Hijack from the first post!
Could the Underwood Devil trademark have been at least partly responsible for the slightly related rumor of Satanist major food brands? Surely you all remember the Proctor and Gamble rumors of our childhood? (Yes, I know they aren’t the same company, I’m asking about possible connctions in the public’s eye.)
Any connections that you maybe came across, Una, while researching your column?
I didn’t run into any of the sort of, how shall we say, “religious hysteria” over the devil trademark in the early days. That doesn’t mean that someone didn’t care for the poor Underwood devil, but it’s possible. At the time of his trademarking it was a very different country.
Interesting. One would think that religious fundementalists were more rigid then rather than the way it seems to be evolving today.
Still, I wonder what people like the Adventists, IBSA (currently JWs), Baptists, and Church of Christ (the old style holy roller church, not the “everyone’s right” church of the present) of the day would have felt about old DevilBoy and similar things…
Suggestions on where to start?
I’m not certain. It could really have belonged to an era where some groups objected to it but there was no publicity to speak of, or it could have only been objected to by a tiny minority. For example, I thought that the bulk of the P&G “man in the moon” controversy was driven by a single religious group, not a general movement within any major branch of Christianity, but that sort of topic is something I really don’t know much about.
Strictly speaking, there were no fundamentalists in 1870; the movement came into being in 1910. And no one (apart from the outright demented) believed in Satan worship. (I suspect modern fundamentalist belief in Satanism is more than half a direct result of the rather silly “Satanism” that grew up in the wake of the Britannica’s naíve acceptance in 1929 of Margaret Murray’s long-demolished theories, as influence by the rather inbred nature of fundamentlst thought.
Excellent, JW! That helps narrow down what I’m looking for.
Tanx to bofe uv youse guys, NCB
Do you include “brainwashed” under the demented catagory? I wish that you were correct, but there is no accounting for what misconceptions perfectly innocent and otherwise mentally sound people have had drilled into their heads.
Does demented really include the misinformed?
Oops! I see that I misread your post. You were speaking of the past and not the present. Correct? Sorry.
I am curious to know what kind of things you are thinking of, Zoe.
I can say for a certainty that in 1892, the company was proud of its trademark, so much so that they sued the Cudahy Packing Co., who infringed on their trademarked devil. That from a Chicago Tribune story from that year.
If the devil was a pariah as a symbol on your grocery product at that time, you would hardly expect a rival packer to be trying to imitate their competitor.
Really, the whole devil worship meme is a relatively new phenomenon. I can remember in my own childhood (and I’m only 33!) reading Harvey Comics (or was it Gold Key?) (publishers of Casper the Friendly Ghost), which published titles like Hot Stuff, the Little Devil and Wendy the Little Witch. I really don’t know how those would go down nowadays. There was even quite a bit of noise made over such totally innocuous 90’s stuff as “Sabrina the Teenage Witch” (who also started, incidentally, in comic books…she was an Archie Comics gal).
So…, what everybody seems to be saying is that this whole fundementalist bruhaha over such worries is a relatively new phenomenon (do doo da do do).
I guess I’ve just heard such a volume of noise about it that it feels like I’ve heard it forever.
Now You Know…