Men who, if their primordial capitalist bosses had not given them rum, would have done something to get their wages raised

In that sudden roar the word you make out is "Daiquiri." Yes, yes, I know. I have alluded to rum before, we must not deny hat it exists and it is drunk, and as a historian I must give it its due. It gave us political freedom and negro slavery. It got ships built ans sailed, forests felled, iron smelted, and commercial freight carried from place to place by men who, if their primordial capitalist bosses had not given them rum, would have done something to get their wages raised. 

B. DeVoto, The Hour (1951), 55

There are only two cocktails

There are only two cocktails. The bar manuals and the women's pages of the daily press, I know, print scores of messes to which they give that honorable and glorious name. They are not cocktails, they are slops. They are fit to be drunk only in the barbarian marches and mostly are drunk there, by the barbarians. .... I have shown that our forefathers were a great people: they invented rye and bourbon. They were also a tough people: nothing so clearly proves it as they survived the fearful mixtures they also invented and then drank.

B. DeVoto, The Hour (1951), 50-51

This is the most famous line in this hard-edged gem of a book. It makes me want to engage with Martinis, and bourbon.