That Devil's Island Gin!

“Give me one more drink, Of that Devil's Island Gin, Give me one more drink, Of that Devil's Island Gin, I've been drunk once tonight, And I want to get drunk again.”

Excerpt from Devil’s Island Gin Blues, by Roosevelt “Honeydripper” Sykes

In March 1905 a white teenager named Margaret Lear was on her way home from school in Shreveport, Louisiana. As she passed through an African-American neighborhood, possibly similar to the one shown here, she was brutally attacked and murdered. Her accused assailant, a black man named Coleman, allegedly was drunk on “cheap gin” he had bought at a local saloon.

The murder and its aftermath garnered national headlines. Three years later a prominent muckraking American journalist, Will Irwin, writing in Collier’s Weekly of May 16, 1908, used the incident to indict the saloon trade and in particular inexpensive gin that was being produced by Northern distilleries and, as Irwin saw it, “sold in the low dives of all the black belt from the Carolinas to Louisiana and Mississippi.” .

Irwin, shown here, also blamed the names and advertising for brands of gin as suggesting that they possessed the properties of aphrodisiacs. “The gin was cheap, its labels bore lascivious suggestions and were decorated with highly indecent portraiture of white women.” Implicit was his conclusion that this liquor was responsible for sexual aggression in Coleman and other blacks. The journalist singled out for special attention Devil’s Island Endurance Gin. In quart bottles, like the one shown here, it sold for $1.

Two of the brand’s early 1900s trade cards seem to bear out Irwin’s contentions. The first shows a man peeking into a woman’s beach dressing room where it is not clear how much clothing she has on. Opened, she is seen wearing a bathing suit and seems little disturbed about being watched and says: “Those fellows who drink that Devil’s Island Endurance Gin seem to have the very “devil’ in them.” Note that from the shadows, Satan is watching. The second trade card shows a woman in the process of undressing, with scads of bosom showing. She sees the devil in the mirror with a large bottle of gin. The liquor is credited with giving “that good and funny feeling” and other positive effects. This gin clearly was being merchandised as a stimulant for something.

Devil’s Island Endurance Gin was a product of Dreyfuss, Weil & Co. of Paducah, Kentucky, which registered the trade name in 1905. In business from 1887 until 1918 and the coming of Prohibition, the company was both a distiller and distributor of a wide number of liquor brands, chiefly whiskey. One of its ads boasted that Devil’s Island Endurance Gin was made from a secret European formula and that by its third year in production 7,619,410 bottles had been sold in the U.S.

Irwin’s linking of Devil’s Island Endurance Gin and the Lear murder, caught the attention of one of America most prominent industrialists and millionaires, Henry Ford. A notorious anti-Semite,Ford did a ghost-written weekly column for a newspaper he owned, the Dearborn Independent. On the assumption that Dreyfuss and Weil were Jewish, he used the article to rail against liquor trade for selling the “products of Jewish poisoned liquor factories.” The Jewish race, he more than implied, was responsible for lawless actions of the Negro race. One derogatory racial stereotype thereby became the occasion for another.

As for Coleman, guilty or not, he was nearly killed by a white lynch mob and the Louisiana militia had to be called out to protect him. Within nine days after the crime, according to newspaper reports, he was tried in a Shreveport court, found guilty, and “legally” executed. The New York Times reported that the Governor of Louisiana was expected to be in attendance at the hanging. Another stanza of Syke’s 1933 lyrics for Devil’s Island Gin Blues goes like this:

Oh, you learn tomorrow, 'Bout a month ago, You'll learn tomorrow night, 'Bout a month ago, Couple bottles of mo' gin, Mama, Lordy, an’ I had to go.

Mark Twain's "Jug of Empire"

Several years ago I published an article on Mark Twain, as the “patron saint” of American whiskey, one that subsequently was reprinted in my most recent book, Mostly Whiskey. With the 100th anniversary of Twain’s death approaching during April, 2010, it seems appropriate to devote attention once again to this giant of American literature and his love of Kentucky bourbon.

More than any other writer in the Nation’s history, Samuel Clemens aka Twain celebrated whiskey as the national drink of choice. He has been quoted saying: “Whiskey is for drinking; water is for fighting over.”

Twain’s most notable tribute to whiskey was an elaborate spoof on a patriotic saying known to young and old of his time: “Westward the course of empire takes its way....” Originally penned by an obscure American poet, the quote was reprinted frequently. It also became the title and theme of an famous 1861 painting, shown here, that still adorns a stairway in the U.S. Capitol. Put simply, the quotation implies that the United States was destined to move west and create an new empire in North America.

For Twain, who made a career out of debunking overly romantic notions, the driving force behind American expansion was not empire-building but whiskey. In his autobiographical book, “Life on the Mississippi,” the author took issue with the well known motto. It should have been, he said: “Westward the Jug of Empire takes its way.” Twain explained:
“How solemn and beautiful is the thought, that the earliest pioneer of civilization, the van-leader of civilization, is never the steamboat, never the railroad, never the newspaper, never the Sabbath-school, never the missionary--but always whiskey! Such is the case. Look history over; you will see. The missionary comes after the whiskey-- I mean he arrives after the whiskey has arrived; next comes the poor immigrant, with ax and hoe and rifle; next, the trader; next, the miscellaneous rush; next, the gambler, the desperado, the highwayman, and all their kindred in sin of both sexes; and next, the smart chap who has bought up an old grant that covers all the land; this brings the lawyer tribe; the vigilance committee brings the undertaker. All these interests bring the newspaper; the newspaper starts up politics and a railroad; all hands turn to and build a church and a jail-- and behold, civilization is established forever in the land. But whiskey, you see, was the van-leader in this beneficent work.”

But Twain/Clemens was not merely a man of words about whiskey. While not given to overindulging, his fondness for bourbon was well known. During his brief career as a journalist in Washington about 1868, Twain agreed to share expenses with a roommate with a similar taste for whiskey. Their total joint income per week was $24. In his autobiography he recounts: “Twenty four dollars a week would really have been riches to us if hadn’t had to support that jug; because of the jug we were always always sailing pretty close to the wind....”

When a friend sent him a case of whiskey, Twain’s thank-you note ran this way: “The whiskey arrived in due course...; last week one bottle of it was extracted from the wood and inserted in me, on the installment plan, with this result: that I believe it to be the best, smoothest whiskey now on the planet.”

In his later years, while in England on a lecture tour and to receive an honorary degree from Oxford University, shown here. Twain remarked to companions that despite enjoying their company he badly missed the taste of Kentucky bourbon. To accommodate him, his friends imported six cases and even switched from Scotch to help him drink it. Old Crow whiskey, claiming Twain for their own, ran a series of ads in the 1960s around his personna, including one with glass in hand and decanter nearby.

Twain was born two weeks after the approach to earth of Halley’s Comet. In 1909, the author predicted: “I came in with Halley’s Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year and I expect to go out with it....The Almighty has said, no doubt: ‘Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.” Prophetically, Twain died on April 17, 1910, reputedly one day after the comet’s closest approach to earth.

As shown here, lensman Dave Thomson has created a photo montage of Twain’s birthplace in Missouri; his home in Redding, Connecticut, where he died; and Halley’s Comet. The only important item missing from Thomson’s picture, to my mind, is a bottle of Kentucky bourbon.

"Man Wanted, No Irish Need Apply"

As St. Patrick’s Day approaches with its parades and parties, a time some say when everyone wants to be Irish, it is instructive to look back on a time, not so long ago, when it was quite different for immigrants from the Auld Sod. My Irish grandmother, born in Ohio about the time of the Civil War remembered the signs in her home town: “Man Wanted, No Irish Need Apply.” Prejudice against Irish was rampant throughout the United States in the 1800s and into the early 1900s.

Vivid evidence is a trade card from a St. Louis, Missouri, peddler of quack nostrums, that shows an Irishman, simian in looks, with dynamite and whiskey. It is entitled “The Friends of Ireland.” This card was circulated by a Bellevue, Ohio, pharmacy -- a town where also lived some of my Irish relatives. Irish at the time were about 12% of the population of Bellevue. Remember that trade cards were advertising pieces, meant to attract customers, not insult them.

That trade card seems tame, however, when compared to other cartoon images of the Irish in those times. “The most recently discovered wild beast” is the caption for a cartoon of an animal-like figure staring out of a cage bearing a sign: “Irish American Dynamite Skunk.” Around him are other Irish folks, apparently giving him support, while a policeman looks on in indifference. Truly it is a shocking image of an individual “bred in the United States,” as a second sign indicates.

Liquor and violence were the attributes of the Irish, if illustrations of the times are to be believed. Shown here is a cartoon of a monkey-like Irishman who brandishes a rum bottle in one hand and a flaming torch in the other, sitting on a barrel of gun powder. He is a clear and present threat to all right thinking Americans.

It was not only anonymous illustrators who were preaching the anti-Irish sermons of the time, but also well-recognized cartoonists. Thomas Nast, famous for helping to expose the corrupt Tammany Hall in New York City, was a determined foe of the Irish. In his drawing of an 1867 incident Nast depicts the rapacious Irish rioting against and defeating the forces of law and order.

Frederick Opper, who later gained national fame and fortune as the cartoonist creator of Happy Hooligan, was another artist skilled at Irish bashing. In a cartoon, captioned "A King of Shanty," he mocks Irish poverty, caricatures Irish people as ape like and primitive. This cartoon irishman has, again, the out-thrust mouth, sloping forehead, and flat wide nose of the standard Irish caricature. Note too that the man wears a cooking pot on his head.

Yet the Irishman had a vote in democratic America and the fear of mob rule was evident in depiction's of Irish and their leaders. The cartoon “Who’s Boss?” is meant to convey the idea that these less-than-human creatures were dictating the national policy on the drinking of alcohol. Mob rule, led by Irish, was thwarting the efforts of Prohibitionists.

One of the most telling images of the Irish appeared in the December 9, 1876, issue of Harper’s Weekly, which self-congratulated itself as “A Journal of Civilization.” There the Irishman is equated on a scale with a black man. The clear idea is that as the blacks were a curse on the South, so the Irish were a curse on the North.

At the age of 96 my Grandmother subscribed to Ebony magazine and strongly espoused the civil rights movement for African-Americans. When I asked her why, she said she remembered well the time when “No Irish need apply’.”

Prohibition: The View from Thuringa

In 1896, Gustav Schafer and Gunther Vater founded the Schafer and Vater Porcelain Factory in Thuringa, Germany, with the purpose of making high quality porcelain items. By 1910 the reputation of the pottery for craftsmanship and design had grown to international proportions and Sears Roebuck was importing and selling large quantities of Schafer and Vater pottery in the United States.

Among the pottery’s products were a host of small figural liquor bottles for distribution by American distillers and saloons, called nips.” The term is taken from an Old English word nipperkin, meaning a container of liquor holding a half pint or less. These German giveaways were always imported empty, then filled by a distiller, whiskey distributor, or saloonkeeper and handed off to favored customers.

An example is the “Old Sedgwick” ceramic figural. That was a brand of the A. Bauer Distillery of Chicago, a distiller profiled briefly in my blog of Sept. 18, 2009. This bottle has the brand name glazed right along with the figure of the jolly Dutch toper, sitting on a barrel and smoking his pipe. Many nips bore paper labels identifying the giver and containing company advertising.

With the coming of National Prohibition to the United States, this major business opportunity was largely denied to Schafer and Vater. Profits from their American exports were severely curtailed. The company response was to design and sell objects lampooning the notion of abolishing alcoholic drink. Several of these nips are my favorites.

For example, the pottery produced a jolly Uncle Sam sitting on a barrel pouring himself a large drink from a large bottle. On the barrel is written -- What We Want. This was a clear message about the unpopularity of Prohibition. Uncle Sam’s hat comes off to decant the liquor. This figure came in blue and brown glazes and also in multicolored painted versions.

Another figural nip makes fun of the hatchet-wielding Temperance terror from Kansas, Carrie Nation, discussed in my blog of Oct. 23, 2009. The nip is a pious looking woman in a bonnet and shawl clutching a large bottle, her eyes lifted heavenward, her hands folded a in prayer. Her skirt carries the message: God save Miss Carrie Nation. This same figure comes with a range of messages. One of them asks God to save Francis Willard, the well-known leader of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union.

Often Schafer andVater nips came in bottle shapes with a cartoon in bas relief on one side. Among them is one multicolor ceramic showing the good ship “Prohibition” whose captain is swigging down what one presumes to be alcohol, throwing the empties into the sea, while a sailor looks on in some alarm. Another in a brown glaze, contrasts the happy drinker with the stern faced Prohibitionist and asks the (easily answered) question: “Wet or Dry?”

We conclude with a nip figurine of a rather stout gentleman with a wide smile on his face and carrying bottles, presumably of whiskey, in his hand, arms, and pocket to point of breaking, nine in all. The caption at this feet says simply Prohibition. I have pondered what message Schafer & Vater tried to get across with this image. My guess: This gent represents the fact that drinking in America actually increased in many places during Prohibition.

After a fire destroyed its first factory in 1918 Schafer and Vater rebuilt and continued to produce high quality ceramics. As a result of World War II and its postwar location in Communist East Germany, the company’s international customer base was cut off. The pottery began a slow decline that ended in 1962 when it closed. In 1972 the East German Government assumed full control of the vacant factory and is reported to have destroyed all company records and molds. The interesting and inventive ceramics of this Thuringan firm presumably can never be reproduced. As a result, Schafer and Vater nips today not only are avidly collected, they often bring fancy prices.

Nudes: Paris Salon to U.S. Saloon

By 1748 the official exhibit of the French Academy of Fine Arts, known popularly as the Paris Salon, had become the greatest art event in the Western World, a status it maintained for 142 years. First held annually and later biannually, the Salon had undisputed influence in Europe and abroad. Nudes were a regular feature of the exhibits, many of them “dressed up” in mythological references. As shown here, in 1864 Artist Honore Daumier satirized middle-class French women scandalized by the Paris Salon’s many paintings of the naked Goddess Venus.

Nude paintings in the exhibit, often in reproduction, found a ready audience in the United States. American drinking establishments, from which women and children almost always were barred, regularly featured paintings of unclothed women over the bar or on the walls of their dark wood environs. The fleshy products of the Salon inevitably made their way to the American saloon.

Among the most popular and widespread were the works of William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905). Shown here in a self-portrait, Bouguereau was a staunch traditionalist whose realistic paintings on mythological themes were interpretations of classical subjects with a heavy emphasis on the female body. One of his most popular Salon offerings was called “Nymphs and Satyr,” showing a bevy of unclad damsels cavorting around a half-man, half-goat figure.

It was just the thing to lend a touch of French class to a Yankee bar. At the Hoffman House, a well-known Manhattan males-only bastion, a copy of the notorious Bouguereau painting resided on one wall. For a hefty fee Hoffman House allowed its name and the painting to be used to advertising products like cigars and whiskey. As a result “Nymphs and Satyr” was replicated on saloon signs and a wide array of merchandising items. It became as well known in the U.S. as in France.

At the Paris Salon of 1884 appeared a painting by a popular French artist named Emile Antoine Bayard (1837-1891). Entitled “An Affair of Honor,” it represented a duel with rapiers between two women who were stripped to the waist. The scene was laid in a well known Paris park where reputedly many encounters of this kind reputedly occurred among French courtesans. The popularity of the picture was enormous and it was exhibited all over the world.

Much reproduced, the image found its way into many of our 19th and early 20th Century barrooms. The Klein Brothers distillers of Cincinnati added advertising for their whiskey brands on the picture and gave copies away to favored saloon keepers. As for Artist Bayard, shown here on an 1891 magazine cover, he later moved to illustrating novels, among them “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”

Angelo Asti (1847-1903) was another frequent exhibitor at the Paris Salon. Born in Italy, he resided most of his life in France and was considered a French painter. Asti was renowned for paintings of women with long hair and loose bodices as well as erotic nudes -- some depicted on those infamous French postcards.

Asti is reputed to have spent some time in America, specifically Ohio, where he may have met the Bieler boys, three scions of a Cincinnati distilling family. The Bielers had an eye for advertising their Brookfield Rye whiskey with feminine pulchritude. They distributed signs and other artifacts that displayed a fetching lady wearing a diaphanous dress and contemplating a bottle of their whiskey. It bears Asti’s signature in the lower left.

Just as the Paris Salon lost popularity in the early 1900s, so the death knell of saloon nude art was sounded by the onset of Prohibition in 1920. When Repeal occurred in 1934 women now had the vote, openly quaffed alcoholic mixtures, and increasingly frequented dens of strong drink. As the females began to walk through the swinging doors in ever great numbers, the nudes behind the bar began to come down until today they are virtually as extinct as the dodo.

Key Words: The Salon of Paris, nude saloon art

The Collecting Impulse

Newsman Jim Lehrer, himself a world class collector of bus signs and memorabilia, once said that there are important people and organizations working to preserve the “big things of life” like buildings and battlefields. It is left to the rest of us, Lehrer said, to preserve the other things.

But we would be kidding ourselves if we pretend that research and preservation are the only reasons for collecting. Lehrer himself has characterized the thrill of the “The Find,” the rush a collector gets when at last encountering that most highly sought item.

Scientists have studied the phenomenon and some concluded that the drive to collect comes from deep in the human psyche and may be almost as old as homo sapiens himself. Says Anthropologist David Given, “This focus on artifacts is a deep principle, and something that separate us from all other primates. Certain parts of our brain have specific areas that resonate to the features of human-designed products. We can’t get enough of them. It’s almost a compulsion.”

Throughout the ages pottery has had a special attraction for collectors. I am among them. In his book, A Tramp Abroad, American author Mark Twain announced himself as a “bric-a-brac” collector with a yen for ceramics. He said: “I am proud to know that I lose my reason as immediately in the presence of a rare jug with an illustrious mark on the bottom of it as if I had just emptied that jug.”

As Twain implies, there is something very primal about pottery. In the Old Testament Bible, for example, the potter’s art was extolled. Jeremiah, shown here in a medieval statute, in Verse 18: 1-8, was directed by the Lord to visit a potter: The Prophet, shown here in a statue, recounted his experience: “So I went down to the potter’s house; and there he was, working at the wheel. And whenever the vessel he was making came out wrong, as happens with the clay handled by potters, he would start afresh and work it into another vessel, as potters do.” A valuable lesson in pragmatism.

Writing in a more contemporary period the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, shown here, expressed this image of the potter creating from the earth: “No handicraftman’s art can to our art compare; we potters make our pots of what we potters are.” Or as it has been put more humorously: “If it be ashes to ashes and dust to dust; please, potter, handle my kin gently if you must.”

Speaking personally, the jug shape itself is highly attractive. I like to handle the items in my collection, to feel the texture of their surfaces and their roundness. It has been speculated that ceramic vessels that bulge at the bottom and constrict at the top as jugs do subconsciously signify shelter, self-sufficiency and “amplitude.” This may be just a fancier way of expressing the verse that appears on an American mini-jug:

“Nearer brown jug to me,
“ My lips pressed to thee,
“Even though thou art but clay,
“Close by thee I’ll stay.”

Still life artist Dennis J. Grafe once explained why he preferred to paint and draw jugs rather than landscapes. He explained that his purpose was to make his viewers throw off casual observation of their surroundings and really become aware of the distinct qualities of objects. “In the case of a jug,” Mr. Grafe said, “the viewer is exposed several qualities of this object which make it unique....shape, color, texture or weight.” In this view the pleasure derived is appreciating the individuality and authenticity of an item.

Collectable artifacts obviously range far beyond pottery. My collecting friends cherish bottles, vases, tiles, paperweights, watch fobs, match safes, trade cards, model airplanes, books, old toys and hundreds of other items. One only need look at eBay for a day to understand the vast numbers of different artifacts being collected by Americans.

Whatever an individual collects, whether of interest to me or not, I respect the impulse and pride behind the effort. While a particularly fine example of a jug may not be comparable to owning a Rembrandt painting of one, we collectors can be encouraged by the words of the famous detective Sherlock Holmes in one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle stories. Holmes tells his friend, Dr. Watson: “To the man who loves art for its own sake, it is frequently in its least important and lowliest manifestations that the keenest pleasure is to be derived.” To which I would add: “Elementary my dear Watson.”

Blacks in Whiskey Ads - 150 Years

The depiction of African-Americans in whiskey merchandising over the past 150 years has reflected societal changes. The trade card “Essence of Old Virginia,” for example, has been dated from 1859, on the eve of the Civil War. It advertises “Wheat Whiskey” of the A.M. Bininger Co. of New York City. The obvious message conveyed is how happy Southern slaves are playing music and dancing for their white masters. The ad surely was scorned by Abolitionists.

The much reproduced Belle of Nelson Whiskey advertisement shows a black female slave serving the nude ladies of a Middle Eastern harem. According to the Library of Congress where an original resides, this image dates from 1883, not long after the end of Reconstruction in the former Confederacy. With the future of African-Americans much debated in both South and North, it likely was safer to depict blacks -- and nude women -- in an exotic setting.

In 1900 the Green River Distillery of Owenboro, Kentucky, began using the image of a grizzled black man leading a donkey with a jug of whiskey and an umbrella strapped to the saddle. The image reflected the idea of the faithful, submissive Negro in the South that had come to be accepted as a national myth. Note the details of his face.

The inspiration for this image purportedly was a story told to the distillery founder, John McCulloch, a Kentuckian who had opposed slavery. According to the tale, a lengthy rain storm disrupted liquor supplies arriving at local tavern and it had run dry. Suddenly an African gentleman,braving the gale, appeared in town to deliver Green River Whiskey aboard his mule. Suddenly the rain stopped and a rainbow appeared. The thirsty crowd cheered and celebrated for days. Green River used the image in dozens of ways over the years.

As blacks moved North, generally to fill menial positions, their depiction in service roles such as waiters, porters, or bellhops were common. Note the ad for “Grant ‘63” whiskey from the Spang Distillery of Boston. This image appeared on an ink blotter issued about 1910. There may be some irony as well in the whiskey being named for General Ulysses S. Grant, who defeated the Confederacy and ended slavery in the South.

Extending from 1920 until 1934 National Prohibition meant no whiskey ads. With Repeal, surviving distilleries were quick to resume merchandising. The industry feared that during the hiatus consumers had forgotten how to make and mix drinks. Many distilleries in 1934 and 1935 issued “recipe” books, often with histories attached. One featured Irvin S. Cobb, a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist who had been a leader in the fight against Prohibition. Cobb, whose reputation and career soon would fall because of his racist views, was featured in a booklet from Frankfurt Distillery and its Paul Jones brand. Among illustrations was one that stereotyped blacks happily mixing drinks for white “gentlemen.” Clearly this was meant to invoke nostalgia for the “Good Old Days” of the pre-bellum South.

The theme of African-Americans as servants of affluent whites carried over into the next decade as exemplified by a Norman Rockwell-drawn 1940’s ad for Cream of Kentucky Bourbon. This brand had used black servants in its ads at least since 1911 and Rockwell obliged with an image that was only fractionally better than the Frankfurt Distillery’s. The waiter clearly is cast in an “Amos and Andy” mode.

The prize for the most racist whiskey ad of them all, however, must go to the Brown-Foreman Distillers of Louisville, Kentucky. Depicted on its 1940’s match cover ad for “Old Polk” brand whiskey is an African-American straight out of a minstrel show. He has thick lips, big feet and a loud wardrobe. This insensitivity when viewed from a 21st Century perspective seems almost unbelievable. Interesting too, distillery advertising of Old Polk Whiskey before Prohibition featured the likeness of former President James K. Polk.

Today when African-Americans are depicted in whiskey ads, of course, the images are entirely different. They are shown enjoying drinks with friends, often with whites present or in family situations. The Nation, including American distillers, has come a long way in the 150 years since Bininger’s dancing colored boy, but obviously it hasn’t been an easy road.