Historic news yesterday on the decision to retire the character and brand of Aunt Jemima, that longtime mainstay of Old South marketing. Anyone with the barest cultural imagination has paused over this packaging in the last (choose a number: 20? 30? 50?) however many years and thought, Really? Still?

The durability of the brand has had a great deal to do with its immense appeal, which dates to the turn of the last century—when people were racing to get in on the new packaged food industry. Americans were no longer buying commodities bulk out of barrels at a dry goods store; they had begun to shop in markets that offered boxes, jars, and bottles of stuff with catchy names and attractive packages printed in color. The creation of products which could be marketed across the country midwifed the modern advertising industry. And as shown in Robert J. Gordon’s Rise and Fall of American Growth, the period between 1870 and 1940 saw stupefying changes in daily life, unrivaled since despite our much-heralded digital revolution.

Aunt Jemima Pancake Mix (concocted in St. Joseph, Missouri, 1889; trademarked in 1893) and Cream of Wheat (created in 1893, in North Dakota) share several attributes: 1) they are simple, cheap commodities dressed up as “recipes” with a huge profit margin, 2) they gambled on the romance of the antebellum South during the early Jim Crow era, despite being manufactured on the Great Plains, 3) they built their brands on the personification of formerly enslaved characters, and 4) they made fantastic sums of money doing so, selling to northern and southern consumers alike.

Harry Stacy Benton, Detail of Frank White as Rastus in Our Platform: Cream of Wheat, 1907 advertisement. Dowd Modern Graphic History Library, Washington University. — Harry Stacy Benton, Detail of Frank White as Rastus in *Our Platform: Cream of Wheat*, 1907 advertisement. Dowd Modern Graphic History Library, Washington University.

I wrote about Rastus, the Cream of Wheat chef, in the cultural history section of my book Stick Figures: Drawing as a Human Practice (Chapter 7: Blind Spots, especially Sections 7.3 and 7.4, Missing Persons and Individuation, Denied). Rastus was a repurposed Uncle Remus, who appeared in Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings in 1881. Rastus (unfailingly represented by photographs of the head of Frank White, often glued onto otherwise illustrated advertisements) was genial, compliant, and unthreatening.

Jemima was the female counterpart of Remus/Rastus, a “mammy” figure lifted from the stock characters of minstrelsy. The illustrator A.B. Frost was retained to create the image of “Aunt Jemima,” the new face of the product, which was new in itself Merchandisers were learning that the invention of a trusted persona helped to create a relationship with consumers.

Magazine publisher Frank Munsey dropped the price of his eponymous magazine from 25 cents to a dime in October 1893, thereby changing his business model to advertising from subscriptions; when many competitors followed suit, advertising was propelled to a new position, and consumer goods were ready to exploit the opportunity.

Frost’s gouache and ink portrait was painted in 1890, and remained on boxes of Aunt Jemima pancake mix for more than three decades. That painting, a modest thing on stiff paperboard, lives in the Dowd Modern Graphic History Library at Washington University.

Last year I published a catalogue essay for New Perspectives, the N.C. Wyeth retrospective at the Brandywine Museum in Chadd's Ford, Pennsylvania. That piece was devoted to an assessment of Wyeth’s advertising work, an under-considered part of his career. Basic to the argument was that Wyeth had an aversion to the complexity of modernity, including demographics, and that his work looked backward as a question of cultural orientation. Perhaps as a result, he was approached with ad campaign jobs that smacked of nativism, au courant between the wars—sort of like now. After submitting the essay I kept pulling on some threads, and when I gave a talk at the museum last September I was able to explore an aspect of the subject which pertained to NCW and Aunt Jemima to a greater degree. I have a revised version of that essay in the cooker for a future book project.

A century ago In 1920, N.C. Wyeth worked on a major campaign for Aunt Jemima, devoted to building out the legend of the the great cook herself. One of those ads, “Gray Morn,” tells an unlikely story indeed. Quoting from my essay:

Subtitled “How kind Fate took a hand in the Misfortunes of War back in the days of old ’64,” the narrative tells an elaborate story of how a general and his orderly became separated from their unit and were forced to hide in the woods for days amid plentiful Union troops. They found “her” cabin (which looks a great deal more like a rough-hewn New England home than the clapboard shack it would have been, and bears a striking resemblance to Wyeth’s own hearth in Chadd’s Ford). Jemima welcomed and nourished them with pancakes. “Yo’ sho’ did give dem Yankees de slip,” says she, among other utterances in dialect. We are asked to believe that a real person in her stead would gladly assist such men, who given their choice would have re-enslaved or browbeaten her into semi-servitude following the conflict.

Amid the sustained, implacable outcry following the murder of George Floyd, a crescendo of bullshit-calling on Confederate nostalgia-cum-white-supremacy has finally been heard. The Lost Cause animates the logic of that ad, and the legend of Aunt Jemima. Wyeth’s six ad cycle includes the following installments of her story:

1) Aunt Jemima’s fame began in the days “before the war” when she was cook for Colonel Higbee whose plantation was a mecca for visitors. Her pancakes were a “specialty of the house.” (SHE WAS ENSLAVED “BEFORE THE WAR.” THIS REALITY IS COMPLETELY ELIDED.)

2) When a Mississippi paddlewheeler caught fire near Higbee’s Landing, the Colonel opened his home to survivors. Men, women, and children were comforted by Aunt Jemima’s cheering words, and batches of her famous pancakes revived their spirits. (ENSLAVED PEOPLE WERE SUPER CHEERFUL. TOURISM WAS BIG IN THE ANTEBELLUM SOUTH; PEOPLE LOVED TO GO TO SWELTERING PLANTATIONS WHERE PEOPLE WERE BRUTALIZED INTO PERFORMING BACKBREAKING LABOR. WHO WERE THESE PEOPLE? PROTO-ROTARIANS?)

Synopses of NC Wyeth ads from 1920, printed on circa 1960 disposable paper placemat for Aunt Jemima’s Kitchen, Disneyland. (In operation from 1955 to 1970.)

3) Gray Morn: After the “War Between the States,” a Confederate General recalled….etc.

4) Years later, representatives of a northern flour mill heard the General’s story while traveling downriver on the Robert E. Lee. At Higbee’s Landing the two men went ashore to try to persuade Aunt Jemima to share her recipe with homemakers. (PANCAKE TALENT SCOUTS UNCOVERED JEMIMA, WHO WAS OTHERWISE DOING WHAT WITH HER TIME WHILE STATE-SPONSORED TERRORISM WAS BEING VISITED UPON POST-RECONSTRUCTION SOUTHERN BLACKS? HIDING IN THE COUNTRYSIDE?)

Synopses of NC Wyeth ads from 1920. There is something truly obnoxious in the way the two grain-trading swells come jauntily ashore, the old Confederate with the Van Dyck beard between them. How grand! What a time was had back in the day at Higbee’s… — Synopses of NC Wyeth ads from 1920. There is something truly obnoxious in the way the two grain-trading swells come jauntily ashore, the old Confederate with the Van Dyck beard between them. How grand! What a time was had back in the day at Higbee’s Landing!

5) It takes some coaxing! But Aunt Jemima agrees to reveal her “secret,” because the opportunity to make so many families happy with the ease and satisfaction of her mouth-watering pancakes was irresistible; she leaves her cabin and begins her glamorous new life making pancakes all over America. (THE COPYWRITERS AT N.W. AYER WERE REALLY LAYING IT ON PRETTY THICK HERE)

6) Off she goes to the Columbian Exposition (1893, Chicago—in honor of Christopher Columbus, who like R.E. Lee has had a very bad week or two) and begins her ambassadorial career. A real woman named Nancy Green played the part of Aunt Jemima in Chicago and was she still doing so when these ads ran in American magazines in 1920.

When I wrote the piece for New Perspectives I had not seen all six ads. But last summer in the Wooden Shoe Antique Mall in Holland, Michigan, I came across a surprising artifact: the placemat from Aunt Jemima’s Kitchen at Disneyland, located in Frontier Town from 1955 to 1970. (See top of post) There is a lot to unpack here, including the grimly hilarious fact that Jemima’s Kitchen was located in Frontier Town. The Homestead Act of 1862, designed to populate the West during and after the Civil War by incentivizing movement with free land, was not extended to the survivors of chattel slavery after the War—a wicked boomerang on Manifest Destiny.

Quaker Oats bought Aunt Jemima in 1936, and one of the first things they did was refresh the brand by re-envisioning Aunt Jemima herself. Her story stayed the same, and she retained her knotted headscarf and its distinctive pattern. But Chicago illustrator Haddon Sundblom (who had already revivified the Quaker Oats character) was engaged to give Jemima a warmer, cheerier, more modern look. This Jemima—more ample, bountiful even—greets us from the center of the placemat (above).

The text at the bottom of the placemat tells us that these images are based on famous illustrator N.C. Wyeth’s paintings, which hang in the offices of the Quaker Oats Company in St. Joseph, Missouri. Wyeth’s illustrations for literature are used to buff up his reputation, borrowing glory for this ridiculous object. Keep in mind that Wyeth’s AJ campaign was at least 35 years old at this point. The roaring 20s, the Great Depression, World War Two, and the postwar boom transpired between 1920 and 1955. So little had changed that the same cultural narrative remained sufficiently persuasive to celebrate. Emmett Till was killed in 1955, the year Aunt Jemima’s Kitchen opened in Disneyland.

There is so much going on at this moment that it can be difficult to process. But something epochal is occurring. As someone who has looked at a lot of ugliness hidden in plain sight on the pages of 20th century American magazines, I am delighted that toxic bedtime stories about American history—including a Lost Cause myth that has claimed many lives even as it moved a lot of product—are finally collapsing. There are other questions worth returning to here, including the role played by illustrators and designers in all this.

Meanwhile, good for Quaker Oats. They will sell fewer pancake mixes under a new name. Century-old brand equity is extremely valuable. Even so, Jemima has really left “her cabin” this time, exactly 100 years after N.C. Wyeth painted her doing so.

Maybe the old Quaker spirit is still alive and moving in there somewhere. Looks like they had a meeting, and then they did the right thing.

Just in time for Juneteenth.

Quaker Oats Cries Uncle on Aunt Jemima