“A Name Which to Them is Sacred”: Quakers and Religious Trademarks in American Enterprise

Abstract

This article examines disputes surrounding the ownership and appropriation of the name “Quaker” in American enterprise in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. I focus specifically on efforts by the Society of Friends – colloquially known as the Quakers – to prohibit the use of the name of any religious church, denomination, society, or association in commerce, thereby rendering religious trademarks unregistrable. By exploring disputes around the Quaker name, I argue that the Society of Friends strategically appropriated terminology provided by trademark law (product origin, goodwill, distinctiveness) to claim ownership in the Quaker name while simultaneously arguing that religious names were sacred and thus could not be owned as a form of intellectual property. This historical debate provides insights to crucial questions about the spectral operation of trademark law in the United States. For instance, how are the taxonomies and logics of trademark law ‘possessed’ or spectrally animated by other pre-existing cultural/theological dimensions of ownership? Conversely, how does trademark law then reconstitute pre-existing logics around naming within religious organizations, for instance by providing new frames (the name as defense for consumer confusion or as guarantor of divine source) for understanding American religious practice?