The Candy Prophylactic: Danger, Disease, and Children's Candy Around 1916

By 1916, America had firmly established its international reputation as "a great candy eating nation" ("Brooklyn Leads" 1). American candy consumption was by some estimates approaching half a pound per week per person; if that was an average, there were many eating significantly more ("Pure Candy"). Children, too, in the early decades of the twentieth century were buying and eating candy like never before. And candy was a notable economic force; by 1916, the retail value of the candy business was estimated by the trade journal International Confectioner at something close to US$600 million, and the children's candy market was a big piece of that (April 1917: 43). But if, as Joseph Hawes and Ray Hiner argue, historians have been so long in turning their attention to children because "children were hidden from historians but in plain view," even the historians who have noticed the children seem to have overlooked the children's candy, a substance so trivial, so insignificant, its existence barely registers (43). Despite the evident and inescapable fact that children bought and ate quite a lot of candy in the early twentieth century, there is little consideration of what all that buying and eating might mean.1 Whether such candy eating was harmful or benign was in the first decades of the twentieth century a matter of much dispute. In an era before the ideas of "junk food" and "empty calories" decided the question, candy's nutritive status was not entirely clear. The nutritional science of the day, commonly referred to as the "New Nutrition," recognized the calorie as the unit of energy in food and distinguished between carbohydrates, proteins, and fats. Experts advocated a diet including calories from all these sources, each of which was understood to perform a distinct function in the body's growth and maintenance (Levenstein 57-58, 112-20). Sugar candy belongs to the class of carbohydrates. But carbohydrates as such were undifferentiated: fruit, grain, and candy alike were, in accordance with the best science of the early 1900s, equally good sources of "energy." People needed to eat carbohydrates for fuel, and candy was a concentrated and delicious source of carbohydrates: good energy food.2 Yet the "scientific" assurances were not always entirely persuasive. Even if carbohydrates were good fuel, many contemporaries could not quite accept the logical consequence that candy was good food. In the decades leading up to the first World War, candy alarmists of every persuasion harangued the public with accounts of all the ills that could be expected as a consequence of children's uncontrolled candy consumption (Woloson 54-65). The wide and often surprising array of physical and moral maladies that were reputed to follow on children's candy eating make it clear that the meanings of candy, and its dangers in particular, had little to do with candy's nutritional qualities. Reformers' attacks on children's candy vacillated between an image of corrupted children whose innocence had been destroyed by candy's pleasures, and an image of vulnerable children whose innocence exposed them to the harmfulness of candy's pleasures. Some children had been lost to candy- a tragedy, perhaps, but also a hopeless cause. Others, younger and still untainted, needed to be saved from candy. There was, to be sure, a strong class bias in these attacks. The "worst" candies were supposed to be those made and sold by the "street vendors" and "immigrant peddlers" and bought by the workingclass and immigrant children. The presumably delinquent behaviors associated with candy eating were by and large the recreations of working-class boys who earned their own money and spent most of their time in the street. And the children who needed to be protected from candy's physical and moral contaminations, the innocent and vulnerable children, were by and large the children of the white middle class. Candy was but one of many possible threats to the health and well-being of children in the early 1900s, and certainly not the most urgent. …