Television critic Glenn Garvin pours himself a drink and sits down with the Smithsonian Channel’s Drinks, Crime, and Prohibition two-part documentary:
One of the silver linings of Prohibition, if you’re looking for them, is the birth of the cocktail. Bartenders, for the most part, didn’t experiment much with flavored drinks; Americans mostly took their liquor hard and straight. But, confronted with the truly heinous taste of the rotgut stuff coming out of jury-rigged stills during Prohibition, customers revolted. Bartenders started disguising the stuff with with exotic mixes of sugar, fruit and liqueurs.
One that caught on quickly was a concoction of gin, absinthe, and lemon juice that the bartenders called, in a fit of mordant whimsy, the Corpse Reviver No. 2. Except some of the whimsy began to wear off as the government cracked down on the bootleggers by lethally contaminating one of their common ingredients, industrial alcohol. When 65 people died of the additives in a single day in New York City, the Corpse Reviver No. 2 sadly failed to live up to its name. As federal spin doctors might have put it had they existed, sometimes you’ve got to poison the village in order to save it.
I learned everything in those two paragraphs from the excellent Smithsonian Channel documentary Drinks, Crime, and Prohibition, a two-part affair that airs on consecutive Mondays. Funny at times, appalling at others, it makes it clear that Prohibition was not just a short and inexplicably nutty chapter in U.S. history but a sinister, mutually exploitative alliance of moralists, racists and Progressive power-mongers that still distorts American politics. “Prohibition looms in our minds unto this day,” says Derek Brown, a bartender and informal historian of American drinking habits. “It split us. It changed us.”
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