By then, nearly every American farm contained a sizable apple orchard—not to make apple pie but to make hard cider, which was the country’s most popular beverage, guzzled daily by young and old alike. “In rural areas, cider took the place not only of wine and beer but of coffee and tea, juice and even water,” wrote culinary historian Michael Pollan. “Indeed, in many places cider was consumed more freely than water, even by children.”

Subscribe Today

• Did you enjoy our article?
• Read more in American History magazine
• Subscribe online and save nearly 40%!!!
 

The cute little tykes would knock back a tumbler of hard cider with breakfast and then proceed off to school with a pleasant buzz, and nobody worried that it would ruin their chances to get into Harvard, perhaps because Harvard served hard cider in its dining halls.

In the early 1800s, Americans drank more booze than at any time before or since—more than five gallons of pure alcohol per person per year. (Today’s figure is about two gallons per adult.) “Americans drank at home and abroad, alone and together, at work and at play,” wrote historian W.J. Rorabaugh in his classic 1979 book, The Alcoholic Republic. “Americans drank before meals, with meals and after meals. They drank while working in the fields and while traveling across half a continent.”

Meanwhile, America’s native-born hard drinkers were joined by hordes of hard-drinking European immigrants who brought the alcoholic crafts of their native lands—Scots-Irish distillers, German brewers and Italian winemakers, each contributing another ingredient to America’s melting pot or, in this case, to America’s cocktail shaker.

As Americans moved west, the first sign of civilization in many new towns was a saloon—or several saloons. In 1876, for example, Dodge City, Kan., contained 1,200 people and 19 saloons. Western saloons sold liquor, of course, but they also served as restaurants, dance halls, casinos, brothels, courtrooms, post offices, funeral parlors and, on Sunday mornings, churches.

Saloons also provided their customers with cultural offerings, some better than others. “At the upper end of Main Street is a one-horse beer hall, called by courtesy a concert garden, where a pianist and violinist have performed so far without getting shot,” reported the Anaconda, Mont., Standard in 1897. “Occasionally a woman, whose face would stop a freight train and voice would rasp a sawmill, comes out and assists the pianist and violinist in increasing the agony.”

But America’s firewater was not always sold in saloons and frequently wasn’t even marketed as liquor. Much of it was bottled in patent medicines bearing such wonderful names as “Kickapoo Cough Syrup” and “Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound” and promoted as healthful elixirs.

Sold in drugstores and advertised in traveling “medicine shows,” patent medicines were touted as cures for everything from colds to cancer. Actually, they cured nothing but they did provide relief from physical, mental and spiritual pains with the same secret ingredient found in whiskey—ethyl alcohol. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound, advertised as a cure for “female complaints,” contained 18 percent alcohol. Peruna, America’s most popular patent medicine, was 28 percent alcohol. Hostetter’s Celebrated Stomach Bitters contained 47 percent alcohol—more than your average whiskey—and was said to have steadied the nerves of Union soldiers at the Battle of Gettysburg. Paine’s Celery Compound, advertised as a “Nerve Tonic and Alternative Medicine,” contained a mere 21 percent alcohol, but the booze was fortified by a dose of cocaine, which no doubt contributed to its popularity.

“More alcohol is consumed in this country in patent medicines than is dispensed in a legal way by licensed liquor vendors,” Samuel Hopkins Adams wrote in his famous 1905 Collier’s magazine exposé of the hidden ingredients in patent medicines, which influenced the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act.

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to