Pink Elephants

Stupid Question ™
May 1, 2003
By John Ruch
© 2003

Q: How did the idea of seeing pink elephants while drunk start?
—Anonymous


A: It started as the far less amusing idea of seeing pink spiders.

From the late 1800s to about 1930, pink spiders were the standard drunk-hallucination cliché. But there were variations. Pink rats still have some British currency. The earliest use of “pink elephants” I could find is in Jack London’s “John Barleycorn” (1913), which in the same breath refers to “blue mice.” (Do blue mice scare pink elephants, I wonder?)

Drunks really can experience hallucinations of threatening insects and animals, though the pop-culture cliché that it happens while drinking is only very rarely true. Instead, it’s usually a symptom of delirium tremens, the final (and sometimes fatal) stage of alcohol withdrawal, typically occurring two to three days after an alcoholic’s last drink.

Hallucinated beasties are often of strange colors, and that’s probably where the “pink” (and “blue”) comes from. There are other possibilities: “to paint the town pink” is to go on a drinking spree; there are also such drinks as pink champagne, pink gin and the “pink lady” cocktail. But that’s a winding road to follow, and I think the spiders just really were pink. Ask me about “pink” later if you care.

What are not common in drunken hallucinations are large, generally unthreatening animals such as elephants. Their coup over the spiders almost certainly involved some outside influence.

I think seeing pink elephants was a combination of pink spiders with the preexisting slang phrase, “to see the elephant.” This term sprung up around 1830, especially in the West and Southwest, and meant to have an overwhelming experience. “I’ve seen the elephant” basically meant, “I’ve had enough.”

It could also mean, in the words of etymologist J.D. Lighter, “to gain worldly experience or to learn a hard lesson,” from which came the sense of seeing something incredible, shocking or awesome (including, in military parlance, live combat). Hallucinations seem to fit that bill.

By the mid-1800s, “the elephant” referred to any incredible sight, while the meaning also broadened to include anything generally worth seeing. Thus, by the late 1800s, sightseeing was sometimes known as “elephant business,” and hanging out in opium dens was “elephant hunting.”

(It’s also interesting, though probably irrelevant, that “elephant’s trunk” was rhyming slang for “drunk” in the mid-1800s, though mostly in the UK.)
Wherever the elephants actually came from, they sealed their claim to being the quintessential drunk hallucination through popular culture. This happened, by no coincidence, during the 1920s-1940s period, when drunkenness was often depicted as cute and funny. Elephants are certainly less disturbing than venomous vermin.

The laws of the New Drunk Order were carved in stone by such popular entertainments as Guy Lombardo’s song “Pink Elephants” (1932) and Disney’s “Dumbo” (1941), with its bizarre “Pink Elephants on Parade” segment.

Whiskey Companies During Prohibition

Stupid Question ™
March 7, 2002
By John Ruch
© 2002

Q: Several American whiskey companies claim to have been around since the 1800s. So how did they survive Prohibition?
—David Houston


A: National Prohibition, which ran from January 1920 to December 1933, basically outlawed any booze of 0.5 percent and higher alcohol content. It killed about half the country’s distilleries and breweries, and perhaps 75 percent of the wineries.

But survival was possible. Many companies simply shifted production to legal items: Breweries sold barely alcoholic “near-beer” and yeast, while wineries sold grapes and grape juice.

The really successful companies diversified. The famous brewing company Anheuser-Busch made yeast and near-beer, but also ice cream, soft drinks, commercial refrigerators and car bodies.

Prohibition law also had several exemptions to exploit. Many distilleries survived with a medicinal-use license; doctors wrote prescriptions for whiskey to the tune of 1 million gallons a year during Prohibition.

Sacramental wine for church and synagogue ritual use was allowed (production skyrocketed by 800,000 gallons in what must have been a very religious first two years of Prohibition), as was wine for making vinegar and flavoring foods and tobacco. This kept a few lucky wineries afloat.

Home-brewed beer and wine also were legal. That’s why so many companies started selling yeast—a key ingredient. Some even sold bricks of wine grapes, or bottles of half-brewed beer, packaged with some yeast and a “warning” not to use them to make booze.

And an unknown number of firms simply kept operating illegally, bribing officials and reaping the benefits of bootlegging.

America’s most famous whiskey distillers used all these tactics. But in most cases the companies didn’t really survive. More commonly, it was the families who owned them who survived, then reinvented the companies after Prohibition.

For example, the label on a bottle of Jim Beam declares the recipe has been “standard since 1795.” It’s indeed based on Jacob Beam’s original recipe, but it wasn’t made at all during Prohibition. The Beam family sold the entire distillery and went into fruit farming, limestone quarrying and coal mining.

In fact, the company’s name—the James B. Beam Distilling Co.—and the Jim Beam brand name itself date only to 1934, when Jim (Jacob Beam’s great-grandson) reinvented the company.

Jack Daniel’s has a more colorful survivor story. Established in 1866, the distillery was sold off during Prohibition by Lem Motlow (Jack’s nephew). The buyer was Cincinnati’s George Remus, a flamboyant murderer who ran more than a dozen distilleries under medicinal-use licenses, while actually diverting the product into bootlegging.

Lem survived as a mule-trader, then got Jack Daniel’s back after Prohibition. Today it’s owned by Brown-Forman, a 132-year-old distiller that itself survived on a medicinal-use license for its original Old Forester brand.

Bloodied but unbowed, Jack has certainly had the last laugh on Prohibition: It’s made in a dry county.