Drunks
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Rush apparently intended the Sober House to be a public institution; the cost of treating paupers was to be paid from local taxes. Rush later described it as a “hospital” that he hoped to see established “in every city and town in the United States.” He anticipated criticism from people who would see a Sober House as “an infringement upon personal liberty, incompatible with the freedoms of our governments.”
We do not use this argument when we confine a thief in jail, and yet, taking the aggregate evil of the greater number of drunkards than thieves into consideration, and the greater evils which the influence of their immoral example and conduct introduce into society than stealing, it must be obvious, that the safety and prosperity of a community will be more promoted by confining them than a common thief.
Rush said that no one should be confined without being examined by a doctor and two or three judges or commissioners appointed for that purpose. Presumably, the same officials would determine when the reformed drunk could be released.17
Rush did not see a lot of progress in his lifetime. The temperance movement was just getting under way when he died in 1813. But he was not discouraged. “The seeds of truth upon all subjects are imperishable,” he wrote to John Adams. While some ideas are instantly popular, “the more profound they are and the more interesting they are to human happiness, the more slowly they come to maturity,” he said. The idea that chronic drunkenness was a disease and that its victims deserved compassion was certainly one of these. “I am aware that the efforts of science and humanity, in applying their resources to the cure of a disease induced by an act of vice, will meet with a cold reception from many people,” Rush had written in his expanded Inquiry. “But let such people remember, the subjects of our remedies, are their fellow creatures. . . . Let us not then, pass by the prostrate sufferer from strong drink, but administer to him the same relief we would afford to a fellow creature in a similar state, from an accidence and innocent cause.” Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, was a founding father of the movement for alcoholism recovery as well.18
Slowly, doctors began to respond to Rush’s leadership. A doctor was one of the organizers of the first temperance society in Moreau, New York, in 1808. Others became active in the temperance movement as it spread across the country over the next two decades. In the early 1830s, Dr. Samuel B. Woodward, the superintendent of the Worcester State Lunatic Hospital in Massachusetts and a renowned temperance lecturer, published a series of articles in a Boston newspaper that called for the creation of public institutions for “inebriates.” Woodward claimed to have successfully treated “many hundreds” of drunks who had been confined either for insanity or for committing crimes while drunk.” The result of this experience has been the fullest conviction, that a large proportion of the intemperate in a well-conducted institution would be radically cured,” he wrote. The treatment he had in mind was not much different than the talk therapy that all the patients in his hospital received, but he believed that the drunks had a better chance of permanent recovery than those who were suffering from other kinds of mental illness, particularly if they were treated in separate institutions.19
The Washingtonians were the first to provide beds for homeless drunks, building bunks in the basements of their New York and Boston headquarters. In the winter of 1857, there was a new effort to create a home for men who were trying to get sober. The wife of a clergyman, Mrs. Charles Spears, petitioned the Massachusetts legislature to establish such a place. As a part of their ministry, Mrs. Spears and her husband worked with prisoners and their families. They became convinced that drunkenness was responsible for much of the city’s crime and misery. More than six thousand people signed their petition. Before the state could act, a group of Mrs. Spears’s supporters rented a suite of rooms in Boston that they offered to drunks as the Home for the Fallen.
The Home for the Fallen was clearly inspired by the optimism of the Washingtonians and was renamed the Washingtonian Home a few years later. One of its founders was a young businessman from Maine named Albert Day. Day was not a reformed drunk: he had never had an alcoholic drink in his life. Born in 1821, he had been exposed to the temperance movement at an early age and, before the age of ten, had spurned an offer to take his first drink. Day was deeply sympathetic to the plight of alcoholics and was active in the Washingtonian movement before he moved to Boston. He was a member of the committee that opened the Washingtonian Home in 1857 and a year later gave up his business to become its superintendent.
The Washingtonian Home could not have found a better leader. At thirty-six, Day was still boyish looking, with long dark hair combed back from his forehead. His eyes were deep-set and inquiring, but the corners of his mouth often turned up in a small smile. He had been convinced that alcoholism could be cured ever since he met a drunk named Jack Watts. He went to Watts’s cottage when he heard that the man, his wife, and three young children were starving. “Mr. Watts, I hear you are in straitened circumstances,” Day said. Watts admitted that he had spent his last three cents in a bar and that his children were hungry. Day immediately left to buy food for the family, and after delivering the groceries, he promised to return.
The next day Watts told Day that he had been unemployed for a long time. Day spoke about the importance of temperance—“kindly, respectfully, hopefully, strongly”—and offered to pay him a dollar for a day of chopping wood. Day gave Watts the money that night, and when he visited the next morning, Watts was still sober. Day spoke again about the necessity of total abstinence, and Watts said he would never drink again. Day helped him get a job. When Watts died many years later, he was still sober.20
Watts was the first of thirty thousand alcoholics that Day would treat over the next forty years. From the start, he was convinced that drunks could not be forced to stay sober. People had been putting them in jails, workhouses, and insane asylums for years, only to see them return to drinking on their release. They couldn’t stop drinking until they wanted to stop drinking. For this reason, the Washingtonian Home adopted a policy that “those only can be admitted who have a sincere desire to reform.”
Because of their frequent incarcerations, drunks had a hard time understanding that the Washingtonian Home was not a jail. David Harrisson Jr., a lawyer and an alcoholic who spent four months in the home, described the commotion that ensued when a newly arrived alcoholic became convinced that he was being held against his will:
I have heard the superintendent smilingly address him, “Why, my dear fellow, what is the matter?” The reply would be shrieked out, “I won’t and shan’t be kept in here.” “Why, who wants to keep you?—there is the door. Come, I will show you the way out.” To see the look of drunken and stupid astonishment which the poor fellow would put on was ludicrous in the extreme. For a few minutes he would stare around in imbecile astonishment, and then, with a long drawn sigh, and “Well, I’ll be blowed if this don’t beat cats,” sink back, overcome into the nearest chair.”
The superintendent offered more reassuring words. “We don’t intend to restrain you, sir,” Day said. “If you intend to stop here, and try to reform, you can do so, and we will do all in our power to help you.” “That’s just my gait,” the drunk replied. “Say, old chap, ain’t you going to treat?” Like Rush, Day used a nauseant as part of the detoxification process. He handed the man whiskey spiked with ipecac to induce vomiting. The patient soon became “as docile as a lamb and almost as helpless as a child,” Harrisson wrote.21
With few exceptions, residents of the Washingtonian Home were never confined. Almost all of them paid for room and board during three to six months of treatment, so they usually left the building to work during the day. They might be temporarily restrained if they got drunk again and became violent or were in danger of hurting themselves when they were suffering delirium tremens, the illness that struck many drunks during the first days after they quit drinking. In these cases, Day would sometimes administer ipecac or potassium bromide, a s
edative.
Treatment at the Washingtonian Home primarily involved psychological counseling. At the time he became superintendent, Day was hardly qualified to do anything else. Although he would later graduate from Harvard Medical School, he was just a businessman who wanted to help alcoholics. But he had a clearer understanding of what needed to be done than most doctors. They thought their job was over when they had nursed the drunk back to health. Day disagreed. “It may safely be laid down as a rule, that no man has thus needed his care that does not stand in need of further assistance and advice,” he wrote in Methomania, a slim volume that was his only contribution to scientific literature. Day was never a theorist. His great gift was his ability to see each patient as an individual. “[M]y experience has convinced me, that each case must be approached with rare discernment of individual characteristics and circumstances, and that no rule of treatment throughout is capable of universal application,” he said.22
While every drunk was different, the therapeutic goals were the same. The first objective was to convince the sick man that he could get better. This wasn’t easy when most people believed that alcoholics were incurable. No one believed it more than the drunks themselves. “[I]t follows that the element of hope should be carefully nourished as a powerful stimulant to other methods employed,” Day said. Next, the patient must be shown that he had to stop drinking alcohol. Rush had believed that the high concentration of alcohol in distilled liquor caused alcoholism and that drunks could continue to consume wine and beer. But this view had been abandoned by the temperance movement. Day wrote that it was a “physiological fact” that the “physical effects of the poison” made it impossible for the alcoholic to drink alcohol. Like Rush, he believed that drunkenness was a disease, but not a disease that could be cured by medicine:
[I]t is well to impress upon the patient, by all the means at command, the vital interests to himself that hang upon his total and continued abstinence; to encourage and increase as far as possible his self-respect; and to stimulate into active exercise that family affection and domestic disposition which will of themselves act as a powerful restraint. The usually exciting and demoralizing character of the past life should be avoided; while a habit of mind should be sought, calm, even in temperament, cheerful in disposition, and free from unusually or unnecessary excitement.
Everything depended on the alcoholic’s decision to stop drinking. “The patient should be encouraged, that his disease can be cured, and at the same time impressed with the belief that it rests mostly with himself, and that ‘eternal vigilance is the price of liberty,’” Day said.23
Day used every opportunity to educate his patients about the nature of their disease. The size of the Washingtonian Home made this easy. In 1860, twenty men were in residence at any one time, giving the superintendent many opportunities to speak with them individually. He also delivered informal talks on Wednesday evenings, often using the experience of recent patients as a starting point. One evening, Day discussed the case of a man who had left the home after several months of treatment. He was full of confidence that he could stay sober, congratulating himself for not even thinking about a drink during a long delay at a train station. It seemed to prove that he had licked his problem, but he decided to test himself. “Here goes, then, for the last glass of whiskey I shall take as long as I live, and I take it purely as a scientific experiment,” he said. The scientist was discovered dead drunk an hour later and escorted back to the Washingtonian Home. Day drew the following conclusions:
1. No hope for the inebriate until he thoroughly distrusts the strength of his own resolution. 2. No hope for the inebriate except in total abstinence as long as he lives, both in sickness and in health. 3. Little hope for the inebriate unless he avoids, on system and on principle, the occasions of temptation, the places where liquor is sold, and the persons who will urge it upon him.
Day was not discouraged by relapses, and he urged his patients to remain hopeful. “Some men, he said, must fall, at least once, before the last rag of confidence is torn from them.” Day said he knew men who had relapsed three times before they finally got sober.24
The Wednesday evening lectures were delivered in the chapel of the Washingtonian Home. Religion played a prominent role in the life of the institution. There were both morning and evening prayers. These nonsectarian services were probably agreeable to most residents, who were largely drawn from the middle and upper classes and therefore accustomed to regular church attendance. “[T]hey had been ornaments to the society in which they moved . . . were of excellent education, superior abilities, and no small experience in the walks of life,” Harrisson said. Many were ministers. The home also welcomed workingmen if they could afford to pay room and board, and some beds were reserved for the poor.25
Superintendent Day believed religion helped men stay sober. He presented every departing patient with a Bible and urged him to read it daily. He did this to encourage his “moral elevation” but also to strengthen resistance to the “unavoidable temptations” of society. One of Day’s patients was a fireman from Philadelphia who had gloried in the drunken battles fought with rival engine companies when they arrived at a fire simultaneously. Once he sobered up, the man “proved to be a good, simple soul, very ignorant, not naturally intelligent, and therefore more capable of faith than of knowledge,” according to a writer who visited the Washingtonian Home after the Civil War. He began to read the Bible while still a resident of the home. By the time he left six months later, “this daily reading being associated in his mind with his reform, the book became a kind of talisman to him, and he felt safe as long as he continued the practice.” The fireman stayed sober throughout his service in the Civil War and earned a reputation for bravery. After his return from one especially harrowing mission that included swimming across the Potomac River under fire, he was offered whiskey. “Don’t offer me that,” he said. “I dread that more than bullets.” He was killed at the Battle of Antietam.26
The residents of the Washingtonian Home also helped each other. Twenty percent of the men in treatment either arrived in the throes of delirium tremens or soon fell victims to it, providing an object lesson for those who were not so badly off. There were positive role models, too. From the beginning, the managers observed that a fellowship developed among the residents. A new man was surprised to meet alcoholics who had been sober for months. As he talked to his neighbors, he began to think about the implications for himself. “They gradually feel that what others have done they can do; that, after all, the whole difficulty is a disease, which simply needs correcting,” Day wrote in his first report in 1858. “A spirit of emulation is engendered among the inmates, and each gives countenance and strength to the other.” The drunks shared their life stories with each other and also spoke during public meetings on Tuesdays. Graduates of the home often attended the public meetings to steel themselves against relapse and served as role models for the men in treatment.27
The Washingtonian Home was a success from the beginning. In the spring of 1858, Day reported that not more than ten of the several hundred men who had been treated had relapsed. By 1860, it had treated five hundred men. He would probably have acknowledged that the number of relapses would grow over time as the reformed men faced repeated temptations. But he was confident that most would stay sober as long as they remembered what they had learned. Graduates who lived in the Boston area could take a refresher course by attending the Tuesday night meetings at the home. But even those whose homes were far away had options. Many of those whose stories are told in Harrisson’s A Voice from the Washingtonian Home became active in the temperance movement. One graduate returned to his home in New Bedford, Massachusetts, to discover that a former resident of the home was scheduled to address a local temperance convention. Others joined local groups of the Sons of Temperance, and some became leaders.28
Many graduates also maintained a correspondence with Day. It often began with a letter reporting their safe arrival home. One man
assured Day that he had arrived “without accident and clear of whiskey.” His family gave him a rapturous reception. “My cheeks were almost blistered, and my arms quite lame from the kisses and shaking of the hands that I got,” he said. Another graduate of the home waited a day before he showed himself on Main Street:
On the corner of the square . . . was a constant crowd, renewed as fast as one left by another filling his place, and which was composed of persons anxious to shake hands with me. I can assure you that no politician, on returning to his constituents, could have been made to feel more the elevation of success, and the pride of station, than I have been compelled to feel since my advent on Saturday.
The joy at being restored to the affection of their family and friends naturally made the reformed men deeply grateful to Day and his institution. They also felt a strong sense of obligation. “I trust that my course in the future may be such as never to bring the Home into disrepute, and myself and friends again to disgrace and ruin,” another said. Some men wrote to Day every year on the anniversary of the day they stopped drinking.29
There was never a shortage of patients. The home’s alumni were walking advertisements for its success, and they recommended it enthusiastically to their drinking buddies. “There is a gentleman in the office now asking me what you have been doing to make me look so well,” a recovered man wrote Day. “I tell him it takes you to do it, and he had better start.” Being the only institution of its kind certainly helped. As news of its existence spread, men from all over the country began to apply for admission. “[I]ts former inmates may be found . . . in almost every State of the Union and territory of the United States, from the icy coast of Northern Maine to the Pacific shores of far-off California,” Harrisson wrote. A majority of the patients were from places that were closer to Boston, including everyone associated with the publication of Harrisson’s book—the publisher, the printer, the manufacturer of the paper, and the man who engraved the images.30