Meanwhile, other brands became popular in part thanks to deals cut with the military to place it in commissaries around the world-deals in keeping, it seems, with some of the charges of wartime profiteering that industry executives faced in the 1940s. And not just national: by Mitenbuler’s reckoning, Rebel Yell, later beloved of Keith Richard and other rockers, was a coded rejection of the nascent civil rights movement in the South. Who would have thought that taking a plug from the jug could be a resonant political act? Mitenbuler, a journalist who specializes in “drinking culture,” combs the archives to turn up stories both entertaining and revealing about how bourbon came to be identified as a national drink-a process as artificial and as eagerly swallowed up as the invention of Paul Bunyan. “America was astonishingly drunk.” So concluded just about every visitor to these shores in the early days of the republic.
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