The makers of American wine, beer, and whiskey recognized WWII as an opportunity to remake the image of these once-illicit commodities and broaden their base of consumers. Having halted beverage production to produce industrial alcohol for the synthetic rubber program, whiskey distillers had little need to sell whiskey—a prized good perpetually in short supply. Instead they launched a public relations campaign to tout the industry’s patriotic contributions to the war effort and battle public perceptions that distillers were deliberately withholding whiskey to gin up prices. Brewers and vintners created separate collective advertising campaigns that aimed to destigmatize wine and beer while also touting them as morale boosters, aids to wartime food crusades, and emblems of the good life servicemen were fighting to defend.
Despite their well-organized advertising and public relations campaigns, alcohol producers and their network of allies were never in full command of alcohol’s cultural reinvention. Circumstances that the industry thought would redound to their benefit—the military’s decision to permit sales of low-alcohol beer in the Army PX, the reduction in European wine imports, the exposure of servicemen to wine-drinking cultures abroad—did not invariably play out to their advantage. This paper examines how consumers’ own experiences with unsatisfying substitutes for prized intoxicants, especially on the battlefront, alternately disrupted and bolstered the industry’s carefully crafted marketing messages. It complicates our understanding of how businesses reinvent the image of controversial commodities by foregrounding factors that business either failed to anticipate or lacked the power to control. To illuminate the limits of reinvention, this paper uses sources that voiced and represented the perspectives of consumers and servicemen: memoirs, war journalism, cartoons, GI gripe letters, marketing research.