How did Americans switch from drinking Chinese green tea to Indian black tea?

[vellocet]

I'm in one of my periodic fits of studying tea. This Monday, there will be a tea party in a park. In the tea party there are a bunch of tables run by different people who prepare different kinds of tea, and everyone walks around and tries them. I'm going to prepare Southern iced tea (while dressed in a seersucker suit and straw boater).  A while back, I was surprised to learn that Southern iced tea used to be entirely green tea, shipped from China by the swift Yankee clipper cargo ships.  Now, we drink black tea almost exclusively.  How did the change happen?

 

After a lot of searching, all the sites only give passing mention to the fact that WWII disrupted the supply.  I remember reading that Mao cut off the US from green tea in 1949, but haven't been able to find any confirmation.  Anyone know the details?

[Jim]

Can't access it without my VPN, but have you checked out Victor Mair's true History of Tea: archive.org Might have something on it.

Looking for that found this link to an earlier book by Money, who says the green tea drunk in the US came from Java, and he wasn't too keen on the quality: The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Truth About America, by Edward Money.