Beer is without question, like Pizza, Madonna, and fast cars,an icon of modern American culture. That the white working classAmerican male is stereotypically referred to as "Joe Six-pack" isbut one example of the dominance of beer as lower and middle-class America's preferred alcoholic beverage. But this was notalways the case. 150 years ago, in the 1840s, hard cider held theposition now held by beer as the preferred alcoholic beverage ofthe working class. But somehow, by the end of the 19th century and well beforeProhibition, Cider all but disappeared in the United States.That hard cider remains popular in all the other outposts ofBritish culture, that apples are still a major American crop, andthat every other alcoholic drink once popular in America cameback after prohibition make the question of cider's disappearanceall the more perplexing. Order a glass of hard cider in an American bar today, and thebartender might look at you strangely. The only hard ciders to befound are relatively expensive English imports like Bulmer's andWoodpecker's. So foreign has this drink become that mostAmericans have never even tasted it. While hard cider remains afavorite draught beverage at most British pubs and is stillconsumed in large quantities in Canada, Australia, and itscountry of origin, France, descendants of anglo-culture in theUnited States, and only in the United States, no longer know whathard cider is. Had hard cider never been produced in the U.S., for whateverreason, then this might not seem such an oddity. But what makesthis particularly problematic is that hard cider was not onlywidely produced and consumed in the U.S. but held a place of highesteem on American tables and in American taverns well into the19th century. Perhaps the height of cider's popularity came inthe election campaign of 1840 when the conservative Whigcandidate, William Harrison, managed to convince a majority ofworking class Americans that he was one of them by associatinghimself with the symbols of "log cabin and hard cider." Numerous anecdotes testify to the popularity of hard cideras Americans' preferred drink on the farm and in the town fromthe colonial period to its demise. Because public sources ofwater in unsanitary old England were not fit to drink from, thecolonists at first distrusted the water in the new world, andtheir opponents even used the fact that they drank water as asign of their obvious desperation. Apple trees for ciderproduction were among the first fruits planted in the Britishcolonies. John Hull Brown reports that from the early 18thcentury to 1825 even children drank hard cider with breakfast anddinner. By the 1670s, orchards in New England were producing upto 500 hogsheads of cider annually in some communities. In 1721,several villages in New England reported a cider production ofover 3000 barrels a year per village. John Adams drank a tankardof hard cider every morning. Horace Greeley, looking back at theearly years of the 19th century, recalled that a barrel of hardcider lasted his family barely a week; anybody dropping in hadhis mug filled again and again, "until everybody was about asfull as he could hold....whole families died drunkards andvagabond paupers from the impetus first given by cider-swillingin their rural homes." (Demon 21) Nor was this a peculiarly New England phenomenon. Ciderappears constantly in the literature and letters of 17th and 18thcentury Virginia. William Byrd's Diary provides ample evidencethat cider was a staple drink on his plantation. In 1682,Nicholas Spencer, secretary of the Virginia House of Burgesses,speculated on the cause of the riots of the past two years: "Allplantations flowing with syder, soe unripe drank by ourlicentious inhabitants, that they allow no tyme for itsfermentation but in their braines." Virginia's Shenandoah valleycontinues to be a major apple producing region, and yet eventhere hard cider is little known today. In the one good study of patterns of consumption of alcoholicbeverages in early American culture, W. J. Rorabaugh providestables which attempt to catalogue alcohol consumption bydifferent drinks. His data indicates a dramatic disappearance ofcider as a favored drink in the year 1840 followed by thebeginning of beer as a national beverage. By his own admission,however, the table, while it looks authoritative, is based onguess work from anecdotal and "literary sources." No good harddata exists. Furthermore, there is ample evidence that beer, forinstance, was consumed along with cider from the colonial periodon, and that cider continued to be consumed along with beer andother alcoholic drinks well after 1840. Yet Rorabaugh's tableposes the problem sharply. What happened to cider? How can thealmost complete disappearance of a popular cultural artifact beaccounted for? And just what significance does this have forAmerican cultural studies? While tastes in cider and beer may seem frivolous subjectsfor serious scholarship, foodways have come to be recognized asan important element of culture and are a fitting part of therecent emergence of cultural studies. The disappearance of hardcider is an oddity that provides important insights into Americanculture. Easy answers to this problem leap quickly to the mind.Temperance and prohibition were often cited by those to whom weposed the question. But these movements were directed against allalcoholic drinks, particularly whiskey and rum, all of which,except cider, survived to be drunk again. A popular example,cited in several texts, refers to a farmer who chopped down hisorchard in a fit of Temperance enthusiasm. But this one exampleis only one anecdote repeated as if it represented a trend; itdoes not provide evidence of a movement, nor does it explain thecontinuation of significant apple production in numerous regionsof the country. As long as apples continued to be grown, cidercould have been made. Nor does the mere citing of temperanceanswer the particular problems posed by the disappearance ofcider; why should the temperance campaign affect cider socompletely and not beer which is equally alcoholic? Rumors ofapple tree blights and diseases that killed the orchards andforced people to switch to beer are not backed up by anyevidence. And, again, apple production continued despite whateverblights may have occurred. To say, as some have, that Americanssimply preferred harder, more alcoholic drinks does not explainthe continuing popularity of beer. Perhaps the most often heard theory is that German immigrantsarriving in the 1840s and 1850s brought with them superiormethods of brewing which produced better beers which "just"tasted better and therefore replaced cider. Why this would happenin the United States, however, and not in the other Britishcultural outposts, or in England, remains a mystery unexplainedby the "just tastes better" theory. Moreover, this ignoresanthropologist Marvin Harris' thesis that taste follows behaviorand does not determine it. We like what we like for reasons ofcost, efficiency, protein requirement, ecology, and hierarchicalsocial desires. Even religious food prohibitions, argues Harris,follow and rationalize ecological and social/historicalnecessity; religious prohibitions are an effect and not a cause. What we then call "taste" is but a question of familiarityand habit. Taste is as conditional and as shaped by context asany other value. To say that beer "just" tastes better is toimply that there are no external causal factors responsible forthis change in taste. But nothing in our cause and effectuniverse "just" happens. There are reasons for change and theseneed to be explored. One can readily understand Germanimmigration and improved beer production as causes for beer'sassuming a much larger share of the beverage market, but whycider-drinking Americans should immediately give up theirtraditional drink for that of a recent immigrant group remains amystery. If anything, one would assume resistance on the part ofolder inhabitants to the peculiar symbols of the culturalpreferences of recent immigrants who are often viewed as an alienthreat. Cider, before we get much further, needs to be defined. Fortax purposes, the U.S. government defines cider as "a beveragemade from fermented apples of not more than 8% alcohol." Thesweet apple "cider" available at roadside stands in the Fall is,literally, apple juice, the product of squeezing fresh apples.The thin, clear liquid sold in the stores as "apple juice" is infact apple juice that has been hom*ogenized, pasteurized,sweetened, filtered, and otherwise processed until almost all ofthe flavor, color, and content has been removed. True cider, orwhat is sometimes called "Hard Cider" is the result of fermentingfresh apple juice without the addition of any extra sugar. Thisproduces an alcoholic beverage of about 5% alcohol, depending onthe sweetness of the apples. Consumed before all the sugar isfermented, or kept alive by the addition of extra sugar, ciderusually has a slight carbonation. With additional sugar added,historically in the form of molasses, honey, or maple syrup, thealcohol content can be brought up from an average 5% to around10%. Any alcoholic drink over 8% but under 14% is technically awine. Much confusion, therefore, still remains in any discussionof cider. Most people today use the term inappropriately to meanfresh, unprocessed apple juice. Many who do ferment the juice butadd sugar still call the resulting 10 to 12% alcohol content"cider" instead of "wine." For the purposes of this paper, theterm "cider" refers to the beverage made from fermented apples without any extra sugar having been added. The very fact of cider's disappearance also needs to beclarified. After all, even today, many road side stands will sella gallon of cider along with their apple juice. In the lastdecade, several small wineries have begun to produce true applecider and to market it nationally. And the English and Canadianimports still have a loyal if small following. But none of theseare examples of a significant industry or market share. Theyremain at best marginal. Rorabaugh's rather dramatic charts alsoneed some clarification. The drop-off in cider consumption in theUnited States does not seem to have been nearly as dramatic as heimplies. Anecdotal evidence in literature and in popular culturecontinue to link cider and rural American life even up to theturn of the century. Currier and Ives produced at least threepaintings which all depict cider making in the late 1800s. Thereis, however, in each of these, a element of nostalgia thatsuggests that such scenes were indeed a fading part of theAmerican landscape. It is even possible that the best evidence of the popularityof cider in the early nineteenth century, the Whig's 1840 "LogCabin and Hard Cider campaign," owes more to nostalgia than tothe contemporary popularity of cider. Just as having been bornin a log cabin came to be a symbol of the values associated withthe early republic, so cider seemed also to partake of the flavorof those earlier times. The suggestion here is that by 1840,cider drinking was already fading from the American scene andhence could be used to evoke an earlier, simpler, and supposedlymore virtuous era. What we have then is not the sudden decline in cider drinkingsuggested by Rorabaugh but a gradual decline that began early inthe century and took many decades to complete. The catastrophictheories presented by a few, such as the possibility of an appleblight that ruined the orchards and forced every drinkingAmerican to turn to beer, have no verification. Instead of such simple, unicausal answers as an apple blight,or the temperance movement, we are forced to recognize that thedemise of cider occured for a complex variety of interrelatedreasons. These causes are not merely economic, or political, orhorticultural, or ecological, or social but all of the above. Ifanything, they demonstrate the extreme complexity of any attemptto unravel even the most seemingly innocent of cultural changes.And they demonstrate that understanding such changes requires anunderstanding of the way in which different, seeminglyunconnected cultural factors reinforce one another. Among the causes that contributed to the demise of cider inthe United States, without question the Temperance Movementbelongs near the top of the list. From the 1820s onward,Temperance spread steadily and had significant impact on Americandrinking habits. According to Rorabaugh, the United States in theearly years of the century was on a massive drinking binge.Release from the constraints of a more rigid social order,anxieties that accompanied the unsettled mobility of life in arapidly expanding country, succeeding waves of prosperity anddepression, the availability of cheap alcohol, and a justifiedfear of drinking contaminated well water all contributed to thisbinge. The Temperance Movement was part of a reaction to what wasperceived to be a growing lack of social discipline. Temperanceadvocates feared that drunkenness would destroy the republic. Coupled with this was a perceived threat from recentimmigrant groups. The Irish and the Germans, particularly in themassive waves of immigration in the 1840s, were seen as threatsto Anglo dominance. Temperance was very much a WASP movementcentered in the Protestant churches geared towards maintainingthe hegemony of WASP institutions. The disintegration of thefamily due to alcoholism was seen as particularly dangerous asprolific German and Irish immigrants competed for jobs andpolitical control. Cider, as a traditional English drink, wasmuch identified not so much as an American drink but as a symbolof rural WASP culture. The earlier English settlers who drankcider could be distinguished from the Germans who drank beer andthe Irish who drank both beer and whiskey. When in an effort toend drunkenness among the WASP majority Temperance advocatesurged their countrymen to refrain from alcoholic beverages, ciderwas therefore peculiarly vulnerable. The Cult of Domesticity was also a part of the Temperancemovement. The establishment of the home as a secure haven fromthe cultural and economic storms of the early Republic,separating male and female spheres, was part of the largermovement to reassert some sort of control over what seemed to bethe disintegration of traditional, WASP values. Women were amongthe most active proponents of Temperance citing the damage thatalcoholism did to the family. Temperance literature was coloredwith stories of wife beating and child abuse. In theirinfluential Domestic Economy, Harriet Beecher Stowe and hersister, Catherine Beecher, who has been called practically thefounder of the Cult of Domesticity, wrote that even suchseemingly "innocent" alcoholic drinks as apple cider have noplace in a Christian home where children might be led intounwholesome activities. Hence, even those not in danger ofbecoming alcoholics or of harming the home were obliged toobserve strict temperance in order not to set a bad example forthose weaker than they. Cider drinking in the home such as thatwhich Horace Greeley remembered from his youth had to go. Against this decline in alcohol consumption generally amongthe temperance-minded WASP majority, German settlers inPennsylvania and the mid-West found themselves obliged to producetheir own alcoholic drinks, something they would have done in anycase. Among the technological innovations that the immigrantsbrought from Europe was the recent introduction of bottomfermenting yeasts. Previously, beer made in the United States hadbeen made with top fermenting yeasts, yeasts that floated on thetop of the wort exposed to air during the brewing process. Thisexposed the beer to numerous bacteria and unwanted yeasts whichmore often than not produced off flavors or outright spoilage.Prior to the 1840s, American beer was of fairly poor quality.With the introduction of bottom fermenting yeasts, these spoilageproblems were overcome. At the same time, waves of Germanimmigrants provided a ready market for the new and improvedstyles of beer. What's more, many of these new immigrants settledin urban areas. Urbanization was an important part of the changes in sociallife that lead to the decline of the dominance of cider and therise of beer. The concentration of immigrant Germans,particularly in Pennsylvania and later around the Great Lakes incities like Milwaukee, was one factor that favored beer in thecities. Another is that cider production has to be done on sitenear the orchards or in towns surrounded by orchards. The applesrequired are too heavy and bulky to be shipped over greatdistances, and without refrigeration they would spoil. Hence,cider had to be produced from apples at the orchard and thendelivered to urban markets in large wooden barrels. Beer on theother hand could be brewed right in the middle of the city. Theonly ingredients required were barley, which was light and easilyshipped without spoilage, and water, which was plentiful. Thus acombination of German ethnic preference for their native beer,the development of bottom fermenting yeasts, and the economics ofcider and beer production all favored beer over cider in thecities. Another factor which influenced urban drinking patterns, andkept the Temperance Movement at bay, were the repeated Choleraepidemics of the 1830s and 1840s. Polluted water in the citieswas the cause of several extremely serious CHolera epidemics.Water become as feared in the Urban United States in the middleof the nineteenth century as it had been in England in theseventeenth century. Unspoiled alcoholic beverages were known tobe safe from the disease. Not until the beginnings of sanitarywater works in the late 1840s was it safe to follow theTemperance crusaders cold water army. Milk drinking did notbecome widespread in urban areas until later in the century withthe development of railroads and the invention of refrigeratedrailroad cars. By then, cider drinking was already a quaint,peculiarly rural WASP tradition. Even among rural WASPs, however, cider drinking remainedlargely an Eastern tradition. The five to ten years that it tookfor an apple tree to mature to full fruit production made it aless desirable crop for a mobile population. The rapid expansionof the frontier westward, often by entrepreneurial settlers whocleared the land, built a farm, sold it, and then moved on, wasnot congenial to the time and stability required for ciderproduction. Barley, on the other hand, could be grown andharvested in a single summer. Even further to the West, in theplains, the winters were too harsh for apple trees, but the flat,rich prairies were ideal for grain. There was only one JohnnyAppleseed, and his efforts were more symbolic thanrepresentative. Assuming then a niche for low-alcohol beverages such ascider and beer, in the competition between them, cider never hada chance. Even if the Temperance campaign had not seriouslyrestricted cider drinking in the ethnic WASP community, thecomparative economics of cider and beer production, the relativeease and cheapness of beer brewing compared to the time andexpense of apple growing, would have favored the growth of beerover cider. The anthropologist of foodways, Marvin Harris, has developedwhat he calls "Optimal Foraging Theory." This states, in essence,that humans will like those foods which are the easiest and thecheapest to obtain. Hence, Americans do not eat insects, notbecause they taste bad but because the amount of energy requiredto gather them is high and the return in protein is relativelylow. Our perception that they "taste Bad" follows their undesirability as a source of food. Presumably, if insects in thenew world were slow and fat, our ancestors would have developeda taste for them. We can state then that beer became America'sfavorite working class drink, not because of any defect in thetaste of cider, but because of the economics of production. This still leaves behind the curious question of why ciderconsumption disappeared so completely. One would assume that someremnants of the old habits would persist, just as some peoplecontinue to favor peculiar regional foods or to use hula hoops.One answer has to do with the identification of cider drinkingwith the older WASP values of rural America. Because that ethnicgroup was the primary carrier of Temperance, its peculiar favoredbeverage, cider, was particularly vulnerable. Beer and rum andwhiskey and wine had consumers outside of the WASP community.Hence these beverages maintained a market share and wereavailable after the temperance movement and later afterProhibition. When later generations of Yankees and other WASPsdid return to drinking low-alcohol beverages, beer was alreadycheaply and widely available. Moreover, cider drinking had becomeso closely associated with that older rural lifestyle thatalthough it was rejected by the Temperance crusaders it still was perceived as a part of the culture that produced Temperance.In other words, a younger generation in rebellion against theteetotaling habits of its parents rejected those things whichsmacked of that quaint old Currier and Ives culture. What littlecommercial cider production still existed in the United States bythe turn of the century seems to have been done in completely byProhibition in the 1920s. When prohibition ended in the 1930s,there was neither the desire nor the means to resuscitate thecider industry. Another curious factor seems to have been added to themystery early in the century, however. Evidence exists that thebeer industry, keeping a wary eye on its once formidable rival,perhaps aware of the fact that cider continued to rival beerconsumption in England and Canada, bought up what little remainedof the cider industry. And as if this wasn't enough, in theFederal alcohol regulations of 19??, for unexplained reasons,cider was expressly prohibited for sale if it contained any addedpreservatives. What made this suspiciously noteworthy is thatwine and beer were not subject to the same restrictions. Theycould continue to be sold across state lines even though theycontained sulfites and other preservatives. Only cider was sorestricted. The result, of course, was to forestall theredevelopment of any cider industry. This explains why todaycider can be sold at farm stands but that there is only a tinycider industry which is just now trying to become national. It ishard to avoid the conclusion that the beer industry did its partto make sure that cider would never again become America'sfavorite low alcohol drink. Last but perhaps not least, in addition to the attack oncider from the beer industry at the turn of the century, softdrinks, notably coca-cola, seem to have been marketed for exactlythe niche once filled by cider. The slight degree of stimulantpromised by the cocaine with which Coca-cola was first producedand the effervescence both imitate aspects of cider. In 1896, aneditorial in the New York Times even made this comparisonexplicit calling on American workers to switch from debilitatingalcoholic refresheners like cider and to try the new colainstead. Thus, the temperance movement remains as a major culpritresponsible for the decline of cider consumption in the U.S., butthe association of cider with rural WASP culture was the addedfactor which distinguishes cider from beer or wine. Add to thisthe economics of beer production, growing urbanization, Germanimmigration, a predatory beer industry, and a substitute drink incoca-cola, and there seems to be enough factors working togetherto explain why and how cider so completely disappeared.
