Made In America - Bill Bryson [132]
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