Drunks

by Christopher Finan

  What defined the disease was the inability to stop drinking. “[N]otwithstanding the knowledge of the danger of resorting to alcoholic stimulants, the popular condemnation of the practice, and the inward convictions on the subject, there is an overwhelming impulse which drives its victims to indulgence,” Parrish wrote. People accused drunks of failing to exercise willpower, but it was a disease that robbed them of the power to quit. He continued, “If our philosophy be true, we have primarily, a defective condition of body or mind, and an impaired will, among its earliest evidences; then an appetite, and lastly drunkenness with all its resulting evils.” Thus, the drunk suffered twin defects—a need for alcohol to soothe his restless and depressive nature and an inability to stop drinking once he started. Powerless over his own life, he was in dire need of medical attention. “When drunkenness is the result of an impaired moral nature, or of a defective physical organization . . . it is to be considered as a disease, and treated accordingly,” Parrish said.44

  Parrish argued that alcoholics had been treated unfairly. Their disease shared characteristics with other illnesses. Insanity was the result of “excess or irregularity of some kind.” Rheumatism, gout, and consumption could be inherited or acquired. Dyspepsia, colic, and cholera were sometimes the result of abusing the “goodly fruits of the earth.” But science ignored the drunk. “[U]pon what principle can this class of person be excluded from the common ranks of men who are diseased,” Parrish asked. While acknowledging that “many inebriates” did not seek recovery and that some had to be confined in institutions for the rest of their lives, Parrish insisted that many more could get sober if they had help. He urged his colleagues to publicize the new things they were discovering about alcoholism every day. “These should be so many centers of light and information, from which may radiate truth, which our people, who are already scourged to sadness by this evil, are eagerly waiting for,” he said.45

  The next paper read at the conference was “a remarkable document” that made “a profound impression,” Parrish said many years later. Framed as a letter to the attendees, it was the product of a meeting of the inmates at the Parrish’s Pennsylvania Sanitarium. The recovering drunks wanted to express their support for the goal of expanding medical treatment for alcoholism. In the process, they provided an intimate view of their lives as alcoholics and as recovering men. They began by confessing ignorance about how they became drunks. “Doubtless, to ourselves, as well as to others, the cause of our condition is a mystery,” the letter said. How was it that they became alcoholics, while other members of the family could drink without danger? What was it that made it possible for the hard-drinking friends of their youth to moderate their drinking as they became responsible adults? Their sense of grievance was strong. They had a list:

  1. That a social ostracism is practiced towards us, which is not practiced towards other members of families or society, who have vices and diseases, that are equally offensive to morals, and equally damaging to the community.

  2. That church ostracism in many instances, deprives us of the very sympathies and forces, that should combine, for our relief and restoration.

  They complained that the law treated them unfairly, excusing acts committed by the insane while applying the full force of the law to crimes committed during alcoholic blackouts. “[O]ur sorrows and sins, are made texts for sermons; our symptoms and misfortunes are caricatured by lecturers and performers, and we are exposed to odium and ridicule,” they said.46

  They expressed their gratitude for the inebriate asylum. “[W]e need places of refuge . . . where we may escape the depressing influences to which we have referred,” the letter continued. But they weren’t seeking merely to escape. Drunks needed time to “regain that moral tone, and power of will, which can alone fit us for the duties and responsibilities of life.” They thanked Parrish and quoted extensively from his annual report to the board of the sanitarium. The letter concluded with a blessing:

  We earnestly desire that the spirit of your counsels may be just and right, and sincerely hope that through them, society and government, may be so led, that while relieving them of one of the most terrible evils uncontrolled appetite inflicts, the victims themselves may be gently led back to the prodigal’s home.

  It is certain that Day and the other men at the conference were deeply moved.47

  The founders of the AACI believed they had started something new. “It is not a temperance, but a scientific gathering,” Willard Parker told his colleagues at the opening of their meeting. But the declaration of principles that it adopted after hearing from the drunks at Parrish’s asylum made it clear that the AACI was just as committed to advocacy as the activists who had resumed their fight for prohibition:

  1. Intemperance is a disease.

  2. It is curable in the same sense that other diseases are.

  3. Its primary cause is a constitutional susceptibility to the alcoholic impression.

  4. The constitutional impression may be inherited or acquired.

  5. Alcohol has its true place in the arts and sciences. It is valuable as a remedy, and like other remedies may be abused. In excessive quantity it is a poison, and always acts as such when it produces inebriety.

  6. All methods hitherto employed having proved insufficient for the cure of inebriates, the establishment of asylums for such a purpose is the great demand of the age.

  7. Every large city should have its local or temporary home for inebriates, and every state, one or more asylums for the treatment and care of such persons.

  8. The law should recognize intemperance as a disease, and provide other means for its management than fines, station-houses and jails.48

  The advocates of the disease theory of alcoholism knew that they would encounter opposition. “[T]here need be no controversy with the doctrine of sin or law,” Parrish wrote, clearly expecting trouble. One of the first shots was fired by a police judge from Lowell, Massachusetts, just a few months after the AACI was organized. Nathan Crosby was a rock-ribbed conservative whose view of human nature had not improved during his twenty-five years on the bench. He strongly disapproved of the idea that criminals could be reformed by more humane treatment. He was particularly hard on drunks, who he believed were entirely responsible for their behavior. “The American Association for the cure of inebriates [sic] say inebriety is a disease . . .,” Crosby told a committee of the Massachusetts legislature. “[B]ut the great truth . . . remains that the drunkard is self-made, progressively self-taught, and obstinately self-immolated.”49

  The committee was considering legislation to create governmentoperated inebriate asylums. Crosby objected:

  Sir, instead of asylums, would it not be better to build places more odious than our jails and houses of correction, to bring back again the stocks and pillory and iron cage, that the people might be terror stricken at the view and flee as for their lives, from every approach of the appetite.

  Crosby believed that only banning the sale of alcohol would solve the problem of drunkenness. He urged the legislators “to barricade all grog shops, cracker-and-salt-fish saloons, all gambling houses and club rooms.” The police could take care of the drunks they found in these establishments. “Let them put the men within into the pest house, to drink worm-wood tea and eat soups or chain them to the nearest lamp-post, till sober,” he said.50

  Crosby was not the only critic of the AACI and its supporters. By its second annual meeting, there had been so much “influential opposition” from temperance advocates and religious leaders that Parrish felt he had to respond. During an opening address, he noted that the critics were not doctors and therefore had “a very superficial and false notion of what disease is.” “If intemperance is not a disease, how comes it that so many tens of thousands of people die from it every year?” he asked. Parrish categorically rejected the charge made by Crosby and others that recognizing alcoholism as a disease relieved drunks of the responsibility to stop drinking. “When a person knows that he has a disea
se, he applies himself to its relief or cure,” he said. “He takes counsel, changes his mode of life and does what his physician may prescribe.” Parrish expressed amazement that the AACI’s efforts had been made the target of “ungenerous assault.” “It seems to me that every good citizen, and especially every Christian citizen, should rejoice over the recovery of intemperate persons, by any instrumentality that may be made available for that purpose,” he said.51

  The reference to Christians is significant because many of the AACI’s critics were religious leaders. Like the prohibitionists, ministers felt threatened by the prospect of an organized recovery movement. They believed that drunkenness originated in the sinful nature of man and that the only hope for sobriety lay in religious conversion. The disease theory of alcoholism removed God from the central place in the recovery process. The Washingtonians had encountered opposition from the same source. Their reply had been that it was the churches that had abandoned the drunks. Thirty years later, Parrish echoed their complaint. “[H]as the church put itself directly to the work of reaching these offensive children of our common family, and attempted to do them good, and make them wiser and better? Has it not too often cast them off?” he asked.52

  The closing of the New York State Inebriate Asylum in 1879 was a blow to the AACI. But the asylum had been plagued by poor management from the beginning, and the problems did not disappear after Day took over. Turner’s dream had been grandiose. He was followed by men with a better understanding of alcoholism and a more modest model of treatment. AACI members found reason for hope in the fact that the number of inebriate asylums had grown since 1870. The Franklin Reformatory Home for Inebriates opened in Philadelphia in 1872, the Appleton Temporary Home in South Boston in 1873, and the Walnut Lodge Hospital for Inebriates in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1878. In 1876, the AACI founded the first scientific journal devoted to the subject, the Quarterly Journal of Inebriety. In 1888, Parrish expressed his satisfaction. “When I look back over the years that have passed since 1870, I am amazed at the progress the cause has made,” he wrote.53

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Search for Higher Power

  THE ENEMIES OF THE Water Street Mission attacked on July 4. Jerry McAuley, a reformed drunk, had been under no illusions when he opened the mission in a New York City slum in 1872. Water Street was one of the most notorious streets in the city. Located just a block from the crowded East River docks, it was known for its many seedy bars and the prostitutes who made themselves available to sailors and other passersby at all hours. He knew he had enemies. The saloon keepers hated him because he welcomed drunks, and many of them were getting sober. The police hated him because they took bribes from the saloon keepers, so they joined in the harassment directed at McAuley and his mission. But he never expected the mission to be attacked with fireworks.

  On Independence Day, a barrel appeared in the street in front of the mission before the evening service. A ruffian posted at the mission door signaled to men in the street whenever someone stood to testify to the blessings he had received from God. Fireworks were lit and dropped in the drum, exploding so loudly they drowned the voices inside. But McAuley was resourceful:

  I said to the congregation, “Now I want you to watch me: I’ll select a hymn ahead of time, and the moment I say ‘Sing!’ just sing with all your might, and when I say, ‘Testify!’ be ready and spring right up.” A convert arose and opened his mouth, when bang! bang! bang! went the fireworks in the barrel. “Sing!” I shouted, and they fairly roared; my! What lungs they had, and you couldn’t hear the fireworks at all! Just as soon as that pack was out I called “Testify!” and a brother jumped up, and before they could get the next pack ready and rightly on fire he was through, and then we drowned the racket again with a grand old hymn.

  When the hooligans ran out of firecrackers, they were reduced to shooting some Roman candles against the back of the house. “[W]e never had a better meeting,” McAuley insisted. “Several were helped spiritually, and among others one soul was gloriously saved!”1

  The saloon keeper across the street who had orchestrated the disruption eventually moved elsewhere, and so did many others who tried to do business in the same space. “We carried the matter to God, and prayed him to break up whoever came in there to sell rum; and that prayer was heard, for 15 or 16 failed one after another,” McAuley explained. The Water Street Mission had opened two years after the founding of the AACI. Its success was an early indication that religion would be a powerful force for recovery in the last half of the nineteenth century.

  His neighbors in County Kerry, Ireland, would probably have said that McAuley was born bad. He was certainly angry. According to a brief autobiography McAuley wrote in 1875, his father was a counterfeiter who fled home to avoid arrest. He said nothing about his mother. He was raised by a grandmother whose prayers he mocked by throwing things at her head as she kneeled. He did not attend school but spent his time getting into trouble. “I got blows for me meat and drink till I wished myself dead many a time,” he said. At thirteen, he was shipped to a married sister in New York but lived with her only a short time before meeting two boys who became his partners in crime. They made their living as river pirates, launching a boat under the cover of darkness to steal what they could from the many ships moored in one of the world’s busiest ports. At nineteen, he was arrested for a robbery and sentenced to fifteen years of hard labor in Sing Sing prison.2

  As McAuley entered the strong stone walls of Sing Sing, he noted a sign above the door.” The way of the transgressor is hard,” it read. Prisons were intended as reformatory institutions, but they used harsh measures to accomplish their goal. When McAuley arrived, Sing Sing still banned prisoners from all conversation and punished infractions with techniques that are regarded as torture today. The punishment didn’t work on McAuley. “[I]t only made me harder and harder,” he said.3

  But prison did change him. One Sunday, about five years into his sentence, he was shocked to hear one of his criminal confederates address the inmates during religious services. Orville Gardner, a former prizefighter and thief, had such a terrible reputation that he was known as “Awful Gardner” in the New York newspapers. He was also an alcoholic, but the death of his young son had forced him to take a hard look at his life, including his drinking. He put a two-quart jug of whiskey in a boat and rowed to a clearing on the Brooklyn shore. “Now it is give you up forever or never leave this place alive,” Gardner said, addressing the jug. He fought temptation for nine hours, praying for help. He rejected the idea of smashing the jug, fearing the smell of whiskey would be irresistible. He dug a hole, buried it, and rowed back to Manhattan.4

  McAuley was deeply moved as Gardner told his story. Back in his cell, he picked up a Bible and began searching for a passage that Gardner had recited. He read the whole book twice. “I was resting one night from reading, walking up and down and thinking what a change religion made in Gardner, when I began to have a burning desire to have the same,” McAuley said. He knew that he should pray for forgiveness, but he was convinced he had committed too many sins. McAuley was in agony for weeks until he heard a voice say, “Go to God; He will tell you what is right.” He fell to his knees on the cold stone floor of his cell, determined to stay there until he found forgiveness. “I was desperate,” he said.

  All at once it seemed as if something supernatural was in my room. I was afraid to open my eyes. I was in an agony, and the sweat rolled off my face in great drops. Oh, how I longed for God’s mercy! Just then, in the very heart of my distress, it seemed as if a hand was laid upon my head, and these words came to me, “My son, thy sins, which are many, are forgiven.” . . . Oh, the precious Christ! How plainly I saw him, lifted on the cross for my sins!

  McAuley jumped to his feet and began to pace his cell. “A heavenly light seemed to fill it; a softness and a perfume like the fragrance of the sweetest flowers,” he said. He was not sure whether he was living or dead. He began to clap his hands and shout, “Praise
God!” A passing guard asked what was the matter. “I’ve found Christ,” McAuley said. “My sins are forgiven. Glory to God!” The guard threatened to report him in the morning for making a ruckus. No punishment followed, but the authorities were skeptical about McAuley’s conversion. It was another two years before he was paroled.5

  McAuley found the streets of New York very lonely when he returned from prison in 1864. “I could not go back to my old haunts and companions, and I knew no others,” he said. He no longer believed himself to be a Catholic, but he had never been to a Protestant meeting, and he met no one who might have invited him to attend. “If I had found a single Christian friend at that time, it would have saved me years of misery,” he said. He found one friend, but this man introduced him to lager beer, a drink that had recently been imported by German immigrants. McAuley knew he had a problem with alcohol. He had not taken a drink since his release from prison. But he was assured that beer was not like whiskey. “They told me it was a harmless drink, wholesome and good and as simple as root-beer,” McAuley said. “I drank it, and then began my downfall. The old appetite was awakened. From that time I drank it every day, and it was not long before I went from that to stronger liquors.”6

  With a ready supply of alcohol to ease a guilty conscience, McAuley returned to the Fourth Ward. The Civil War was in its final bloody year, and the federal government was offering a bounty to volunteers as well as a payment to the men who recruited them. “Rascally business that. I would pick men up wherever I could find them, get them half drunk and coax them to enlist,” McAuley said. “I made a great deal of money in this way, which I spent freely. I became a sporting man, went often to the races, and my downward course was greatly quickened.” When the war ended, McAuley became a river pirate again and was nearly killed on two occasions. He was so drunk one night that he fell out of his boat and almost drowned.7