Drink (65 page)

The trend toward homogeneous national brands was assisted by advances in packaging. The beer can, invented in 1935, took off in the 1950s. It was the ultimate portable and disposable beer delivery system, and perfectly suited to the growing home-consumption market. The trend toward drinking at home was driven by changing leisure patterns: The neighborhood saloons that had dominated recreation pre-Prohibition did not return in similar numbers post-repeal, and instead of rushing the growler, beer lovers bought cans by the case in drive-through liquor stores, which they consumed in front of the television. Home drinking was also boosted by the persistence of local prohibition—in 1959 nearly 14.5 million Americans still lived in areas that were still officially dry. They could, however, import with impunity, and liquor stores thrived on the wet borders of such regions.

The ownership of TV sets spread at a lightning pace in the 1950s: In 1952, 15.3 million Americans owned TVs; by 1955, 32 million had been sold; and by 1960, 90 percent of households had them. Television offered wonderful opportunities to drink manufacturers to place an image of their products in the front rooms of American households. This alarming prospect stirred what was left of the temperance movement into action. Between 1947 and 1958 they forced nine congressional committee hearings on their legislative proposals to ban alcohol advertising. However, their influence had so waned that no action resulted. No legislator wished to revive Prohibition. Besides, beverage producers had forestalled the drys with self-regulation. The Distilled Spirits Institute (DSI), the main trade association of American distillers, imposed an advertising code on its members that prohibited radio and television advertising, the depiction of women in print advertising, and the placement of hard-liquor ads in religious publications. Their decision not to advertise on TV was subsequently confirmed by a ban from the National Association of Broadcasters. The brewers, in contrast, allowed themselves to advertise on broadcast mediums and to show women in beer ads. Budweiser was the first U.S. brewer to sponsor a network TV show (the Ken Murray show on CBS in 1951), and others followed suit. They were, however, cautious in the way they presented their product and, in 1954, complied with a House Commerce Committee suggestion by agreeing not to feature anyone actually drinking beer in their ads. This restriction was intended to prevent the brewers from seducing juveniles and natural-born drys with images of actors expressing joy after a mouthful of suds. Temperance may have faded but the paranoia that had given birth to it remained: Humanity, born in sin, needed protecting from its evil nature.

Early TV programs did not feature much drinking and, when they did, tended to represent it in a humorous light. The vaudeville inebriate, rather than the red-eyed home breaker, was the face of alcohol on the small screen.
I Love Lucy,
the most popular program in America, which ran from 1951 to 1957, used intoxication to garner laughs, most memorably so in the “Lucy Does a TV Commercial” episode of May 5, 1952, in which Lucy gets the part of the “Vitameatavegamin girl” to promote an eponymous tonic. As Lucy rehearses the tongue-twisting script and drinks the beverage—which, in the style of traditional American tonic drinks, is highly alcoholic—she gets progressively drunker, until she mangles her lines into comic innuendo:

The trend toward tippling outside of bars, saloons, and taverns was also fueled by a rise in underage drinking. After repeal, the age of consentfor alcohol had been set at the federal level as twenty-one. Americans could have sex and marry at fourteen, drive a car at sixteen, be called up for military service at eighteen, but could not drink until they were old enough to vote. Not all of them waited. They had unprecedented freedom of movement and spending power. Manufacturers of automobiles and other consumer goods identified and targeted the new teenage market. Its constituents were fond of dressing up and dancing; they also believed learning to smoke and drink to be rites of passage into the adult world they rebelled against yet imitated. The teen world was explored by Hollywood in
Rebel Without a Cause
(1955). Its opening scenes feature a drunken teenager, Jim Stark, played by James Dean. While Jim is arrested and taken to the police station, he is treated sympathetically, and when his family arrive to claim him, they try and pass off his inebriation as no more than youthful high spirits. There is not an ounce of temperance sentiment in the scene— the fact that Jim is drunk is presented as unremarkable. His reasons for getting drunk receive greater attention. They are depicted as a mixture of nihilism and escapism, and established teenage angst as a proper motivation for drinking.

Teenagers also worked up a thirst by dancing. A new strain of music—rock ’n’ roll—was emerging, whose practitioners were deified or demonized, depending on the age of the listener. Rock ’n’ roll had alcohol in its blood. The forms of music it was created from, especially blues and country, acknowledged booze as an inspiration, and a number of early rock ’n’ roll stars continued the tradition. Jerry Lee Lewis personified the new breed of hard-drinking rocker. In contrast to Elvis Presley, who drank more Pepsi than anything else in his initial years of fame, Jerry Lee seldom let such childish refreshments pass his lips. By the time he achieved national recognition in 1957 with the hits “Great Balls of Fire” and “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On,” the twenty-two-year-old Lewis was on his third marriage, to his thirteen-year-old second cousin. Although he had been drinking legally for only fourteen months, he had developed a whiskey habit, which he supplemented with pharmaceuticals, as did Gene Vincent, a contemporary star in the teenage firmament. The author of “Be-Bop-A-Lula” (1956) acquired his taste for alcohol, tranquilizers, and amphetamines after breaking his leg in a motorcycle accident. The tranquilizers were prescribed, the amphetamines were taken to counter the lethargy they engendered, and the whiskey served to take the edge off the speed.

As rock ’n’ roll and its mixture of black and white performers and influences became a fact of life in America, attempts were made to sanitize its performers in order to maximize sales. If they could be represented as clean-living young men and women, and their music as an encouragement to rhythmic exercise, then parents would approve and let their children buy and play rock ’n’ roll records. This proved to be uphill work. While performers such as Elvis Presley toed the line and might, in their early years, be characterized as the soda fountain faces for the new genre, others were less malleable. Gene Vincent “turned out to be willful, difficult, often drunk, and possibly a little insane. Where Elvis attempted to be all things to all people, Gene embraced the evil heart of rock ’n’ roll.”

The lyrics of most fifties rock songs were dry. Dating, automobiles, music, and dancing were their principal themes. Sex and teenage inebriation had to be expressed in innuendo. But little by little, the bottle crept in—the spirit of Cecil Grant’s “Nashville Jumps” (1949)—

and was revived by Chuck Berry in “Rock and Roll Music” (1957), and thereafter drink was celebrated in rock with increasing frequency. It was the ideal balm for teenage angst, for the lovesick, for the would-be rebel. It was an antidote to milk bars and soda fountains and prom queens.

32 RECONSTRUCTION

Europe lagged behind America in the introduction of new consumer goods such as television sets and record players. Its inhabitants had far less disposable income during the 1950s than their transatlantic counterparts. The continent had to rebuild itself before it could advance into a brave new world of rock ’n’ roll and beer commercials. The task of reconstruction post-World War II had been vast: Cities and infrastructure had to be rebuilt from the ground up, factories retooled to make civilian goods, fields and waterways cleared of mines and munitions, and in order to achieve such renewal, near-dead economies had to be jolted back to life.

In the event, the economic revival was completed with remarkable speed. Boosted by American aid, by 1951 the output of many European nations exceeded prewar levels, though on a per capita basis they were still a long way behind the United States. The process of renewal, however, was uneven. The continent had been divided into a capitalist West and a Communist East under the de facto control of Soviet Russia. Those countries on the Communist side of the Iron Curtain did not enjoy the same dynamic growth as their Western counterparts, and any surpluses they generated were siphoned off by the USSR as war reparations. Moreover, in the booming West, certain industries, notably that for beverage alcohol, lagged behind the general trend.

One of the priorities of European reconstruction had been fixing and improving the water supply. Prior to World War II, a majority of European households did not have a piped source of potable water. During the war, a significant number of the casualties had been caused by malaria, or waterborne diseases. On some fronts, such as the Italian, these had killed more soldiers than had died in action. The provision of safe water took precedence over the redevelopment of breweries and distilleries. In 1951, German beer production was half of what it had been when Hitler had invaded Poland. However, it recovered quickly thereafter and, in the western portion of the divided nation, had reached 150 percent of prewar levels for the entire country by 1960. Thirty-two hundred breweries had risen from the rubble to supply demand. The picture in East Germany, under Soviet control, was very different. Weak beer dribbled out of a mere 212 breweries, which together generated only two-thirds of the volume that the region had produced in 1939.

In France, the restrictions imposed by the hated Vichy regime on cafés and other watering holes were continued for a decade after the war. Winemaking, however, was encouraged, and the state took steps to ensure that its vineyards focused on quality as much as quantity. A new interim grade of French-made wine—Vins Délimités de Qualité Supérieure (VDQS)—was introduced to work alongside the AOC system of 1935. The VDQS stamp enabled producers in areas not yet designated as
Appéllation Controlée
—90 percent of France in 1950—to achieve higher prices than mere
vin du table,
and assured patriotic Frenchmen that the juice in the bottle was French-bred. This and other policies were so successful that by 1953 France was drowning in wine, and supply management measures were instituted. Growers were set targets, and if they exceeded these, they had to deposit any surplus production with the government, which used it as buffer stock or distilled it for industrial use.

No sooner had the state intervened to manage the fertility of French vines than nature struck back with harsh winters and late frosts, causing a general shortage, forcing prices through the roof, and incidentally creating one of the greatest vintages of the twentieth century (that of 1955) in Bordeaux. The government responded to the crisis with more legislation, which it alternately repealed or enforced in subsequent years, until 1964, when it decided to focus on regulation instead of market manipulation. The decision was taken as a consequence of France’s membership in the European Economic Community (EEC), an entity established by the Treaty of Rome in 1957, to encourage free trade between a number of European countries. Italy, also a member, produced cheaper wine than France, which, according to free market principles, would force French growers out of business. This menace was held off with import quotas for a few years and killed, finally, with French-inspired, pan-European quality control legislation, which required Italy, and other EEC members, to register their vineyards, grade their wine, and perform other costly, time-consuming measures, in the name of harmonization.

In the same years that French legislators were equivocating on whether to control prices or output, French scientists continued to investigate the salutary properties of the national beverage. In 1951, Jean Lancepleine proved that the bactericidal properties of French white wine were not simply the result of its being alcoholic. His work was followed up by Hélène Jensen, who demonstrated that the antibacterial properties of red Bordeaux were even better, and better still if the wine was between seven and ten years old. Scientific proof that the addition of wine to contaminated water might make it drinkable confirmed one of the oldest human prejudices over the fluid—that the mixture was safer than untreated water. The French, as in the past, responded favorably to the good news by drinking more wine. Per capita consumption rose steadily until 1962, when it peaked at just over twenty liters of pure alcohol equivalent—or nearly 170 bottles each for every French person over the age of fifteen.

Despite such high levels of consumption, the French did not experience an epidemic of alcoholism, nor did they rush in their thousands to join the French arm of Alcoholics Anonymous. The idea that drinking might be a kind of disease did not occur to them. On the contrary, in the opinion of Roland Barthes, writing in 1955, “to believe in wine [was] a coercive collective act” in French society, and unbelievers were described as “sick, disabled, or depraved.” Conversely “an award of good integration is given to whoever is a practicing drinker: Knowing
how
to drink is a national technique which serves to qualify the Frenchman, to demonstrate at once his performance, his control, and his sociability.” Barthes thought that French attitudes derived in part from their belief that intoxication, far from being the primary aim of the drinker, was a side effect of no more than incidental importance: “What is characteristic of France is that the converting power of wine is never openly presented as an end. Other countries drink to get drunk, and this is accepted by everyone; in France, drunkenness is a consequence, never an intention. A drink is felt as the spinning out of a pleasure, not as the necessary cause of an effect which is sought: wine is not only a philter, it is also a leisurely act of drinking.”