Clio's Review: Intoxicating Pleasures

Lisa Jacobson, Intoxicating Pleasures: The Reinvention of Wine, Beer, and Whiskey after Prohibition (University of California Press, 2024).

Lisa Jacobson’s Intoxicating Pleasures: The Reinvention of Wine, Beer, and Whiskey after Prohibition begins where the familiar story of Prohibition usually ends. The book grapples with the popular misconception that alcohol was widely embraced immediately following Prohibition’s repeal. Through the 1920s, alcohol had acquired a stigma that wasn’t easily erased when the law was lifted. Americans, she argues, had to be persuaded not only to drink again, but to think differently about what drinking meant.

Tracing the cultural rehabilitation of wine, beer, and whiskey from the 1930s through the mid-twentieth century, Jacobson shows how producers and their allies worked to disassociate alcohol from the saloon, drunkenness, and social disorder. They did this by defining and encouraging moderation, and linking alcohol to hospitality, leisure, and the pleasures of everyday life. Jacobson brings together an impressive cast of advertisers, home economists, cookbook authors, physicians, government officials, restaurateurs, Hollywood filmmakers, and others who helped create the ideal of the respectable, moderate drinker.

Some of the book’s most fascinating material concerns World War II, which Jacobson identifies as a crucial turning point in transforming alcohol’s cultural image. Beer became associated with Americana and the hope of peacetime domesticity. Wine, and specifically wine-based recipes, helped make wartime rationing more palatable. Whiskey distillers converted their plants to wartime production even as consumers asserted a remarkable “right to decent whiskey.” Pleasure itself acquired patriotic meaning during the war, and quality alcohol became a key component of pleasure.

Intoxicating Pleasures is a significant work of scholarship in which Jacobson demonstrates that now common and ordinary practices—beer with friends, wine with dinner, a whiskey to seal the deal—are actually historical constructions. Modern drinking cultures, she reminds us, were intentionally made.

I thoroughly enjoyed Intoxicating Pleasures and highly recommend it. Listen to or watch my conversation with Lisa Jacobson, then buy the book and discover why what’s in the glass is only part of the story.