P&PC New Acquisition: Mighty-Maurice the Pot-Holder

Everyone knows about the Kitchen Debate between then-U.S. Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev at the opening of the American National Exhibition at Sokolniki Park in Moscow on July 24, 1959. But who knew that the Cold War American kitchen was also full of poetry? About two years ago, we introduced P&PC readers to a wooden ring holder and a "Pinkerstink" cocktail glass, both of which had poetry on them. And now we have the pleasure of bringing you our latest find—the "Mighty-Maurice Pot-Holder" produced by Gilner Potteries, a company that operated out of Culver City, California from 1948-1957 and claimed to be "California's Largest Art Ware Manufacturers." Unfortunately, our recent acquisition is only the box, but even though we don't have the pot-holder or the pottery, we're happen to at least have its poetry—two stanzas of self-introduction straight from Mighty Maurice's mouth:

For neatness in your kitchen
Hand your hot-pads on my arms
I'm the guy for whom you've been wishing
And being handy is one of my charms.

I can also hold your watch and rings
Whenever you do the dishes
Ever see another fellow
Who is quite so ambitious?

Apparently, Maurice is one of the "Happy People"—little male pixies that, apparently, fed and responded to the "pixie craze" of the 1940s and 1950s. (Maurice's female counterparts, like the one pictured here, were called "Merry Maids.") Tempted though we are to tie Mighty Maurice and his kind to The Borrowers (which was published in 1952), we're more moved to think back in time—like, to fifty or sixty years earlier when Palmer Cox's "Brownies" were all the rage. Wiki writes, "Not unlike fairies and goblins, Brownies are imaginary little sprites, who are supposed to delight in harmless pranks and helpful deeds. Never allowing themselves to be seen by mortal eyes, they are male, drawn to represent many professions and nationalities, all mischievous members of the fairy world whose principle attribute is helping with chores while a family sleeps."

Imaginary little sprites? Male? Helping with chores (like holding pot-holders, rings, and watches)? Sounds a lot like Mighty-Maurice to us. A Canadian illustrator and author, Cox made his Brownies into a pioneering name brand in advertising. There were Brownie books. There were Brownie pamphlets advertising patent medicines and soap (you might remember us talking a bit about that here.) There were Brownie dolls, games, mugs, plates, flags, and more (though we can't find a Brownie pot-holder). Like Mighty-Maurice, Brownies also wore funny hats. And as the picture of the Brownie pictured here suggests, Brownies also had a special relationship to poetry, oftentimes speaking in verse just as their pixie cousin Mighty-Maurice does. But perhaps the most telling and interesting connection between Brownies and Mighty-Maurice's "Happy People," however, is the semantic one, as the name "Maurice" (which means "dark skinned" or "Moorish") can't help but link up with the brownness of Cox's ethnically-other Brownies.

The upshot of all this? Both the creations by Cox and Gilner are little idealized racial or ethnic others who happily help with chores around the house. (Cf. "Happy People" and "Merry Maids.") Who knew, then, that even as Nixon was extolling the virtues of capitalism and the labor-saving technology of the modern American kitchen, some kitchens in America contained a nostalgic kernel of the past—the ghost of the African American or ethnic housekeeper and/or kitchen maid whose physical labor and position in the American economic system would have never been mentioned, much less extolled, by an American politician debating social progress with a Soviet Premier.

P&PC in the Oxford History of Popular Print Culture

Between 1860 and 1920, advertising strategies for two products almost singlehandedly changed the face of consumer culture in the United States—or so Cary Nelson and P&PC claim in "American Advertising: A Poem for Every Product," which is Chapter 7 in the newly-released, 700-page tome U.S. Popular Print Culture 1860-1920 (Volume 6 of Oxford's History of Popular Print Culture series). At $160, the book's no cheapie (maybe Oxford needs a jingle or two to help advertise it?), but Nelson and P&PC offer ten images from their private collections and lots of great verse to show how poetry—a genre that many people associate with anticapitalist endeavors—fueled the development of the advertising industry and paved the way for a myriad of advertising techniques we're familiar with today.

In "A Poem for Every Product," Nelson and P&PC argue that, while poems were used to pitch everything from galoshes to carriages, two consumer items in particular—patent medicines and soap—deserve special credit (or blame) in powering the development and expansion of the American advertising industry and its poetry, as U.S. poets found at that conjunction the possibility for regular incomes and audiences appreciative of their skills. In the writing of this essay, Nelson took on the subject of patent medicines while P&PC picked up on the issue of soap (a topic we've addressed on this blog before), and we found the two products to be intimately related, as soap assumed the dominant place in advertising that patent medicines occupied prior to the Progressive Era's truth-in-advertising movements that culminated, in part, in the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. The shift from snake oil to soap—two items with simple recipes that needed advertising to differentiate one brand of similar material from another—was complicated and not accomplished overnight, but one of the poets helping it along was the phenomenally successful Canadian writer and artist Palmer Cox. Thus, Cox serves as a sort of fulcrum in "A Poem for Every Product," a moment halfway through the essay when Nelson's argument about patent medicines transitions to P&PC's thoughts about soap. Here, in the way of a preview of that essay, follows an excerpt from the moment in "A Poem for Every Product" when the shady business of advertising starts relying on soap to help, uh, clean up its act:

"In 1890, five years after writing 'Wisdom in Fable' for Pond's Extract, Palmer Cox [pictured here] produced 'A Friendly Turn' to advertise Ivory Soap for Cincinnati's Procter and Gamble Company. There, in four pages of his trademark tetrameter couplets and whimsical pen and ink illustrations, Cox called on his 'Brownies' to spin a tale of Ivory's elfin origin, purity, and medicinal qualities. While not as universal in its application as Pond's—which in 1885 had purported to resolve a range of skin ailments in addition to 'Sore Throat, Rheumatism, Wounds, Catarrh, Hemorrhages, Nose Bleed, Sprains, [and] Swellings'—Ivory is nonetheless credited with the ability to treat people's 'scabby heads,' 'unsightly pimples,' 'scaly crust,' and 'body sore.' Like a miracle cure, the 'pure and perfect' Brownie concoction works its transformative magic almost overnight:

No more were seen the scabby heads,
Or finest garments all in shreds,
No more unsightly pimples rose,
To mar the chaps, or scaly crust,
Made people wish themselves in dust.
For, from the infant on the breast,
To those who neared their final rest,—
For rich and poor, the great and small,
Found Ivory Soap had cleansed them all.

For people suffering, Cox writes, as if pitching the merits of a patent medicine, 'Their sole relief and only hope / Is found in using Ivory Soap.'

"The apparent ease with which Cox moves—or has been moved—between patent medicine advertising and soap advertising is in part an indication of his poetry's general marketability and public appeal, but it's also emblematic of a larger, conceptual shift that took place in American advertising in the last decade of the nineteenth century. That shift—which occurred as the age of patent medicine advertising was coming to an end—saw advertisers seize on and redeploy the curative rhetoric of nostrum advertising in order to market other consumer goods as well. In promoting a transformative power inherent to the commodity item, this new strategy not only contributed to the further fetishization of goods in the new 'modern' consumer economy by further obscuring the labour relations of their production. It also publicized the notion that the commodity item was itself a cure for people's many and varied ills—promising to be not just a physical good with a specific use, but a shortcut to social status, sex appeal, or lifestyle—and that the corresponding act of buying and consuming was a medicinal activity in its own right. That is, in the expansion of patent medicine advertising strategies more broadly at this time, we can see the birth of what we now call 'retail therapy.'

"That expansion didn't happen all at once, nor did it happen equally from product to product. Indeed, restructuring the logic of consumption and Americans' relationship to commodity items in this way required a tangible form of what Fredric Jameson would call a 'vanishing mediator'—that entity which 'serves as a bearer of change and social transformation, only to be forgotten once that change has ratified the reality of the institutions.' In the case of American consumer capitalism, that signal mediating product was soap, partly because soap had been included in the patent-medicine industry for a long time [it was oftentimes an ingredient in nostrums], and partly because it provided an outward performance—taking something dirty and making it clean—of the transformative character that advertisers hoped would eventually become linked in the American psyche to every other product....So twinned were the discourses of patent medicine and soap at the end of the nineteenth century that at least one nineteenth-century producer of nostrums—Palmer Cox's patron, Pond's Healing and Pond's Extract—was able to respond to the Pure Food and Drug act by transforming itself almost immediately into a skin-care cleansing specialist, Pond's Cold Cream, which is still on the market today."

For the rest of this essay—including the performance of Dreydoppel's Borax Soap in "The Great Contest!!"—check out Chapter 7 of U.S. Popular Print Culture 1860-1920 from Oxford University Press.