Roger Angell's article on the Martini in this summer's New Yorker belongs to a minor genre that can be called "the demise of the Martini." 

Angel's theme can be traced up the decades of the twentieth century.  The monitory tone is heard already in post-Prohibition articles.  Frank Shay in Esquire, December 1934 wants to maintain the standards of the era before Prohibition, when, for example, the best bars did not serve an olive in a Martini.

Angell speaks disparagingly of Bernard DeVoto's The Hour.  The Martini article in that volume, "For the Wayward and Beguiled" (from DeVoto's Harper's column of December 1949) defined the genre and the attitudes on which it rests.  With this article, DeVoto doomed his followers, including Angell, to epigonal status.

As the century wears on, the warnings grow more frequent.  James Villas said in Esquire, April 1973: "I am a little shocked at the degree to which the [Martini's] components, preparation and garnishments have been modified or changed during the last decade" (111).  Donald J. Gonzales was much shocked.  In Saturday Review, November 1975, he began: "the perfect martini is fast joining our national list of endangered species."

Nowadays, Angell informs us, young people, are drinking strange concoctions that they attempt to dignify with the cognomen "Martini."  Donald G. Smith foresaw the threat in the mid-1980s.  In M,SU, 33, I quoted from his doomsday article.  The main idea:

 
The martini is an honest drink, tasting exactly like what it is and nothing else.  There is no sugar in a martini; no egg whites, no black and white rums, no shaved almonds, no fruit juice, no chocolate, and no spices.  A martini is not served in a pineapple shell nor a piece of rolled up canoe bark, and there are no disgusting pieces of flotsam around the top.  It is a clear, clean, cold, pure, honest drink ... .

In 1998, William Grimes reported on grated chocolate and many other things, including oysters and marshmallows, floating in "Martinis."  Not only had the kind of drink Smith detested come into prominence; it was being called a "Martini."

 Angell perceives that it is "the chic shape of the glass" that draws today's young crowd to the drinks they are calling "Martinis."  Modesty restrains me from making further reference to M,SU, where I linked the resurgence of the "Martini" to the glass (xx).  As a bartender in Dallas told Grimes, "If it's in a Martini glass, it's a Martini."

The glass is the excuse for the figure of speech by which its contents, whatever they may be, are a "Martini."  The phenomenon is linguistic or rhetorical.  See "The Anything 'Martini': How the Meaning of the Name Expanded in the 1990s."
 

In the old days, Angell recalls, we drank Martinis at lunch and then went back to work. Jerry Della Femina described that custom elegiacally in The New York Times Magazine  in 1989.  Grimes wrote its obituary in 2001.  Reflecting on a Democratic tax stimulus plan that would have made business meals, presumably including the three-Martini lunch, fully deductible, he said:  "There is a flaw in the plan. Americans are not capable of drinking three martinis at lunch. Weakened by decades of white-wine spritzers and designer mineral waters, they can barely hoist a Bud Lite. At this late date, a three-martini lunch would kill them."

The genre in which Angell is exercising himself rests on one of the several constants of Martini symbolism: this drink belongs to the past.  See "Past, Martini as Thing of the."

The genre demands reminiscence, and Angell tells an anecdote about his stepfather, E.B. White, who was a twentieth-century Martini-man, one of those who built this cocktail into their persona.  See "Breakfast Martini." But it was the only personal anecdote in the article.  I wish there had been more.  I also wish that he would answer the question posed in the webpage file just cited.  (He could, but he won't.)

 A couple of details.

o Though The New Yorker prides itself on its fact-checking, it let Angell get away with a reference to FDR in a paragraph on the "real thing."  But FDR was not keeping it real.  His Martinis were improvised with whatever ingredients came to hand.  See M,SU, 142-43 (n. 73).

o Angell retells a "dumb story" that he heard from fighter pilots when he was stationed in the Pacific during World War II.  The story is a type (stranded person mixes Martini from emergency kit and is corrected by someone who suddenly appears on the scene).  See M,SU, 9 ("perhaps the most prevalent of all Martini jokes").  For an African sub-type, see the article by Donald J. Gonzales.

References:

Roger Angell, "Dry Martini: The ultimate cocktail, down cold," The New Yorker, Aug. 19 and 26, 2002,    pp. 66-69.
Jerry Della Femina, "The Hey-Day of the Three-Martini Lunch," The New York Times Magazine, Oct. 28, 1989, p. 22.
Bernard DeVoto, "For the Wayward and Beguiled" (in "The Easy Chair," a regular column), Harper's, December 1949, pp. 68-71. Reprinted, with revisions, in The Hour (Boston: Riverside Press, Houghton Mifflin, 1951), pp. 27-43.
Donald J. Gonzales, "Crisis at the Cocktail Hour," Saturday Review, Nov. 1975, pp. 46-48.
William Grimes, "Oh, for Just Plain Gin and Dry Vermouth," The New York Times, Wed. Aug. 19, 1998, pp. F1, 9.
_______ .  "Man the Martinis? That Bridge Is Too Far," The New York Times, Oct. 14, 2001, Section 4, p. 3, col. 4.
Phillips A. Lyman, A Bachelor's Cupboard, Boston, 1906.
Frank Shay, "The Best Cocktails of 1934," Esquire, Dec. 1934, pp. 40; 179-80.
Donald G. Smith, "To the Young, Vermouth Is a State," The Wall Street Journal, Dec. 9, 1985, Section 1, p. 24.
James Villas, "The Social Status of the Martini," Esquire, April 1973, pp. 111-112.