Off topic a bit, but if anyone has a genuine Duffy Pure Malt Whiskey.."a medicine" bottle and wants something collectible that goes with that product, let me know. It will be a dark brown or dark amber bottle that originally came with a cork in it. Made somewhere between 1886 and 1911...
It says:
"Duffy's pure Malt whiskey..a medicine".
The sides are marked in lines labeled teaspoon--dessert spoon and tablespoon.
Duffy Malt Whiskey & The Temperance Movement
Duffy's distillery found itself increasingly in need of a "work around" to the [WWW]temperance movement at a time when prominent figures such as Susan B. Anthony were speaking passionately against the consumption of alcohol. Duffy's claim was that "malt" meant "medicinal." While many distillers marketed their alcohols as "for medicinal use only," but didn't specify what sort of medicine it was, Duffy decided to straddle both worlds of the temperance movement by selling his alcohol in pubs and bars, as well as marketing it, beginning in 1886, as a cure for specific ailments, such as consumption (tuberculosis), bronchitis, pneumonia, dyspepsia, weariness, any lung condition, malaria, and the "greatest known heart tonic." Duffy's Malt Whiskey was classified as a medicine, and sold in both bars and drugstores. The ads often featured "testimonials" by supposed users of Duffy's Malt Whiskey, who claimed that it cured them of tuberculosis, or other serious ailments. The advertisements usually included a warning not to purchase from "unscrupulous" dealers, who might try to pass of "dangerous imitations and substitutes" which were "positively harmful". Duffy backed up his fiction by concocting a story that "the formula was worked out fifty years ago by one of the world's greatest chemists." The company adopted a logo of a bearded scientist, holding up the concoction he had supposedly invented. To further validate his whiskey as a medicine, he gave away "Duffy" branded medicine spoons, rather than shot glasses.
In order to help pay for the expenses of the Spanish American War, Congress passed a special tax on patent medicines. On July 5, 1898, the Commissioner of Internal Revenue, N. B. Scott, wrote to the local collector of revenues in Rochester, ruling that "Duffy's Pure Malt Whiskey, is being advertised as a cure for consumption, dyspepsia, malaria, etc., liable to a stamp tax as a medicinal article." A background memo elaborated that although Duffy's contained nothing but distilled spirits, it was a patent medicine "by the manner in which it is presented to the public." The ruling decreed a tax of two cents per bottle. While the stamp tax did cost Duffy a considerable sum of $40,000 per year, in actually it saved him from hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal and state liquor taxes, and allowed him to advertise as "the only whiskey recognized by the Government as medicine."
In 1905 and 1906, investigative journalist [WWW]Samuel Hopkins Adams wrote a series of eleven articles called "The Great American Fraud" for Collier's Weekly, exposing many of the false claims made by patent medicines, and pointing out that in some cases the "medicines" damaged the health of the people taking them Though he admitted that Duffy was partially justified in his claim of Federal recognition of his whiskey as medicine, Adams took particular aim at Duffy's product because of its claims to "cure." He stated that Duffy's Pure Malt Whiskey was inferior, even as a whiskey. He also exposed the "testimonials" by alleged clergymen, entrepreneurs, and Temperence workers in Duffy's malt whiskey advertisements as works of pure fiction. Despite Adams' exposé, sales of Duffy's malt whiskey remained strong.20
In 1905, Patrick W. Cullinan, the New York Commisioner of Excise, went to court against Duffy, claiming that Duffy's Pure Malt Whiskey was nothing more than sweetened whiskey, and thus was subject to state liquor taxes. Duffy's team countered with eleven physicians, four of them members of the Rochester Health Dept., who swore to their belief that the whiskey contained drugs that made it real medicine. Cullinan won his case in the New York Supreme Court, and Duffy's malt whiskey became subject to New York State liquor tax. At this time, Duffy's was being sold across the country and even in Europe, so the NY liquor tax proved to be only a slight setback.
In 1907, the first head of the Food and Drug Administration, [WWW]Dr. Harvey W. Wylie is quoted speaking against Duffy: "I stated that Duffy's Malt Whiskey was one of the most gigantic frauds of the age and a flagrant violation of the law, and that there was no necessity that we delay at all in the matter." For two years, his pleas for prosecution against Duffy were ignored, leading Dr. Wylie to denounce the "determined efforts of my colleagues to protect Duffy's Pure Malt Whiskey from being molested either by seizure or bringing any criminal case against the maker."
After Walter B. Duffy's Death, Prohibition
When Walter B. Duffy died, the Rochester Distilling Co. finally began to buckle under the continued pressure of Dr. Wylie's efforts through the FDA. Dr. Wylie had warned the patent medicine industry that using the word "cure" would subject products to particular scrutiny. Beginning in 1915, Duffy's Pure Malt Liquor ceased to make medicinal claims other than its being a "tonic stimulant" and "household remedy." As Prohibiton set in, Duffy's dropped the label "whiskey" and marketed its product strictly as a "tonic." The comapny moved to Los Angeles, and changed its name to Duffy's Laboratory, Ltd. The depiction of the "old chemist" on its labels was dropped. The product was still whiskey, with a labeled alcohol content of "not over 40 percent." (Forty percent alcohol content is approximately 80 proof.) Eventually, even Duffy's couldn't survive government scrutiny, and it closed its doors in the midst of Prohibition in the year 1926. Duffy's remained permanently out of business, never to reemerge after prohibition.
