I need a new drug

Kansas City Star, July 7, 1921. Neither beer nor whiskey nor dopey junk–sounds like a breakthrough all right. I’m guessing the formula was bought up and filed away in the same secure facility that holds the pill that turns water into gasoline, the secret of anti-gravity and umpteen whirling perpetual motion machines.

Chop on pop

Ths Brattleboro, Vermont, Reporter, June 14, 1806. Hoo boy, heref a meffed-up ftory about a terrfically unhappy family. Bafically a confpiracy of children to kill their drunken, violent old man before he killed again. Gotta feel forry for the kidf, though my guess is the teenage murdereff probabaly fwung for thif.

Can this marriage be saved?

Miami Herald, August 29, 1914. That, my friends, is a world-historically beautiful opening sentence, belonging in the company of “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. . .,” “Happy families are all alike. . .,” “It is a truth universally acknowledged. . . ,” and “A couple of days later the phone rang.”

Every currant hides a demon

Lowell Daily Citizen, February 10, 1879. A reminder that The Onion is nothing new under the sun, this mock temperance lecture (which is really pretty funny in a Twain-derivative fashion) is firmly grounded in reality: Temperance people and prohibitionists were squarely in the anti-mince camp, primarily though not exclusively owing to its alcoholic content. And as we’ve seen, they weren’t exactly wrong in regarding mince as a loophole in the enforcement of interdiction.

Pie-eyed

Kansas City Times, August 7, 1919. “One half of one percent” was the allowed alcohol content of “near-beer” under Prohibition. Mince at 14.12 % would definitely be more efficient.

Arguably redundant

Baltimore Sun, March 26, 1892. Taking the uneasy way out.

Guns don’t kill people

Kansas City Times, May 3, 1918. She was all like, “Single malts are for the birds,” and he was all like “To blend is to adulterate,” and things just escalated from there.

The Amazon of Illinois

Chicago Tribune, November 11, 1913. I mourn this lost Chicago, a city where a well-read, shotgun-wielding spinster lady could squat, farm and defend the boundaries of her river island for a decade before attracting the attention of the authorities.

Mince pie, Mormons and manslaughter

Kansas City Star, December 12, 1886. Mince pie, as we’ve seen, was known to cause bad dreams, but in particularly susceptible folk it seems to have induced clairvoyant hallucinations as well.

“According to some”

Cleveland Plain Dealer, December 12, 1922. A poignant note of special pleading on behalf of the booze-less mince pie. Perhaps it was Prohibition that killed mince: The dephlogisticated version just didn’t do it for mince fans, and by the time the booze came back, the brand had been fatally undermined.
By the by, I did a search on the phrase “as American as apple pie” in both the Proquest and America’s Historical Newspapers archive. The earliest use that I found was from 1921, but the phrase doesn’t seem to really come into its own until the 1940s. Just coincidence? I think not.