I don't think I ever encountered one. My parents certainly never had one, although they often had friends over and all would drink beer or hard liquor until everyone was quite happily drunk. This was in the 1950s and 1960s.
Even as a young adult, in the very late 1960s and into the 1970s, a cocktail party as such simply didn't exist. Parties with alcohol, yes. In my young adulthood BYOB (bring your own bottle) parties were the norm. You brought your own liquor, the host provided mixers and such, and a good time was had by all.
Another important point is that wine was almost NEVER consumed in this country until relatively recently. So if you see a movie or TV show that takes place any time before 1990, let alone before 1970, where parents are having wine at dinner, you get to scoff loudly. Most Americans simply didn't consume wine back then. The series "MadMen", which by and large is quite accurate, shows wine consumption that simply didn't exist then. Period. End of discussion. They get the smoking right. The vast majority of adults smoked then (the official figures are that about 2/3 of men, and a bit more than 1/2 of adult women smoked in the late 1950s, the peak era of smoking) which actually overestimates smoking because a very low percentage of adults over age 60 in the 1950s or 1960s smoked. Speaking from personal experience as a child born in 1948, at least 3/4 of the dads and at least 2/3 of the moms smoked at that point. I think the nonsmokers tended to be outliers, Mormons or various rural folks. Even though I never smoked, smoking was so normative that it never occurred to me, all the way through the 1970s to not allow people to smoke in my apartment. I had a party once, in 1980, and I relegated smoking to the balcony of my apartment and felt quite guilty. I shouldn't have, but I did.
Things change.
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