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From Pat Deveney's database:
TNT.
The Naked Truth / The Voice of the Public.
1929--1931 Monthly
Muscatine, IA. Language: English.
Publisher: N. Baker Publication. Editor: Norman Baker.
Succeeds: Why
1/1, March 1929-1931. $2.00 a year, 20 cents a copy.
Baker (1882-1958) was a successful inventor (the calliaphone, for example, car batteries, radio tubes, etc.) and promoter of enterprises (some legitimate like his Baker's Mel-Ripe Coffee -- "all excess acids are neutralized" -- and a line of California and Hawaiian canned fruits), a pioneer in radio with KTNT in Muscatine, Iowa, and the border-radio station XENT in Nuevo Laredo, the organizer of the farmer-labor political alliance (on whose ticket he ran for governor of Iowa), and as he aged a rabid anti-establishmentarian and believer in big-business and government Trusts that conspired against him, all of which he denounced in his radio programs and in this journal. He had begun as a traveling hypnotist and mentalist, demonstrating his powers of stopping blood flow from small pricks to audiences around the Midwest, moved through a variety of successful enterprises, and by 1930 was concentrating on a cancer cure peddled by his own Baker Institute in Muscatine. When this produced a wave of negative reaction from the Medical Trust and the Federal Radio Commission, Baker replied in kind, giving as good as he got, denouncing the Trusts. He eventually decamped with his cancer clinic to Mexico (and then to Arkansas) to avoid the government's regulatory reach, but this was ineffective, and in 1939 he was sentenced to four years in prison for mail fraud for his claims about his cancer cure. His later years were spent in luxury in Florida.
The journal featured regular monthly columns by N. Tangley on variations on the theme of "The Power of Mind over Matter," articles on suggestion and auto-suggestion and the like, proclamations that "Cancer is Curable: Cures Positively being Made while Medical Trust Refuses Recognition Because it Affords Them No Financial Gain,"articles of general interest ("Sex Ignorance is to Blame"), exposes of the Medical and Banking Trusts and the frauds of organized spiritualism ("Truths of Mediums Exposed"), farm advice, recipes, a radio course, advice on smart wardrobes for the seasons, health advice (the dangers of "devitalized foods"), etc. The journal was said to have had 30,000 subscribers
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| Claude-Generated Themes:
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TNT was Norman Baker's sensational Muscatine, Iowa magazine of 1929–30, the print arm of his notorious KTNT radio operation and cancer-'cure' empire. Its covers promise exposés of insurance graft, the dangers of aspirin, the failings of orthodox medicine and the AMA 'medical trust,' and a drugless, mind-over-body path to health, interlaced with anti-medical crusading and cancer copy. It is a health-freedom and drugless-medicine muckraking paper rather than an esoteric periodical, and even its 'Tricks of Mediums Exposed' feature is debunking rather than believing. Within the collection's taxonomy it earns a primary health-reform / alternative-medicine reading and a minor mind-cure note for its 'power of mind over body' theme, but its center of gravity — populist medical-conspiracy journalism — falls outside the occult and metaphysical topics entirely. It is best read alongside the physical-culture and naturopathy titles rather than the spiritualist press its term-panel superficially flags.
Generated by Claude from the periodical's digitized text; a thematic reading, not a bibliographic description.
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