A Letter to Mary Spencer, who made Gibraltars rock candy (1759 – 1828)
Dear Mary,
In 1776, candy was not an everyday indulgence.
It was a small miracle.
Sugar remained expensive, imported, and precious throughout much of colonial America, meaning sweets occupied a strange space somewhere between luxury, medicine, preservation technique, and emotional celebration.
Most Americans did not casually snack on candy throughout the day because doing so would have been financially absurd.
Candy belonged to special moments.
…And perhaps that made it sweeter.
The average colonial kitchen produced candies mostly through molasses, maple syrup, honey, fruits, nuts, spices, and painstaking labor rather than industrial refinement.
Sugar itself arrived largely through Caribbean trade networks built atop slavery, plantation violence, and imperial commerce.
Even sweetness carried blood quietly inside its supply chains.
And perhaps few candies represented early American confectionery more beautifully than your famous Salem Gibraltars.
Hard rock candy infused with peppermint, created in Salem, Massachusetts in the early 1800s, Gibraltars became one of the first distinctly American commercial candies. Dense enough to survive years without spoiling, they occupied that fascinating early boundary where candy still behaved partly like medicine.
A cough drop slowly evolving into joy.
…Which honestly describes a surprising amount of human history.
In 1776 itself, most sweets remained homemade.
Sugar plums coated nuts or fruits in layers of crystallized sugar.
Candied citrus peels preserved precious imported fruit.
Horehound lozenges soothed sore throats.
Maple candies boiled northern sap into brittle sweetness.
Chocolate existed mostly as bitter drinking chocolate rather than bars.
Colonial candy was functional first.
Delightful second.
And because refined sugar remained rare, sweetness itself carried emotional intensity modern people sometimes forget. Today Americans consume sugar so constantly that sweetness often fades into background expectation.
But in 1776?
Sweetness still felt extraordinary.
A tiny interruption in hardship.
Then came the 19th century.
And candy democratized itself.
This was the century where industrialization transformed sugar from aristocratic luxury into working-class pleasure. Expanding Caribbean and Louisiana sugar production flooded markets while new machinery mechanized candy production dramatically.
The Industrial Revolution did not merely build railroads and factories…
…It built childhood.
Suddenly candy became cheap enough for ordinary people, especially children, to buy regularly.
The rise of “penny candy” changed American culture profoundly.
Tiny affordable sweets sold individually at general stores, apothecaries, and street counters allowed children unprecedented economic independence.
A child with one cent could purchase delight.
(An underrated form of democracy.)
And the inventions came rapidly.
In 1847, the first machine-made lozenges appeared through the company later known as New England Confectionery Company, creators of NECCO Wafers. In 1845, the Young and Smylie confectionery firm created what eventually became Twizzlers.
Licorice entered the republic with chewy confidence.
Then came candy corn in the 1880s, originally marketed charmingly as “Chicken Feed.”
…Which remains perhaps the most suspiciously successful agricultural rebranding in history.
And perhaps no figure transformed American candy more dramatically than Milton Hershey.
In 1895, Hershey began producing affordable milk chocolate on massive industrial scale. Before this moment, chocolate remained relatively expensive and inconsistent. Hershey industrialized sweetness itself.
Chocolate stopped being elite.
It became American.
And behind the candy boom lurked another uncomfortable truth:
Sugar production still depended heavily upon exploited labor globally. Even after slavery formally ended in the United States, sugar industries across the Caribbean and elsewhere continued operating through brutal labor systems, colonial extraction, and economic inequality.
Candy carried empire folded invisibly into wrappers.
Then came the 20th century.
And candy became culture.
This was the great age of candy bars, movie theater sweets, Halloween rituals, and mass advertising. Candy stopped being occasional treat and became emotional infrastructure embedded directly into American childhood.
Factories mechanized everything.
Sugar prices dropped further.
National brands emerged through radio, magazines, and eventually television.
And suddenly Americans possessed candy icons.
Hershey’s bars.
Milky Way.
Baby Ruth.
Mounds.
Tootsie Roll.
The 1920s alone produced over 40,000 candy bars nationwide.
Capitalism looked at sugar and said:
“We can make this emotionally unforgettable.”
Then war intervened.
During World War II, the U.S. military demanded durable chocolate capable of surviving transport and combat conditions. The result helped inspire M&M’s in 1941, whose candy shell prevented melting.
A war-born snack becoming lunchbox royalty.
American innovation frequently emerges through deeply strange pipelines.
And after the war, candy fused permanently with marketing aimed directly at children. Television commercials exploded.
Mascots emerged.
Halloween transformed into massive trick-or-treating economy.
Easter became inseparable from jelly beans and chocolate eggs.
Christmas stockings filled with candy canes.
Sugar embedded itself into ritual.
Then the later 20th century pushed candy toward sensation itself.
Pop Rocks crackled audibly inside mouths.
SweeTARTS weaponized tartness.
Now and Later challenged dental integrity courageously.
And American candy culture increasingly prioritized novelty, color, intensity, and entertainment over simple sweetness.
Candy became performance art for the tongue.
Then came the 21st century.
And candy entered its chaotic laboratory era.
This was the age of extreme sourness, hybrid textures, international flavor experimentation, nostalgia branding, artisanal revival, and health-conscious contradiction.
Modern Americans simultaneously criticize sugar consumption…
…and consume astonishing amounts of candy anyway.
A very American balancing act.
The 2000s introduced aggressively sour products like Warheads and Toxic Waste whose marketing strategy seemed essentially:
“What if candy briefly assaulted you?”
Children loved it!
Then came experiential candy.
Jelly beans tasting like dirty socks.
Interactive Harry Potter-themed flavor roulette.
Freeze-dried candy exploding across TikTok.
Candy no longer simply tasted sweet…
It became challenge, spectacle, and social-media content.
And perhaps the strangest modern development is this:
Americans increasingly want “healthy candy.”
An almost philosophically confusing concept.
Organic gummies.
Vegan marshmallows.
Non-GMO lollipops.
Low-sugar chocolates sweetened with monk fruit or erythritol.
Candy wrapped in wellness language like a donut wearing yoga pants.
At the same time, artisanal candy exploded too. Small-batch chocolatiers, nostalgic candy shops, handmade caramels, Japanese Kit-Kat flavor imports, and gourmet gummy companies transformed sweets into curated foodie experiences.
The penny candy store evolved into boutique edible nostalgia.
Yet despite all the innovation, the most beloved candies remain comfortingly familiar:
Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.
Skittles.
Twizzlers.
Kit Kat.
Gummy Bears.
Americans consistently return to nostalgia disguised as snacks.
And perhaps that is the deeper emotional role candy plays.
Candy rarely nourishes physically. It nourishes memory.
Halloween pillowcases dumped across living room floors.
Movie theaters.
Grandparents sneaking peppermints from coat pockets.
First dates sharing milkshakes.
Road trips.
Carnivals.
Breakups soothed temporarily by chocolate.
Candy often becomes emotional punctuation marking moments of human life.
Mary, if you could witness America in 2026, you would likely stand astonished by supermarket aisles stretching endlessly with thousands of brightly packaged candies engineered scientifically for flavor, texture, color, and psychological craving.
The abundance would feel almost impossible.
But I’d bet you would also recognize something timeless beneath all the branding and artificial coloring and sour-spray chaos.
Human beings still searching for small sweetnesses to interrupt difficult lives.
Still turning sugar into celebration.
Still needing tiny pleasures to survive larger hardships.
With admiration, nostalgia, and one suspiciously overstuffed Halloween pillowcase,
—The Radical Left 🍬🖤
And dear reader, perhaps this is the deeper question candy asks us after 250 years: why do human beings so consistently attach emotional meaning to sweetness? Is candy merely indulgence…
…or comfort, ritual, memory, and brief relief from life’s bitterness? And in a world increasingly optimized for stimulation and consumption, can simple pleasures still remain innocent…
…or does every sweet thing eventually become commercialized?
Because from maple candies beside colonial hearths to neon gummy experiments engineered for TikTok reactions, America has always understood one enduring truth:
People can survive a surprisingly long time on hope…
…but hope tastes better with sugar on it.