Got Moxie?
The New England Moxie Congress, and their strange, singular thirst.
Since the twenties, Americans have used the word moxie to describe pluck, energy, determination, or courage. Nerves of steel, courage under fire, ice water in the veins — all those old chestnuts are basically moxie.
The adjective came into vogue following the rise of Moxie the soda, one of America’s oldest beverages but not a well-known elixir outside its northeastern birthplace. One of Moxie’s old slogans is “The drink that made the name famous” — and, unlike many aspects of its loopy history, it’s no bullshit.
First bottled and sold commercially in 1885, a year before Coca-Cola, Moxie was originally called “Moxie Nerve Food,” a carbonated version of a patent medicine developed by Dr. Augustin Thompson.
A medical doctor turned entrepreneur, Thompson began by marketing Moxie as a wonder drug for the sickly turn-of-the-century American. Prior to the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, anyone, physician or not, could make unsubstantiated medical claims — and that’s more or less what Thompson did. He hawked Moxie as a cure-all capable of curbing alcoholism, stimulating appetite, curing paralysis, reversing “loss of manhood,” and preventing fabricated maladies such as “softening of the brain.” One Moxie origin legend involves a fake character named “Lieutenant Moxie,” a Most Interesting Man in the World-type who traversed the globe in search of a cure for consumption — and found it in the magical gentian root south of the equator.
The drink itself is far from universally loved. At a glance, Moxie, which really is made with gentian root, resembles an average caramel-colored cola. Each gulp begins familiarly, with a taste like birch beer or sarsaparilla. Then comes the aftertaste. Describing it as “bitter” is a little like describing the surface of the sun as “hot.” It’s an astringent, challenging, and face-scrunching rush so far removed from the typical soft-drink experience that it immediately lays down an ultimatum: You’re either with us or against us.
In the Winter 2010 issue of Gastronomica, Moxie virgin Robert Dickinson wrote: “[It tastes] like medicine. Like the tar on a telephone pole. Like the sludge at the bottom of the barrel that you’re supposed to just throw away.” A piece in Shepard Fairey’s now-defunct magazine Swindle characterized Moxie’s finish as “some sort of evil black licorice potion from Satan’s private reserve.”
But then there is the New England Moxie Congress, a hundreds-strong band of zealots who are fervently dedicated to it.
“Some say, ‘Man, it tastes like licking a railroad tie,’” says Karl Strauch, a St. Louis-based NEMC member who’s been “incurably addicted” to Moxie since the early fifties. “Others say, ‘Actually, that’s pretty good.’”
To understand the NEMC and its membership, you need to understand The Bottle. First erected around 1907, The Bottle is 32 feet tall and 10 feet wide, a monolith of spruce, oak, and pine made to look just like the original stub-necked Moxie vessel. In its heyday, The Bottle would make appearances at various fairs and expositions. Persuasive salesfolk in crisp white soda-jerk shirts would call out from its windows and doors, luring over passersby looking to “enjoy a lift… the healthful way.”
In 1910, as Moxie rose in popularity, The Bottle took up residence at an amusement park in Manchester, New Hampshire, only a few miles from the company’s current headquarters in Londonderry. Here, it became a kid-friendly attraction. Children could enter The Bottle, scramble up a ladder, and plummet down a steep slide jutting out the other side, which by today’s standards sounds like the setup for a totally winnable lawsuit.
Over the next decade, The Bottle slipped out of the public eye and into the possession of a New Hampshire man named Louis Messier. He disassembled it, dragged it to the other side of Pine Island Pond, attached a cottage, installed a toilet, and lived inside for two years. But after changing hands a few more times, it fell into disrepair.
If The Bottle was emblazoned with the name of another fizzy liquid, there’s no telling where it would have ended up. But The Bottle said Moxie. And when Moxie is invoked, the NEMC, and their strange and singular thirst, tends to get involved.
George and Judy Gross, NEMC members who were present for its formation in 1991, launched a capital campaign, scaring up the $12,000 necessary to grant the Congress full control of The Bottle. Over the next eight years, through sponsorships and the enthusiastic pushing of T-shirts and bumper stickers, they — in conjunction with the Matthews Museum — managed to raise $87,000 more, covering its restoration and permanent installation at the Matthews Museum in Union, Maine, the birthplace of Moxie’s creator. While they gathered the funds, the Grosses stored The Bottle in nineteen separate pieces in their Maine garage.
“It was our dream,” says George Gross. “We actually put up a plaque in it that says ‘Our Dream.’”
The NEMC has an executive branch, a fundraising arm, a newsletter, a lobbying purpose, and yearly functions, mostly centered around the Moxie Festival held every summer in Lisbon Falls, which sees Congress members descending on Vacationland in shorts and hot-orange tees. The membership numbers — you can pay $10 a year, or pony up $100 to join for life — tend to fluctuate between two hundred and three hundred.
Though it draws participants from as far away as Wales, a heavy portion of the Congress resides in the region that gave birth to its muse. “New Englanders have a reputation for being kind of quirky and stubborn,” says current NEMC president Rick Seferian, a Mainer. “We operate a little differently than people in different parts of the country.”
Everyone in the NEMC wants to see Moxie thrive. Many act as evangelists, coaxing the uninitiated to take their first sips. Fans like Strauch, who rarely finds the stuff in St. Louis, hope Moxie will expand its reach, which is mostly confined to the East Coast; aside from its New Hampshire HQ, the only other companies licensed to produce Moxie are Catawissa Bottling Company in Pennsylvania and Orca Beverage in Washington. Strauch has journeyed to both to get his fix.
Coca-Cola of Northern New England, the Londonderry bottler that acquired Moxie in 2007, tends to keep its distance when it comes to the group’s suggestions, involving it in other ways. (The Congress wrote the history section of the official website.) “We’ve made decisions that haven’t made them happy, and they voiced it,” says general manager Justin Conroy, alluding to disagreements over topics like distribution, logo design, and packaging.
“We’d like them to be more excited,” says Seferian, whose presidential position means he’s the primary liaison between the Congress and the company. “For them, it’s a business. For us, it’s a mission.”
But what is that mission? For more than a few Congress members, so chatty when it came to Moxie nuts and bolts, that’s hard to answer. And since much of the NEMC membership is retirement age, the need for new blood is pressing. “I’m sixty-nine years old and I’m one of the younger members of this group,” says NEMC historian James Jansson. “I feel like the kid.”
The social perks of membership, as well as the thrill of introducing skeptics to the stuff, are surface motivations for many Congress members. It’s deeper with others. Jansson has no issue using the term “obsession” to describe his relationship with the drink — he’s been featured on the Food Network, decked out in his homemade “Moxie Boy” costume. Former president Merrill Lewis has just been commissioned to write a book on the topic.
If there’s a shared DNA strand, a latent personality trait, or a communal tongue configuration that makes them love what so many hate, the members of the New England Moxie Congress have yet to isolate it.
“I’m not a psychiatrist or psychologist,” says Strauch. “I just think the stuff tastes good.”
This story was originally published by luckypeach.com (RIP) in March 2015. All photos by Neal Santos.
