Blacks in Whiskey Advertising III

For the past two years, my contribution to February’s Black History Month has been to discuss the historical depiction of blacks in whiskey advertising. The 2010 post focussed on a series of images to show some progression over the years as views on civil rights evolved. Last year the post featured ads depicting black waiters serving whiskey. This year I have gathered another group of images from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, several of them disturbing but nevertheless instructive.

The first is a sign that shows a black man walking down a road with a chicken under one arm and a watermelon under the other. We are expected to assume that he did not come by either honestly. He has spotted lying in the road, a bottle of Fern Glen Rye whiskey and looks at it with great interest. But he will have to lay down one or the other treasures in order to secure it. “I’se in a perdickermunt,” he says. The whiskey made by the Fern Glenn Distilling Co. of St. Louis, Missouri. The company appeared only a short time, 1916 and 1917, in local business directories, perhaps indicating ads like this did not work.

The stereotype watermelon appeared in another distiller’s ad, again involving a choice between the melon and a bottle of whiskey. The melon is held by a black woman wearing an apron; the whiskey by a bearded winking man. On the ground in front of them is a boy wearing a tattered hat who is clearly torn between one and the other. The caption is a strange one: “The Temptation of St. Anthony.” The medieval saint’s temptations were largely sexual in nature, rendering this caption ridiculous.

This image appeared on a number of signs, some like this one with a faux wood motif. It was the product of the Paul Jones Distillery. It was founded by a family who provided sons and their wealth to the Confederacy only to find after the war that their home was in ruins and they themselves were destitute. This may have been the reason for the persistent racism in Paul Jones advertising. Initially from Virginia the Jones family moved to Frankfort, Kentucky, in 1886 and eventually adopted the name, Frankfort Distillery. It was one of a favored few distilleries allowed to make medicinal whiskey during Prohibition and emerged into the Post-Pro era, where its advertising continued to demean blacks.

The next ad, for Prosperity Whiskey, was the product of the Bernheim Distillery of Louisville, Kentucky, an organization better known for its I.W. Harper Brand. The Bernheims, emigrated from Germany with little money but created one of the most successful whiskey enterprises in American history. The photographic image of a Negro wedding shown on this saloon sign is profoundly offensive even by the standards of that earlier time. Although accounted philanthropists, the Bernheims apparently were not above patently racist advertising. The next ad, showing a ragged black boy dancing to his own accompaniment is also from Bernheim. It advertises “Old Continental” whiskey. Cards like this were printed with a local saloon carrying the whiskey printed on the bottom.

The next card shows a black boy kissing a black girl with the caption: “Honey duz you love me as much as my Pa duz ‘Old Prentice Whisky?’” In the background a voice from a cabin says, “Whar dem chillun.” This brand was the product of J.T.S. Brown & Sons of Louisville
in business from 1871 to 1919. These were blenders of whiskey featuring several brands and drawing their liquor from a range of Kentucky distillery warehouses.

The Louis Petzold Company of Baltimore produced a trade card with a murky message. It shows a white youth poking his head from a globe of the Western Hemisphere while in the background a group of blacks is picking a vast field of cotton. In the foreground a side-wheeler steamship moves by. The whiskey is “Dixie” and it product said to be “for medicinal use.” Petzold, a German immigrant, is said to have started a liquor business in 1862, although his initial directory listing is 1870. The firm disappeared from listings in 1898.

Unfortunately the torn label on this “Old Mose” flask prevents identifying the merchant behind the brand. The organization also issued a shot glass advertising Old Mose but did not include other information. The next trade card shows another dancing black. This time it advertises both a whiskey (Old Crow) and a saloon (Hayes at the White House). This was a Boston-based drinking establishment that sold customers a beer for a nickel and a shot of whiskey for a dime.

The sum impression of these pre-Prohibition images is their perpetuation of racial stereotypes, their distortion of black physical features, their attribution of fractured English, and their feeble attempts at humor. As a antidote to these images, I include here a 1966 Old Taylor Bourbon ad that celebrates as an American hero, Benjamin Banneker (1731-12806), a free African American astronomer, mathematician, surveyor, almanac author and farmer. The ad celebrates in particular his role in surveying the boundaries of the District of Columbia.

Black Waiters: "Fetch, Toby, Fetch"

Last year about this time, as an observance of February’s Black History Month, I featured a blog about the way African Americans have been depicted in whiskey advertising throughout the years. Many of the images proved to be degrading or at best depicted blacks in menial or serving positions. This year my Black History blog will concentrate on blacks in wait service.

Here my conclusion is that whiskey ads often treated black waiters with more dignity before, rather than after, Prohibition. A case in point is an 1894 advertising poster issued by a Cincinnati-based railway that also featured a number of products manufactured in the city. The dignified waiter holds on a tray a bottle of Cabinet Whiskey he is offering to two passengers. This whiskey was a product of the Freiberg and Workum Co. (1855-1918). From distilleries in the company owned in Kentucky they produced and distributed a number of nationally-known brands.

Similarly dignified is the waiter who is serving 15-year-old Old Fitzgerald whiskey to a passenger in an individual small bottle on what the ad claims is one of “the best Railroads in the United States.” This is a 1901 ad from the S.C. Herbst Importing Co., headquartered in Milwaukee with a branch office in Chicago. Founded in 1870, the Herbst organization survived until Prohibition.

Contrast those first two examples with a post-Prohibition1935 ad from Paul Jones whiskey, a brand was from Frankfort Distilleries. Founded after the Civil War by Paul Jones, a whiskey salesman, the company moved to Louisville, Kentucky, in 1886. Frankfort Distilleries survived the years of “Dry” (1920-1934) becoming one of the few outfits that were allowed to produce “medicinal” whiskey under government permit. Providing a quarter of the national supply, the company boasted that 20,000 doctors had written prescriptions for its “spiritus frumenti alcoholic stimulant” -- the word “whiskey” having been banished.

After Repeal, Frankfort Distilleries had a head start on its competition. It funded national ad campaigns that harked back to a pre-Civil War era when plantation owners could sit, smoke cigars and tell the obsequious waiter, “Toby, fetch me the key to the springhouse.” The gentleman at left in the ad was supposed to be the redoubtable, but now long dead, Paul Jones himself. The message here was clear: Let us celebrate the good old days when slavery was in flower.

Other ads emphasized the subordinate nature of the black waiters by giving them ungrammatical speech patterns. Cream of Kentucky “Thee” Whiskey, for example, featured an ad in which a waiter holds a bottle in one hand and a drink in the other. He declaims: “De Kunnel sez Mint Julep.” This brand originated with the Rush Distilling Co. of Jacksonville, Florida.

Similar illiterate speech appears in a 1940s ad from Sherwood Rye. The smiling waiter here tells us “Ain’t had time to sit me down, since Sherwood Rye done come to town.” The same rhyming waiter in another Sherwood ad -- not shown here -- says: “De man who calls for Sherwood Rye, sure knows the bestest brand to buy.” Sherwood Distillery was founded in 1882 in Cockeysville, Maryland. The original operation was closed with Prohibition and the buildings destroyed in 1926. However, the brand name survived and was produced post-Prohibition until the 1950s from a facility in Westminster, Maryland.

Calvert Whiskey took a two page ad in Life Magazine in 1941 to show a black waiter with two whiskey collins on a tray. His speech is grammatical but his manner is a wide grin that communicates how happy he is to be serving. Originally part of the Fleischmann distilling operation in Relay, Maryland, the Calvert facilities and brand name were purchased in 1933 by the Canadian Joseph E. Seagram and Son.

A final example is from Walker’s Deluxe straight bourbon. From 1947 to 1953 this brand featured the same very distinguished black waiter, usually holding a tray on a bottle of the whiskey. Although there was nothing particularly servile in this waiter’s attitude, the ad-makers in one 1953 instance could not avoid the temptation to picture him in front of an old Southern plantation house -- once again harking back to those pre-bellum days. The brand was from Hiram Walker of Detroit and Walkerville, Ontario.

Since the Civil Rights Era of the 1960s, a half century ago, the depiction of black waiters has disappeared from all U.S. whiskey advertising. Other things have changed as well. Now a highly educated, articulate African-American is in the White House. Toby need no longer fetch.