One line of commentary on my last post is deeply disconcerting. Three of our fellow bloggers on the postmodern conservative website have launched a scandalous attack on Maxwell House, mocking the American company which, until Folgers came on to the scene, was the number one producer of coffee in America. It pioneered the idea of providing a decent cup of coffee at an affordable price to every person in America, which is the democratic idea put into action. To belittle Maxwell House is to run down America.
Samuel Goldman, our nation’s most brilliant young Germanist, spoke in his reply of Heidegger and the experience of angst. He therefore knows full well of Heidegger’s attack on the great American principle of average quantity: “The primacy of sheer quantity is itself a quality, i.e., an essential characteristic, which is that of boundlessness. This is the principle we call Americanism.” It is precisely this great principle of mass distribution that pseudo-aristocrats deplore — this, along with the related economic principle of maximizing the use of resources. The latter is articulated in the great aphorism of “good to the last drop,” which stands in contrast to the pseudo-aristocratic practice of flaunting one’s concern for economic logic by leaving grounds in the cup, a notion otherwise known as Der Satz vom Grund.
Peter Lawler, the great American theorist, is no less guilty of snobbism than Goldman, only with less excuse. He has written eloquently on the limits of Darwinism and on the limits on the idea of progress, and yet here he happily joins hands with evolutionary Larry in casually dismissing Maxwell House on Darwinian grounds: “It goes without saying that the gradual disappearance of Maxwell House from our country is one undeniable sign of progress.” I do deny it, along with editor Poulos’s flippant rejoinder “Maxwell House — American to the Bitter Dregs.” The decline of Maxwell House (and the concomitant rise of Starbucks) is a clear sign of corruption. It is correlated with every matter of cultural decline, from the mounting threat of demographic extinction to the selection of Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House of Representatives.
Maxwell House is an American icon, in the grand tradition of A&P and Chevrolet. Its motto good to the last drop was allegedly supplied by none other than that great American Theodore Roosevelt. Finally, to return to Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, which launched the whole conversation, I now reveal a secret that accounts for the reference to coffee at the end of my post. It has rarely been remarked that Hopper’s painting revolves around the theme of coffee and coffee drinking: there are, count them, three mugs on the counter, and they all contain coffee — no one here is drinking rosehip-raspberry herbal tea. The sugar is pure granulated white, not raw brown. The coffee, trust me, is Maxwell House. No instance in recorded history exists of anyone drinking Maxwell House with brown sugar. That’s the necessary condition. The sufficient one is that there are two huge urns of coffee behind the counter, and no one, even today, uses anything but Maxwell House to prepare coffee in this way. Finally, the color of the coffee in the glass tubes of the two urns is green, a “detail” that plays with Hopper’s use of light and color. (This critical detail is not visible in any reproduction I have looked at, though it is not only noticeable, but conspicuous, in the original.) I know from an experiment that only Maxwell House is so thin as to allow itself to refract light in this way. Maxwell House is our House of bean.
May 15th, 2009 | 5:35 pm
You can see the greenness of the coffee here:
http://bit.ly/1eKis
May 15th, 2009 | 5:41 pm
Also, and incidentally, I interpret the greenness of the glass tube to mean that it (and thus the urn) is empty. The scene takes place just before closing time. Each customer sits staring into space, ignoring the dregs of the urn that sits in their cup. They are, themselves, the ignored dregs — the people who do not matter enough to be at home in bed. The man behind the counter busily finishes his cleaning duties, glancing at his customers and placidly hoping they will finally leave.
May 15th, 2009 | 5:59 pm
Savor the flavor of that aperçu: beneath its initial tartness, so sharp on the palate, you may detect undertones of blackcurrants and tobacco. Americans boarded and schooled at Maxwell House — we Nighthawks — drink coffee least of all in order to taste something good. We want our coffee tasting like what it is — hot-burning fuel for restless individuals who must unnaturally still be awake, still intent; or a last inch of candle for brooding individuals burnt at both ends, awaiting, awaiting, some saving novelty. I can’t go on; I’ll have some coffee; I’ll go on. Our House of bean would never be mistaken to offer the Starbucks spa treatment — bon bons for bobos, a yummy running reward doled out for a lifetime of breakneck compliance. For folks checking into Maxwell House the whole point is to keep the wheels turning, to grease the wheels, nothing postindustrial about it. Life may be bitter, and our coffee, too; but we, somehow, endure as more. To taste bitterness is to know you are still not bitter through and through. Roaming, rambling, straining, failing, recovering, laboring, groaning, racing, dancing, romancing, fighting — nevertheless! We get knocked down, but we get up again…. Who needs ‘progress’ when you’ve got resilience — a hard fund to draw from, but a deep one, nevertheless, for we perennial floppers at Maxwell House, we bitter-enders, Americans down to our dregs.
May 15th, 2009 | 7:13 pm
First, a salute to Dr. Caeser, a man who has plummed the depths of human wisdom as they have not been plummed since the Axial Age. Such exegetical brilliance as his has not been experienced since Plato said, “Did you hear the one about the cave?” So, let us give Caeser his due, “Bravo, well done, thou servant of truth!”
And now the history, part one. Maxwell House located in that olde and gracious center of southern hospitality and civility, Nashville, Tennessee served a house coffee, beginning in 1892 brewed by the brothers Leon and Joel Cheek. In 1901 the brothers Cheek began to manufacture the black brew with a certain Mr. Neal for public consumption. So successful were their endeavors the Postum company bought them out in 1928.
The history part duo. My grandfather, a Presbyterian minister, told his eldest son, my father, not by any means a minister, that Maxwell House Coffee was originally manufactured by a relative. My father, some years ago passed the story on to me. Indeed, there may (or may not) be truth in my grandfather’s claim because people with similar names (Cheek, Cheeks, and Cheeke) can, possibly, be related. And, so it was that as I grew up in my father’s household it was Maxwell House Coffee, that American and particularly southern brew, that was consumed by the bucket.
I have stayed silent as certain Postmodern Conservative contributors (Poulos, Lawler, and Goldman) brutally and mercilessly assailed the family brew, but no more! To drink Maxwell House Coffee is to partake in the American Way, to recall the silent susseration of a southern breeze through the sweet magnolias, to take one’s pleasure upon the front porch while standing against the encroachments of progress and technology! Oh! God Bless Maxwell House Coffee and may American continue to manufacturer and consume it!
And, for any executive at General Mills reading this testimonial, I am, indeed, available for parttime work.
May 15th, 2009 | 7:58 pm
The highly esteemed Herr Doktor Professor mistakes my argument. I have no objection to the Idea of providing a decent cup of coffee to every American at an affordable price. (For Ideas are, as we know, postulated with intersubjective necessity by Reason itself). But I contend that it must be overcome by more adequate approximations, which will, as History continues, asymptotically approach but never realize the Idea. Hopper could preserve the Age of Maxwell House for our contemplation, as if in amber, only because it had been deserted by Spirit.
Starbucks coffee is bad only when it is brewed and consumed in one of their stores. When decocted properly, with appropriate equipment, their Arabian Mocha Sanani gives a cup that needs no sugar, brown or otherwise, and satisfies amply both EROS and LOGOS.
May 15th, 2009 | 8:02 pm
er…. scratch General Mills and make that Kraft Foods at maxwellhouse.com…at least they didn’t move the operation to China.
May 17th, 2009 | 5:15 pm
As one who measures his coffee intake by the pot rather than the cup, I can perceive, dimly, the outline of a brilliant insight in Prof. Ceaser’s commentary and I suspect there is much to ponder in the many learned replies above. Mostly, though, I realize that I shouldn’t read anything after just half-a-pot of coffee on a Sunday morning, or any other day.
Oh, I’m drinking Yuban, by the way. Fire at will.
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