๐ญ Tomorrow, America Celebrates a Tradition That Began in 1916 — Except It Was Invented in the 1970s — Woody Magazine, Jul. 3, 2026
Tomorrow, America Celebrates a Tradition That Began in 1916 — Except It Was Invented in the 1970s
The tale of four immigrants settling their patriotism with hot dogs is one of the Fourth of July's favorite origin stories. The publicist who dreamed it up admitted he made the whole thing up.
Tomorrow, on the Fourth of July, tens of thousands of people will crowd the boardwalk at Coney Island in Brooklyn. ESPN cameras will roll. An announcer will pick up a microphone and open the Nathan's Famous International Hot Dog Eating Contest the way it opens every year — with a story. In 1916, the story goes, four immigrants argued over who among them was the most American, and settled it the only sensible way: by seeing who could eat the most hot dogs.
It sounds like a tradition more than a century old. It isn't.In 2010, Mortimer "Morty" Matz, a longtime publicist for Nathan's Famous, told The New York Times the plain truth: the 1916 origin story was something he and a fellow press agent, Max Rosey, cooked up in the early 1970s. It was a fabrication — invented to make a brand-new publicity stunt look like an old American ritual.
First, the setting. Nathan's Famous is the most recognizable hot dog brand in America. Its founder, Nathan Handwerker, was a Polish immigrant who, in 1916, borrowed $300 from friends and opened a small hot dog stand on Coney Island. His former employer, Charles Feltman, sold hot dogs for a dime; Handwerker sold his for a nickel — half the price. Cheap franks and high volume let him repay the loan within a month, and the stand grew into a Coney Island landmark.
Handwerker knew how to work a crowd from the start. When his prices dropped so low that rivals accused him of grinding dog meat into his franks, he hired college students, dressed them in white coats, and sat them out front to eat — the notion being that if doctors ate here, the food had to be clean. Building a brand on manufactured trust was already the business in 1916.
So 1916 is a real year. It is just the year the stand opened — not the contest. The publicists borrowed a true date and bolted it onto an invented tradition.
Why bother? By the 1960s, Nathan's had gone public, and Coney Island's tourist crowds were thinning. The brand needed attention. Matz and Rosey had a modest goal: get a photograph into the New York papers. So they took an eating contest they staged in 1972 and dressed it up as an annual event stretching back decades. In his 2007 book Horsemen of the Esophagus, the journalist Jason Fagone reported that the two men had invented the spectacle precisely to lure television cameras to the hot dog stand.
A tradition needs history to stand on. So they built the history first.The lie had more than one layer. To sell "annual since 1916," you have to account for the years no contest took place. So they invented two cancellations: 1941, supposedly in protest of the war in Europe, and 1971, in protest of unrest at home. Contests that never happened were handed reasons for their absence.
Doctoring quotes was another Matz specialty. The politician Nelson Rockefeller had once said no candidate could hope to be elected without being photographed eating a hot dog. Matz's side reshaped it into a tidier line and put it into circulation: no one could be elected without being photographed eating a hot dog at Nathan's Famous. Two words that were never there — "at Nathan's" — now lived inside the quote.
The most cinematic detail — four immigrants competing over patriotism — came later still. In the 1990s, the brothers George and Richard Shea, who had learned the trade from Matz and Rosey, took over the publicity. They went on to found the International Federation of Competitive Eating and Major League Eating, which has sanctioned the contest since 1997. The particulars kept shifting. In one version, an Irish immigrant named James Mullen won the first contest with 13 hot dogs. In another, the year was 1917, and the actress Mae West's father squared off against the comedian Eddie Cantor.
There's an irony buried in the myth. The premise — that the most American person is the one who can eat the most hot dogs — falls apart on inspection. The hot dog descends from Austrian and German sausage, and it was immigrants who turned it into an American staple. A contest to crown the "most American" by devouring an immigrant food is, if anything, an accidental self-portrait of a nation built by immigrants. The tradition was fake. The country it captured was not.
Even the name comes with an invented backstory. For decades people repeated that the cartoonist Tad Dorgan coined "hot dog" at a 1901 ballgame — yet that cartoon has never been found, and the phrase was already student slang at Yale in the 1890s. The contest, the origin, even the birth of the name: America's favorite food is wrapped, layer over layer, in stories someone made up.
Dig a little deeper and you'll find a trace of a one-off contest in 1967, staged to mark a century of the hot dog in America; the winner, Walter Paul, reportedly put away 127 of them in an hour. But the annual event we know today really begins in 1972. The early contests weren't always held on July 4 — some fell near Memorial Day, others near Labor Day — and winning totals hovered around 20.
The man who blew that modest world apart arrived in 2001. Takeru Kobayashi, a 23-year-old from Nagano, Japan, who weighed about 130 pounds, ate 50 hot dogs in 12 minutes — nearly double the standing record of 25 and one-eighth. It was so far past anyone's expectation that officials ran out of the number cards used to track his count and had to scrawl the figures by hand.
The secret was technique. Kobayashi pulled each sausage from its bun, snapped it in half, and washed the bread down with water — a method soon dubbed the "Solomon Method," after the biblical king who proposed splitting a baby in two. He added the "Kobayashi Shake," a full-body wiggle that forced the food down. He won six years in a row.
The crown changed hands in 2007, when the American Joey Chestnut ate 66 to beat a jaw-injured Kobayashi's 63. The Chestnut era followed; he set the contest record of 76 in 2021.
Kobayashi's exit was a scene in itself. He had refused to sign an exclusive contract with Major League Eating and hadn't competed since 2009. In 2010, he tried to climb onto the stage after the contest ended and was hauled off in handcuffs — friends said he was only trying to congratulate Chestnut. The following year, Nathan's stripped his photo from its Coney Island "Wall of Fame."
Here is the part that makes the whole thing click: the "tradition" is still being manufactured, in real time. In 2024, Chestnut — a sixteen-time champion — was barred from the contest after signing a sponsorship deal with Impossible Foods, the plant-based meat brand. Nathan's does not permit competitors to promote a rival. That year's belt went to Patrick Bertoletti. Then, in 2025, Chestnut returned, ate 70.5 hot dogs in ten minutes, and reclaimed the title for a seventeenth time. His official record, 76, still stands from 2021.
Ban and return, feud and reconciliation: the drama around the contest is written live, and the drama is the product — exactly as it was when four fictional immigrants supposedly settled an argument in 1916.
Nathan's own website still frames the 1916 tale with the words "legend has it." In the same breath, it notes that the first officially recorded contest was in 1972. It isn't quite a lie. It's just that convincing people something is old turned out to be enough.
- 「Source ↗」 The Washington Post — The legendary origin of the Nathan's hot dog eating contest is a myth
- 「Source ↗」 Wikipedia — Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest
- 「Source ↗」 The Saturday Evening Post — The Dubious Past of the Annual Hot Dog Eating Contest
- 「Source ↗」 Wikipedia — Joey Chestnut (2024 ban and 2025 return)
- 「Source ↗」 Wikipedia — Takeru Kobayashi (2001 record, Solomon Method, 2010 arrest)
- 「Source ↗」 Food Republic — origin myth, the reshaped Rockefeller quote, the Shea brothers
- 「Source ↗」 National Hot Dog & Sausage Council — origin of the name "hot dog" (Dorgan myth debunked)
- The New York Times, 2010 (Mortimer Matz interview, as cited by the outlets above); Major League Eating (IFOCE) contest records
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