Cocktail shakers resembled the teapots they replaced, and the ability to mix a good cocktail was just as important as learning the latest dance step. The at-home afternoon tea, once an inexpensive way to repay social obligations, turned into the five o’clock cocktail hour and a new American institution was established. Drinking was once a man’s game, but now men and women could drink together openly. Single women, long excluded from drinking in public restaurants and dining rooms, invaded speakeasies. It was liquid emancipation, equal rights served in a cocktail glass. The Nineteenth Amendment giving women the right to vote passed on August 16, 1920, and, with one foot on the brass rail and a cigarette in hand, women asserted themselves by ordering their cocktail of choice. Cocktails became a symbol of free thinking and free spirits.
The gin martini and cocktail shaker ruled. It was the Jazz Age and liberated flappers were smoking, bobbing their hair, dancing the Charleston and the Black Bottom. Speakeasies were regarded as more chic than criminal. Americans flocked to speakeasies.Īmerica’s old love affair with tea and the tea dance, a popular group entertainment in hotels and halls where young people could meet, took a back seat to this new libation and gathering place. The ability to spot a Federal Prohibition agent was more valued than knowing the finer points of tavern deportment without licensing hassles or city inspections, anyone could open a speakeasy or become a bartender, if they didn’t mind breaking the law. When 8,168 licensed, liquor-serving saloons and restaurants in New York were shuttered because of the new law, 32,000 illegal speakeasies soon sprang up. More than just the American way to serve drinks, cocktails became a part of American culture and the American state of mind. The mystique of the outlaw had a powerful allure and cocktail parties came to symbolize high society and Jazz Age sophistication.
People who’d never tasted a cocktail suddenly wanted to.
What followed was a fascination with alcohol that ran like wildfire into the American collective consciousness. But the law was ambiguous––it was never illegal to drink liquor as long as you hadn’t made, bought, or moved it. When Prohibition became the law of the land on January 16, 1920, alcohol was thought to be effectively banned.
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