![]() ![]() A few years ago, a public campaign raised enough money to put a marker on his grave, which bears his famous image. Nonetheless, when he died in 1938, the local newspaper identified him as the Cream of Wheat guy. By the time of the 1930 Census, he had retired from cooking. It is said that he was famous in the area for his “Maryland” chicken. But after World War I, he settled in central Michigan, working as a chef at the Holly House in nearby Mason, south of Lansing. It appears that White, like many chefs, moved around a lot. This is reflected in the 1930 Census and the Michigan record of his second marriage, late in life. White was born in 1867 in Barbados, and came to the U.S. A few years ago, a researcher, Jesse Lasorda, put the story together. ![]() White, who lived the latter part of his life in Leslie, Michigan. It is believed that the real-life chef was Frank L. The company has always said that in about 1900, it paid $5 for a photo of a real chef in Chicago. The Cream of Wheat guy was modeled on a real chef. The Chef may be your personal servant, but at least he’s a man and not a cartoon. They didn’t dip into the Zip-Coon, half-man half-ape grotesquery that permeated so much advertising, and persisted in some areas into the 1950s. ![]() This is where you may send your kids to school, and here are the low-paying jobs they may inherit when they grow up….Īt least Cream of Wheat gave their Chef a genuinely human face, and so I suppose we should view this as a baby-step forward in representation. In the south by law and in the north by custom, that was the status quo that white America fought to maintain through segregation, restriction, and marketplace manipulation: This is where you may live, work, eat, drink water, go to the bathroom, and sleep when you travel. Slavery may have officially ended with the Civil War, but in the Jim Crow era, African Americans were still seen as the servant class: the cooks, the waiters, the porters, the nannies. For many years, the product’s social message was clear: black America exists to serve white America. ![]() Yet in terms of representation, the milder stereotypes are just as devastating. But for the most part, the stereotypes were milder: the Chef is part of your family, and, gosh darnit, the kids just love him. Sometimes, Cream of Wheat’s artists crossed a line from benign to the malicious, and dipped into blatantly offensive “Rastus” stereotypes, as we saw in part 1. In this 1908 ad, the Chef stands side by side with a white child’s “mammy.” In a number of ads, the Chef is feeding the children, or interacting with the children playing in his kitchen.Īt times, the Chef seems to be not just the family cook but something of a male nanny as well. In general, such ads convey the idea that Cream of Wheat, via its Chef, should be part of your family’s daily routine. And do we even need to say it: serving the white children, such as in this 1918 ad: We’re still struck, of course, by the clumsiness of trying to jam both stereotypes into the same scene:įrequently, the Chef was shown serving children. Of course, stereotypes are usually rooted in some grain of truth, and in 1909, cooking and railroad work were two of the comparatively few non-farming occupations that were generally open to African American men. On at least one occasion, as seen in the 1909 ad below, the Chef was not only the cook but also the railroad dining car porter, so that two classic stereotypes are fused into one. Why are these people dressed like that? Those costumes look more 1811 than 1911. In the advertising artwork of the 1910s and 1920s, sometimes the Chef was presented as a hotel chef, working in the “Cream of Wheat Inn.” But more often, the Chef was presented not as a “chef” per se, but as a combination of household cook and waiter, sometimes preposterously so, as in this 1911 ad: But there’s another dimension we left untouched. In our last post, we focused on the Cream of Wheat chef as “Rastus,” and all that name embodies in American social history. ![]()
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