Neff believed that staying in touch with former patients was critically important. Hospital statistics showed that two-thirds of them would relapse. Most would not even provide an annual progress report. When they did write, Neff and his staff replied promptly. Neff’s letters were full of encouragement. “I want to congratulate you upon your success which I feel sure will be permanent,” he wrote one man. “[W]e are ready to do everything we possibly can for your welfare.” He also urged his correspondents to help other alcoholics. Neff asked Thomas Rand to write John Rowan, a new patient, because “it offers him considerable encouragement and will be a help to him in the fight which he is now making.” When Rowan relapsed and left Foxborough, Neff sent Rand his new address and asked him to let him know how Rowan was getting on.42
Neff stayed in touch with his patients for years after they left Foxborough and helped whenever he could. At one point, Rand found himself working at the Water Street Mission, where he discovered “quite a few of the Foxboro [sic] boys.” When he wanted a new job, Neff put him in touch with a member of the New York City Board of Inebriety. Over the years, Neff also offered Rand advice on dealing with his two alcoholic brothers. When Rand got married, Neff asked his bride to remind Thomas to continue to write to him. Neff’s letters were enormously important to Rand. “I was deeply touched by your kind words and the confidence that you have in me that I will never go back to the old life. . . . I mean never to betray that confidence,” he wrote. Rand was the son of an alcoholic and the brother of two more. The knowledge that someone believed he could stay sober, and that Neff was both a doctor and a prominent government official, helped Rand make it happen.43
In 1908, the same year that Irwin Neff became superintendent of the Foxborough hospital, Quanah Parker, the last great leader of the Comanche people, testified before a committee of the legislature that had just been organized by the new state of Oklahoma. The committee was considering a bill that would reenact a ban on the use of peyote that had been passed in 1899 by the territorial legislature. Parker was famous. Born in 1845, he was the son of a Comanche leader and a white woman, Cynthia Parker, who had been raised by the tribe. He had distinguished himself as a leader of a proud tribe that had heavily resisted white settlement. Following the final surrender of the Comanche, he was appointed the principal chief of the tribe by federal authorities and led his people for the next thirty-six years.
In his testimony, Parker explained that peyote was not just a drug with psychoactive properties. It was the source of a new religion that was changing Indian life from the Mississippi to the Rocky Mountains. Parker told the legislators that banning peyote violated the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of religion. “I do not think this legislature should interfere with a man’s religion,” he said. There was something else they should know about peyote, he added. “I do think piote beans have helped Indians stop drinking.”44
Life had not become easier for Indians since the days of Handsome Lake. The misery experienced by the Iroquois and other eastern tribes spread westward until it affected even the remotest natives. The last Indian wars concluded in the Pacific Northwest in 1858. Over the next thirty years, the white population in what is now western Washington State grew from just over one thousand to almost three hundred fifty thousand. Most of the Indians were confined to impoverished and disease-ridden reservations.
The one thing they didn’t lack was alcohol, which liquor dealers were more than happy to provide, even though it was against the law. In 1864, a government official observed that one Washington reservation was “surrounded by logging camps, which are occupied by men of very loose and immoral habits, who are continually taking the Indian women and furnishing the men with whiskey.” “We all felt blind those times,” an Indian leader recalled. “We lost by drowning—our friends drank whiskey and the canoes turn over—we died out in the bay.”45
The Native Americans needed something to believe in. Their old gods appeared powerless to help them. Peyote became the vehicle of a new religion. The Comanche and the Kiowa, both southern tribes, had discovered it through trade and warfare with Indians living in Mexico. The peyote plant has medicinal properties. Parker was said to have learned this himself when it helped him recover from injuries he suffered when he was attacked by a boar. This quality of the magical power of peyote alone would have impressed the Indians. But the plant also produces mescaline, a psychoactive drug that causes visual and auditory hallucinations that the Indians believed confirmed the mystical power of peyote.
By the early 1870s, the Comanche and Kiowa had created ceremonies during which they ate peyote buttons to achieve spiritual enlightenment. The most common peyote rituals were held in the evenings, when the participants gathered in a tipi and sat in a circle around a small crescent-shaped altar where they placed a large peyote button, “Grandfather Peyote.” As the night progressed, several sacred objects were passed around the circle. Each Indian sang four songs before passing the sacred objects to the next man. Small peyote buttons were also passed. The ceremony proceeded until dawn, when the participants joined other members of the tribe for a special meal.
Peyotism connected the Indian directly to his god. “The white man goes into his church and talks about Jesus, but the Indian goes into his tipi and talks to Jesus,” Parker explained. Peyotism also provided an outlet for emotions that could not be expressed in other ways. Followers were encouraged to confess their sins to a Road Man, who presided during the ceremony. When someone called him over, the Road Man would listen to his confession and then raise him to his feet, praying for his redemption. The result was a powerful catharsis that led normally stoic and tight-lipped men to laugh and cry. Many Indians were repelled by such displays of emotion and questioned the manhood of the Peyotists. But the believers felt a new sense of community. They called each other “brother” to indicate their membership in a new family.46
Not everyone was happy about the new Indian religion. Many states had banned the use of peyote by 1918 when an Arizona congressman, Carl M. Hayden, introduced federal legislation. During hearings, the bill was supported by Indians who saw the new religion as a threat to their traditional beliefs, government officials who feared that a new Indian religion would encourage opposition to their plans for the assimilation of Native Americans, and white temperance advocates who rejected peyote as a new means of intoxication that might be even worse than alcohol. Others vigorously defended Peyotism as a moral force. Francis LaFlesche described its impact on his tribe, the Omaha:
At the meetings of this new religion is taught the avoidance of stealing, lying, drunkenness, adultery, assaultism, the making of false and evil reports against neighbors. People are taught to be kind and loving to one another and particularly to the little ones.
LaFlesche said that the many prizes won by Peyotists at tribal fairs showed that they were among the most industrious members of the tribe.47
The opponents of the Hayden bill declared that abstinence from alcohol was a key element to the success of the Peyotists. James Mooney, an anthropologist who had made the first detailed study of the peyote movement, testified that sobriety was an absolute among them. “Followers of the peyote rite say that peyote does not like whiskey, and no real peyote user touches whiskey or continues to drink whiskey after he has taken up the peyote religion,” he said. Thomas L. Sloane, an Omaha who would become the first Indian lawyer to argue a case before the US Supreme Court, agreed. “It has changed a large number of men from drunkards to decent people,” he testified. A botanist for the Department of Agriculture who had conducted a detailed study of peyote was called as a witness to discuss the charge that peyote was a dangerous drug. “Peyote is undoubtedly a narcotic and if taken in excess it has bad effects,” William E. Safford said. However, he added, “in all cases I have investigated I have not found any instance where it was taken to excess.” The strong case made for Peyotism did not prevent the House of Representatives from passing the Hayden bill. However, it died in the Senate.
By then, there were more than twelve hundred Peyotists in ten states.48
Yet even as new forms of assistance were emerging for drunks, the problem of alcoholism appeared to be solving itself. Admissions to Warwick Farm, the new facility for alcoholics outside New York City, began to decline in 1916 following the outbreak of war in Europe. The population of drunks always swelled during hard times and shrank when there were plenty of jobs. During the first years of World War I, the United States maintained its neutrality and experienced strong economic growth while it sold munitions and other goods to both sides. The demand for bodies grew even more when the country entered the war on the side of Britain and France in 1917. Men were drafted into the armed forces, and even those who were not healthy enough to soldier were able to find jobs in the war industries.
The Salvation Army was among the first to notice how this affected drunks. From the time of its founding in 1865, the army had fought to save the souls of the lowest and the poorest. It grew out of the evangelism of General William Booth, who believed that the established churches were failing to reach the working classes in England. He hit on the idea of creating an army of male and female evangelists who would “attack” heathen territory. His soldiers would catch the eyes and ears of the locals by wearing smart red uniforms trimmed in blue and marching to their services, playing drums and musical instruments if they had them and singing loudly if they didn’t. By the time the Salvation Army established its first beachhead in the United States in 1880, it had enlisted 1,640 soldiers in 630 “divisions.” They were holding more than ten thousand meetings a week.
The Salvation Army had always had a strong interest in recruiting drunks. So it is not surprising that its first American convert was Jimmy Kemp, a well-known drunk and small-time thief on the West Side of Manhattan. A short man with black hair and a mustache that turned up at the ends, he was frequently beaten by larger men. He became known as “Ash-Barrel Jimmy” after falling headfirst into a trash barrel one night. Two policemen had to drag the can to the station house, pulling Kemp by his feet, before he could be extricated. A Salvation Army officer discovered Kemp standing outside the hall where the army was about to hold its first meeting in America and took him inside. The conversion of Ash-Barrel Jimmy became the talk of the neighborhood and helped draw a crowd to the army’s meetings. Kemp enlisted in the army and eventually rose to the rank of captain.
The Salvation Army expanded its assistance to the urban poor in the 1890s. Two days before Christmas in 1891, it opened a “Cheap Food and Shelter Depot” in lower Manhattan that provided sixty beds and a restaurant serving hot meals. The cost was eleven cents per day. If a man was broke, he could work for two hours in the shelter or chop wood in the yard. Similar facilities opened in large cities across the country and were later converted to industrial homes where men were employed salvaging and repairing used clothing and furniture that was collected by the army’s familiar red, horse-drawn trucks.
In 1909, the Salvation Army launched a Boozers’ Convention in New York City to attract drunks to its headquarters on Fourteenth Street. It hired a fleet of buses, and beginning at 4:30 in the morning on Thanksgiving, its soldiers roamed the city, picking up men who could not resist their offer of free food. To draw even more attention, the army organized a nearly mile-long parade in the afternoon that was led by a large water wagon from the city’s street-cleaning department. Bums rode the water wagon, which was flanked by army soldiers who pretended to keep them there. Farther back was a reeling drunk chained to a walking whiskey bottle that was ten feet tall; his grieving wife and starving children followed. Five marching bands kept the parade moving.
When they arrived on Fourteenth Street, the guests were led into a large hall. The air quickly grew stale from the smell of over a thousand men, many of whom were homeless. But there was lively entertainment onstage, including a play, The Trial of John Barleycorn, which inevitably ended in a conviction and execution. The men also listened to short sermons from army officers and testimonials by sober alcoholics. “Before the Army picked me up . . . I was so lousy that if everything on me could vote I could have been elected president of these United States,” one man joked. Several times during the day, the drunks were given an opportunity to come to the penitents’ bench at the front of the room where they could pray. Hundreds rushed forward on each occasion. After the meeting, the male converts who were homeless were taken to the army’s hotels and industrial homes. There weren’t many women, but those who needed shelter were taken to the army’s hotel for women on the Bowery.49
During the roundup of drunks for the 1910 Boozers’ Convention, a Salvation Army “lassie” encountered Henry F. Milans, a drunk who had once been the managing editor of the New York Daily Mercury. At forty-nine, Milans was at rock bottom. He had been living on the Bowery for two years, and his drinking had sent him to Bellevue Hospital several times. He had just been released after his latest stay, which had terrified him. Three doctors told him he was incurable. The first two commiserated with Milans, but the last one, a professor from Cornell University, didn’t even speak to him. Sitting next to his bed, the doctor addressed himself to the medical students who were following him as he made his rounds:
“This man,” said the professor slowly, as though to give emphasis to his words, “can never be cured! . . . He must die as he has lived, a drunkard. Nothing can save him. Before long he will be found dead in one of the human rat-holes that abound in the slums where he will hide away as soon as he leaves the hospital, providing he does not finish here in delirium tremens.”50
Milans had awakened on Thanksgiving morning nearly frozen after a night of fitful sleep under a warehouse loading platform. He was surprised when a young woman wearing a uniform and blue poke bonnet approached and spoke to him. Still reeling from the death sentence that had been pronounced at Bellevue, Milans poured out his story. The woman was indignant. “Of course they can’t cure you there,” she said. “Yours is more than a physical trouble; it is the sort of heart disease that they can’t touch. But listen, Jesus can cure you and make you a good man again if you will let him.” Milans followed the soldier to army headquarters and was converted a week later.51
Even as Milans made a new career in the printing business, he was not afraid to acknowledge the help he had received. He began speaking in churches, Salvation Army halls, prisons, and anywhere else he could find a crowd. He threw the words of the doctors back at them:
Explain if you can, you who do not profess any belief in the miracle-working power of the Savior. Explain if you can, you wise men of Bellevue, you professors at Cornell, you to whom science has taught so much about these bodies of ours, and who dare to pronounce a man beyond hope because his very vitals demand the poison so insistently that he must dies unless he gets it! . . .
Explain it, if you can. You can’t? I can. And in a word—Christ!
During every speech, Milans encouraged his listeners to write to him if they were having a problem with alcohol. His correspondence swelled to the point where he was called “the letter-writing evangelist.” He probably joined the United Order of Ex-Boozers, a group of three hundred sober drunks organized by the Salvation Army in 1914 that encouraged its members to help other alcoholics. Milans continued to write letters and make speeches for the rest of his long life.52
By the time the United States entered the war in 1917, the Salvation Army had built a thriving business in the sale of used furniture and clothing. Its workshops employed nineteen thousand men. A Salvation Army officer, Colonel William Peart, estimated that 75 percent were drunks:
Among the vast army of confirmed drinkers were representatives of all trades and professions. We’d get doctors, lawyers, teachers, clock-makers, upholsterers, cabinet-makers, carpenters—all types, in fact, that could turn their hands toward making salable articles out of unsalable ones. . . . In a measure, they were doing to the furniture what we were doing to them.
The war hit the Salvation Army hard. It lost two-
thirds of its workers, leaving it with a force made up almost entirely of “old men and cripples.” The change was clearly apparent at the end of 1919. Christmas was normally the busy season in the workshops. “But last Christmas we could hardly corral a handful. And the dead calm in our workrooms and our dormitories has continued,” Peart reported in the fall of 1920.53
At first, it appeared that Prohibition might finish the job that the war had started, delivering the death blow to alcoholism. The Eighteenth Amendment, which banned the production and sale of “intoxicating liquors,” was ratified in January 1919. But many states were already dry, and Congress outlawed the manufacture of liquor during the war. By the time the Eighteenth Amendment took effect in January 1920, Prohibition had already profoundly changed the country and the lives of alcoholics. In October 1921, Evangeline Booth, General Booth’s daughter and the “commander” of the Salvation Army in the United States, reported that drunkenness had almost entirely disappeared among the men who were living and working in the army’s facilities. Booth acknowledged that liquor was still being sold illegally and “that the task of banishing all intoxicating liquor from the land is a stupendous, a lengthy one.” But she confidently predicted complete victory. “By the Constitutional Amendment of Prohibition a measure has been enacted that will do more to bring the Kingdom of God upon earth than any other single piece of legislation,” she said. It appeared to Booth and many others that the United States was entering an age of joy and prosperity.54
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