WHEN KING GEORGE VI OF Great Britain visited American President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1939, war was looming in Europe. But for one brief moment, all that mattered was hot dogs.

The king and his wife, Queen Elizabeth (mother of the current queen), had traveled across the Atlantic for an official state visit, with an itinerary that included a trip to the Roosevelt family estate in Hyde Park, New York, where First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt had planned a picnic lunch. It was an intentionally informal affair that swapped the White House dining room and champagne toasts for a countryside porch and casual conversation—including instructions on how, exactly, to eat the meal’s centerpiece.

“The king looked at the hot dog and said, ‘What should I do?’” the Roosevelts’ son James recounted years later. “My father said, ‘Put it in your mouth and keep chewing until you finish it.’”

This wasn’t the first time the Roosevelts had hosted such a meal for world leaders—they had served hot dogs when Crown Princess Louise of Sweden visited Hyde Park in 1938. But the picnic with British royalty turned into a media frenzy. Newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic reported every detail: the paper plates, the royals ditching their usual protocol and shaking hands with guests, Eleanor Roosevelt’s casual attire of “an old rose and white cotton sport suit,” the fact that King George asked for seconds and washed it all down with beer.

The menu also included Boston brown bread and strawberry shortcake, but it was the hot dogs that made headlines. In the years that followed, they became the central feature of the collective memory of the event, mentioned in obituaries when King George VI died in 1952 and in news coverage when the Hyde Park residence went on the market in 1968.

But the event had a larger legacy. It kickstarted an enduring tactic of American international relations: hot-dog diplomacy.

Franklin D. Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt with Sara Delano Roosevelt at a picnic in New Brunswick, Canada, 1906. FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY & MUSEUM

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AS THE ROOSEVELTS SEEMINGLY UNDERSTOOD, the central and overlapping selling points of a hot dog—beyond being tasty—are convenience, informality, and adaptability. They’re simple, handheld foods that you can eat by themselves or gussy up in an infinite number of ways. The National Hot Dog and Sausage Council counts 18 regional variations, though surely there are more, each representing distinct cultural identities and traditions. But at their core, each hot dog is still merely and magnificently the same thing, and maybe the closest the United States has to a national dish.

That broader symbolism has grown over the years, but it was already a work in progress when the Roosevelts held their picnic in 1939.

“So often when we try to define a national food culture in the U.S., it’s really difficult to do so,” says Smithsonian food historian Dr. Ashley Rose Young. “In the modern context, people often cite things like McDonald’s or international fast food cultures. But if you go back to the 1800s or even through 1950, when you would ask someone to define American culture, they would go through regional cultures, and the hot dog was a regional food that was gaining popularity outside of the Northeast.”

A vendor sells Frankfurter hotdogs for 20 cents during the 1953 World Series in Brooklyn, New York. HY PESKIN/GETTY IMAGES

The key to the hot dog’s spread was baseball. In the early 1900s, as the sport gained a reputation as the national pastime, media outlets extolled it as “a place where immigrants can learn America,” embodying ideals about the rule of law and meritocracy, says Dr. Seth Tannenbaum, assistant professor of sport studies at Manhattanville College. After stadium vendors in the Northeast started selling hot dogs, sometime around 1901, the food gained a similar reputation as what Tannenbaum calls “a supposedly democratic food within the supposedly democratic atmosphere of the baseball stadium.”

One vendor at the Polo Grounds in New York, Harry Stevens, is often credited with being the first to sell hot dogs at a ballpark. Tannenbaum’s research has shown that this is incorrect—other people were selling them before this—but Stevens did help solidify the conceptual relationship between food and pastime, thanks to an interview with The New York Times in 1924. “If I were poetic, I would say that one touch of the frankfurter made the whole world kin,” Stevens said. “At the counters in the rear of the Polo Grounds, you would find a prominent banker eating a frankfurter and drinking a glass of beer, and beside him would be a truck driver doing precisely the same thing.”

The same ideals underpinned the picnic at Hyde Park. It was a chance for both American and British leaders to relax but also, critically, to show off their common touch. It let the king and queen participate in a “more egalitarian kind of culture than they had in Europe, because of how the hierarchy worked and how royalty was treated,” Young says.

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IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE ROOSEVELTS’ SAUSAGE feast, hot dogs became a fad food in the United States: retailers sold an additional 1 million pounds in the following months, and “society belles” ate them at parties in London.

Their elevation to a staple of diplomacy was equally swift. Fifteen days after hosting King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, the Roosevelts had the crown prince and crown princess of Norway over for the same meal. Two days later, the American embassy in France “served the delicacy without the bun” to diplomats and “French society in Paris.” And in 1943, during World War II, the U.S. embassy in Moscow held a Fourth of July party featuring “hot dogs with buns and mustard; punch with vodka.”

“The king looked at the hot dog and said, ‘What should I do?’”

While the first decade or so of hot-dog diplomacy could be chalked up to the burst of initial media attention, its endurance signaled a more intentional effort by American diplomats and their counterparts. In 1954, the American government airlifted 100 hot dogs and buns (and “a supply of mustard”) to the newly crowned Queen Elizabeth. Two years later, the Queen herself got in on the act, serving hot dogs at Buckingham Palace for visiting members of the American Bar Association, who reportedly enjoyed the homestyle meal and took advantage of the relaxed protocols to smoke cigarettes and cigars “all over the 42 acres of the lawn—something that guests to the Queen’s garden parties are not supposed to do.”

Hot dogs, and the sense of aw-shucks egalitarian fun they can embody, offered a low-key display of American ideals, and by inviting other leaders to join the feast and play a part in the production, American officials offered them a chance to portray themselves as regular folks. This fit conveniently within the United States’ postwar “soft power” kick, which promoted national identity and might through culture and non-military means.

The most famous soft-power effort of the era was the Marshall Plan. There was also, among others, the Jazz Diplomacy program, which sent musicians including Dizzy Gillespie and Louis Armstrong abroad as unofficial emissaries, promoting American culture and, the government hoped, subtly endorsing American policies and power. This cultural battle was a hallmark of the Cold War, with the Soviet Union funding competing displays and, most bizarrely, the CIA funding modern art and buying paintings detested by taxpayers.

Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev tastes his first American hot dog in Iowa in 1959. BETTMANN / GETTY IMAGES

It’s not surprising that food was part of this broader campaign—the art of “gastrodiplomacy” dates back to ancient Rome, and it’s taken off in the last century, with other prominent examples including Thailand’s promotion of pad thai, Chairman Mao’s mangoes, and Peru’s recent push to be the next big culinary trend. In 2012, the United States launched the Diplomatic Culinary Partnership, formally establishing the country’s gastrodiplomacy decades after the Roosevelts started the unofficial version with their picnic at Hyde Park.

In every case, media coverage of hot-dog diplomacy is almost as important as that meal itself. There always seem to be cameras present, or at least reporters, all of them eager to feast on the spectacle of powerful people eating street food. And while American leaders popularized hot-dog diplomacy, the master of it may have been Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. During a trip to the Des Moines Packing Co. in Iowa in 1959, while eating hot dogs with Henry Cabot Lodge, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Khrushchev asked, “Capitalist, have you finished your sausage?” “Yes, we capitalists get hungry, too, you know,” Lodge replied. The cameras clicked, the two men had a laugh, and the hot dogs—and the leaders’ camaraderie while eating them—were headlines the next day, a diplomatic win for all involved.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, President Bill Clinton, and Yasser Arafat of the Palestinian Authority engaged in hot-dog diplomacy. SHARON FARMER / WILLIAM J. CLINTON PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY

The process of making a hot dog is, famously, not one that most people want to know about in detail, and the same could be said of the national mythology that hot dogs ostensibly embody: look beyond the surface and the reality can be off-putting. The precise symbolism of hot-dog diplomacy—we’re all friends and there’s no formality or discord here—doesn’t always stand up to scrutiny, but those egalitarian ideals remain a strong marketing tool.

In recent years, French President Nicolas Sarkozy got a double serving of hot-dog diplomacy, first at the Kennebunkport vacation home of then-President George W. Bush, in 2007, and then, in 2010, a meal of half-smokes at Ben’s Chili Bowl in Washington, DC, with President Obama. Three months later, during a trip to New York City, British Prime Minister David Cameron lunched at a Central Park hot dog cart with Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The meals were covered with the usual, mostly charmed amusement in the press (although Cameron caused a minor outrage in Britain because he didn’t use any mustard).

In 1999, President Bill Clinton met with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat in Norway, with a goal of negotiating peace in the Middle East. The three men ended the session by sharing a meal of hot dogs—a symbol of kinship and egalitarianism but also, considered another way, a reminder that small diplomatic gestures won’t fix longstanding strife.

President Barack Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron eat hot dogs at the NCAA basketball tournament in 2012. JIM WATSON/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

The last time hot-dog diplomacy generated headlines was in 2009, when it appeared that tensions between the United States and Iran were starting to wane. The Obama administration told American ambassadors “they may invite representatives from the government of Iran” to their 4th of July festivities. “A New Iran Overture, With Hot Dogs,” read one story in The New York Times. A few weeks later, though, after the Iranian government violently suppressed protests following the country’s presidential election, American diplomats rescinded the invitation.

It’s only a matter of time, surely, before an American president shares another hot dog lunch with another world leader. For their part, U.S. embassies still serve hot dogs, giving them pride of place in recent announcements about events in Bulgaria, Montenegro, Italy, and Israel. While no meal between leaders is likely to top the picnic at Hyde Park as a media spectacle, and the power of hot dogs to generate headlines seems to have waned, the United States hasn’t given up on their soft-power potential. Like King George VI, American diplomats keep going back for more.

Today's selection -- from Slave Empire by Padraic X. Scanlan. The novel Robinson Crusoe was a perfect complement to the aspirations of empire in Britain in the early 18th century:   "The British Library holds more than 700 editions of Daniel Defoe's novel Robinson Crusoe, only a fraction of the total. Enormously popular when it was published in 1719, Robinson Crusoe remains fresh and engrossing: tense and evocative of isola­tion and solitary labour, crackling with bursts of violence. The long second act of Crusoe is the famous part of the story. Stranded on an uninhabited island within sight of Tobago, and with only the salvage of his wrecked ship, Robinson Crusoe rebuilds something like a seeded English life. Over decades, he clears land, sows crops and tames animals. He reads and re-reads the few books that survived the wreck, especially the Bible. He trains a parrot to speak and learns to mark the passing of the seasons. When a party of cannibals happens on the island with a captive whom they plan to eat, Crusoe fights them off. The man Crusoe saves, whom he calls 'Friday' after the day of the rescue, becomes Crusoe's servant. Crusoe teaches Friday to worship Christ, to speak English and to forswear human flesh. More cannibals arrive, with two captives, a Spanish sailor and a man who happens to be Friday's father. Friday and Crusoe massacre the cannibals and bargain with the Spaniard, who promises to return with a ship. But before the sailor returns, an English vessel, seized by mutineers, appears. Crusoe and Friday help the loyal sailors to end the mutiny, maroon the rebels on the island and return to England. "When it was published, Robinson Crusoe flattered British readers' sense of themselves as subjects of a powerful, confident --  and Protestant -- empire. In 1688, the Stuart King James II, a Catholic, was driven from England by an invading army, invited by a group of Members of Parliament and led by the Dutch Stadtholder, William of Orange. Taking the throne as King William III of England and reigning in partnership with James II's staunchly Protestant daughter Mary, William's 'Glorious Revolution' ended nearly fifty years of conflict between Parliament and the Crown in England. The revolution seemed less glorious to England's Celtic and Scottish neighbours, but in England the Glorious Revolution was welcomed by many as the realization of 'English liberty'. William signed laws that confirmed Parliament's right to establish succession to the throne, affirmed that the kings of England and Scotland would be Protestant, and reinforced the rights of the subjects of the Crown to 'Dissent', or non­-Anglican Protestant confession. William III and his allies in Parliament, the Whigs, believed in property. To a Whig grandee, the process of turning unenclosed 'waste' land into profitable farmland was almost devotional: Crusoe not only survives the wilderness, he domesticates it. He not only defeats the natives; he teaches them to serve him. When he fenced his fields and counted both his crop yields and his sins, Robinson Crusoe was building England from the ground up. Crusoe, having rescued a man from cannibals, tells him his name is "Friday" "Slavery was English liberty's foil. In early modern politics, landed Englishmen were 'free' in contrast with the 'enslaved' subjects of abso­lute monarchs. Where the Bourbon kings of France could seize land or imprison their subjects without due process, the English boasted that a subject of William III held land securely and could not be imprisoned without a right to appear in court under a writ of habeas corpus. "Because the story of Crusoe, alone, building English life and liberty in the tropics was so compelling to readers, the beginning and end of the novel are easy to overlook. But Robinson Crusoe's time in isolation is bookended by adventures as an enslaved captive, slave trader and slaveholder. In the novel's short first act, Crusoe runs away to sea. In 1651, he joins a ship in the 'Guinea Trade' to West Africa. In that era, many English merchants went to West Africa for gold; the largest English standard gold coin was called a 'guinea' because English ships called at forts on the Gold Coast, part of present-day Ghana, and traded gold for finished goods. Pirates sailing out of the Moroccan port of Sale capture and enslave Crusoe. These 'Barbary corsairs' were a hazard of sailing off North Africa in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when tens -- perhaps hundreds -- of thousands of people were captured and wither held for ransom or resold as enslaved labourers. "In 1654, Crusoe escapes from North Africa with the help of a boy named Xury, Crusoe promptly sells Xury to a Portuguese captain, who promises to set the boy free after ten years of service Then Crusoe sails across the Atlantic to Salvador de Bahia, in Brazil where he becomes a sugar and tobacco planter. By the 1650s, Portugese colonists in Brazil already relied on enslaved African labour. Spain and Portugal, however, had been united under a single monarchy from 1580 to 1640, and the slave trade was still dominated by a monopoly contract, or asiento, offered by the Spanish to supply the Americas with enslaved labourers. English merchants wanted a share of the asiento, and between 1651 ad 1660, English ships carried some 7,096 enslaved people across the Atlantic. In 1659, Crusoe and a group of his fellow Brazilian slaveholders plot to skirt the monopoly. Crusoe offered to lead an expedition to West Africa to purchase enslaved workers to smuggle into Brazil. It is this voyage that ends in the famous shipwreck. "The third act returns Crusoe from his desert island to the plantations he abandoned. By 1688, as William of Orange landed in Kent at the head of an army, England's colonial empire in the Americas looked very different than it had when Robinson Crusoe was ship­wrecked off South America. In 1655, England had taken Jamaica, which would soon become its largest and most valuable slave colony, from Spain. In the middle of the seventeenth century, in places such as Virginia and Barbados, enslaved Africans had worked alongside European convicts and indentured labourers. Some African workers were indentured, rather than enslaved, although the distinction between 'servants', as these nominally free labourers were called, and slaves was blurry. But as the eighteenth century approached, enslaved labour became virtually universal on the plantations of Britain's growing empire in the Americas. English planters soon considered enslaved African workers -- who disembarked from slave ships very far from home, disoriented, dispirited and terrorized -- essential for growing tobacco, coffee and, above all, sugar. The English slave trade accelerated. Between 1681 and 1690, English ships carried at least 96,873 enslaved people across the Atlantic, with the overwhelming majority arriving in the 'sugar islands' of the Caribbean. "Robinson Crusoe was marooned for three important decades in the history of European colonial slavery, and his story paced the English empire's. When Crusoe left Brazil, plantation slavery was gaining momentum; while he languished in the Caribbean, planta­tions sprung up on islands just beyond his horizons; when he returned to Europe at the end of the novel, he discovered that his plantations had made him rich. In Lisbon, he claimed a handsome dividend from his sugar plantations, and then sold them for a profit. "In 1719, when Robinson Crusoe appeared in print, slavery was in even greater ascendance. A larger circle of planters was now carving claims to land and liberty out of human flesh in the Caribbean. 'English liberty' had become 'British liberty': The Act of Union in 1707 had united England, Wales and Scotland into a new political entity, Great Britain. The English empire became the British empire. Scotland's universities -- more progressive, rigorous and worldly than Oxford and Cambridge -- supplied the new British state with well-educated, ambitious men willing to make their fortunes abroad. The empire brought Britain's nations closer together and fuelled British imperial power. Settlers and merchants in North America and the Caribbean maintained close connections with London, Bristol, Liverpool and Glasgow. As its empire waxed, Great Britain challenged France for supremacy in Europe. "As the British state consolidated, the Caribbean colonies came to rely almost entirely on enslaved African labour. On islands such as Barbados, other crops gave way to sugarcane. Many of Britain's 'sugar islands' imported nearly everything colonists needed, and the mainland colonies prospered by selling to them. Technically, Britain's mainland colonies were bound by the Navigation Acts, laws that forbade British colonies to trade with anyone but Britain or other British colonies. But these laws were indifferently enforced, and de facto free trade was the norm. Mainland colonies such as Massachusetts sold food and manufactured goods not only to British, but also to French and Spanish sugar colonies. This trade further bound free British colonists on the North American mainland to the enslaved economy of the Caribbean. It also gave slaveholders from across Europe a common stake in plantation slavery. Many of the mainland British colonies had substantial populations of enslaved people as well, especially in the southern parts of North America, where plantations could grow tobacco and rice. The slave trade flourished between 1721 and 1730, British slave ships carried 181,811 enslaved people to the Americas. All told, British ships carried more than 2.5 million enslaved Africans from 1701 until the abolition of the British slave trade in 1807, well more than a third of the more than 6 million people who suffered what Europeans called ‘the Middle Passage’ during the eighteenth century." About Us DelanceyPlace.com is a brief daily email with an excerpt or quote we view as interesting or noteworthy.   Copyright © 2022 DelanceyPlace.com, All rights reserved. In the past you provided Delanceyplace with your email address. If you no longer wish to receive our emails please click unsubscribe, to send an email requesting to be removed. 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