by Wright, Ben;
A – addled, afflicted, in his airs
B – biggy, boozy, buskey, buzzey, been at Baradoes, drunk as a wheel-barrow, he’s kissed black Betty
C – cherubimical, cracked, juicy, halfway to Concord. He’s been too free with the creature. Sir Richard has taken off his considering cap
E – he’s eat a toad and a half for breakfast, cock ey’d
F – fishey, fox’d, fuddled, sore footed, been to France
G – groatable, gold-headed, as dizzy as a goose, been with Sir John Goa, got the glanders
J – jagg’d, jambled, going to Jerusalem, been to Jericho, juicy
R – rocky, raddled, rich, lost his rudder, ragged
S – steady, stiff, stew’d, stubb’d, soak’d, soft
V – he makes Virginia fence, got the Indian vapours10
In the US, a million college T-shirts carry a quote attributed to Benjamin Franklin about beer. In fact Franklin chose wine, not beer, as ‘a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy’.11 The quote is from a letter Franklin wrote to his friend Andre Morellet in 1779. It’s a hymn to the pleasures of wine and an argument that God wanted us to drink because he gave us elbows:
You see in animals, who are intended to drink the waters that flow upon the earth, that if they have long legs, they also have a long neck, so that they can get at their drink without kneeling down. But man, who was destined to drink wine, must be able to raise the glass to his mouth. If the elbow had been placed nearer the hand, the part in advance would have been too short to bring the glass up to the mouth; and if it had been placed nearer the shoulder, that part would have been so long that it would have carried the wine far beyond the mouth. But by the actual situation, we are enabled to drink at our ease, the glass going exactly to the mouth. Let us, then, with glass in hand, adore this benevolent wisdom – let us adore and drink!12
Benjamin Franklin appreciated and celebrated the pleasures of drink. Not so his fellow Founding Father Benjamin Rush, a physician and pioneering advocate of temperate behaviour. He was one of the first Americans to question whether booze was in fact good health in a glass. From his experience treating patients and a stint as the Continental Army’s surgeon general, Rush came to the view that drink, specifically distilled spirits, had several downsides. These included vomiting, liver disease, hand tremors, stomach sickness, dropsy, madness, palsy, apoplexy and epilepsy.13 He published his findings in a pamphlet, ‘An Inquiry into the Effects of Spirituous Liquors’, which in 1784 came as quite a shock to binge-drinking Americans. Deploying medical evidence, Rush began to cut through where the preachers and puritans had failed. Americans would continue to drink heavily into the nineteenth century, with whisky replacing rum as the popular tipple of choice, but the work of Benjamin Rush would be a weapon for the temperance movement more than a century later.
By the mid-nineteenth century societies such as the Sons of Temperance had sprung up to help Americans dry out. In 1851, while posted to Sackets Harbor on Lake Ontario, a young army lieutenant called Ulysses S. Grant turned to the group for support. Grant the President is barely remembered. Grant the soldier and Union Army commander is revered. But it’s his drinking that has gripped and split historians of the Civil War for decades. In his biography of Grant, William McFeely writes: ‘The idea that he drank prodigiously is as fixed in American history as the idea that the Pilgrims ate turkey on Thanksgiving, but the evidence for it is far more elusive.’14 That hasn’t stopped Grant becoming one of the most famous drunks in American political history. Throughout his military career, even while leading the fight against the Confederate forces, Grant was dogged by rumours of excessive drinking and intemperance.
The West Point graduate and Mexican war veteran started to drink heavily when he was dispatched to California and the Pacific Northwest in the early 1850s. Desperately missing his family, Grant turned to alcohol to relieve the loneliness. Most biographers agree that Grant preferred occasional binges to everyday drinking. He could go for weeks without touching a drop. And nor was Grant unusual in America’s hard-drinking army. But in 1854 Captain Grant was discovered to be drunk on parade and resigned his commission.
Grant’s thirties were spent failing at various jobs and when war broke out he was working as a clerk in his father’s store in Illinois. He decided to re-enlist, and his meteoric rise up the ranks over the next four years was even more remarkable considering the sniping he battled from rivals about his drinking. After he led the Union Army to a brutal, blood-soaked victory at Shiloh in 1862, the press devoured planted stories about Grant’s supposed intoxication. When he fell from his horse near New Orleans in September 1863, drunkenness was blamed. One of the most notorious examples of Grant’s inebriation occurred during a trip up the Yazoo River on the steamer Diligent in June 1863 to flush out Confederate forces. A Chicago Times reporter on board, Sylvanus Cadwallader, witnessed Grant indulge in a two-day bender. But instead of filing a sensational story that could have terminated Grant’s command, Cadwallader buried it. The manuscript of his account was finally published in 1955, triggering decades of argument between historians about its veracity.
Throughout the war, Grant’s chief of staff John A. Rawlins had the job of steering the general away from the bottle. Grant’s rivals tried to undermine his standing in Washington by focusing on his drinking. But the star of the Union Army was defended at the top. In part that was because he seems to have drunk only during quiet periods of the campaign. In the view of the historian Geoffrey Perret, ‘[Grant’s] drinking was not allowed to jeopardise operations. It was a release, but a controlled one, like the ignition of a gas flare about a high-pressure oil well.’15
And, most importantly, President Lincoln believed Ulysses S. Grant was the only man in America who had the guts, talent and drive to deliver victory and repair the Union. There is a quote attributed to Lincoln in response to complaints by Congressmen about Grant’s drinking habits: ‘I then began to ask them if they knew what brand of whisky he used,’ confided the president to John Eaton. ‘They conferred with each other and concluded they could not tell … I urged them to ascertain and let me know, for if it made fighting generals like Grant, I should like to get some of it for distribution.’16 In other words, drench the troops in whatever Ulysses S. Grant was drinking.
The misery of war strained the nerves of those fighting it. When the Civil War general William Sherman suffered a nervous breakdown, he and Grant became brothers in battle. ‘Grant stood by me when I was crazy, and I stood by him when he was drunk; and now we stand by each other always.’17
Prohibition
With typical brio, Churchill described America’s thirteen-year booze ban as an ‘affront to the whole history of mankind’. The culmination of decades of pressure from temperance societies, dry religious denominations and anti-saloon activists, prohibition was meant to cut crime and corruption while improving America’s moral and physical health. The movement had particular momentum in southern and western rural states, where it had clearly become a vote-winning cause.
By the First World War many states were partially or completely dry and the pressure to act was building in Washington. Despite President Wilson’s attempt to veto the prohibitionist Volstead Act, Congress passed it into law. It then needed to be ratified by thirty-six states, and in January 1919 Nebraska became the last to do so. The Eighteenth Amendment was grafted onto the Constitution and precisely a year later America’s liquor stores were closed, its saloons padlocked, wine cellars sealed off and distilleries mothballed. The manufacture, sale, advertising, transport and import of alcohol was banned. Existing private stocks of liquor could be drunk at home, but otherwise the shutters were pulled down.
But what was meant to herald a new era of American sobriety instead spawned a decade of bootleggers, rum-runners, speakeasies, smugglers and gangsters. The story of prohibition’s spectacular failure has been told many times before. But it’s the two-faced behaviour of the politicians who banned the booze t
hat is the focus here.
The beginning of prohibition coincided with the start of Warren Harding’s presidency, by most measures reckoned to be one of the worst in American history. Corrupt and incompetent, Harding did like a drink and had no intention of obeying the spirit of prohibition. In the words of one contemporary, the President had a sociable nature, one ‘not at all averse to putting a foot on the brass rail’. But since the public bars had been shut, Harding was forced to drink at home. He arranged to have $1,800 worth of liquor transferred from his private home to the White House, which became a salon for members of his administration. A friend of Harding’s wife, Alice Longworth, recalled the White House air, ‘heavy with tobacco smoke, trays with bottles containing every imaginable brand of whisky … cards and poker chips ready at hand – a general atmosphere of the waistcoat unbuttoned, feet on the desk, and the spittoon alongside’.18 According to Daniel Okrent, Harding’s Washington was ‘awash in alcohol from the moment of his inauguration’.19
The Attorney General, Harry Daugherty, arranged for Justice Department employees to deliver stocks of seized liquor to his private drinking den. Up on Capitol Hill, many Congressmen and Senators who trumpeted the benefits of prohibition in public were determined to get their hands on a drink, a habit known as a drinking wet but voting dry. H.L. Mencken called the prohibition era the ‘Thirteen Awful Years’ and lampooned the deceptive hypocrisy of politicians: ‘Today the voter chooses his rulers as he buys bootleg whisky, never knowing precisely what he is getting, only certain that it is not what it pretends to be. The Scotch may turn out to be wood alcohol or may turn out to be gasoline; in either case it is not Scotch.’20
Herbert Hoover, Warren Harding’s successor in the White House, did try to beef up the enforcement of prohibition, but throughout the 1920s Washington was so wet it squelched. A pervasive liquor trade had become essential to the lives of politicians and the press revelled in exposing the deceit. In 1929 there was a deluge of stories. On 19 November, police raided a speakeasy across the road from the White House and found an admittance list that included members of the Cabinet and a Congressman.
Some politicians tried to source their own supplies, rarely with success. There was Congressman William M. Morgan of Ohio, who represented a bone-dry district. He was caught by customs officers returning into the port of New York with two bottles of whisky and two bottles of champagne in his bags. Representative Edward E. Denison from Illinois, a supporter of the tough new prohibition penalties introduced by the Jones Law, was caught smuggling eighteen bottles of Scotch and six of gin from Panama into his office in the Capitol building. Others were caught with leaking luggage at ports and railway stations.
More sensible members of Congress relied on the services of Capitol Hill’s own bootlegger. In October 1930, the Washington Post ran a series of front-page articles written by George Cassiday, who smuggled drink into Congress for a decade. Cassiday began the series with a confession: ‘For nearly ten years I have been supplying liquor at the order of United States senators and representatives at their offices at Washington. On Capitol Hill I am known as “The Man in the Green Hat.”’21 Cassiday was given a key and a storeroom in the House Office Building which served as his off-licence and he claimed that four out of five Congressmen guzzled alcohol at their homes or in their offices during prohibition. After he smuggled the goods in at night, Congressmen carried the bottles out during the day, exempt from the security bag check at the door. In 1925 Cassiday was arrested carrying a briefcase of booze into the House Office Building. After lying low for a while, he transferred his business to the Senate side of the Hill.
In November 1928 the Washington Post ran another exposé of DC’s political drinking. The article began: ‘Here is the nation’s capital – where they made the law. Here in little back rooms, men gather and violate the law.’22 But politicians weren’t the only Washingtonians ignoring prohibition. Drinking thrived in the jazz clubs of U Street and in the speakeasies of Dupont Circle, while hundreds of bootleggers made discreet home deliveries.
It was the same in cities across America. People who had never drunk before embraced the thrill of beating the ban. Criminality and corruption flourished. Because the home-made hooch being illegally brewed often tasted awful, fruit-flavoured cocktails became popular. It was therefore fitting that the policy debacle of prohibition was finally repealed by the martini-sipping Franklin Roosevelt. Writing shortly before the capital’s bars were reopened and glasses could again be clinked without the threat of a raid and arrest, the Washington Post columnist George Rothwell Brown mourned the culture that had gone. Without drink, he wrote, politics was poorer:
Something has gone out of life with the passing of famous old Washington institutions as Mullany’s, the historic bar of the original Willard’s, Shoomaker’s, Hancock’s and the old Whitney House, of an earlier day. Here were absolutely open forums for the discussion of the principal problems of the day by men who spoke freely under the inspiration of more or less strong drink; which had a tendency to promote eloquence and bust asunder the shackles of convention, conservatism and caution. The poet has said truth lies at the bottom of a well, but in reality it lies at the bottom of a wine bottle.23
The Presidents
Mitt Romney’s 2012 bid for the presidency was floundering even before he divulged his distaste for booze. ‘I tasted a beer and tried a cigarette once as a wayward teenager,’ Romney told People magazine in November 2011, ‘and never tried it again.’ The square-jawed, multi-millionaire Republican was already struggling to connect with American voters unfamiliar with the mysteries of venture capitalism. His admission that he had briefly gone awry and sipped a can of beer as a ‘wayward’ youth did little to bridge the cultural chasm between Romney and the suds-loving blue-collar voters of Pennsylvania and Ohio. This was not a guy they could imagine bonding with over a beer.
A devout Mormon, Mitt Romney eschewed drink and drugs for religious reasons. But could Americans really trust a President who had never been drunk? And how would he handle the world’s most stressful job without the help of an early evening sundowner?
President Obama is no toper but is happy to be snapped with a beer in his hand on the campaign trail or at home. In July 2009, he hosted what was imaginatively dubbed a ‘beer summit’ on the Rose Garden patio. The arrest of a black Harvard professor by a Massachusetts police sergeant had triggered a huge row about racial profiling in the United States. In an effort to calm down the furore, Obama got the two men together for a drink in front of the cameras. The President supped a glass mug of Bud Light while the US press went into a frenzy over the pictures. This was beer to symbolise – and perhaps facilitate – bridge-building and reconciliation. A signal to Americans that the President deliberated over a drink too.
Obama told reporters: ‘This is three folks having a drink at the end of the day, and hopefully giving people an opportunity to listen to each other. And that’s really all it is.’ It was in fact a carefully contrived photo opportunity that probably did little to harmonise race relations, but did send a signal to Americans that Obama was still a bit like them. A signal President Romney would have been unable to send.
American voters may also have remembered the gloomily sober administrations of two previous non-drinking Presidents. Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush had little in common apart from unpopularity, evangelicalism and teetotalism. In 1976 Carter successfully campaigned against the tax deductibility of the three-martini lunch, a move that helped kill off the boozy lunch in corporate America. After the election a defeated Gerald Ford said the three-martini lunch was the epitome of American efficiency: ‘Where else can you get an earful, a bellyful and a snootful at the same time?’
Life in the Carter White House was drearily dry and a chore for its more sociable visitors. Senator Ted Kennedy remembered arid evenings of earnest discussion: ‘You’d arrive about 6:00 or 6:30 p.m., and the first thing you would be reminded of, in case you needed reminding, was that he and Rosalyn
n had removed all the liquor in the White House. No liquor was ever served during Jimmy Carter’s term. He wanted no luxuries nor any sign of worldly living.’24
George W. Bush went dry after discovering God at the bottom of a glass. His years of partying, heavy drinking and frat house frolics ended abruptly on 28 July 1986, when he woke up with a hangover and decided it would be his last. The previous night had been spent at the Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs, where he and a group of Texas friends celebrated their collective fortieth birthdays. Bush had long liked to drink what he called the four Bs: beer, bourbon and B&B (brandy and Benedictine). He claimed never to have been an alcoholic but he did drink heavily, getting arrested for drink driving in 1976 near the Bush retreat at Kennebunkport, Maine. Another session ended with Bush drunkenly smashing his car into some neighbours’ bins and then challenging his father to go mano a mano outside the family’s home in Washington. The senior Bush – patrician, serious, successful – was not amused.
Was the drinking an escape from the pressure of having to live up to his name? Certainly by the age of forty Bush junior had failed at business and made no impact in politics. It seems a conversation with the Reverend Billy Graham in Kennebunkport the year before his birthday persuaded him it might be time to swap grog for God and get his life in shape. In 1986 George W. went cold turkey and hasn’t touched alcohol since. Instead, he swapped a compulsion to drink for an obsession with fitness and propelled himself into politics. After seeing how that turned out, American voters may have been wary of giving the White House to another non-drinker. Mitt Romney’s Mormonism wasn’t a problem for voters, but perhaps his teetotalism was.