PETER: Well, the point I took from the interview, Ed, was that, "We're just going to be nostalgic regardless." I mean, that's sort of genetically hardwired, that the-
ED: I'm kind of nostalgic for the earlier part of the show in fact.
PETER: That's right! But what's interesting here is the tension between comfort and family values, because when we had comfortable accommodations and rooms of our own, that is Virginia Woolf could go off to her room of her own, then we didn't have that kind of enforced togetherness that we get nostalgic for. If the only place you can avoid freezing is huddled around an open fire then you can make believe-
BRIAN: And that's half of you that's not freezing.
PETER: That's right! And you can say, "Oh, wasn't it wonderful in those days when we were all huddled around the fire, keeping our front sides warm, and our back sides cold." And when comfort comes along we disperse, so we're getting nostalgic for conditions of necessity in which we had no choice and in a way that's the sort of downside of choice. In some ways we're nostalgic for not having choices and that's what family values really are all about.
ED: So in many ways, America becomes the land of comfort, partly because there's so many darn trees here we can afford to. And that really was the source of fuel all the way through the 18th century, right?
PETER: Yeah, I think it's the availability of fuel supply, but I also think it's because it was seen very early on, and I say it's coming out of the Revolutionary Enlightenment period, as a kind of cultural entitlement. Comfort is something to which you can aspire, it takes an aspirational society to make something like comfort so important as a social phenomenon.
ED: But, speaking of the Revolutionary Enlightenment, it's not comfort in the sense of being carried about on feathered pillows-
PETER: No, that's a great point. What you're describing is the distinction between aristocratic comfort and what you can command the labor of others and at great expense and the great expense of other people's labor, you can achieve a kind of condition that other people can only serve, they can't aspire to. One of the aspects of American comfort is that it's within your power to make yourself comfortable by your control over the climate in your room, over the way it's lit, over the way it's furnished.
BRIAN: So this is the Home Depot of comfort. I mean we're doing it ourselves.
PETER: Yeah, you're doing it yourselves, and I think it's very Democratic.
ED: I can't help but notice a strong regionalist bias to all that we're talking about, which the whole idea is getting warm and there's large parts of the country where getting warm is not really a problem, it's getting cool. And you do see that Southerners in the architecture certainly try to do what they can to get their comfort. What they don't have is any technological means, a stove simply isn't worth as much in the South, right? So, I think what you see is the South both holds on to this older version of servant based comfort, partly because of slavery and partly because of being a more rural environment. What it does mean though is that in the 19th century, when Northerners are looking for indexes of Southern backwardness it's the absence of plumbing, running water, electricity, all those kind of things. It actually becomes seen as the very embodiment of what a backward place looks like. "They're not even comfortable."
BRIAN: Yeah, well guys we've talked about discomfort in the North and discomfort in the South, the next story we're going to turn to really combines the two. In 1805, a 23-year-old in Boston came up with a business scheme that sounded completely nuts on the face of it. His name was Frederic Tudor and his plan was to cut large blocks of ice from nearby ponds, okay so far, that's what they did. But Tudor wanted to ship them to the Caribbean. Boston newspapers had a field day with the idea. But Tudor had the last laugh, he somehow succeeded in making it with his ice to Martinique and selling what remained in the form of, you got it, ice cream. He would go on to export New England ice all over the world. BackStory producer Catherine Moore has a story of the man who eventually became known as The Ice King.
CATHERINE MOORE: Small successes aside, there were problems. Besides ice's stubborn tendency to, you know, melt over time, the truth was that even here in the United States no one really knew what to do with the stuff. In those days, the gold standard for drink temperature hovered somewhere between tepid and milk-warm. Iced drinks would have struck imbibers as strange, even unhealthy. But Tudor maintained that once a man, even a skeptic, drank from the cool cup of The Ice King, he would never be satisfied with lukewarm dregs again.
CATHERINE MOORE: He even tried a little experiment at a Charleston, South Carolina boarding house, sidling up to the communal table he presented a four gallon jar of ice water.
MALE VOICE: This was the subject of ridicule to the household. Every one of the boarders declared that they would not touch the water and endanger their health. I found that the high resolution and firm determination was soon over come without any persuasion of mine. That after time, every man drank the water, no other, and that four gallons was not enough.
CATHERINE MOORE: Like Americans discovering the cappuccino, they just didn't know what they had been missing. Once they found out though, there was no going back, they were hooked. And Tudor happily played the part of the drug pusher. But first he donated ice to barkeepers, so they could charge the same price for warm and cool drinks.
MALE VOICE: A man who has drank his drinks cold at the same expense for one week, can never be presented with them warm again. When we have persuaded 100 persons by means of our same price plan, these 100 will soon carry with them 100 more and that ratio will compound faster than we can calculate.
CATHERINE MOORE: Tudor knew from the outset that the pleasures of his ice were habit forming. But ultimately his success would depend on the perception of ice as a necessity, not a luxury. So even while he shivered in debtors prison, even while his journal entries rang with increasing despair, even while he manically hacked off chunks of an iceberg to stock his Caribbean ice houses during a warm New England winter, he kept his prices low. Low enough that even the masses could partake on a daily basis. And where luxury, necessity and availability meet, comfort is born. By 1857, Tudor was a millionaire. Americans were clinking chilled glasses in celebration of his queer genius, and the ice box had taken its place among the necessities of comfort in American homes.
CATHERINE MOORE: Nearly 150,000 tons of the ice were shipped that year from Boston to markets as far away as India. Staring out from his cabin on Walden Pond, one of the sites of Tudor's ice harvesting operations, Henry David Thoreau marveled that the water he observed might someday be mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges.
CATHERINE MOORE: In his twilight years, Tudor opened up an amusement park at his country estate, which featured, along with ice cream of course, a cool natural spring. He called it Maolis, Siloam spelled backwards, because it reminded him of the biblical pool where Jesus cured a man of blindness. By the time he died in 1864, Tudor had cured Americans of their blindness to the thing they didn't know they had needed all along. The cold comfort of ice.
PETER: That's BackStory producer, Catherine Moore.
BRIAN: It's time for another break, when we get back, we'll move on the technology that made my childhood in Miami at least somewhat bearable. That's right, air conditioning.
PETER: More BackStory coming up in a minute.