Drunks
Page 11
His conscience finally saved McAuley. It had never stopped bothering him. One day, as he was sitting in his room, he heard a voice in the hallway below ask, “Do you love Jesus?” The voice belonged to a missionary, Henry Little, who had met the landlady on the stairs. “No, indade, do I love Jesus; and who is he?” she asked. McAuley jumped to his feet. “That voice—those words! It seemed like long-forgotten music,” he said. Before he could open the door, the missionary had climbed the stairs in search of a tenant at the top of the building. McAuley waited for him on the landing below. He was broke, dressed in dirty clothes, and his head was closely shaved. “I was a frightful looking object,” he said. When Little finally appeared, he was afraid that McAuley might attack him but agreed to meet in the street. McAuley hoped Little might help him find an honest job. As they talked, Little led McAuley to a mission on the Bowery. There, Little and another missionary tried to persuade him to sign a pledge to quit drinking. “I told them I shouldn’t be likely to keep it, that I had taken it many times before, and broken it,” he said. They told him to try again, that God would help him this time. They also promised to help him find work. “Well, to please you I will,” he said.8
McAuley spent the next two years trying to get sober. In 1870, Julius Chambers, a young reporter for the New York Herald, approached McAuley for a story he was writing about river pirates. McAuley was sober and refused Chambers’s offer to buy him a drink, saying he would never again touch the “damnable stuff.” But he did not look well. “I saw a tall, cadaverous man, with strangely white cheeks,” Chambers wrote. “His fine gray eyes had in them a look of hopelessness and lament I could not resist.” He was also terribly thin. When Chambers bought him dinner, McAuley admitted he had not eaten in twenty-four hours.9
Slowly, McAuley’s life began to improve as he found steady work and a sober girlfriend. But he was seeking more than a paycheck and a happy marriage. At work one day, he had a vision in which he saw himself bringing people to God in his old neighborhood by the docks. He persuaded a wealthy friend to give him the use of a former saloon that he owned at 316 Water Street. With money he solicited at religious camp meetings, he cleaned and repaired the space, hung a sign, “Helping Hand for Men,” and opened for business in October 1872.
Once the door was thrown open, the needy flooded into the mission. “Such a sight I never saw,” McAuley said. “Sinners crying, ‘God have mercy on me!’ ‘Lord help me!’ and while I was on my knees the Lord said, ‘You had better open the door every evening.’ And so I did.” The mission was a sanctuary for the homeless. Fifty to sixty men slept there overnight. McAuley said:
They would be stretched out on the benches and then on the floor until there was not room to put your foot down without stepping on them. They were a terribly degraded set, hungry and alive with vermin, but we looked beyond all that and saw only souls for whom Christ died and whom He desired to save, and every now and then God found a real jewel among them.
The jewels were several dozen men and women who were converted in the mission and joined in helping others. Their goal was to lead them to salvation by accepting Christ as their savior and learning to live a moral life. The example was set by McAuley, who used the details of his life to demonstrate that no sinner was beyond redemption.10
The nightly meetings at the Water Street Mission were unique. There were no fire-and-brimstone sermons urging people to repent or face eternal damnation. The people who came to the mission were already in hell. The service started with hymns and a reading from the Bible. Then McAuley rose from his wooden armchair to make a brief statement:
Why do you come to this prayer meeting? Is it to thank God because you’re happy? No. You come here because you’re wretched and miserable. You know you’re living in the gutter and you know it’s your own fault. God didn’t put you in the gutter. You went there of your own accord.
McAuley did not dwell on the sinfulness of his listeners. He had been a sinner himself. “I’ve been a thief; I’ve been in jail. . . . I’ve been as low as any man or woman in this room,” he said. He focused on the solution:
I crawled up out of the gutter at last, with God’s help, and now I want to get you out. You feel that you’re sinners. You feel, deep down in your hearts that you’re low, miserable and degraded and I tell you that you’ll never feel any better or be any better until you stop sinning and come to Christ.
He would then invite anyone who was ready to stop sinning to stand and speak.11
For the next thirty to forty minutes, men and women spoke from the heart. Some simply testified to the power of their conversion. “God spake peace to my soul one day at four o’clock in the afternoon on board the ship George Peabody at Pier 14,” a sailor said. Others wanted to describe their struggles at length, forcing McAuley to impose a restriction. “SPEAKERS ARE STRICTLY LIMITED TO ONE MINUTE,” said signs posted around the room. One minute was long enough to ask for help. “I am a confirmed drunkard. I have lain out all night in the gutter,” a man said. “Help me. Pray for me. I’m afraid I can’t hold out.” “God will help and we will help,” McAuley responded. “Let us first ask the pity and the help of God.” At the end of the testimonies, McAuley rose again:
We’re going to have prayers now. Don’t you want to be saved tonight? Who’ll stand up for prayers? There’s one, there’s two, three, there’s another. Don’t be afraid to stand up. It don’t make any difference what kind of clothes you have on. . . . You’ve got to cry to God for help if you want to get rid of your bad habits.
McAuley would then walk along the line of people kneeling, placing his hand on the shoulder of each man and woman and helping those who were having trouble forming their words. “I can’t pray,” one man said. “I’m too bad. I’m afraid to.” “You can’t be too bad,” McAuley replied. “Just say, ‘God be merciful to me a sinner.’”12
McAuley knew that most of those who experienced conversion would not remain saved, especially the drunks. The converts were surrounded by misery, and whiskey was only three cents a drink. “If you lived in this place, you would ask for whiskey instead of milk,” a woman told a missionary as they stood in the rear court of a tenement. McAuley kept his converts busy:
I’d have fallen again if I hadn’t been so busy holding on to others. And that’s the way to keep men. Start them to pull in somebody else. When your soul is on fire, longing to get hold of every poor wretch you see, there’s no time for your old tricks nor any wanting to try them again.
Each convert contributed what he or she could. Some of the women visited the sick and sewed clothing for children.13
The drunks took care of their own. “Happy Charlie” Anderson was in charge of the new men, even before they had finished giving testimony, helping steady them as they spoke. He and the other reformed men made sure that the new recruits were fed and clothed, helped them find jobs, and strengthened their resolve when they were tempted to drink. The sober men were models for the newcomers, living proof that recovery was possible. “I saw men who had come into the mission sodden with drink turn into quiet steady workers,” wrote Helen Stuart Campbell, a writer and social reformer who was introduced to the mission in 1878. “Now and then one fell—in one case permanently—but the prodigals commonly returned confessing their weakness and laboring earnestly to prove their penitence.”14
McAuley died of tuberculosis in September 1884. Not many of New York’s numerous newspapers mentioned his death. The few reporters who covered the funeral were probably surprised to discover a large crowd outside the Broadway Tabernacle, one of the biggest churches in the city. It had been full for hours, and people were packed into every approach, forcing the police to push and shout to get the minister in the door. It was one of the largest funerals for a private person that had ever been held in New York. Eminent businessmen and ministers took turns praising McAuley. There were “many gentlemen and ladies” present, but the reporters were watching everyone else:
“old women, wrinkled and seamed”
. . . “here and there sprinkled through the crowd the painted face of the scarlet woman showed itself.” . . . “the straw hats of a few homeless tramps” . . . “a great many Negroes of both sexes” . . . “the young shop girl who has been saved from temptation” . . . “gamblers and confidence men who seemed very ill at ease.”
These were the lost souls who had found relief at one of McAuley’s missions: drunks, prostitutes, former slaves who had fled the South, the homeless, and the working poor. A shabby man asked a reporter to carry a small bunch of flowers inside. “It ain’t any great shakes,” he admitted.15
McAuley was not alone in showing kindness to alcoholics and other outcasts in the postwar era. In 1873, the year after the opening of the Water Street Mission, women around the country took to the streets in an effort to halt the sale of alcohol. In just a few months, they demonstrated in nine hundred small towns in thirty-one states. They entered saloons and drugstores that sold liquor. If their request to banish liquor was refused, they kneeled in prayer or began singing, driving customers out the door. Some owners agreed to close their business. Others responded with curses and threats or went to court for injunctions barring the women from their establishments. What became known as the Woman’s Crusade for Temperance reportedly closed thirty thousand saloons.
The soldiers of the Woman’s Crusade believed that they could accomplish their goal through spiritual renewal. The movement started with prayers to change the hearts of saloon keepers and broadened into a campaign to help drinkers. They accepted the fact that some people were incapable of quitting alcohol. Many of them had husbands or family members who were alcoholics. Whether they were morally weak or suffered from an illness, they believed the help needed could only come from God. This was the philosophy of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), which was organized in 1874 to channel the energy unleashed by the Woman’s Crusade.
The WCTU’s attitude toward drunks would change after it became a pillar of the prohibition movement, but in its early years, it launched a “gospel temperance” crusade that carried the promise of sobriety to drinkers wherever they could be found. The chapter in Newark, New Jersey, was particularly active. A member reported:
We might speak of our gospel temperance work in the jail: how the prisoners sought and found the Savior, the Lord giving us a trophy the first meeting; of our bands of hope and young ladies’ league; cottage prayer-meetings, saloon visiting, etc. But time will not permit. . . . A true record of it is kept on high. It is a blessed work. Unto Him be all the praise and glory forever.
WCTU chapters created “reading rooms, coffee houses, and friendly inns” where men could find sober recreation. Members offered help in literature distributed through Sunday school classes. When a potential convert stepped forward, they stayed after him until he saw the light. In Newark, they visited one man for eighteen months. Finally, he was given suitable clothes so that he could go to church. “He was deeply convicted of sin, and sought the Savior, whom he found able to save, even to the uttermost,” the WCTU reported. The convert had been sober for six months when this report was made. He had become the chaplain for a club of reformed men and had spoken of his experience several times in New Jersey and New York.16
Another Newark man, a “Mr. Jones,” was discovered during a visit to his home, which had received several temperance tracts. His wife greeted the crusaders with evident relief and related the story of her husband’s sad decline. His family, including a brother who was a minister, had been praying for him for years, but it hadn’t stopped his drinking. Once the owner of two houses, he was unemployed; the family was living in rented rooms and had almost exhausted their savings. Still Mrs. Jones was hopeful because her husband had been reading the temperance pamphlets and wanted to speak with the visitors. “He listened with joy to the ‘good news’ of redemption through Jesus’ blood. How Jesus came to seek and save the lost,” one of the visitors recalled. “We felt God’s presence there.” Everyone knelt in prayer. When they rose, Jones agreed to accompany his guests to their church, where he took the pledge.17
When the news of Mr. Jones’s conversion got around the neighborhood, a number of women asked the WCTU to visit their homes. Another ten men were converted. Meanwhile, Jones honored his pledge. “Two years have rolled away since that memorable 3rd day of September, and he is one of our most consistent Christian men, a good citizen, and an earnest temperance worker,” the WCTU reported.18
The Woman’s Crusade was at its peak in the winter of 1874 when it discovered one of its most important converts in Bangor, Maine. Dr. Henry A. Reynolds had once been full of promise. He had graduated from Harvard Medical School during the Civil War and spent two years as a surgeon in an artillery unit. On his return, he opened a successful practice and was named the city physician. However, he soon began drinking alcoholically, binging for six weeks at a time. “I have walked my father’s house night after night for seven nights and days, a raving, crazy madman, as the result of intoxicating beverages,” Reynolds said. He even suffered delirium tremens. He tried different ways to stop, but nothing worked. “I had ‘drunk my last drink’; I had broken my bottle; I had sworn off ‘before a justice of the peace’; I had tried to ‘taper off,’” he said. Finally, he tried the only thing he believed he had left:
I threw myself on my knees in my office, and asked of my God to save me, and promised him that if he would save me from such sufferings as I had once been through, with his assistance I would be true to myself and to him, and do what I could for the salvation of others.
Soon after, Reynolds attended a prayer meeting organized by the woman crusaders. Some doubted the sincerity of the town’s notorious doctor, wondering whether his taking the pledge wasn’t a joke. But Reynolds would express his gratitude to the crusaders for the rest of his life.19
Reynolds was determined to keep the promise that he made to God to work for the salvation of other alcoholics. He believed that drunks were misunderstood:
No nobler class of men walk the earth than some who are drinking men. They are naturally generous, whole-souled, genial, jolly; but by intemperance their minds become diseased. They become scorned and degraded outcasts in the ditch, kept there by thoughtless people, less generous and honorable by nature than themselves. But for rum, these might be on the throne instead of in the gutter.
Reynolds was convinced that many could be saved if someone was willing to make an effort to help them. But his own experience convinced him that few were willing. “I am compelled to give the same painful testimony that so many do, that no one asked me to turn over a new leaf, or said an encouraging word to me in the way or urging me to try and live a sober life,” he said. “Had some kind friend shown me the way out of it, and whispered in my ear that I could be a better man, I might have been so.”20
Reynolds decided that he would establish a club for drinkers who wanted to reform. During his first sober months, he had belonged to a Young Men’s Crusade Club, whose members included teetotalers, moderate drinkers, and drunks. “The result was constant quarreling and strife. The organization died,” Reynolds said. He began to think about a new club that would be closed to nondrinkers, “a society composed entirely of reformed men.” “There is a bond of sympathy between reformed men which binds them together,” he said. He paid for an ad in the Bangor newspapers, inviting men who wanted to stop drinking to a meeting on September 10, 1874. The men of Bangor had a reputation as the biggest drinkers in a hard-drinking state. Eleven appeared at the meeting.21
Reynolds was not a powerful speaker. “It takes me about an hour and a quarter to make a 25-minute speech,” he admitted. But what he lacked in eloquence he made up in his commitment to building his organization. His method was to travel to a town and hold meetings that addressed a general audience, collecting pledges from everyone who wanted to sign. But most of the pledge makers were people who did not drink much. It was the drunks he wanted to reach:
[A]t the close of a series of meetings I get
together what of the above-named material I can, and organize a club. These men really become self-constituted missionaries and go to work, which helps to save themselves and others.
Although most reformed men eagerly embraced the missionary role, others needed a kick in the pants. Reynolds was not slow in delivering it to the members he thought were underperforming:
You are to blame for not having a larger and more effective club. . . . Out of gratitude to God for your deliverance you ought to be the first to go out into the byways and hedges, and compel others to come in. I know what it is to have a pleasant home and a lucrative practice; but I have abandoned both that I may be the means, under God, of saving others from the depth of sorrow and suffering from which I have been extricated. I could not rest. Don’t leave a stone unturned to reform others.
He expected his supporters to be as deeply committed to rescuing drunks as he was.22
Reynolds’s focus on the needs of alcoholics led him to part company with prohibitionists. This was probably not easy for him. “I attribute my salvation from a drunkard’s grave to the Woman’s Temperance Crusade,” he said. “I consider myself as a brand plucked from the burning through the prayers of the Christian women of America.” But he refused to lead his troops into the battle for legal restrictions on the sale of alcohol. While he may have favored them personally, he believed that involvement in politics of any kind would distract reformed men. “Let everything else alone. You reformed men have enough business on your hands to take care of yourselves, without being made cat’s-paws for politicians to pull their chestnuts out of the fire,” he advised. This single-mindedness meant that all their energy went into recruiting, which enlisted fifty-one thousand men in the first twenty-one months.23