The Great Chewing Gum Crisis

World War needs and a national habit clash head on. It's a matter of sugar and ships, tension and nerves.

By John Stanton

The average American likes to chew gum. In fact, if he wants to remain average, he must chew just 109 sticks of it every peacetime year. That is the average consumption (if consumption is the word) per American capita. Some Americans, like former Postmaster General James A. Farley, who masticates the good out of five packs a day, 9,125 sticks a year, take up the slack for the unaverage Americans who never touch the stuff. But even with the statistical help of such as these, the picture remains the same — a lot of Americans chew a lot of gum.

Now they are chewing a lot less than they would like to chew. Almost daily that fact is becoming plainer. A news story recently spoke of a man in Reno, Nev., who visited fifteen stores before he found a 5-cent package for sale. Some of the New York City stores are doling it out, a stick at a time, and all the begging in the world won't bring more. In a few places black favoritism has appeared; storekeepers are hiding complete five-stick packages under their counters for their regular customers while the casual trade must rest content with the one-stick ration. Everywhere the picture is the same — chewing gum is getting mighty scarce.

The man responsible for the scarcity is A. Hitler. He let loose the war. Now, to help defeat him, much of the sugar that once went into chewing gum is being used to make explosives. Carrying the explosives to the battlefronts are some of the ships that once carried chicle to the United States from Mexico and Central America. As a result of these two factors — the rubber shortage has nothing to do with the case — plus the increased demand caused by the wartime needs of both civilians and the military services, chewing gum is moving from the retailers' shelves faster than the manufacturers can make it.

Just why people like to chew gum has been the subject of several learned scientific investigations. One of them lasted four years. It proved, in the words of Professor H. L. Hollingworth of Barnard College, that "the collateral motor automatism involved in the sustained use of the conventional masticatory does result in a lowering of tension and the tension thus reduced is muscular." In other words, the gum chewer relaxes. The professor wasn't sure why, but he guessed that the pleasant associations of the dinner table are reproduced in the act of chewing.

The average, or 109-stick, American had noticed something of the sort. In times of national tension gum chewing increases. Since this war started the average ner capita consumption has soared to 130 sticks. During the last depression the late William K. Wrigley Jr., gazing at the mounting profits of his own and other gum companies while all else went smash, observed, "I guess people chew harder when they are sad." The typist trying to coax more speed from her fingers, the busy executive, the man under nervous strain, all find surcease in chewing gum.

Today workers on war production lines are urged to chew gum to ease the strain of ever faster work. The Army issues gum to aviators who chew it during nerve-wracking combat operations. It is part of the "iron rations" for troops going into difficult tropical terrain; it helps keep teeth clean when ordinary brushing is impossible, it helps quench thirst when water is not available. The humble stick of chewing gum has achieved an important place for itself.

It was not always so. Gum won its place against strong opposition. In the Eighties and Nineties and on into this century the reformers placed chewing gum fourth on their little list of things they well knew would be missed. It came right after sex, liquor and cigarettes. It was asserted that certainly stomach trouble and probably insanity awaited the unfortunate man caught in the toils of chewing gum. As late as 1932 a distinguished scientist, Nikola Tesla, wrote:

"Even smoking, snuffing or chewing tobacco will eventually impair the health, though not quite so much as chewing gum which, by exhaustion of the salivary glands, puts many a foolish victim into an early grave."

Mr. Tesla — he was arguing against prohibition at the time — probably had his tongue, if not a wad of gum, in his cheek. But until very lately such things were liable to be taken very seriously in the home. Mother's technique was to describe the habit in horrid terms and trust to the child's natural sweetness and desire for purity in all things to effect a cure. Many a man of middle age recalls being told that gum was made from gooey stuff dug from the hooves of horses. Today, perhaps, he wonders what mother would have said had she known that a chunk of sun-warmed tar scraped from the road was much preferred to a "store-boughten stick." And, listening to his own wife tell his son that gum is made from strips of old inner tubes, he probably wonders what the boy chews when he is away from home, and hopes it is nothing fatal.

In any event, the boy will be chewing in a long tradition. The history of chewing gum goes back to the dawn of time. In the Middle East, birthplace of civilization, the gums of certain cactus plants are still treasured for their chewing qualities. Scientists have discovered discarded wads of prehistoric gum about the homes of Texas cave dwellers, just as they may be expected to discover wads about the sidewalks when they come to excavate New York some centuries hence. The American chapter in the long story started when the Indians taught the first white settlers how to use the golden sap of the spruce for chewing gum.

Until just before the Civil War this sap was the main ingredient in American chewing gum. It was chewed mostly by "young misses"; their brothers "chawed tobaccy" just as soon as their hides were tough enough to stand the lickings they got for it. The young ladies chewed a lot of it. In the first half of the last century the gathering of spruce sap was an important industry in Maine; it brought $300,000 into the State in one of the good years. The business became so widespread that at last the poet (Anon., it was) wept:

All to induce the flow of saliva,
Scarcely a spruce is now alive-a

To this day some spruce gum — and some gum made from paraffin, the residue of crude petroleum — is on the market. The expert discovers its presence in his mouth by its tendency to be brittle rather than nice and soft and chewy. But the most modern gums spring from the mouth of Santa Ana, the fierce Mexican soldier-politician. When he went out to fight the Americans he chewed the same chicle, the sap of Central America's sapodilla tree, that Montezuma's warriors chewed three centuries before him. Later, living out one of his periods of exile in Staten Island, he gave some chicle to Thomas Adams, a young photographer who sometimes was his secretary.

Young Adams experimented with the stuff, failed in an attempt to make rubber of it, finally peddled it to candy stores for chewing gum. It sold well and an industry was born.

The industry grew. By 1869 the first patent for flavoring chicle was granted to William F. Semple of Mount Vernon, Ohio. Peppermint gum made its appearance in the Nineties. A short time later Ju-Ce Kiss, Yucatan, Kiss-Me Gum and Blony were keeping the nation's jaws busy. By that time Santa Ana's former secretary, now a man of wealth, was employing 250 per- sons turning out gum in a factory six stories high.

Today that industry has tentacles that reach out all over the globe. Its center is in the jungle forests of Central America. There chicleros roam the countryside during the rainy season cutting the trunks of sapodilla trees in a herringbone pattern. The sap — about two and a half pounds to a tree — is gathered in buckets. It is boiled and then hardened in twenty-pound cakes that are shipped to the factories, where the gum is boiled again, dried, mixed with sugar and flavoring, rolled out in strips, cut in sticks and wrapped, all by machinery. In 1939, after the year's work was done, it was figured that 2,629 workers had taken $17,630,000 worth of raw materials and converted them into $60,783,000 worth of finished product.

Out of the growth of the industry branch industries grew. Not the least of these is the industry that arranges for the final disposal of the used wad of chewing gum. It is an industry whose exact size is unknown, since its statistics, for the most part, are lost in the maze of municipal budgets. But Mayor La Guardia, begging people to wrap the used wad in the paper it came in be- fore throwing it away, has assured New York's taxpayers that the figure runs into the "hundreds of thousands" of dollars. One Times Square street corner once yielded 3,900 wads to the street-cleaners' scrapers, the sidewalks in front of a New York department store 73,000 wads. Theatres and other places of public congregation all add their bit to this industry; a New York theatre employs three men, two inside and one out, in the fight to keep its head above chewing gum.

There was a time when the rest of the civilized world liked to pretend that America consumed this mass of gum all alone. If there ever was any truth in the story, it is long since dead. During the first World War the American Expeditionary Force carried gum to England and France, and after the war the tourists carried it on to Germany, Poland and the rest of the world. Now London's sedate Imperial Institute displays chewing gum in exhibits devoted to the life and activities of the British Empire. American gum wrappers are printed in thirteen languages and the little men with the pointed heads have Teutonic faces for Germany, Gallic faces for France, even Chinese faces for China. In normal times more gum goes to foreign lands from America than razor blades, or elevators or silk stockings or vacuum cleaners. But these are no longer normal times.