A snapshot of the quack "miracle cure" doctor-corrupt politician-Nazi propagandist industrial complex ca. 1954-7
Or, how I discovered that my Jewish grandparents in Ebensburg, PA were represented by a Nazi-friendly state senator in the 1950s
Last night I stumbled upon an incredible story about my central Pennsylvania hometown while researching a post (coming soon) on the fascist genealogy of the anti-fluoridation campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s. It all started when I was reading a book chapter about one of the more infamous and successful “alternative medicine” quack doctors of the mid-20th century, Harry Hoxsey. Hoxsey made a killing selling a “miracle cure” for cancer that he claimed his ancestors had developed after seeing a horse cure itself of hoof cancer by rubbing the affected spot on a particular patch of plants.
It was total bullshit and Hoxsey seemed to have been aware of this. When Harry himself was diagnosed with prostate cancer in his 60s he sought out the same conventional treatments that he claimed were inferior to his “miracle cure tonic.” It’s also worth noting that both of his parents, who had helped perfect the supposed miracle cancer cure that he inherited, died at a relatively young age of, you guessed it, cancer. Fuck cancer, but also and just as emphatically, fuck people who become millionaires by selling ailing people expensive fake cures for cancer.
One of Hoxsey’s most avid supporters and promoters was the “Jayhawk Nazi” Gerald Winrod, a Christian Nationalist preacher who’d been tried for sedition in 1944 for his pro-Nazi activities during WWII. In the 1930s Winrod had also been a major booster of John Romulus Brinkley, the quack doctor who claimed to cure impotence by implanting goat testicles into men’s scrotums. Brinkley came very close to getting elected governor of Kansas as an anti-establishment, populist write in candidate in 1930. In the 1930s Brinkley took a tour of Nazi Germany and was so impressed by what he saw that he had the swimming pool at his Texas home tiled with swastikas. If you’re not familiar with this story, the film Nuts! is a very entertaining and informative introduction to it. [One particularly nutty twist to the story is that the high powered AM radio station Brinkley set up to advertise his quack cure played a major role in popularizing the Carter family singers and the genre we’ve come to know as “country music." Also, Wolfman Jack got his start in the 50s working for the high-powered Mexican AM station that Brinkley had founded to evade American broadcasting laws in the 30s.]
As I discussed in this earlier Rightlandia post about Walter Huss’s quackish ideas about health, there’s long been a connection between the populist, Nazi-friendly far right and the anti-government and anti-science devotees of “alternative” medicine.
The iteration of this story that I stumbled upon last night, however, threw me for a loop because it took place in the central Pennsylvania county (Cambria) where I grew up and where my family has resided since the 1910s. It was a story that garnered a ton of national attention in the 1950s but I’d never heard of it, and neither had my mom (who was in elementary school there when it happened and who has lived in Cambria County virtually her entire life). The most shocking part of the story is that the person who represented my grandparents and my mom in the Pennsylvania state senate in the 1950s was a great fan of Gerald Winrod’s.
Pittsburgh Press, 5 May 1955
This 1961 portrait of “Bouncy Little Haluska” gives you a flavor of the sort of character he was—a flashy dressing, fast talking, “fighter” with an eighth grade education and a chip on his shoulder about people in the media or politics who tried to stand in his way. He performed magic tricks at his campaign events which were backed by a 12-piece band. “Whenever they’re against me, I’m at my best,” he says. “And the people in my district love a person who will fight for a cause.”
Given that description of Haluska, I’m sure you will be shocked to learn that he was involved in a corrupt, fake-cancer-cure scam from which he made a ton of money.
In 1954 State Senator Haluska arranged for his pal (and business partner) Harry Hoxsey to set up one of his miracle cancer cure clinics in a town in Cambria County. Such clinics were necessary because it was illegal for Hoxsey to sell his potions across state lines, so his patients had to come to him. Haluska thought the influx of patients who would need places to stay, food to eat, and diversions to spend money on while there for treatment would be an economic windfall for any community lucky enough to land this amazing opportunity. In these small towns of about a thousand residents comprised primarily of coal miners and their families, this was a very attractive prospect…that is, as long as you were comfortable hosting a quack doctor who was pocketing the life savings of desperate cancer patients to whom he was selling very expensive snake oil. Hoxsey’s treatments generally cost around $400 (the equivalent of about $4500 today). The “medicine” his “patients” paid for probably cost less than a dollar to make and it absolutely did not work in the slightest.
Map of Cambria County, PA. The county is about 80 miles east of Pittsburgh. Ebensburg, the county seat of about 3000 people, was where my grandparents lived and where I grew up. Patton was Haluska’s hometown and Portage was the town that eventually landed Hoxsey’s clinic. For scale, Portage is about 10 miles from Ebensburg. After Hoxsey’s Portage clinic was shut down by a consent decree in 1957, it relocated to Cresson until that operation also got shut down. Later I’ll explain why Lilly and Nanty-Glo are circled.
When the Hoxsey clinic in Portage was finally shuttered by the government in 1957, it came out that Haluska had been paid between $1000 and $3000 each month, the equivalent of $10,000 and $30,000 in 2023 dollars. Haluska, a former coal miner himself, used his political and social clout to set up a medical scam to enrich himself at the expense of working class people who paid several months salary for the fake cure that Holuska and his Nazi-loving, Jew-hating Christian friends like Gerald Winrod marketed to them. Holuska, Winrod, and Hoxsey stuffed their already fat wallets with the money of ailing and desperate people who they conned, accurately perceiving that they could transubstantiate into cold hard cash the reservoirs of trust that inhered in them as “men of God” and respected community leaders.
The local angle on this story was covered exceptionally well by a journalist for The Pittsburgh Press who wrote a six-part series in 1954 on Haluska’s efforts to strong arm the local community into allowing his pal Hoxsey to set up shop there. The journalist, who was himself the son of central Pennsylvania coal miners, was rightfully suspicious about what Haluska and Hoxsey were up to. His series offers a rich and sophisticated window into how these right wing populist charlatans used anti-government and anti-elite rhetoric to gain public support. As someone who’d grown up in and then left a working class coal mining community, this journalist saw right through these wealthy and powerful politicians and entrepreneurs whose cynical grift involved getting working class people to side with them as fellow “victims of the system” and “champions of the little guy.” The series is a real model of what accurate, not-bothsides journalism can look like. The author allows Haluska and Hoxsey to have their say, but he does not allow them to get away with their lies about their “miracle cure.” I’m sure Haluska and Hoxsey thought this journalist was “biased,” but I’d say he privileged accuracy in a situation where there was much public and political pressure to allow these powerful charlatans to define the situation.
I’ll close with a few observations at the end (as well as a truly stunning twist to the story), but I want to just let this amazing 6-part series speak for itself. The resonances with our contemporary moment are legion.
A few themes leap out to me. The first is the eagerness with which ordinary people in Patton and Portage seem to have embraced a populist charlatan like Hoxsey because at least he wasn’t one of those eggheaded academics, doctors, or bureaucrats who thought they knew better. The moment when Holuska arranges for a grand parade to welcome Hoxsey to Cambria County put me in mind of this scene from Inherit the Wind (1960).
I also find it interesting that Holuska appears to have successfully recruited the local Chamber of Commerce to back his scheme. Cultivating a healthy skepticism about institutions like modern medicine is always a good thing, but that skepticism can be easily manipulated and monetized by entrepreneurial charlatans and their powerful and unscrupulous enablers.
A second theme is how Haluska and Hoxsey profited off of peoples’ all-too-human fears about death and hopes for a simple solution to their suffering.
The state of medical knowledge about cancer treatment in the 1950s was not terribly advanced. The treatments that existed were physically punishing and had only modest success rates. This was just the lay of the land at the time, there were simply limits to human knowledge about cancer (just as there are limits to our knowledge about everything in the world, limits that ideally keep receding as we learn more). But rather than living inside that modern epistemological world in which some things are fairly confidently known while others are not, Hoxsey and Haluska cynically told desperate people that THEY had THE REAL ANSWER that you too can acquire for $400. Even worse, they told those people that the actual doctors and scientists who were trying in good faith to find actual, evidence-based answers were ackshually money-grubbing charlatans who were using their access to political power and the media to cruelly rip you off by selling you a false bill of goods. Hm, now who would ever think to do such a thing?
A third theme that stood out to me is the plight and bravery of those doctors at the Spangler Miners’ Hospital who threatened to quit if their boss (the politician who was promoting this Hoxsey quackery) didn’t resign. It can’t have been easy to be a doctor in these communities where you were one of the few college-educated people and where you faced many countervailing pressures and lots of suspicion from the mine operators, the union, business leaders, and the miners themselves. I’m sure the story of what these doctors did is far more complicated than what we see in these press reports, but it made me think about the plight of doctors today who have to cope with patients who show up in their offices with heads stuffed with propagandistic disinformation about vaccines, Covid treatments, etc.—disinformation that has been put in their heads by people in positions of wealth and influence who seek to profit from that democracy-corroding disinformation. I’m sure there was also much pressure brought to bear to use one’s credentials (in return for a generous fee, of course) to bless Hoxsey’s lucrative “cure.” It speaks well of these doctors that none of them took that bait, though that’s admittedly a pretty low bar.
A fourth and final theme has to do with the media. When Hoxsey came under federal scrutiny, Holuska’s friend Gerald Winrod undertook a massive (and lucrative) propaganda campaign on Hoxsey’s behalf. I want to emphasize that anyone who read Winrod’s Defender was, at the very least, comfortable having in their home some of the most hatefully antisemitic and racist literature imaginable at the time, literature produced by someone who had literally conspired with the Nazis in the 1940s to overthrow the US government.
Pittsburgh Press, 24 March 1957.
Today we’re used to seeing far right politicians working the media to advance their political goals and talking points, and this was exactly what Holuska was doing at the local level in the 1950s with his weekly op-eds in five of Cambria County’s leading newspapers. Without such easy access to the megaphone of the local media, it’s unlikely Holuska could have ginned up such avid support for his scheme.
But here comes the “you’ve got to be kidding me” kicker. The person who owned those five newspapers in which Gerald Winrod-fanboy John Haluska had a running column was none other than Herman Sedloff, a Russian Jewish emigre who had moved to the nearby coal mining town of Nanty Glo (circled on the county map above) in 1921 to found a “labor oriented” paper. At that time Cambria County had a national reputation as a notoriously anti-union area marked by organized KKK vigilante violence against labor organizers, Catholics, and Jews. The anti-union violence was so extreme that in 1924 a trainload of KKK-linked Johnstown business owners chartered a railroad car, traveled to the mining town of Lilly baseball bats in hand, and provoked a conflict in which three Lilly workers were murdered. I think I’ve mentioned before that my grandfather, whose father had just opened up a clothing store in Ebensburg in 1923, remembered a hooded Klan parade marching past his father’s store in 1924 when he was 8 years old. In that year approximately 40% of the adult men in Ebensburg, the fathers of my grandfather’s classmates, owned Klan robes. The owners of the company-town coal mines at Colver (named for owners Mr. Colman and Mr. Weaver) and Revloc (Colver spelled backwards) employed billy-club wielding goons who stood on the train platform and chased back onto the train anyone who tried to disembark who they did not recognize and thus was presumed to be a labor organizer.
It was into this highly charged situation that Herman Sedloff, a Jewish immigrant from Russia, chose to place himself as the editor of a “labor oriented” newspaper in Nanty-Glo. That took some chutzpah to be sure. But it’s also important to note just how unsettled the socio-political landscape was in the coal producing areas of Cambria County at that time. Coal mining company towns like Colver and Revloc had only been built in the 1910s. The thousands of workers who moved into the county to work in the newly opening bituminous mines were mostly immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, many of whom were Catholic and few of whom spoke English as their first language. So while my great-grandfather Jacob Covitch (a Jewish immigrant from Hungary who opened up a clothing store in Ebensburg in 1923 to cater to local mine workers) or Herman Sedloff (a Russian Jewish immigrant who founded a labor-oriented newspaper in Nanty Glo in 1921) looked like “outsiders” to the white Anglo Christians who found themselves “innundated” by immigrants, such immigrant “outsiders” quickly came to comprise the majority of residents in those places. John Haluska (1902-1984), future pal of nativist Christian Nationalist hater of Jews and Catholics Gerald Winrod, was himself born in Patton to recently immigrated Catholic Slovak parents, his father having landed a job in the region’s recently opened coal mines.
By the time we fast forward to the 1950s—when John Haluska was serving as State Senator and Jewish immigrants like Jacob Covitch and Herman Sedloff were successful local businessmen and active members of the Kiwanis Club—the socio-political landscape of Cambria County had changed quite a bit. Still, this Herman Sedloff piece of the story, which I only found out about this morning when I was texting about this with my mom who still lives in Ebensburg, raises far more questions than I can possibly answer at this point.
Anyone who read Gerald Winrod’s Defender would have “known” that “the Jews control the media” and sought to “destroy Christianity” via the Communist conspiracy which they were supposedly behind. And yet, here was a Jewish newspaper owner in Cambria County giving weekly space in all of his newspapers to John Haluska, a political co-worker with Gerald Winrod. Did Herman Sedloff ever have second thoughts about turning over space in his newspapers to that Haluska huckster with Nazi friends? What did Sedloff think of this whole 1950s episode with Haluska, Hoxsey, and Winrod? Did he dismiss Haluska’s links to Winrod as just a kooky eccentricity that posed little actual threat to American Jews like himself? Was Haluska a true believer in the fascist hokum Winrod spouted, or did he just see Winrod as another quintessentially American, attention-seeking entrepreneur like himself who was willing to say or do any outlandish thing that could make him a quick buck? Haluska and Sedloff must have seen each other with some regularity. Did they ever have a conversation about that Gerald Winrod Nazi? My gut tells me that I’ll probably never find much evidence that can help me answer such questions.
Sadly, one person who could have provided some answers is my grandfather who died in 2011. In the 1950s and 60s he was running the clothing store his father had opened in 1923 and spending many a weekend afternoon happily toodling around Ebensburg’s 9-hole golf course smoking cigars with his friend Herman Sedloff. Meanwhile John Haluska was 12 miles up the road in Patton, smoking cigars and spouting his nonsense about Gerald Winrod.
Righlandia coda
Since this post has been entirely devoid of Walter Huss content, I feel obligated to provide at least a little bit of that. Harry Hoxsey died in 1974 but his “miracle cure” lived on as a treatment one could receive by traveling to the Hoxsey clinic in Mexico that had been set up by some of his former assistants from his Dallas clinic. When Walter Huss attended an alternative cancer treatment seminar in Pasadena in 1989, he very well may have attended the featured movie about “Hoxsey Cancer Therapy.”
This document may look familiar because I referred to it in this recent post about Kirkpatrick Dilling’s mother, one of Gerald Winrod’s fellow Nazi-loving defendants in the 1944 Sedition Trial. Kirkpatrick Dilling, like Huss and Winrod and Hoxsey and Haluska, was a significant player in the quack "miracle cure" doctor-corrupt politician-Nazi propagandist industrial complex after which this newsletter was titled.
So there you have it. All roads lead to Walter Huss and it all fits together like that guy’s stringboard from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
What a name. I assume it's pronounced "Ho[a]xsey"
You’ve got me wondering about my dad, a classic New York Jewish liberal Democrat who was also a big fan of Carlton Fredricks’ radio show — with the result that throughout my childhood, his invariable breakfast was a concoction of cottage cheese, canned pineapple, and wheat germ. All very strange.