The history of American whiskey, its rise to global prominence, and its status as a symbol of American identity are rooted in a unique confluence of factors.
In the early 20th century, prohibition crippled the whiskey industry. Many distillers shuttered and those that survived did so by producing medicinal whiskey or pivoting to other industries. At the end of Prohibition in 1933, whiskey distilling boomed in the U.S. as restrictions against mass production ended. Nonetheless, producers faced an uphill battle. Whiskey retained an association with criminality and drunkenness—one that whiskey makers were desperate to break.
World War II again laid the industry low, as distilleries were repurposed to produce industrial alcohol for the war effort. As the war ended, it provided an unexpected boost to American whiskey production, albeit in two indirect ways.
The U.S. emerged as a dominant economic power, which led to rapid expansion of American industry, including whiskey production. Whiskey became a key export that followed the rise of American cultural and economic influence abroad. Additionally, the war introduced many American soldiers to whiskey, and as they returned home, they brought with them a taste for the spirit.
The postwar economic boom, coupled with rising disposable income and the expansion of consumer culture, fueled whiskey’s golden age in the 1950s and 1960s. As global markets adjusted to America's economic expansion in this period, whiskey remained a staple of U.S. exports. The Bourbon Institute, a trade society formed in 1958, fought to lower trade restriction on American whiskey abroad, eventually removing almost all trade barriers in Europe.
The increasing demand for American goods abroad meant that the spirit, once primarily a domestic product, became a key player in international trade in the 1950s and 1960s. The Bourbon Institute framed this growth explicitly in cultural terms. In 1960, its president William J. Marshall, proclaimed, “The bourbon industry feels that its product is a distinctively unique American product and that the sale of this product plays its part in the broader program of having American ways and products known throughout the world.”
This shift reinforced whiskey’s role as a symbol of American craftsmanship, while also tying it to the country’s broader economic influence on the world stage. Overseas, American advertising for whiskey retained the claims of Americana and frontier individualism that championed brands like Jack Daniels and Jim Beam as uniquely American even as they flooded foreign markets.