"Hokey Pokey" Originator Dead (1907)

[George Thompson]

"Towse" writes, citing target="l">http://www.littlebookroom.com/historicshopsNY.html
""It didn't take New Yorkers long to acquire a taste for ice cream after first lady Dolley Madison popularized it early in the nineteenth century, when she served it at her husband's inauguration.""

This seems to be another erroneous food legend.  New Yorkers were eating ice cream before the Madison administration.  See the following bit of good advice:
Cold water and Ice Cream are both extremely pernicious [in hot weather; the proper first aid for those who indulge].  New-York Evening Post, July 19, 1803, p. 3, col. 2

There is an illustration of a street vendor selling ice-cream in Harper's Weekly, August 15, 1868, p. 520.  The accompanying text on p. 521 does not contain the words "hokey pokey" or "ice cream", and the vendor is not identified or represented as Italian -- I don't notice any oddities of costume of facial appearance that characterized the stereotypical Italian.  The illustration is reproduced in John Grafton, New York in the Nineteenth Century, 2nd ed., N. Y., Dover, 1980, p. 84.

The earliest appearance of "hokey pokey" in Harper's Weekly, according to HarpWeek, is 1891.  I note that HarpWeek has the bizarre whimwham of replacing certain letters with Chinese characters -- a very useful feature.

GAT

George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern Univ. Pr., 1998.