Victorian Pop Culture: Gimme Some Taffy

 Gimme Some Taffy 

     This is part 3 in a series of crazes, trends, and  popular expressions in our Victorian ancestors’ days. Part 1 was “The Dolly Varden Craze” and Part 2 was “Shabby Genteel.”

     Taffy - Praise, flattery, “soft soap.” 

     At a graduation and alumni banquet in Pittsburgh a member who could not attend sent a letter of regret, “but covered the members of the association with good wishes and taffy,” the Pittsburgh Press reported in December 1898.  

     In 1882 the Lewisburg Local News in Pennsylvania ran a piece that first appeared in Cincinnati explaining just what “taffy” was when it did not refer to America’s then-favorite candy. “When a politician wants office, he takes to the stump and tells the people how intelligent they are and how proud he will be to represent such a constituency on the floor of Congress. That is taffy. When a lecturer winds up a tedious discourse with an extravagant puff of the town and its people, assuring them that he has rarely addressed an assembly on whose countenances intelligence had so indelibly set its mark, and that it will be the proudest day of his life when he can again return and appear before them, he is giving them taffy.” The writer added other examples such as a European actress proclaiming to reporters how much she loved America, the land of the free and home of the brave, after having her band strike up “Yankee Doodle,” or a young man seated close to a young lady at the park, earnestly talking - “One hundred dollars to a cent he’s giving her taffy.”

     “Taffy keeps the wheels of business moving,” the article continued. “No drummer would think of starting out without a full supply of it,” drummers being traveling salesmen.

      It was used frequently to describe politicians. In an 1880 article titled “General Distribution of Taffy,” the Intelligencer Journal of Lancaster, Pennsylvania shared examples of praise from other newspapers for congressional candidates. Examples were:

“Taffy for John E. Wiley - Mr. Wiley is a gentleman, and is personally one of the most popular men in the country.

Taffy for Blaine - Blaine is the undoubted choice of the overwhelming majority of the Republican voters of Lancaster county – a fact that is undeniable and undenied.”

        

     In the Journal of Agriculture and the American Stock Breeder in 1882, Karl Karlington of Webster County, Missouri wrote, “Who is he who doesn’t like a nice round little lump of taffy to roll as a sweet morsel under his tongue? Everyone who has not got sky-blue hair. Taffy has been one of the greatest powers that have been instrumental in turning the world.” Taffy could succeed where bullets and bombs did not, Karlington said. 

     

The editor of the Sterling Gazette of Sterling, Kansas was mocked by the editor of the St. John Sun. The Sterling Gazette editor reprinted the mockery, and his reply on 13 Aug 1885:

     “The editor of the Sterling Gazette, on his way home, filled considerably space in his paper with taffy for the people of Stafford and Pratt counties. Brother Cowgill will find that taffy does not take well with the people of these counties. People who have grit enough to leave comfortable surroundings in the east and settle in a wild country and make it blossom as the rose, are not the ones to be soft soaped. Give us some substantial arguments in favor of your candidates, Bro, and save your taffy.” - St. John Sun

“If we gave the people of Stafford and Pratt counties “taffy,” what does the editor of the Sun call the treacle he has been giving them for a few years? No, we gave no taffy, but spoke the sober truth, as it appeared to us after making a tour of those counties.” 

 Of course in this era of popular poetry about every subject, there was a poem about taffy. Here are five of the seven verses. Two that were a slur on the Chinese have been left out. This is from the January 1881 Oshkosh Northwestern:

Taffy

A queer expression of late has been heard,

‘Tis based on the novel misuse of a word;

And tho’ some might think it rather absurd,

You’ll see that it’s quite expressive.

In steamer or carriage, in parlor or street,

We hear it – ‘tis uttered by all that we meet,

They over and over and ever repeat

This remark, “You’re giving me taffy.”

The wife who desires a new bonnet or dress

Will give her dear husband a loving caress,

And then on his lips a warm kiss will impress

She’s silently giving him taffy.

His daughter would like a piano – a grand;

She murmurs while holding her pa by the hand,

“You’re the sweetest, the dearest papa in the land,”

She’s giving her parent taffy.

“Come John,” says a father, “I claim as my right,”

To know you didn’t come home till ‘twas dark?”

And Johnny gives this as his answer:

“I was reading a book on the state of the nation,

And filling my mind with information,

At the Young Men’s Christian Association.”
He was giving the old man taffy. 

    The earliest mention in newspapers was in 1878. It’s heaviest use was throughout the 1880s, but it continued to be used into the turn of the twentieth century, such as a 1910 headline, “Taft Will Use Taffy.” As late as February 1910, a  short, “humorous” and racist story in the Atlanta Constitution had a policeman saying to the protagonist, “The police think you’re just trying to give us taffy.” By 1920 it seems to have fallen completely out of use. 

Sources:

     “Taffy is the Oil,” Mayfield Weekly Monitor (Mayfield, Kentucky), 6 March 1889, p. 2.