In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

85 i Four j “WonderfullyGrandandColossal” The Pumpkin and the Nation, 1861 to 1899 A fter the Civil War, American farmers would increasingly forsake the agrarian ideal of self-sufficiency in their push toward maximizing profits on commodity crops.1 They relied on banks to extend them credit to expand their operations and purchase the latest equipment. They depended on railroads and grain operators to connect them to manufacturing centers throughout the country. And with increasing regularity, farm households became food consumers instead of producers so that they could devote their land entirely to moneymaking crops. Facilitated by federal land grant programs such as the Homestead Act of 1862 and by the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, the center of agricultural production continued to move westward. Cattle replaced buffalo on the midwestern prairie, and railroad towns sprang up to convey the animals to Chicago slaughterhouses. The invention of the refrigerated railroad car jump-started the beef industry in the 1870s but also helped northeastern farmers, who were unable to match midwestern farm prices, reorient toward dairy production for urban markets. Barbed wire, windmills, and sod houses marked the presence of homesteaders on the Great Plains, yet the changing mode of American agriculture made it difficult for them to compete, much less survive, in international commodities markets.2 Feeling hamstrung by the railroads, banks, and grain operators, which increasingly controlled the flow and profits of agriculture, in the 1860s 86 < “Wonderfully Grand and Colossal” farmers mobilized through the Grange and Farmers Alliance to try to regain their independence. They achieved only mixed success because farming and food processing were moving toward greater corporate control . Bonanza wheat farming, which developed in the Red River valley of North Dakota in the 1880s, was a portent of the future, with its industrial form of production, heavy reliance on machines, and dependence on large outside investments. At the other end of agricultural production, the demise of slavery in the South meant the rise of tenant farming and sharecropping, under which many newly freed slaves and poor whites lived in dire poverty. There was nothing picturesque about subsistence farming. All too many people barely eked out a living on land devastated by the war, and they were often strangled by debt. With this combination of poor sharecroppers , rich middlemen operators, and massive farm businesses, American agriculture was moving in directions that could not have been more at odds with the quaint family farm of lore. Nor could it have been more different from pumpkin farming. Raising pumpkins remained antithetical to all the new trends in American agriculture . The mode and scale of their production—hand picking a few acres— were anachronistic. “We could wish that we had seen the last of them,” wrote the influential agricultural journal The Horticulturalist in 1870. “It is about time that pumpkins were retired from service and entered upon the fossil list.”3 At a value of $2.50 a ton by the end of the century—that is, about a tenth of a cent per pound (rice brought 7 cents per pound)—the pumpkin ranked among the least valuable and useful of farm commodities .4 The July 1882 edition of American Agriculturalist stated disparagingly, “It would hardly pay to devote land to the production of pumpkins.”5 Yet a pumpkin, one of the least profitable and palatable of vegetables, appeared prominently on the American Agriculturalist’s masthead. Biggs and Brothers advertised pumpkins on the cover of their annual seed catalogs .6 Agricultural fairs became known as “pumpkin shows” because the vegetable was a key attraction.7 It was obviously not the crop’s economic worth or its promise of financial reward that inspired agricultural trade publications and expositions to feature the vegetable. It was the pumpkin ’s symbolic value. By placing images of pumpkins alongside bucolic scenes of farm work and outdoor recreation and making the vegetable the cornerstone of their events, publishers and agricultural fair organizers “Wonderfully Grand and Colossal” = 87 embraced the idea that pumpkin farming was a valuable, uplifting pursuit and the pumpkin an important crop, even if it was not a route to financial success. The late nineteenth century marks the important shift when the pumpkin’s meanings were alienated from its uses. No longer was its symbolism sustained by material and practical functions—that is, by actual farmers raising actual pumpkins for human and animal sustenance. It now thrived on its own without them. The popular literary journal Harper ’s Weekly filled its pages with images and stories of pumpkins, evidence of its public appeal. But the U.S. Agricultural Census, the data-­ collecting arm of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), established in 1861 for the purposes of research, education, and regulation, did not even bother to include pumpkins in its reports through the end of the century, a strong indication that the pumpkin lacked status as a commercial crop. Most Americans valued pumpkins for pleasure, not for profits. They made pumpkins objects of display detached from any practical utility. For example, rather than bragging about the total yield per plant that could contribute to a farm’s economy, Burpee’s seed company documented the success of its “Genuine Mammoth” with reports of cash prizes won for 200- and 225-pound specimens.8 Similarly, the 1899 Buckbee seed catalog described new varieties in terms of how they served the pumpkin’s expanding ceremonial uses for display and dessert. It touted its “King of the Mammoth,” a 469-pounder exhibited at the 1893 World’s Fair, for its grandiose size, calling it a “wonderfully grand and colossal variety, astonishing everyone by its mammoth size and heavy weight.”9 It marketed “Pure Gold” for its associations with picturesque farm life and its excellence in sweet pies rather than for its uses as daily food for people or animals. “The pumpkin is a gorgeous fruit, principally celebrated for its services to agricultural fairs. . . . It must be remembered that pumpkins of mastodonic size are valued, like the very fat women and overgrown pigs which are placed on exhibition, rather for their weight and size than for any other quality. . . . Its bigness is all it is valued for,” explained a journalist for the Rocky Mountain News in 1879.10 By comparing the pumpkin with a pig and a woman, the reporter underscored the vegetable’s reputation as a living creature and its value as a metaphor with which to talk about human relations and gender identity, even as he recognized its complete lack of utilitarian function. 88 < “Wonderfully Grand and Colossal” Many merchants around the country must have taken notice of the spectacle the pumpkin’s great girth aroused at fairs, because they began to display pumpkins in their shops. The vegetables were “highly prized to place in show windows, restaurants, etc,” as Samuel Wilson’s 1888 seed catalog noted.11 Instead of offering pumpkins for sale for food or fodder , merchants used them as marketing gimmicks to draw in customers, thereby infusing the pumpkin with a brand new commercial value never previously achieved for its practical uses. One merchant described how a mammoth pumpkin on public view at a Massachusetts nursery “astonished the gazers.” A man was “moved to write a poem about it,” he contended , and another “declared that he positively stood in awe of it.”12 Clothing-store proprietors from St. Paul, Minnesota, to Boston, “Desirable Pumpkins,” a page from the 1899 H. W. Buckbee Seed and Plant Guide, Rockford, Illinois. Buckbee began to breed pumpkins for holiday display and dessert rather than for practical functions . Special Collections, National Agricultural Library. “Wonderfully Grand and Colossal” = 89 Massachusetts, held contests offering merchandise prizes to whoever could most accurately guess the number of seeds in a giant pumpkin on display. A Boston dry goods store owner named Wallenstein, explained an 1890 article in the Atkinson (Kansas) Champion, “placed a large pumpkin in his show window and advertised that any person purchasing one dollar’s worth of goods should have a guess at the number of seeds it contained, and that the person guessing the number, or the nearest to it, should be entitled to a first prize of a plush cloak.”13 As nine people tied for first place and three for third, the publicity stunt must have worked. The owner of Proprietor Barth, a “St. Paul One Price clothing house,” gained a lot of press and customers by displaying a reported ten thousand pumpkins and serving up pumpkin pies to more than seven hundred people in his store.14 As the Rocky Mountain News observed, there was nothing useful about the pumpkin besides the spectacle it aroused. Americans prized the pumpkin for its looks and its meanings, not its meat. Like New En­ glanders of a generation before, many Americans in the late nineteenth century celebrated the pumpkin for the very reasons that made it a “fossil” in the world of agriculture: the unruly nature of the plant, which was ill adapted to standardization and mechanization; its minimal economic value in the modern commodities market; and its association with an old-fashioned way of making a living off the land. As Americans erected more skyscrapers, laid more railroad tracks, and diligently pursued wealth and material goods, many felt they were losing their connection to the natural world, an authentic way of life, and their cultural roots. The pumpkin helped them rebuild those connections. A romance with nature permeated almost every aspect of American middle-class life in this period. It found expression in the birth of the national park and city park movements, the spread of suburbanization, greater participation in outdoor recreation, and the popularity of nature writing and landscape paintings.15 The families of bankers, merchants, lawyers, and, by the end of the century, those of more modest means sought temporary refuge from urban life by spending their vacations at farmsteads and at resort hotels and cottages in mountain settings.16 Closer to home, middle-class Americans created picturesque suburban homes with manicured lawns and naturalistic gardens inspired by the work of the popular landscape architects Andrew Jackson Downing and Frederick Law Olmsted. 90 < “Wonderfully Grand and Colossal” Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous frontier thesis address at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair was but one political manifestation of this pervasive romantic pastoralism.17 Building on the legacy of Jeffersonian agrarianism , Turner predicated American democratic values on the vastness of the American continent, where generations of independent farmers had broken the soil, supposedly paving the way for civilization. Although more contemporary historians have long since rebuffed this idea as misguided and ethnocentric, this frontier myth rang true for many Americans. Just as Americans believed the frontier was closing in the late nineteenth century , so they began to look more longingly on the agrarian way of life, with which they associated it, and to the pumpkin, with which they had long equated it. Playing with pumpkins—putting scary faces on them and giving them devious personalities—marked one of the new ways that middle-class Americans found a way to feel connected to nature. The field pumpkin’s rusticity, its headlike shape and living flesh, its time of harvest, and its historical connection to the world of wild spirits all captured Halloween’s essence and explain why the pumpkin acquired its ghoulish persona. “To add weirdness and quaintness [to your party],” advised a party planner, “have plenty of jack-o’-lanterns made of pumpkins.”18 The danger of the jack-o’-lantern titillated more than it terrified. The fear was part of the fun, just as it was, for example, when hiking the John Muir trail in the newly opened Yosemite National Park. Newspapers published accounts of people carving and displaying jacko ’-lantern pumpkins instead of feeding the vegetable to cows and pigs. Probably the first image of a pumpkin jack-o’-lantern appeared alongside the article “A Pumpkin Effigy” in the November 23, 1867, issue of Harper’s Weekly—although the article did not describe the pumpkin that way, nor did it mention Halloween.19 The engraving depicts a rustic farmstead, and portrays a pumpkin perched atop a fence post, surrounded by the farm boys who have carved it. The streams of light that flow from its jagged, devilish facial features illuminate a frightened girl, her younger sibling, and their terrified dog. In the background, a man loads pumpkins into a barn surrounded by leafless trees, signs of the passing season and rural setting. The darkened sky and gnarled tree limbs echo the mood set by the pumpkin’s sinister face. The author of the accompanying article, which included Whittier’s romantic ode to the pumpkin, explained to readers: “Wonderfully Grand and Colossal” = 91 “The sport of the pastime consists of paring a pumpkin to resemble a human head, and placing a light within to illuminate it, suddenly expose the monster just created to the view of passing persons, frequently to the very considerable horror of some youthful and more timid persons.”20 An 1887 story in the Boston Daily Advertiser told of a group of Harvard students “who stole a prize squash to make a jack o’ lantern.” Another story covered a group of boys in Newark, New Jersey, who had placed a carved pumpkin over an electric lamppost.21 “The effect can be better understood than described when one thinks of the huge head of a monster suspended in midair with the rays of a strong electric light streaming from its eyes, nose and mouth,” commented the reporter. Jack-o’-lantern pumpkins were still a new enough phenomenon to elicit surprise and astonishment. L. W. Atwater, The Pumpkin Effigy, wood engraving, Harper’s Weekly, November 23, 1867. This illustration is one of the earliest depictions of a jack-o’lantern pumpkin. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., LC-USZ62-8391. 92 < “Wonderfully Grand and Colossal” The popularization of Halloween mirrored the development of Thanksgiving and happened at about the same time. In both cases, nineteenth -century Americans reimagined remnants of old rituals to fit their whims and fancies.22 By the time of the great Irish migration to North America in the middle of the century, Americans no longer celebrated Halloween as the ancient Celtic fête commemorating the onset of winter, when souls of the dead walked the earth. Now it was a night of entertainment , when spirits appeared as sources of eerie fun and playful conjuring. Halloween night in the post–Civil War United States became an excuse for socializing among young adults, a time to recall the magic and mystery of the ancient festivities in a good-humored way. “We are all of us the better for an occasional frolic, and Halloween, with its quaint customs and mystic tricks, affords opportunity for much innocent merriment,” declared the authors of “Halloween Romps and Frolics by Two Experienced Entertainers,” in the October 1897 issue of Ladies Home Journal.23 With women’s magazines to guide them, Americans transformed ancient Halloween festivities into parlor games, and participants began arriving in costume. Activities centered on finding clues to one’s future paramour’s identity. His initials might appear in an apple rind, or her image in a candle-lit mirror. Creepy stories and decorations of witches, black cats, jack-o’-lanterns, and other spooks amused more than they frightened.24 “The Magic Halloween,” “Halloween Pumpkins,” and dozens of other poems like them imagined the pumpkin as a wily creature stalking the night.25 “The Magic Halloween” chimed: All Hallowe’en, the magic night, When folly reigns supreme, The pumpkin heads are all alight, The stars are all agleam. “Halloween Pumpkins” playfully warned: With pumpkin heads all peering, Is it not a fearsome sight? For the witching hour is nearing Of Hallowe’en midnight! “Wonderfully Grand and Colossal” = 93 Rural harvest decorations became backdrops for the more mystical creatures. As one columnist instructed: “Bunches of wheat or grasses over pictures and in vases, ears of ripened corn, and festoons of brilliant cranberries strung upon a thread, will give a suggestion of the country to the scene. Wherever possible, have a roaring, crackling, open-fire.”26 The party planner suggested that in lieu of holding a Halloween party in a “large old-fashioned country barn,” the hostess could use her house and let “the old fashioned pumpkin or squash be the chief dependence.”27 She recommended, “Let all the light that is used, either inside or out, come from pumpkin lanterns.”28 Turning the pumpkin into a jack-o’-lantern made it not only a playful spirit but also a party favor, signaling its transformation from an agricultural product into a home decoration, a new use that would eventually change both the actual physical pumpkin and its market value. One need not look hard to discover where Halloween celebrants, agricultural fair organizers, and journal publishers got their inspiration to embrace the pumpkin as their totem. Picturesque pumpkin images and stories filled the popular press. The cosmopolitan Harper’s Weekly regularly published sentimental and nostalgic vignettes of country life, with its barnyard dances, cornhusking parties, and pumpkin harvests, which appealed to middle-class sensibilities. Currier and Ives introduced such images into American homes through inexpensive prints, such as the “American Homestead” series, which featured quaint farm scenes in every season. These artists and writers were concerned less with presenting the economic realities of American agriculture than with communicating the belief that small-scale, low-tech farms stood for simpler times and a more natural and virtuous existence. As farms began to exist more in the hands of large-scale enterprises than of small ones, and as labor became more the act of machines than of human hands, these antiquated images lived on in popular culture as symbols of American cultural identity and, in time, as models for late-twentieth-century farm markets. Many writers gushed unapologetically over the pumpkin because it captured so well both the rustic image of rural life and nature’s vitality . “How dear to this heart is the old yellow pumpkin . . . the mud covered pumpkin, / The big-bellied pumpkin that makes such good pies!” cheered a poem published in newspapers from Minnesota to Louisiana.29 The author of the article “Gone Forever” anxiously viewed the changes 94 < “Wonderfully Grand and Colossal” happening around him by mourning the passing of the days when pumpkins were a part of everyday life. “They don’t grow the same kind of pumpkins now,” he sighed. “The sun never shines down on the old cornfield the same way it did thirty odd years ago.”30 As if to relive those mythic days of old, James Whitcomb Riley’s 1887 poem “When the Frost Is on the Punkin ” recalled the visceral sounds and traditions of a rustic farm at harvest time: When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder’s in the shock, And you hear the kyouck and gobble of the struttin’ turkey-cock, And the clackin’ of the guineys and the cluckin’ of the hens, And the rooster’s hallylooyer as he tiptoes on the fence; O, it’s then the time a feller is a-feelin at his best, With the risin’ sun to greet him from a night of peaceful rest, As he leaves the house, bareheaded, and goes out to feed the stock, When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder’s in the shock!31 Riley’s rhythmic cadence reinforces the sense of harmony between the farmer and the natural world. Each seems in tune with the other. The pumpkin, as the centerpiece of the poem, symbolizes this happy union. The poet’s use of parochial language, such as “It’s then the time a feller is a-feelin at his best,” evokes a provincial and unsophisticated small-time farmer. Yet the poet evinces none of Emerson’s condescension toward working farmers. Any number of landscape paintings, such as Winslow Homer’s 1878 Pumpkins among the Corn, could have illustrated such poems. The typical farm painting of the time revealed little of the regularity or standardization that actually characterized late-nineteenth-century commercial farm operations. Rather, in typical picturesque style, the paintings emphasized the natural irregularities of the setting. Although some paintings of the genre, such as J. Francis Murphy’s undated The Pumpkin Field, contain no human figures, the insertion of fences or glimpses of distant farmhouses is a benign reminder of the human presence.32 In Winslow Homer’s 1873 The Last Days of the Harvest, which was reproduced in Harper’s Weekly, two young boys lazily shuck corn in a field of bundled cornstalks and pumpkins while two men spear and toss pumpkins into a horse-drawn wagon. Homer places a field pumpkin prominently in front of the boys, making “Wonderfully Grand and Colossal” = 95 the vegetable both the visual and the thematic focus of the painting.33 In John Whetten Ehninger’s 1867 October, four men load pumpkins into the back of an ox-drawn wagon. One stands with a pumpkin in his arms next to a woman who sits passively on a cart to the side. The stoic female sitting in the field could represent nature itself, a contemporary rendition of the mythical Ceres watching over the men’s labor. All the figures wear simple country clothes, yet the cleanliness and neatness of their garments imbue them with a sense of dignity. The large orange pumpkins in October blend into the colors of the fall foliage of distant trees and the more muted hues on faraway hillsides, as if to relate the natural changes in the landscape to the seasonal labor of the farmers. A calmness and serenity in both Homer’s and Ehninger’s paintings belie the arduous work being depicted. The sexual improprieties that Dutch genre painters associated with rural peasants and with pumpkins are absent from these more earnest and sympathetic views of humble, rural life. John Whetten Ehninger (American, 1827–1889), October, 1867. Oil on canvas, 32 1/4 by 54 1/8 inches. Quaint images of pumpkin farming like this one showed up regularly in the popular press and in works of fine art and literature in the mid-nineteenth century. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C./Art Resource, New York. 96 < “Wonderfully Grand and Colossal” The golden halo that pumpkin farmers enjoyed in these tributes to American agrarianism could still be reduced to a tarnished crown of thorns, however, when pumpkin motifs left the farm. In an editorial that evokes Hawthorne’s Feathertop, the New Eclectic Magazine observed: “There is nothing women resent so much as pumpkin manhood—nothing which humiliates them more in their own esteem than to discover that they have been taken in by appearances, and that what they believed was solid wood turns out to be only squash.”34 Strains of the mean-spirited or ignorant pumpkin man reemerged in political cartoons such as one in the 1863 issue of Harper’s Weekly, which portrayed Clement Vallandigham, an outspoken critic of President Lincoln and a Democratic candidate for the Ohio governorship, as “an ugly Pumpkin growing upon thy land.”35 In the cartoon, a large pumpkin with a frowning human face sits unhappily on the ground between two men with pitchforks, who personify the states of Ohio and Pennsylvania. The cartoonist is criticizing the “noxious weed” type of politician who keeps returning to the political landscape even after the people try to get rid of him. “I’ve tossed [him] over into my neighbor’s field,” says one man to the other, “and he’s [returned] and took root, you see, among the . . . thistles.” Similarly, a cartoon of the U.S. Supreme Court published in an 1896 edition of Puck portrayed the judges as lacking sophistication and erudition by depicting them as farmers surrounded by hard cider, whittling sticks, doughnuts, chewing tobacco, and a pumpkin.36 The perpetuation of this negative stereotype for men of letters throughout the second half of the nineteenth century underscores the limits of agrarian ideology: pumpkins and subsistence farming were antithetical to modern society—although that could be their charm, too. Perhaps the most endearing new meaning of the pumpkin was an affectionate association of children with pumpkins. Like previous generations , many Americans in the industrial centers thought of rustic farms as places of their youth, but now they began to depict children and pumpkins together. This development coincided with new attitudes not only toward nature as an escape from modern stresses but also toward childhood as a time of carefree existence. Throughout the colonial period and into the nineteenth century, most people thought of children as small adults whose temptations needed to be strictly controlled. Influenced by the rise of Romanticism and new pedagogical approaches in the nineteenth “Wonderfully Grand and Colossal” = 97 century, many Americans began to view children as more inherently good than bad. They saw childhood as a time of innocence and purity. For a child to act naturally was considered proper and good. Describing the young pumpkin plant before it burst into great fruit, none other than Henry Ward Beecher noted, “But this pause upon the threshold of active life, this modest reserve, is becoming in both boy and pumpkin.”37 Equating a child with a pumpkin, a potent symbol of nature and vigorous development , was therefore a positive affirmation, as opposed to the negative connotations for adults, who were supposed to be guided by reason. The artist Worthington Whittredge’s 1863 In the Pumpkin Patch offers a case in point.38 A teenage boy rests next to a gigantic pumpkin, with massive leaves, which is growing in a clearing on the edge of a wood. The boy and the pumpkin straddle the boundary between tamed nature—the manicured field—and wild nature—the overgrown vegetation. That the boy lies on the ground next to the pumpkin conflates boy and vegetable. Both the young man and the pumpkin exude a sense of vitality and promise yet also a bit of unruliness and laziness. Just as the boy escapes his chores and his responsibilities to his household, so the pumpkin escapes the confines of the field. The tone of the painting suggests a celebration of the splendors of youth and nature. Whittredge’s image is echoed in many of Winslow Homer’s paintings that pair young boys with pumpkins, such as The Last Days of the Harvest and Corn and Pumpkins. Children’s stories at this time began to feature the pumpkin in tales that aimed to teach the difference between virtuous and unruly behavior. Olivia Lovell Wilson’s 1887 play Luck of the Golden Pumpkin is a good example.39 In the play, the eldest son of a poor farm family goes into town to sell his prize pumpkin in order to buy his starving brothers and sisters Christmas dinner. He sadly gives the pumpkin to an impoverished stranger, whose request for the pumpkin the boy, out of the goodness of his heart, cannot refuse. At the play’s finale, the stranger turns out to be a long-lost wealthy uncle who reciprocates the boy’s generosity with a pumpkin filled with gold coins. The play reiterates the adage that hard-working, virtuous people are rewarded with the fruits of their labor. The pumpkin, the catalyst for the farm boy’s success, is the embodiment of this theme, as it is in the Cinderella tale. One of the last lines of the play announces: “We owe it all to Mark’s golden pumpkins!” Pumpkins are literally as good as gold and no longer a crass, fake “lump of gold,” as Hawthorne had it. 98 < “Wonderfully Grand and Colossal” Following the model of the animal fable, the novelist and social critic William Dean Howells instilled childlike behavior in the pumpkin, playfully using it to offer a morality tale about blind ambition and the benefits of a humble, old-fashioned rural work ethic. In his 1892 “The Pumpkin Glory,” a virtuous young pumpkin stays within the confines of the garden andaspirestobetheepitomeofdomesticharmony—aThanksgivingpie.40 Unlike his dutiful brother, a bad little pumpkin wanders off in search of greater fame and glory. He gets his vine twisted in a fence post so that his body droops and becomes lopsided rather than growing beautifully round like his brother’s. True to his nature, the wild pumpkin becomes a jack-o’-lantern, but while vainly teetering on a fence post he falls into the squalor of a pigsty and ends up being eaten by a sow. In contrast, the good little pumpkin ends his life by attaining his lifelong dreams of winning first prize at the county fair and occupying an honorable and revered place on the Thanksgiving table as a pumpkin pie. By the 1890s, Americans saw pumpkins more regularly in tales, prints, and poems than in fields. And these sentimental stories and images, more than the vegetable’s flesh, fueled the appetite for eating pumpkin. People craved pumpkin pie because of what it meant. “When properly made,” explainedtheauthorof“GenuinePumpkinPie”intheKansasCityJournal, “the pumpkin pie is the embodiment, so to speak, of peace on earth and good will toward men. No man ever plotted treason or formulated dark damnable designs while filling his system with a genuine New En­ gland pumpkin pie. . . . If the genuine, thick, creamy, sweet-scented pumpkin pie could be universally distributed it would banish pessimism and cause anarchy to take to the woods.”41 Like this anonymous writer, many Americans believed pumpkin pie possessed deep cultural values and profound goodness and righteousness. Eating pumpkin pie connected people to particular ideologies. Who did not eat pumpkin pie, then, is as important as who did. Technological innovations that changed the course and character of agricultural production also affected consumption patterns. The development of refrigerated railroad cars by the 1870s and the use of iceboxes in homes increased the availability and sustainability of perishables, from dairy and meat products to fruits and vegetables. The advent of commercial canning, as well as of Mason jars and other hermetically sealing home canning techniques at mid-century, made once-seasonal products “Wonderfully Grand and Colossal” = 99 edible year-round. Jars of green beans and tomatoes replaced strings of dried pumpkin in house cellars. The use of canned meats and vegetables proliferated during the Civil War as a means of sustaining troops in the field.42 The industry spread to the civilian market after the war. Canned goods were initially affordable only for the well-to-do, but by the turn of the century, reductions in the costs of manufacturing and materials made the products available to most segments of society. The transition from the open hearth to the cast-iron stove and lighter steel pots eased the burden of home cooking. New modes of transportation and the development of grocery store chains that standardized the types of foods available to consumers weakened regional differences in foodways. Cookbooks and women’s magazines were among the many new publications that proliferated in the late nineteenth century with innovations in the speed, quantity, and cost of commercial printing and distribution systems. Recipes were no longer handwritten notes among family heirlooms but printed documents that women cut out from popular magazines. Although Americans might have eaten pumpkin pie throughout the year, they associated it most strongly with Thanksgiving. In the early 1860s, the idea of the American nation was anything but certain. With the help of Sarah Josepha Hale’s letter-writing campaigns and editorials lobbying for the national holiday, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Thanksgiving Proclamation on October 3, 1863, while the nation was in the midst of the Civil War—a moment when the need for reassurance about the nation’s identity could not have been greater. Independence Day and George Washington’s birthday were the only two national holidays to precede it. Like them, Thanksgiving was at once a call for national unity and patriotism and an attempt to create a common sense of heritage. It was to be celebrated annually on the last Thursday of November. In her November 1864 Godey’s Lady’s Book column, “Our National Thanksgiving—ADomesticFestival,”Haleeditorializedaboutthespecial place the holiday would serve in the nation’s annual calendar: “‘The Birth of Washington,’ which brings before all minds the example of the patriot hero and the Christian man; ‘Independence Day,’ which reminds us of the free principles on which our Government was founded; and ‘Thanksgiving Day,’ which lifts our hearts to Heaven in grateful devotion, and knits them together in bonds of social affection—are three anniversaries such 100 < “Wonderfully Grand and Colossal” as no other People have the good fortune to enjoy.”43 At this moment of unparalleled national crisis, Hale’s beloved New En­ gland holiday and its celebratory pumpkin pie became, like the other holidays, an affirmation of American values and identity. Pumpkins, wrote one poet, “are the joy and pride of a nation.”44 What made Thanksgiving different from the other national holidays was its reliance on food, nature, and traditions connected to the land. Any holiday meal is a “reminder of common origins and common past,” as the food historian Harvey Levenstein has observed, yet at Thanksgiving the meal and the food itself embody the holiday ideals and are absolutely essential to creating a sense of shared American identity.45 The holiday’s harvest symbolism brought all the facets of the celebration together. Lincoln ’s Thanksgiving Proclamation called on Americans to celebrate “the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies,” defining the harvest as a bedrock of the country.46 Many Americans made Lincoln’s sentiments their own. Timothy Ball’s 1898 Thanksgiving sermon proclaimed, “So today we gather, according to the custom of the New En­ gland forefathers, to offer our public Thanksgiving and praise to the Giver of seed-time and harvest, for the many blessings that we enjoy, and especially for the fruits of the earth, these varied products of our fertile soil.”47 In the early nineteenth century, Americans celebrated the nation’s natural resources and spectacular scenery to compensate for what they feared was a lack of national cultural heritage relative to that of Europeans . Yet by making the harvest, and the pumpkin in particular, a central symbol of Thanksgiving, Americans made nature a building block of their heritage, not a substitute for it. They began to think of nature as a repository of native, homegrown traditions and an icon of the nation’s ancestral roots. By sitting down to a harvest meal, they made these ideas part of themselves in a very real way. Although many historic examples existed of thanksgivings and harvest celebrations, such as the one held by the Jamestown settlers in 1609, the founders of the national holiday focused on the Pilgrims and their 1621 gathering as the true source of the national holiday meal. The Pilgrims, of course, were not the first Europeans to colonize North America, nor was their harvest feast anything out of the ordinary. And the pumpkin certainly was not. Even though New En­ glanders maintained the strongest Thanksgiving tradition over the years, the holiday’s founders had “Wonderfully Grand and Colossal” = 101 less historical and more ideological reasons for focusing on Pilgrims and pumpkins. During the tumultuous years of the Civil War, northerners portrayed the Pilgrims’ struggles and successes as a motivational story in the country’s own conflict. Thanksgiving devotees held up the Pilgrims, the ancestors of the North, as pious and righteous, in contrast to slaveholding southerners. They therefore lent credence to the northern cause. “Their sacrifices, their heroic example, their pious and purifying influence , thrown loose upon the atmosphere for us to breathe, or embodied in institutions that mould and order our lives, are among the richest blessings that claim acknowledgment upon each recurring Thanksgiving Day,” enthused Scribner’s magazine in 1869.48 Many writers of children’s primers found potent role models in the Pilgrims. The educator Elizabeth Share, of Brookline, Massachusetts, wrote to teachers: “But the most suggestive work of all for Thanksgiving must always be the old, old story of the Pilgrims. Again we find life, life in its noblest relations of self-sacrifice and love.”49 For many Americans, especially in the North, who felt threatened by the influx of new immigrants from abroad, the Pilgrims became emblematic of American society and culture. Owners of colonial revival homes and members of the newly formed Daughters of the American Revolution expressed similar passions for establishing ties to their colonial ancestors and their Anglo-Saxon roots. Just decades before, of course, ardent New En­ gland patriots such as John Greenleaf Whittier were decidedly ambivalent about the early New En­ gland colonists. And few Thanksgiving enthusiasts acknowledged them, which highlights the contrivance of claiming Pilgrims as the originators of the holiday and the progenitors of American national identity. By the time of Lincoln’s proclamation, historical episodes in which desperate New En­ gland colonists stole food from Indians had been replaced with scenes of benevolence and good will. Besides being a celebration of the nation’s natural bounty and a reenactment of the mythical Thanksgiving of the Pilgrims and Indians, the holiday was an affirmation of simple American fare (and, by extension, what were thought of as down-home values) and the virtues of rural life, as well as a time for family reunions. Thanksgiving celebrants kept true to thevernacularNewEn­ glandtraditionby startingthedayoffwithachurch service and ending it with a family feast. Displaying jack-o’-lanterns was 102 < “Wonderfully Grand and Colossal” also part of the festivities, not just for Halloween. Every autumn until Hale retired from Godey’s Lady’s Book in 1877, the magazine published cozy stories about joyous Thanksgiving homecomings at New En­ gland farmsteads. “Let Thanksgiving, our American holiday . . . awaken in American hearts the love of home and country,” she proclaimed.50 She and other magazine editors printed recipes alongside quaint holiday tales as instruction manuals for re-creating not only the meal but also the holiday ’s “olden-time” spirit.51 Reuniting family members on the family farm took on particular significance in the mid- to late 1800s as the younger generations left the homesteads for the war or for life in the cities. Under the title “Thanksgiving on the Farm,” the cover of the November 1898 edition of Ladies Home Journal featured a collage of rustic images depicting dinner preparations and a dining table full of food surrounded by people, with a field of cornstalks and pumpkins as a backdrop. The November 1869 issue of Scribner’s stated, “It is a healthy thing for separated families to gather back to the old homes and relight the old altar-fires.” The article chastised those “multitudes in the great cities . . . who turn their backs upon the humble, hearty country homes.” “Give up all that frets you and all that fascinates you in your city life, and be simple boys and girls again!” it counseled.52 Judging from the numbers of people who pursued lives away from the farms, country living was more appealing in nostalgic poetry and for weekend retreats than in reality—much the way the pumpkin was more delectable as a holiday treat than as daily dinner fare. And for many Americans who struggled at subsistence levels, this image of farm life offered little comfort. The bill of fare for Thanksgiving in the November 1888 edition of Ladies Home Journal included roast turkey, giblet sauce, celery, mashed potatoes, cranberry jelly, boiled onions, and sweet potatoes, along with the now less traditional chicken pie, boiled fish, roast venison, and cauliflower , with turtle soup as a starter.53 American cooks took pride in the simple, mostly native fare as an expression of a down-to-earth American character. Some critics sneered at those who incorporated French culinary styles into this all-American occasion. They even objected to the European trend of serving food in courses, rather than family style, in which everything appears on the table at once. In “Puritan Costume Party for Thanksgiving,” one writer advised: “You must pile your table “Wonderfully Grand and Colossal” = 103 with food as if to give the impression of a recent famine. That is not easy to do if you serve in courses, like the French manner.”54 An engraving by John W. Ehninger for Harper’s Weekly conveys the way Thanksgiving celebrants directly correlated what they ate with a particular American scene and illustrates why food is such a cornerstone of this national holiday. Entitled Preparing for Thanksgiving, the print, a variation on the pumpkin harvest in Ehninger’s October, casts the main ingredients of Thanksgiving dinner in the typical rustic farm imagery so popular at the time. Farmers load a wagon with harvest vegetables for the holiday meal. A rotund haystack, marker of a bountiful harvest and natural abundance, is echoed in a big pile of pumpkins, and enormous turkeys waddle across the picture frame. By partaking of the holiday meal, diners both emotionally and tangibly became part of the American farming tradition and the natural world. And although this quaint Thanksgiving picture could not have looked more different from industrial forms of agriculture at the time, the ways in which Americans invested their identities in rustic farm life, and in pumpkin farming in particular, began to transform real-life farm economies. The finale of the meal was—as it still is—the pie. There might be apple, cherry, and coconut cream pies, but by the mid-1800s there was always pumpkin pie, a key ingredient in this national identity-building ritual. The Chautauquan magazine referred to Thanksgiving as “the season of pumpkin pie.”55 May Hanks’s poem “Pumpkin Is Queen” waxed: Thanksgiving day would be a side-play, Minus the golden Pumpkin, No feast is complete, if they have not to eat, A circle of yellow Pumpkin.56 The pumpkin became the celebratory end to the Thanksgiving meal and the “national vegetable,” as the author of the newspaper article “The American Pumpkin” called it, because it was both a voluptuous symbol of the natural gifts of the American continent and a container of “distinctly American” stories.57 In the essayist’s words, the pumpkin was “emphatically and literally a home industry in all its roots and branches and manufacturers .” Late-nineteenth-century Americans celebrated pumpkin pie as a homegrown tradition and as a symbol of the nation with a sense of 104 < “Wonderfully Grand and Colossal” pride that Amelia Simmons’s revolutionary-era pumpkin pie only hinted at. “It has a noble and generous mission to perform and a grateful memory to preserve,” continued this paean, as the author traced landmarks in American history through the vegetable. “It is known to have been the early comrade of the Pilgrim Fathers and was a constant companion of the pioneers who followed the star of empire westward. It was a friend in need to the patriots who fought the Revolution,” he declared. Although New En­ glanders had sung the pumpkin’s praises for generations, Lincoln ’s proclamation established a whole new level of meaning. Regional stories about pumpkins became epic American tales. Eating pumpkin was no longer an act of desperation but an act of patriotism. Consuming a “golden crescent” of pumpkin pie, as described in the children’s tale The Story of Pumpkin Pie, was one of the most fulfilling ways to partake in the nation’s agrarian ideals.58 Endless poems, children’s stories , and magazine articles sang the praises of pumpkin pie as a “golden reminder” of the values and virtues of life on an old-fashioned farm, just as so many popular paintings by Homer and others had done.59 One Thanksgiving story referred to pumpkin pie as “a moral thermometer.” “Pumpkins, you know,” wrote the author of “Peppery Pumpkin Pies,” “are nourished in sunshine. They are gathered in the glowing autumn days, and brought in the house, golden reminders of the summer sun. If the pies are made by one of a sunny disposition, they will be sweet, juicy, and delicious—in short, such an essence of sunshine, sugar and spice. . . . But if one ill-natured thoughtisharboredduringtheirpreparation,theyaresouredandruined.”60 Pumpkin pie stood for the simple things in life and the bedrock qualities of the American character. Or so many people liked to think. American writers loved to define themselves as an unpretentious lot in comparison with more sophisticated Europeans. And they often used pumpkin pie to do it. While some writers celebrated the Thanksgiving meal itself, many more called on pumpkin pie to humbly sing America’s praises. In “Pumpkin Pie,” one poet portrays himself as a modest man who desires nothing more from his homeland than the simple things in life, rather than any exotic riches. He writes: Then hail to the muse of the pumpkin and onion! The Frenchman may laugh and the En­ glishmen sneer At the land of the Bible, and psalm-book, and Bunyan; “Wonderfully Grand and Colossal” = 105 Still, still to my bosom her green hills are dear; Her daughters are pure as her bright crystal fountains; And, Hymen, if ever thy blessings I try, Oh! Give me the girl of my own native mountains, Who knows how to temper the sweet pumpkin pie.61 In a news article titled “He Longs for Pie,” the author complains about being unable to find pumpkin pie on the menu at Delmonico’s, the St. James, the Waldorf, or the Brunswick—the fanciest and most expensive New York restaurants. He said, “I trust that I shall always be able to eat and value the splendors of French cookery without peptic accompaniment or subsequent regrets, but, as an American citizen, I demand that the national discs of delight, the mince and pumpkin pies, be retained upon their pedestals and flashed under our eager eyes whenever our souls send forth a cry for them.”62 In a similar vein, Margaret E. Sangster wrote “Thanksgiving Pumpkin Pies” in the dialect of a country fellow who takes pride in his plain background, as epitomized by a love of pumpkin pie.63 He recalls “a thinkin’, like a simpleton, of Mother’s pumpkin pies” while bemoaning the wealthy, aristocratic life into which he has married. His wife’s “French cook costs a fortune, but—I favor home-made pies,” he states proudly. The American fairytale “The Pumpkin Giant,” published in 1892, turns these sentiments about the simple things in life into a morality play, similar to Luck of the Golden Pumpkin.64 These both sound a lot like Benjamin Thompson’s colonial poem about “the times when Pompion was a Saint.” In the tale, a poor farm woman makes pies from pumpkins that sprout from the remains of a pumpkin-headed giant who has been slain by her husband. When the local king tries a piece of her pie, he exclaims, “I never tasted anything so altogether superfine, so utterly magnificent in my life. . . . stewed peacock’s tongues from the Baltic are not to be compared with it.”65 As in most fairytale endings, everyone lives happily ever after, but this story takes an unusual twist. “Roses in the [royal] garden were uprooted and replaced by pumpkins,” it concludes. “All royal parks became pumpkin fields.” The tale extols the simple rewards of the pumpkin over the finest delicacies that money can buy. The modest pumpkin farm becomes a mythical landscape of deep meaning that signifies American values. 106 < “Wonderfully Grand and Colossal” As the many odes to the pumpkin pie’s delicious taste confirm, the pie’s appeal was not just ideological but visceral and personal, too. Adding sugar and spices made eating pumpkin not only a symbolic act but a pleasurable one, which by extension sweetened the ideas attached to the vegetable. The 1890 cookbook Hood’s Good Pie expresses the way these two phenomena—the ideological and the physiological—worked together. The cover depicts three large, voluptuous pumpkins reaching up with their broad, leafy vines and wrapping themselves around a baked pumpkin pie set on a linen-covered table. Whittier’s line, “What moistens the lip and what brightens the eye—What calls back the past, like the rich Pumpkin pie?” serves as a caption. In large, bold letters across the top of the cover is the title, Good Pie, signifying the tasty flavor, of course, but also the benevolent meanings and values the pie possesses. Eating a slice offers not just nutritional enrichment but cultural enrichment. In the late nineteenth century, Sarah Josepha Hale encouraged women to take seriously their role as Thanksgiving cooks and hostesses. She wrote in Godey’s Lady’s Book, “It belongs to the altar and the hearth at which woman should ever be present, and the women of our country should take this day under their peculiar charge, and sanctify it to acts of piety, charity and domestic love.”66 Her success in making Thanksgiving a national holiday is evidence enough of how American women used the domestic sphere, particularly the kitchen, to political and patriotic ends, as Simmons did during the Revolutionary War period. Not everyone, however, thought about women’s making pumpkin pies in quite the way Hale did. For example, Preparation, an engraving by C. G. Bush for Harper’s Weekly, depicts a suitor sitting close to a woman and leering over her shoulder as she dutifully prepares Thanksgiving dinner, with the meal’s ingredients, including turkeys, apples, and a mound of pumpkins , set before her. “Pumpkin pie a tempting dish to almost any fellow; / So sweet and tender, luscious (yum!)”—a line from the poem “Pumpkin Pie”—could easily serve as a caption. It well sums up the sexual innuendo inthesceneandtherebyperpetuatesoldstereotypesaboutwomen,pumpkins , and sexuality.67 While women took their responsibilities seriously, at least some men seem to have had other things on their minds. In his book Eyes and Ears, Henry Ward Beecher offered a variation on the same theme when he quickly moved between botanical description and sexual innuendo: “The pumpkin-blossom is large and buxom, open-hearted, a “Wonderfully Grand and Colossal” = 107 refuge for bees, that fly into it with open wings, and work around its nectarines in a golden dust, and so overload themselves with sweets as often to forget their homeward duties, and, like sailors in some tropic island, desert their ship to live in the luxury of overmastering sweets.”68 Regardless of its meanings for men and women, the Thanksgiving holiday was in the hands of northerners, and its themes reflected northern values and ways of life. The Northern bias begs the question of how the holiday was received in other parts of the country and among people who were not “Anglo-Saxons,” as Euroamericans were referred to at the time. WhereaswhiteAmericansintheMidwest andinthemid-Atlanticregions Cover of the 1890 cookbook Hood’s Good Pie. Warshaw Collection of Business Americana: Cookbooks. Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution. 108 < “Wonderfully Grand and Colossal” were quick to see themselves in the rural and colonial Thanksgiving icons, white southerners were, in short, reluctant. “It is a New En­ gland custom, said some,” noted a Congregational minister who sought to introduce the holiday to his Texas congregation, “and not at all adapted to us.”69 The Richmond Daily Dispatch, on February 15, 1865, editorialized sarcastically that “the Day of Thanksgiving, when he [the Yankee] gorges to repletion with turkeys and pumpkin pie, and [honors] the Landing of the Pilgrims, who came to America to be at perfect liberty to deprive everybody else of their liberties, [is one of] his great festival days.”70 Not everyone across the nation embraced the national holiday as his or her own. The general consensus for the South, based on a variety of sources, is that white southerners were initially unreceptive to the holiday, but by the end of the nineteenth century many had begun to embrace it.71 Even then, many still considered it a New En­ gland transplant versus a “national” tradition. As one observer noted in 1879, “‘The Thanksgiving Day’ was a New En­ gland institution, to commemorate the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers . . . though I dare say that the Southerners heartily wish that the Pilgrim Fathers had gone to the bottom of the sea before they ever landed at all. However, now ‘Thanksgiving Day’ seems to be the family feast of the year.”72 Northerners such as the minister in Texas used the holiday stories, harvest symbols, and foods to try to inculcate their values in others. One overt example is the 1892 Thanksgiving celebration at the Hampton Institute, the Virginia school funded by northerners to educate African Americans and American Indians. Goose, potatoes, and “New En­ gland pumpkin pie” were served to the students, who had been gathered in an assembly hall with a stage “decorated with symbols of the year’s abundance in grains and grasses and golden fruits of the earth,” explained the institute’s journal, Southern Workman. A Seneca Indian girl from New York State stood before the audience and recited the stories of the Pilgrims ’ first Thanksgiving and of the Thanksgiving held by the Revolutionary War soldiers at Valley Forge. A Winnebago boy proclaimed to the gathering, “I am thankful that by the help of the white race, the Indian and negro races are advancing in civilization and Christianity.”73 The reformers made Thanksgiving and the pumpkin valuable tools of assimilation , with actions that now appear to be rabid testaments to the gross ethnocentrism of the nineteenth-century reform movements. “Wonderfully Grand and Colossal” = 109 Many African Americans seem to have readily adopted Thanksgiving on their own. One source stated that “all the negroes learned to look upon it as the holiday of year,” and W. E. B. DuBois observed, “On the whole, the Negro has few family festivals. . . . Thanksgiving is coming to be widely celebrated, but here again in churches as much as in homes.”74 Southerners and African Americans did develop their own Thanksgiving food traditions, perhaps reinterpreting the holiday’s ideals and symbols. Many substituted sweet potato pie, a regional specialty, for the traditional New En­ gland pumpkin pie. In the article “Thanksgiving at All Healing , N.C.,” published in the journal The American Missionary, Miss K. Le Grange wrote with a sense of regional pride that “not a pumpkin was to be had, so we made a sweet potato pie, which looked just as golden as any New En­ gland pumpkin pie that ever was eaten.”75 One explanation for this practice could be that in the South, the image of the pumpkin farmer was more pejorative, denoting a lazy good-for-nothing instead of an inspirational image of the humble and virtuous yeoman. This racist argument against emancipating slaves illustrates the point. “Instead of becoming intelligent husbandmen, working in an orderly way,” one critic wrote, “the negroes cut and shuffle about, like vagrants and squatters, enjoying their light pumpkin livelihood in a desultory way.”76 A derogatory cartoon titled “Thanksgiving Morning in the Johnson Family,” which depicts a black family as numbskull characters who mistake a mock turkey, made of a pumpkin body with stick feathers and head, for a real one, reveals the pervasiveness of the stereotype.77 Pumpkin was a common food for poor blacks in the late nineteenth century for the same reasons that other poor people throughout the centuries had relied on it. But in the case of poor black farmers, depicting them as “pumpkin eaters ” was a racial slur without the airbrush of nostalgia. This stigma might explain the popularity of sweet potato pie instead of pumpkin pie to this day in the South. The deep meanings Americans invested in the pumpkin tell a story not only about people but also about the vegetable itself. The relationship between the physical plant and the stories about it has always been reciprocal , with the pumpkin’s physical qualities inspiring meanings and the meanings transforming the plant’s uses. The separation of squash from pumpkin is one of the best examples of this. But another major shift began to take place in the late nineteenth century. The cultural iconography 110 < “Wonderfully Grand and Colossal” began to alter the nature of the plant itself and to infuse market value in the pumpkin for the first time in its long “earthly career,” to use a poet’s phrase. This shift would foreshadow larger changes to come. Farmers reacted to elevation in the pumpkin’s status by attuning their businesses to take advantage of the new demand. “The Pumpkin Business ,” a headline in an 1891 agricultural journal, would have seemed an oxymoron just a few years earlier.78 The farmer featured in the article grew pumpkins to supply his canning factory. “You see, in order to keep his factory going he has to have a pumpkin-ranch,” explained the author. The year 1899 was a milestone for pumpkin farming: it was the first year in which the U.S. Agricultural Census recorded pumpkin production. Yet calling pumpkin production a business still required some stretch of the imagination. That year, 3,194 of 614,146 American farmers reported growing pumpkins on a total of 3,341 acres, slightly more than an acre per farm. Judging by these statistics, fewer than 0.5 percent of farmers in the United States grew pumpkins. By comparison, 5,336 farms (about 0.8 percent) each grew eight-tenths of an acre of squash; 18,964 farms (about 3 percent) each grew less than an acre of green beans; and 343,999 farms (about 56 percent) each planted about half an acre of cabbages.79 That its cultural affiliations, not its practical uses, spurred innovation is evident in the pumpkin’s new names and varieties, such as Burpee’s Golden Marrow and Buckbee’s Big Gold, first advertised in 1882 and 1899, respectively. One grower’s comment that “in many places people will pay more for early pumpkins for pies than they will for any kind of squashes” helps explain the proliferation of new varieties, including Finest Family , Early Sugar, Sweet, Quaker Pie, and Thanksgiving, all of which were small to medium-size pumpkins bred primarily for pie making—each pumpkin approximately two pies’ worth—at Thanksgiving.80 A small advertisement, “Ask for ‘thanksgiving’ pumpkin at your grocer’s,” verifies the marketability of the vegetable’s new uses and imagery.81 Although it might at first seem incongruous that the pumpkin started out as livestock food early in the century and became a treasured holiday dessert by century’s end, its cultural history provides some compelling explanations for this development. The two forms of consumption might have been at opposite culinary poles, yet Americans linked them ideologically. As a cheap and prolific vegetable, the pumpkin proved good fodder not only for horses but also for American mythmakers, who “Wonderfully Grand and Colossal” = 111 self-consciously tried to distance themselves from foreign influences and to shelter themselves from the modern, industrial world. They sought their cultural heritage in the countryside and in hardscrabble settlement stories, in which the pumpkin was a prominent and potent player. Americans ate it up. Events in the nineteenth century set in motion the transformation of a nearly worthless farm crop into a highly marketable icon of American agrarianism. The469-poundBuckbee’s“KingoftheMammoth”pumpkindisplayed at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, an event that celebrated American progress , ingenuity, and modernity and attempted to articulate to the world an American identity, sat across the concourse from the pavilion where Frederick Jackson Turner delivered his now-famous frontier speech. The pumpkin was an awesome natural specimen, but more important, fair organizers featured the behemoth because it embodied the stories Americans liked to tell about themselves, stories that rivaled those of the famous historian himself. ...

Share