AThe Merican whiskey flies away from the shelves in Canada, but without reason, for the reason, the manufacturers of American whiskey would like. In response to President Donald Trump’s prices on Canadian imports to the United States, many Canadians boycott American products, especially whiskey.
Viral videos show that employees of Canadian alcohol stores are pushing trolleys with popular American whiskey brands like Jack Daniels and Maker’s Mark in the back of stores, encouraging consumers to “buy Canadian”.
Although there are economic and political reasons to target whiskey by trying to retaliate against the United States, there is an additional reason at stake. Canadians are trying to damage an American industry that has long sought to position themselves as a central in the history and identity of the United States. For example, in 2011, Jack Daniels, the number one that sells whiskey in the United States, launched its “AS American As” advertising campaign. The advertisements represented images of classic Americans – black jeans, cowboy hats and white fences – while a voiceover said: “We are the creators of things born of an independent spirit.” Other brands of popular American whiskey such as Bulleit, 1792, and High West proclaim their association with the American border and American values perceived as individualism and perseverance.
However, despite this imagery, the whiskey industry has been shaped by world forces for almost a century. These forces helped him grow in the post-second world war period when American cultural influence spread around the world. Today, it makes producers of whiskey vulnerable to types of boycotts that are currently taking place in Canada.
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The history of American whiskey, its rise in power in global prominence and its status as a symbol of American identity are rooted in a unique confluence of factors.
At the beginning of the 20th century, prohibition paralyzed the whiskey industry. Many distillers have closed their doors and those who survived have done so by producing medicinal whiskey or by swivel in other industries. At the end of the ban in 1933, the distillation of whiskey exploded in the United States while restrictions against mass production ended. Nevertheless, the producers faced a difficult battle. Whiskey has retained an association with crime and drunkenness – one that whiskey manufacturers were desperate to break.
The Second World War again put the industry, because the distilleries were reused to produce industrial alcohol for the war effort. At the end of the war, he provided an unexpected boost to the production of American whiskey, although in two indirect ways.
The United States has emerged as a dominant economic power, which has led to a rapid expansion of American industry, including the production of whiskey. Whiskey has become a key export which followed the rise of American cultural and economic influence abroad. In addition, the war introduced many American soldiers to whiskey, and when they got home, they brought a taste for the mind with them.
The post-war economic boom, associated with the increase in disposable income and the expansion of consumer culture, fueled the golden age of whiskey in the 1950s and 1960s. While global markets adapted to America’s economic expansion during this period, the whiskey remained a basic food for American exports. Bourbon Institute, a commercial company formed in 1958, fought to reduce commercial restriction on American whiskey abroad, ultimately eliminating almost all trade barriers in Europe.
The growing demand for American goods abroad noted that the spirit, formerly mainly a national product, became a key player in international trade in the 1950s and 1960s. The Bourbon Institute explicitly supervised this growth in cultural terms. In 1960, its president William J. Marshall, proclaimed: “The Bourbon industry believes that its product is a distinctly unique American product and that the sale of this product plays its role in the wider program to have known ways and products known worldwide.”
This change has strengthened the role of whiskey as a symbol of American craftsmanship, while linking it to the country’s broader economic influence on the world scene. Abroad, American advertising for whiskey has preserved the affirmations of Americana and the individualism of the border which defended brands like Jack Daniels and Jim Beam as a American, when they flooded foreign markets.
However, despite this brand image, the whiskey industry was not immune to consumer preferences. In the 1970s, a new generation of American drinkers turned more and more to vodka and lighter minds, considering them more modern and fashionable than whiskey. Above all, given the link between vodka and the USSR in the imagery of the Cold War, the Spirit has become subversive Cooly in a way that whiskey could not correspond. This left the whiskey industry, like so many other types of American manufacturers, to face a period of decline, with a drop in sales and many historic distilleries closing their doors. In the 1980s, less than 100 distilleries remained in service in the United States, a contrast that struck with the years of post-war boom.
While the distilleries closed, it also triggered the consolidation of the industry. During the decades that followed, a handful of conglomerates came to dominate the American whiskey industry, acquiring smaller family distilleries at a quick pace. Today, the spirit of individuality announced in whiskey advertisements is not reflected in its production. In 2015, eight companies produced around 99% of all whiskey made in the United States
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In fact, many most popular whiskey brands in America are currently belonging to international conglomerates with huge financial portfolios: Jim Beam (owned by the Japanese company Sunntory Global Spirits), Bulleit (belonging to the British company Diageo) and Wild Turkey (belonging to the Italian company Campari Group) are only a few of the manufacturing brands American who are currently part of a global capital network.
This reality exposes how the assertions that whiskey is a unique American product – an industry rooted in the border, perseverance and economic independence – are as many myths of the industry as of the facts. American whiskey industry has long been shaped by global forces, export and whiskey advertising abroad to the growing domination of international conglomerates.
This story helps explain why Canadians have targeted American whiskey in their boycotts. Indeed, bourbon, whiskey from Tennessee and other American manufacturing whiskeys come massively from states that voted for Trump, in particular Kentucky and Tennessee. Canadian politicians are to take advantage This partisan division. Last month, the Prime Minister of British Columbia, David Eby, ordered alcohol stores managed by the British Columbia State to stop buying American alcohols from “Red States”.
Canadians want to target the heart of a movement that considers themselves concerning American identity and they do not see better means than to boycott an industry that is still marked as clearly American. Even 60 years later, Bourbon distiller still deceives a 1964 congress resolution declaring their mind “a distinctive product in the United States”. The writer Reid Mintenbuler says that the American distillers of whiskey and bourbon rely on “the values implicit by the iconography of the border found on countless bottles of Bourbon [which] Are intrinsically American: individualism, self -sufficiency, practice and guts. »»
American whiskey is based on these affirmations of authenticity and tradition to sell the product of the industry. This may have to change so that industry prosperous at a time when the United States contacts many countries around the world
This brand image played a key role in the elevation of American whiskey worldwide in the post-war period when the influence of the United States was born in the world. However, the international market that has shaped the whiskey industry for a century has been sensitive to political forces. This means that it is not immune to the consequences of geopolitical disputes and the change in consumer preferences worldwide. Today, while the Trump administration courts opposucts abroad, the identity and brand image of the industry leave it in a particular exposed and vulnerable way, because the efforts of the Canadian boycott highlight.
E. Kyle Romero is a deputy professor at the University of Northern Florida. He studies the history of American foreign policy, immigration policy and the global consumer economy.
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