Drunks

by Christopher Finan

  There has been nothing like it. But like everything else, it has its day; and, when repeated and long continued, becomes stale and wearisome. In spite of various characters introduced, there is a sameness in the tale, for every drunkard’s life is in its leading features the same.

  Six months later, a Cincinnati minister confirmed this view. “[T]hough the Washingtonians have endured, and worked well, their thunder is worn out,” he said.31

  Marsh and other ministers were also unhappy about signs of religious indifference among the Washingtonians. In 1843, during a Washingtonian meeting in Newark, a Rev. Scott complained about the Washingtonians holding meetings on Sundays. A Washingtonian newspaper, the Crystal Fount and Rechabite Recorder, reported that this irritated some members of Scott’s audience, and the minister was chastised by the next speaker. “Mr. Segue, of Morris County . . . gave us a thorough-going Washingtonian address, in which he gave [Scott] two or three severe, but at the same time very polite ‘raps on the knuckles,’” it said. The newspaper’s editor explained that while the Washingtonians wanted to work with ministers, they feared that religion could be an obstacle to getting men sober:

  For the propagation of the temperance cause we wish to meet on common ground, but if we agree to unite with temperance anything which should be kept separate, we must fail in accomplishing the object we have in view. Our object is to reform the inebriate, and if the infidel or the skeptic will unite with us effecting his redemption from rum drinking, we give them the right hand of fellowship.

  The Washingtonians concerned themselves with saving lives, not saving souls. Therefore, the Sunday meetings would continue. “We believe it is ‘lawful to do good on Sabbath Day,’ and as our Sabbath evening meetings are eminently calculated ‘to do good,’ they will most assuredly be continued,” the editor wrote.32

  The opinions of the Washingtonians were becoming irrelevant. Temperance leaders were preparing to move forward without them. As attendance at Washingtonian meetings continued to decline, groups began to close. “Where are all the Washingtonian societies, which sprang up in a night? Dead or breathing their last!” the American Temperance Union journal wrote just five months after the huge Boston demonstration. But the temperance movement would live on, it insisted.

  Is not this evidence of a retrograde feeling in the temperance community? We say, No. Amid all these declines and changes and deaths, the temperance cause has moved onward. Each new organization has given it a new impulse for the time, and when it has accomplished its work, it has given way to something more acceptable to the community and perhaps more efficient.

  The Journal was right. The temperance movement’s first major victories were just around the corner. In 1851, Maine approved the first statewide ban on the sale of alcohol; twelve more states and two Canadian provinces soon followed. Despite the boasts of the Washingtonians, “moral suasion” was not the wave of the future.33

  The Washingtonians were probably doomed from the beginning. The explosion of popularity that greeted their arrival was both a blessing and a curse. It filled their meetings with eager recruits, but the overwhelming majority of men who signed the pledge did not have a deep personal interest in sobriety. They signed because they were moved by the spectacle of alcoholics reclaiming their lives, because they thought it would be good for the country and might improve the quality of their lives. Some signed because everyone else was signing, and they wanted to share the excitement. But only a small minority of the signers were people who had a serious problem with alcohol.

  There are no precise numbers. Rev. Marsh estimated that 4 million people signed the pledge during the 1840s, including 500,000 hard drinkers and 100,000 “sots.” A modern student of the Washingtonians estimates that fewer than 150,000 heavy drinkers joined the movement. In any case, the reformed drunks constituted a small minority of the people who took the pledge. They made up a larger percentage of the membership of the Washingtonian groups, but they probably weren’t a majority. As a result, many Washingtonians were never more than fair-weather friends who quickly lost interest in the organization.34

  When the nonalcoholics deserted, the Washingtonian movement was left in the hands of the reformed men. They did not lose interest in the “drunkalogues” that were spoken at meetings. The many similarities in the life histories of alcoholics were actually a source of strength for the recovering drunks, encouraging them to see themselves as part of a larger group with a responsibility to support men who were struggling and to reach out to alcoholics who were still drinking. But they faced temptation every day. There were three thousand bars in New York City. Temperance leaders were so alarmed by the number of new bars opening in Boston that they held a series of meetings in late 1842 and early 1843 to study the problem. The only explanation appeared to be that men were beginning to break their pledges. “Backsliding” was a growing threat.

  Politics made matters worse. Politicians in the early American republic were novices in the democratic arts, but it didn’t take them long to recognize that the shortest route to a man’s vote was through a shot glass. The Founding Fathers had been the first to “treat” their constituents to hard cider or whiskey. The advent of universal male suffrage propelled election-related drinking to new heights. “In many counties the candidates would hire all the groceries in the county seats and other considerable villages, where the people could get liquor without cost for several weeks before election . . .,” a former governor of Illinois recalled. “[L]ong before night a large portion of the voters would be drunk and staggering about town, cursing, swearing, halloing, yelling, huzzaing for their favorite candidates.” The importance of alcohol was clear on the day that Andrew Jackson was inaugurated in 1829. The rowdiness of his supporters at a reception threatened serious damage to the White House until the punch bowl was carried out to the lawn, drawing the crowd with it.35

  The excesses of election year drinking were no laughing matter for the Washingtonians, especially the members who were newly sober alcoholics. It was hard enough to remain abstinent in normal times. The elections of the time were tremendously exciting events. “The minds of all men seem filled with but one idea—’How our party goes,’ and who will be elected,” the Crystal Fount reported during the final days of the 1844 presidential campaign. “Such excitement we have seldom witnessed—so much singing, speaking, aye, and drinking and carousing, fighting and quarreling. Night and day have both been made hideous by the men and boys of both parties.” The problem was exacerbated by the fact that political meetings were “almost invariably” held in taverns, which also served as polling places. The editor of the Crystal Fount believed that the election had undone several years of hard work:

  The evil done to the cause of temperance, during the past few months, is almost incalculable. . . . Men have broken their pledge in this city, who have held prominent stations in the temperance cause, and who have defied the tempter for two or three years, and boasted that they knew the blessing of temperance too well to break the pledge; yet carried away by excitement, and mingling in the company of rum-drinkers, and frequenting taverns, they have fallen lamentably low.

  He insisted he was not discouraged. “Our army is great and vast compared with the few noble souls who began the work about four years since,” he said. Even then, the army was melting away.36

  A strong organization might have enabled the Washingtonians to survive the loss of most of its members, but it was a grassroots movement consisting of hundreds of independent groups. The Washingtonians never seemed to think they needed a national organization. The local groups were marked by an extreme democracy. Officers were elected every quarter. As a result, there were no generally accepted rules or guidelines to direct groups whose members included both former drunks and lifelong teetotalers, workers and paragons of the middle class. They were vulnerable to factionalism and internal disputes.

  Americans had lost their zeal to save the alcoholic. Even the Marthas withdrew from their charity work. Virginia All
en, a newspaper editor, lamented the loss. In 1846, she reported that two hundred New York City women were arrested for drunkenness in a single week:

  Where are our Martha Washingtonians? Where those who once waited not for such objects to meet their sight, but rather sought them out and encouraged them in the pure joys of the paths of Temperance? Alas, alas, we are becoming selfish and care no more for the wretched beings whom we once delighted to rescue from misery and starvation.

  The revolution was over.37

  Yet the efforts of the Washingtonians were not wasted. It is unreasonable to expect them to have permanently erased the stigma of alcoholism. They did change the lives of thousands of drunks, at least briefly. The closing of their meetings was a serious blow because it deprived them of a regular opportunity to meet with other alcoholics, offering support to the wavering and receiving it themselves in times of need. A majority, perhaps the overwhelming majority, began drinking again. But there were men and women who remained abstinent, drawing strength wherever they could find it—from active participation in the temperance movement, religion, family, friends, and sheer willpower.

  The Washingtonians had proved that many drunks wanted to get sober, but they had also learned the lesson that it is easier to get sober than to stay sober. The testimonials of reformed men speaking at meetings had inspired many drunks to try. They had signed the pledge with every intention of quitting forever. But addiction is powerful. The drunks needed a source of strength to resist temptation. The Seneca and other Iroquois tribes had found that power in a new religion. As the Gaiwiio or Good Word won the support of a growing number of Iroquois, it created an environment in which it was easier to resist the temptation to drink and to raise children who never acquired the habit.

  The former Washingtonians were not entirely without alternatives. Many of them joined a new organization, the Sons of Temperance. All the founders were workingmen. Brothers John and Isaac Oliver were printers who were prospering on business generated by the Washingtonian phenomenon, producing sheet music, handbills, and their own newspaper, the New York Organ. The Olivers started the Sons of Temperance in an effort to stem backsliding by providing material incentives for membership. In return for a payment of five cents in weekly dues, the group provided medical and burial insurance for the members and their wives.

  Like the Freemasons and other fraternal organizations, the Sons of Temperance developed secret rituals. They initiated members in special ceremonies, used codes and symbols, and honored members with special titles and other marks of distinction. Such affectations were necessary to compete with other fraternal organizations, but they also made it easier for drunks to seek help. The Washingtonians admitted their alcoholism in public meetings, but membership in the Sons of Temperance was secret. So a drunk could join without revealing to the world that he had a problem. Secrecy also protected the Sons from the bad publicity that visited the Washingtonians whenever one of their members got drunk. The rituals strengthened the social bond between the Sons, who were expected to help brothers who had started drinking again.

  The Sons of Temperance grew rapidly, enrolling 221,578 members in chapters around the United States in just six years. As in the case of the Washingtonians, most of these men were not alcoholics. But probably thousands of drunks found refuge there or in the other fraternal temperance groups that were active at the time—the Rechabites, the Independent Order of Good Samaritans, and the Independent Order of Good Templars.

  Members of the Samaritans were almost all reformed drunks. The Samaritans and their female auxiliary, the Daughters of Samaria, banned any discussion of political issues, including prohibition, and became the first group of reformed drinkers to welcome all alcoholics, including African Americans. Notwithstanding their open-door policy, the membership of the Samaritans peaked at fourteen thousand.

  The Independent Order of Good Templars, which was founded in 1851, was by far the largest of the fraternal temperance societies. Its first great leader was an ex-drunk, Nathaniel Curtis, a middle-aged baker from upstate New York. Curtis had stopped drinking during the Washingtonian movement and then joined the Sons of Temperance. But he disliked the requirement that members of the Sons pay for sickness and burial insurance because it excluded people who couldn’t afford the dues. He also persuaded the Templars to welcome women as members. As a result, the Templars grew rapidly by recruiting groups that lacked social standing, including women, manual laborers, and young people.

  The Templars actively recruited reformed drunks, but their ambition was larger. They wanted to help all their members remain abstinent from alcohol and strongly supported legal prohibition. The focus of their meetings was on temperance education, and members were required to follow a course of study on the subject and to pass an exam testing their knowledge. Reformed drunks do not appear to have shared their stories during the meetings. Nevertheless, the Templars helped many of them. In 1885, a former leader of the Templars estimated that four hundred thousand of the five million members who had joined since the group’s founding had been “hard drinkers.” As many as half of the hard drinkers were reported to have stayed sober.38

  One Washingtonian never surrendered. Even as his comrades followed new paths, John Hawkins stuck to the old road, carrying the promise of recovery to alcoholics. The life of a Washingtonian lecturer was never easy. Travel often involved great hardship. There were no railroads in the 1840s. People traveled on sailing ships, steamboats, canal boats, and in carriages and on horseback; passage was frequently delayed by bad weather and impassable roads. Hawkins was willing to speak anywhere there was at least a promise that his expenses would be covered. These contracts were not always honored. In one town, news of a poor collection following one of Hawkins’s speeches prompted the local saloon keepers to send him some money. Hawkins smiled at the joke and kept the change. At the time, he was speaking almost every day and traveling an average of ten thousand miles a year.39

  Hawkins did more than give speeches. He met with alcoholics wherever he could find them, often in jails. Since colonial times, local communities had responded to the problem of drunkenness with punishment. During the eighteenth century, Massachusetts fined drunks five shillings, and those who were unable to pay were confined in the stocks for three hours. Whipping was also used for minor crimes. These punishments were not intended to reform the offenders but to maintain public order. With the rise of humanitarianism in the early nineteenth century, the focus of criminal justice became reformation. But the change did not benefit drunks, who were arrested repeatedly and sent to jail.

  During a tour of the South in the winter of 1844, the mayor of Charleston, South Carolina, asked Hawkins to visit the court where the drunks who had been arrested the night before were processed. First offenders and others who were “not so bad” were released after signing the pledge. “The others, the worst, are sent to the poorhouse, a kind of workhouse and prison,” Hawkins wrote his son. “I visit them every day, talk to them, encourage them.” Visiting the prison one day, Hawkins met a young man who had been confined for more than fifty days, living on bread and water in a cold, dirty cell.

  Hawkins received a constant stream of requests for help from the relatives of alcoholics. It was no different in Charleston. “I have also visited with a great many families who have sent for me, to talk to the father, husband, brother, or son, as the case may be and with few exceptions, I have been successful,” he told his son.40

  To modern ears, Hawkins can sound foolish, even messianic. How could he claim success after talking with a drunk for only a few minutes? He probably did not believe he had permanently changed the men whose lives he touched. Because he was a drunk himself, he was all too aware of the danger of relapse, and he became a strong supporter of prohibition when it was clear that moral suasion could not keep men sober.

  On the other hand, it is true that Hawkins and his fellow Washingtonians underestimated the difficulty of keeping men sober. They believed that alcohol was the dr
unk’s biggest problem, and that he would become like other men when he stopped drinking. This ignored the damage that had been done by years of abusing alcohol. Drunks were seriously flawed individuals who required help to conquer what Alcoholics Anonymous would later characterize as a threefold disease—physical, mental, and spiritual. Their only hope was the growth of institutions that could provide a solution to these long-term problems. Given enough time, the Washingtonians might have begun to provide the answers that alcoholics needed, but they were unable to sustain their movement.

  Hawkins was naturally distressed by the signs of decline. Despite the success of his tours in the Midwest and the South, there was continued evidence of deterioration in the East. Even Massachusetts, a Washingtonian stronghold, was in danger. In January 1847, Hawkins wrote a letter to the editor of the Mercantile Journal, proposing the creation of a fund to hire a “suitable person who would be willing to devote his whole time in finding out and visiting the unfortunate drunkard and endeavor so to reform him that he may be kept out of the Police Court and House of Correction . . . and make him a useful citizen, by watching over him for good.” The suggestion that someone should be paid to help alcoholics was farsighted, but it was also an acknowledgment that the popular support that had once lifted the alcoholic had disappeared.41

  Hawkins never stopped insisting on everyone’s duty to help the drunkard. He delivered another call to arms in March at what was probably the last Washingtonian convention in Massachusetts:

  When I look at the nature of man, and consider the passions, like the flint and steel, ready to burst into flame at the slightest collision, I wonder that so many have been saved. I have now lived seven years a sober life, and enjoyed for seven years a sober sleep. There is nothing now to make me tremble. There is one sweet thought at morning and night, in summer and in winter, in sickness and in health, that my heart involuntarily and continually utters, and it is this,” Thank God I am a sober man.” Let us go on, brethren, nor cease our labors, until the last drunkard is saved. Never give up a man while there is life; but struggle on, and lift him up again and yet again, nor relinquish your hold on him, until he is dead, dead, dead!42