by Wayne Curtis
Sadly for temperance leaders, the chill proved temporary. Wets successfully lobbied for amendments to weaken dry laws in several states, making the sale of wine and beer legal. Court challenges in eight states found the liquor bans at odds with the state constitution and repealed them altogether. And Wets in all states soon made a discovery: The laws were easy to evade. The striped pig became a “blind pig,” and a nickel bought a viewing of a sightless hog and a dram of free liquor. The first coming of Prohibition stumbled and fell.
The temperance movement faced further setbacks in the run-up to the Civil War and the four-year bloodletting that followed. After the South fired on Fort Sumter, social activists shifted their energies from social betterment to the emancipation of slaves—except for a handful of temperance camp followers who traveled with the troops and forced tracts upon them. (The temperance crusaders marked up one small success during the war: They had a law passed in 1862 that banned liquor aboard “vessels of war, except as medicine and upon the order and under the control of the medical officer and to be used only for medical purposes.”) After Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, Virginia, and the postwar rebuilding of a nation, liquor prohibition seemed a distant and quaint memory. America resumed drinking habits not from the more moderate 1850s but the harder-drinking 1830s.
Temperance leaders charged, possibly with some accuracy, that the Civil War had changed the social landscape. The country came out of the war with a more dominant masculine culture, in which the ability to hold one’s drink became a mark of status. Many states renounced their earlier flings with prohibition, and no states showed any interest in curbing drinking anew. Not one state passed a law banning liquor sales between the years of 1856 and 1879.
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Drink was back. H. L. Mencken dubbed the decades following the war—roughly from 1865 to 1900—the “Golden Age of American Drinking.” Bartenders concocted their own bitters, infused their own cordials, and brought a high level of skill to their craft. This era saw the invention of such classic cocktails as the Manhattan, the old-fashioned, and the martini. The highball—liquor enlivened with a splash of soda water—came into fashion in 1895, although purists groused that the liquor was “robbed of authority” by diluting it with the “cheap fluid which they put under bridges or use in sprinkling the lawn.” The rickey, a cocktail made with a fresh-squeezed lime, surfaced around 1880. The Tom Collins, basically a rickey with the addition of sugar, followed soon after. Even flip resurfaced, although considerably altered from its colonial incarnation; the loggerhead was out, replaced by a whole egg, shaken vigorously. The cobbler, the fizz, and the sour also appeared in this heady era, and Scotch, brought into fashion by the golf craze that swept the nation in the 1890s, began its decades-long popularity.
Cities large and not so large were suddenly home to a surfeit of fancy hotel bars, as famous for their drinks as for the opulence of their surroundings. Among the more notable were the Waldorf, the Hoffman House, and the Knickerbocker in New York City; the Palace in San Francisco; the Antlers in San Antonio; and the Touraine in Boston. The trend was abetted by the invention of the modern icemaker, which could produce ice in bulk and on demand, without the mess of cutting ice from a February pond and packing it in sawdust. Cocktails on the rocks went from a luxury to a necessity. Jerry Thomas became the first modern bartender and authored a now-revered book for both bartenders and home drinkers. The ungainly word mixologist was coined in 1856. By 1870, W. F. Rae noted, “The most delicate fancy drinks are compounded by skillful mixologists in a style that captivates the public.”
The embrace of elaborate concoctions, flavored and mixed with an array of bitters and tonics and infusions, was one of America’s most visible cultural exports in the 1890s. “American bars” appeared throughout Europe, with the fanciful drinks inspiring curiosity among many and revulsion among a few. Harper’s magazine in 1890 noted the rise of American bars in London, dispensing “various mixtures that taste like hair oil, but…cost[ing] twice the price of English liquor.” Among the cocktails of note were the Sustainer, the Silent Cobbler, the Square Meal, the Alabazam, the Bosom Caresser, the Flash of Lightning, the Corpse Reviver, the Heap of Comfort, and the Prairie Oyster.
And where was rum in all this? It made the occasional cameo in bar guides but for the most part was relegated to cold-weather drinks and cough medicine. Its most notable incarnation was in the Tom and Jerry cocktail, invented by Jerry Thomas himself: An egg (the yolk and white beaten separately) was mixed in a china mug with Jamaican rum, powdered sugar, and brandy. Hot water was added, and nutmeg grated over the top.
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While swells in derbies elbowed their way up to the modern hotel bars, rough-edged drinkers congregated in saloons, which proliferated in the years following the Civil War. Saloons ranged from rank hellholes in urban slums to fancier establishments in prosperous downtowns, complete with hand-carved back bars and brass railings and original artworks, often of female nudes. Saloons could be found on main streets and in back alleys, and various estimates put the number nationwide at one to every three hundred to four hundred Americans. San Francisco might have been the most pickled city, with one saloon for every ninety-six inhabitants. A saloon was not the place for the fancy drinks of hotel bars. Here, patrons ordered their whiskey straight or beer by the tall glass.
Especially beer. Known as “the poor man’s clubs,” saloons attracted immigrants who brought to their new country a love of malt and hops. German immigrants established breweries in Milwaukee and St. Louis, and beers made by the Coors, Pabst, Schlitz, Schmidt, Anheuser, and Busch families became household names. Whiskey found its popularity eroding against the cheaper, easier-to-quaff beer, the consumption of which increased fourfold between 1880 and 1913. By the turn of the century, more than 60 percent of the alcohol consumed by Americans was beer—a reversal for spirits, which had accounted for 60 percent of the alcohol consumed in 1830.
Saloons were often owned and operated by the largest breweries and boosted their beer sales with aggressive promotions and free (and salty) lunch buffets. The world of the saloon was increasingly seen as one of extravagant excess—not only of drink, but of gambling, sex, and petty crime. While old-fashioned temperance tracts flogged the “rum seller,” a new breed of activist turned his or her sights on the saloon as the nation’s chief distribution center of evil. The charge had resonance, since Americans increasingly associated saloons with the wave of immigrants that had fetched up on its shores. Their unfamiliar accents sounded a note of alarm to established Americans already unsettled by the social and economic changes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Temperance had found a new demon.
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In May 1893, Howard Hyde Russell founded the Anti-Saloon League of Ohio, which was soon followed by nine other state chapters. Two years later, these groups and dozens of local affiliates merged to form the Anti-Saloon League of America. Deft at political assassination and ready to carpet bomb with its screeds—the ASL printed and distributed more than 100 million copies of antidrinking tracts in the early twentieth century—the ASL became politically influential in short order. A new wave of state prohibitions on liquor sales soon swept the nation.
This time, temperance leaders—many of whom happened to be women—viewed the battle against drink as more than a metaphor. Perhaps none embraced the fight as fervently as the six-foot-tall and sourpussed Carry Nation, a Kansas resident who lost one husband to alcohol and a second to her activism. She concluded, not incorrectly, that prayer at the doorstep of a saloon did little to reverse the evils of alcohol. It would require weaponry. (Suffrage also played a role: “You refused me the vote,” she explained simply to the Kansas legislature, “and I had to use a rock.”) In the spring of 1900, following the Lord’s instructions—conveyed to her in a dream—she loaded a wagon with b
rickbats, bottles, bits of scrap metal, and chunks of wood, then traveled twenty-five miles from her home in Medicine Lodge to Kiowa and proceeded to lay to waste three saloons, smashing windows, glassware, and artwork. Efforts to arrest her came to nothing, since Kansas was officially a “dry” state. The mayor and town council needed arresting, Nation thundered, and then continued on her way unmolested. Her armaments grew less cumbersome. She adopted the hatchet as her weapon of choice and ravaged saloons in Kansas and other dry states, smashing bottles and glasses, and hacking at the polished bars. (Her efforts in wet states were limited to loud hectoring, since she didn’t have carte blanche to cause actual damage to legal enterprises.)
Carry Nation launched her final crusade in Butte, Montana, in 1910. She was sixty-three. It did not go well. She crossed swords with a woman saloon proprietor whose determination equaled her own. Her cloak of invincibility, already frayed, was in tatters. She died a year later of “nervous trouble,” and was buried, largely forgotten, next to her mother in a small cemetery in Missouri.
The Anti-Saloon League soldiered on, turning its attention to Congress and pushing for a nationwide ban on alcohol sales. They found growing support in Washington. Heavy drink and its attendant problems were again on the upswing. The league proved agile in corralling politicians into supporting its cause, especially through the determined efforts of Wayne Wheeler, who began his career on a bicycle lobbying for antidrinking statutes along Lake Erie in Ohio. Wheeler raised vast amounts of money from the industrial leaders, including Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie, Pierre du Pont, Cyrus McCormick, and both John D. Rockefeller Jr. and Sr. The corporate titans, who believed that drinking was hurting productivity among their workers, contributed more than money. They were visible supporters of temperance, believing a sober workforce would yield more profits.
By the second decade of the twentieth century, there was a groundswell of support for a broader prohibition. In 1907, another round of state prohibition laws were passed. In 1915, whiskey and brandy were eliminated as medically approved drugs, and the American Medical Association condemned the drinking of spirits. An effort to pass a national prohibition through constitutional amendment in 1914 fell 61 votes short of the two-thirds majority required. The movement regrouped, and in 1916 the ASL succeeded in getting numerous antidrink legislators into office. A constitutional amendment banning the sale of drink was introduced again the following year, and this time quickly passed in both the House and the Senate.
The amendment moved to the states. Thirty-three were dry when the voting began; the Drys had seven years to convince thirty-six states to ratify the amendment and change the Constitution. The Wets had been lax in fighting the amendment, in part because they were convinced that states would refuse to tinker with the constitution over such a small matter. They were wrong. Mississippi was first to ratify the amendment in January 1918, and fourteen other states followed by the end of the year. Then came the deluge. In early January 1919, twenty states signed on to the ban on liquor sales, and on January 16—less than one year after Congress had voted on the amendment—Nebraska became the thirty-sixth state to ratify the amendment. (In all, forty-six states would go along, with only Connecticut and Rhode Island declining.) As saloon historian George Ade saw it, “The non-drinkers had been organizing for fifty years, and the drinker had no organization whatever. They had been too busy, drinking.”
The Volstead Act created the mechanisms that would actually end the liquor trade, and Congress passed it quickly. Americans poured themselves a last legal drink. The temperance crusade, which began in the 1830s, was an eighty-year thunderstorm that concluded with a single thunderclap. On midnight, January 16, 1920, any American involved in the production, transfer, or sale of any liquor, beer, or wine would be jailed and his or her property confiscated.
The Republic of Rum had fallen at last.
[ DAIQUIRI ]
Mix two ounces LIGHT RUM with juice of half a LIME and one to two teaspoons SUGAR or simple syrup, to taste. Shake in cocktail shaker with half cubed ice, half crushed ice, with no la-dee-da, until shaker is too icy to hold. Strain into chilled cocktail glass.
Chapter 7
[ DAIQUIRI ]
The moment had arrived for a Daiquiri. It was a delicate compound; it elevated my contentment to an even higher pitch. Unquestionably, the cocktail on my table was a dangerous agent, for it held in its shallow glass bowl slightly encrusted with undissolved sugar the power of a contemptuous indifference to fate; it set the mind free of responsibility; obliterating both memory and tomorrow, it gave the heart an adventitious feeling of superiority and momentarily vanquished all the celebrated, the eternal fears.
—JOSEPH HERGESHEIMER, SAN CRISTÓBAL DE LA HABANA, 1920
It was 1932, and Ernest Hemingway was looking for a way to avoid his home in Key West, Florida. His celebrity as a writer had soared after the publication of Death in the Afternoon, and a constant stream of friends, well-wishers, and the idle curious flowed to the Whitehead Street house where he lived with his wife, Pauline. Hemingway tried to write in his office off the backyard pool, but the constant splashing and merrymaking put him in a state of great distraction. So he packed his bags, headed to the ferry terminal, and bought a ticket for Cuba. A few hours later, he made his way through narrow streets of old Havana to a small hotel called the Ambos Mundos. Here, he paid for a corner room on the quiet fifth floor and settled in to write. He said that the cool breezes of a Havana morning allowed him “to work as well there…[as] anywhere in the world.”
But then came the stifling Havana afternoons. Hemingway would rise from his desk and set off to explore the city. He went deep-sea fishing, swimming in the Caribbean, and wagering at the jai alai fronton. And, increasingly, he haunted Havana’s bars, of which there were no shortage in the waning years of American Prohibition. He grew fond of one in particular, El Floridita, just a few blocks up Obisbo Street from his hotel. He discovered here a delightful drink and a consummate bartender, both of which he would make famous. The bartender was named Constantino. The drink was called the daiquiri.
Prohibition had a number of far-reaching effects on American society, virtually none of which the antibooze crusaders had anticipated or desired. “The Noble Experiment,” in large part, served mostly to prove the law of unintended consequences.
For starters, instead of stigmatizing the drinking of alcohol, Prohibition actually made it more respectable. While the Volstead Act did succeed in shuttering the lower-class saloons, it gave rise to the speakeasy, which soon became the habitat of women and the middle class. As Prohibition historian Thomas Pegram noted, the liquor ban “broke down the saloon culture of male drinking and replaced it with a culture of youthful, recreational drinking which emphasized social contact between men and women.” Not every drinker welcomed this change. Hollywood gossip Heywood Broun groused that the old saloons may have been rotten and coarse, but a visit to the bartender didn’t require elbowing through a crowd of schoolgirls.
Prohibition also transformed what America drank and how it drank it. In particular, it gave rise to the cloying cocktail, which arose in part to mask the medicinal-tasting homemade liquors that flooded the underground market. “Everyone with a bottle of bathtub gin, a basket of fruit, and some icebox leftovers invented a new cocktail,” wrote David Embury in 1948. “Almost any liquid short of gasoline, added to the liquor of that era, would help conceal its raw alcohol taste and would therefore improve it. Eggs and cream, in particular, smooth out the taste and disguise the alcoholic strength of liquor. And so dawned the day of the poultry and dairy cocktails.”
And then there was the Dry’s influence on West Indian rum. By banning the sale of all beverage alcohol in the United States, prohibitionists did what no island distiller could have dared hope for: They pulled weary old rum out of its shallow grave, not only infusing it with life, but giving it a bit of swagger and a touch of class.
&nbs
p; Prohibition, it turned out, was the best thing to happen to rum since the first barrels rolled ashore on the docks of the northern colonies in the mid-seventeenth century.
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When the ban on liquor went into effect in January 1920, hundreds of American distilleries went dark. (A few dozen were granted permits to manufacture industrial alcohol.) This, in turn, triggered the largest coast-to-coast home science project in American history. Americans were suddenly fascinated by the obscure habits of yeast. In 1919, even the august Scientific American Publishing Company printed a booklet entitled Home Made Beverages: The Manufacture of Non-Alcoholic and Alcoholic Drinks in the Household. Vendors sold small barrels for aging homemade spirits, along with simple stills that could process one- or five-gallon batches. Those who couldn’t afford a fancy apparatus adopted a simpler approach: They would ferment a mash from corn (or grain) and sugar, then set it in a large pot on the kitchen stove and bring it to a low simmer. When the mixture reached 180 degrees, above the boiling point of alcohol but below that of water, they draped a cloth over the top and patiently squeezed out the captured vapors. With the addition of a few juniper berries, an almost potable gin could be fashioned from the rag’s wringings.
More ambitious moonshiners fired up backcountry stills to meet demand. Small puffs of smoke blossomed like dogwood in rural hills across the country, and white lightning and “corn likker” moved from the hollows to homes and speakeasies under the cover of night. (Federal agents found and destroyed 696,933 stills in the first five years of Prohibition, but the liquor kept on coming.)
