by Behr, Edward
The massive consumption of hard liquor had been a feature of “New Continent” life ever since the earliest colonization stages: as early as 1630, Peter Stuyvesant noted that “one quarter of New Amsterdam (as New York was then called) is devoted to houses for the sale of brandy, tobacco and beer.” In pre-independence times, the colonies’ judges were so frequently drunk at the bench that heavy fines were instituted for those proved incapable during court proceedings.
In some parts of rural America, liquor was used as currency, with prices displayed in terms of whiskey pints or gallons. Farm laborers, including slaves, got ample liquor rations. Kegs of whiskey, with tin cups attached, were at the disposal of ships’ crews and passengers on flatboats on the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. There were barrels of rum on tap in shops for favored customers, and even court sessions were an excuse for drinking: the liquor consumed by judge and jury during proceedings was a legitimate court expense. With rum, applejack, and blackstrap (rum and molasses) a few pence a quart, eighteenth-century Americans, whether rich or poor, slaves or free men and women, appear to have gone through life in a semiperpetual alcoholic haze. In the early nineteenth century, Asbury noted, “so much rum was available in the Massachusetts metropolis that it sold at retail for fourpence a quart. West Indian rum, supposed to be better than the New England product, was only twopence more.”
The New Continent passion for liquor reflected the settlers’ own cultural origins — in no way was it sui generis. The early immigrants came from a land — Britain — where eighteenth-century pub owners routinely displayed the notice “Drunk for a penny, dead drunk for twopence.” Hogarth’s “Gin lane” immortalized the degradation of London’s wretched “lumpen proletariat.” Cheap gin first made its massive appearance in London in 1724, and became an immediate addiction (much like crack or heroin today) to wretched, underpaid, unrepresented slum dwellers, so much so that the “Gin Act,” passed by Parliament, attempted to contain this plague — to little effect, for, as Henry Fielding, the writer and social reformer, noted in a pamphlet published
in 1751, “should the drinking of this poison be continued at its present height, during the next twenty years, there will be by that time very few of the common people left to drink it.” Some at least of Fielding’s “common people,” intent on a different, less miserable life, must later have joined the ranks of America’s eighteenth-century settlers.
The taverns where Americans did their drinking were little different in their squalor from the inns described by eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century travelers in Europe, with the exceptions that at first rum, and not gin, was the staple liquor; that hard liquor and beer (not wine) prevailed; and that it was all absurdly inexpensive. At first no licenses of any kind were required, no taxes imposed. The only pro-viso was that, as in Europe, saloons and bars had to be lodging houses as well — all drinking establishments were expected to provide meals and living quarters. These were, almost invariably, as in Europe, on the sordid side.
Long before the Revolution, there were big differences between European and American attitudes as far as drinking practices were concerned. Temperance — and later, Prohibition issues — from the eighteenth century on, rapidly became “the most important question in American life.” The reason why is still a matter for endless debate. The puritan ethic largely explains why the Temperance issue was to become a constant religious obsession. But perhaps the simple, largely overlooked answer is that unlike Europe there were no other major issues that warranted equal concern — no wars (until the Civil War), no major social upheavals, no immediate, overwhelming cause around which public opinion might be mobilized in the interests of justice and freedom. The Prohibition issue became America’s lasting preoccupation largely by default.
New Continent saloon keepers had far more clout and from the start were far more involved in the political process than their European counterparts. This, too, was an example of the idiosyncratic social context of the land, where political ideology mattered far less than in Europe.
In America, from independence onward, the saloon keeper became a key figure in local politics. He delivered the vote — usually to the highest bidder, whose political views mattered far less than his personality, his prejudices, and the amount of jobs and money at his disposal. As John Adams, America’s second president, wrote of saloons in his diary in 1760:
The worst effect of all [is that] these houses are become the nurseries of our legislators. An artful man, who has neither sense nor sentiment, may, by gaining a little sway among the rabble of a town, multiply taverns and dram-shops and thereby secure the votes of taverner and retailer and all; and the multiplication of taverns will make many, who may be induced to flip and rum, to vote for any man whatever.
This lasting connection between politics and liquor, predating the Prohibition era by 150 years, was what made American drinking habits unique. In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European literature, there are few references to the political clout of English publicans, or of French café or German Bierstube owners, though there are endless examples of European social, literary, and political groups meeting in drinking places, from Dr. Samuel Johnson’s London pubs to Hitler’s Munich Bier stub en.
The drinking habits of Americans in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries must be seen in this special social context. America was an overwhelmingly rural, vastly underpopulated country. Unlike Europe, it was not permanently wracked by bitter ideological conflicts (except for the issues culminating in the Civil War). The social and political life of small communities, scattered over a vast expanse of land, centered, far more than in Europe, around those twin meeting places, the church and the tavern, and it was no coincidence in an age devoid of radio, television, mass advertising, and mass-circulation newspapers that tavern keeper and preacher were key community opinion makers — influential figures whose views were taken seriously and discussed interminably. (The status of the saloon keeper would change in the second part of the nineteenth century, as increasingly they were foreign-born, reflecting the urban immigration waves that changed the composition of American society so dramatically from 1850 on.)
The early political clout of the tavern owner — and later of the brewing or liquor conglomerates that would take them over — was intolerable to idealists such as Adams. In a letter to a friend in 1811, he wrote:
I am fired with a zeal amounting to enthusiasm against ardent spirits, the multiplication of taverns, retailers, dram-shops and tippling houses, and grieved to the heart to see the number of idlers, thieves, sots and consumptive patients made for the physician in these infamous seminaries.
With time, drinking habits changed. Americans continued to drink inordinately, but, as also happened in Europe, rum and gin became working-class staples, whereas the wealthy indulged in increasingly fashionable Madeira, port, and Malaga. (Beer was not consumed in large quantities until much later, with the nineteenth-century arrival of German immigrants.) Hard cider had been a staple since the early eighteenth century, and whiskey made its first appearance about 1760 (the first distillers were in western Pennsylvania, but many farmers made their own). The Whiskey Rebellion occurred in 1794 when the federal government, discovering for the first time the milch-cow opportunity of liquor taxation as a source of revenue, imposed a small excise tax on distilled spirits.3 The “whiskey war” was brutally put down by the militia. Although the farmers eventually paid the tax, “every family in Western Pennsylvania operated its own (illegal) still.”4
In 1810, the total population of the United States was still only slightly above the 7 million mark, and though statistics were, by today’s standards, primitive, they reveal that per capita consumption of liquor was huge. According to a report published in 1814 by the Massachusetts Society for the Suppression of Intemperance (one of the first of the Temperance movements), “the quantity of ardent spirits consumed in the country surpasses belief.” Over 25 million gallons were consumed locally, it claimed, but
> considering the caution with which accounts of property are rendered to government through fear of taxation; considering also the quantities distilled in private families . . . there is a high probability that millions might be added to the account rendered by the marshals. Let it stand, however, as it is, and add to it eight million gallons of distilled spirits in the same year imported, and the quantity for home consumption amounts to 33,365,559 gallons (or 4.7 gallons per person).
Another Temperance society (Connecticut, May 19, 1830) reported that “in one of the most moral and regular towns of Lichtfield County, whose population is 1,586, the amount of distilled liquors retailed during the last ten years has been 36,400 gallons.” Later reports from other local temperance societies claimed that the “1,900 inhabitants of Dudley, Massachusetts, drank ten thousand gallons of rum” and that “the population of Salisbury, Connecticut, consumed 29.5 gallons of rum for each of its thirty-four families” in 1827. According to the Albany (New York) Temperance Society, its 20,000 inhabitants (in 1829) “consumed 200,000 gallons of ardent spirits” — ten gallons a head of what must have been mostly whiskey, rum, or gin. The average (white, adult, male) yearly per capita consumption, in the years 1750-1810, has been roughly estimated at between ten and twelve gallons of “ardent spirits.”
Long before American independence, local authorities and their London masters made sporadic efforts to reduce the scale of drinking, with little success. In theory, regulations abounded: drinking shops could serve only limited quantities to each customer, who could remain there for only an hour or two (both times and quantities varied from place to place). However, the rules were rarely enforced. In Massachusetts, habitual offenders were pilloried, and made to wear hair shirts inscribed with a large D or the word Drunkard.
In Georgia, when drinking assumed such alarming proportions that news of it reached London, an Act of Parliament was passed in 1734 enforcing Prohibition (though beer was exempt), and a ban on exports of rum and brandy to Georgia, regarded by London’s colonial authorities as the most turbulent part of the colony, was put into effect. Effective in 1735, it lasted eight years and was only rescinded in 1743 after reports reached London that Georgian farmers were abandoning their crops to concentrate on moonshining, and that contraband liquor from South Carolina was entering Georgia on a huge scale. This earliest Prohibition experiment revealed, in this Georgian microcosm, almost all of Prohibition’s inherent failings: bootlegging5 and moonshining apart, Georgian juries systematically refused to convict offenders, and some colonial enforcers of the law took bribes to look the other way. Over a century and a half later, history would repeat itself on a much vaster scale.
From the very earliest settler times, a small minority of Temperance activists tried to fight the tide. These were invariably Puritan leaders, such as Increase Mather and his more famous son Cotton, whose concern was less the physical than the religious health of their parishioners, Increase Mather preaching, for instance, in 1673, that “the flood of excessive drinking will drown Christianity.” But even Cotton Mather was unable to fight the tide completely: at a “private fast” in Boston, he noted in his journal, after prayers, “some biskets, and beer, cider and wine were passed round.”
The Methodists were to become the avant-garde of the Temperance
movement, but their use of the word excessive was significant: social drinking was so prevalent that outright Prohibition was unthinkable, except to a few mavericks. So strong were the rules of social behavior that even the most abstemious preachers found it difficult to refuse a drink. Increase Mather himself put it eloquently in his sermons: “Wine is from God but the drunkard is from the devil.”
The most revered American of all, George Washington, was no role model for Temperance activists. A notorious drinker — in his first few months as president, about one fourth of his household expenses were spent on liquor — he may well, if his generals’ testimony is to be believed, have conducted part of the war against the British in an alcoholic haze, for, as General Marvin Kilman, a commander in the Continental Army, was to write, “Much of George Washington’s continuing good cheer and famed fortitude during the long years of the war, caused to some extent by his overly cautious tactics, may have come from the bottle.”
Temperance activists were still harping on the religious note seventy-one years later. Excessive drinking, they were convinced, went hand in hand with spiritual neglect — it “obliterated the fear of the Lord.” In 1744, a Philadelphia grand jury, chaired by Benjamin Franklin, claimed that the greatest danger facing intemperate drinkers was “Godlessness,” and that excessive drinking was responsible for the increasing evils of “swearing, poverty, and the distaste for religion” Thirty-five years later (February 27,1777), a Constitutional Congress in newly independent America pressed, unsuccessfully, for a total ban on the manufacture of whiskey.
But it was Dr. Benjamin Rush, the former surgeon general of the Continental Army during the Revolution and one of the heroes of the war against the British (his signature is on the Declaration of Independence), who introduced the first scientific note in the still largely ineffective, minority campaign against excessive drinking. Rush, who had graduated from the College of New Jersey (later renamed Princeton) at the early age of fifteen, was an intellectual giant as well as the country’s best-known doctor and the founder of America’s first antislavery society. A Quaker, he numbered Benjamin Franklin among his close friends, and in his youth had become a disciple of another Quaker luminary, Anthony Benezet, an eccentric Temperance campaigner who was also a convinced abolitionist.
It was Benezet who aroused Rush’s interest in liquor, and his later “revisionist” views. Based on his own vast medical experience, including his treatment of war casualties, his book An Inquiry into the Effect of Spirituous Liquours on the Human Body and Mind (published in 1785) called into question the widely held belief that alcohol was a healthy stimulant, the “good creature of God.” On the contrary, he wrote, alcohol had no real food value; administered to the sick or wounded, it worsened their condition; and even moderate drinking of “ardent spirits” (by which he meant whiskey and rum, for there was little gin at the time in America) was habit-forming, leading first to memory loss, then to progressive physical and moral degradation. The addict’s descent was described in Hogarthian rhetoric: “In folly it causes him to resemble a calf; in stupidity, an ass; in roaring, a mad bull; in quarreling and fighting, a dog; in cruelty, a tiger; in fetor, a skunk; in filthiness, a hog; and in obscenity, a he-goat.”
Losing all moral sense, his downward path was inevitable: first came burglary, then murder, then madness and despair, and, in the end, the gallows. Rush’s “Inquiry” included a chart, a “moral and physical thermometer of intemperance,” that became a fixture in thousands of homes. Milk and water guaranteed “serenity of mind, reputation, long life and happiness.” Wine, porter, and beer could be absorbed “only in small quantities and at meals.” But the fated downward path was revealed in the following chart, on a scale of 0 to 80:
Intemperance
The symptoms of “this odious disease” included “certain immodest actions” and other “extravagant acts: singing, hallooing, roaring, imitating the noises of brute animals, jumping, tearing off clothes, dancing naked, breaking glasses and china.” The specific diseases caused by liquor were listed as follows:
1. Decay of appetite, sickness at stomach, puking of bile and discharging of frothy and viscous phlegm.
2. Obstruction of the liver.
3. Jaundice and dropping of belly and limbs, and finally every cavity of the body.
4. Hoarseness and a husky cough, leading to consumption.
5. Diabetes, i.e., a frequent and weakening discharge of pale or sweetish urine.
6. Redness and eruptions in different parts of the body, rumbuds, a form of leprosy.
7. A fetid breath.
8. Frequent and disgusting belchings.
9. Epilepsy.
10. Gout.
11. Madness — one third of patients confined owed their condition to ardent spirits. Most of the diseases are of a mortal nature.
Rush’s renown and the apocalyptic imagery of his prose had an enormous effect on ordinary people, and on physicians and clergymen around the country, as well as on congressmen in Washington — though President James Madison continued to drink a pint of whiskey before breakfast. Rush himself was no Prohibitionist: on the contrary, the core of his argument was that consumers should be made to switch from hard liquor to wine and beer. To wean addicts, he even suggested mixing wine with opium to calm them down until they were cured — for opium then was no controlled substance but an innocuous, effective drug, almost as widespread as aspirin today.
Rush saw hard liquor as a “temporary aberration.” The moderate consumption of wine and beer, ensuring health and lasting happiness, would ensure a radiant future for generations to come. Some cynics, such as Boston’s Fisher Ames, who had defeated Samuel Adams for Congress in 1788, were more cynical, and realistic: “If any man supposes that a mere law can turn the taste of a people from ardent spirits to malt liquors, he has a most romantic notion of legislative power.” This was a warning later Prohibition advocates would dismiss or ignore.
There was one issue that united both laissez-faire advocates and hands-on Temperance interventionists: all those in authority, in Indian territories and reservations, banned the sale of liquor to the “native American” survivors, or at least issued orders that liquor was not to be used as a medium of exchange. Earlier traders bartered cheap rum for valuable otter furs, and witnessed the consequences: Indian tribes became so addicted that their interest in trapping animals waned.