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National Archives Opens “Spirited Republic” Exhibit

March 9, 2015 – America’s turbulent relationship with alcoholic beverages is now on view at the National Archives Museum’s “Spirited Republic” exhibit, which opened March 6, 2015.

The exhibit tracks the history of alcohol from the early settlers to the present day. Beer, hard cider, spirits and wine were consumed daily at all levels of society, even by children. It is well documented that many of the Founding Fathers had connections to alcohol. Samuel Adams worked for his father’s malt house. Thomas Jefferson made money from importing alcoholic beverages from Europe. Following the Revolutionary War George Washington ran a distillery near his home at Mount Vernon, producing as many as 11,000 gallons of brandy and whiskey in 1799, the year of his death.

There is a display that shows how many gallons of alcohol the average American drank in 1830. At 7.1 gallons per person of legal age it was two and a half times today’s national average. As Bruce Bustard the curator explained to ABC News, “You’d start with a wee dram at breakfast, and then you’d have something at perhaps a mid-morning break of your labor, you’d have whiskey with lunch at the noon hour, you might have an ale, and then in the evening you’d have a night cap,” Bustard said. “It was not binge drinking. It was integrated into the lives of their community and their individual work and family.”
There’s plenty to look at when it comes to the mid-19^th century Temperance Movement that culminated in Prohibition, which lasted from 1920 until 1933 when the 18^thAmendment was repealed by the 21^stAmendment. You’ll meet Daisy Simpson, a rare female federal agent known as the “the lady hooch hunter” in San Francisco where she enforced the law, as well as other colorful characters.

One of the exhibits is President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s cocktail shaker and cups that he used every night to make drinks for his staff when he was Governor of New York, during Prohibition, and when he became President.