Read more
"Roaring Twenties" America boasted famous firsts: women's right to vote under the Constitution's Nineteenth Amendment, jazz music, talking motion pictures, Charles Lindbergh's solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean, Flapper fashions, and wondrous new devices like the safety razor and the electric vacuum cleaner. The decade opened, nonetheless, with a shock when Prohibition became the law of the land on Friday, January 16, 1920. American ingenuity promptly rose to its newest challenge. The law, riddled with loopholes, let the 1920s write a new chapter in the nation's saga of spirits. Men and women spoke knowingly of the speakeasy, the bootlegger, of rum-running, black ships, blind pigs, gin mills, and gallon stills. A new social event-the cocktail party staged in a private home-smashed the gender barrier that had long forbidden "ladies" from entering into the gentlemen-only barrooms and cafâes. The drinks, savored in secret, were all the more delectable when the cocktail shaker went "underground." The danger of the illicit liquor trade was also memorialized in drinks like the "Original Gangster," the "St. Valentine's Day Massacre," the "Tommy Gun," and others. Crime rose, fortunes were amassed, and a slew of new cocktails were shaken, stirred, and poured in hideaways to brand the "roaring" 1920s as the era of "Alcohol and Al Capone."--
About the author
Cecelia Tichi is Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English and American Studies Emerita at Vanderbilt University. Her books include
Jazz Age Cocktails,
Gilded Age Cocktails,
What Would Mrs. Astor Do? The Essential Guide to the Manners and Mores of the Gilded Age and
Civic Passions: Seven Who Launched Progressive America. Her mystery fiction includes the "Val and Roddy DeVere Gilded" series, set in the Gilded Age. Her website: https://www.cecebooks.com.
