Sacred Cod of Massachusetts - "Sacred Cod" Nickname

"Sacred Cod" Nickname

The Committee's report refers at one point to "the sacred emblem", and while it was working an item appeared in the Boston Globe referring to the carving as "the Sacred Cod". Within a few years authors, journalists, and advertisers—even those far from New England—were using the term routinely.

The phrase quickly came to refer not only to the wooden Cod in the State House but to actual cod from the sea as well, especially as an item of commerce. At the 1908 convention of the Retail Grocers of the United States, held in Boston, one delegate recalled

the first organized effort ... for the bettering of conditions in the grocery business. I refer to the Boston tea party. How could we get along without the Boston baked beans or the almost sacred cod?

Two years later the New Hampshire Board of Agriculture, bemoaning the counterfeiting of foodstuffs "famous for their distinctive properties or superior quality", warned that "haddock, hake, pollock, cusk, etc., are substituted indiscriminantly in place of the sacred cod." In 1912 President William Howard Taft, in Boston, addressed a journalists' banquet in New York City "by long distance telephone from the home of the sacred cod". And in 1922 historian Samuel Eliot Morison, emphasizing fishing's vital role in the colonial economy, wrote that "Puritan Massachusetts derived her ideals from a sacred book; her wealth and power from the sacred cod."