Drunks

by Christopher Finan

  Within a year, more than eighty patients were being treated at Dwight every month, and five more Keeley Institutes had opened around the country.36

  Keeley’s big break came in a letter from Joseph Medill, the publisher of the Chicago Daily Tribune. Medill was an important man: he was a founder of the Republican Party, a friend of Abraham Lincoln, and, briefly, the mayor of Chicago. Medill was also a strong temperance man who butted heads with Chicago’s Germans by enforcing a ban on the sale of liquor on Sundays. He had been hearing rumors about the Keeley Cure for several years before he finally decided to send a medical student who was “slightly addicted” to alcohol to Dwight. When the man returned and claimed he was cured, Medill wrote Keeley to inquire further. Recognizing his chance, Keeley gambled everything, daring the publisher to send him “half a dozen of the most confirmed inebriates and hopeless wrecks of alcoholism in Chicago.” Keeley said that if he failed to cure them, he would publicly confess his failure. Medill was intrigued:

  The challenge was so bold and startling that I at once accepted it. . . . The experimental cases were sent down to Dwight one at a time, extending over a period of several weeks. And in due time they were all returned to me, looking as if a veritable miracle had been wrought upon them. They went away sots and returned gentlemen. It was amazing.

  Medill was not convinced until he has sent some of his acquaintances to Keeley. When they returned sober, he pledged to do whatever he could to promote the double chloride of gold. “I felt it to be a duty which I owed to humanity,” he said.37

  The Chicago Daily Tribune began covering the Keeley Institute like it was the next Great Chicago Fire. The reporters clearly understood the kind of coverage their publisher wanted. Dwight “is an elysium for inebriates,” the first wrote.

  Dr. Keeley has reformed more drunkards than all the temperance lecturers now strutting and fretting before the imbibing public. He is a connoisseur on drunks, plain and frapped. He delights in the drink-addicted and ditch drunkards are his especially weakness.

  “[H]e has treated over 5,000 individual cases, coming from every State in the Union and from countries abroad,” claimed another Tribune reporter, who accepted this grossly exaggerated statistic. The Tribune followed up with editorial endorsements, proclaiming that Keeley “appears to be doing a great work in curing the victims of the drink and opium habit.” It also featured testimonials from doctors, Keeley graduates, and their grateful families. The Tribune promoted the Keeley Cure almost every day for six months, while publishing only a few articles and letters that raised questions about Keeley and his methods. “The town is filled with all the patients it can hold, and every train is surrounded by patients standing ready to welcome the coming and speed the departing,” the Tribune reported. “Sunshine, quiet, hope, relief—these fill the days at Dwight.” The message to drunks was clear. Tens of thousands responded.38

  Many of the drunks arrived with members of their family. C. S. Clark, a writer and a patient, recalled:

  From a train steps a venerable father or a widowed mother, assisting a wrecked son to reach the platform. Just behind them is a faithful wife, supporting an unsteady husband. Next is evidently a fine business man in the custody of a friend, then a sister accompanying a brother to this place of reformation.

  Some arrived alone, drunk and loquacious. Some were unconscious. One man arrived with a tag tied to the lapel of his “ragged, greasy coat”:

  PLEASE PUT THIS MAN OFF

  AT DWIGHT, AND

  NOTIFY DR. KEELEY OR ASSISTANTS

  Most were middle-class men who could afford to pay a hundred dollars for treatment, plus room and board. A majority of those who got sober at Dwight were farmers, but there were also many professional men. (The drunk with a tag was a doctor.) There were also a few women who were treated in separate facilities, mostly for opium addiction.39

  The Keeley boom transformed Dwight. Keeley and his partners could now afford to construct a handsome brick building to house their offices and a laboratory. Located just two blocks from the train station, it was impossible to miss, as the steady flow of arriving drunks became a torrent. A year after the publication of the first Tribune story, the Dwight institute was treating as many as seven hundred patients per month. Keeley did not provide housing, so the drunks either stayed at the Livingston Hotel next door or boarded with residents. During the day, they strolled along the streets, lounged on the hotel’s front porch, and checked their mail at the post office.

  But wherever they were, they stopped what they were doing when it was time to take their medicine. Four times a day, they formed lines in the treatment hall to take injections of double chloride of gold. Some rolled up their sleeves; others wore shirts that had been slit to provide easy access. Everyone waited. When Joseph Medill visited Dwight in 1892, he reported that it took six lines to accommodate everyone. The drinking of the tonic, too, was a collective experience. Clark recalled how strangely it struck a newcomer:

  [T]he hour to take it arrives . . . he hesitates and looks around among the hundreds of fellow patients. . . . He notes a sudden graceful, uniform and systematic movement toward perhaps 500 inside pockets; an equal uniform withdrawing of 500 small vials; a grand raising of those bottles toward heaven and then a magnificent lowering to 500 throats! The newcomer looks in profound amazement. Not a smile—not a ripple at this seemingly ludicrous public performance by 500 well-dressed, manly, sensitive men!40

  The new men made friends quickly. Treatment at Dwight encouraged a strong camaraderie among the patients that often began within minutes of their arrival. When the train pulled in, there was always a large crowd of men at the station that included patients who had completed their treatment and the friends who had come to wish them well. The remaining patients were quick to approach the newcomers with offers of advice. Clark was one of two hundred patients at the station one day when a well-known politician arrived. The man appeared stunned as he surveyed the crowd. “Gentlemen of the convention,” he said at last. “Is it possible—can such a thing be—that you are all sober?” Amid great laughter, the politician was taken in charge by his fellow drunks.41

  Many distinguished men went to Dwight for treatment. Clark was in line waiting for an injection one morning when he tried to engage a new man in conversation by asking him something simple. “Damned if I know, sir,” the man replied. “I don’t know anything; I am simply a fool without sense or reason.” He turned out to be one of the most prominent lawyers in Missouri. Patients at Dwight had a lot of time to kill. They spent much of it in conversation with other drunks, exchanging life stories and strengthening their resolve to be better men. The experience created bonds of deep affection. “I have had an opportunity to sit at the feet of men of learning who are an honor to America—men able to instruct the learned, prepared to widen broad mind, and capable of pointing lessons of love and endurance to those already graceful in these accomplishments,” Clark said.42

  What bound the men together even more than their shared history of suffering was the conviction that they were getting better, and not just better—cured. Keeley claimed that 95 percent of his patients got sober and stayed that way. How could the men at Dwight doubt it? They were supplied two-ounce vials of whiskey until they decided that they no longer wanted it. After two or three days, men who had drunk liquor every day for years were revolted by the sight of it.

  But this was only a preliminary stage—a reaction to the alcohol antagonist that Keeley and Hargreaves had discovered years before. According to Keeley, the cure—the double chloride of gold—was only beginning to do its work. During his first week at Dwight, John Flavel Mines, a fifty-five-year-old journalist and the author of popular reminiscences of old New York, suffered a kind of depression that normally sent him on a drinking spree. Although Mines had been sober for several months, Keeley prescribed whiskey until the craving passed. When it did, the depression lifted, and Mines experienced a profound sense of release:

  When I saw that it
had ceased to make me its victim and slave, I could have cried for joy. I knew from that moment that the bichloride of gold had gotten the upper hand, broken the fetters of my disease, and made me whole. . . . [S]uddenly, as if I had stepped out of the blackness of an African jungle into the quiet sunshine of Central Park, I broke out of my living tomb and knew that I was cured.43

  In the fall of 1891, the North American Review published articles by several doctors who considered Keeley a fraud. But the criticism hardly made a dent in his popularity, even after Mines got drunk and died in a New York charity hospital. Keeley could count on the loyalty of his patients. Two days after Mines’s well-publicized death, Keeley returned to Dwight from a European trip. Descending from the train, he found seven hundred patients drawn up in double lines along two blocks of the street leading from the station to the institute. As he passed, the men raised their hats in salute.

  Keeley had never claimed that he could save every alcoholic. He estimated that 5 percent of drunks were beyond hope. He acknowledged that he could do nothing for the man who wanted to keep drinking. He told a group of departing patients:

  You must remember that I cannot paralyze the arm that would deliberately raise the fatal glass to the lips. When you all go out into the new life, I will have placed you exactly where you were before taking the first drink. You will look back over the past and then contemplate the future, and you will then choose which path you will follow the balance of your days.

  While it was appropriate to warn the drunks that they would face temptation, the warning was undercut by the assertion that they had been fully restored. The promise of the Keeley Cure was that double chloride of gold healed cells that had been poisoned by alcohol, eliminating the craving for drink. The cured drunks were once again like other men.44

  Not every Keeley graduate felt confidence in the future. Some admitted to nervousness as the train carried them ever closer to home and its temptations. But most expressed confidence in their ability to stay sober. “Yes sir, it is his own fault if he don’t [stay cured], and it is not the fault of the treatment,” one Keeley graduate said. “If a man wants to behave himself, he can, and he can make a damn fool of himself if he wants to.” The feelings of the departing Keeley men were well expressed by Eugene V. Debs in the spring of 1893. In a few years, Debs would help found the Socialist Party and later run for president four times as its candidate, but at the time, he was a thirty-seven-year-old official of a union of locomotive firemen. The remarks he delivered on leaving the Keeley Institute suggest that he had followed the same road as the other drunks:

  I feel this morning as I never felt before, the utter meaningless-[ness] of words to express my gratitude for my deliverance from the fetters that have heretofore bound me, and the privileges I have enjoyed while here, of knowing so many manly men and splendid women. . . . For 20 years I continually indulged in the use of alcoholic stimulants, and I can see myself this morning, after passing through this magical treatment, as I was, and I feel very grateful for the great change that has taken place in me.

  To the other graduates, too, their sudden deliverance from alcoholism seemed miraculous.45

  The growth of the Keeley Institute was breathtaking. Beginning with one patient in 1889, the Keeley Company reported over $170,000 in profits just two years later. Men who wanted to open franchises were throwing money at Keeley in 1891. Twenty-five branch institutes opened in that year, and Keeley began to think about expanding abroad. He dreamed of building a world headquarters in Chicago and angered the directors of the city’s Washingtonian Home by offering to buy their institution and run it properly. The Keeley juggernaut continued to roll in 1892. It seemed that every city wanted to brag about their Keeley Institute, and seventy-five new facilities opened. Profits hit $508,966. In early 1893, Keeley seriously considered selling his company to a New York syndicate for $2.5 million but was unable to agree on all the terms of the sale.

  As the Keeley Institute spread across the country, its graduates also established a national presence. In April 1891, when there were still relatively few patients at Dwight, three of them formed a Bi-Chloride of Gold Club and began meeting in a blacksmith’s shop every morning after the first shot of the day. New patients were invited to speak, and men who were departing made farewell remarks. Soon, graduates were writing to the club about the experience of returning home. “These letters were always encouraging. Their moral effect on the patients, still anxious about themselves, is invaluable,” a club member recalled. The men who were writing the letters began to form their own clubs in Chicago, Pittsburgh, Lafayette, Indiana, and Farmington, Maine. There were soon fifty clubs in twenty states. Three hundred members arrived in Dwight in February 1892 to form a national organization. “With as much pride as if it had been a military decoration,” many of the delegates wore a Bi-Chloride of Gold Club pin, which featured an upside-down horseshoe bracketing the initial “K.” The design became the emblem of the new Keeley League.46

  The Keeley League had several goals. It wanted to sustain the camaraderie that existed among Keeley patients as a way of helping them adjust to the difficulties of a sober life. For that reason, membership was limited to drunks who had taken the Keeley Cure. The Keeley League also wanted “to further the cause of temperance among all people by curing the drunkard of the disease of intemperance” and to “extend the knowledge of the Keeley remedies.” Its mission was “to bring about a reformation in public sentiment which will close the gates of the prison against the drunkard and open to him the doors of the hospital,” a league official said. A weekly newspaper, the Banner of Gold, became the voice of the Keeley movement. The most important work of league members was to encourage other drunks to get sober and help pay for men who could not afford treatment. In 1893, it reported that they had referred 2,700 patients and covered the expenses of 574. These numbers would grow as new leagues were established. Two years later, there were more than three hundred branches of the league in forty-two states.47

  Federal and state governments also supported the Keeley movement. Officials had created veterans’ homes to assist men who had been wounded during the Civil War. But boredom was a big problem, and many of the men used their pension checks to buy liquor. The old soldiers’ homes were declared to be “in a frightful state of inebricy [sic].” Seizing the opportunity to win a federal endorsement, Keeley offered to provide the gold cure at a discount and free training in how to administer it. He won a contract to provide services to the facilities at Forts Leavenworth and Riley. More than a thousand veterans were treated at Leavenworth over the next two years.

  State and local governments also promoted Keeleyism. Prodded by constituents who were members of the Keeley League, the legislatures in Minnesota, Louisiana, North Dakota, and Colorado appropriated money to send drunks to local Keeley Institutes. Minneapolis mayor William H. Eustis asked Keeley for advice on dealing with inmates of the city jail who had been repeatedly arrested for drunkenness. Sixty-one men were sent for treatment, including nine who had been arrested more than ten times. Eustis also provided housing for the men until they could find jobs. Fifty-three were still sober five years later.48

  By 1893, Keeleyism had become a national institution. In July, there were 118 Keeley Institutes in operation across the country. In its annual report, the executive committee of the Keeley League claimed that a hundred forty thousand patients had taken the double chloride of gold cure. Later, Keeley would claim he had treated nearly three hundred thousand, although this figure appears to include mail-order customers. The success of the Keeley Institutes could also be measured in the rapid growth of competing franchises, including the Empire Institutes, the Oppenheimer Institutes, the Gatlin Institutes, and the Neal Institutes. All made the same sweeping claim to be able to cure addiction to alcohol, drugs, and tobacco using products like Dr. Haines Golden Remedy, the Geneva Gold Cure, and the Kelly Bi-Chloride of Gold Cure.

  The expansion might have gone on for years if the country hadn�
��t been hit by a deep depression. In 1893, almost five hundred banks and fifteen thousand businesses closed their doors. Unemployment rose to 12 percent in 1894 and remained in double digits for four years. The depression had an immediate impact on the Keeley Institutes. A majority of the drunks who traveled to Dwight were farmers, and farmers were one of the groups hardest hit by the depression. Soon the depression affected almost every American and made it increasingly difficult for men to raise a hundred dollars for treatment. While the Dwight institute was never in danger, five branches closed immediately and twenty-four more by the end of 1894.

  Leslie Keeley died at his winter home in Los Angeles on February 21, 1900. The death was widely reported. The Chicago Tribune, which had played such an important role in the growth of the institute, published the longest and most respectful obituary. It said that Keeley had built his “palatial residence” two years earlier in the hope that California’s sunny climate would ease his bronchial trouble. At sixty-eight, he possessed “a world-wide reputation” and a $1 million fortune. What the Tribune didn’t say was that Keeley’s influence had greatly diminished. His reputation as a doctor had been battered by years of criticism leveled by members of the American Medical Association, who considered the gold cure a fraud. The leaders of the AACI, who shared his concern for alcoholics, were among his severest critics. The profitability of the Keeley Institute had also waned. There were only forty-four institutes still in operation. Profits had fallen nearly 80 percent.49

  But the Keeley Institute survived. Its fortunes revived when the economy began to grow strongly again in 1897. At that point, the income of the Dwight institute was half of what it had been a few years earlier, but it still treated hundreds of patients every month. The number of branch institutes also stabilized. In January 1900, the Keeley League newspaper, Banner of Gold, reported that new institutes had opened in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Seattle, Washington. H. K. Aiken, the owner of the institute in Waukesha, Wisconsin, told the paper that business was good and growing. A few months later, the Keeley Institute Managers Association held its fourth annual meeting in Dwight. The representatives of twenty-five institutes attended.