Mrs Winslow’s syrup contained alcohol and morphine and was sold from the 1840s to the 1930s. Today, advertising it as safe for children would be considered fraud.
Do corporations have a First Amendment right to deceive the public? Is it legal to knowingly lie about products or their public health or environmental impacts?
These days the question comes up in the context of the climate change debate, but the fight over corporate and commercial speech has a long and storied history.
Until about a century ago, advertising was unregulated, and advertisers were perfectly free to lie without taking responsibility for their products. “Soothing syrups” of opium and morphine were good for children, they said; radioactive drinks like “Radithor” healed like having the sun on the inside, they said; and Grape-Nuts cereal would cure appendicitis without medical help, they said.
This sort of fraud is an abuse of the marketplace of ideas, and it was ended with a Progressive-era campaign to regulate advertising.
And yet, by the 21st century, international corporations were insisting on a First Amendment right to champion junk food, to market tobacco, to fabricate information about sweat shop working conditions in developing nations, and to use outright nonsense to challenge legitimate science on fossil-fuel induced climate change.
