Louisiana Lottery Co. divined the behavioral truth that our hearty native stock didn't want to work at all, and sold chances to win a fortune.

Some, understanding that their victims were just as larcenous as they were, offered “green goods and queer coins” — euphemisms for counterfeit money. Those who took the bait usually got a package of neatly wrapped newspapers.

There were mailers like the Wizard of the Stars (a clairvoyant), the American School of Magnetic Healing, and the Public Clearing House, which promised a $500 reward to anyone it failed to match up with a spouse. (Few were married, fewer collected.)

When they were done bamboozling citizens, these prehistoric marketers swindled the post office. To qualify for the super-cheap publisher's rate, they added “news” to their brochures to make them look like publications, and bulked up their lists with any names they could get their hands on. “These disgusting prints thus force their way unsolicited into homes throughout the country and their demoralizing influence it would be hard to overestimate,” said a critic in the 1890s.

As to their personal attributes, we can only rely on criminal anthropology. Dr. William Littleton Robins studied postal felons around the turn of the 20th century and found that those guilty of fraud were less likely than simple burglars or train robbers to be tattooed. They had longer reach and distinct cranial profiles. “One was dilischopephalii, 22 were mesocephali and 14 were brachyceali,” Robins reported.

Oh yes, the founding fathers occasionally were caught and some “languished in jail for a little,” as Direct Media's Florence Leighton put it. But we should honor them because they set the standards that prevail in many quarters of the industry today.