Mmm. Popsicles.

The Boy Who Accidentally Invented the Popsicle

120 years ago, 11-year-old Frank Epperson left his drink on the front porch on a chilly night. That accident became one of the most successful frozen dessert brands in the nation.

Selina Alipour Tabrizi

An early advertisement for Popsicle (National Archives)

Whether their favorite is ice cream, popsicles, or gelato, most people would agree that frozen treats are delicious.

While the origins of frozen desserts are unclear, they likely trace their roots back to the Ancient Persians, who used ice houses to produce and store faloodeh and sorbets. First-century Roman cookbooks included recipes of sweet desserts sprinkled with snow. Marco Polo is (probably falsely) credited for introducing frozen desserts to Italy after his travels in China, and Thomas Jefferson popularized ice cream in the United States — his handwritten vanilla ice cream recipe from the 1780s was one of the earliest in the nation.

But one story in frozen dessert history stands out, and it is not about a United States president or a Silk Road explorer: It’s about an 11-year-old boy.

On a winter day in 1905, young Frank Epperson made a beverage mixing soda powder with water to stay hydrated. One night, he accidentally left his cup on the porch overnight with a stirring stick inside, according to popsicle.com. Temperatures dropped during the night, and the next morning, Epperson found his cup where he had left it, no longer liquid, but now an icy snack. He ran the cup under hot water, pulled it out using the wooden stick, and tasted the new frozen dessert. He named it the Epsicle — a combination of “Epperson” and “icicle” — but unlike the process of its invention, the product didn’t turn into a national success overnight.

Epperson continued making Epsicles for his friends, and later, his children — who began calling the treat “Pop’s Sicle” or “Popsicle,” the name the brand keeps to this day — for many years. He also sold popsicles around his neighborhood until 1923, when he decided to expand his market to Neptune Beach — known as the “West Coast Coney Island” — where it became a beloved treat, selling as many as 8,000 in one day.

Following this popularity, Epperson applied for a patent on June 11, 1924, describing the Popsicle as a “frozen confection of attractive appearance, which can be conveniently consumed without contamination by contact with the hand and without the need for a plate, spoon, fork or other implement.”

Epperson’s request was approved two months later, and he immediately sold all of the rights to the invention that had defined much of his life to the Joe Lowe Co., which later started a subsidiary called the Popsicle Industries. Epperson later regretted the loss, saying: “I was flat and had to liquidate all my assets. I haven’t been the same since,” according to NPR. The frozen dessert brand, however, continued on without him.

A few years later, the Great Depression began to weigh heavily on the American public. As the stock market crashed and employment declined, struggling families had to cut out the ten-cent popsicles from their purchases. In response, the Popsicle Corporation devised the first two-stick popsicles so that two children could enjoy a snack for the price of one. According to a 1931 advertisement, “People who could not afford dimes, quarters and halves for ice cream gladly bought Popsicles at a nickel each for children, family and friends.” The two-stick popsicle became a huge success, doubling the company’s sales in a year. The Popsicle Corporation later declared itself “Depression Proof.”

But not everything was as sweet as the dessert itself for the Popsicle brand. The Popsicle Corporation also had rivalries with the company Good Humor — a brand known for their chocolate-coated bars and the first ice cream trucks. The dispute resulted in a series of court cases over patent violations. The initial conflict ended with a compromise: The Popsicle Corporation would sell iced treats with no milk, and Good Humor would sell products containing milk. However, with the drop of dairy prices in 1932, Popsicle ignored the agreement and decided to tap into the ice cream market — coming out with a “Milk Popsicle” that included 4.48 percent butter fat.

*Wrapper for Popsicle’s “Ice Milk” product (National Archives)*

*A Good Humor advertisement (National Archives)*

Good Humor filed a lawsuit immediately. Both sides fought to define “sherbet.” Good Humor strictly defined it as “flavored water ice,” but Popsicle rebutted, claiming that most state regulators did not categorize the Milk Popsicle as ice cream, but with terms such as “imitation ice cream,” “frozen custard,” “milk sherbet,” or “ice milk.” The judge ruled for Good Humor, and both companies signed their new court-approved agreement on April 7, 1933. Ironically, over the next six decades, Unilever — one of the largest global consumer goods companies — bought the rights to both Good Humor and Popsicle, ending the Cold War between the two companies.

If you remember buying a cold treat from a neighborhood ice cream truck on a hot summer day, eating a Firecracker during a Fourth of July party, or splitting a two-stick pop with a friend, you’re one of millions that probably has nostalgic memories of Popsicles. It continues to be one of the most popular frozen dessert brands, and for that, we have an 11-year-old Frank Epperson to thank.

Heather Cox Richardson (From Yesterday)

The Great Chicago Fire by Heather Cox Richardson Read on Substack

Today is the anniversary of several deadly wildfires that took place in 1871. While it was not the deadliest— that label went to the Peshtigo Fire in Wisconsin— the Great Chicago Fire tends to be the one people remember, not least because observers turned it into anti-immigrant propaganda even before the flames had died out.

A short history of the facts behind the popular memory of the Great Chicago Fire.

(This is not tonight’s letter, by the way. It’s just cool history, and I don’t get to do enough of that lately.)

“Howl”ing Peace & Justice History for 10/6

I’m so glad the newsletter is back! I’d missed it in my Inbox. Although, we can see all of it anytime we want to, at The Year In Peace & Justice History. That’s where I got them for a few months before I took a break on them. I figure it’s a sign I should pick it back up, that I’m getting newsletters again.

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryoctober.htm#october6

Responding to claims about homosexuality & the Bible

Some clips from recent Majority Report that I enjoyed.

Let’s talk about Trump’s government shutdown….

Let’s talk about Russian MiGs entering NATO airspace….

So is tRump compromised, and asset, or just an useful idiot? Hugs

President Donald Trump’s Department of Education has announced that it will partner with right-wing think tanks and organizations to develop and spread what it claims is “patriotic education”—but which critics worry is nothing less than ahistorical propaganda—in American

https://www.tumblr.com/reagan-was-a-horrible-president/795163107006791680/trump-ed-dept-partners-with-right-groups-to

Two more clips from The Majority Report. One on RFK destroying the CDC and the other on the how bad Chuck Schumer is as an opposition party leader.

The MAGA Influencers Rehabilitating Hitler

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/09/maga-hitler-anti-semitism/684078/?gift=Y5UOGK3oJJO3esRHvDP7oaL48gPVGjYarTgx2L5-WNM&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

A growing constituency on the right wants America to unlearn the lessons of World War II.

By Yair Rosenberg

Bettmann / Getty

September 3, 2025

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“The story we got about World War II is all wrong,” a guest told Tucker Carlson on his podcast two weeks ago. “I think that’s right,” replied Carlson. The guest, a Cornell chemistry professor named David Collum, then spelled out what he meant: “One can make the argument we should have sided with Hitler and fought Stalin.” Such sentiments might sound shocking to the uninitiated, but they are not to Carlson’s audience. In fact, the notion that the German dictator was unfairly maligned has become a running theme on Carlson’s show—and beyond.

Last September, Carlson interviewed a man named Darryl Cooper, whom he dubbed “the most important popular historian working in the United States today.” Cooper’s conception of honest history soon became clear: He suggested that British Prime Minister Winston Churchill might have been “the chief villain of the Second World War,” with Nazi Germany at best coming in second. The day after the episode aired, Cooper further downplayed Hitler’s genocidal ambitions, writing on social media that the German leader had sought peace with Europe and merely wanted “to reach an acceptable solution to the Jewish problem.” He did not explain why the Jews should have been considered a “problem” in the first place.

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“What is it about Hitler? Why is he the most evil?” the far-right podcaster Candace Owens asked in July 2024. “The first thing people would say is: ‘Well, an ethnic cleansing almost took place.’ And now I offer back: ‘You mean like we actually did to the Germans.’” A repeat guest on Carlson’s show, Owens defended him after his conversation with Cooper. “Many Americans are learning that WW2 history is not as black and white as we were taught and some details were purposefully omitted from our textbooks,” she wrote on X.

These Reich rehabilitators are not fringe figures. Carlson’s show ranks among the top podcasts in America. He spoke before President Donald Trump on the final night of the 2024 Republican National Convention, and his son serves as a deputy press secretary to Vice President J. D. Vance, who owes his office in part to Carlson’s advocacy. Owens has millions of followers on YouTube, Instagram, and X, and over the past six months, she has been interviewed by some of the nation’s most popular podcasters, including the comedian Theo Von and the ESPN personality Stephen A. Smith. Her output has attained sufficient notoriety that she is currently being sued by French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife, Brigitte, over her repeated claims that the French first lady was actually born a man. Cooper, the would-be World War II revisionist, publishes the top-selling history newsletter on the entire Substack platform.

Yair Rosenberg: The anti-Semitic revolution on the American right

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Why does a potent portion of the American right seek to rehabilitate Hitler? The Nazi apologetics are partly an attention-seeking attempt at provocation—an effort to signal iconoclasm by transgressing one of society’s few remaining taboos. But there is more to the story than that. Carlson and his fellow travelers on the far right correctly identify the Second World War as a pivot point in America’s understanding of itself and its attitude toward its Jewish citizens. The country learned hard lessons from the Nazi Holocaust about the catastrophic consequences of conspiratorial prejudice. Today, a growing constituency on the right wants the nation to unlearn them.

Before World War II, the United States was a far more anti-Semitic place than it is now. Far from joining the conflict to rescue Europe’s Jews, the country was largely unsympathetic to their plight. In 1938, on the eve of the Holocaust, Gallup found that 54 percent of Americans believed that “the persecution of Jews in Europe has been partly their own fault,” and that another 11 percent thought it was “entirely” their fault. In other words, as the Nazis prepared to exterminate the Jews, most Americans blamed the victims.

The same week that the Kristallnacht pogrom left thousands of synagogues and Jewish businesses in ruins, 72 percent of Americans opposed allowing “a larger number of Jewish exiles from Germany to come to the United States to live.” Months later, 67 percent opposed a bill aimed at accepting child refugees from Germany; the idea never made it to a congressional vote. Many Americans worried, however illogically, that fleeing Jews might be German spies, a vanishingly rare occurrence. Those with suspicions included President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who suggested in 1940 that some refugees could be engaged in espionage under compulsion from the Nazis, “especially Jewish refugees.”

This climate of paranoia and hostility had deadly consequences. In 1939, the U.S. and Canada turned away the M.S. St. Louis, which carried nearly 1,000 Jewish refugees. The ship was forced to return to Europe, where hundreds of the passengers were captured and killed by the Germans. Restrained by public sentiment, Roosevelt not only kept the country’s refugee caps largely in place but also rejected pleas to bomb the Auschwitz concentration camp and the railway tracks that led to it. When the United States finally entered the war, it did so not out of any special sense of obligation to the Jews but to defend itself after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

That indifference to the Holocaust was immediately dispelled when the Allied Forces liberated several of the Nazi camps where millions of Jews had been murdered. Entering the gates of these sadistic sites, American service members came face-to-face with unspeakable Nazi atrocities—rotting piles of naked corpses, gas chambers, thousands of emaciated adults. Denial gave way to revulsion. “I thought of some of the stories I previously had read about Dachau and was glad of the chance to see for myself just to prove once and for all that what I had heard was propaganda,” Sergeant Horace Evers wrote to his family in May 1945. “But no it wasn’t propaganda at all … If anything some of the truth had been held back.”

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Timothy W. Ryback: How Hitler dismantled a democracy in 53 days

Dwight Eisenhower, the supreme commander of the Allied Forces in Europe and future U.S. president, personally went to Ohrdruf, a subcamp of Buchenwald and the first Nazi camp liberated by American troops. “I made the visit deliberately,” he cabled to Washington, “in order to be in position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda.’” Eisenhower then requested that members of Congress and prominent journalists be brought to the camps to see and document the horrors themselves. “I pray you to believe what I have said about Buchenwald,” the legendary CBS broadcaster Edward R. Murrow told his listeners after touring the camp. “I reported what I saw and heard, but only part of it. For most of it, I have no words.”

Two-thirds of Europe’s Jews had been murdered. American soldiers, drafted from across the United States, returned home bearing witness to what they had encountered. “Anti-Semitism was right there, it had been carried to the ultimate, and I knew that that was something we had to get rid of because I had experienced it,” Sergeant Leon Bass, a Black veteran whose segregated unit entered Buchenwald, later testified. In this way, the American people learned firsthand where rampant anti-Jewish prejudice led—and the country was transformed.

Americans began to understand themselves as the ones who’d defeated the Nazis and saved the Jews. Slowly but surely, anti-Semitism became un-American. But today, those lessons—like the people who learned them—are passing away, and a wave of propagandists with a very different agenda has arisen to fill the void they left behind.

Over the past few years, Tucker Carlson and his co-ideologues have begun insinuating anti-Semitic ideas into the public discourse. The former Fox News host has described Ben Shapiro, perhaps the most prominent American Jewish conservative, and those like him as foreign subversives who “don’t care about the country at all.” He has also promoted a lightly sanitized version of the white-supremacist “Great Replacement” theory that has inspired multiple anti-Semitic massacres on American soil. Candace Owens has accused Israel of involvement in the 9/11 attacks and the JFK assassination, and claimed that a Jewish pedophile cult controls the world. (Like many pushing such slanders, she has apparently discerned that replacing Jews with Israel or Zionists grants age-old conspiracy theories new legitimacy.) In March, an influencer named Ian Carroll—who has a combined 3.8 million social-media followers, and whose work has been shared by Elon Musk—joined Joe Rogan, arguably the most popular podcaster in America, to expound without challenge about how a “giant group of Jewish billionaires is running a sex-trafficking operation targeting American politicians and business people.”

Before America entered World War II, reactionaries such as the famed aviator Charles Lindbergh and the Catholic radio firebrand Father Charles Coughlin inveighed against the country’s tiny Jewish population, accusing it of controlling America’s institutions and dragging the U.S. to war. “Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government,” Lindbergh declared of American Jews in 1941. “Why is there persecution in Germany today?” asked Coughlin after Kristallnacht. “Jewish persecution only followed after Christians first were persecuted.” For these men and their millions of supporters, behind every perceived social and political problem lay a sinister Jewish culprit.

Read: What Tucker Carlson’s spin on World War II really says

The 21st-century heirs of Lindbergh and Coughlin seek to turn back the clock to a time when such sentiments were seen by many as sensible rather than scandalous. These far-right figures have correctly ascertained that to change what is possible in American politics, they need to change how America talks about itself and its past. “The reason I keep focusing on this is probably the same reason you’re doing it,” Carlson told Darryl Cooper, the amateur Holocaust historian. “I think it’s central to the society we live in, the myths upon which it’s built. I think it’s also the cause of the destruction of Western civilization—these lies.”

Carlson couches his claims in layers of intellectual abstraction. Others are less coy. “Hitler burned down the trans clinics, arrested the Rothschild bankers, and gave free homes to families,” the former mixed martial artist Jake Shields told his 870,000 followers on X last week. “Does this sound like the most evil man who ever lived?” The post received 44,000 likes. (Shields has also denied that “a single Jew died in gas chambers.”) “Hitler was right about y’all,” said Myron Gaines, a manosphere podcaster with some 2 million followers across platforms, referring to Jews last year. “You guys come into a country, you push your pornography, you push your fuckin’ central banking, you push your degeneracy, you push the LGBT community, you push all this fuckin’ bullshit into a society, you destroy it from within.” These influencers are less respectable than Carlson, but their views are precisely the ones that more presentable propagandists like him are effectively working to mainstream. After Carlson’s guest last month suggested that the U.S. “should have sided with Hitler,” Shields reposted the clip.

Had Carlson and his cohort attempted their revisionism 20 years ago, they would have encountered a chorus of contradiction from real people who had experienced the history they sought to rewrite and know where its conspiratorial calumnies lead. But today, most of those people are dead, and a new generation is rising that never witnessed the Holocaust firsthand or heard about it from family and friends who did.

Late last year, David Shor, one of the Democratic Party’s top data scientists, surveyed some 130,000 voters about whether they had a “favorable” or “unfavorable” opinion of Jewish people. Hardly anyone over the age of 70 said their view was unfavorable. More than a quarter of those under 25 did. The question is not whether America’s self-understanding is changing; it’s how far that change will go—and what the consequences will be.

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About the Author

Yair Rosenberg

Yair Rosenberg is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of its newsletter Deep Shtetl, about the intersection of politics, culture, and religion.