On one level, it exposes the mismatch between rhetoric and reality. To quote Mr. Tipton in My Cousin Vinny, “no self-respecting Southerner uses instant grits.” And yet Quaker’s instant grits seem to do just fine.
But there’s another aspect. For much of U.S. history, the South *hated* Quakers.
This might seem strange to a modern audience because that Quaker guy on the label seems quaint, folksy, and harmless. But that’s not how they were perceived from the 1600s through the 1800s. Back then, Quakers were seen as unpatriotic, religious radicals who subverted societal norms.
Some of the stuff they practiced was flat-out crazy for their time: they believed in spiritual equality between men and women, and women were even *gasp* allowed to speak out during worship services.
They believed that people were inherently good (that everyone had the Light of Christ within them), they refused to take oaths, and – as pacifists – they disagreed with the idea of killing other people.
But what earned them the enmity of the South at that time, more than anything, was that they opposed slavery. They even went so far as to practice manumission -- they pooled their money and bought slaves, only to set them free. This was considered dangerous because – just by their existence and example – free blacks were considered a latent security threat.
For their political extremism, Congressmen William L. Smith of South Carolina considered Quakers to be just as hazardous to the county as slavery itself. In recalling the compromises of the 1787 Constitutional Convention, he explained,
“We took each other with our mutual bad habits and respective evils, for better, for worse. The Northern states adopted us with our slaves, and we adopted them with their Quakers.” [Source]Given the historic animosity between the South and the Quakers, I think I understand why the Quaker guy on the label is smiling.
Judging by how uncontroversial Quaker beliefs are today, apparently, he got the last laugh.
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