What’s More American Than a Bomb Pop?

Though last weekend brought President Donald Trump’s pitiful little celebration on the National Mall, this coming weekend commemorates the semiquincentennial of the United States, 250 years after its tax-avoidant founders sought to steal this land and use it to enrich themselves and others. As we prepare to feast on hot dogs and watch fireworks, I am actually thinking about the truly most American of treats: the Bomb Pop.

Invented in Kansas City in 1955 by Jim Merritt and Doc Abernethy, a couple of local food manufacturers, the Bomb Pop has been a summertime staple ever since. It’s made with layers of cherry, lime, and blue raspberry popsicle, creating a correspondingly patriotic color scheme that is in total aesthetic alignment with the sweet-tart confection’s shape: a rocket, or missile, an obvious nod to both the space race and the nuclear arms race that loomed large in the American consciousness throughout the mid-20th century.

Some have speculated that the Bomb Pop is shaped like a firework, those kinds of rockets you might buy at a roadside stand and set off with your friends as a teenager. Patricia Merritt Lear, whose father co-invented the treat, was explicit about the origins of its shape. “The Bomb Pop is literally a bomb because my dad dropped bombs in the war,” Lear told KCUR in a June 2026 interview, sharing that her father was an accomplished pilot who spent much of World War II bombing German soldiers.

Lest you think I am just some wokepilled lib looking for something to complain about, I am not the first to question the idea that associating a frozen treat with a weapon is a pretty weird thing to do. As the Bomb Pop became more popular across the United States, KCUR notes that pissed-off parents wrote letters to newspapers across the country, complaining about the way that war was being used to market frozen confections to their children.

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“I find it deplorable that even ice cream comes in forms that suggest that the bombing and killing of people is perfectly American, cool and delicious,” one mother wrote the Kansas City Star in the early 1970s. Her complaint is both a perfect time capsule of the anti-war era and illuminates a truth that’s still just as relevant today: It’s not cool or delicious, but the bombing and killing of people is a deeply American pastime.

As I write this, Israel is firing bombs almost assuredly provided by our government at Lebanon, killing dozens all while Donald Trump tells us that this is the highly successful result of the peace deal he negotiated. It’s just all such a goddamn bummer. There is not much that has me excited to celebrate the upcoming holiday, even though I do really love eating a good hot dog while watching a fireworks show, then heading out in search of an icy Bomb Pop to cool it all down.

In a different time, that dessert might have just seemed like a kitschy reminder of what used to feel like American exceptionalism. It was always a delusion, but there’s no denying that for many of us middle-class whites of a certain age, there was a time when we did truly feel proud to be Americans. We ate our Bomb Pops while wearing our American flag shirts from Old Navy, twirling sparklers and chasing lightning bugs, ignoring the violent reality that our delusion created for the people on the other side of the world.

The adage goes that there’s nothing more American than apple pie, but really there’s nothing more American than war, than violence turned into a for-profit industry propped up by a lobby more powerful than God herself. Actually, that’s maybe what the saying should be: There’s nothing more American than war — or the kitschy frozen treat inspired by the horrors of it.