Drunks

by Christopher Finan

  It certainly helped that Reynolds had a knack for publicity. He developed a catchphrase by continually urging drinkers to “dare to do right” by signing the pledge. But he came up with his greatest innovation as he prepared for the first convention of club members in Bangor in the spring of 1875. Thinking it would be useful for the reformed drunks to recognize one another on the street, he sent his office boy to the dry goods store to buy several yards of red ribbon. He cut the ribbon into six-inch pieces and greeted the arriving delegates by tying a ribbon into the buttonhole of their jacket lapels. The ribbon was more than a tool for promoting group solidarity. It showed the world that they were new men. “I was not ashamed to drink,” Reynolds said. “Why should I be ashamed to acknowledge that I don’t drink? . . . I want to be known as a man who dares to do right.” The red ribbon was also a way of encouraging drinkers to quit. “[I]f every man who reforms wears a Red Ribbon, it won’t be long before the absence of the ribbon will be noticeable,” he explained. Wearing the red ribbon might even help a man resist a moment of temptation:

  A man with any decency in his makeup would want to take off his ribbon if he was tempted to drink; but while he was taking it off God would be at work at his conscience to save him from falling.

  If the man entered the bar still wearing the ribbon, there was always the possibility that the bartender would refuse to serve him. This may have happened occasionally, but there were rumors that some saloon keepers sought to discredit the reform movement by serving liquor to men who had never reformed, tying ribbons on them, and sending them reeling into the street.24

  Reynolds began to establish clubs at the invitation of a WCTU chapter in Gloucester, Massachusetts. A year later, there were fifty Red Ribbon Clubs with twenty thousand members. Next he traveled to Michigan, where he had even greater success. Seven months later, the Red Ribbon Clubs had enrolled eighty thousand; the Detroit chapter alone had thirty-seven hundred members. The Michigan legislature approved a resolution praising the Red Ribbon Clubs for creating a significant decline in crime, although there are no available statistics to prove this. Some of the enthusiasm for the reform clubs spread into Indiana as well. It was reported that every third man walking the streets of Indianapolis was wearing a red ribbon.

  At the same time that Reynolds was launching his movement in Michigan, another reformed drunk, Francis Murphy, was taking Pennsylvania by storm. Murphy was a forty-year-old Irish immigrant who had been a saloon keeper in Portland, Maine, before drink got the better of him. He got sober following a religious conversion in jail and organized a club of reformed men there several years before Reynolds got started. Like Reynolds, Murphy got a boost from the WCTU after his speaking gifts were discovered at a temperance convention. Frances Willard, the WCTU corresponding secretary, invited him to Chicago, where he quickly organized eleven clubs. Also like Reynolds, he differed with the WCTU. He refused to support prohibition or to condemn men who were engaged in the liquor business. He also expressed annoyance at nondrinkers who attended his meetings only to be entertained by hearing drunks tell their stories. His meetings were for “the reclamation of men addicted to drink, and not for the amusement of sober people,” he said.25

  In 1876, Murphy formed a club in the First Methodist Church in Pittsburgh. Some of the church trustees wanted to throw him out when they discovered that he was drawing a rough crowd. “The reform crowd broke windows, spit tobacco juice on the floor, disordered the pews, and did various other obnoxious things,” they complained. However, there was no argument over Murphy’s success. In the first month, five thousand people signed the abstinence pledge. Churches began to open their doors to new meetings, and Murphy found himself dashing from one meeting to another to address the swelling ranks of reformed men. By the time his campaign was ten weeks old, thirty churches were hosting temperance meetings, and a newly sober man could attend a different one every night of the week. An estimated forty thousand had signed the pledge. Clearly, most of these people were not alcoholics. The enthusiasm generated by Murphy’s campaign was sweeping the city.26

  Some of the meetings drew up to two thousand people. Like Jerry McAuley, Murphy asked them to testify to the blessings of sobriety. “Brother George Magoffin will now tell us how good he feels,” Murphy said. “Brother George, tell the people how happy your wife and little ones are since you signed the pledge.” Each of the men told his story in his own way:

  The speeches are of every kind, from grave to humorous. Some touching, pathetic recital of past struggles and sorrows, with the names of loved ones, of wife, mother or children, connected with it, elicits tears; while following this may come some quaint reminiscences of services in the tanglefoot battalion, which causes a broad smile, which frequently deepens into a ripple of laughter, among the audience.

  Once the new men had gotten used to telling their stories, they were sent to speak at other meetings. They also helped minister to the drunks who were walking through the door for the first time. On Christmas Day, Murphy hosted a dinner for twelve hundred of Pittsburgh’s poor. Drunks were helped to find clothing, temporary housing, and jobs.27

  News of Murphy’s success in Pittsburgh soon spread, and he began to receive requests to speak from communities throughout western Pennsylvania. Emulating the success of the Red Ribbon Clubs, Murphy adopted blue ribbons and sent his converts north along the Allegheny Valley to Erie, where one reformed man was said to have obtained pledges from nearly a third of the population. Others worked their way east through southern New York. By early 1877, the blue ribbon movement was becoming a national phenomenon. Murphy became the president of a new organization, the National Christian Temperance Union, which was organized in Pittsburgh in February. At a convention in October, it was reported that members were active in Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, Kansas, and Nebraska. They claimed to have taken twenty thousand pledges in Missouri, thirty thousand in Colorado, and as many as three million nationwide. Murphy’s followers were particularly strong in Ohio, where the state corresponding secretary reported in late 1877 that one hundred forty thousand men had stopped drinking in the Columbus area alone.

  God was not the only higher power in the late nineteenth century. A rival, science, was on the rise, as new discoveries began to change daily life, bringing electric light to dark city streets and making possible the rise of buildings to seemingly impossible heights. Frederick B. Hargreaves celebrated science in 1880 in language that was common to the age:

  The march of progress has been . . . onward; intellect has been making rapid strides. . . . Invention has succeeded invention, discovery followed discovery, till the miracle has ceased to be a marvel, and the elements nature and science, have become tributary to the masterly powers of man.

  In such an age, it was easy to believe that science would one day cure alcoholism. The men who belonged to the AACI were skeptical, but miracle drugs were being discovered all the time. The public craved new cures, and the purpose of Hargreaves’s pamphlet was to deliver the good news to alcoholics. Its title was Gold as a Cure for Drunkenness, Being an Account of the Double Chloride of Gold Discovery Recently Made by L.E. Keeley of Dwight, Illinois.28

  Hargreaves was a twenty-five-year-old English minister who emigrated in 1872 to assume a post at a Presbyterian church in a small rural community south of Chicago. He led his new congregation for only fifteen months before moving on. He secured a job in another church but left after three months. He found one more pastoral position but was fired because of his drinking. He scraped by doing legal work for several years until the rise of the gospel temperance movement gave him a new lease on life. He became a lecturer for the Illinois State Temperance League and traveled around the state addressing members of the ribbon clubs.

  During these years, Hargreaves lived in Dwight, a town of eighteen hundred that lay along the line of the Chicago and Alton Railroad, seventy miles south of Chicago. There he became friends with the town’s physician, Dr. Leslie E. Keeley, a veteran of the Civil War who
had moved to Dwight after graduating from Rush Medical College in Chicago. According to Hargreaves, one day, after returning from a lecture tour, he and Keeley discussed the plight of a mutual friend with alcoholism. They had both heard of a drug that was supposed to help a person stop drinking. It was probably a nauseant like ipecac that could be added to whiskey as Albert Day had done, causing a drinker to vomit so violently that he would become nauseated if he even smelled alcohol again. They decided to experiment with it, using a local saloon keeper, Pat Conafry, as the test subject:

  [Keeley] said Pat would take anything he asked him to take, so he fixed up a bottle and gave it to Conafry; and in a few days he lost his desire for liquor, and could not drink any at the end of about a week. He, however, made strong efforts, and one Sunday got a drink to stick and got gloriously drunk and would not take any more medicine.

  Hargreaves and Keeley were delighted with the result of their experiment and believed that they had made an important discovery. They used the medicine to help a second man, John P. Campbell, and began to discuss how to market the product as their own. Campbell joined the venture as a partner.29

  The only detailed account of the origin of the “Keeley Cure” comes from a deposition given by Hargreaves in a lawsuit that was filed against him by the Keeley Institute in 1902, two years after Keeley’s death. Keeley forced out Hargreaves as a partner in 1886, depriving him of a share of the enormous profits generated by the cure a few years later. Hargreaves started marketing his own cure and, after Keeley’s death, was sued by his heirs who feared Hargreaves was about to reveal the Keeley formula to help create a new business that would undercut the Keeley Institute. Much of what Hargreaves said about Keeley during his deposition was extremely unflattering, perhaps even defamatory. But there is no question that he worked closely with Keeley in launching his business. His account, which was given under oath, provides details about the discovery of the Keeley Cure that are unavailable elsewhere.

  According to Hargreaves, Keeley was initially reluctant to become publicly identified with the sale of a cure for alcoholism. Doctors were seeking to establish their expertise as healers at the time, and one of the ways they emphasized their superiority was by condemning the patent medicines that promised to cure virtually every illness. Keeley feared that being associated with the cure might damage his reputation. He was supplementing his income by serving as a doctor for the railroad and thought he might lose his job. As a first step, they agreed that Hargreaves and Campbell would rent a hotel room in Bloomington, Illinois, and begin advertising for patients. They spent a month in Bloomington, but it was hard going. “It was a new thing, you understand, and people were skeptical,” Hargreaves explained. The failure in Bloomington convinced Keeley that he had to vouch for his product publicly. “He took the position that . . . it would give more tone and prestige to the business if his name was used . . . and so we decided to call the firm name ‘Leslie E. Keeley, M.D.’”30

  Meanwhile, Hargreaves and Keeley had decided that they needed to make changes in their medicine. They called it a “tonic” that could help a man stop drinking, but it was effective only in the early days of the sobering-up process. They continued to experiment in the hope that they would find a drug that would permanently eliminate the desire for alcohol. One possibility was gold. Gold salts had been used for medicinal purposes since ancient times. In Keeley’s day, the use of gold chloride was declining because of the danger of kidney damage and poisoning by the mercury used in gold extraction. However, some doctors still prescribed it for skin and venereal diseases. It was also thought to stimulate the brain and nervous system. Keeley was not the first doctor to suggest that it might be useful in fighting addiction.

  According to Hargreaves, Keeley almost killed the first drunk he treated with gold chloride. A sewing machine salesman named Dalliba, the only patient that they had been able to recruit in Bloomington, had a bad reaction to the gold pills that Keeley had given him. “We had a bad time with him. Keeley had to come down two or three times, and we finally had to stop it,” Hargreaves said. But it was only a brief setback, Hargreaves said.

  [W]e hit on another remedy that did all we ever expected the gold to do; and it was a far more valuable specific for drunkenness than gold; and we used that in place of gold. Keeley has often said to me: “What a lucky thing we happened to hit on that drug,” as it saved further experiments and was not dangerous.

  Hargreaves asserted that Keeley stopped using gold within months of launching the business. Nevertheless, he insisted on advertising his medicine as the “Double Chloride of Gold Cure.” “It was an awful good name, and Keeley hated to part with the name,” Hargreaves said. He justified it by saying there are particles of gold in everything. “Keeley would often say, ‘There is a trace of gold anyway in it, and that is enough.’”31

  Hargreaves said Keeley bent the truth frequently in the early months of his enterprise. The business was started on a shoestring. None of the partners was wealthy, and they sold very little medicine during the first six months of 1880. They found it hard to raise twenty-three dollars to publish Gold as a Cure for Drunkenness. It contained an introductory letter from Hargreaves in his capacity as vice president of the Illinois State Temperance League and several articles purportedly written by Keeley. Hargreaves claimed to have written almost everything published under Keeley’s name. “[N]o one ever accused him of being able to [write],” he said.32

  According to Hargreaves, the only pieces that Keeley contributed to the pamphlet were fictionalized testimonials. Although the business was in its infancy, the pamphlet consisted of dozens of statements from doctors, lawyers, employers, and other prominent men. Hargreaves said he wrote most of them, signing the names of Keeley’s friends and associates, even giving one the title of General. Hargreaves said that Keeley wrote the patients’ testimonials himself. A little dishonesty was necessary, Hargreaves explained. Times were hard. “We were not ‘lying on flowery beds of ease,’” he said.33

  Slowly, the Keeley Company began to grow. At first, the gold cure was sold by mail. Later, to increase income, patients were encouraged to take their treatment in Dwight under Dr. Keeley’s supervision at a cost of a hundred dollars for four weeks. One of the first patients at the Keeley Institute was a newspaper editor from Missouri Valley, a small town in western Iowa. Robert Harris arrived in Dwight in 1889 after more than a decade of heavy drinking. Harris recalled that he was one of only four patients and that the group followed a strict treatment regimen. They received injections of the newly formulated double chloride of gold at 8 a.m., noon, 5 p.m., and 7:30 p.m., and were required to drink several ounces of tonic every two hours. After three weeks of treatment, Harris left Dwight convinced that he could stay sober. “It was the cure I was after . . . and every day since that time I have thanked God that there was such a man on earth as Dr. Keeley,” Harris said. Back in Missouri Valley, Harris used his newspaper, the Times, to broadcast the news of the liquor cure. He persuaded eight of his friends to depart for Dwight. “[I]n every case, the cure has been as perfect and successful as it was in my case,” he reported in 1891.34

  Missouri Valley was only the first Iowa town to embrace the Keeley Cure. A woman in Boone read one of Harris’s articles and showed it to her husband, William Marsh, a prominent businessman who was unable to stop drinking. When Marsh returned from Dwight, he persuaded the son of the town’s wealthiest man to go. Over the next eighteen months, the two newly sober men preached the Keeley Cure to every drunk they knew, and helped pay for those who couldn’t afford the train fare, treatment charges, and room and board. F. M. Havens, a close observer of the Boone experiment, described the outcome in a letter to a friend:

  The net results in Boone and immediate vicinity are, that 41 men—good men—who 18 months ago were down—many of them to the very worst condition, physically, to which alcohol can drag a human being, are today bright, fresh-faced men, with nothing in their appearance or actions to indicate that they were
ever victims of the alcohol habit.

  The effect of forty-one sober men returning to a small community must have been dramatic, particularly when they displayed absolute confidence in their ability to stay sober. “If I had the feeling that I am using the least little bit of will power to refrain from drinking, I would be afraid of myself,” one man told Havens. “[B]ut on the contrary, I never think of it—no more than if I never tasted whiskey.”35

  The year 1890 was a turning point for the Keeley Company. Keeley and his partners believed that most of the profit from their business would come from the sale of franchises to men who would open Keeley clinics around the country. The franchisees would make a large initial payment for the right to use the Keeley name and become a steady source for the sale of the cure. The dream began to come true with the opening of a Keeley Institute in Des Moines in early 1890. The number of patients was beginning to grow exponentially as graduates shared the good news. Robert Harris, the Missouri Valley editor, explained:

  [I]t is strange what a change comes over the spirit of their dreams within a few days after their arrival at the institute. That fear of the people knowing where they are has gone and they are like a new convert to religion—they have found a good thing and they want the world to know it. That is why every patient cured is a walking advertisement for the cured.