The most interesting article I read this past weekend? Glad you asked. It was this column by the Wall Street Journal’s “How’s Your Drink?” columnist, Eric Felten. His subject is the history of the cocktail, and in 1,200 or so words, he distills a lot of complex facts into a high-octane tale.
Felten pours scorn on the notion that Alec Waugh (Evelyn’s older brother and an author himself) invented the cocktail party in London in 1925. He concludes that the credit, such as it is, must go to Mrs. Julius S. Walsh Jr. of St Louis, who in 1917 threw what was supposedly the world’s first cocktail party.
Why did I find this article so fascinating? It’s not because I’m a lush or an aficionado of beverage history or a friend of Felten. (I’ve never met the multi-talented author, who is not only a writer, but also a jazz musician based in Washington, D.C.). But somehow I always find his columns to be delightful and instructive reading—just the right “pick me up” for a dreary Saturday morning, and with none of the hangover associated with the more traditional variety.
I still treasure the Pimm’s Cup recipe he produced this summer, which made for some very contented guests at Boot Manor. And I keep reading even though we have some fundamental ideological disagreements. I think he is understandably, if sadly, deluded in his notion, expressed in this interview, that a “true” martini must be made with gin, not vodka. (I do find myself agreeing with him, however, that it is “fanciful” to think “that there is an appreciable difference among competing brands of vodka.”)
The cocktail history article grabbed me in particular because Felten mentions one of my favorite characters of all time—Smedley Butler, a Marine who won two Medals of Honor before being drummed out of the service (for insulting Mussolini in public of all things), and before he turned into an isolationist and pacifist in the 1930’s. Butler, a teetotaler sometimes known as “The Fighting Quaker,” occupies a prominent place in my book, The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power. He makes a fascinating cameo in Felten’s article:
The first cocktail party to get much ink in the New York Times . . . was a scandalous evening of drinking at San Diego’s Hotel Del Coronado. One evening in April 1926, the commander of the local Marine base, Brig. Gen. Smedley D. Butler, arrived at an officers’ party at the hotel and found one of his subordinates, Col. Alexander S. Williams, to be crocked. It might have all been ignored had Butler not loathed Williams’s politics, which were left-enough-of-center to be described as “anarchistic.” And so Butler had the man charged with intoxication. The court-martial that followed in the “cocktail party case” was something of a sensation, with a parade of junior officers perjuring themselves, attesting to Williams’s total sobriety. Old Smedley suffered a nervous breakdown, attributed to “worry over the coolness toward him by society since he made charges of intoxication” against Williams. The opprobrium felt so acutely by the general is some indication of the high esteem in which society already held the institution of the cocktail party.
I must remember the next time I have my favorite cocktail, a vodka gimlet (another drink, like the martini, that fundamentalists erroneously insist must be made with gin), to raise a toast to Felten and wish him all success on his forthcoming book, a compilation of his Journal columns.
