Moxie

The Little Soft Drink with a BIG Attitude

Apr 17, 2024

Hi History Lovers!

I’m still in Baltimore, Maryland, still on elder care duty and rediscovering the amazing power of serendipity. Every time I leave the house, my childhood home, to walk neighborhood streets I know like the proverbial back of my hand, invariably I come across something or someone that makes me see it all differently, dare I say magically.

Take last week, for example. I stopped to talk to a woman walking her dog (this happens A LOT), and she mentioned his name was Moxie.

“Oh, is he really high-energy and spunky?” I asked.

“He’s named after the soft drink,” she said and then went on to give me this week’s History With Hope newsletter topic.

Moxie is a soda beverage sold in New England. The main ingredient is gentian root, which gives it a bittersweet taste like licorice. Or sarsaparilla but without knocking out your liver.1

Created in 1884 in Lowell, Massachusetts by Maine native Dr. Augustin Thompson (1835-1903), Moxie is one of the first mass-produced carbonated beverages. Like Coca Cola, which made its debut two years later, Moxie got its start as a tonic claiming to cure a variety of physical ailments2 including “loss of manhood, paralysis and softening of the brain.”3

Thompson, a homeopath, attended medical college in Philadelphia and set up his practice in Lowell, Massachusetts. He claimed to have named the beverage after “Lieutenant Moxie,” a friend who supposedly discovered the “rare plant” (gentian root), though this may well have been a marketing ploy.4 Other original ingredients were wintergreen, sassafras and cocaine,5 which was legal at the time and a common ingredient in restoratives6 — I’m looking at you, Coca-Cola.

Image courtesy of The Moxie Festival in Lisbon, Maine.

To tap into the new, expanding soft drink market, Dr. Thompson added carbonation, rebranded as “Moxie Nerve Food,” and upped his fantastical claims to include “curing drunkards” and “nervous, prostrated, overworked people” with the result of happier homes and reduced crime and suffering — all at the bargain price of 40 cents per quart bottle.7 That’s about $12.88 today.

The first bottle was sold on March 7, 1885 and the formula was patented that July.8 After Thompson’s death, his son, Francis Thompson became president of the company from 1904 until his death in 1939. During this tenure Francis turned Moxie into a multi-million dollar business.9

At its peak, Moxie was available in more than thirty states and parts of Canada, outselling Coca-Cola.10

In 1906, after the Food and Drug Act tightened label regulations, the product became simply “Moxie.”11 12

By 1909, the company moved its operations from Lowell to Boston.13

In the 1920s, high profile Moxie enthusiasts included President Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933), who is said to have toasted his election win with a cold Moxie,14 and Charlotte’s Web author E. B. White (1899 - 1985), who wrote “Moxie contains gentian root, which is the path to the good life.”15

Moxie sales declined during the Great Depression of the 1930s. It didn’t help that the company raised the price from a nickel to a dime.16

During the Second World War, the company adopted the slogan, “What this Country Needs is Plenty of Moxie,” but Moxie never quite recovered its former glory.17

In the 1950s, Boston Red Sox batter, Ted Williams (1918 - 2002), became the face of Moxie on billboards and print ads as well as radio.18

Today the soda is almost exclusively found in Maine and parts of Massachusetts. Since 2007, Moxie has been owned by Japan’s Kirin Brewery Company, Ltd., which also owns the Coca-Cola Bottling Company of Northern New England where Moxie is made.19

On May 10, 2005, Moxie was named as the official state soft drink of Maine.20

The drink continues to have a devoted regional fan base. A shortage of Moxie during the Covid pandemic created a stir among consumers.21

July 13, 2024 will mark the fortieth anniversary of the annual Moxie festival in Lisbon, Maine where Moxie enthusiasts gather for three days. Attractions include a parade, the largest in the state, of Moxie floats, vintage cars, and more, all draped in Moxie orange, a recipe contest, and a Moxie chugging contest (vomiting is discouraged).22 There is also a Moxie wing of memorabilia at the Matthews Museum of Maine Heritage in Union, Maine.23

Full disclosure: I haven’t yet tried Moxie, but the next time I find myself in Maine, I plan to make a point of it. I’ll let you know if my brain feels any firmer.

If I seem to be on a beverage kick, you may be right. If you missed my post on Guinness, catch up here.

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Safrole, the key ingredient of sarsaparilla drinks, was found to contribute to liver cancer in rats and thus it and sassafras or sarsaparilla-containing products were banned.

https://www.maine.gov/sos/kids/about/symbols/drink