A Thirst for Empire by Erika Rappaport

Author:Erika Rappaport
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2017-04-04T04:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 8.5. “Turn to Tea Today.” Tea Tells the World (London: International Tea Market Expansion Board, 1937), 7. (By permission of UC Davis SpecialCollections)

The addition of ice, lemons, and sugar made tea into an American beverage. This invention had a long history, but in the early twentieth century the Indian Tea Market Expansion Board, Domino sugar, and Sunkist embarked on a decades-­long joint promotion that branded the drink as a healthy, refreshing American summertime treat. If hot tea was British and for old ladies, iced tea became a thoroughly American drink that did not carry any particular gender or class associations. Sunkist was a trademark of the California Fruit Growers Exchange (CFGE), a cooperative of California citrus growers formed in 1893. While there was already an established orange and lemon industry in California, the CFGE built a veritable “Orange Empire” in Southern California. Like the empire of tea I have described here, the CFGE had “spheres of influence” over land, labor, and consumers, “colonizing public and private spaces across the country with alluring advertisements.”113 Sunkist marketed California as a Garden of Eden and invented new drinks, including orange juice, lemonade, and iced tea. Corporate cookbooks, for example, taught American women how to make and serve iced tea with lots of sugar and with a fresh lemon slice decoratively poised on the rim of a tall, ice-­filled glass.114 Sunkist thus also helped nationalize tea by providing a new cluster of homegrown associations and dietary and material culture. It also popularized the new religion that a modern healthy diet and lifestyle contained fruit, defined as a mixture of vitamins and sunshine.115 Of course, probably no amount of vitamin C could compensate for the large amount of sugar that was often added to iced tea. That taste was also the product of widespread and enduring advertising, much of which was associated with Domino brand sugar, brought out by New York–­based sugar refiners Havemeyers & Elder in 1898. With a big-­budget ad campaign that proposed sugar cubes were modern, clean, and unadulterated, Domino became identified as “A Triumph in Sugar Making!”116 In 1929, the company then introduced superfine loose table sugar, designed and advertised to dissolve completely in cold drinks such as iced tea.

So, by the time that the ITMEB advertised iced tea in the 1930s, all the ingredients were in place and the Tea Board’s iced tea campaigns contributed to the sale of all these commodities. In 1936 some twenty million consumers in thirty-­six different cities read ads telling them that iced tea “keeps you cool.”117 The campaign, like that for hot tea, didn’t tackle the whole country but engaged in intensive regional efforts, particularly in the South and the West. Advertising, often included American flags and other nationalistic imagery and explicitly stated that iced tea was “America’s Own Discovery” (fig 8.6). Clear glassware, as opposed to a teapot and cup, also demarcated iced tea’s distinctive identity, and Mr. Ice Cube, rather than Mr. T. Pott, reminded consumers that tea keeps up your “vitality” (fig.

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