by Bill Bryson
Through most of the eighteenth century the principal strong drink in America was rum, a shortening of rumbullion, a word whose origins are entirely obscure. Towards the end of the century a new drink came along that rapidly displaced it – bourbon. Bourbon was a by-product of the Whisky Rebellion of 1791, when the federal government imposed a bitterly opposed tax on domestic rye whisky. In an effort to evade taxation, some two thousand distillers fled to Kentucky – which was not yet a state and thus, they hoped, not subject to the tax – and set up their stills there. When the rye crop failed, they turned as an expedient to corn and found to their gratification that it produced a drink of uncommon smoothness. They called it after the county in which they had settled, though in fact it was not bourbon as we now know it. It was only later, after the 1820s, that distillers took to ageing it in oak casks, a process that gives modern bourbon its agreeable colour and flavour. Although there is still a Bourbon County in Kentucky, none of the state’s bourbon is produced there (at least not legally). To say that it was popular barely hints at its effect. By the 1830s, the average adult American was drinking six gallons of bourbon a year – twenty-four times more than today.
Saloon, in the sense of a place to drink, is not recorded until 1848, though, oddly, saloon-keeper goes back to the eighteenth century.25 From the French salon, it originally signified any large hall or other public gathering place. Bootleg, first used in 1855, comes from the American West. According to Dillard, enterprising traders sold liquor illegally to the Indians by putting it in a flat bottle that they could slip into their boot.26I have no grounds to dispute this, but it does seem to me evident that the amount of liquor one could transport in this way would be hardly worth the bother. Certainly there must have been more commodious places to hide illicit alcohol on any wagon. I suspect the term may be metaphorical.
Rotgut, often shortened to rot, dates from 1819. Those who drank too much would get the jitters, or shakes. For a time strong drink was known as jitter sauce, and one who took to it too heartily was a jitterbug, a sense resurrected by Cab Calloway in 1934 for a type of dance music. Chronic drinkers faced the prospect of ending up on skid road, a term that comes from western logging camps, where logs were slid down a track called a skid road. Eventually the word was transferred to the shanty towns that grew up near by and, misheard by easterners, was transliterated into skid row.27
In response to the increasing sottishness of Americans, there arose a vigorous temperance movement in the early nineteenth century and with it a new word: teetotal. No one knows where the word comes from but, as ever, there is no shortage of theories. The most plausible is that it was simply a jocular way of emphasizing the ‘total’ in ‘total abstinence’. It appears to have first been used at a New York temperance meeting in 1827 and was common in both Britain and America by the 1830s.
Booze is not recorded in America before 1890, in a Webster’s Dictionary, which is surprising since the word has existed in the shadows of respectability since Chaucer’s time. We can assume that it was used in America long before 1890, but just didn’t find its way into print. Manhattan, highball, hangover, daiquiri and gin rickey are all also first attested in the 1890s. Daiquiri comes from Daiquiri, Cuba, where a potent form of rum was made. Gin rickey evidently commemorates a certain Col. Rickey, but beyond that the story grows vague. Equally murky is the derivation of Tom Collins. According to Mencken the drink was named for a ‘distinguished bartender’ though tantalizingly he gives no further clues as to the gentleman’s identity.
Drinking terms then grow quiet for a time, but on 16 January 1920 three ominous terms became suddenly fixed in the American consciousness: the Eighteenth Amendment, the Volstead Act and Prohibition. The first was the Constitutional amendment that made the whole thing possible, the second the law that laid down the terms of punishment, and the third the generic term for the whole business. Considering its impact on American habits, Prohibition slipped into law with remarkable ease. As Frederick Lewis Allen put it: ‘The country accepted it not only willingly, but almost absent-mindedly.‘28 Many, including quite a few in the temperance movement itself, were under the impression that Prohibition would affect only hard liquor and that milder tipples like beer would be safe. How wrong they were.
The new law had a devastating effect on restaurants, particularly at the classier end of the market. Deprived of bar earnings, many had no choice but to close down or to tempt fate by quietly offering bootleg liquor. In 1921, Delmonico’s suffered the mortal humiliation of being noisily raided after an undercover agent attending an afternoon thé dansant was served something with more kick than tea. The restaurant eventually gave up the fight on 21 May 1923, just short of its hundredth birthday. The same fate befell scores of other famous establishments across the land.
Wine growers to their dismay were reduced to producing harmless grape concentrate, which of course almost no one wanted. They recovered their composure, and their fortunes, when they discovered that there was nothing illegal about pasting a prominent label on each bottle announcing boldly, ‘WARNING: WILL FERMENT AND TURN INTO WINE’, and providing step-by-step instructions on how a careless consumer might inadvertently convert this healthful beverage into something with the power to make his legs wobble. Sacramental wine, excluded ftom the strictures of the Eighteenth Amendment, also showed a curious leap in sales, with some cynics suggesting that not all of it – or even much of it – was ending up in devout stomachs. In the years 1925 to 1939 American wine consumption actually trebled, and California’s vineyards expanded from less than 100,000 acres before Prohibition to almost 700,000 acres afterwards.29 Seldom has any law anywhere led to greater hypocrisy or been more widely flouted. People not only continued to drink, but in greater numbers than ever. Before Prohibition New York had 15,000 legal saloons; by the end of Prohibition it had over 30,000 illegal ones. Detroit had no fewer than 20,000 speakeasies, as illegal drinking establishments became rather curiously known. Boston was rather primmer with just 4,000 illicit watering holes, but that was four times the number of legal saloons in the whole of Massachusetts before Prohibition. Hardly anyone took the law seriously. In 1930, a journalist testified to the House Judiciary Committee that he had attended a lively party at a Detroit roadhouse where he had seen the Governor of Michigan, the chief of police of Detroit, and four circuit court judges drinking lavishly and enjoying the entertainment of a troupe of young ladies who were dancing the hootchy-kootchy (another new word of the age, based on the earlier coochee-coochee) without benefit of clothing. They couldn’t even have been wearing G-strings since this device of minimal attire would not become known to strippers until 1936. Although the term is often said to have arisen as a jocular allusion to the thinness of the G-string on a violin, it actually has a more noble pedigree. In the nineteenth century it described the leather string Indians employed to hold up their loincloths and was spelled geestring (probably a folk translation of a more complicated, and now forgotten, Indian term).
All this is by way of reaching the point that Prohibition – or more correctly the Volstead Act – was a law without teeth. Congress appropriated just $5 million to enforce the act and employed just 1,520 agents to protect America’s frontiers from smugglers – or one man for every twelve miles of border.30 A small but curiously durable myth is that President Herbert Hoover stoutly defended Prohibition as ‘a noble experiment’. In fact, he called it ‘a great social and economic experiment, noble in motive and far-reaching in purpose’, which isn’t quite the same thing and actually falls considerably short of a ringing endorsement. He wasn’t praising Prohibition itself, but merely the motives of those who had foisted it on the nation. In point of fact, by the election campaign of 1928, when Hoover made his utterance, Prohibition was an obvious disaster.
Prohibition may have been an inconvenience to drinkers but it enriched the vocabulary. Bootlegger, speakeasy, hip flask and many other terms associated with illicit behaviour became part of the common parlance. So, too, did the ex
pression the real McCoy. Although often supposed to date from a much earlier period, it is a Prohibition catch-phrase. No one knows who or what this McCoy was – explanations range from its being the name of a now-forgotten but presumably talented bootlegger to its having some connection with opiates from Macao – but there is no documentary evidence to favour any particular claim.
The more sinister side of Prohibition also gave new meaning to such words as gangster (originally in the nineteenth century it denoted membership of political gangs, not criminal ones), moll (an old English term for a girl, which was given an unexpected boost as the word for a gangster’s distaff sidekick), and racket, another English word dating back to 1812 in the sense of shady doings, but which had died out there and was resurrected in America in 1927. The growing importance of the car to criminals, as well as to everyone else, is reflected in getaway car and to be taken for a ride.
Brewers didn’t have nearly as easy a time of it as winegrowers. In desperation they turned to producing a product they hopefully called near-beer, and soft drinks with names like Howdy, Chero-Cola and Lithiated Lemon (which would eventually evolve into 7-Up, so called because it came in seven-ounce bottles).
Soft drinks were already an old tradition in America having first appeared as flavoured soda water in Philadelphia in either 1825 or 1838, depending on which source you credit. Throughout the nineteenth century root beer, sarsaparilla, ginger beer, spruce beer and other non-intoxicating beverages became increasingly popular. However, it was not until 1886 that America got its quintessential soft drink when John Styth Pemberton, an Atlanta pharmacist and patent medicine man whose earlier, less inspired inventions had included Globe of Flower Cough Syrup and French Wine Coca, brewed up a concoction of cola nuts, coca leaves, caffeine and other similarly dubious condiments in an iron tub in his backyard, stirred it with a wooden oar from an old boat and called it Coca-Cola.
His bookkeeper, Frank Robinson, who was a dab hand at calligraphy, drew up the florid italic logo that Coke uses to this day. Pemberton viewed his invention not as the refreshing thirst-quencher that the world has come to love, but as an efficacious tonic for hangovers and other ills of the upper body.31 (It was also discreetly hinted that it was a potent aphrodisiac.) Pemberton, alas, failed to see Coca-Cola’s true potential. In 1887, he sold a two-thirds interest in the company for the curiously precise but decidedly short-sighted sum of $283.29. It took another Atlanta pharmacist, Asa G. Candler, to capitalize on Coca-Cola’s true possibilities as a money-making refreshment. Just before the turn of the century he bought the formula from its new owners for $2,000 and with canny marketing converted his investment into a fortune. By 1919, when the company was sold again, this time to a consortium of Atlanta businessmen, Candler’s $2,000 outlay had grown in value to $25 million.
Such success naturally encouraged imitation and soon American purchasers could try competing brands like Co Kola, Coke-Ola, Coke, Koke, Klu-Ko Kola, Afri-Cola, Okla-Cola, Carbo-Cola, Sola Cola, Pepsi-Cola and even Celery-Cola. Many copied not only Coca-Cola’s famous name and italic logo, but also its distinctive bottle. Coke took them all to court. By 1926 it had resorted to law no fewer than seven thousand times to protect its trademark, including one fight that went to the Supreme Court. Not only did it destroy almost all its challengers, but in 1930 it won the exclusive right to its alternative name, Coke, making it the world’s only successful product with two names.32
The one competitor it notably failed to quash was Pepsi-Cola, invented in 1898 by Caleb D. Bradham and so called because it was intended to combat dyspepsia. Despite going bankrupt twice in its formative years, PepsiCo is now actually a larger company than Coca-Cola thanks to its diversifications – it owns, among much else, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell, which is why you needn’t bother asking for Coke there – and by having the good sense not to tamper with its formula as Coke did, with disastrous results, in 1985, when it introduced New Coke. (Marketing disasters are something of a tradition at Coke. It once launched Coca-Cola flavoured cigars, with results not unlike those that greeted New Coke.)
Despite its occasional setbacks Coke has long been a symbol of American culture in a way that Pepsi has never managed. As long ago as 1950, it inspired a word for the American cultural takeover of the planet: Coca-Colonization. Today, Coke is sold in 195 countries (giving it a bigger following than the United Nations, with 184) and is claimed to be the second most universally understood term in English, exceeded only by OK – an expression that conveniently carries us back to the nineteenth century and the start of the next chapter.
12
Democratizing Luxury: Shopping in America
In 1846 an Irish immigrant in New York named Alexander Stewart opened a business on Broadway called the Marble Dry-Goods Palace and in so doing gave the world a new phenomenon: the department store. Never before had a single enterprise tried to bring together such a range of merchandise under one roof. The business thrived and soon it covered a whole block on Broadway and had a staff of two thousand. Even that was not enough, however. In 1862 Stewart relocated to an eight-storey building near by, and renamed it A. T. Stewart’s Cast-Iron Palace. It was, and for many years would remain, the largest retail operation in the world.
In its wake came scores of other similar emporia – Field, Leiter & Co. (later Marshall Field) in Chicago, Jordan Marsh in Boston, John Wanamaker’s in Philadelphia, Hudson’s in Detroit, R. H. Macy’s, E. V. Haughwout’s and Lord & Taylor in New York.
We don’t know when people started calling them department stores. The term isn’t found in print until 1893 (in Harper’s Magazine), but, as so often, the context makes it clear that it was already widely used and understood: ‘They [Brooklyn stores] compare favourably with the best and largest department stores of New York.‘1
What is certain is that department stores transformed the shopping experience for millions of urban Americans. Palace was scarcely an exaggeration for these new establishments. They offered not only an unprecedented range of goods, but also levels of comfort, luxury and excitement previously unknown to consumers. Three things made this possible: the development of cast-iron architecture, allowing the construction of more open interiors, the arrival of the safety elevator, giving stores the option of expanding upwards, and, above all, the increasing prosperity of Americans.
Compared with previous retail establishments, these new bazaars were airy and spacious and marvellously self-contained. Almost from the start they boasted restaurants, tearooms, rest-rooms and other conveniences, eliminating the need to go elsewhere for anything. As early as the 1850s, Stewart’s emporium was entertaining shoppers with fashion shows and organ recitals. You could, as millions remarked in wonder, spend a whole day there. But what truly distinguished department stores was that they were the first grand commercial enterprises that were open to everyone. In the words of Émile Zola, they ‘democratized luxury’.2 A secretary or clerk might live a lifetime in a city and not once enter a swanky hotel or restaurant, never see the inside of a concert hall or opera house, or venture into a fashionable milliner’s. But such a person could experience something of the same intoxicating whiff of elegance and possibility in a department store, and mingle on equal terms with what was known in the business as the carriage trade, those wealthy enough to arrive in their own conveyances.
Department stores offered millions their first look at wonders of the age like the passenger elevator (the world’s first permanent safety elevator was installed in the Haughwout Department Store in New York in 1857), electric lighting, public telephones, and escalators (the last so novel and giddying that some stores stationed nurses at the top to minister to those made light-headed by the experience). By the turn of the century the department stores’ services were almost limitless. They had post offices, branch libraries, lost-and-found departments, hair salons, roof gardens, first-aid stations, information bureaus, ‘silence rooms for nerve-tired shoppers’, even their own in-store radio stations. They would sew on missing button
s, bandage a cut, amuse a lost child, answer any question – and all without charge. Some put on lectures, concerts and plays. Most provided demonstrations of new products. Shopping had become a social experience.
By 1900, Marshall Field was serving as many as 250,000 customers a day, and had become one of Chicago’s biggest employers with a staff of 8,000. Wanamaker’s in Philadelphia took orders twenty-four hours a day. Its Crystal Tea Room could handle 10,000 customers at a time. America had embraced with both arms conspicuous consumption, a term coined in 1899 by the sociologist Thorstein Veblen in his Theory of the Leisure Class, and much required ever since.
One man more than any other was responsible for the modern look of department stores. He was Harry G. Selfridge, a Wisconsin native who took a job as a stock boy with Marshall Field in 1879 and quickly rose through the ranks. One of his first acts was to take goods down from the high shelves and put them on counters and tables where customers could peer at them, touch them and, as critics noted, shoplift them (though this was by no means a new activity; shoplifting has been part of the English vocabulary since 1680). Among Selfridge’s many other innovations were the bargain basement, annual sales, gift certificates, the practice of reminding customers how many shopping days were left till Christmas, the custom of keeping the ground-floor windows lighted at night, thus encouraging evening strollers to browse and plan their next day’s shopping, and the now universal practice of putting the perfumes and cosmetics departments on the ground floor by the main entrance where they would sweeten the atmosphere and act as a magnet for passers-by.
