Oleomargarine

How many of you folks are old enough to remember these...not me





thanks for looking
Richard

The diary lobby hated margarine and did everything they could to stop it.

I remember stories from my dad about selling margerine colored yellow would be considered false advertising so you would recieve a packet of yellow dye that you would have to mix in yourself

It's true. In fact, in Canada, margarine was banned up until 1948, when the Supreme Court ruled that there should no longer be a ban in the Margarine Reference, a case we took in Constitutional Law.

For anyone interested, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margarine_Reference

Why, WHY would anyone tax fake butter???

from what t360 said, I would guess that the dairy lobby got the votes to tax margarine in an attempt to price them out of the market.

A very famous man once said about Margarine "I trust Cows more than I trust Chemists "

I think that famous "man" was actually Dr. Joan Dye Gussow, Professor Emeritus of Nutrition Education Program at Columbia University

KirkS

I am pretty sure the canadian dispute with margarine was without it being colored it was fraudulently sold as real butter . I recall the stories of a 10lb bag of margerine with the yellow die and it had to be kneded throughout. I suppose it also could have been mistaken for lard which was so prominently used back in the day. Could have been pressure from the dairy board and crisco corp. I remember it tasted like s&*! when I was a kid.

I ran across one of the 1935 series.
Are these state revenue stamps?
This perfin is "4-1-ILL" and "8-23-48".
No idea why I bought it, just caught my eye.

Jaxom10 - This stamp is inscribed United States Internal Revenue, so it is a federal revenue stamp. The federal tax on oleomargarine ended June 30, 1950.

Neils250 - The United States began taxing oleomargarine in 1886. Part of the reason for the tax was that both butter and oleomargarine were shipped in wooden firkins (barrels). Since oleomargarine was cheaper, there was an incentive for grocers to move oleomargarine into empty butter firkins and sell the oleo for the higher price of butter. If the grocer did and the container did not have the large oleomargarine tax stamp, the grocer would have been charged with evading the tax (the absence of the stamp being prima facie evidence that the tax had not been paid).

Yes, the dairy industry lobbied hard for this and 1902 succeeded in having the original 4¢ per pound tax changed to ¼¢ per pound for uncolored margarine (not a threat to the dairy interests) and 10¢ per pound for colored margarine (perceived as a threat because it looked like butter), in effect raising the price of colored margarine to the price of butter.

Is mine a corner copy with horizontal and vertical cut lines or did the design change with another border? How many different ones were issued? Any idea of a catalog number?

Seeing those oleomargarine revenues is a first for me. Thanks for posting them! I do remember my mother giving me the transparent bag of white lard like stuff to color. There was an orange pill the size of a finger nail inside the bag which you would squeeze and once it popped you would knead the stuff until the whole mess was a nice, even yellow tint. Then she would slice the bag open and squeeze the mess into a butter dish and put it in the 'ice box'. Yes, we still had an ice box in the mid '40s. I think mom assigned me that chore to keep me busy for a while. Thanks for the memories!

Hoxsie454 - I, too, remember kneading the clear bag once the bubble of dye was broken. And of course this was the industry's work around the 10¢ per pound colored oleomargarine tax. It was uncolored when you bought it!

The oleomargarine tax stamps were placed on cartons, the most common size being the 24 pound carton. There are some difficult sizes (as I recall the 48 pound stamp is tough. Notice that the 12 pound stamps illustrated in this thread is from the Series of 1931. The 24 pound stamp was added four years later and thus inscribed Series of 1935. The preceding series of 1926 comes in two different gauge rouletting, 3 ½ and 7. All of the Series of 1926 are scarcer than the Series of 1935.