When MEMEs actually reflect HISTORY
The image of the traveling snake oil salesman of 19th century America is by now a familiar trope. It is the image of the heartless huckster who preys upon the trust of the general public to swindle them out of their hard-earned savings. With a bottle of useless tonic and the help of a plant in the audience, the snake oil salesman made a living out of lies and deceit.
In these respects, William Levingston was your average snake oil salesman…
He used a made-up title, billing himself as “Dr. Bill Levingston, Celebrated Cancer Specialist” despite being neither a doctor nor celebrated nor a cancer specialist.
He was an inveterate cheat and liar, having abandoned his first wife and their 6 children to start a bigamous marriage in Canada at the same time as he fathered 2 more children by a third woman.
And like every snake oil salesman, he had a cure-all tonic to hock. He called it Rock Oil and charged $25 a bottle for it, equivalent at the time to 2 months’ salary for the average American worker. Claiming it could cure all but the most terminal cancers, there were always desperate souls in every town who could be duped into buying a bottle.
As near as anyone can tell, “Rock Oil” was in fact just a mixture of Laxative & Petroleum OIL (what we now call "MINERAL OIL") and had no effect whatsoever on the cancer of the poor townsfolk he conned into buying it.
Yes, in almost every respect, William Levingston was your run-of-the-mill snake oil huckster, except his name was NOT in fact “Levingston.” That was an identity he had assumed after being indicted for raping a girl in Cayuga in 1849. His actual name was William Avery Rockefeller, and he was the father of John D. Rockefeller, founder of the infamous Rockefeller dynasty, who would later go on to monopolize "patented medicine" and create the "American Medical Association" to ensure that medicine was never used to "cure", but to perpetually treat just the symptoms of disease.