by Behr, Edward
But such orders were systematically ignored. Liquor was introduced in the Northwest by John Jacob Astor’s Pacific Fur Company in 180% at first with disappointing results — to the traders. A company employee, Gabriel Franchere, noted that the “mild and inoffensive” Pacific Northwest Indians did not know how to make liquor, and despised those who drank. “These savages,” he wrote, “are not addicted to intemperance, regard liquor as poison and consider drunkenness disgraceful.”6 Strong drink, noted another Northwest company trader, Ross Cox, was anathema to them: “All the Indians on the Columbia River entertain a strong aversion to ardent spirits.” Liquor, they believed, was only fit for slaves.
Sir George Simpson, head of the Hudson’s Bay Company in London, and a highly moral man, was aware of this and issued instructions that on no account should liquor be used as barter. But by 1824, the battle had been lost: rival traders, including Russians from across the Siberian border, had no such qualms, and although the Indian chiefs at first sent them packing, younger members of the Pacific Northwest tribes eventually challenged the elders’ authority. The traders were cunning, devious — and patient. Some provided the Indian hunters with slaves, bought from other tribes, to sweeten their deals. The Hudson’s Bay Company directives were still observed, at least in principle: strong drink was not used as a medium of exchange. It was, however, used to celebrate a deal. First the traders and the Indians drank together, to seal their contract. Then liquor became a bonus package, along with money, that accompanied every transaction. Soon afterward, this fiction went by the board, and liquor replaced money. Ten otter pelts could be had for a bottle of whiskey. Russian traders used vodka.
The result was a holocaust: liquor addiction went hand in hand with mortal disease. The Columbia River Indians died en masse, and some, such as the Chinooks, were virtually wiped out. The tragedy was recorded in extraordinarily lyrical poems, passed down from generation to generation by survivors. Here is the piteous cry of an Indian chief as he simultaneously chronicles his decay and finds solace in the whiskey that enables him to forget his plight:
I am afraid to drink but still I like to drink.
I don’t like to drink, but I have to drink whiskey.
Here I am singing a love song, drinking.
I didn’t know that whiskey was no good.
And still I am drinking it.
I found out that whiskey is no good.
Come, come closer to me, my slaves,
And I’ll give you a drink of whiskey.
Here we are drinking now.
Have some more, have some more of my whiskey.
Have a good time with it.
Come closer to me, come closer to me, my slaves,
We are drinking now, we feel pretty good.
Now you feel just like me.7
Once the drinking habit started, Edwin Lemert,8 a native-American specialist, noted the Indians drank until they dropped. Massacres, blood feuds, and killings all became endemic after 1820. And though the Hudson’s Bay Company reiterated its instructions in 1831, unregulated competition proved too strong: the whiskey-for-skins barter continued, with fearful consequences.
Most Temperance activists, of course, were unaware of the Indians’ tragic predicament. But whether as a result of Dr. Rush’s writings, or because of the growing spectacle of “immoderate” drinking among increasing numbers of manual workers, Temperance societies mushroomed throughout America at the turn of the century. Active at first on the East Coast, and stimulated by campaigns conducted by puritan theologians such as the Reverend Lyman Beecher and his more famous daughter, Harriet Beecher Stowe, they formed, split, and amalgamated, but invariably thrived. The Philanthropist, the first Temperance newspaper, began publication in Boston in 1826. By 1829, there were a thousand Temperance societies throughout America, and The Philanthropist chronicled their spectacular successes: liquor dealers pledging to stop selling hard liquor and drunkards pledging no longer to drink the stuff. In 1831, Lewis Cass, a prominent Temperance advocate appointed secretary of War, put an end to the army’s liquor ration, also banning the sale of “ardent spirits” in all military installations. By 1836, a web of Temperance societies — some affiliated, others single-mindedly autonomous — blanketed inhabited America. No preacher — whether Methodist, Presbyterian, or Catholic — could ignore them, and many clergymen became totally committed to these movements, providing venues, and in some cases actively using the pulpit to raise funds. They were not yet politically important, at least not in the sense that “wet” or “dry” advocacy might determine election outcomes. But they were becoming bolder, more extreme — and more intolerant. By 1836, Rush’s vision of a healthy community enjoying moderate quantities of beer and wine was largely forgotten: the new Temperance leaders were on the warpath against wine, beer, and cider drinkers as well. For the first time, from the 1830s on — in pulpits, pamphlets, and medical journals — total Prohibition was being openly advocated.
FERVOR AND FANATICISM
A new generation of puritanical Temperance advocates, from the early nineteenth century on, discovered — and richly mined — a new theme, both simple and compelling, designed to put an end to yet another avenue of pleasure: drinking, they decided, was a mortal sin. A leading Boston preacher, the Reverend Justin Edwards, was among the first to spread this doctrine. Others quickly took it up. The evils of drink were no longer to be found, exclusively, in physical and mental deterioration: what was at stake, from the 1830s onward, was the human soul itself.
The puritan ethic has always required a “sign,” an incontrovertible, visible proof of salvation, among its elect. In earlier days, material prosperity — as Tawney showed in Religion and the Rise of Capitalism — had been proof enough. But in the 1830s, it became fashionable to invoke another “sign,” another kind of proof: preachers all over America began equating drunkenness with damnation, abstinence with salvation. And salvation, according to an editorial in the Temperance Recorder, one of a spate of new prohibitionist journals, would bring about “unprecedented peace, happiness, prosperity.” Lyman Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s father, repeatedly relayed the terrifying message: “Drunkards, no more than murderers, shall inherit the Kingdom of God.”1 The message became increasingly vituperative, increasingly extreme. Here, for instance, is the Reverend Mark Matthews, moderator of Seattle’s First Presbyterian Church: “The saloon is the most fiendish, corrupt, hell-soaked institution that ever crawled out of the slime of the eternal pit. ... It takes your sweet innocent daughter, robs her of her virtue, and transforms her into a brazen, wanton harlot. ... It is the open sore of this land.” It was a tone that would retain its power right up to the imposition of Prohibition in 1920.
With the new religious fervor, even Rush acknowledged that his scientific evidence had taken second place. Given that the huge majority of Americans still indulged in liquor with evident enjoyment, and little care for their health, “I am disposed to believe,” he wrote, “that the business must be affected finally by religion alone.”
Not that medical evidence was neglected. As so often happens, Rush’s learned treatise spawned a rash of pseudoscientific, alarmist nonsense. A Dr. Thomas Sewell of Columbian College, Washington, alleged that liquor was responsible for most human afflictions: “Dyspepsia, jaundice, emaciation, corpulence, rheumatism, gout, palpitation, lethargy, palsy, apoplexy, melancholy, madness, delirium tremens, premature old age. ...”
These were but a “small part of the endless catalogue of diseases produced by alcohol drinking.” Physicians also began propagating as scientific fact a myth that became accepted, for decades, as verifiable truth: that excessive drinking could lead to the body’s spontaneous combustion. Case after case, recorded not only in American but in French and British nineteenth-century medical journals, involved individuals bursting into flames from close contact with a candle, suddenly and inexplicably exploding, or even “... quietly simmering, while smoke poured from the apertures of the body. . . . Vivid accounts of
the terrible sufferings of drunkards whose insides had been transformed into roaring furnaces were published in most of the leading temperance papers. . . . and temperance lecturers were quick to point out that such an unusual experience was but a mild foretaste of what awaited the drunkard in hell.”2 Dr. Eliphalet Nott, President of Union College,
Schenectady, New York, was an expert on this form of “spontaneous combustion,” and firmly believed that
. . . these causes of death of drunkards by internal fires, kindled often spontaneously in the fumes of alcohol, that escape through the pores of the skin, have become so numerous and so incontrovertible that I presume no person of information will now be found to call the reality of their existence into question.
No one delivered these grim messages more eloquently than the Reverend Justin Edwards, a prolific writer and speaker, whose fulminating, alliterative style made him the most sought-after preacher of his day, and the Prohibitionists’ chief attraction. His “Temperance Manual,” originally devised as a sermon, widely distributed throughout America,3 began with the grim premise that any human activity that did not directly involve religious worship was a misappropriation of the brief time on earth allotted to human beings, for “Ever since man turned away from God as a source of enjoyment, and from his service as a means of obtaining it, he has been prone to seek it in some improper bodily or mental gratification.”
It was necessary, first of all, to demolish the theory that liquor was “the good stuff of life.” Edwards ridiculed Holinshed’s sixteenth-century chronicles, which claimed that
It sloweth age; it strengthened! youth; it helpeth digestion; it cutteth flegm; it abandoneth melancholia; it relisheth the heart; it highlighteth the mind; it quickeneth the spirits; it cureth the hydropsie; it expelleth the gravel; it puffeth away ventosity; it keepeth and preserveth the head from whirling, the eyes from dazzling, the tongue from lisping, the teeth from chattering, the hands from shivering, the sinews from shrinking, the veins from crumbling, the bones from aching, the marrow from soaking. . . .
But the core of Edwards’s argument was that liquor never had been, and never could be, part of the kingdom of God, for “The ingredient [vinous fermentation] is not the product of creation, nor the result of any living process in nature. It does not exist among the living works of God.” On the contrary,
... it is as really different from what existed before in the fruits and the grains as the poisonous miasma is different from the decomposition and decay of the vegetables from which it springs. It is as different as poison is from food, sickness from health, drunkenness from sobriety. . . they are as really different in their natures as life is from death.
He was on tricky ground here. How could God, creator of all things, not be held responsible for this “poisonous miasma”? After all, as even his most devoted parishioners must have observed, fruit and vegetables rotted with age, in a natural fermentation process.
In his zeal to deny liquor any organic authenticity whatever, his metaphors became increasingly mixed, his arguments more extreme:
To conclude that because one is good as an article of diet, and therefore the other must be good, is as really unphilosophical and false as it would be to conclude that because potatoes are good as an article of food, that therefore the soil out of which they grow is good for the same purpose.
Without a single redeeming quality, liquor
. . . has been among the more constant and fruitful sources of all our woes. Yet such has been its power to deceive men that while evil after evil has rolled in upon them, like waves of the sea, they have continued till within a few years knowingly and voluntarily to increase the cause. . . . Ministers preached against drunkenness and drank the drunkard’s poison.
Conventional wisdom, in short, was that “to take a little now and then does a man good.” But, Edwards continued, between 1820 and 1826 “it was realized that if drunkenness was to be done away with, men must abstain not only from abuse but from the use of what intoxicates — that is one of the first principles of moral duty.” The result would be immediately forthcoming: “They will enjoy better health; they can perform more labor;4 they will live longer.”
Alcohol was a drug that altered perceptions. Sometimes, he admitted, “men take alcohol to drown present sorrow.” Thus,
A man lost his wife, the mother of his children, and he was in great distress. He took alcohol, and under its influence grew cheerful, and seemed full of mirth. He seized the dead body of his wife, and with high glee dragged her across the room by the hair of her head, and threw her into the coffin.
Likewise, “auctioneers, merchants and others have often furnished it to their customers, gratis, to make them feel more rich, and thus induce them to purchase more goods and at higher prices, and thus cheat them. “ It was, of course, the Reverend Justin Edwards’s intention to strike the fear of God into his listeners, and his diatribe ends with a horrific description of the impact of alcohol on the human body.
Why does alcohol cause death? Were the human body transparent, every man might answer this question. Alcohol inflames the sinews of the stomach. The surface becomes inflamed and begins to grow black. The coats become thickened. Ulcers begin to form and spread out till . . . the whole inner coat of that fundamental organ puts on an appearance of mortification, and becomes in color like the back of the chimney. Not infrequently cancers are formed and the whole surface becomes one common sore. The man cannot digest his food. The system is not nourished. Other organs become diseased, till the body itself is literally little else than a mass of putrefaction.
The “spontaneous combustion” theory was a fact.
Take the blood of a drunkard, from his head, or his liver, and distil it. You have alcohol. It has actually been taken from the brain, strong enough, on application of fire, to burn. Dr. Kirk of Scotland dissected a man who died in a fit of intoxication. From the lateral ventricles of his brain he took a fluid distinctly sensible to the smell as whiskey. When he applied a candle to it, it instantly took fire and burnt blue.
However absurd, such tales were of considerable symbolic importance to a devout Christian audience. The point was made that the drunkard was not only destroyed by fire in his own lifetime: his hideous fate reminded them of the eternal hell-fire that awaited him in the thereafter.
This, and other apocalyptic vignettes designed to strike fear in the hearts of all its readers, was the theme of an 1850s best-seller. Timothy Shay Arthur’s Ten Nights in a Bar Room and What I Saw There — an immensely popular, mawkish tearjerker — described the appalling fate, the “road to hell,” of all those who succumbed to the temptation of ardent spirits. Interestingly, though such potboilers were dutifully written by profit-seeking hacks, no truly great American literature used the ravages of alcohol as a pretext to examine current social issues on a broader canvas.
But there was no nineteenth-century American writer comparable to Emile Zola (Jack London is his nearest equivalent, at any rate in terms of subject matter), whose favorite theme was the destruction of human lives through alcohol — the only drug that enabled the dispossessed to endure the monstrously cruel social system exploiting them. In America, alcohol was a religious rather than political or social problem. The Puritans’ view of habitual drunkards was singularly uncharitable: they were perceived as weak, self-indulgent, profoundly flawed individuals, not, as in Zola, as victims of an unjust society, alcohol merely accelerating their doom.
In early nineteenth-century American literature there is almost no hint that excessive drinking may have been the only solace of desperate men and women for whom there was no other release — that for underprivileged males (women were not admitted) the saloon was at once refuge, club, library, employment agency, and sole source of local news. Jack London is an exception, but his descriptions of America’s saloon culture show a mixed attitude. Although he was fascinated by the working-class companionship and sense of belonging that only the saloon could provide, he nevertheless regarded liq
uor as an intrinsic evil, never bothering to ask why working-class people became drunkards in the first place.
The thrust of the new, hard-line Temperance preachers was very different, and the impact of men such as the Reverend Justin Edwards was enormous because the message they imparted was far more ominous: they were convinced that the liquor industry was nothing less than a vast, godless conspiracy intended to undermine society. Their message struck an immediate chord, for any conspiracy theory — whether it has to do with witchcraft, communism, satanic child abuse, or even more recently the United Nations — has always found a ready, credulous American audience.
As the Reverend Justin Edwards constantly reminded his listeners, Judge Jaggett says: “Over every grog shop ought to be written in great capitals: THE ROAD TO HELL, LEADING DOWN TO THE CHAMBERS OF DEATH. You sell to the healthy, and you poison them. So by the time the father is dead, the son is ready to take his place.” So with men who sell poisonous drink. If they sold it to none but drunkards, they would soon kill them and the evil would cease. But the difference is: they sell to sober men. No sooner have they killed one generation than they have prepared another to be killed in the same way. That is abominable, and ought to receive universal execration.
He conceded that not all those involved were necessarily conscious conspirators. Some (relatively innocent) saloon keepers might plead: “But in that case I must change my business?” To which he replied, with the earnestness of the truly saved: “So must the thief, the highway robber, the murderer.”