By the time Baker arrived in northern Arkansas in July, the local economy had collapsed. But you can make even more when you settle in one place, forcing your victims to pay to come to you. You can make a lot of money peddling lies on the road. They drank his treatment down like Kool-Aid-flavored hydroxychloroquine, and thereby sealed their own demise. Baker assured them that one day cancer would disappear, like a miracle. Throughout the early 1930s, tens of thousands of desperate Americans gathered together at rallies to hear him speak. In a time of economic misery and political instability, it felt good to have an enemy, and Baker’s confidence was its own lure. Baker was vicious in his denunciations, but his audience liked it.
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He claimed that doctors knew how to cure cancer, but refused to do it because it afforded them no financial gain, unlike his own selfless actions. He told his followers that doctors recommending vaccines were part of a nefarious government plot. He branded this tonic “Secret Remedy #5.” Baker’s secrets earned him $444,000 in 1930 alone, the 2021 equivalent of $7.2 million.īaker was an opponent of vaccines. He peddled a cancer treatment that consisted of little more than seeds, corn silk, carbolic acid, and water, though he did not tell that to his audience. In 1930, he set up a hospital in Muscatine, called it the Baker Institute, and staffed it with people who had minimal medical expertise. In December, he started a print magazine, The Naked Truth, and put a photo of himself on the cover alongside the proclamation cancer is cured. In 1929, as the stock market crashed and America lurched deeper into despair, Baker proclaimed himself a medical genius. Mark Twain had worked at its newspaper, before being accosted by a local with a knife who insisted he call him the son of the devil or be killed, at which point Twain decided to leave town.īut Baker’s cruelest crime was making ordinary people believe he could save them. He operated a station in Muscatine that he called “KTNT,” which stood for “Know the Naked Truth.” Muscatine was at this time a fledgling Midwestern media mecca. An aspiring politician, former carnival barker, and skilled demagogue, Baker gained a massive audience spouting conspiracy theories through the newly popular medium of radio. In the 1920s, he traveled through a shell-shocked America still reeling from the Spanish Flu, scouring the landscape like a vulture preying on pain. Born in the Mississippi River trade town of Muscatine, Iowa, in 1882, Baker grew up rich and spent his formative years getting wealthier through fraud. In 1937, a con artist named Norman Baker arrived in Eureka Springs with a new mark in mind.
Then the Great Depression hit and it became a place where people literally died of false hope. The hotel changed hands and identities: a luxury resort, a women’s conservatory, a junior college. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the famous and infamous passed through as the Ozarks became a gangsters’ paradise and a politicians’ retreat. Since 1886, the Crescent has loomed over Eureka Springs, attracting travelers seeking miracle cures in the town’s waters, which are said to possess magical healing powers. This is not our opinion, but the hotel’s calling card. The official reason was to break up the ten-hour drive, but the real reason was to stay at the Crescent Hotel, and the reason we wanted to stay at the Crescent Hotel was that it’s haunted. Every year we would stop in Arkansas and spend a night in Eureka Springs. Louis, Missouri, to Dallas, Texas, to celebrate Christmas with my sister and her family. They come for the magic and the ghosts.īefore the pandemic hit, every December my family would drive from St. No one comes to Eureka Springs for certainty anyway. It’s reassuring in this day and age, such reliable disorientation. The topography dictates your journey: renames it, replaces it.
You can enter the ground floor of a building and walk a straight line out the back door only to discover you have just left that side’s fifth floor. There are no traffic lights in Eureka Springs because there is no clear way to turn, no bearings to get, no center to hold.
The town is built into the bedrock, captive to ancient geology, its buildings carved into curving cliffs and its trees erupting through layers of sloping sidewalks. In northern Arkansas there is a town called Eureka Springs, where no streets meet at a right angle.
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