Dudley J. LeBlanc

individual · Lafayette / Erath, Vermilion Parish, Louisiana

lived:1894–1971

active:1943–1951

type:individual

role:promoter

location:Lafayette / Erath, Vermilion Parish, Louisiana

eventual status:publicly_disconfirmed

"Hell, you can't buy LeBlanc. You can only rent him."

FINANCIAL CONFLICTS

LeBlanc personally profited from Hadacol's marketing while serving as an elected Louisiana state senator. By 1949 the company recorded roughly $2.5 million in a single year's sales (Carlson 2018), and for the 15 months ending March 1951 sales reached $25 million with reported profits of $2.5 million (Gisclair 2018). In late summer 1951 LeBlanc sold his ownership interest to a group of New York investors identified by one account as the Maltz Cancer Foundation of New York, and the three sources in this bundle report the price very differently: Gisclair dates the sale to late August and puts the price at $8.2 million, with LeBlanc collecting only about two-thirds of that after the buyers went bankrupt; Carlson dates the announcement to September, first given at $8 million, and reports LeBlanc later said the real price was only $250,000 plus a share of future profits; Time, writing that October, gives a third figure again, $250,000 down against a price previously announced at $1,100,000 (Gisclair 2018; Carlson 2018; Time 1951). Time reported the buyers found a $1.8 million second-quarter loss where LeBlanc had reported a $3.6 million profit, and accused him of concealing roughly $2 million in unpaid bills and $656,151 in federal tax debt, and of listing $2,272,000 in "accounts receivable" that largely did not exist (Time 1951); Carlson's independently sourced account gives closely consistent figures of $2.2 million owed to suppliers and more than $650,000 in unpaid federal taxes (Carlson 2018). LeBlanc avoided fiduciary responsibility or liability for the resulting collapse (Gisclair 2018).

INTERVENTIONS PROMOTED

Hadacol

NOTES

Dudley J. LeBlanc was born August 16, 1894, in Youngsville, Louisiana, and died October 22, 1971, at Abbeville General Hospital, Abbeville, Louisiana (Internet Archive item description, “Captain Hadacol 2,” circa 1951). He was elected to the Louisiana House of Representatives in 1924 and to the state senate in 1940, where he sponsored a popular old-age pension law (Carlson 2018); Gisclair’s account adds that he also served one term on the Louisiana Public Service Commission, went on to serve four nonconsecutive terms as a Louisiana state senator representing Vermilion Parish, and ran unsuccessfully for governor (Gisclair 2018).

A senator you could only rent

LeBlanc built a reputation in Cajun-country politics as a showman willing to trade his support to the highest bidder. “Hell, you can’t buy LeBlanc,” Louisiana Governor Earl Long — brother of the assassinated “Kingfish” Huey Long — said of him. “You can only rent him” (Carlson 2018). In 1943, LeBlanc mixed his first batch of a new tonic in wine barrels in his own barn, assisted, he later said, by two “pretty Cajun girls” who stirred the mixture with oars (Carlson 2018). He called it Hadacol. It was his elected political authority and personal salesmanship — not any medical standing — that he put behind the product: he fronted its national advertising, hosted the touring Hadacol Caravan variety show himself, and appeared under his own Senate title in its promotion (hadacol-caravan-ad-times-picayune-1951).

From a fortune sold to a rap he beat

LeBlanc’s Hadacol fortune collapsed in the scandal documented in the linked Intervention record: a Federal Trade Commission investigation, buyers who discovered a bankrupt company within weeks of the 1951 sale, and Hadacol’s removal from store shelves (Gisclair 2018; Time 1951; Carlson 2018). LeBlanc’s political career outlasted the business, though diminished: he finished seventh in the 1952 Louisiana Democratic gubernatorial primary, and in 1957 federal investigators charged him with tax evasion, a case he beat (Carlson 2018). He tried once more to sell a nearly identical tonic under a new name, Kary-On; almost nobody bought it (Carlson 2018). eventual_status: publicly_disconfirmed reflects the FTC’s contemporaneous characterization of Hadacol’s marketing as “false, misleading and deceptive” (Time 1951) and the company’s public financial collapse, rather than any personal criminal conviction of LeBlanc himself.