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Cocktails: Immigration
Appears in
Published 2004
Driven by the potato famine in the British islands and the disastrous economy of the post-Napoleonic Wars on the Continent, waves of immigrants flocked to the cities of the Northeast, and they brought strong communal drinking traditions with them—the pubs of the British islands and the beer halls of Germany.
Ghettos in the cities were soon filled with illegal drinking establishments and social clubs called “blind pigs.” The enormous potential for a political power base in these ghettos did not go unnoticed by the political machines of the day. Many of these illegal operations were later turned into bars and saloons funded by the big-city political machines like Tammany Hall in New York City to gain control of the voting population in the Irish and German ghettos. Some blocks in Manhattan had as many as six bars, and it was in these bars that the business of the political precincts and wards was done. It was in these bars that the cocktail culture of the latter half of the nineteenth century was born.