The notion that something can be 'as Southern as sweet tea' is a very recent one.
Though Richard Blechynden was indeed present at the India Pavilion that year, World's Fair historian Pamela J. Vaccaro points out that a man named N. B. Reed had earned over $2,000 selling iced tea at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. More to the point, even at that earlier date, it was already a well-established beverage.
The public actually found it out much sooner, for 1868 was iced tea's breakout year. On July 6 of that summer, thedeclared,"During the heated term there is nothing so invigorating as iced tea. A slice of lemon no thicker than a wafer placed in each tumbler adds to the relish." TheSpringfield RepublicanSome editors saw fit to embellish the notices as they republished them.
And there matters stood for the rest of the 19th century, with iced tea remaining a popular beverage served throughout the country in the warm summer months, sometimes sweetened, but often not, depending on each drinker's preference.It's hardly surprising that iced tea was slower to reach popularity in the South.
My own father, who was raised in south Georgia in the 1940s and 1950s, remembers that the tea at his house was invariably served presweetened—in fact, until he went away to college, he had had no idea it could be made any other way. But other Southerners of his generation have told me that their iced tea was never sweetened when they were growing up; that there was always sugar in a bowl on the table, which you could opt to stir in with long-handled iced tea spoons.
That started to change in the last years of the 20th century. In 1989, Kathy Petty, a columnist for thein Augusta, Georgia, joked that"getting a glass of sweet iced tea above the Mason–Dixon line is about as likely as finding a reactor pipe at SRP without a crack in it." By the 1990s, people were becoming quite emphatic about the linkage."Southern ice tea is always very sweet," a writer for Alabama'sdeclared in 1994.
Klineman grew up in Atlanta in a transplanted Jewish family, his mother from Brooklyn and his father from Cleveland. He latched onto sweet tea, he says, as a way to"assimilate with my classmates." That jibes with my own experience, growing up in the suburbs of Atlanta and, later, Greenville, South Carolina. Though I was born in the South to Southern parents, many of my classmates weren't.
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