Origins: Peanuts

 Americans for more than a century have known peanuts primarily as a snack food, but it didn't start out that way.  Cultivated by indigenous peoples of Peru, Brazil and elsewhere in South America, they arrived in North America well before Columbus.  Eventually they spread to West Africa and to China.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, peanuts in the US were cultivated mostly in the southeastern states such as Virginia and Georgia.  They were known then as goobers, or goober peas--a more accurate name since they are legumes, not nuts. They were probably named goobers by slaves, from the Bantu word nguba. It's possible that peanuts came to the South from West Africa along with the slave trade.  Grown at first as animal feed, they were also fed to slaves, who were literally working for peanuts--though that's probably not the origin of the phrase.

But then came the Civil War, and goobers became an essential food for Confederate soldiers, because they were plentiful and nutritious.  Invading and hungry Union troops found little alternative to them left in the South, but developed a taste for peanuts that they took with them to the North.  Peanut vendors began to appear on city streets.

By the end of the century, peanuts as snack food began an association with two major forms of mass entertainment: the circus (and its cousins such as the carnivals, where "Peanuts, popcorn, candy apples!" became the concessionaire's cry) and baseball.  But the cultural association with black Americans continued, so that at public entertainments the seats in the back reserved for them were called The Peanut Gallery.  That was broadened in vaudeville times to simply mean the cheap seats. The reference to it as a children's section began  in the 1940s,  immortalized in the 1950s for my generation by the Howdy Doody Show on the new mass medium of television. The association may be that children are small and so are peanuts.  But today there is some pejorative association with sniping "from the peanut gallery," as by the vulgar crowd.  The idea that hecklers threw peanuts at the stage may be part of it, or more probably invented later.   

Peanuts at first were sold in the shell.  Cora Bunch, a concessionaire with the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show began selling them by the bag, which caught the attention of the fledgling Pennsylvania concern transplanted to Virginia called Planter's Peanuts, where she was hired.  Planter's was started by Italian immigrants, the Peruzzi brothers, who roasted peanuts with a hand-cranked machine for their fruit and nut stand.  Obici Peruzzi tinkered together an automatic peanut roaster, and the brothers were in business.  Their "Mr. Peanut" logo--created when a house artist added a monocle and cane to the sketch by a fourteen year old contest winner--helped sell peanuts as a fun snack.

As for baseball, the story goes that an early baseball entrepreneur sold advertising space on the scorecards given out to patrons, but one of his advertisers, a peanut company, paid him with their product.  He began selling these peanuts at baseball games in 1895.  In 1908, two New York songwriters who had never seen a baseball contest, wrote a song called "Take Me Out To The Ball Game," still sung by the entire stadium of fans during the seventh inning stretch at Major League games.  "Buy me some peanuts and Crackerjacks--I don't care if I ever get back," expresses pure infectious joy.

Later in the 20th century the peanut took on other roles--some say mostly through the efforts of pioneer botanist George Washington Carver, who worried that the South was killing its fertile soil by planting way too much cotton, and only cotton.  He advocated crop rotation, and peanuts was one of the crops he favored.  Carver eventually came up with more than 300 food uses for peanuts, including salted peanuts, and two more variations that entered the American food canon: peanut ice cream, and especially peanut butter cookies.  (Peanut butter had been known for a long time--though Carver developed several variations himself.  It had been popularized by John Harvey Kellogg, the cereal king, who patented a process for making a smooth peanut butter for his sanitarium patients.)  

Certainly by the 1950s and probably earlier, salted peanuts became staples at bars selling beer and liquor in England as well as the US, often available in little bowls on the bar, for free. That they might increase thirst of course did not occur to the bar owners.  

For whatever combination of reasons, peanut farmers like James Earl Carter (who became President of the United States in 1977) elevated peanuts as a crop in Georgia, which leads the nation in its production--so much so that it established a nickname as the Goober State, though officially it preferred to be associated with the peach.

As for peanuts and baseball, that association was still very strong in the early 1960s when I started going to Pittsburgh Pirates games at the venerable Forbes Field.  Most concessions were just outside the ballpark gates, so most food inside came from the roaming vendors.  I would leave the game with a pile of peanut shells on the cement in front of my seat.  Peanuts  were very popular with adults as well, who liked them with beer. They were easier to manage then when the ballpark beer came in cans, and at my first night games I would hear the frequent pop of tops pulled open, and see the spray rise into the haze of the lights.  

Now that ballparks are green fields surrounded by food courts, with entire restaurants hidden within the stadium, the lowly peanut wouldn't seem to have much of a chance.  But according to the National Peanut Board, the leading peanut supplier still sells more than four million bags of peanuts to MLB parks each year.   Still, in general the rise of peanut allergies has probably taken its toll.

As for the phrase "working for peanuts," there is no agreed-upon point of origin, though two possibilities are connected to those two traditional venues for peanuts sales and consumption.  By one account, it referred to circus elephants, who worked all day "for peanuts."  By another, it came from an early ballpark peanut vendor who joked with friends that he was working for peanuts.  But whatever the derivation, it likely refers to the fact that peanuts are inexpensive, and if you work for them, you aren't being paid very much.  This suggests that there might be something to the association with slaves in the South. In general, peanuts had a remarkably consistent association with poor people, black or white, with all the attendant contempt. 

The origin of Crackerjacks is more specifically known.  A German immigrant with a popcorn stand in Chicago, F.W. Rueckheim, concocted a variation of the molasses-coated popcorn ball, and added peanuts--then mostly a circus snack.  He premiered his "candied popcorn and peanuts" at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair.

The Crackerjack name probably came from two slang expressions of the time, "cracker" meaning excellent, and "Jack" as a slang name for any man.  So "that's cracker, Jack" may have led to the combination.

But the Crackerjack logo--prominent on the boxes we got as kids, and almost as famous as Mr. Peanut--has a more definite and melancholy origin. The boy in the sailor suit with his dog was a likeness of Rueckheim's beloved grandson Robert, who died of pneumonia at the age of 8.