As a distinctly American drink, the cocktail has a long-established role in American literature. As early as 1851, a character in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance is known for his skill in compounding gin cocktails (which appeared to be his sole talent) as a preamble to his dinner parties. In 1852, William Makepeace Thackeray published his novel The Newcomes, in which a character, a sea captain, describes the New York City custom of having brandy cocktails before dinner.1
The Dry Years were among the most fertile for literature about contemporary life and mores, especially in the United States, where cocktails appeared in a great many major works of the major writers. This was, after all, the time of The Great Gatsby, which at its most literal level was a book about Prohibition awash in mixed drinks, including the mint julep Daisy concocts for Tom at the Plaza Hotel toward the end of the book—“Open the whiskey, Tom,” she ordered, “and I’ll make you a mint julep. Then you won’t seem so stupid to yourself … Look at the mint.”
Then there is the cocktail in Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise. About a third of the way into the book, the protagonist Amory Blaine makes some gains in losing his innocence at a New York nightspot. Encouraged by a chorus-girl companion, Axia Marlowe, he orders a double daiquiri and has a “inexpressibly terrible” vision of a man with a face like yellow wax. It is the devil himself. In Tender Is the Night, the gin and tonic has a cameo appearance: “At three he called Rosemary and was bidden to come up. Momentarily dizzy from his acrobatics, he stopped in the bar for a gin-and-tonic.”
Fitzgerald was so obsessed with the cocktail that he suggested it ought to become a verb. He drew up a chart displaying all of its cases, including:
IMPERFECT= I was cocktailing
PERFECT = I cocktailed (past definite)
PAST PERFECT = I have cocktailed
CONDITIONAL = I might have cocktailed
PLUPERFECT = I had cocktailed
Sinclair Lewis delighted in creating characters who supported Prohibition but who, like the narrator in The Man Who Knew Coolidge (1928), was not “a fanatic” about it:
If a fellow feels like making some good homebrewed beer or wine, or if you go to a fellow’s house and he brings out some hooch or gin, but you don’t know where he got it and it isn’t any of your business, or if you have a business acquaintance coming to your house and you figure he will not loosen up and talk turkey without a little spot, and you know a good dependable bootlegger that you can depend on, then that’s a different matter, and there ain’t any reason on God’s green earth that I can see why you shouldn’t take advantage of it, always providing you aren’t setting somebody a bad example or making it look like you sympathize with lawbreaking.
No sir!2
Then there is Ernest Hemingway (there are martini-drinking scenes in both A Farewell to Arms and The Sun Also Rises) and other major Jazz Age writers—to name a few, John Dos Passos, John O’Hara, H. L. Mencken, Theodore Dreiser, and Edna Ferber.
Dashiell Hammett’s characters Nick and Nora Charles in The Thin Man spend much of their time in speakeasies or hotel rooms toasting each other. Their drink, naturally, is the dry martini, and Nick is first spotted in the film version of The Thin Man instructing a bartender in its preparation: “A Manhattan should be shaken to a fox trot, the Bronx to a two-step, but a dry Martini must always be shaken to a waltz.” Nora, waking up the next morning with an ice pack on her forehead, asks what hit her. “The last Martini,” says Nick.
Beyond The Thin Man, the movies were soaking Wet. “The plot of the first all-talking motion picture revolved around bootleg whiskey,” John C. Burnham says about Lights of New York (1928) in Bad Habits: Drinking, Smoking, Taking Drugs, Gambling, Sexual Misbehavior and Swearing in American History. Burnham added that an analysis of films released in 1930 revealed that drinking played a role in four-fifths of them and none of them depicted drinking in a truly negative light.3
Some films that seemed to have an anti-alcohol theme were, in fact, satirical. The purest example is the 1933 W. C. Fields classic The Fatal Glass of Beer, which mocks the moralistic tone of some early movies and older anti-drinking temperance shows. Fields was to become one of filmdom’s chronic comic drunks. “ ’Twas a woman drove me to drink,” he slurred on occasion. “I never had the courtesy to thank her.” He was not the first. Charlie Chaplin in City Lights (1931) and Buster Keaton in What No Beer (1933) were prime examples. Both Chaplin and Mary Pickford had period cocktails named after them.
If Hollywood was awash in booze, so too was Broadway, which had a similar fascination for the martini. The drink seemed to have restorative powers when inserted in song lyrics, such as Cole Porter’s “Babes in the Woods,” first performed in the Greenwich Village Follies of 1924:
They have found that the fountain of youth
Is a mixture of gin and vermouth.
In the end, the writers and filmmakers were leaders in the fight against Prohibition. For H. L. Mencken, Prohibition was the ultimate violation of the individual liberties he cherished. He wondered aloud and in print what George Washington would have thought of the Eighteenth Amendment—or Jefferson, particularly, for Virginia went dry before the rest of the country. As Marion Elizabeth Rodgers points out in Mencken: The American Iconoclast: “Mencken read reports of officers waking women passengers on sleeping cars and searching their suitcases, pawing through their underwear for contraband liquor. ‘Imagine it! Virginians doing that! Try to imagine Jefferson’s comment on it.’ Such indignities meant that civilized people had to submit to a form of espionage ‘by great hordes of shoddy and dubious men, each with full legal right to harass decent citizens.’ It was one of the most cynical violations of the Bill of Rights he had ever witnessed.” Mencken, who openly rejoiced as attempts to enforce the law failed, later recalled in his essay “The Noble Experiment” only two isolated instances during the entire period—1920 to 1933—when he could not find a drink if he wanted one.4
In organizational terms, the leader of the Wet writers and artists was a journalist and novelist named Irvin S. Cobb. He was a major celebrity in his time, close to the film community because of his screenplays and the host of the 7th Academy Awards in 1935. Not only did Cobb inveigh against Prohibition in his literary works, he made it a personal crusade. Joining a national organization called the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment, he became the chairman of its Authors and Artists Committee. Under his vigorous leadership, the committee ultimately boasted 361 members, including some of the nation’s best-known figures. As chairman, he blamed Prohibition for increased crime, alcoholism, and disrespect for law. “If Prohibition is a noble experiment,” he said, “then the San Francisco fire and the Galveston flood should be listed among the noble experiments of our national history.”
Ten years before Repeal, Governor Gifford Pinchot of Pennsylvania gave a speech in which he bluntly identified the element that does most to obstruct enforcement: “It is not the solemn ass who gets up in assemblage and solemnly announces that ‘prohibition cannot be enforced.’ It is not the flappers and ‘sheiks,’ who rather take to the idea that it is clever and devilish to break the law. I don’t mean those, either, of permanently immature minds who seem to be congenitally incapable of thinking there is anything more sacred than a cocktail before dinner. These folks do some harm, but not much … The real harm is done by able, influential people of the community who set themselves on the side of the bootlegger and against the law. All that is necessary to straighten them out is to have them come to a realizing sense of what they are doing.”5
While deep in the Great Depression, the nation spent an estimated $36 billion on bootleg alcohol, and the government had collected not a penny of this amount in excise taxes. The jobs and revenue that legalized drinking brought with it were an immediate benefit of Repeal.
Once again bars were legal and operated under rules set by states and localities. Three years into the Noble Experiment, writer Ring Lardner had noted that the biggest difference in bars was that because, by law, there weren’t any, they didn’t have to close at any particular hour. “Now,” he added, “they have closing times again.”6