So the Mayflower, with its barrels of beer, sat in Provincetown Harbor, and the colonists were only allowed to kiss each other. Eventually they mutinied and demanded that their leader, William Bradford, force Jones to share his beer, but the captain stood firm. He said he would “not give a drop” of the precious beverage to his own father. “We had to be content with water like animals,” Bradford wrote in the colony’s journal. It was not until Christmas Day that Jones allowed the sickly pilgrims to board the ship and offered them beer. In limited quantities.
The history of the United States is steeped in alcohol. Here’s how it influenced the country’s destiny
However, the story spread since the 1930s by the largest American beer producer, Budweiser, that the colonists shared this drink with the natives during a Thanksgiving dinner in the fall of 1621 is not true. Import costs were prohibitive, and in the English-founded village of Plymouth, the barley crops failed and it was not until a year later that they developed a method of making beer from corn. Beer had been brewed since 1613 by the Dutch who occupied Manhattan, but it could only be brought from Cape Cod by ship. However, corn also proved to be an excellent raw material for the production of whiskey.
However, the most popular alcohol in colonial America was rum made from sugar cane and molasses. The Caribbean (West Indies) provided such abundant raw materials that in 1733 the British Parliament imposed high tariffs on them. As a result, smuggling developed on a large scale and the first seeds of rebellion against the Crown sprouted. The war of national liberation called the American Revolution began with the sinking of a shipment of highly taxed English tea, but the colonists were fed up with all the payments to the mother country, and the most painful were the tariffs on sugar (6 shillings per hundredweight – 50.8 kg) and molasses (6 pence per hundredweight – 50.8 kg – 3.785 l).
The father of the new nation, George Washington, knew how to care for his children and soon after the outbreak of war ordered the construction of state distilleries in all 13 colonies, convincing his comrades that “the benefits of drinking strong alcohol are known to every army in the history of the world and are indisputable.” Washington founded a distillery on his Mount Vernon plantation in 1770. Initially, he produced rum, but Scottish manager James Anderson convinced him to plant rye and make whiskey. It became one of the main sources of income for the first president of the United States. When he died in 1799, his heirs inherited 150 gallons, or 568 liters, of alcohol.
However, the young country had to pay off war debts before the president imposed a tax on alcohol consumed by businesses and citizens. Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton designed the tax to hit small producers, especially farmers, the hardest. The backlash was much harsher than the authorities had anticipated. Residents in the western regions of the country began to organize protests, which grew in intensity and by the summer of 1794 had turned into an open rebellion called the Whiskey Rebellion.
On July 15, when U.S. Marshal David Lenox arrived at Oliver Miller’s Pennsylvania farm, 15 miles from Pittsburgh, to serve money, the men there fired shots into the air and chased him away. The next day, they surrounded the home of General John Neville, where Lenox lived, and demanded the sheriff’s surrender. Neville began shooting and killed Miller, and his colleagues sought reinforcements. On July 17, they returned with 600 armed men and set the house on fire, forcing the defenders to surrender.
The revolt soon spread throughout western Pennsylvania. Washington began negotiations with the rebels, but at the same time sent federal militia units, numbering nearly 13,000 men, to confront them. The revolt was suppressed without major casualties, but the tax did not generate the expected revenue for the state and was abolished in 1803.
While the rebellion was being suppressed, many of its participants fled to Kentucky, which already had the largest number of distilleries. There were excellent conditions for growing corn, but rye did not want to grow. That is why the most popular American drink for many years became bourbon, that is, whiskey filtered through a layer of maple charcoal and only then poured into fresh, charred oak barrels, where it matured. Most bourbons are still made with a high percentage of corn in the mash bill and have a subtler, sweeter flavor than Scotch whiskey.
The effects of mass consumption of bourbon had little to do with subtlety. In 1825, the consumption of spirits amounted to 7 gallons of pure alcohol (67.5 liters of whiskey) per person in the United States over the age of 15 per year. And by 1860, consumption had increased to 86.4 liters. For comparison: contemporary Russians, even adults, statistically drink only 13.9 liters of vodka – more than six times less than Americans in the 19th century. It is worth noting here that the image of a bartender serving whiskey from a bottle to bar patrons, popular in Western films, is a misunderstanding. The first bottled alcohol – Old Forester bourbon – hit the market in 1870. Previously, only barrels and kegs were used.
According to historian Gerald Carson, the Civil War was fought by armies of constantly drunk soldiers and officers, which may partly explain why it claimed an estimated 620,000 lives—nearly two percent of the U.S. population, or the equivalent of 6 million people today. During World War II, 407,000 people died. American soldiers and 58,000 returned from Vietnam in coffins—nearly as many as died in just one Civil War battle at Gettysburg.
The social problems resulting from widespread drunkenness were enormous. Alcohol abuse was associated with gambling, which ruined entire families, and prostitution, which led to an alarming spread of venereal disease, not to mention brawls and duels with gunmen. Local authorities began banning the sale and consumption of alcohol long before Congress passed Prohibition on January 16, 1920. Maine closed its saloons in 1846, Vermont in 1852, New Hampshire and Massachusetts in 1855. Unfortunately, the experience gained by state legislatures did not deter federal lawmakers.
The effect of universal prohibition was the flourishing of organized crime on a scale unknown in history. In addition, robbery rates increased by 9 percent, murders by 13 percent, and drug addiction by 44.6 percent. Over the course of 13 years, 10,000 people died from denatured alcohol poisoning. Alcohol consumption fell by only 10-20 percent, tax revenues by 14 percent, while the costs of combating bootlegging and bootlegging increased sixfold and people’s spending on alcohol doubled. Because hard liquor took up less space than beer or wine and was easier to transport, consumption of bourbon, gin, and rum remained 15 percent lower after the end of Prohibition than before.
Four-fifths of the congressmen and senators bought bootleg Canadian whiskey from mobster George Cassidy. To make his job easier, Cassidy rented space in the Cannon Building (home to the lawmakers’ offices), which is connected to the Capitol by an underground tunnel. An unexpected result of Prohibition was the flourishing of jazz, which spread from the clubs of New Orleans to illegal speakeasies across the country. Anyone who wanted to drink did, and the prohibition introduced in the name of public morality turned out to be a harmful fiction that taught millions of citizens to break the law.
How did whiskey influence the fate of the United States? “The president often lost consciousness”
Alcohol had a major impact not only on the lives of ordinary Americans, but also on the country’s politics. President Ulysses Grant had to fire the most powerful man in Washington, his secretary Orville Babcock, when it was discovered that he belonged to the so-called Whiskey Gang – a group of corrupt officials who profited from the non-taxation of part of the profits from distillery production. A scandal in which the participants misappropriated $7.5 million a year (2% of the state budget!), shook Grant’s position and deprived him of the opportunity for a third term. His successor, Rutherford B. Hayes, was a teetotaler and banned alcohol from the White House.
Contrary to legend and rumor, few presidents drank excessively at their residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Exceptions included Irishman James Buchanan. Every Sunday, on his way home from church, he would stop at the Jacob Baer distillery and buy a ten-gallon barrel of whiskey, which he would spend a week drinking with friends. He could drink three bottles of brandy in one sitting, and a contemporary journalist wrote with admiration that after such a drink, “He did not stagger, did not blush, remained as calm, composed, and alert as at the beginning of the libation. Many ambitious newcomers tried to keep up with him,” “but they were dropping like flies.”
Richard Nixon, on the other hand, was weak-minded. During his historic visit to China in February 1972, his advisers’ main concern was not the outcome of the negotiations but the prospect that their distinguished guest would fall asleep at the table after toasting his hosts with the traditional Maotai 55 vodka, made from sorghum. At the banquet hosted by Premier Zhou Enlai, Ambassador Winston Lord paced behind the president on orders from White House Chief of Staff Alexander Haig, reminding Nixon to dip his lips only into the glass.
Initially, the president drank on weekends in Florida with two drinking buddies, Charles Rebozo and Robert Abplanalp. Once, while leaving a restaurant in Mimi, he approached a stranger on the street and offered her a job in the White House, while convincing the security guard that “it was built to Henry’s taste” (Kissinger). After the Watergate scandal broke, Nixon began getting drunk almost every day and, worse still, he would often talk to people on the phone, including world leaders, during which he would frequently pass out.
Alcohol, or rather the hangover, heightened the president’s suspicions and paranoid fears, but no politician has beaten the alcoholic and head of the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee, Senator Joseph McCarthy, in this regard. Before drinking himself to death at age 48, he ruined the lives of thousands of innocent people while tracking down suspected communists, including Charlie Chaplin, who was expelled from the country in 1952, writer Arthur Miller and composer Leonard Bernstein.
A lesser-known aspect of his activities was the crackdown on gays. Historians have called these persecutions the Lavender Scare, a reference to the anti-communist Red Scare. In 1953 alone, the State Department fired 425 employees suspected of being homosexual. McCarthy believed they were as dangerous as the alleged Soviet agents in the media and Hollywood. “If you oppose the purges, you are either a Communist or a cocksucker,” he once told reporters.
As noted investigative journalist Seymour Hersh writes in his book The Dark Side of Camelot, John F. Kennedy was injured in September 1963 when he tried to jump a young aide into the pool after a few cocktails. He was forced to wear a corset that restricted his movement. According to Hersh, there is a good chance that if he had been able to bend freely, the second bullet fired in Dallas by Lee Harvey Oswald would not have shattered his skull.
