Abstract

"Government House Grog: Rum, Mercantilism, and the New Deal in America's Caribbean Empire"

Ian Seavey, University of Texas, Rio Grand Valley (ian.seavey@utrgv.edu)

In 1937, the first fifty thousand cases of Government House Rum landed in New York City from the U.S. Virgin Islands. Intended for widespread distribution, pamphlets were also inserted along with the rum that marketed recipes for signature cocktails, which included grog, and a brief history of how the spirit was developed. The marketing pamphlets indicated that a rather nebulous entity called the Virgin Islands Company oversaw production of the rum. In reality, this company was run by the U.S. federal government. With the repeal of Prohibition in December of 1933, the Roosevelt Administration decided to get into the rum business and created the Virgin Islands Company. While marketed to the State Department and the Department of the Interior as another New Deal agency, the Virgin Island Company essentially functioned as a venture in mercantile colonialism. Through the process of vertical integration, the federal government controlled every step of the operation, including sugar cane harvesting and refining, in addition to sprit distillation and packaging and then marketing.
The story of the Virgin Islands Company matters because it disrupts previous conceptions of American empire. Traditionally, the U.S. empire has been described as everything from informal and umperial to economically exploitative and intentionally expansionist, but never mercantilist. That form of empire was only practiced by the European powers and American policymakers tried to distance themselves from it. This paper traces the co-creation of VICO as a New Deal organization in the 1930s and how they marketed the rum it produced to argue that U.S. policymakers treated overseas territories as laboratories of reform under the guise of economic recovery. VICO’s profits from rum production were funneled into public works and welfare programs. These experimental policies were enacted to help improve the economy of the Virgin Islands but instead further entrenched colonial status by exploiting predominantly Black labor to make profits.