"Manhattan" Transcript

By Mark Sundaram

Welcome to the Endless Knot Cocktail Bar, or rather the Alibi Room in here in Sudbury! Tonight I’ve gone on location to explore the sometimes scandalous history of the Manhattan cocktail!

The Manhattan is one of the most classic and iconic of cocktails, right up there with the Martini. Its recipe is fairly straightforward: two parts whisky, one part sweet vermouth, a dash of bitters, and garnished with a maraschino cherry. There have been several different cocktail recipes with the name Manhattan and several similar recipes by different names, but the earliest reference to this cocktail by this name in the Oxford English Dictionary is from 1882. In the 1887 cocktail recipe book The Bartender’s Guide by Jerry Thomas, the world’s first celebrity bartender, the drink calls specifically for Boker’s bitters, though today it’s usually made with Angostura bitters, and rye whisky. During American prohibition from 1920 to 1933, American whiskey obviously became scarce, so Canadian rye smuggled into the US became the standard whisky to use, though now the cocktail is often made with bourbon. For more on this history and its connection to the American whisky market, you can check out an old video on the Manhattan made by my buddy the Cynical Historian.

The word whisky, unsurprisingly, has Celtic origins, and is an abbreviation of usquebaugh, which came into English from Scots Gaelic uisge-betha, meaning literally “water of life”, and was a calque on Latin aqua vitae, which was also the source of French eau de vie and Scandinavian aquavit. Gaelic uisge “water” goes the Proto-Indo-European root *wed- “water, wet”, which also gives us words such as wet, water, and vodka, from Russian meaning literally “little water”, quite the understatement, and both Gaelic betha and Latin vita come from Proto-Indo-European *gwei- “to live”, also the source of the words quick, vivid, biology, and zoo. Though there are two different roots meaning “water” in Proto-Indo-European, which we’ll look at later, Latin aqua comes from Proto-Indo-European root *akw-a-, which meant “water”, but may have originally meant something like “river” or “current”, coming from the root *oku- “swift”, which may also be the source of the root *ekwo-, from which comes Latin equus “horse” and thus English equestrian. In any case, the root *akw-a- also comes into English through Germanic, giving us the first element in the word island, appropriate given we’re talking about the island of Manhattan. The two spellings of whisky, by the way, is mainly a regional variation, with Ireland and the United States preferring whiskey with an <e> and everywhere else without the <e>. Now whisky is made from grain, but different whiskies can be made from different grains. Rye whisky, as the name implies, is made mainly with rye grain, the word rye coming from Old English ryge, from the Proto-Indo-European *wrughyo- meaning “rye”, though in Canada the word rye is sometimes used to refer to whisky that doesn’t have rye in it. Bourbon whiskey, on the other hand, is made primarily from corn. The word bourbon is either a reference to Bourbon County in Kentucky or Bourbon Street in New Orleans, but in either case associates bourbon with the southern US, and both those placenames come ultimately from the French House of Bourbon, and the royal dynasty that dates back to the 16th century, which gets its name from Bourbon l’Archambault, chief town of a lordship in central France. This placename comes from the name of an old Celtic god of minerals and bubbling spring water, called Borvo, worshipped in Gaul and Lusitania, an area around modern day Portugal that was heavily influenced by Celtic mythology. The name Borvo comes ultimately from the Proto-Indo-European root *bhreu- “to boil, bubble, effervesce, burn”, also source of the words bread, brew, and appropriately enough ferment. As for Scotch whisky, the demonym Scot or Scotti in Latin was originally used by the Romans to refer to the Irish, and the name followed the Irish who invaded Scotland in the 6th century CE, and eventually became exclusive to the inhabitants of northwest Britain. It’s uncertain where the name originally came from, and though it might be Celtic in origin, there’s no evidence that the Irish used it to refer to themselves. It might be connected to the Gaulish personal names Scottos and Scottios, which in turn might come from a word for a cutting tool. There was a later folk etymology that derived it from the name of a mythical princess Scota of a Gaelic speaking people who came from Scythia, hence the name. Scythia itself comes from the Greek name for the region along the north coast of the Black Sea, supposedly from an Indo-European root meaning “shepherd”.

Finally, vermouth gets its name from being originally flavoured with wormwood, which in German is called Wermut. Though it’s uncertain where this German word comes from, there is an Old English cognate referring to the wormwood plant, wermod. This has led some to etymologize the word as wer meaning “man” (think werewolf, literally “man-wolf”) plus mod related to our modern word mood but with the original sense of “courage”. The particular kind of “man-courage” involved here stems from the fact that wormwood was used as an aphrodisiac. Vermouth is sometimes considered a type of amaro, an Italian bitter liqueur, and bitters are a type of concentrated botanical based alcoholic flavouring originally developed as patent medicines but now typically used as a flavouring in cocktails. The word bitter comes from Old English biter “having a harsh taste, sharp, cutting, angry, full of animosity, cruel”, ultimately from the Proto-Indo-European root *bheid- “to split”, with Germanic derivatives referring to biting (hence also to eating and to hunting) and woodworking, which is also the source of the words bite, beetle, boat, and pizza, and if you want to know more about vermouth and bitters, check out our video on the “Americano” cocktail.

Now there are no prizes awarded for guessing that the name of the cocktail is related to the New York borough Manhattan, but the exact connection here is worth exploring. First of all, the name of the borough comes ultimately from the Munsee language of the indigenous Lanape people, either (e:nta) mənaháhte:nk meaning “(where) one gathers bows” or simply munahan meaning “island”. The Dutch were the first European colonizers there as part of New Netherlands, setting up a fur trading settlement there in 1624, but there were ongoing hostilities between the Dutch and the English, called the Anglo-Dutch Wars, which affected their colonial holdings, and Manhattan, the southern tip of which was settled as New Amsterdam and served as the seat of the New Netherlands colonial government, moved back and forth between the two powers, with various treaties being signed along the way, and eventually Manhattan ended up under England’s control with the Netherlands instead shoring up their control of the small Banda Islands east of Java. This might not seem like a good deal today, but at the time the Banda Islands were the sole source of the extremely valuable spice nutmeg, which, by the way, is used in some bitters, though I have no idea if it’s in Angostura Bitters, whose recipe is a closely guarded secret, or Boker’s Bitters, whose recipe was lost and has only been reconstructed through analysis of a surviving sample. In any case it’s a better deal than the supposed $24 worth of  trinkets (though more accurately “60 guilders worth of trade” equivalent to about $1000 today) Peter Minuit paid the Lenape for Manhattan on behalf of New Netherlands.

Now New Amsterdam in New Netherlands was of course named after Amsterdam in the Netherlands, which itself is named after the Amstel river as the city had its start when a bridge and dam were built at that point in the river. The -dam part is exactly what it looks like, and appropriately enough English borrowed this water management technology word from Middle Dutch. Though dam can be traced back to the relatively widespread Proto-Germanic root *dammaz meaning “dam”, its ultimate origin is unknown, though one suggestion is that it might come from the Proto-Indo-European root *dhe- “to set, put”, the source of a great many English words including do, deed, doom, face, abscond, faction, fetish, affair, malfeasance, and nefarious. As for Amstel, it’s a compound formed from the Germanic elements ama “water, current” and stelle “place, area, position”. The stelle part is easily traceable back to the Proto-Indo-European root *stel- “to put, stand”, which also lies behind words such as stall, stale, stilt, and stout. The root of ama isn’t certain, but it might come ultimately from the Proto-Indo-European root *ap- “water”. As I metioned earlier, there seem to have been two basic roots in Proto-Indo-European that meant “water”, the first, *ap-, referred to animate water, water as a living force, and the second, *wed-, which we saw as the source of the words whisky and vodka, referred to water as an inanimate substance, ironic given that as we’ve seen that whisky means “water of life”. Another cocktail related word which we get from the *ap- root is julep, as in Mint Julep, but that’s for another cocktail video!

In any case, the name of the cocktail may in fact not be a reference to the borough directly, but instead to the Manhattan Club, a popular social club in Manhattan where the drink was said to have been invented. The story goes that in 1874 during a banquet there in honour of the newly elected Governor of New York, Samuel J. Tilden, who was a member of the club, a certain Dr Iain Marshall invented the drink and poured it for the guests. Who this Dr Iain Marshall was is unclear, and there are other origin stories, such as the one that claims the drink was invented by a bartender named Black (no other name given) in a bar on Broadway near Houston Street sometime in the 1860s, or the one that it was invented at a club for a Supreme Court justice named Truax (there never has been a Supreme Court justice of that name), so given the sketchiness of those stories we’ll stick with the Manhattan Club theory. The drink became popular and soon people started asking for a cocktail like the one at the Manhattan Club, and the drink thus got its name. The other important detail of the story was that the banquet was supposedly hosted by Lady Randolph Churchill, née Jennie Jerome, the mother of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and in some versions of this story it was she who invented the Manhattan cocktail. The only problem with this detail is the date: the New York State Election was held on November 3rd and Winston Churchill was born November 30th of that same year, so it’s not likely Lady Randolph was actually there. But this putative connection with Winston Churchill’s mother is not entirely random. You see the Manhattan Club, which was founded in 1865 by John Van Buren, son of US President Martin Van Buren, who was purported to have scandalously lost his famous father’s house in a card game, along with $5000 and his mistress Elena “America” Vespucci, a descendant of Amerigo Vespucci after whom America is named (again see our “Americano” video), and who is possibly apocryphally credited with saying “vote early and vote often”, was the Democratic answer to the Republican associated Union Club of the City of New York, though in later years the Manhattan Club’s members drifted towards the Republican end of things. The Manhattan Club was housed in a number of different locations over the years, but settled in 1899 in the Jerome Mansion, which had been the home of financier Leonard Jerome who was the father of Jennie Jerome, so she had grown up in that building, though that purported banquet in honour of Tilden would have taken place in the original location of the Manhattan Club at the old Charles Maverick Parker Mansion at 96 Fifth Avenue at the corner of 15th Street. As an amazing coincidence, one of the members of the Republican leaning Union club was one Winston Churchill, but not THE Winston Churchill, instead a best-selling American novelist also named Winston Churchill. This is why the British Prime Minister always published under the name Winston Spencer Churchill, to avoid the confusion, since at the time the American Churchill was the more famous writer. The two corresponded over the confusion of names and even met up on two occasions, but I need hardly tell you which Churchill history forgot. Poor Winston (you know which one I mean).

As for Jennie herself, or I suppose we should say Lady Randolph, she gave birth to Winston less than eight months after her marriage on April 15th, 1874 when she was 20 — she had been introduced to Lord Randolph Churchill by the Prince of Wales, later to become King Edward VII, in August of 1873 and they got engaged three days later, but the wedding was delayed for months as their parents couldn’t agree on the settlements — but I guess they couldn’t wait. Despite this initial passion, she is believed to have had many lovers during her marriage, including the very Prince of Wales who had introduced them, as well as Prince Karl Kinsky of Wchinitz and Tettau, and Herbert von Bismarck son of Otto von Bismarck, and she later married younger and younger men, one in fact younger than her own son. The Prince of Wales also had many mistresses, including one Alice Keppel, who happens to be the great-grandmother of Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall who was the mistress and now wife of the current Prince of Wales, Charles, subject of media scandals that played out in the tabloid press and eventually led to the death of Charles’s first wife Princess Diana.

The word scandal comes into English through French from Latin scandalum “cause for offence, stumbling block, temptation”, from Greek skandalon “a trap or snare laid for an enemy”, where it developed the figurative sense “a stumbling block, offence”. The original sense had the idea of a “trap with a springing device”, coming from the Proto-Indo-European root *skand- “to leap, climb”, also source of the words scan, scale, echelon, and ascend, descend, transcend, and condescend. Latin scandalum is also the source, through French again, of the word slander, and you can see how the two concepts are related. Now the original sense in English was religious, “discredit caused by irreligious conduct”, and the modern secular senses of “malicious gossip” and “shameful action or event” didn’t develop until a little later in the late 16th and early 17th centuries.

And it turns out that scandals, whether romantic or political, lie behind the stories of the Manhattan—and just a quick content warning, some of these involve sexual violence. Two years after Tilden celebrated his gubernatorial victory by drinking a Manhattan cocktail, he was a candidate in one of the most controversial presidential elections in US history in 1876. Tilden was of course the Democratic candidate and ran against Republican Rutherford B. Hayes. Tilden won an outright majority with nearly 51% of the popular vote, but had one too few electoral college votes for a majority, with twenty votes from four states being unresolved. Remind you of any other political scandals? To resolve the debate, Congress appointed a bipartisan electoral commission but the Republicans had a one-seat majority on the commission, and can you say stolen election? A compromise was agreed to in which the Democrats accepted Hayes as President in exchange for an end to Reconstruction, thus leading to the disenfranchisement of black voters in the south, so really it was a bad thing all around.

But there was a far more lurid scandal associated with the Manhattan Club. On the evening of June 26th, 1906, after leaving the Manhattan Club, renowned New York architect Stanford White went to a show at Madison Square Garden, which he had designed, and was shot in the face at point blank range by millionaire playboy Harry Kendall Thaw. To understand the events that led up to this bold murder, we have to go back to Tarentum, a small town near Pittsburgh in either 1884 or 1885 (no one is sure of the year) when Evelyn Nesbit was born. Her father, an attorney, encouraged her curiosity and self-confidence as a child, supplying her with books, including ones considered for boys only, and encouraged her to take lessons when she became interested in music and dance. Tragically, he died suddenly at only 40 years old, when Evelyn was 10 or 11, leaving the family without support. Her mother, not the most capable of women in business matters, found it difficult to support her two children and eventually all three of them ended up working as sales clerks at a fabric store, but when Evelyn in a chance encounter caught the eye of an artist who wanted her as a model to paint, her modelling career took off, and she became a popular model in Philadelphia where they were living at the time, earning more money through that then the three of them combined did in retail. Eventually, the family found themselves in New York, and through reference letters from the Philadelphia artists she became acquainted with artist James Carroll Beckwith, whose primary patron was John Jacob Astor IV, business man and real estate developer of the fabulously wealthy and influential Astor family. Soon Evelyn was posing for many famous artists and photographers. At this time she was only around 15 or 16 years old. She became the “it girl” of the moment, appearing in many magazines, including Vanity Fair, Harper's Bazaar, and Cosmopolitan, as well as on postcards and advertisements, sort of the first pin-up girl. The famous illustrator Charles Dana Gibson made her one of his “Gibson Girls” who essentially defined the ideal of feminine beauty at the time in one of his most famous illustrations titled “Woman: The Eternal Question”, in which her curled locks formed the shape of a question mark. As a side note, the Gibson cocktail, essentially a Martini garnished with a pickled onion instead of an olive or twist of lemon peel, may be named after Charles Dana Gibson, as it is said he challenged Charlie Connolly, the bartender at the Players Club in New York to improve upon the Martini, and the change in garnish was his improvement. Nesbit also turned her attentions to the stage, becoming one of the famous “Florodora Girls” as a chorus girl in the musical Florodora (which incidentally inspired the Floradora cocktail made from gin, lime juice, raspberry syrup or crème de framboise liqueur, and ginger ale, with the pink drink recalling the pink dresses of the Florodora Girls), before getting a more central role in The Wild Rose. And it was through this that she caught the attention of two men. First was the famous architect Stanford White, who had designed homes for many of New York’s wealthy, including the Astors and the Vanderbilts, as well as the New York Herald building and the aforementioned Madison Square Garden. White was one of New York’s social elite, and very much a playboy, bon vivant, and womanizer himself. Speaking of playboys, it’s been said that the term playboy, at least in its modern sense, was invented for White’s killer Harry Kendall Thaw, as we’ll see in a minute, though the word had been around before him, but speaking of the playboy lifestyle, a big part of this was the drinking scene and the various clubs and bars, a major element of New York’s social scene at the time. And it’s that lifestyle that lies behind the title of another cocktail recipe book by that celebrity bartender Jerry Thomas, How to Mix Drinks, or The Bon-Vivant’s Companion, from 1862. Now getting back to White and Nesbit, when they were introduced, White was 46 and Nesbit was 15 or 16, and White took the young girl under his wing, also helping out her mother and brother, and convinced her mother of his good intentions. He entertained her at his apartment with food from Delmonico’s, one of the top restaurants in New York at the time, and she was allowed one glass of champagne. His apartment famously featured a red velvet swing suspended from the ceiling by ropes covered in ivy-like vines, in which Nesbit sat while he pushed her. Accounts vary as to whether this apartment was located in his private tower that he had designed at Madison Square Garden, or another property. At the time of its completion, by the way, the Madison Square Garden tower was the second highest in New York, at some 32 storeys. White convinced Evelyn’s mother to take a trip home to Pittsburgh to visit friends, allaying her fears of leaving her daughter unchaperoned in New York, saying that he’d watch over her.  While her mother was away, White entertained Evelyn at his apartment, and introduced her to another infamous room, the mirror room, which was ten by ten feet and panelled with mirrors on all the walls and ceiling. On this occasion the champagne flowed more freely, and Nesbit blacked out, waking up naked and in bed with White. In spite of this incident, Nesbit became his lover and became quite infatuated with him, but eventually his interest in her waned as he moved on to other conquests, though he remained a presence in her life.

Nesbit also had a brief affair with a young John Barrymore, from the famous Barrymore acting family, while he was pursuing a career as an illustrator, before taking up the family profession and becoming a famous actor himself. Both Evelyn’s mother and Stanford White disapproved of the relationship, and White had her enrolled in a boarding school in New Jersey run by the mother of director Cecil B. DeMille in an attempt to break them up, and though Barrymore proposed to Evelyn, in front of both her mother and White, she turned him down. Later on Barrymore was worried that he’d be called to testify in the murder trial about an emergency surgery she’d had while away at the boarding school, officially an appendectomy but alleged to have been an abortion. Of course the Barrymore family has had its own run-ins with media attention and scandals, perhaps most famously with Drew Barrymore, the granddaughter of John Barrymore, and her troubled childhood and struggles with drug and alcohol abuse. As another side note about the Barrymore family, John Barrymore’s nephew, Samuel Colt, made an uncredited appearance in The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing, a 1955 movie about Nesbit’s life, starring Joan Collins.

But the other major male figure in Nesbit’s life was Harry Kendall Thaw. Thaw hailed from a wealthy Pittsburgh family, the son of coal and railroad baron William Thaw, Sr. Throughout his life, Harry Kendall Thaw exhibited considerable mental instability and sadistic behaviour, and was addicted to cocaine and morphine. Thaw, who purported lit his cigars with $100 bills, spent a considerable amount of money on obsessive partying and supporting his drug addiction, as well as indulging in his sometimes violent sexual proclivities, and a considerable amount was spent on his behalf to cover all of this up and avoid public scandal. Thaw moved to New York City with the intention of living it up in his playboy lifestyle there, but had difficulty breaking into that elite social community. His applications to those all important social clubs of New York, including the Manhattan Club, were rejected, which Thaw attributed to the machinations of Stanford White, leading light of that social community. Furthermore, Thaw was in the habit of throwing lavish and expensive parties inviting the most beautiful showgirls and prostitutes, but when one woman he publicly snubbed decided to get her revenge by hijacking all the female invitees to White’s infamous tower apartment leaving Thaw with only a roomful of men, a public humiliation reported in the gossip columns, Thaw believed it was actually White who was behind it. Thaw became obsessed with White, admiring the playboy lifestyle in New York that he seemed to be able to get away with but which was denied to Thaw, thus causing great resentment. White, however, probably knew nothing of Thaw’s growing resentment towards him and the full-blown vendetta it turned into, in fact thinking very little of Thaw at all, considering him simply a poseur and of little consequence to the New York social scene, though he did refer to Thaw as the “Pennsylvania Pug” in reference to his baby-faced appearance. Nesbit also caught Thaw’s eye, and like John Barrymore, he went to see her in The Wild Rose many times, becoming obsessed with her as well. In fact it may have been her relationship with White, his arch rival, that drove Thaw’s interest in her. In a classic example of sociopathic manipulation, Thaw reigned in his transgressive tendencies and acted kindly and solicitously towards Evelyn, taking her and her mother on a trip to Europe to recover from her “appendectomy”. But the hectic itinerary he had planned was exhausting to both mother and daughter, driving a wedge between them, and Mrs. Nesbit soon returned to the US. Thaw pressed the idea of marriage to Evelyn, who was initially reluctant, feeling she couldn’t accept without revealing the details of her relationship with White, especially given Thaw’s obsession with female chastity. But Thaw eventually wheedled out of her the details of White’s assault of her, which set him off. The travel itinerary turned into a tour of sites connected with female martyrdom, including a visit to the birthplace of Joan of Arc, where he left the comment in the visitor’s book “she would not have been a virgin if Stanford White had been around”. They finally ended up at Katzenstein Castle where he kept her locked up and whipped her and sexually assaulted her over a two-week period, after which his mood shifted and he became apologetic and even upbeat. Thaw continued to pursue Nesbit’s hand in marriage, and eventually, desiring financial stability, she relented and they were married in 1905. However, though she was expecting to continue the interesting social life that she was accustomed to, she found herself living with her new husband under the watchful eye of Mother Thaw back in Pittsburgh. And ultimately it was the past history that she had with Stanford White that led to his murder. On that fateful night in June 1906, Evelyn and Harry Kendall Thaw were in New York dining at Cafe Martin. Stanford White happened to be dining there that night as well, and when she saw him arrive, Evelyn let her husband know that she saw “the Beast”, as he insisted she call White. At the time he didn’t seem to have much of a reaction. After dinner, White stopped in at the Manhattan Club before going to his Madison Square Garden for the opening night performance of the show Mam’zelle Champagne being performed at the rooftop open-air theatre. Thaw happened to have also bought tickets for the performance, and saw that his rival was there. During the big finale, a song called, highly appropriately, “I could Love a Million Girls”, Thaw approached White and shot him, holding his gun up in the air afterwards and calling out the explanation “He ruined my wife”.

Lurid as this story is, what’s most interesting for our purposes is the media frenzy that followed this high society murder scandal. Already by the next morning, the news media pounced on the story, with media mogul William Randolph Hearst leading the way, and the upcoming trial would soon be dubbed the “Trial of the Century”, remarkable for a crime committed in just 1906. Reporters would hype up the details on anything even remotely connected to the murder to produce more copy. The newspapers competed for scoops, each trying to outdo the others, and both sides of the case gave those scoops to the reporters in an attempt to bolster their cases in the court of public opinion. As was the usual practise, Thaw’s mother used the family fortune to obscure her son’s past transgressions and induce favourable accounts of him, and the District Attorney’s office hired the services of a Pittsburgh PR firm to orchestrate a smear campaign to discredit both Thaw and Nesbit. That District Attorney, by the way, was none other than one William Travers Jerome, cousin of Jennie Jerome of putative Manhattan cocktail fame, and he himself prosecuted the case against Thaw. Female reporters, sometimes referred to as “Sob Sisters” and the “Pity Patrol” ran human interest stories with Thaw lionized as a protector of women (which is what he actually thought of himself), and his mental illness, drug addictions, and abusive behaviour downplayed. Nesbit’s portrayal in the press was more ambivalent, as she was portrayed as a victim, but also not as a respectable woman. White was dragged through the mud, with some even retroactively criticizing his professional record as an architect, though journalist Richard Harding Davis, a friend of White’s, who by the way was the inspiration for Charles Dana Gibson’s portrayal of the Gibson Man, counterpart of the Gibson Girls, with his dashing, clean-shaven look, wrote a defence of White, who he says was distorted in the tabloid press, interesting given that Davis himself has been accused of yellow-press tactics and being involved in an alleged plot of William Randolph Hearst that started the Spanish-American War in order to sell more papers. It certainly is true that Davis helped to create the legend surrounding the Rough Riders, the volunteer cavalry of Davis’s good friend Theodore Roosevelt. Perhaps most amazing in the media furore was the fact that Thomas Edison rushed into production and completed within a week of the murder itself a film, Rooftop Murder, which was shown in nickelodeon theatres. All this lurid tabloid media attention upset some, and various church groups lobbied to have the details of the trial censored in the press, and President Roosevelt even threatened to do so, though this was never carried out. In the end, Thaw’s wealth probably carried the day. While in jail he received preferential treatment, being allowed to wear his own clothes, and have lavish food catered by Delmonico’s with wine and champagne, and he was eventually declared not guilty by reason of temporary insanity, and though he was committed to an asylum (where again he received preferential treatment), he was eventually able to simply stroll out of the hospital to a waiting car which brought him to Sherbrooke, Quebec, and in the end he was able to pull strings and have himself declared sane again.

Now when we talk about tabloid journalism, we’re talking about sensationalized stories about crimes, scandals, gossip, and celebrities, but the term tabloid originally referred to a particular format of newspapers. Actually the word tabloid originally had a medicinal sense. Ultimately from Latin tabula “table”, which perhaps comes from the Proto-Indo-European root *sta- “to stand”, the word tablet was formed in Old French as a diminutive of table “table”, and came into English around 1300 with the meaning “slab or flat surface for an inscription” and by the 1580s had developed the sense of a pill of medicine. With the addition of the suffix -oid meaning “having the form of”, from Greek eidos “form” ultimately from the Proto-Indo-European root *weid- “to see”, the pharmaceutical company Burroughs Wellcome & Co. established the trademark name “tabloid” for their new highly compressed and thus smaller tablet, and soon the word began to be used to refer to other small compressed items. The regular newspaper format was known as the broadsheet, but a smaller format with pages half the size of a broadsheet and a reduced number of columns became known as a tabloid newspaper, not just for its physical size but also for the compressed nature of its content. Alfred C. Harmsworth, editor and proprietor of the London Daily Mail, instituted this new format with “current news … presented in condensed and tabulated form”, stating that “the world enters today upon the twentieth or time-saving century. I claim that by my system of condensed or tabloid journalism hundreds of working hours can be saved each year”. Ironically the outcome was just the opposite with the new format becoming associated with sensational hyped up scandals and fake news, all with the aim of generating scandals to sell more and more papers. But fake news didn’t begin here. Back in 1835, the New York Sun ran a series of articles about the purported discovery of alien life on the moon, a discovery which was attributed to famed astronomer John Herschel. The articles, commissioned by editor Benjamin H. Day to increase sales from acclaimed reporter Richard Adams Locke, whom he had hired away from the rival paper Courier and Enquirer, included fantastic details about the lunar vegetation and animal life and outlandish illustrations. When pressed, Locke admitted it was a hoax, but claimed it was meant as a satire of scientific speculation and that it served to divert “the public mind, for a while, from that bitter discord, the abolition of slavery”. Similar to this Great Moon Hoax of 1835 is the 1874 Central Park Zoo Escape Hoax perpetrated by James Gordon Bennett Jr in his paper the New York Herald, which claimed that there was a mass escape of zoo animals, which then ran amok in the city killing many people. At the end of the lengthy article, it was revealed it was a hoax, though critics nonetheless accused the Herald of inciting a panic, though the perpetrators of the hoax later claimed that they were only trying to point out improper safety precautions at the zoo. And for more about these and other hoaxes, you can check out our video on the “Tom Collins” cocktail. As for the term “fake news”, it goes back farther than you might think. Though it’s become particularly commonplace in the post-truth politics of the Trump era, it’s actually first attested in 1890 during the peak period of Yellow Journalism (more on that term in a minute). As for the Herald, it was actually James Gordon Bennett Sr who founded the paper in 1835, after having worked at the New York Courier and Enquirer. Bennett’s new paper had its big break about a year after its foundation in the form of another scandalous murder, when 23 year old New York prostitute Helen Jewett was brutally murdered with a hatchet and one of her regular clients, 19 year old shop clerk Richard P. Robinson, was arrested and tried for her murder. The press jumped on the story, the first time such a scandalous murder was covered in newspapers, laying the foundations for later tabloid journalism, with the Herald leading the way. In Bennett’s sensational coverage of the story he conducted the first ever newspaper interview, of Rosina Townsend, the madam of the brothel. Bennett would later score another first in 1839 when the Herald conducted the first ever interview of a sitting US President, none other than Martin Van Buren, and in what is probably the earliest example of chequebook/kiss-and-tell journalism he published a notice in 1836 offering a reward to any woman who “will set a trap for a Presbyterian parson, and catch one of them flagrante delicto”. But it was Bennett’s son, James Gordon Bennett Jr. who is perhaps most notable here, a scandal in himself. In addition to his Central Park Zoo Escape Hoax, under Bennett Jr’s editorship the Herald funded Henry Morton Stanley’s expeditions to Africa to find David Livingstone, which culminated in their meeting and the famous line “Doctor Livingstone, I presume?” in 1871, and various other explorations and endeavours, including an ill-fated attempt on the North Pole. In his personal life, Bennett Jr was another one of these wealthy playboy types, and was an avid sportsman, organizing the first polo match and tennis match in the US, founding the Gordon Bennett Cup in ballooning, and kicking off international motor-racing by sponsoring the Bennett Trophy races from 1900 to 1905, and personally winning the first trans-oceanic yachting race. But it’s his scandalous behaviour which is perhaps most noteworthy. Bennett Jr became engaged to socialite Caroline May, and when his wealthy father-in-law to be threw a party for the couple at the May family mansion in 1877, Bennett showed up late and drunk, and proceeded to urinate in the living room fireplace (according to some accounts in the grand piano) in full view of his hosts and their guests. Needless to say, the engagement was promptly cancelled, and the Guinness Book of World Records lists the incident as the “Greatest Engagement Faux Pas”, if anything a massive understatement and certainly a great scandal if ever there was one, and it’s for this type of wild and over-the-top behaviour that his name became the British expression of surprise and incredulity, “Gordon Bennett!”, as a kind of minced oath for the exclamation “Gor blimey!” meaning “God blind me”. After this Bennett Jr didn’t end up getting married until he was 73 years old, when he wed Maud Potter, the Baroness de Reuter, who was the widow of George de Reuter, son of Julius Paul Reuter, founder of Reuters news agency. When he died, Bennett Jr appointed American businessman James Stillman as one of his trustees, but only a few weeks later before Stillman was able to act under this authority, he too died, having named businessman and Yale University benefactor John William Sterling as his executor, who then died suddenly too, naming as one of his executors managing the now combined estates worth $76,000,000, his domestic partner and cotton broker James O. Bloss, who was also a major Yale benefactor, who then died just a few weeks after that at the Metropolitan Club, another one of those all important New York clubs, where he was staying as a member, founded by financier J.P. Morgan, and designed by none other than architect Stanford White. Gordon Bennett!! As it turns out, by the way, Stanford White also designed the New York Herald building, completed in 1894, demolished in 1921, though its name lives on as Herald Square, where the building used to stand, which is immortalized in the lyrics of the song “Give My Regards to Broadway” with the line “Remember me to Herald Square”.

Now that other term, yellow journalism or yellow press, refers to pretty much the same thing as tabloid journalism, with yellow journalism perhaps being more common in the US and tabloid journalism being more common in Britain, and the name can be specifically traced back to two newspaper publishers around the turn of the 20th century. One was William Randolph Hearst, who, as we’ve already seen, led the way in the scandal reporting around the Thaw-White murder. His rival was Joseph Pulitzer (yes the person the Pulitzer Prize in journalism is named after was a pioneer of tabloid journalism). Pulitzer, already publishing a paper in St Louis, turned his attention to New York and purchased the failing newspaper the New York World in 1883, and increased its circulation by publishing sensationalized stories of crimes, disasters, and scandals, and by undercutting the competition by dropping the newsstand price to 2 cents. Soon the New York World had surpassed the Sun and Bennett’s Herald, having not only the highest circulation in New York, but also in the country. Inspired by Pulitzer’s approach, Hearst, who was already publishing a paper in San Francisco,  purchased the failing New York Journal in 1895, and immediately engaged in a circulation war with Pulitzer’s World, dropping his newsstand price to 1 cent (which Pulitzer soon matched) and printing the same sensationalist content that Pulitzer had been. Hearst even stole away some of Pulitzer’s staff, as well as the World’s popular and centrepiece comic strip Hogan’s Alley drawn by Richard F. Outcault, which featured the popular sensation character known as the Yellow Kid, and it’s from this bald-headed kid in an over-sized yellow shirt that yellow journalism gets its name (and if you want to learn more about the Yellow Kid, check out our video about the word “Marvel”, which talks about the history of comics). It should be remembered that the World and the Journal published solid reporting as well, perhaps most notably by famed pioneering investigative reporter (and industrialist and inventor too!) Nellie Bly, who while she worked for the World, went undercover as an inmate in an insane asylum to reveal the horrible conditions there, and made a record-breaking trip around the world in 72 days in emulation of Jules Verne’s famous novel, and later was a battlefield correspondent during WWI for the Journal. And in spite of their competition, both Pulitzer and Hearst were politically similar, supporting the Democratic Party, and both served in the House of Representatives as Democrats, and Pulitzer had been a very vocal supporter of Tilden’s run for the Presidency. The Pulitzer Prize, by the way came out of an endowment Pulitzer made to Columbia University. Pulitzer became quite wealthy in the newspaper business (and even hired Stanford White to design his luxurious personal residence), and when he died in 1911 he left two million dollars to the university, which was also used to created the Columbia University Graduate School in Journalism.

Now in the midst of his success with the New York World, Pulitzer had a new building constructed to house his newspaper, the New York World Building with its gilt dome which contained Pulitzer’s own private office, an early skyscraper which upon its completion in 1890 became the tallest building in New York and tallest office building in the world. It was the first building in New York to surpass the height of the spire of Trinity Church which had dominated the city’s skyline, and it kicked off something of a competition to have the tallest building and a construction boom in skyscrapers. While Chicago was quicker out of the gate at building skyscrapers, it soon became one of the distinguishing features of New York, and they became especially popular with New York newspaper companies. In particular, Park Row was home to a number of newspaper companies and became nicknamed Newspaper Row, and featured a number of early skyscrapers, including the New York World Building and the New York Times Building, both designed by skyscraper pioneer George B. Post. Of course there were critics of the skyscrapers too, including writer Henry James and photographer Alfred Stieglitz (husband of painter Georgia O’Keefe) in his picture “Old and New New York”, which contrasted the old low rise buildings with the steel frame of the Vanderbilt Hotel under construction at the time, and some architects, including Stanford White, refused to take part in this skyscraper boom. Nevertheless, when White designed his Madison Square Garden tower, it was at the time, as we saw earlier, the second highest in New York. Now White’s building had been funded by a syndicate including  J. P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, P. T. Barnum, Darius Mills, William Waldorf Astor, and James Stillman, who you’ll remember in connection with the James Gordon Bennett Jr estate, but it should be noted that this is not the Madison Square Garden of today. White’s building, located at 26th Street and Madison Avenue, was torn down in 1926, and Madison Square Garden was rebuilt at a different location, on Eighth Avenue between 49th and 50th Streets, so not actually at Madison Square, though the name stuck. This Madison Square Garden too was torn down in 1968 when a new Madison Square Garden, the current one, was built at yet a different location between 7th and 8th Avenues from 31st to 33rd streets, sitting atop Pennsylvania Station. Now when the previous Madison Square Gardens were torn down, skyscrapers were put up in their locations: the World Wide Plaza where the 1925 building used to be, and the New York Life Building where White’s 1890 building used to be. The New York Life Building, with its stunning golden pyramid top made with 25,000 gold leaf tiles, was designed by noted architect and skyscraper pioneer Cass Gilbert in 1926 and completed in 1928, and was Gilbert’s last significant skyscraper in Manhattan. Gilbert, who had earlier in his career worked for Stanford White’s architecture firm McKim, Mead & White, is also known for designing the Woolworth Building, which from the time of its completion in 1913 until 1930 was the tallest in New York, and indeed in the world. Now with all these skyscrapers being put up, this golden age of skyscraper building also led to buildering, a portmanteau of building and bouldering, a rock climbing term, which is the recreational climbing of tall buildings. The Woolworth Building was attempted by George Polley in 1920, but he was arrested partway up for climbing without permission. Polley, who climbed over 2000 buildings, earning the nickname the Human Fly, got started on this activity when the owner of a clothing store said he would give him a free suit if he climbed to the roof of the building. And of course many of these New York skyscrapers have been ascended over the years, and there have also been other builderers who have received the nickname the Human Fly, including John Ciampa who in 1947 climbed the Astor Hotel. Hotel Astor is connected with that famous Astor family who have already come up a number of times in our story. At the time of its construction it was seen as something of a successor to the famous Waldorf-Astoria hotel, though it should be noted that although the land was owned by William Waldorf Astor, it was mainly the work of William C. Muschenheim and his brother, Frederick A. Muschenheim, who leased the site from absentee landlord Astor. Completed in 1904, the hotel featured a rooftop garden much like the one atop Madison Square Garden where Stanford White was killed, which were popular in New York buildings from the 1880s until Prohibition. The Waldorf-Astoria, on the other hand, had its start in 1893, when William Waldorf Astor built the Waldorf Hotel on the site where he had previously had his mansion, built by his father John Jacob Astor III. The wealthy New York Astor family had its start when patriarch John Jacob Astor, born in Waldorf near Heidelberg, came to America around 1783 or 1784, first making his fortune in the fur trade before focusing his interests on real estate investment, becoming the first multimillionaire in the US. Astor had purchased the parcel of land where the Waldorf Hotel would later be built in 1826. His grandson John Jacob Astor III, who had built his mansion on that site, started out his career dabbling in railroads, but was outsmarted by Cornelius Vanderbilt, and so decided to keep his focus on the now family tradition of real estate.

The Waldorf-Astoria, then, came about because William Waldorf Astor, great-grandson of John Jacob Astor, didn’t get along with his cousin John Jacob Astor IV, usually known as Jack and patron of artist James Carroll Beckwith who was, you’ll remember Evelyn Nesbit’s early benefactor, and his mother Caroline Schermerhorn Astor, so that’s why he built the Waldorf Hotel, which was located right next to her mansion, and was designed to overshadow it, and Mrs Astor then retaliated by tearing down her house and building, along with Jack, another hotel at that site, the Astoria Hotel. Incidentally, one Alexander Turney Stewart built his mansion just across from Mrs Astor’s at northwest corner of Fifth Avenue and 34th Street, and after the death of his widow in 1886, it served as the home of the Manhattan Club, before it moved to the Jerome Mansion in 1899. Eventually the two hotels merged to become the legendary Waldorf-Astoria, joined by a 300 m corridor known as Peacock Alley. Mrs Astor lived with son Jack at another location, suffering from dementia and eventually dying in 1908, and Jack died not long after in 1912, going down with the Titanic (the US Senate enquiry into the maritime disaster was later held at the Waldorf-Astoria), whereas William Waldorf Astor moved to England and became Baron Astor in 1916 and Viscount Astor in 1917. The Waldorf-Astoria was later relocated to its current site and the old hotel was torn down in 1928 to make way for yet another early skyscraper, the Empire State Building, which would become a popular target for many builderers, but was most famously scaled by King Kong.

Now the original Waldorf-Astoria was mainly run by hotelier George Boldt, who mediated between the Astor cousins and merged the two hotels into one, and it was his focus on catering to the super-rich clientele that made the hotel synonymous with luxury. Boldt is also credited with either inventing or popularizing Thousand Island Dressing, named after the Thousand Islands region lying between the US and Canada, where Boldt kept a summer home, when he instructed the Waldorf-Astoria maître d'hôtel Oscar Tschirky to put it on the menu. Tschirky himself became quite a local celebrity, being referred to as “Oscar of the Waldorf” for his fine attention to detail and luxury, and he is credited with the invention of a number of other famous recipes to come out of the Waldorf-Astoria, including Eggs Benedict and Waldorf Salad. But for our purposes, there’s another more important recipe devised at the Waldorf-Astoria, the Rob Roy cocktail. The Rob Roy, a variation on a Manhattan that substitutes Scotch whisky for the rye, was invented in 1894 by the bartender at the Waldorf-Astoria in honour of the New York premiere of the operetta called Rob Roy loosely based on the life of Scottish folk hero Rob Roy MacGregor, by composer Reginald De Koven and lyricist Harry B. Smith, and thus brings us back once again to the Manhattan cocktail.

And there’s one last link between the Manhattan and the Astor family — which involved John Jacob Astor III, whose mansion was on that plot of land that was the site of the original Hotel Astor, being appointed to a blue-ribbon commission to look into the the city’s finances because of the growing political scandal surrounding William M. Tweed, more commonly known as “Boss” Tweed, the Democratic politician who at various points held a number of positions including in the US House of Representatives and the New York Senate, and basically controlled the Democratic political machine in New York. “Boss” Tweed was being hounded by the New York Times and the satirical cartoonist Thomas Nast from Harper’s Weekly, who by the way was also responsible for the Democratic Donkey and Republican Elephant symbols, and whose whose work was featured in celebrity bartender Jerry Thomas’s bar. Nast’s cartoons were particularly damaging to “Boss” Tweed, leading to that commission looking into the city’s books, which the commission found were “faithfully kept”. But it wasn’t until our old friend Samuel J. Tilden came on the scene re-examining the records and found that money was being embezzled by Tweed, as much as $200 million by later estimates, that “Boss” Tweed’s hold on power was broken. Tilden gained a reputation for stamping out corruption, which helped him get elected as Governor of New York. So you could say that it was this political scandal that led to Tilden’s governorship celebration at the Manhattan Club and therefore the invention of the Manhattan cocktail! And on that note, I think it’s time for a drink!

I’m here with Kyle Marcus, owner of the Alibi room. Kyle, can you show us how to make a classic Manhattan?

If any of you find yourself near Sudbury, Ontario, I highly recommend you drop by the Alibi Room to try one of these for yourself!

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