The Rise of Baking Powder Business

In Chicago and Terre Haute, Indiana, two new companies entered the baking powder war. Both used a new formula based on sodium aluminum sulfate, which Royal conflated with alum. Calumet was headed by salesman William Wright; Clabber was developed by the German Catholic immigrant Hulman family. Within fifty years, the Hulmans had grown from a small grocery to a distillery and department store, and wholesaler with branches throughout the Midwest, and earned the respect of labor leader and native son Eugene Debs. Baking powder also expanded into new foods such as Aunt Jemima pancake mix.

How Does It Feel to Be a Trademark?

Hurst’s best-selling novel of the 1930s portrayed the life of a New Woman business tycoon and the African American maid whose family waffle recipe became the basis for an “Aunt Jemima” kind of product and fortune. Stereotypes such as the “mammy” and “tragic mulatta” are either damaging caricatures or images to expose racism, depending on the reader’s interpretation of the text. The novel’s use of limited point of view works to satirize Bea Pullman’s racism even as the novel looks sympathetically on her quasi-feminist ambitions. The decision of the light-skinned Peola to leave the United States presents an indictment of society’s racism, though it breaks her mother’s heart. The film version of the novel from 1934 offers an interesting comparison to more stereotypical black images in cinema at the time, though some critics still found it offensive.