The 100-Year Butter Battle (1904)
This Day in Esoteric Political History
Jody Avirgan & Radiotopia
4.6 • 982 Ratings
🗓️ 22 May 2025
⏱️ 26 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
It's May 21st. This day in 1904, a fight over taxing margarine reaches the Supreme Court. It's a key moment in the long fight between traditional butter and its margarine subsitute.
Jody, NIki, and Kellie discuss why the fight has been so contentious, and some of the more absurd ways in which Big Butter has tried to stop the spread of margarine.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to This Day, a history show from Radiotopia. My name is Jody Avergan. |
| 0:10.4 | This day, May 1904, the Butter Wars reached the United States Supreme Court. That is right. We are diving right into the 100-year history of the battle between butter and margarine, |
| 0:22.6 | which did indeed reach the highest court in the land. This is the story of a newish product, |
| 0:28.5 | margarine going up against a very well-established and traditional and very well-connected industry, |
| 0:33.4 | butter and the dairy lobby. It goes all the way back to the 1870s, which I will confess |
| 0:38.5 | really surprised me a lot earlier than maybe I expected margarine to be on the scene. Of course, |
| 0:43.4 | this war extends well into our lifetimes. I think we kind of saw peak margarine in the 1980s and |
| 0:48.9 | 1990s or so, then a shift back to butter in this century. But let's get into it. |
| 0:54.6 | Here to spread the margarine of history all over the toast of our brains. |
| 0:59.0 | No? |
| 1:00.3 | Sounded good when I was writing it. |
| 1:03.4 | You want me to repeat it to make it really long? |
| 1:05.5 | Just burn it into our toasts. |
| 1:06.9 | Here to spread. |
| 1:07.5 | The margin of history all over the toast of our brains is, as always, Nicole Hammer of Vanderbilt and Kelly Carter Jackson of Wellesley. Hello there. |
| 1:15.5 | Hello, Jody. Hey there. This is our butter battle episode. |
| 1:19.0 | Butter battle. That's good. Maybe that. Let's make that the title. |
| 1:22.2 | I'm still here from Dr. Zeus. |
| 1:24.4 | Oh, yeah. I forgot about that. |
| 1:30.1 | Well, let's ask the most important question. |
| 1:32.2 | What exactly is margarine? |
| 1:34.0 | This is a very good question. |
... |
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