On July 23, 1886, the 49th Congress (1885–1887) set in motion an era of commercial regulation by passing the Oleomargarine Act which defined the very essence of butter and imposed a two-cent per pound tax on oleomargarine, a butter substitute made from animal fat.  The law, which President Grover Cleveland signed 10 days later, came after months of debate over whether the federal government could (or should) regulate private economic activity, as well as the areas of interstate commerce, agriculture, and public health.  The debate pitted dairy interests against virtually everyone else, and featured graphic (and often false) descriptions of the processes used to create margarine, which had been invented in France only 17 years before.  The vivid imagery came courtesy of Chicago meatpackers, who capitalized on the new product since its manufacture at the time harvested excess animal fat that had earlier gone to waste.  Margarine also yielded high-profits but cost very little, making it popular among both industrialists and the millions of consumers who couldn’t afford real butter during a lingering economic recession.  Dairy interests, however, saw margarine as a threat and appealed to Congress to regulate it with a prohibitive tax.  “If I could have the kind of legislation that I want it would not be a source of revenue, as I would make the tax so high that the operation of the law would utterly destroy the manufacture of all counterfeit butter and cheese as I would destroy the manufacture of counterfeit coin or currency,” Representative William Price of Wisconsin said. Future Speaker David Henderson of Iowa compared margarine to the witches’ brew in Shakespeare’s Macbeth.  Those in Congress who opposed the tax tried to stop the bill through so-called “killer” amendments.  With tongue in cheek, Representative John Adams of New York offered an amendment to tax chicken incubators “in order that the great American hen may be properly protected.”  Representative George Tillman of South Carolina was among margarine’s few defenders on the House Floor, and got a good laugh when he said that margarine, “when it is honestly made out of good materials,” was actually better than butter.  The Oleomargarine Act, which remained in effect until 1950, foreshadowed later attempts to regulate private economic activity.  http://history.house.gov/HistoricalHighlight/Detail/15032395622

However it evolved, butter has been with us for at least 4000 years.  Our word butter comes from the ancient Greek–a combo of bous (cow) and turos(cheese)–still appropriate today, since the bulk of modern American butter comes from cows.  Butter, from its ancient inception, had nothing much in the way of competition until 1869.  In that year French chemist Hippolyte Mège-Mouriès--spurred on by a hefty financial prize offered by Emperor Louis Napoleon III--patented a lower priced spread made from beef tallow.  He dubbed it oleomargarine–from the Latin oleum, meaning beef fat, and the Greek margarite, meaning pearl, this last for its presumably pearlescent luster.  The Emperor was hoping that a cheaper butter alternative would benefit the lower classes and the military, neither of which seems to have appreciated it much.  Mège-Mouriès sold his patent to Jurgens, a Dutch butter-making company, which eventually became part of Unilever, still one of the world’s major producers of margarine.  Margarine arrived in the United States in the 1870s, to the approbation of the broke, and to the universal horror of American dairy farmers.  Within the next decade there were 37 companies in the United States enthusiastically manufacturing margarine; and “margarine” and “butter” had become fighting words.  Butter, traditionally, is yellow, a color ideally derived from plant carotene in the milk of grass-fed cows.  Margarine, on the other hand, as made in the industrial vat, is white, the unappetizing shade of grade-school paste.  Margarine manufacturers, to better appeal to the public, wanted to tint their product yellow; butter producers objected, claiming that yellow margarine, fraudulently masquerading as butter, was a deliberate ploy to deceive the public.  (Butter from corn-fed cows is also anemically pale, and is routinely dyed to turn it an attractive butter-yellow; this practice, however, butter makers argued, was simply a cosmetic tweak.)  By 1902, 32 states had imposed color constraints on margarine.  Vermont, New Hampshire, and South Dakota all passed laws demanding that margarine be dyed an off-putting pink; other states proposed it be colored red, brown, or black.  The “pink laws” were overturned by the Supreme Court (on the grounds that it’s illegal to enforce the adulteration of food) but the ban on yellow margarine remained.  (The last hold-out, Wisconsin, only repealed its margarine-color law in 1967.)  In the cash-strapped days of the Depression and during the butter shortages of World War II, however, margarine inexorably began to bypass butter.  This was helped along by improvements in the manufacturing process–margarine was now made from hydrogenated vegetable oils rather than animal fats--and by a clever side-step of the yellow ban in which white margarine was sold with an included capsule of yellow food coloring.  Buyers simply squished the two together to produce a nicely butter-colored non-butter spread.  (Though not in Wisconsin, where using yellow margarine was a crime, punishable by fines or imprisonment.)  By the 1970s, Americans were eating about ten pounds of margarine per person per year.  Margarine may also have received some additional oomph from the famous Wisconsin senatorial taste test of 1955, in which senators, blindfolded, were challenged to tell the difference between butter and margarine.  Good Wisconsinites all, most weren’t fooled--except, famously, the vociferously pro-butter Gordon Roselip, who preferred the margarine, insisting that it was butter.  It turned out later that Roselip’s wife, worried about her husband’s heart, had for years been sneakily substituting (illegal) yellow margarine for butter at the Senator’s dinner table.  In the seemingly unending duel between butter and margarine, butter is winning the latest round:  as of 2014, butter had surpassed margarine as America’s favorite spread.  We’re now each eating on average 5.6 pounds of butter a year, as opposed to a dwindling 3.5 pounds of margarine.  New evidence has shown that the trans fats in margarine may be worse for us health-wise than the saturated fats in butter.  There’s also the upswing in the public’s preference for natural foods in favor of processed products--and a lot of people say that real butter just plain tastes better.  In 2002--over three decades after the last margarine color ban was lifted--Parkay produced a new margarine in a “Fun Squeeze” bottle.  It came in two colors.  One of them was pink.  Rebecca Rupp  http://theplate.nationalgeographic.com/2014/08/13/the-butter-wars-when-margarine-was-pink/

On May 22, 1849, Abraham Lincoln received Patent No. 6469 for a device to lift boats over shoals, an invention which was never manufactured.  However, it eventually made him the only U.S. president to hold a patent.  Lincoln learned river navigation early in life and took a flatboat down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers as a teenager.  A few years later, Lincoln moved to Illinois and made a second flatboat trip to New Orleans.  Before the flatboat could get to the Illinois River, it became stranded on a milldam at New Salem, a small pioneer settlement along the Sangamon.  As the boat took on water, Lincoln sprang to action.  He had part of the cargo unloaded to right the boat, then secured an auger from the village cooper shop.  After drilling a hole in the bow, he let the water run out.  Then he plugged the hole, helped move the boat over the dam, and proceeded to New Orleans.  In 1832, as a candidate for the Illinois General Assembly from Sangamon County, Lincoln published his first political announcement, in which he stressed, not surprisingly, the improvement of navigation on the Sangamon River.  Read more and see graphics at http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/education/patent.htm

At the drop of a hat  This saying is said to come from the American West, where the signal for a fight was often just the drop of a hat.  It may have an Irish origin, based on something like "he's ready to fight at the drop of a hat" which in turn may be followed by "roll up your sleeves" or "take off your coat"--items of clothing involved in the start of fights.  Flanders and Swann called their show At the Drop of a Hat.  Perhaps they needed little encouragement to break into song.  Their well-known animal observation piece, 'The Hippopotamus Song', had inspired the Queen, Prince Philip and the Mountbattens, who saw the revue at the Fortune Theatre, to join in the chorus of 'mud, mud, glorious mud' chorus.  https://www.phrases.org.uk/bulletin_board/26/messages/1217.html  See also http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-att1.htm

5 books worth reading this summer by Bill Gates   May 21, 2018  Leonardo da Vinci, by Walter Isaacson.  A worthy follow-up to Isaacson’s great biographies of Albert Einstein and Steve Jobs.

Everything Happens for a Reason and Other Lies I’ve Loved, by Kate Bowler.  When Bowler, a professor at Duke Divinity School, is diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer, she sets out to understand why it happened.  Lincoln in the Bardo, by George Saunders.  It blends historical facts from the Civil War with fantastical elements—it’s basically a long conversation among 166 ghosts, including Lincoln’s deceased son.  Origin Story:  A Big History of Everything, by David Christian. David created my favorite course of all time, Big History.  It tells the story of the universe from the big bang to today’s complex societies, weaving together insights and evidence from various disciplines into a single narrative.  If you haven’t taken Big History yet, Origin Story is a great introduction.  Factfulness, by Hans Rosling, with Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Ronnlund.  Hans, the brilliant global-health lecturer who died last year, gives you a breakthrough way of understanding basic truths about the world—how life is getting better, and where the world still needs to improve.  https://www.gatesnotes.com/About-Bill-Gates/Summer-Books-2018

Baked Beans

Add one or a couple of ingredients such as:  dry mustard, molasses, chili sauce, coffee, pineapple, brown sugar, crushed pineapple, bourbon, rum or brandy to baked beans.

"Life is an exchange of ideas, information and emotion."  "I'm suggestible--if I like the suggestion."  Martha Esbin

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1892  May 25, 2018