🎧 256: Frederick Lewis Tudor ...

     Frederick Lewis Tudor was the man who established the international ice trade, cutting ice on the lakes of New England and shipping it virtually all over the world. This remarkable enterprise captured the imaginations of so disparate a trio as Henry David Thoreau, Gabriel García Márquez, and the Marx Brothers.
     In the winter of 1846–1847, when the ice trade was in full swing, Thoreau watched a crew of immigrant Irish ice cutters at work on Walden Pond and recorded in his journal these remarks about the extent and influence of the ice trade:

The sweltering inhabitants of Charleston and New Orleans, of Madras and Bombay and Calcutta, drink at my well. . . . The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges.

A hundred years later, Márquez described the arrival in nineteenth-century Macondo of what may well have been some Walden Pond ice:

There was a giant with a hairy torso and a shaved head, with a copper ring in his nose and a heavy iron chain on his ankle, watching over a pirate chest. When it was opened by the giant, the chest gave off a glacial exhalation. Inside there was only an enormous, transparent block. . . .

Surely the ice trade, based as it was on teaching people to want something that they hadn’t even known existed before, selling something for which there was no demand, marks the dawn of modern marketing, and the Piper family, in the person of Thomas Piper, was there.
     What was Thomas Piper like? My mind’s eye’s image of him is an inaccurate but appealing one. It comes straight from the movie Cracked Ice, in which the Marx Brothers romp through a series of madcap adventures loosely based on the events leading to the establishment of the ice trade.
     In Cracked Ice, we first meet the flamboyant Frederick Lewis Tudor (Groucho) at a dinner party in a fashionable home on Beacon Hill, in Boston, in 1805, where he is sitting between the wives of two of his brothers. The brothers, successful, sober men, sit opposite him. Tudor inclines toward one of the women and whispers in her ear. She looks startled, then smiles coquettishly. Tudor inclines toward the other (Margaret Dumont) and whispers in her ear. She squeals and slaps his face.
     “Really, Fred,” says one brother, “be reasonable, won’t you?”
     Tudor, demonstrating the mercurial temper and physical agility for which he was noted, leaps upon the table and begins berating his brothers for their unimaginative reasonableness, gesticulating with the leg of a roast duck as he does so.
     “The difference between us, brothers,” he declares at the end of his tirade, dropping himself into the lap of Margaret Dumont, “is that you have hearts of ice. Not mine, brothers! My heart burns! (It must have been the horseradish.) I say phooey to being reasonable. Give me imagination! It’s men with imagination who leave their mark on this world!” He looks at Margaret Dumont and bats his eyes. “Am I right, toots?” he asks.
     “That sounds like hubris to me, Fred,” says the other brother.
     “Hubris, schmoobris,” Tudor fires back. “I tell you the man with imagination can do anything he puts his mind to. Anything!”
     “How about — selling water?” suggests the first of the brothers, with haughty composure, idly turning the stem of his crystal goblet. The other guests laugh. Tudor storms out of the house in a rage, and from the street he shouts, “I will sell water, and I’ll make my fortune at it, too!”
     Striding across the street, blinded by rage, he is nearly run over by a wagon (not a Studebaker; Henry and Clem Studebaker built their first wagons in 1852). The driver, young Tom Piper (Chico), stops his horses and rushes to pick Tudor up from the cobblestone pavement. Still in a fury, Tudor waves him off. “When I need your help, I’ll ask for it,” he shouts.
     Tom climbs back up to his seat and is about to pull away. Tudor notices the lettering on the side of the van: WENHAM ICE. His face lights up. “Help!” he cries.

In Topical Guide 266, Mark Dorset considers Real People and Historical Figures from this episode.

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