Tedium - Corporate Casserole 🥘

Today in Tedium: After mashed potatoes (instant or not), perhaps my favorite Thanksgiving dish is green bean casserole, a well-thought mixture of dried onions, green beans, and Cream of Mushroom soup, with perhaps a couple of other extra ingredients in the mix. It’s pretty great, and has become a fixture of any a well-designed Thanksgiving plate, generally a good edge food as it’s solid, not very runny, and a good collector of gravy. One thing you might not know about this specific casserole dish is that it’s the invention of a corporation—Campbell’s, to be specific—as a way to promote the use of Cream of Mushroom soup. The creator of this wonderful dish? A former test kitchen supervisor for the company named Dorcas Reilly. Her legacy will live on our plate. But it got me thinking about how corporate influence directly creates some of our most fundamental traditions. Things seen as just a part of the way we live came into place through well-considered marketing and lobbying, and just stayed there, becoming a part of the fabric of our lives. Today’s Tedium ponders the way corporations influence our cultural traditions, using Thanksgiving as a key example. — Ernie @ Tedium

Today’s GIF comes from an actual Campbell’s commercial in which an evergreen tree grabs a bite of green bean casserole from a windowsill. I’m not making this up. Watch the commercial; it makes a strong case for why trees shouldn’t be given spoons.

How the modern form of Thanksgiving came to life thanks to the influence of a magazine editor

As the United States was deep in the throes of a civil war, a decades-long campaign by a prominent magazine editor and author to take the roots of the formative days American colonialism and turn them into a moment of thanks and reflection had finally won over the guy in charge.

In 1863, Abraham Lincoln heard the persistent drumbeat of Sarah Josepha Hale, whose influence on American culture came in no small part due to her work on Godey’s Lady’s Book, a 19th-century publication whose reputation was hard to miss. Hale, who is otherwise legendary for her authorship of “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” used her editorship in the magazine to pitch, among other things, the value of a Thanksgiving holiday. That simple, if oft-repeated, wish helped create one of the key pieces of Americana.

And when I say oft-repeated, I mean it. She literally wrote about it dozens of times over a period of many decades, with her desire to see the holiday growing more passionate over time. She first called on governors to support the concept at a state level, then eventually taking her push national. One sample, from an 1857 editorial:

We hope the Governors will unite on November 26th, the last Thursday in the month. Then the war of politics will be over for the year; and all elections, State and National, will be closed; the harvests of the country gathered in; the preparations for winter made; and the crowning glory of all the blessings God has, during the year, bestowed on our great nation would be the union of all our States and Territories in a day of National Thanksgiving. The peoples of the Old World would thus be taught that freedom from man’s tyranny brings us nearer to God—that, while rejecting earthly lords, we willingly acknowledge our dependence on the Lord of heaven and earth.

Her lobbying from her column space helped to turn the event from a purely regional phenomenon tied to New England, one that had only briefly been nodded to on a national scale by George Washington nearly a century earlier, into a yearly event intended to tie the nation together. And while different New England states often had their own days, Hale made the push for one consistent date to rule them all. It took her more than 30 years of persistent editorials to finally, finally get a president to agree to take the whole idea national—this was not a viral campaign, this was the life’s work of one woman.

Hale has often been compared to Martha Stewart and Opera Winfrey in modern-day retellings of this story, which makes sense, as she effectively spearheaded many of the traditions that we now associate with the holiday—including, most notably, the consumption of turkey and pumpkin pie.

Some of Hale’s earliest writings about Thanksgiving made the case about the importance of pumpkin pie to the Thanksgiving meal, despite sweet pumpkin pie custard in a crust not becoming the best-known vessel for pumpkin until centuries later. (It’s likely pumpkins were used as a foodstuff in the pilgrims’ time, but not in pie form.) In her 1827 book Northwood, she wrote prominently of Thanksgiving dinner, putting pumpkin pie at the center of the tradition.

“There was a huge plum pudding, custards and pies of every name and description ever known in Yankee land; yet the pumpkin pie occupied the most distinguished niche,” she wrote.

Hale knew the value of her words—and had limits on when and how she would use them. She was, notably, an opponent of women’s suffrage, ensuring that the magazine would remain a strongly traditionalist voice, but she also was a strong patriot and knew the kind of influence the magazine, with its circulation of 150,000 at a time before the mail system was even fully baked, could carry.

As JSTOR Daily noted in 2017, the magazine tried, in its own subtle way, to fight the Civil War.

“By invoking motherhood and domesticity, Hale made a sustained argument for national unity,” JSTOR’s Erin Blakemore wrote. “She masked her worries about a potential war in stories that exalted how women could influence the actions of men from the sweet domesticity of their own homes.”

In this light, her support of Thanksgiving was a subtle political play—and that play had an effect that went far beyond the magazine’s own legacy.