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THE NEV YORITER, JEPTEMBER 15, 2OO3

JAKE LEGHow the blues diagnosed a medical mystery.

BY DAN BAUM

T\r.John Morgan, a professor atJ.-lthe City University of New YorkMedical School,likes to call himself apharmaco-ethnomusicologist. His firstlove is early-American vemacular music,and his apartment, on the Upper WestSide, is stacked with ancient records.Some years back, Morgan was listeningto the Allen Brotlers"Jake Walk Blues,"released in 7930.In alcazno-backed Ten-nessee twang, the brothers sang, "I canteat, I carit talh drinking mean jake, Lord,I cantwalk."

The lyrics pinballed through Morgarismemory and lit up twice. First was a lec-ture he'd heard in medical school, in 1961:a professor had mentioned a strange pa-ralpis called'jake walk" that he had ob-served during his residency in Cincinnatiin the thirties. Nextwas a face from Mor-gan's childhood in Ohio, that of a leglessbeggar called Nigger John. Nigger Johnhad had the'jake legi'Morgan recalledhis mother telling him. She had said it inaway rhat discouraged firrther i"q"t y.

Stout and bearded, Morgan, whois sixry-three, delicately set the arm ofa tumtable on a thiclq spinning record,and after a moment's hiss we heardwhat sounded like pure despair. "Ishmon

Bracey, one of the Mississippi greats,"Morgan whispered. From seven decadesbaclg Bracey wailed, 'Jake leg, jake leg,what in the world you trying to do? Seemslike everybodyin the city's messed up onaccount of drinking you."

Morgan has collected a number ofsongs about the jake leg or the jake walk"From themwe leam thatsome newkindof paralysis appeared in 1930," he said."No songs mention it before then." Hebegan bending back blunt fingen. "The

paralysis was brought on by drinkingsomething called jake.' It affiiaed enoughsouls to instigate an entire subset of folkmusic. Blacks and whites were affected.It rendered men imDotent. And it rvasno longer inspiring musicians bv 1934,which meantitwas a catadysmic but dis-

ANNALJ OF EPIDEMIOLOGY t rrdot lr

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of thercaughtand harwho hefew dar

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qcrete event." He sat back and spread hishands. "Behold the study, through fotkmusic, of a substance-induced epidemic,"he said. "Pharmaco-ethnomusicology."

Morgan has been researching the jakeleg on and offfornventy-sevenyears. Hehas put together a CD collection of sev-enteen tunes mentioning it, includingone by Gene Autry, and he has writtenhaJf a dozen medical-joumal articles onthe subject. In the nineteen-seventies, heinterviewed a number of the epidemic'ssurvivingvictims and collected his data, ateeming baznar of anecdote and chem-istry, in a huge manuscript that has beengathering dust for years. He also has afilthy carton firll of clippings. With a lit-de prodding, he agreed to turn all thematerial over to me. "I'm not giving up onthe story mysel-f," he said. "I just dontmind someone else telling it, too."

A r f"t as we know, the outbreak wasfLfurt detected in Oklahoma City, byEptraim Goldfain, a thirty-four-year-oldphpician who had emigrated from Ro-mania as a child and had put himselfthtough medical school by operating astreetcar. He was bookistrlv handsome.with swept-backred hair, a cleft chin, andround hom-rimmed glasses. With a fewpartners, he ran a thirty-five-bed cliniccalled the Reconstruction Hosoital. OnFebruary 27 ,7930, aman whosi name islost to history staggered in off the street.The patient's feet dangled like a mari-onette's, so that walking involved *irg-ing them forward and slapping them ontothe floor. He told Goldfain that he hadstrained himself lifting an automobile,and a couple of days later his calves hadbegun to tingle. Then his legs went uselessbelow the knee. He wasnt in any pain, hesaid, but he could barelyget around.

Sudden paralysis in those days usuallymeant polio, but to Goldfain, who re-counted the patient's history in a medicaljournal, this didnt look like polio. Hedidnt pay much attention to the story

Preparc(hospital

E crtyot n5 what lori Inor*g tttltrvrn- the succ

of them, a podiatrist, claimed he hadcaught the illness from his own patients,and handed Goldfain a list of the oneswho had gone foot-floppy in the pastfew days. The list had sixry-five narnes.

Oklahoma in 1930 was a hard-luckplace. Thanks to price-killing oversup-plies of wheat and cotton, its people hadgotten a head start on the Depression.The same dayrhatGoldfain sawhis fivepatients, the American Hospital Association criticized Oklahoma City's medicalpreparedness, noting that it had fewerhospital beds per capita than any other

f; cityof its size. Nowitwas strugglingwith5 what looked like a full-blor,vn epidemic.

F h one frenetic day, Goldfain visitedE thirry men on the podiatrist's list, and ini the succeeding weefts followed up with

for bootlegging. They struckhim as beingashamed of their illness. He had only tolookatthem, and the gimyscratdr housesthey lived in, to know they were stew-bums, boozegobs, hooch histers, drunls.

Within a few davs. in various localesin the Easq the South, and the Midwest,men began folding up. Some found thatthey couldnt climb out of bed in themoming. Those who could stillwalk allhad the same rubber{egged gait; onedoctor in a Rhode Island hosoitalfoodedwith victims said that the min walked asif they were passing *"o"gh "a field ofwetgrass." In Providence, a seventy-year-old hobo was sfficken at 11 A.M. at thecomer of Friendship and Plain Streets;he sat down and couldnt get up. Thenumbers were frightening: fifty-five cases

Jnut lifting the car. Goldfain thought*re man's symptoms suggested lead poi-soning. He ordered blood and spinal-iluid tests. They came back negative.

Later that day, another man appeared,erhibiting the same bizarre palsy. Andthen another. By the end of the day,Goldfain's clinic had admitted five pa-tients with the distinctive paralysis. (jne

other visits. The men's feet dangled, theirlegs hung dead below the knee. Somecould get around on crutches, somecouldntmake theirlegs move atall, somecould use neither their legs nor theirhands. Goldfain knew at once that thiswas no contagion. No chil&enwere siclqand hardlyanywomen.The men Goldfainsaw all lived in a seedy part of tovrn knovrn

in Worcester, Massachusetts. Five hun-dred practically ovemight in Wichita. Sixhundred and ninety in Topeka. A thou-sand in Mississippi. The mysteryplaguesmote Johnson Ciry Tennessee, particu-larly hard. "4. great many of the victimsfor the first three or four weeks wereashamed to come on the sffeets. but thevfinally came out," aJohnson Cityvictimwrote in a letter to the Swgeon General'soffice. "You can go on the streets ofJohn-son City now, and in the run of a day,youcan count three or four hundred peoplein the same condition that I am in."

In NewEngland, as in the South, thetypical victim was an alcoholic man Jivingalone in a cheap rented room, unem-ployed or holding a menial job. Manywere veterans of the Great War. A pat ofCincinnati doctors examined a hun&edand seventeen victims and found theirmedian age to be forty-seven; almost allof themwere eamingless than fortydol-lars a week "Afa$

proportion led lone-some lives," the doctors wrote. "Indeed,

itwould be difficult to imagine anyonehaving less contact with the people aboutthem than some of these patients."

fhe economics of Prohibition, then inI its eleventh yeaq painted a bull's-eye

on the urban and small-tolrm poor. Cityswells could buy bonded liquor from Can-ada; baclsvoods hillbillies often had ac-cess to s

'lls. Lol,v-income townsfolkdrank

what they could get-rubbing alcohol,hair oil, Stemo, doctored antifreeze. Whatmanyof them prefened though,was jake.

Jake wasJamaica ginger extract, one ofthe hundreds of dubious but harrnless pat-ent medicines that.Americans had been*ly"g on for a cenhry. A pale-orangeconcoction packaged in a two-ounce glassbottle, it was supposed to treat catarrh,flatulence, and "late menstruation." Be-cause it was as much as eighty-five-per-cent alcohol, it packed the kick of fowjiggers of Scotch. And it was legal. Pat-ent medicines had been providing an endrun around temoerance laws since Mainebecame the fusl state to go dry, in 1851.A botde costing thirty-five cents wasavailable in many pharmacies, groceries,and even dime stores. Preachers andschoolmarms could slip the flat, dear-glass botde into a pocket for a discreetnip athome. Common rummies, though,often took a botde into the store's backroom, which many jake sellers kept as

THE NEV YORKER, JEPTEMBER 15, 2OO3 5I

f

Paralysis sictims initiallyfeh foot-1fl0pp1t," and tpalked with a rubberJegged gait.

low-rent speakeasies. There they couldmix the jake with Coca-Cola and havetheir own firtive Iitde parry.

The Pure Food and Dnrg Act of 7906had purified neither. It required onlyhonest labelling. If a patent medicinecontained alcohol, morphine, opium, co-caine, heroin, alpha orbeta eucaine, chlo-roform, cannabis indica, ctrloral hydrate,or acetanilide, the label had to say so. Fur-thermore, if the medicine was listed in acompendium of drug standards such asthe United States Pharmacopeia (U.S.P),the medicine hadto meetthose standardsand the botde could carry the U. S .P label.

Jake, as a "fluid extract," fell under theU.S.P reqdrcment of four-per-cent solids(in this case, ginger) in a soiution of alco-hol and water. In I9I9 , the Volstead Aatumed every state dry, but it banned onlybeverage liquor; jake and other alcoholicmedicines remained legal. \Mhen the qrs-terious outbreak of paralysis occurred,eleven years later, there was no reasoninitiallyto suspect that jake had anyrole.

'-l-h. tirst person to record a connec-I tion between iake and the paralysis

may have been Ishmon Bracey, the blackblues singer who cut'Jake Liquor Blues"in Grafton, Wisconsin, in March of1930, onlyweela after Goldfain sawhisfirst case. Braceywas one of half a dozenMississippi bluesmen-Son House,Willie Brown, and Charley Pattonarnong them-whom Paramount Rec-ords had invited to Grafton that spring tomake "race" records. (This wasonlv ten vears after the first blackblues hit was recorded-MamieSmith's "Crazy Blues," on OkehRecords---and Paramount hadheard from fumiture-store olvn-ers, who sold record-players,that they could move more stockif there were more black bluesrecords available.) In addition toBracey, Tommy Johnson, whohadmade aname forhimself in1928 by recording "Canned Heat Blues,"about drinking Stemo, cut his'AlcoholandJake Blues" at Grafton. He was, ac-cording to his biographer, David Evans, ahopeless alcoholicwho in a dmnken stu-porbecame convinced thathe had signedawayhis rights everto record music again.

Johnson's brother recalled for Evans, "See,

when Tom get broke, he would sell any-thing to get a drinkof whisky or a drink

52 THE NEVYORKER, JEPTEMBER 15, 2OO3

of alcorub or anything thatd bring ondrunk Hed take this oldblackThree-in-One shoe polish and strain it through aoowder mufi It would be iust as clear aswater." Though he lived and performedfor another twenty-six years, after theGrafton session Johnson never recordedanother song. Daddy Stovepipe, a singerwho liked to oerform in formal attire. andhis wife, Miisissippi Sarah, also appar-endy recorded ajake{eg song though

John Morgan has never found it.Morgan believes that no other incident

has inspired as muchpopularmusic as thejake-walk epidemic. Generally, one songcomes out of a disaster, maybe two. "There

is nothing to equal the jake walk ' he toldme. As a pharmaco-ethnomusicologist,Morgan pala partinrlar attention to theportrayal of intoxicants. "Alcohol songs,like heroin songs, tend to be negative andwaming and the jal<e songs fit that pattem.Marijuana songs are almost alwa1re firnrry"

Newspaper writers came up withnicknames for the ailment jake leg jakewalk, jakeitus, jakeralysis, gingerfoot."The worst has happened," a one-paragraph story in the Topeka DailyCapitol said. "Emporia, the Athens ofKansas, has jake leg."'In the countryas a whole, as many as a hun&ed thou-sand people were affected, many endingup in the poorhouses, county farms, vet-erans' homes, and pogeys that consti-tuted the social safety net in those days.

Right behind tlle stories of outbrealacame reports of miracle cures: "galvanic

current," sodium thiosulfate (a

cure for "heavy-metal" poison-ing), and baths in cidervinegar.An Oklahoma Clty man saidhe recovered from the jake legby being "bumped around on along trip by automobile." AlAlabama jake{egger told his

.doctor that com whiskey wasthe "specific treatment" for hiscondition. ATixas woman toldajudge that her doctor had rec-

ommended beer. Dr. Robert Kidd, ofColumbus, Ohio, treated ahundred andtrventy-five jake-leg cases by removingforty cc.'s of spinal fluid from each pa-tient and replacing it with a productcalled Lillet horse serum. Aside from"terrific anaphylactic reaction," rise intemperature, severe headache, backache,nausea, and vomiting that requircd Adren-alin andmoqphine to combag everything

went swimmingly. O. B. Van Fossen,a chemist at the Golden Rule oil refin-ery in Wichita, looked out his windowone day to see a dozen jake-leg victimsbathing in the slush ponds of warm pe-troleum refuse and mud. The lime andsulfur of the slurryr, they'd been told,might do them good.

Some victims, for whatever reason,did recover varying degrees of mobility;for others, the paralysis was permanent.

John Morgan tracked doram some severejake{eg victims in 1977. By then, themuscle floppiness theyd experienced inthe nineteen-thirties had evolved into aspastic tigdity, but they were still crip-pled. Autopsies of jake{eggers who diedfrom other causes showed damage tothe central nervous system, including thespinal cord's anterior horn cells-thesame that go bad in cases of polio andamyotrophic lateral sclerosis (A.L.S., orLou Geh,rig's disease). But the spinal col-umn's pyramidal traa cells also sufferedfrom the jake, which gradually led tospasms and rigidity. Higher brain func-tions wererit affected, a team of Univer-sity of Oklahoma researchers conduded,although their methodology raises ques-tions. They dosed a chicken with enoughjake to make its LSr go limp and noted,"The e:cpression in the eyes seemed to in-dicate that the mind was not impaired."

Once jake was established as the vec-tor, there was no escaping the awls^rardtruth that the victims had brought the af:fiction upon themselves. "God is hangingout a red fag as a danger sign to those whoviolate His law," thundered a JohnsonCity Baptist minister. Shame was an ad-ditional burden on the sufferers; the jakelegs distinaive limp betrayed everybody.Fear of disgrace made it hard for doctorsto get a patient history. A paralped oper-ator of a Georgia mill, for enample,vigor-ously denied drinkingjake until his doctortricked him byoffering aprescription thathe said might help but could kill anypa-tient who'd been drinking ginger extact.The patient declined the prescription.

Not allvictims were poor or alcoholic.In the nineteen-seventies, Morgan inter-viewed'James Thomas," a highly re-soected white retiree who had served onthe boards of several Tennessee banks.When he was seventeen. Thomas and hisbrother and some friends had boughtsome jake in Johnson City at a roadsidestore run by a man namedWill Kite and

his daughter. Two weeks later, Thomas,rvho drove a truckfor an oil company, no-ticed that sometlingwaswrong. He sud-denly found it hard to depress the brakeand clutdr pedals. He beganworking in-doors. but noticed that his hands wereweak as well; soon he couldrit walk "A-fter

months in bed," Morgan recalled, "he wasable to struggle to his feet and walkwithcrutdres, and began working on his par-ents'farm. He would hold tighdy to theplow handles and drag his feet behindthe horse, who initially supplied most ofthe locomotive power. His hands re-turned to normal, a process that tookyears, and he became a retail grocer. Henever walked without crutches again."

According to another Johnson Cityresident, the Kites denied that their Ja-maica ginger oftract had caused the ill-ness. "They pointed out that the bottleswere all labelled'United States Pharma-copeia 7 0o/o alco,"'' Morgan explained."Because it was labelled so and carrieda govemmental certificate, it couldnt bethe cause of the illness, theyargued.Theybacked up their beliefs by openly con-suming the jake in the store. The Kitescontinued to ooerate the store for a time.This was accomplished with difficulty,because theyboth had to crawl on handsand knees from the back rooms of thestore to the countertowait on customers."

None of the contemporary news ormedical accounts mentionedwhat appea$to have been the disease's most embarrass-ing consequence.

"It's the doggonest dis-ease ever heard of since I been bom,"Bracey sang.

"You get numb in front of

your body, you carit carry any loviri on." Inthe jake songs, "limber leg" or "limber trou-ble" seems to have been the bluesmen'scode for impotence. "Mama cried out andsaid,'Oh Lord, there's nothiriin theworldpoor daddy can do,

'cause he done drankso much jake, oh Lord, that he got thelimber leg, too,'

" moanedWillie Lofton.Bracey was the most explicit'AuntJane,she came runnin'and screamiri, tellirieverybody in the neighborhood,

'That

man of mine got the limber trouble, andhis lovin cant do me anygood."'

Every song by a black singer mentionsthe limber leg. "If it hadnt made menimpotent, there might not have been anymusic at a11," Morgan said. In 7976,hetracked do'r'rn a sixry-nine-year-old jake-

leg victim named Gwin Davis. When theepidemic began, Davis had been a mill-

"WTe a traditional gay couple----<ne don't have kids."

worker living in a boarding house inElizabethton, Tennessee. He'd bought hisjake at a roadside stand that also sold icecrearn, sandwiches, and moonshine. Heand allbut one of the eight or nine otheryoung men at the boarding house wentlimp at the same time. Initially, they madea game of it. "We thoughtitwas fun, in away. Slap our feet and fall dorvn, this andthat," Davis said.

"We didnt know wewas going to get to where we couldntwalk at all. Yeah, finally got to wherewe couldnt walk at all."When Morganasked him if he'd ever thought of marry-ing, Davis looked at his feet and wept.

It is impossible to determine how manyblack people suffered from the jake leg;they werent welcome at many hospitals,where they might have been counted.Onlywhites gathered statistics on the epi-demic, and, again, the research methodswere often questionable. The researchersat the University of Oldahoma assertedthat theyhad not found "a single case of aNegro being affected" in their region, butthey seem to have doubted their own ob-servations. (Oklahoma was ten per centblack) To see if African-Americans en-joyed a natural immunity to the jake leg,the researchers devised yet another ex-perimentwith chickens, this time dosingblack and white chickens with known

paralytic ginger extract. Secr.ue in the be-lief that black feathers in chickens werethe genetic equivalent of African her-itage in humans, theywatched the blackand white chickens fall ill indiscrimi-nately and concluded that'tolorplap no

part." An Ohio doctor noted that ten percent of the cases he saw were Negroes,and felt compelled to report that, amongthe remainder, seventy-five per centwere"brunettes."The songs of Ishmon Bracey,Willie Lofton, and TommyJohnson re-main the best con-firmation that the jake

leg hit black communities hard.

fhe jake-leg epidemic broke out dur-I ing the last golden moments of the

Republican Elysium, before the fi.rll effectof the crash set in, when the countrywasfeveristrly denying how poor itwas getting.Govemment was small, regulations wereskimpy, enforcementwas an afterthought,and mass product-liability suits were yet tobe pioneered. The federal budget was lessthan four billion dollars, and the biggestitems were defense spending and veterans'benefits. Drug standards were policed, tothe limited eictent allowed, bytheAgricul-ture Departrnent's tinv Bureau of Chem-istry, which n7927 cha"ged its name tothe Food, Drug, and Insecticide Adminis-tration. Its annual budget was litde more

THE NEVYORKER, JEPTEMBER I5, 2OO3 53

than a million dollars, apittance even then.The very idea that the federal govemmentshould play a role in fighting the jake legwas controversial.

In any case, the govemment had noCenters for Disease Control from whichto dispatch regiments of epidemiologists.As jake leg whipped across the land,olenw of theories circulated: that a batchoflun nua U"en contaminated with lead,

arsenic, nicotine, creosote, or carbolicacid; that an unscrupulous boodeggerhadused toxic wood alcohol or petroleum aI-cohol instead of grain alcohol; that thejake-leggers suffered from "lathyrism,

which results from the eating of certainspecies of beans"; that gatherers of wildginger on the island of "Santo Domingo'in "Central America" had accidentallyharvested a poisonous root called

"der-

ringue." One old jake victim in trlizabeth-ton,Tennessee, told Morgan that, becausethe biggest local employer at the timeof the outbreak was a German-orvnedrayon factory, a lot of people thoughtthat the Germans were poisoning the jake

to soften up America for another war.The onlypublic-health watchdog was

the federal Hygienic Laboratory a mis-

erably underfunded outgrowth of theEllis Island clinic, which had been estab-lished in 7887 to screen immigrants. Itwas in the process of changing its nameto the grander National Institute ofHealth, but it had a budget of less than amillion dollars, and a staff of only twelvedoctors. One of themwas abespectacledforry-two-year-old Russian immigrantnamed Maurice Isadore Smith, who, likeEphraim Goldfain, had come to theUnited States as a child and worked hiswaythrough medical school to become apharmacologist. In early 1930, he de-cided that he needed to get his hands ona sample of poisonedjake.

It wasnt easy. As word of the epi-demic spread, storekeepers, fearful ofbeing prosecuted, removed jake fromtheir shelves. Consumers smashed theirbotdes to keep familymembers from get-ting poisoned. More than once, Smith'sinvestigators had to recoverbotdes from

cesspools and outhouse pits. They foundtheir first sample in Findlay, Ohio, andrushed it back to Washington, where test-ing on animals revealed something odd.Though poisoned jake killed rabbits andpanJyzed calves, it was relatively harm-less to monkeys and dogs, animals com-monly used to test for toxicity in humans.

Looming in the baclground of Smith sinvestigation was the Tieasury Depart-ment's Bureau of Prohibition, which hadjurisdiction over any incident involvingalcohol and a budget roughly nine timesthat of either the ED.I.A. or the N.I.H.It also had badges and tommy guns.Some health officials held the dryagentsin contempt as power-hungry, moralisticcops.

"Itwill do us no good to be identified with the Prohibition fJnit," oneED.I.A. official wrote his boss, reason-ing that it would "hinder our work in thefuture if manufacturers think we aresnooDers for the Prohibition outfit." Butthe Prohibition Bureau had the resourcesand labs for analyingalcohol. Its chem-ists quicklyidentified a sulprising chem-

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ical in the suspectjake: tri-ortho-cresylphosphate, orTOCP, a plasticizer formu-Iatedto keep synthetic materials frombe-coming britde. Two companies made it:Eastrnan Kodakand the Celluloid Co{po-ration of Newarlg NewJeney, r,vhich usedit for lacquers, resins, and rubber com-pounds. TOCP was not considered toxic.

Whywould anyone add plasticizer tojake? The most persuasive theorywas putforward by several investigators andchemists. From the start of Prohibition,the teasury Departrnent had sought totackle the problem of people getting toomuch pleasure from patent-medicinetippling by ordering that the solids influid extracts be doubled. In the case ofjake, this transformed a tastypale-orangeliqueur into a black symp so bitter itcould be endured only if heavily diluted.

To enforce compliance, govemmentagents sometimes pulled jake off shelves,boiled off the alcohol, and weighed thesolids. Agents didnt thoroughly test thesolids, though, and this provided an op-portunity for the clever chemists of a

multimillion{ollar industry devoted tosubverting kohibition. Boodeggers wererlt "dy rttippins methyl alcohol out ofdenatured"industrial alcohol to make itdrinkable and distilling potable hoochfrom aftershaves and perfumes. Whatthey needed was away to boost the solidsin jake enough to satisfytheT:menwith-out spoiling the taste.

They tried molasses and various herbs,but what worked best, at least until 1930,was castor oil. It had a higher boilingpoint than alcohol and so stayed behind,to beweighedwith the ginger,when thealcohol was gone. Its drawback was itstendencytoriseto the top of abotde, tip-ping off the buyer that something otherthan ginger and alcohol lurked inside.The plasticizerTOCP solved that.

After testing Smitl's samples, Prohi-bition Bweau chemists described TOCPin alefferto the Food,Drug, andlnsecti-cide Administration as "a tasteless. odor-less substance,viscous in draracter, solublein alcohol, insoluble in water" whicfi "be-

haves very muci like oleoresin of gt"-

ger." It was cheap, perhaps even cheaperthan castor oil, and certainlycheaper thanginger. And the textboofts said itwas safe.fu Smith had seen, even if the boodeg-gers had scrupulously tried TOCP ondogs and monkeys-the most expensiveand human-like of test animds-itwouldhave seemed harrnless. "Only a chemistof some ability could have thought offusing TOCP]," Smith wrote in the Oc-tober, 1930, issue of the jownal, PublicHealth Reports.'And hadthere been any-thing known about the pharmacologicaction of this substance and the possibledire consequences, it is probable that itwould never have been used and the dis-aster would never have happened."

Some newspaper editorials blamed theepidemic on Prohibition's arcane nrles----aview that was expressed more eloquendywhen the Mississippi Sheiks, a blackstring band, recorded'Jake Leg Blues," in

June of 1930.'You thought the lively manwould die when you made the countrydry,whenyou made it so thathe could notget not another drop of rye," the Sheils

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sang. "Well, I know that you will feel badwhenyou seewhathe has had., . He's gotthose jake limber-leg blues."

he poisoned jake samples eventuallyledinvestigators to HarryGross and

Max Reisman, two Boston brothers-in-law who had undertaken various shadyventures together during the nineteen-twenties. They traded a big county houseback and forth, and Reisman ran it brieflyas a resort called BreezyMeadows. Theydabbled in penny-ante food jobbing han-dling canned goods, jams, and entracts.But they never used the same businessname for very long, and constandy re-arranged o'uvnership of theirenterprises ina complicated shell game, no doubt toconceal their dealings at the fringes of theillegal-liquor business. Gross wangled avaluable Prohibition Bureau oermit in1921. to handle various typ., of alcohol,but the Bureau revoked it trvo years later.Reisman was indicted at one point forshipping five gallons of pear extract to anIndian reservation, in violation of a fed-eral law banning alcohol on reservations.By7926,the Prohibition Bureau had thebrothers-in-law pegged as likely boodeg-gers. A surveillance memo from the jakeinvestigation describes "several well-dressed men of the boodegger type . . .loafing about" their office, and one can al-most see the fedoras and soats.

In 7927, police founda still on thegrounds of the countryhouse. Somehow,though, no one was arrested. In 7928,Gross and Reisman rented the third andfourth floors of a building at 65 trultonStreet in Boston. renamed themselvesHub Products,installed Goldie Sprinsky, asister-in-law, as their secretary, and threwthemselves into full-time oroduction ofJamaica ginger extract. They shipped thejake around the country in big banels,which they 611ed at night and labelled"liquid medicine in bulk"The brothers-in-law apparendy cut comers from thestart; now and then, customers wouldcomplain that the jake they received fromHub didnt conform to U.S.P standards,and Gross would type firm, businesslikeanswers defending his product.

Like a lot of good boodeggers, Grossand Reisman were shade-tree chemists,and in the surnmer of 7929 they decidedto supplement the castor oil in their jakewith something cheaper and better. Theyordered barrels of dibutyl phthalate, a plas-

56 THE NEVYORI(ER, JEPTEMBER 15, 2OO3

IN THE READING ROOM

Alone in the libraryroom, evenwhen othersAre there in the room, alone, er<cept for themselves:There is the illusion of peace; the air in the room

Is stilled; tlere are reading lights on the tables,Looking as if they're reading,looking as ifTheyre studying the text, and understanding,

Shedding light on what the words are saFng;But under their steady imbedle gaze the pageIs blanb patiendywaiting not to be blank

The page is blank until the mind that readsCrosses the blackriver, seeking the QreenOf the Underworld, Persephone, where she sits

By the side of the one who brought her there from Enna,Hades the mute, the deaf, king of the dead letter;She is clothed in the beautifirl garment of our thousand

Misunderstandings of the sacred tort.

ticizrrlikeTOCP, and three solvents: fuseloil, butyl Carbitof and Cellosolve. Allwereclear, oilyliquids with high boilingpoints.But the brothers-in-lawwisely reiected allthree; they're lethal. Instead, thly askedone of their chemical suppliers, MartinSwanson, for some ethylene glycol, anotherodorless, oily chemical that was commonin antifresze and nontoxic to most people.Alas, the ethylene glycol boiled off tooquickly. A few days later, Gross calledSwanson and asked him to find somethingless volatile. Swanson was puzded;volanl-ltywas not an issue when ethylene glycolwas used as intended. Swanson sent Grosssome diethylene glycol, which is similarbut has a.higher boiling point. That didntplease Gross, either. "Well, I dont knowwhaton eaflhyou are doingwith this stuffand how you are handling it," Swansontold Gross. Apparendy, Gross was mim-icking the boiling trial that federal agentswould use if they tested his jake, and wasfirdi"g that diethylene glycol evaporatedwith the alcohol instead of staying behindwith the glnger. That was lucky for jakehounds everywhere: itwas as deadlyas theother chemicals. Swanson told Gross thatthe only thing he had that was less volatilewas Lindol, the Celluloid Corporationt

-DavidFeny

trade name for tri-ortho-cresyl phosphate.Gross and Reisman twice asked Swan-

sonif Lindolwas toxic, and askedhim towrite Celluloid to make sure. OnJanu-^ry 18,1930, Swanson received confu-mation from Celluloid that Lindol washarmless, and he told Gross. Hub boughta hundred and thirty-five gallons of it,enough to adulterate six hundred andforty thousand bottles of jake. Grosswould load each shipment onto the ele-vator, take it alone to the fourth floor,and send down the emptybarrels.

Somebody working for Gross andReisman mayhave had second thoughts.On March 1st, a man identi4'ing him-self as an employee of the Dolan DrugCompany, which was a shell operated byGross and Reisman, called the ware-house thatwas storing the jake and said,"Those sixteen drums of ginger whichyou have stored in my name are poison. Idont want them." If an employee washaving pangs of conscience, Gross andReisman were not. On March 15th and19th-more than a week after the firststories about the jake epidemic hit thepapers and two weeks after the call fromthe Dolan Drug Company-Gross andReisman shipped two lastba:rels ofjake.

TheE

deotrHub:DeHdiced

Bolydrbo4vito hiturhkhtr€ adbekriicines,kohi$as'bo" Lg"l

P((rre,iriedarbeussaky&pleadolanm eActTwere oasyuth.y*portan

I n rtheoobuthecatingble fualso ubargei'MardAng*anothrevokrL%41senten

A fL \ ubut ncwith dporatichomarJamaicto qpeapeoplethe Fewhichhwsunand p'rf^q-"havehto Anrthe\j\AicanUr

The ED.I.A. and Prohibition coos foundrlenty of distributors who could fingerHub as the source of their bad jake. InDecember, Gross and Reismanwere in-Jicted by a federal grand jury.

Because Gross and Reisman had para-lrzed tens of thousands of people, every-body involved in the prosecution wantedro hit them with Prohibition charges,which canied jail time, instead of merelythe administrative fines that would likelybe levied by the ED.I.A. But patent med-icines came under the jurisdiction of theProhibition Bureau only if theywere usedas "beverages" rather than as medicine,a legal, distinction almost impossible toprove, especially sincejake labels often car-ried awaming: "This

preparation must notbe used forbeverage purposes underpen-ahyof law."Gross and Reisman eventuallypleaded guilty to violating the Prohibitionlaws as well as the Pure Food and DrugAct. The hitch was that they insisted tlevwere only middlemen. If the judge wenteasy on them and put them on probation,theywould tum over the much more im-poltant criminal. The judge complied.

In reality, Gross and Reisman werethe ones who not only had made the jakebut had ignored early news reports indi-cating that their product was responsi-ble for the outbreak of paralysis. Theyalso neglected to mention, during pleabargaining the two barrels shipped inMarch. When those showed uo in LosAngeles the following yeat andparalyzedanother two hundred people, the judgerevoked Grosst probation. In April,1932, he began serving a two-year prisonsentence. Reisman never did time.

fewpeople tried to sue the distrib-utors who sold them the bad iake,

but nobody went after the one entitywith deep pockets: the Celluloid Cor-poration. In May of 7931, some Okla-homans organized the United Victims of

Jamaica Ginger Paralysis, which claimedto speakfor thirty-five thousand strickenpeople across the country. Unfortunately,the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure,which effectively enabled class-actionlawsuits, were seven years in the future,and product-liability law was in its in-fanry. "To have brought such suits wouldhave been almost unthinkable," accordingto Andrew Popper, a torts professor atthe Washington College of Law at Amer-ican University. "They'd have thrown you

in bad-lawver j"il." All the victims coulddo, really, was petition govemment of6-cials for relief There wasnt much hope.When United Victims firstformed, Ok-lahoma's govemor, William (Alfalfa Bill)Murray, declared, "There are three kindsof people I havent much use for. One isthe man with jakeitis,'another is the in-vestor on the stock exchange, and theother I wont mention."The victims per-sisted anyway'l have awife and two ch.il-dren dependent on me, andwe have beenkicked and cuffed about without anyhome just very litde to eat ever since I gotcrippled," a thirty-year-old man namedJoe Gordon wrote to his senator in a spi-dery hand from Hot Sp.irS, Arkansas,in 1933. "And I'11 tell the world Life looksalmost hopeless for me and mylitde fam-ily, and God knows we have struggled sohard to Live since this awfirll iniustice."Congress was lobbied for years, but itnever passed a bill for victims'relief

"The jake-leg story is almost com-pletely about class," John Morgan says."If

someone had poisoned the Cana-dian source of bonded Scotch, somethingwould have been done. Butthese menweremosdy migrants. They came to the city,leaving their women, to get work Theywere seen as pooq sloppydrunks."And sothejake-leg tragedydropped down the na-tional amnesia hole. With its unwelcomeimplications about Prohibition and pov-erty, and its falling thirtyyears before theera of class-action lawsuits, the epidemicwould have probably remained forgottenbut for the efforts of the Allen Brothers,Ishmon Bracey, Tommy Johnson, theMississippi Sheiks, Willie Lofton, andDaddy Stovepipe and Mississippi Sarah.

Even Ephraim Goldfain, the fintdoc-tor to treat the illness, took litde apparentpride in his role. He went on to make aname for himself locally, pioneering theuse of gold in arthritis therapy. He"wasalso celebrated in Oklahoma for a rheu-matism serum he mixed himsef hand-blowing the glass vials that held the dosesand fashioning, instead of the usual tear-drop top, whimsical animal-head stop-pers. With his granddaughter Suellen inthe passenger seat, he would drive amongthe tiny farm communities surroundingOklahoma Ciry injecting his patients.He died in 1983. Suellen Singer still en-joys telling familv stories about him, butshe says she knorvs nothing about thejake leg. He never mentioned it. I

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THE NEV YORI(ER, JEPTEMBER 15, 2OO3