Cloverine: Origins

The Wilson Chemical Co. decided to recruit little kiddies into help selling their White Cloverine Salve by running ads in Golden and Silver Age comics books. Similar to the Grit Magazine debacle, the Cloverine comic ads tried to entice innocent youngsters into becoming freelance distributors of their ointment, even though all the profits really went to the children's parents as they willfully seemed to sign their offspring into child labor. Each of the advertisements truly caught kid's attention with a small comic strip story demonstrating how awesome it was to be a peddler for a major corporation. These strips regularly had children whose lives were more engaging if they had all the neat stuff they could earn from pitching Cloverine to their unsuspecting neighbors. You could earn standard swag like bibles, dolls, and footballs, but things got delusional when they offered big things like telescopes, air rifles, bicycles, and a full archery set. The most offbeat prize they had was a "live pony", even though there's no context given to whether this is an actual living breathing pony to own or to rent, or if it's just a pony-sized toy since it's only a drawing in the ad. All participating kids would receive a cheap pin badge that let everyone know that they were an authorized agent in case people were so paranoid during the McCarthy era that they might believe the local kids were really selling ointment for the Russians. Petroleum products is something that anyone could pick up at the local supermarket or drug store, so this whole gambit dreamed up to draft dopey lads and lasses into this garish campaign could be considered a slimy slice of evil. The FTC thought so as well when they shut down Wilson Chemical's tactics in the late 60's as being psychologically unsound for adolescent salespeople. The biggest offense though was in one of the Cloverine comic stories where they viewed the kids who were the injuns in a game of Davy Crockett as being the bullies, which despite the racist implications was just something lost on them just because they didn't have any concept of cultural appropriation at the time.