Spruce gum is the gum of our ancestors, the
link between Congressmen blowing bubbles in committee and the patriots
chawing till they saw the whites of the other fellows" eyes on Bunker
Hill. Abe Lincoln probably chewed it, or the resin of some tree, and the
railsplitter only made four visits to the dentist in all his years. It is
the gum of romance that Becky Thatcher gave to Tom Sawyer in Mark Twain's
classic work of youth and love, which was set in the 1840s. Becky didn"t
care much for swinging dead rats around her head on a string, as Tom did.
"What I like is chewing gum," she told him. "Oh, I should say so," Tom
replied. "I wish I had some now." "Do you" I've got some," said Becky to
her secret love. "I"ll let you chew it awhile, but you must give it back
to me." In Mark Twain's words: "That was agreeable, so they chewed it turn
about, and dangled their legs against the bench in excess of contentment.
Tom Sawyer thought so much of the old-time gum that he told Huckleberry
Finn, in Twain's classic of that name, that when a magician rubs a lamp
and genies "come tearing in," they"ve got to do everything he says: "If he
tells them to build a palace forty miles long out of di"monds, and fill it
full of chewing gum, one as valuable as the other; spruce gum was that
important. In any event Americans will still be able to talk in the woods
and take our spruce gum straight from the plated bark of the tree - and
many people say it's tastier that way, too; kids still scrape spruces with
jackknives and after much labor reduce it to aromatic spruce-flavored
balls. But the demise of spruce gum will mark the end of the commercial
spruce gum industry, which for a brief period of time monopolized the
chewing gum trade and made Maine the chewing gum capitol of the world.
Perhaps the industry will be revived, the American palate cultivated again
to the pleasures of spruce gum, but one doubts it. For better or worse,
Americans are into a sweeter, softer chew, as astute businessmen
discovered when the spruce gum industry began to decline.