America’s “Roaring Twenties”: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra
"‘What did they actually drink in this decade?’
‘Oh, this is such a good question. It's my favorite question. I can answer this question for hours, we could do a whole podcast just on the alcohol of the 1920s... So basically, there are three segments of society. And it's, it's very economically driven.
Three different things that you would be drinking in the US under Prohibition. If you were rich, you could afford the real thing which you smuggled in and bought on the black market. So you could get real rums, which would come up from the West Indies on sailboats, and come into New York Harbor. You could get real champagne from France, you could get, there was a what they called a pipeline that came down from Canada, you could get real alcohol through Canada - just had to pay through the nose for it. So if you were very, very rich, you could get the real deal, the real McCoy. It is a myth that the real McCoy comes from a bootlegger called McCoy. That is a cultural myth. Nobody knows where the phrase the real McCoy comes from...
If you were very poor, they drank gasoline, they drank turpentine, they drank, they would literally mix kind of gasoline and water and they drank these incredibly lethal combinations that were sold on the street as bathtub gin or bootleg gin or as moonshine. That's if you were the urban poor if you were the rural poor, you drank homemade moonshine. You drank in the south what they called corn, which was corn liquor, they would literally just put corn into a, into jars and let it ferment in the basement, and then drink it at the end of the, you know, the end of the season. I don't know how long it takes for corn to ferment, but they would, it would ferment for as long as it fermented, and then they would drink corn. And if you were in the north, you would drink wheat based moonshine or grain based moonshine. So you would drink wheat or rye or what, again, you know, if you're in Minnesota and you're growing wheat, then that's, what you would make your, your moonshine out of. So that's the rural poor. Bathtub gin is not the same thing as bootleg gin…
Bootleg meant black market. So anything could be bootleg alcohol. It just depends if, it just meant that you bought it on the black market. So you could buy the real thing as bootleg gin, you could buy bathtub gin as bootleg gin, or you could buy moonshine as bootleg gin, it all just means you got it on a black market. But bathtub gin was really the drink of the middle classes, and what bathtub gin was was that what you would do is you could get 100% alcohol, you could get, I think it's ethyl. I always mix this up. But ethyl alcohol, which I think is the safe one, the chemists listening will correct me if I'm wrong. I think that's right. Anyway, you could get the safe ethanol alcohol, because chemists were allowed to sell it for medicinal. I'm doing inverted. I'm doing scare quotes there. Very much air quotes, medicinal purposes. You could sell pure grain alcohol. And that's what, by the way, that's how Jay Gatsby gets rich in The Great Gatsby, he's selling pure grain alcohol from his drugstores is one of the many, many cons that he's involved or crimes that he's involved in. But that's one of them. Anyway, so you could sell pure grain alcohol, and you got it from your chemist. And then you then had to dilute it and flavor it yourself. And everybody had recipes for gin, they passed around by word of mouth…
They're supposed to be distilled, right. But instead, they're kind of making it with a spoon, which is not how you're supposed to make gin. So what they would do is they would just try to like mix, what they were trying to dilute it themselves. So they would add water. And then they would add some oil essences they would add like oil of juniper to try to make it taste like gin. And then stir it with a spoon and hope for the best and it, and it tasted awful. And it was unbelievably potent because they were starting with 100% alcohol and they were getting it down to about 80% Alcohol. So, and that is why most of the Americans who were drinkers in the 1920s did have raging alcohol problems later in life or die young, because they were drinking very dangerously high levels of alcohol. But they weren't the ones who were going to hospital screaming that they were going blind. They would have alcohol poisoning just because of the concentration of alcohol. But the alcohol per se was safe, it was just too much of it.
But the people who are going blind were the poor people on the streets who were being given what they were told was bathtub gin, but had been cut with turpentine, had been mixed with gasoline, had been, had had various other kinds of poisons added to it to either make it taste like alcohol to cut through something or because it was cheap. I mean always because it was cheap, right. So that so the equivalent is very much with recreational drug use today. If you can afford to get very, very, you know, tested safe, pure cocaine or heroin from your drug dealer, then, then you might be safe. But if you get too pure a hit, it will still kill you. Or if you're buying cheap stuff on the streets, it will be cut with poison and you don't know what you're getting. And those were the people who were ending up hospitalized...
The drop waist… was a reaction against the corsets and the silhouettes of the Edwardian and Victorian era most obviously. So it was both a rebellion against the clothes of your parents, but it was also associated with women's emancipation. So instead of having these very constricting undergarments, it was part of dress reform, it meant that women were uncorseted. Now, they would still often wear corsets underneath those drop waist dresses because unless you have a very certain kind of figure, drop waist dresses are difficult to wear unless you've actually really restricted yourself anyway. So they would still wear various kinds of restrictive undergarments, depending. But it was certainly a move toward, toward more liberated dress, toward free or moving dress. And it was part of the sudden veneration of youth culture. So of course, it suggests that young women are very youthful. It's kind of, it's a pre sexual look for women. It's a kind of teenaged look.
The other thing, we've mentioned contraception but in terms and I should have actually mentioned this earlier but it really has a lot to do with fashion. One of the other innovations that happened that changed women's lives was the invention of something called Kotex, the sanitary napkin… women could wear dresses like that, because they could keep themselves clean while they were menstruating. Because they had access to sanitary pads, and not long after that to tampons... one of the reasons for layers of petticoats, you know, one was that it was cold everywhere, so it keeps you warm. But for women, one of the reasons was that it, it was a way to deal with with menstruation when you don't have any other way of disguising that as it were. And so you need layers of fabric to deal with it...
‘She speaks about her grandmother, who had her teeth removed and replaced by dentures as it would just be cheaper on her husband's, be less of a financial burden on her.’
‘Okay. Well, that sounds like a very British story to me, which doesn't say that it didn't happen in the US, but I'm not aware of it happening in the US.’...
‘When fascism rose came into the cultural conversation in the United States, it was at exactly the same time that the second Klan was on the rise. And the word fascism in the United States begins to be used at the same time to describe the Klan. So they start to say, if you want to know what ,fat what this fascism thing is that this guy Mussolini is doing in Italy, it's like the Klan. And then they also say, if you want to know what this new thing the Klan is, because it was new in America as well, if you want to know what this new thing the Klan is, like what Mussolini is doing in Italy, so they just defined it reciprocally, and, and everybody understood them as being the same movement. They were ethno nationalist paramilitary groups...
Nordic people were racially superior to non Nordic people, as they called them. And Nordic people was anybody from Northern Europe and non Nordic people was literally everybody else in the world. And and so it was broadly Nordic was used there sort of to mean Northern, and so Northern European good. Everybody else inferior, subhuman, unwanted stay home... in the United States, you see it applied to immigrants across these cultures, Southern and Eastern European immigrants. They're described as vermin. They're described as being subhuman animals, they like living in filthy conditions. And that's why we can't bring them in because they'll bring down the quality of life. They are intellectually inferior. That's why they're poor. They're going to lower the breed. It's eugenicist thinking specifically’"
Americans' history of misunderstanding fascism dates back to fascism's start.
Weird. I thought race as a concept was created to justify slavery and colonialism. So Southern Europeans and Eastern Europeans must always have been white too.
