Made In America (39 page)

And on to drinking. One of the more enduring misconceptions concerning the Puritans in America is that they abjured alcohol. In fact, they liked a good drink or even a not-so-good one. One of the more popular tipples of early America, especially at weddings and other big social occasions, was sack posset, a concoction made by combining any handy intoxicant, usually ale or wine, with thick dots of curdled milk, which may explain why no one drinks it any longer. The
sack
in the name has nothing to do with a cloth container, incidentally. It is a corruption of the Latin
siccus,
meaning dry.

If colonial Americans were not adventurous eaters, they were happy to take their drinks from almost anywhere. The international pedigree of drinking terminology is evidenced by, among many others,
julep,
from the Arabic
julab; sangría
(often called
san garee
in eighteenth-century America), from the Spanish word for blood;
toddy
from Hindi
tārē
or
tārē,
a kind of palm tree sap; and
beer,
from the Germanic
bēor
(and ultimately from the Latin
bibere,
'to drink').

The early colonists showed a particular fondness for blending odd ingredients – eggs with milk and beer, for instance – and employed a variety of names to describe the result:
mum,
perry, switchel, metheglin, egg pop, balderdash
(from which comes our word for nonsense),
cherry bounce,
any number of
flips,
and
cock ale.
This last named – a somewhat less than beguiling mixture of chicken soup and beer – is sometimes cited as the source for
cocktail.
Though
cocktail
is indubitably an Americanism – its first known appearance was in a newspaper in Hudson, New York, in 1806 – its similarity to
cock ale
is probably coincidental. Cock ale was never a popular drink – even in that adventurous age few thought of chicken soup as a distinguished addition to the punch bowl – and there is no known link between the two words. So where then does
cocktail
come from? According to Flexner, the term ‘almost certainly' evolved ftom the French
coquetier,
or egg-cup, after a New Orleans apothecary who dispensed concoctions in egg-cups. Other, more literal-minded observers suggest that it has some connection with the tail of a rooster, though quite why the tail of a rooster would suggest a potent beverage is anyone's guess. A more ambitious and almost certainly fanciful theory is that the cocktail was invented for the daughter of King Oxolotl VIII of Mexico. Her name was Xochitl, which the Spanish translated as Coctel.
²³
The word also bears a striking, but apparently coincidental, resemblance to a word from the Krio language of Sierra Leone,
kaktel,
meaning a scorpion, a creature with a notorious sting in its tail. One possibility that seems not to have been considered by any authority, so far as I can tell, is that it might refer to a stiff drink's capacity to make one's tail cock up. Applied to horses, the word took on that sense in England at almost exactly the time that it first appeared in a drinking context in America. At all events for most of its early life
cocktail
didn't have the whiff of sophisticated refinement now associated with it. In the 1820s, a Kentucky breakfast was defined as ‘three cocktails and a chew of terbacker'.
²⁴

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.
²⁶
I 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 expression
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.