In popular memory the repeal of US Prohibition in 1933 signaled alcohol’s decisive triumph in a decades-long culture war. But as Lisa Jacobson reveals, alcohol’s respectability and mass market success were neither sudden nor assured. It took a world war and a battalion of public relations experts and tastemakers to transform wine, beer, and whiskey into emblems of the American good life. Alcohol producers and their allies—a group that included scientists, trade associations, restaurateurs, home economists, cookbook authors, and New Deal planners—powered a publicity machine that linked alcohol to wartime food crusades and new ideas about the place of pleasure in modern American life. In this deeply researched and engagingly written book, Jacobson shows how the yearnings of ordinary consumers and military personnel shaped alcohol’s cultural reinvention and put intoxicating pleasures at the center of broader debates about the rights and obligations of citizens.

About the Author

Lisa Jacobson is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and author of Raising Consumers: Children and the American Mass Market in the Early Twentieth Century.

Reviews

"Full of fascinating and little-known stories that complement and complicate our understanding of twentieth-century culinary culture as a joint product of business, government, and consumers. Lisa Jacobson is one of the best writers on the history of consumer culture."—Megan Elias, author of Food on the Page: Cookbooks and American Culture

"Jacobson's exhaustive research provides a compelling window into the evolution of American drinking culture."—Vicki Howard, author of From Main Street to Mall: The Rise and Fall of the American Department Store

"Intoxicating Pleasures provides the most in-depth and well-researched account of the alcoholic beverage industries in the United States during the 1930s and 1940s. It persuasively argues that Americans' demand for access to alcoholic beverages was in fact a demand for the right to have pleasure."—Pamela Pennock, author of Advertising Sin and Sickness: The Politics of Alcohol and Tobacco Marketing, 1950–1990

"Surprises abound in Jacobson's eagerly awaited Intoxicating Pleasures! Creative research supports an erudite and groundbreaking analysis of alcohol’s still-contested reentry into American culture following Prohibition. A remarkable array of illustrations enhances the elegantly crafted narrative, showing how advocates reinvented moderate consumption as a patriotic and socially suitable source of respectable pleasures."—Pamela Laird, author of Advertising Progress: American Business and the Rise of Consumer Marketing