 Welcome to the endless knot cocktail bar or rather the alibi room here in Sudbury. Tonight, I've gone a location to explore the sometimes scandalous history of the Manhattan cocktail. The Manhattan is one of the most classic and iconic of cocktails right up there with the martini. Its recipe is fairly straightforward, two parts whiskey, one part sweet vermouth, a dash of bitters and garnished with a maraschino cherry. There have been several different cocktail recipes with the name Manhattan and several similar recipes by different names, but the earliest reference to this cocktail by this name in the Oxford English Dictionary is from 1882. In the 1887 cocktail recipe book The Bartender's Guide by Jerry Thomas, the world's first celebrity bartender, the drink calls specifically for bokers bitters, though today it's usually made with angostura bitters, and rye whiskey. During American prohibition from 1920 to 1933, American whiskey obviously became scarce, so Canadian rye smuggled into the U.S. became the standard whiskey to use, though now the cocktail is often made with bourbon. For more on this history and its connections to the American whiskey market, you can check out an old video on the Manhattan made by my buddy, The Cynical Historian. The word whiskey unsurprisingly has Celtic origins, and is an abbreviation of Usquaba, which came into English from Scott's Gaelic, Uschgebehe, meaning literally water of life, and was a calque on Latin aquavitai, which is also the source of French eau de vie and Scandinavian aquavit. Gaelic Uschge water goes back to the Proto-Indo-European root wed, water wet, which also gives us such words as wet, water, and vodka, from Russian meaning literally little water. Quite the understatement, and both Gaelic behe and Latin vita come from the Proto-Indo-European guay to live, also the source of the words quick, vivid, biology, and zoo. Though there are two distinct roots meaning water in Proto-Indo-European, which we'll look at later, Latin aqua comes from the Proto-Indo-European root aqua, meaning water, but may have originally meant something like river or current, coming from the root oku, swift, which may also be the source of the root equo, from which comes Latin equus, horse, and thus English equestrian. In any case, the word aqua also comes into English through Germanic, giving us the first element of the word island, appropriate given we're talking about the island of Manhattan. The two spellings of whisky, by the way, is mainly a regional variation, with Ireland and the United States preferring whisky with an E, and everywhere else without the E. Now whisky is made from grain, but different whiskies can be made from different grains. Rye whisky, as the name implies, is made mainly with rye grain, the word rye coming from Old English Ruria, from Proto-Indo-European rugio, meaning rye, though in Canada, the word rye is sometimes used to refer to whisky that doesn't have rye in it. Bourbon whisky, on the other hand, is made primarily from corn. The word bourbon is either a reference to Bourbon County in Kentucky, or Bourbon Street in New Orleans, but in either case associates Bourbon with the Southern US, and both those place names come ultimately from the French House of Bourbon, and the royal dynasty that dates back to the 16th century, which gets its name from Bourbon la Chambre, chief town of a lordship in central France. This place name comes from the name of an old Celtic god of minerals in bubbling spring water, called Borvo, worshipped in Gaul and Lusitania, an area around modern-day Portugal that was heavily influenced by Celtic mythology. The name Borvo comes ultimately from the Proto-Indo-European root Breu, to boil, bubble, effervesce, burn, also the source of the words bread, brew, and, appropriately enough, ferment. As for Scotch whisky, the demonym Scott, or Scotty in Latin, was originally used by the Romans to refer to the Irish, and the name followed the Irish who invaded Scotland in the 6th century CE and eventually became exclusive to the inhabitants of northwest Britain. It's uncertain where the name originally came from, and though it might be of Celtic origin, there's no evidence that the Irish used it to refer to themselves. It might be connected to the Gaulish personal names Scotus and Scotios, which in turn might come from a word for a cutting tool. There was a later folk etymology that derived it from the name of a mythical princess, Scota, of a Gaelic-speaking people who came from Scythia or Scythia, hence the name. Scythia itself comes from the Greek name for the region along the north coast of Black Sea, supposedly from an Indo-European root meaning shepherd. Finally, Vermouth gets its name from being originally flavoured with wormwood, which in German is called Vermouth. Though it's uncertain where this German word comes from, there is an old English cognate referring to the wormwood plant called Wermode. This has led some to etymologise the word as where meaning man, think werewolf, literally manwolf, plus mode, related to our modern word mood, but with the original sense of courage. The particular kind of man courage involved here stems from the fact that wormwood was used as an aphrodisiac. Vermouth is sometimes considered a type of amaro, an Italian bitter liqueur, and bitters are a type of concentrated botanical-based alcoholic flavouring originally developed as patent medicines, but now typically used as flavourings in cocktails. The word bitter comes from old English bitter, having a harsh taste, sharp, cutting, angry, full of animosity, or cruel, ultimately from the Proto-Indo-European root baid to split, with Germanic derivatives referring to biting, hence also to eating and hunting, and woodworking, which is also the source of the words bite, beetle, boat, and pizza. And if you want to know more about Vermouth and bitters, check out our video on the Americano cocktail. Now there are no prizes awarded for guessing that the name of the cocktail is related to the name of the New York Borough Manhattan, but the exact connection here is worth exploring. First of all, the name of the borough comes ultimately from the Munsee language of the indigenous Lenape people, either into a mana hot tank meaning where one gathers bows, or simply Munahan meaning island. The Dutch were the first European colonisers there as part of New Netherlands, setting up a fur trading settlement there in 1624, but there were ongoing hostilities between the Dutch and the English, called the Anglo-Dutch Wars, which affected their colonial holdings, and Manhattan, the southern tip of which was settled as New Amsterdam, and served as the seat of the New Netherlands colonial government, moved back and forth between the two powers, with various treaties being signed along the way, and eventually Manhattan ended up under England's control, with the Netherlands instead shoring up their control of the small Banda Islands east of Java. This might not seem like a good deal today, but at the time the Banda Islands were the sole source of the extremely valuable spice nutmeg, which, by the way, is used in some bitters, though I have no idea if it's used in Angostura bitters, whose recipe is a closely guarded secret, or Bokers bitters, whose recipe was lost and has only been reconstructed through analysis of a surviving sample. In any case, it's a better deal than the supposed $24 of trinkets, though more accurately 60 guilders worth of trade now equivalent to about $1,000 today, Peter Minowitz paid the Lenape for Manhattan on behalf of New Netherlands. Now, New Amsterdam in New Netherlands was of course named after Amsterdam in the Netherlands, which itself is named after the Amstel River as the city had its start when a bridge and dam were built at that point in the river. The dam part is exactly what it looks like, and appropriately enough, English borrowed this water management technology word from Middle Dutch. Though dam can be traced back to the relatively widespread proto-Germanic root dammas, meaning dam, its ultimate origin is unknown. The one suggestion is that it might come from the Proto-Indo-European root de to set or put, the source of a great many English words including do, deed, doom, face, abscond, faction, fetish, affair, malfeasance, and nefarious. As for Amstel, it's a compound formed from the Germanic elements Amma, water, current, and Stella, place, area, position. The Stella part is easily traceable back to the Proto-Indo-European root Stel to put, stand, which also lies behind words such as stall, stale, stilt, and stout. The root Amma isn't certain, but it might come ultimately from the Proto-Indo-European root ap, water. As I mentioned earlier, there seem to have been two basic roots in Proto-Indo-European that meant water. The first, ap, referred to animate water, water as a living force, and the second, wed, which we saw as the source of the words whiskey and vodka, referred to water as an inanimate substance, ironic given that as we've seen, whiskey means water of life. Another cocktail related word which we get from the ap root is julep, as in mint julep, but that's for another cocktail video. In any case, the name of the cocktail may in fact not be a reference to the borough directly, but instead to the Manhattan Club, a popular social club in Manhattan where the drink was said to have been invented. The story goes that in 1874 during a banquet there, in honor of the newly elected governor of New York, Samuel J. Tilden, who was a member of the club, a certain Dr. Ian Marshall invented the drink and poured it for the guests. Who this Dr. Ian Marshall was is unclear, and there are other origin stories, such as the one that claims the drink was invented by a bartender named Black, no other name given, in a bar on Broadway near Houston Street sometime in the 1860s, or the one that was invented at a club for a Supreme Court justice named Troux. There never has been a Supreme Court justice of that name. So given the sketchiness of those stories, we'll stick with the Manhattan Club theory. The drink became popular and soon people started asking for a cocktail like the one at the Manhattan Club and the drink thus got its name. The other important detail of the story was that the banquet was supposedly hosted by Lady Randolph Churchill, nay Jenny Jerome, the mother of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and in some versions of the story it was she who invented the Manhattan cocktail. The only problem with this detail is the date. The New York State election was held on November 3rd, and Winston Churchill was born on November 30th of that same year, so it's not likely that Lady Randolph was actually there, but this putative connection with Winston Churchill's mother is not entirely random. You see the Manhattan Club, which was founded in 1865 by John Van Buren, son of U.S. President Martin Van Buren, who was purported to have scandalously lost his famous father's house in a card game, along with $5,000, and his mistress, Elena America Vespucci, a descendant of Amerigo Vespucci, after whom America is named, again, C.R. Americano video, and who is possibly apocryphally credited with saying vote early and vote often, was the democratic answer to the Republican-associated Union Club of the City of New York, though in later years the Manhattan Club's members drifted towards the Republican end of things. The Manhattan Club was housed in a number of different locations over the years, but settled in 1899 in the Jerome Mansion, which had been the home of financier Leonard Jerome, who was the father of Jenny Jerome, so she had grown up in that building. Though that purported banquet in honor of Tilden would have taken place in the original location of the Manhattan Club at the old Charles Maverick Parker Mansion at 96 Fifth Avenue at the corner of Fifth Street. As an amazing coincidence, one of the members of the Republican Leaning Union Club was one Winston Churchill, but not THE Winston Churchill, instead a best-selling American novelist also named Winston Churchill. This is why the British Prime Minister always published under the name Winston Spencer Churchill, since at the time the American Churchill was the more famous writer. The two corresponded over the confusion of names and even met up on two occasions, but I hardly need to tell you which Churchill history forgot. Poor Winston, you know which one I mean. As for Jenny herself, or I suppose we should say Lady Randolph, she gave birth to Winston less than eight months after her marriage on April 15th, 1874, when she was twenty. She had been introduced to Lord Randolph Churchill by the Prince of Wales later to become King Edward VII in August 1873, and they got engaged three days later, but the wedding was delayed for months as their parents couldn't agree on the settlements, but I guess they couldn't wait. Despite this initial passion, she is believed to have had many lovers during her marriage, including the very Prince of Wales who introduced them, as well as Prince Carl Kinsky of Wichinnitz in Teteau, and Herbert von Bismarck, son of Otto and she later married younger and younger men, one in fact younger than her own son. The Prince of Wales also had many mistresses, including one Alice Keppel who happens to be the great grandmother of Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, who was the mistress and now wife of the current Prince of Wales, Charles, subject of media scandals that played out in the tabloid press and eventually led to the death of Charles' first wife, Princess Diana. The word scandal comes into English through French from Latin scandalum, cause for offence, stumbling block, temptation, from Greek scandalon, a trap or snare laid for an enemy, where it developed the figurative sense, a stumbling block, offence. The original sense had the idea of a trap with a springing device, coming from the Proto-Indo-European route scand to leap or climb, also source of the words scan, scale, echelon and ascend, descend, transcend and condescend. Latin scandalum is also the source, through French again, of the word slander, and you can see how the two concepts are related. Now the original sense in English was religious, discredit caused by a religious conduct, and the modern secular senses of malicious gossip and shameful action or event didn't develop until a little later in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, and it turns out that scandals, whether romantic or political, lie behind the stories of the Manhattan, and just a quick content warning, some of these involve sexual violence. Two years after Tilden celebrated his gubernatorial victory by drinking a Manhattan cocktail, he was a candidate in one of the most controversial presidential elections in U.S. history in 1876. Tilden was of course the Democratic candidate, and ran against Republican Rutherford B. Hayes. Tilden won an outright majority with nearly 51% of the popular vote, but had won two few electoral college votes for a majority, with 20 votes from four states being unresolved. Remind you of any other political scandals? To resolve the debate, Congress appointed a bipartisan electoral commission, but the Republicans had a one-seat majority on the commission. And can you say stolen election? A compromise was agreed to in which the Democrats accepted Hayes as president in exchange for an end to reconstruction, thus leading to the disenfranchisement of black voters in the South, so really it was a bad thing all around. But there was a far more lurid scandal associated with the Manhattan Club. On the evening of June 26, 1906, after leaving the Manhattan Club, renowned New York architect, Stanford White, went to a show at Madison Square Gardens, which he had designed, and was shot in the face at Point Blank Range by millionaire playboy Harry Kendall Thaw. To understand the events that led up to this bold murder, we have to go back to Tarentum, a small town near Pittsburgh in 1884 or 1885, known as Sir of the Year, when Evelyn Nesbitt was born. Her father, an attorney, encouraged her curiosity and self-confidence as a child, supplying her with books, including ones considered for boys only, and encouraged her to take lessons when she became interested in music and dance. Tragically, he died suddenly at only 40 years old, when Evelyn was 10 or 11, leaving the family without support. Her mother, not the most capable of women in business matters, found it difficult to support her two children, and eventually all three of them ended up working as sales clerks at a fabric store. But when Evelyn, in a chance encounter, caught the eye of an artist who wanted her as a model to paint, her modeling career took off, and she became a popular model in Philadelphia where they were living at the time, earning more money through that than the three of them combined did in retail. Eventually, the family found themselves in New York, and through reference letters from the Philadelphia artists, she became acquainted with artist James Carroll Beckwith, whose primary patron was John Jacob Astor IV, businessman and real estate developer of the fabulously wealthy and influential Astor family. We'll hear more about them later. Soon, Evelyn was posing for many famous artists and photographers. At the time, she was only around 15 or 16 years old. She became the it girl of the moment, appearing in many magazines, including Vanity Fair, Harper's Bazaar, and Cosmopolitan, as well as on postcards and advertisements, sort of the first pinup girl or supermodel. The famous illustrator Charles Dana Gibson made her one of his Gibson girls, who essentially defined the ideal of feminine beauty at the time in one of his most famous illustrations titled Woman, the Eternal Question, in which her curled locks formed the shape of a question mark. As a side note, the Gibson cocktail, essentially a martini garnished with a pickle onion instead of an olive or twist of lemon peel, may be named after Charles Dana Gibson. As it is said, he challenged Charlie Connolly, the bartender at the Players Club in New York, to improve upon the martini, and the change in garnish was his improvement. Nesbitt also turned her attentions to the stage, becoming one of the famous Flora Dora girls as a chorus girl, in the musical Flora Dora, which incidentally inspired the Flora Dora cocktail made from gin, lime juice, raspberry syrup or clementofomboise liqueur and ginger ale, with the pink drink we're calling the pink dresses of the Flora Dora girls, before getting a more central role in the Wild Rose, and was through this that she caught the attention of two men. First was the famous architect, Stanford White, who had designed homes for many of New York's wealthy, including the Asters and the Vanderbilt's, as well as the New York Herald building and the aforementioned Madison Square Garden. White was one of New York's social elite, and very much a playboy, bon vivant and womanizer himself. Speaking of playboys, it's been said that the term playboy, at least in its modern sense, was invented for White's killer, Harry Kendall Faw, as we'll see in a minute, though the word had been around before him. But speaking of the playboy lifestyle, a big part of this was the drinking scene and the various clubs and bars, a major element of New York's social scene at the time, and it's this lifestyle that lies behind the title of another cocktail recipe book by that celebrity bartender Jerry Thomas, How to Mix Drinks or the Bon Vivant's companion, from 1862. Now getting back to White and Nesbit, when they were introduced, White was 46 and Nesbit was 15 or 16, and White took the young girl under his wing, also helping out her mother and brother, and convinced her mother of his good intentions. He entertained her at his apartment with food from Delmonico's, one of the top restaurants in New York at the time, and she was allowed one glass of champagne. His apartment famously featured a red velvet swing suspended from the ceiling by ropes covered in ivy-like vines in which Nesbit sat while he pushed her. Accounts vary as to whether this apartment was located in his private tower that he had designed at Madison Square Garden or another property. At the time of its completion, by the way, the Madison Square Garden Tower was the second highest in New York at some 32 stories. White convinced Evelyn's mother to take a trip home to Pittsburgh to visit friends, allaying her fears of leaving her daughter on chaperone to New York saying that he'd watch over her. While her mother was away, White entertained Evelyn at his apartment and introduced her to another infamous room, the Mirror Room, which was 10 x 10 feet and paneled with mirrors on all the walls and ceiling. On this occasion, the champagne flowed more freely, and Nesbit blacked out, waking up naked and in bed with White. In spite of this incident, Nesbit became his lover and became quite infatuated with him, but eventually his interest in her waned as he moved on to other conquests, though he remained a presence in her life. Nesbit also had a brief affair with a young John Barrymore from the famous Barrymore acting family, while he was pursuing a career as an illustrator before taking up the family profession and becoming a famous actor himself. Both Evelyn's mother and Stanford White disapproved of the relationship, and White had her enrolled in a boarding school in New Jersey run by the mother of director Cecil B. DeMille in an attempt to break them up, and though Barrymore proposed to Evelyn in front of both her mother and White, she turned him down. Later on, Barrymore was worried that he'd be called to testify in the murder trial about an emergency surgery she had while away at the boarding school, officially an appendectomy, but alleged to have been an abortion. Of course, the Barrymore family had its own run-ins with media attention and scandals, perhaps most famously with Drew Barrymore, the granddaughter of John Barrymore, and her troubled childhood and struggles with drug and alcohol abuse. As another side note about the Barrymore family, John Barrymore's nephew, Samuel Colt, made an uncredited appearance in The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing, a 1955 movie about Nesbitt's life starring Joan Collins. But the other major male figure in Nesbitt's life was Harry Kendall Thaw. Thaw hailed from a wealthy Pittsburgh family, the son of a coal and railroad baron, William Thaw Sr. Throughout his life, Harry Kendall Thaw exhibited considerable mental instability and sadistic behavior, and was addicted to cocaine and morphine. Thaw, who purportedly lit his cigars with $100 bills, spent a considerable amount of money on obsessive partying and supporting his drug addiction, as well as indulging in his sometimes violent sexual proclivities, and a considerable amount was spent on his behalf to cover all this up and avoid public scandal. Thaw moved to New York City with the intention of living it up in his Playboy lifestyle there, but had difficulty breaking into that elite social community. His applications to all those important social clubs of New York, including the Manhattan Club, were rejected, which Thaw attributed to the machinations of Stanford White, leading light of that social community. Furthermore, Thaw was in the habit of throwing lavish and expensive parties, inviting the most beautiful showgirls and prostitutes, but when one woman he publicly snubbed decided to get a revenge by hijacking all the female invitees to White's infamous tower apartment, leaving Thaw with only a roomful of men, a public humiliation reported in the gossip columns, Thaw believed it was actually White who was behind it. Thaw became obsessed with White, admiring the Playboy lifestyle in New York that he seemed to be able to get away with, but was denied to Thaw, thus creating great resentment. White, however, probably knew nothing of Thaw's growing resentment towards him and the full-blown vendetta it turned into, in fact thinking very little of Thaw at all, considering him simply a poser and of little consequence to the New York social scene, though he did refer to Thaw as the Pennsylvania pug in reference to his baby-faced appearance. Nesbitt also caught Thaw's eye, and like John Barrymore, he went to see her in The Wild Rose many times, becoming obsessed with her as well. In fact, it may have been her relationship with White, his arch-rival, that drove Thaw's interest in her. In a classic example of sociopathic manipulation, Thaw reigned in his transgressive tendencies and acted kindly and solicitously towards Evelyn, taking her and her mother on a trip to Europe to recover from her appendectomy. But the hectic itinerary he had planned was exhausting to both mother and daughter, driving a wedge between them, and Mrs. Nesbitt soon returned to the US. Thaw pressed the idea of marriage to Evelyn, who was initially reluctant, feeling she couldn't accept without revealing the details of her relationship with White, especially given Thaw's obsession with female chastity, but Thaw eventually wheeled out of her the details of White's assault of her, which set him off. The travel itinerary turned into a tour of sites connected with female martyrdom, including a visit to the birthplace of Joan of Arc, where he left the comment in the visitor's book, she would not have been a virgin if Stanford White had been around. They finally ended up at Katzenstein Castle, where he kept her locked up and whipped her and sexually abused her over a two-week period, after which his mood shifted and he became apologetic and even upbeat. Thaw continued to pursue Nesbitt's hand in marriage and eventually desiring financial stability. She relented and they were married in 1905. However, though she was expecting to continue the interesting social life that she was accustomed to, she found herself living with her new husband under the watchful eye of mother Thaw back in Pittsburgh, and ultimately it was the past history that she had with Stanford White that led to his murder. On that faithful night in June 1906, Evelyn and Harry Kendall Thaw were in New York dining at Cafe Martin. Stanford White happened to be dining there that night as well, and when she saw him arrive, Evelyn let her husband know that she saw the Beast as he insisted she call White. At the time, he didn't seem to have much of a reaction. After dinner, White stopped in at the Manhattan Club before going to his Madison Square Garden for the opening night performance of the show Memzal Champagne, being performed at the Rooftop Open Air Theatre. Thaw happened to have also bought tickets for the performance and saw that his rival was there. During the big finale, a song called Highly Appropriately I Could Love A Million Girls, Thaw approached White and shot him, holding his gun up in the air afterwards and calling out the explanation, he ruined my wife. Lurid is the story is, what's most interesting for our purposes is the media frenzy that followed this high society murder scandal. Already by the next morning, the news media pounced on the story, with media mogul William Randolph Hearst leading the way, and the upcoming trial would soon be dubbed the Trial of the Century, remarkable for a crime committed in just 1906. Reporters would hype up the details on anything even remotely connected to the murder to produce more copy. The newspapers competed for scoops, each trying to outdo the others, and both sides of the case gave those scoops to the reporters in an attempt to bolster their cases in the court of public opinion. As was the usual practice, Thaw's mother used the family fortune to obscure her son's past transgressions and induced favorable accounts of him, and the district attorney's office hired the services of a Pittsburgh PR firm to orchestrate a smear campaign to discredit both Thaw and Nesbitt. That district attorney, by the way, was none other than one William Travers Jerome, cousin of Jenny Jerome of putted Manhattan cocktail fame, and he himself prosecuted the case against Thaw. Female reporters, sometimes referred to as sob sisters and the pity patrol, ran human interest stories with Thaw lionized as a protector of women, which is what he actually thought of himself, and his mental illness, drug addictions, and abusive behavior downplayed. Nesbitt's portrayal in the press was more ambivalent, as she was portrayed as a victim, but also not as a respectable woman. White was dragged through the mud, with some even retroactively criticizing his professional record as an architect, though journalist Richard Harding Davis, a friend of White's, who was, by the way, the inspiration for Charles Dana Gibson's portrayal of the Gibson man, counterpart of the Gibson girls, with his dashing clean shaven look, wrote a defense of White, who he says was distorted in the tabloid press. Interesting given that Davis himself had been accused of yellow press tactics and being involved in an alleged plot of William Randolph Hearst that started the Spanish American War in order to sell more papers. It certainly is true that Davis helped to create the legend surrounding The Rough Riders, the volunteer cavalry of Davis' good friend Theodore Roosevelt. Perhaps most amazing in the media furore was the fact that Thomas Edison rushed into production and completed, within a week of the murder itself, a film, Rooftop Murder, which was shown in Nickelodeon theaters. All this lurid tabloid media attention upset some, and various church groups lobbied to have the details of the trial censored in the press, and President Roosevelt even threatened to do so, though this was never carried out. In the end, Thaw's wealth probably carried the day. While in jail, he received preferential treatment, being allowed to wear his own clothes and have lavish food catered by Delmonico's with wine and champagne, and he was eventually declared not guilty by reason of temporary insanity. And though he was committed to an asylum, where again he received preferential treatment, he was eventually able to simply stroll out of the hospital to a waiting car, which brought him to Sherbrooke, Quebec, and in the end he was able to pull strings and have himself declared sane again. Now when we talk about tabloid journalism, we're talking about sensationalized stories about crimes, scandals, gossip, and celebrities, but the term tabloid originally referred to a particular format of newspapers. Actually, the word tabloid originally had a medicinal sense. Ultimately from Latin tabula, table, which perhaps comes from the Proto-Indo-European root sta to stand, the word tablet was formed in Old French as diminutive of table, table, and came into English around 1300 with the meaning slab or flat surface for an inscription, and by the 1580s had developed the sense of a pill of medicine. With the addition of the suffix oid, meaning having the form of, from Greek ados, form, ultimately from the Proto-Indo-European root wade to sea, the pharmaceutical company Burroughs Welcome and Company established the trademark name tabloid for their new highly compressed and thus smaller tablet, and soon the word began to be used to refer to other small compressed items. The regular newspaper format was known as the broadsheet, but a smaller format with pages half the size of a broadsheet and reduced number of columns became known as a tabloid newspaper, not just for its physical size, but also for the compressed nature of its content. Alfred C. Harmsworth, editor and proprietor of the London Daily Mail, instituted this new format with quote, current news presented in condensed and tabulated form, stating that quote, the world enters today upon the 20th or time saving century. I claim that by my system of condensed or tabloid journalism, hundreds of working hours can be saved each year. Ironically, the outcome was just the opposite, with the new format becoming associated with sensational, hyped-up scandals and fake news, all with the aim of generating scandals to sell more and more papers. But fake news didn't begin here. Back in 1835, The New York Sun ran a series of articles about the purported discovery of alien life on the moon, a discovery which was attributed to famed astronomer John Herschel. The articles, commissioned by editor Benjamin H. Day to increase sales from acclaimed newspaper reporter Richard Adams Locke, whom he had hired away from the rival paper Courier and Inquirer, included fantastic details about the lunar vegetation and animal life and outlandish illustrations. When pressed, Locke admitted it was a hoax, but claimed it was meant as a satire of scientific speculation and that it served to divert quote, the public mind for a while from that bitter discord, the abolition of slavery. Similar to this great moon hoax of 1835 is the 1874 Central Park Zoo Escape hoax, perpetrated by James Gordon Bennett Jr. in his paper The New York Herald, which claimed that there was a mass escape of zoo animals, which then ran a muck in the city, killing many people. At the end of the lengthy article, it was revealed that it was a hoax, though critics nonetheless accused the Herald of inciting a panic, though the perpetrators of the hoax later claimed that they were only trying to point out improper safety precautions at the zoo. And for more about these and other hoaxes, you can check out our video on the Tom Collins cocktail. As for the term fake news, it goes back farther than you might think. Though it's become particularly commonplace in the post-truth politics of the Trump era, it's actually first detested in 1890 during the peak period of yellow journalism, more on that term in a minute. As for the Herald, it was actually James Gordon Bennett Sr. who founded the paper in 1835, having worked at the New York Courier and Inquirer. Bennett's new paper had its big break about a year after its foundation in the form of another scandalous murder when 23-year-old New York prostitute Helen Jewett was brutally murdered with a hatchet and one of her regular clients, 19-year-old shop clerk Richard P. Robinson, was arrested and tried for her murder. The press jumped on the story the first time such a scandalous murder was covered in newspapers, laying the foundations for later tabloid journalism, with the Herald leading the way. In Bennett's sensational coverage of the story, he conducted the first-ever newspaper interview of Rosina Townsend, the madame of the brothel. Bennett would later score another first in 1839 when the Herald conducted the first-ever interview of a sitting US president, none other than Martin Van Buren, and in what is probably the earliest example of checkbook kiss-and-tell journalism, he published a notice in 1836 offering a reward to any women who, quote, will set a trap for a Presbyterian person and catch one of them in flagrante delicto. But it was Bennett's son, James Gordon Bennett Jr., who is perhaps most notable here, a scandal in himself. In addition to his Central Park Zoo escape hoax, under Bennett Jr.'s editorship, the Herald-funded Henry Morton Stanley's expedition to Africa to find David Livingston, which culminated in their meeting and the famous line, Dr. Livingston, I presume, in 1871, and various other explorations and endeavors, including an ill-fated attempt on the North Pole. In his personal life, Bennett Jr. was another one of these wealthy playboy types, and was an avid sportsman, organizing the first polo match and tennis match in the US, founding the Gordon Bennett Cup in Ballooning, and kicking off international motor racing by sponsoring the Bennett Trophy races from 1900 to 1905, and personally winning the first trans-oceanic yachting race. But it's his scandalous behaviour which is perhaps most noteworthy. Bennett Jr. became engaged to socialite Carolyn May, and when his wealthy father-in-law to be threw a party for the couple at the May Family Mansion in 1877, Bennett showed up late and drunk, and proceeded to urinate in the living room fireplace, according to some accounts, the grand piano, in full view of his hosts and their guests. Needless to say, the engagement was promptly cancelled, and the Guinness Book of World Records lists the incident as the greatest engagement faux pas, if anything a massive understatement, and certainly a great scandal if ever there was one. And it's for this type of wild and over-the-top behaviour that his name became the British expression of surprise and incredulity, Gordon Bennett, as a kind of minced oath for the exclamation gore blimey, meaning God blind me. After this, Bennett Jr. didn't end up getting married until he was 73 years old, when he wed Maud Potter, the Baroness de Reuter, who was the widow of George de Reuter, son of Paul Reuter, founder of the Reuter's news agency. When he died, Bennett Jr. appointed American businessman James Stillman as one of his trustees, but only a few weeks later, before Stillman was able to act under this authority, he too died, having named businessman and Yale University benefactor John William Sterling as his executor, who then died suddenly too, naming one of his executors managing the now combined estates worth $76 million, his domestic partner and cotton broker James O. Bloss, who was a major Yale benefactor who then died just a few weeks after that at the Metropolitan Club, another one of those all-important New York clubs, where he was staying as a member, founded by financier JP Morgan and designed by none other than Stanford White. Gordon Bennett As it turned out, by the way, Stanford White also designed the New York Herald building, completed in 1894, demolished in 1921, though its name lives on as Harold Square, where the building used to stand, which is immortalized in the lyrics of the song Give My Regards to Broadway with the line Remember Me to Harold Square. Now that other term, yellow journalism or yellow press, refers to pretty much the same thing as tabloid journalism, with yellow journalism perhaps being more common in the US, and tabloid journalism being more common in Britain. And the name can be specifically traced back to two newspaper publishers around the turn of the 20th century. One was William Randolph Hearst, who, as we've already seen, led the way in the scandal reporting around the fall white murder. His rival was Joseph Pulitzer. Yes, the person the Pulitzer Prize in journalism is named after was a pioneer of tabloid journalism. Pulitzer, already publishing a paper in St. Louis, turned his attention to New York and purchased the failing newspaper The New York World in 1883 and increased its circulation by publishing sensationalized stories of crimes, disasters, and scandals, and by undercutting the competition by dropping the newsstand price to two cents. Soon the New York World had passed the sun and Bennett's Herald, having not only the highest circulation in New York, but also in the country. Inspired by Pulitzer's approach, Hearst, who was already publishing a paper in San Francisco, purchased the failing New York Journal in 1895 and immediately engaged in a circulation war with Pulitzer's world, dropping his newsstand price to one cent, which Pulitzer soon matched, and printing the same sensationalist content that Pulitzer had been. Hearst even stole away some of Pulitzer's staff, as well as the world's popular centerpiece comic strip, Hogan's Alley, drawn by Richard F. Outcult, which featured the popular sensation character known as The Yellow Kid. And it's from this bald-headed kid in an oversized yellow shirt that yellow journalism gets its name. And if you want to learn more about Yellow Kid, check out our video about the word Marvel, which talks about the history of comics. It should be remembered, The World in Journal published solid reporting as well, perhaps most notably by famed pioneering investigative reporter and industrialist and inventor too, Nellie Bly, who, while she worked for the world, went undercover as an inmate in an insane asylum to reveal the horrible conditions there, and made a record-breaking trip around the world in 72 days in emulation of Jules Verne's famous novel, and later was a battlefield correspondent during World War I for The Journal. And in spite of their competition, both Pulitzer and Hearst were politically similar, supporting the Democratic Party, and both served in the House of Representatives as Democrats. And Pulitzer had been a very vocal supporter of Tilden's run for the presidency. The Pulitzer Prize, by the way, came out of an endowment Pulitzer made to Columbia University. Pulitzer became quite wealthy in the newspaper business, and even hired Stanford White to design his luxurious personal residence, and when he died in 1911, he left $2 million to the university, which was also used to create the Columbia University Graduate School in Journalism. Now in the midst of his success with the New York world, Pulitzer had a new building constructed to house his newspaper, the New York World building with its gilt dome which contained Pulitzer's own private office, an early skyscraper, which upon its completion in 1890 became the tallest building in New York and the tallest office building in the world. It was the first building in New York to surpass the height of the spire of Trinity Church, which had dominated the city's skyline, and it kicked off something of a competition to have the tallest building and a construction boom in skyscrapers. While Chicago was quicker out of the gate building skyscrapers, it soon became the distinguishing feature of New York, and they became especially popular with New York newspaper companies. In particular, Park Row was a home to a number of newspaper companies and became nicknamed Newspaper Row and featured a number of early skyscrapers, including the New York World building and the New York Times building, both designed by skyscraper pioneer George B. Post. Of course, there were critics of the skyscrapers too, including writer Henry James and photographer Alfred Stieglitz, husband of the famous painter Georgia O'Keeffe, in his picture Old and New New York, which contrasted the old low-rise buildings with the steel frame of the Vanderbilt Hotel under construction at the time, and some architects, including Stanford White, refused to take part in this skyscraper boom. Nevertheless, when White designed his Madison Square Garden Tower, it was at the time, as we saw earlier, the second highest in New York. Now, White's building had been funded by a syndicate, including J.P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, P.T. Barnum, Darius Mills, William Waldorf Astor, and James Stillman, who you'll remember in connection with the James Gordon Bennett Jr. estate, but it should be noted that this is not the Madison Square Garden of today. White's building, located at 26th Street and Madison Avenue, was torn down in 1926, and Madison Square Garden was rebuilt at a different location on 8th Avenue between 49th and 50th Streets, so not actually at Madison Square, though the name stuck. This Madison Square Garden, too, was torn down in 1968 when a new Madison Square Garden, the current one, was built at yet a different location between 7th and 8th Avenues from 31st to 33rd Streets, sitting atop Pennsylvania Station. Now, when the previous Madison Square Gardens were torn down, skyscrapers were put up in their locations, the World Wide Plaza, where the 1925 building used to be, and the New York Life Building, where White's 1890 building used to be. The New York Life Building, with its stunning golden pyramid top made with 25,000 gold leaf tiles, was designed by noted architect and skyscraper pioneer, Cas Gilbert, in 1926, and completed in 1928, and was Gilbert's last significant skyscraper in Manhattan. Gilbert, who had earlier in his career worked for Stanford White's architecture firm, McKim, Mead & White, is also known for designing the Woolworth Building, which from the time of its completion in 1913, until 1930, was the tallest in New York, and indeed in the world. Now, with all these skyscrapers being put up, this golden age of skyscraper building also led to building, a portmanteau of building and bouldering, a rock climbing term, which is the recreational climbing of tall buildings. The Woolworth Building was attempted by George Polly in 1920, but he was arrested partway up for climbing without permission. Polly, who had climbed over 2,000 buildings, earning the nickname the Human Fly, got started on this activity when the owner of a clothing store said he would give him a free suit if he climbed to the roof of the building. And of course, many of these New York skyscrapers have been ascended over the years, and there have also been other builderers who have received the nickname the Human Fly, including John Chiampa, who in 1947 climbed the Aster Hotel. Hotel Aster is connected with that famous Aster family who have already come up a number of times in our story. At the time of its construction, it was seen as something of a successor to the famous Waldorf Astoria Hotel, though it should be noted that although the land was owned by William Waldorf Aster, it was mainly the work of William C. Muschenheim and his brother Frederick A. Muschenheim, who leased the site from absentee landlord Aster. Completed in 1904, the hotel featured a rooftop garden, much like the one atop Madison Square Garden where Stanford White was killed, which were popular in New York buildings from the 1880s until prohibition. The Waldorf Astoria on the other hand had its start in 1893 when William Waldorf Aster built the Waldorf Hotel on the site where he had previously had his mansion, built by his father John Jacob Aster III. The wealthy New York Aster family had its start when patriarch John Jacob Aster, born in Waldorf near Heidelberg, came to America around 1783 or 1784, first making his fortune in the fur trade before focusing his interests on real estate investment, becoming the first multi-millionaire in the US. Aster had purchased the parcel of land where the Waldorf Hotel would later be built in 1826. His grandson, John Jacob Aster III, who had built his mansion on that site, started out his career dabbling in railroads, but was outsmarted by Cornelius Vanderbilt and so decided to keep his focus on the now family tradition of real estate. The Waldorf Astoria then came about because William Waldorf Aster, great-grandson of John Jacob Aster, didn't get along with his cousin John Jacob Aster IV, usually known as Jack, and patron of James Carroll Beckwith, who was, as you'll remember, Evelyn Nesbitt's early benefactor, and his mother, Carolyn Schermerhorn Aster. So that's why he built the Waldorf Hotel, which was located right next to her mansion, and was designed to overshadow it. And Mrs. Aster then retaliated by tearing down her house and building, along with Jack, another hotel at that site, the Astoria Hotel. Incidentally, one Alexander Terny Stewart built his mansion just across from Mrs. Aster's at the northwest corner of Fifth Avenue and 34th Street, and after the death of his widow in 1886, it served as the home of the Manhattan Club, before it moved to the Jerome Mansion in 1899. Eventually, the two hotels merged to become the legendary Waldorf Astoria, joined by a 300-meter corridor known as Peacock Alley. Mrs. Aster lived with her son Jack at another location, suffering from dementia and eventually dying in 1908, and Jack died not long after in 1912, going down with the Titanic. The U.S. Senate inquiry into the maritime disaster was later held at the Waldorf Astoria, whereas William Waldorf Aster moved to England and became Baron Aster in 1916 and Viscount Aster in 1917. The Waldorf Astoria was later relocated to its current site, and the old hotel was torn down in 1928 to make way for yet another early skyscraper, the Empire State Building, which would become a popular target for many builderers, but was most famously scaled by King Kong. Now the original Waldorf Astoria was mainly run by hotelier George Bolt, who mediated between the Aster cousins and merged the two hotels into one, and it was his focus on catering to the super-rich clientele that made the hotel synonymous with luxury. Bolt is also credited with either inventing or popularizing a Thousand Island dressing, named after the Thousand Islands region lying between the U.S. and Canada, where Bolt kept a summer home, when he instructed the Waldorf Astoria-Mater D. Oscar Cherokee to put it on the menu. Cherokee himself became quite a local celebrity, being referred to as Oscar of the Waldorf for his fine attention to detail and luxury, and he is credited with the invention of a number of other famous recipes to come out of the Waldorf Astoria, including Eggs Benedict and Waldorf Salad. But for our purposes, there's another more important recipe devised at the Waldorf Astoria, the Rob Roy cocktail. The Rob Roy, a variation on a Manhattan that substitutes Scotch whiskey for the rye, was invented in 1894 by the bartender at the Waldorf Astoria in honor of the New York premiere of the operetta called Rob Roy, loosely based on the life of Scottish folk here Rob Roy McGregor by composer Reginald de Coven and lyricist Harold B. Smith, and thus brings us back once again to the Manhattan cocktail. And there's one last link between the Manhattan and the Astor family, which involved John Jacob Astor III, whose mansion was on that plot of land that was the site of the original Hotel Astor, being appointed to a blue ribbon commission to look into the city's finances because of the growing political scandal surrounding William M. Tweed, more commonly known as Boss Tweed, the Democratic politician who at various points held a number of positions, including in the U.S. House of Representatives and the New York Senate, and basically controlled the Democratic political machine in New York. Boss Tweed was being hounded by the New York Times and the satirical cartoonist Thomas Nast from Harper's Weekly, who by the way was responsible for the Democratic donkey and the Republican elephant symbols, and whose work was featured in the celebrity bartender Jerry Thomas's bar. Nast's cartoon were particularly damaging to Boss Tweed, leading to that commission looking into the city's books, which the commission found were faithfully kept. But it wasn't until our old friend Samuel J. Tilden came on the scene reexamining the records and found that money was being embezzled by Tweed, as much as 200 million by later estimates, that Boss Tweed's hold on power was broken. Tilden gained a reputation for stamping out corruption, which helped him get elected as governor of New York. So you could say that it was this political scandal that led to Tilden's governorship celebration at the Manhattan Club and therefore the invention of the Manhattan cocktail. And on that note, I think it's time for a drink. I'm here with Kyle Marcus, owner of the alibi room. Kyle, can you show us how to make a classic Manhattan? I'd love to. Hi, everybody. Today we're going to make a traditional Manhattan. We've put some ingredients together for you that I think you'll like. We're going to use an American straight rye, Woodford Reserve straight rye. If you'd like to spice that up a little bit, any of the Cap Strength Lot 40s are an incredible choice to make a little spicier cocktail. We're also going to add some carpano antico vermouth formula for our vermouth. It's an incredible hard to find vermouth that's guaranteed to elevate any cocktail. And then we're going to finish it with some Angostura bitters, basically the salt and pepper of a bartender. So the first thing we're going to do is we're going to take our mixing glass. We're going to fill it with some ice. We're going to take an ounce and three quarters of our rye. We're going to take three quarters of an ounce of our vermouth. And we're going to tap that off with just a few dashes of bitters. We'll take our bar spoon and we're going to put it right to the edge of our mixing glass. We're going to make sure to go around the outside of the mixing glass. I like to stir it until it gets kind of like almost a greasy look to it. It just starts to open up and sheen a little bit. Make sure we don't want to put bubbles in. We don't want to agitate it. We don't want to infuse it with air. We just want it to get cold. We don't want to break down the alcohol. And then what we'll do is we'll take our julep strainer. If you don't feel confident with a julep strainer, you can always use a nice mesh strainer, but this is the proper way to do it. And then we're going to put it into our beautiful clean coupe. Again, when you pour, you want to try to make sure that we don't get any bubbles, ripples. We want everything to be smooth and proper. And then we're going to finish, we're going to garnish it with our proper luxardo maricino cherry. And that's how we make a standard old school Manhattan. Thanks Kyle. It's my pleasure. Very good. If any of you find yourself near Sudbury, Ontario, I highly recommend you drop by the alibi room to try one of these for yourself. Thanks for watching. If you enjoyed these etymological explorations and cultural connections, please subscribe and click the little bell to be notified of every new episode. And check out our Patreon, where you can make a contribution to help me make more videos. I'm at Alliterative on Twitter, and you can visit our website, alliterative.net, for more language and connections in the podcast, vlog, and more. Cheers.