Selling Sweetness: Retailing Empire in the American Sugar Bowl

• In Event: Edible Imperialisms: Food, Capitalism, and Late-Stage American Empire?

Abstract

Thanks to the Union Pacific railroad, by 1893 the prairie town of Grand Island had become a major contender in domestic sugar production. Lucky attendees to the World's Fair in Chicago that same year had the chance to taste from a matchbox-sized sampler advertising the "native" product as "Manufactured from Sugar Beets grown on Nebraska soil." The Oxnard sugar production facility estimated a yield of six million pounds of sugar from six thousand acres of beets. As historian Kathleen Mapes has demonstrated, small towns in rural areas—like Grand Island—heralded the arrival of sugar factories as exciting steps towards industrialization and beacons of hope for economic improvement. At the same time, they looked skeptically upon the migrant farm workers who came from eastern Europe and Mexico to undertake the harvest. By the end of the 1890s, Henry Oxnard would open a refinery in Ventura County. The California-based industrialist favored tariffs on imported sugar and vocalized the non-obligation of Americans to Puerto Rican, Cuban, and Filipino producers in the nation's growing empire. Protections for the U.S. beet and cane sugar industries grew from visions of empire that consolidated around the World's Fair and the Spanish American War, and retailers played pivotal roles in how consumers engaged with commodity markets altered by imperial expansion.

How did what Sidney Mintz identified as sugar's unmatched exposure to "so much politicking" and ties to imperial exercise of power play out on the dry goods shelves and in the sugar bowls of distributors and consumers in the continental United States? This paper explores how wholesale and retail grocers, grocery clerks, and urban, middle-class consumers in Chicago navigated shifting markets and ideas around sugar production and consumption in the 1890s. After a brief introduction to the politics of beet and cane sugar in the context of slavery and abolition in the nineteenth century, the first part of the paper looks at ties between sugar and ideas of "purity" and "whiteness" during a period of profound anxiety around race, immigration, and food safety. The next section digs into grocers' responses to the rise of the American Sugar Refining Company and formation of the "Sugar Trust" fabricated in large part to exploit sugar production in Caribbean and Pacific imperial holdings. Wholesalers and retailers took action in associations, legislatures, and commercial outlets like retail and advertisements. From there, I turn to consumer experiences of sweetness and empire on the dry goods shelf and in the sugar bowl. In addition to considering the connection between American food policies and social and economic inequalities growing in tandem with American hegemony, attending to the consumer politics around beet and cane sugar sheds light on consumers attachments to price, quality, and racist and nativist ideas of citizenship and belonging over often shared interests with farmers, and farm workers. The paper will conclude with reflections on uncanny ties between issues of taxation, nutritional guidelines, and food production regulation in late-stage American empire as issues of domestic, international, labor, and consumer politics.

Author

• Ellie Palazzolo, University of Mississippi