In the mid-1950s, when Smirnoff vodka launched its famous “It Leaves You Breathless” advertising campaign, few market forecasters could have predicted that within two decades vodka would supplant bourbon as the nation’s top-selling spirit. Historians and marketing analysts have often attributed vodka’s meteoric rise to Smirnoff’s clever advertising and its promotion of new vodka cocktails, such as the Moscow Mule, the Screwdriver, and the vodka martini. In their telling, consumers who had not yet acquired a taste for whiskey—and who wished to keep their drinking undetectable—made vodka their new spirit of choice. Women and baby boomers in particular came to prize this “tasteless, odorless, and colorless” beverage for both its nothingness and its versatility. Yet, as crucial as Smirnoff’s entrepreneurial initiatives were, they did not fully account for the surge in vodka’s popularity. Nor do they fully explain how Americans developed an affinity for a beverage deeply associated with the ills of Soviet-style Communism, even as Cold War tensions continued to fester.
My paper examines how vodka, a beverage once tainted by its foreign associations, eventually acquired a new reputation as the “all-American spirit” or the great “American neutral.” In keeping with the conference theme of “co-creation,” I demonstrate how a host of tastemakers and imagemakers—news correspondents, drinks columnists, Hollywood films, and consumers—created fertile ground upon which new images of vodka could take root. These diverse groups sometimes echoed vodka producers’ marketing messages, but they also amplified the cultural and political contradictions that lay at the heart of vodka culture. A host of classic binaries—between purity and danger, the foreign and the domestic, establishment and anti-establishment, refinement and excess, communism and capitalism—animated midcentury conversations about vodka. The process of co-creation assured that the meanings of the spirit would be as varied as its uses.