The survival of the Keeley Institute owed a great deal to its graduates. According to the Banner of Gold, thirteen of the managers who attended the meeting had gotten sober at Dwight or one of the branches. Many of the medical directors were also former drunks. For many of these men, working at the Keeley Institute was more than a job: it was a way of helping other drunks, as well as insurance against a possible relapse.
The depression did kill the national Keeley League, which held its last national convention in 1897. But at least some of the state and local Keeley Leagues continued to operate. The Keeley League of Sewickley, Pennsylvania, reported in 1900 that it raised enough money to send thirty-five drunks to treatment in the previous year.
By 1900, thousands of Keeley graduates had been sober for many years. Most of the former drunks at the managers’ meeting had quit between five and ten years earlier. Willard Brown, who was treated in 1891, wrote to the Banner of Gold saying that he had recently visited Robert Gibson, class of 1894. Gibson bought and sold livestock, but he had no problem being almost constantly in the company of drinking men as he traveled to Chicago. “[H]e is always thrown among a convivial class of men en route, and when the bottle is passed around the car . . . it is no temptation to him,” Brown said. The Sewickley league held a party in 1900 to celebrate the sixth anniversary of the sobriety of its president, George H. Hegner. John R. Heath was seven years sober when he was elected to city office in Joliet, Illinois, by a record majority. Heath was very public about the fact that he was a former drunk, because he hoped it would help others.50
Keeley graduates continued to recruit drunks and help pay for their treatment. “Good things are very few and far between in this world, therefore a man ought to take care of them,” Heath explained. “I got a good cure at Dwight and why should I not take care of it?” Hegner had a limit on what he was willing to spend to help a man get sober, but it was a generous one. “I have the greatest sympathy for the victim of drunkenness and will do anything possible for him—give him three trials if necessary but not more . . .,” he said. “[I]t is too expensive. Three times is my patience.” So many Keeley graduates arrived with drunks in tow that it became part of the daily life in Dwight. The Banner of Gold reported:
There is probably no work in the world so congenial as for a Keeley graduate to place a friend “in line.” They are always ready to start on the first trains and to drop everything to accomplish this result. It certainly is an inspiration to the patients taking treatment to see them here, as they always seem well, happy and prosperous.51
The Keeley Institute couldn’t deliver the miracle it promised for everyone. Most of its graduates would eventually relapse. But many found sobriety for the first time in their lives, and some stayed sober. Even some of those who relapsed kept searching for a miracle, and some would find it. The future held new sources of power for attaining permanent sobriety. One promised a new age.
CHAPTER FIVE
False Dawn
THE MEN IN THE saloon looked fearfully through the makeshift barricade protecting them from the tall woman at the door. In Topeka, Kansas, in 1901, saloons were called “joints” and their owners were “jointists.” The woman was Carry Nation. Six feet tall and weighing 175 pounds, “the Kansas cyclone” had been terrorizing jointists for months by smashing their fixtures, first with bricks and stones, then an iron rod, and finally a seven-pound hatchet that had once belonged to the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway. Her enemies considered her a crank. She believed God had sent her on this mission, but she was not without a sense of humor. “Boys, boys, come and let me in,” she urged as she stood outside the Topeka saloon in late January. “Your mother would like to talk to you. . . . I’m not mad at you, boys. I’m not hating you a bit, even when I come around with my hatchet.” But Mother Nation was also emphatic. “I give you fair warning,” she said. “Just you close up and get out of this business. . . . If you don’t get out of this, boys, I’ll be around in a few days and just break up your wicked little shops for you.”1
Carry Nation hated alcohol for what it had done to her. At nineteen, while living with her parents in Missouri, she had fallen in love with an alcoholic, Charles Gloyd, a veteran of the Union army who boarded with her family at the end of the Civil War. Her parents warned Carry that Gloyd was a drinker, but the couple carried on a clandestine correspondence and finally married. She realized her mistake almost immediately and left Gloyd, who died two years later. Carry blamed alcohol for the destruction of her marriage, for the ill health of a daughter who was born soon after her separation from Gloyd, and for the seven years of economic hardship that finally forced her to find a new husband, David Nation. She naturally sympathized with the goals of the WCTU and organized a chapter in Medicine Lodge, Kansas. She also became a jail evangelist. Her work with the inmates convinced her “that almost everyone who was in jail was directly or indirectly there from the influence of intoxicating drinks.”2
Like many Kansas prohibitionists, Nation was also deeply frustrated. They had succeeded in amending the state constitution to ban the sale of alcohol, but the law was not being enforced. Every small town had a saloon operating in the back room of a restaurant or pool hall. In the cities, the bars operated openly, paying a monthly fine into the municipal treasury. Nation began her campaign of civil disobedience in the summer of 1900 by marching into several joints in Medicine Lodge singing,
Who hath sorrow? Who hath woe?
They who do not answer no,
They whose feet to sin incline,
While they tarry at the wine.
The owner of the first saloon threw her into the street. But most people in the town were on Nation’s side, and officials closed all three establishments. Soon after, she traveled to a neighboring town and engaged in her first “smashing,” throwing bricks and stones at the mirror behind the bar and the shelf of liquor underneath. She would demolish dozens of businesses in this fashion.
The climax occurred six months later in Topeka, the state capital, when she attacked a saloon favored by legislators. Armed with hatchets, Nation and three other women attempted to rush past a doorkeeper, who grabbed Nation, wrestled away her hatchet, and fired a warning shot into the ceiling. Nation seized another hatchet, demolished the bar, overturned a slot machine, smashed the beer kegs, and threw a heavy iron cash register into the street.
Nation was hailed as a hero by her fellow prohibitionists. “She has aroused the law abiding people of Kansas to the disgrace of law breakers—partly by her own lawlessness,” an editorial in the Emporia Gazette observed. Even those who deplored her violence were fascinated. Her smashings were front-page news from coast to coast. Later, some would even credit her with drawing national attention to the problem of saloons and leading the country toward Prohibition, which went into effect in January 1920. But the United States was already well along that road. By 1903, prohibitionists had succeeded in drying up many of the rural areas of the country. Thirty-five million people were living in places where it was no longer legal to buy a drink.3
The fight for Prohibition was not about curing alcoholism. The ministers who led the temperance movement during most of the nineteenth century were fighting sin and saving souls. Later, temperance leaders were alarmed by the arrival of hard-drinking immigrants from Ireland and Germany, including millions of Catholics, and by the growth of urban unrest and poverty in the nation’s rapidly expanding cities. They wondered how to protect vulnerable women and children, and make improvements in the nation’s health. But this did not mean prohibitionists had no hope for saving drunks. They believed that the higher power that alcoholics needed to help them stop drinking would come from the federal government, making alcoholism vanish with the rest of the country’s problems. A new, more virtuous age would dawn.
In the early nineteenth century, the temperance movement was willing to tolerate some drinking. The pledge not to drink applied only to whiskey and other distilled spirits that contained a lot of alcohol. The
temperance societies followed Benjamin Rush in believing that beer and wine were healthful. Rush had actually recommended them as an alternative to people who were trying to give up spirits. But as the movement grew, many activists became dissatisfied with this approach. They argued that if alcohol was addictive, then all alcoholic drinks were dangerous. There was “no safe line of distinction between the moderate and immoderate use of alcohol,” a Methodist publication claimed in 1832. It concluded by questioning “whether a man can . . . indulge at all and be considered temperate.” In 1836, the national temperance organization began advocating total abstinence from alcoholic drinks.4
The rise of the Washingtonians just a few years later helped enshrine total abstinence as the goal of the temperance movement. The transition to teetotalism had cost the movement some support, particularly among upper-class Americans who could afford wine and were sure it was not the problem. The excitement aroused by the Washingtonians quickly made up for all losses and then gave a powerful boost to pledge taking through the country. The drunks who led the Washingtonians believed that their own stories proved that half measures would not work. Their drinking careers had begun innocently enough, but the desire for alcohol grew until they couldn’t stop. “Whenever I hear a man say he can regulate himself, I say to him—I know that man will be a drunkard,” William K. Mitchell, a founder of the Washingtonians, said.5
But the Washingtonians’ experiences as alcoholics also made them skeptical when other reformers began calling for laws banning the sale of alcohol. To the prohibitionists, it seemed clear that voluntary pledges would never eliminate drunkenness. It is “vain to rely alone on self-government and voluntary abstinence,” the Reverend Lyman Beecher wrote. “Many may be saved by these means; but with nothing more, many will be lost and the evil will go down to other ages.” Most Washingtonians believed that prohibition was bound to fail. They attributed the success of their movement to treating drunks with kindness and appealing to their hearts and minds. “[F]orced obedience, never instills in the mind those feelings of reverence, which the general influence of love causes to spring spontaneously in the erring hearts of the children of men,” Charles T. Woodman, a Washingtonian, wrote. It hadn’t worked for him. He had been jailed for drunkenness fifteen times. Once, in desperation, he had even had himself locked up. But he always returned to drinking.6
Reformed drunks were also concerned that prohibition would distract from the task of helping alcoholics get sober. In January 1842, temperance leaders were excited to learn that Thomas F. Marshall, a congressman from Kentucky, had signed the pledge after experiencing a strong craving for alcohol one day as he entered the House of Representatives. Marshall was an eloquent speaker and a rising political star as well as the nephew of John Marshall, the great chief justice of the Supreme Court who had died a few years earlier. He also strongly opposed prohibition, which he made clear in a speech a few months after he stopped drinking. “Make no statutes . . . on the subject,” he told the members of the American Temperance Union at a large meeting in New York. “Let politicians . . . and legislators, alone,” Marshall said.
Persecute nobody. Look, rather, with compassion and sympathy on the unfortunate wretches who yet have not power to break their chains; but O! Don’t make laws against them! God knows they are under a law hard enough already! This cause is too high for law.
Marshall believed that drunkenness originated in a personal weakness that could only be cured by God.7
The reformed men were not unanimous. At least some Washingtonians favored prohibition, and their number grew as the influence of their organization declined and consumption of alcohol began to increase again. In 1847, John H. W. Hawkins expressed alarm over the fact that alcohol-related cases before the police court in Boston had jumped over 20 percent during the previous year. In a letter to the Mercantile Journal, he blamed the increase in drunkenness on the rapid proliferation of saloons and demanded city and state officials pass laws so “that the wicked rum-seller may feel that he shall not be permitted to grow rich upon the poor.”8
Maine passed the first statewide ban on the retail sale of alcohol. The victory was achieved by Neal Dow, a Portland businessman, who led a ten-year crusade that culminated in 1851. To make sure that the law would be enforced, he ran for mayor and led the first raid on liquor dealers, dumping $2,000 worth of alcohol into the streets. Hawkins actively supported what became known as “the Maine Law” and was making speeches in the state when it went into effect. He reached the town of Hallowell just as fourteen barrels of liquor that had been confiscated in a raid were being broken open in the street. As soon as the first barrel was empty, Hawkins turned it on end and climbed on top to give a speech. “[I]t was a scene to awaken in his breast a joy beyond the power of his words to express,” he told a friend later.9
The passage of the Maine Law was a turning point in the fight for prohibition. It inspired temperance advocates throughout the country, and twelve states adopted similar legislation over the next four years. Although opponents succeeded in repealing or gutting all of the laws before the Civil War, the movement began to revive in the 1870s under the leadership of the WCTU. Its president, Frances Willard, was a strong advocate of women’s rights, including the right to vote, and the WCTU became involved in a wide range of issues affecting the lives of women besides prohibition. American women responded, and the WCTU became the vehicle through which large numbers of them became involved in politics for the first time. As the number of state and local prohibition laws grew, many critics blamed the rising power of women. Carry Nation saw a close connection between women’s rights and prohibition. “If I could vote, I wouldn’t smash,” she said.10
But if prohibition had been just a “women’s issue,” it would never have won the support of Jack London, America’s most popular author in the first years of the twentieth century. Although London was a member of the Socialist Party, which supported equality for women, he opposed women’s suffrage until 1911, when California voters gave women the right to vote in state elections. On his return from the polling place, London told his wife, Charmian, that he had voted for the measure because women would support prohibition, and he believed that all saloons should be closed. This puzzled Charmian. London was an alcoholic who had never expressed a desire to stop drinking. He had been drinking all day and was “pleasantly jingled,” according to John Barleycorn, a memoir that London published two years later. “But I thought you were a friend to John Barleycorn,” Charmian said. He replied:
I am. I was. I am not. I never am. I am never less his friend than when he is with me and when I seem most his friend. He is the king of liars. He is the frankest truth-sayer. He is the august companion with whom one walks with the gods. He is also in league with the Noseless One. His way leads to truth naked, and to death. He gives clear vision, and muddy dreams. He is the enemy of life, and the teacher of wisdom beyond life’s vision. He is a red-handed killer, and he slays youth.
London died five years later at the age of thirty-nine.11
Support for prohibition was growing, but it was only one of several solutions for alcoholism that were being pursued during the first two decades of the twentieth century. This was the most hopeful time for drunks since the rise of the Washingtonians. Historians call this period the Progressive Era because Americans squarely faced a multitude of problems that had been caused by industrialization and confidently set about solving them. The hero of the age was President Theodore Roosevelt, who never met a mountain he couldn’t climb. Once again, there was an upsurge of humanitarianism as reformers established settlement houses in urban areas to help impoverished immigrants get a foothold in the new world. Alcoholics became the beneficiaries of the new reform movement when long-discussed plans for establishing government institutions to help them were finally implemented. But it was a program launched by a church that first attracted national attention.
In November 1906, Emmanuel Church, one of the most beautiful in Boston, was in an up
roar. Its rector, Elwood Worcester, had launched a bold experiment. A man in his early forties, he had the unusual distinction of holding a PhD in psychology as well as a doctorate in divinity. Worcester had studied in Germany with pioneers in the science of the mind and was fascinated by the potential of curing illness through mental healing. Believing there was an opportunity to combine orthodox religion and modern medicine in a new ministry, he launched a series of weekly lectures in the parish house that featured distinguished doctors talking about the role of the mind in maintaining physical health. Worcester and his assistant, Samuel McComb, who had also studied psychology, lectured later on the nature of religious therapy. At the end of the fourth session, Worcester announced that on the following morning he, McComb, and the doctors would meet with anyone who needed help with a moral or psychological problem.
Two hundred were waiting. There were men and women “suffering from some of the worst diseases known to man, old chronic maladies, rheumatism, paralysis, indigestion.” Perhaps as a joke, a local insane asylum sent over some of its patients. But during the next several weeks, the doctors were able to separate applicants with purely physical illnesses from those whose problems were considered strictly psychological, including psychosomatic complaints, phobias, extreme worry, and other neurotic symptoms.12
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