It is not what you might think, and demonstrates how our perception of symbols can change. The ad for Snowflakes shown above is from back in 1914, before a swastika carried that historical baggage. Pacific Coast Biscuit Company was up to something completely different. According to the entry for the National Biscuit Company in a 2007 book called The Business of Food: Encyclopedia of the Food and Drink Industries, back in 1898:
“A several month-long national advertising campaign
introduced the public to the Uneeda Biscuit, the company’s signature soda
cracker, which was the first national cracker brand. Ads also promoted the
innovative package, which was made of moisture-proof cardboard with an
air-tight, waxed paper inner seal devised for freshness. The biscuits became an
immediate success, and a succession of new products followed throughout the first
half of the 20th century.”
Ends of National Biscuit packages had a trademarked IN ER SEAL label with clipped corners, as is shown above. (The label actually was red).
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Starting in 1907 Pacific Coast Biscuit Company put a swastika label (also with clipped corners and in red) on the ends of their packages, perhaps to suggest they were using similar packaging.
But that provoked a trademark infringement lawsuit by National, with court records including the color image comparison (from page 174, which I retitled) shown above. Pacific lost, was enjoined to stop in 1915, and in 1930 was bought up by National. I stumbled over that Pacific Coast Biscuit Company ad when I looked up images of crackers on Wikimedia Commons while writing my last blog post about A simple geometry demonstration using crackers.
In this decade snowflake became a slang term that implied a
person felt he was unique, special, and entitled. My wife Elaine told me that
on Reddit it sometimes gets a special spelling - sneauxflake.
In an ad for Snow Flake Sodas (crackers)in the Oregon Daily Journal on 3 Feb 1916, page 6 it states "In the days of old when the language of signs prevailed in the courts of kings and the schools of the learned, the sign of the "Swastika" was the world's way of saying "All is well." Across the troubled pages of early history it shines, like a rising sun, always lighting up the dark and telling us of a time when peace, prosperity and good-will shall reign over all the earth." This was not a Nazi swastika. The Nazi's did not start using the symbol until the 1930's.
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