Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition

by Daniel Okrent

  Another way: listen to thirty-three-year-old Abraham Lincoln summarizing domestic life in Sangamon County, Illinois. “We found intoxicating liquor used by everybody, repudiated by nobody,” he told a temperance meeting in 1842. “It commonly entered into the first draught of an infant, and the last thought of the dying man.” It was, he said, “the devastator.”

  “TEMPERANCE”: WHEN LINCOLN SPOKE, the word’s meaning was very different from what it would soon become. For decades it had meant moderation, both in quantity and in variety. The first prominent American temperance advocate, the Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush, encouraged the whiskey-riddled to consider a transitional beverage: wine mixed with opium or laudanum. This was the same Rush—respected scientist, signer of the Declaration of Independence, friend to Jefferson and Adams—who insisted he knew of a drunk who had made the mistake of belching near an open flame and was “suddenly destroyed.”

  By 1830 those seven gallons of pure alcohol per capita had confirmed the earlier fears of Harvard literature professor George Ticknor, who in 1821 had told Thomas Jefferson that if the consumption of liquor continued at its current rate, “we should be hardly better than a nation of sots.” Moderation itself was called into question. Just before he took up the cause of abolitionism, William Lloyd Garrison—whose alcoholic father had abandoned his family when William was thirteen—published a journal that bore the slogan “Moderate Drinking Is the Downhill Road to Intemperance and Drunkenness.” General Lewis Cass, appointed secretary of war by Andrew Jackson, eliminated the soldiers’ entire whiskey ration and forbade the consumption of alcoholic beverages at all army forts and bases. Cass was able to do this only because of the improvement in water quality, for among the reasons the whiskey ration had persisted was the foul water supply at many military installations.

  At roughly the same time, the nation’s first large-scale expression of antialcohol sentiment had begun to take shape. The Washingtonian Movement, as it became known, arose out of a Baltimore barroom in 1840, when six habitual drinkers pledged their commitment to total abstinence. In some ways they couldn’t have been more dissimilar from the prohibitionists who would follow them. They advocated no changes in the law; they refused to pin blame for their circumstances on tavern operators or distillers; they asked habitual drinkers only to sign a pledge of abstinence. In the same speech in which he condemned the ubiquity of alcoholic beverages, Abraham Lincoln (who thought mandatory prohibition a very bad idea) praised the Washingtonian reliance on “persuasion, kind, unassuming persuasion. . . . Those whom they desire to convince and persuade are their old friends and companions. They know they are not demons.”

  The movement’s tactics may not have included any elements of compulsion, but the Washingtonian methodology was not entirely as unassuming as Lincoln might have believed. In the grand American tradition, Washingtonian evangelists poured out a lot of sulfurous rhetoric to lure something between three hundred thousand and six hundred thousand men out of the dungeon of inebriety. “Snap your burning chains, ye denizens of the pit,” John Bartholomew Gough urged his listeners, “and come up sheeted in the fire, dripping with the flames of hell, and with your trumpet tongues testify against the damnation of drink!” Certainly the most successful of Washingtonian platform speakers, Gough was a reformed drinker (and, conveniently, a reformed stage actor as well) who in 1843 alone addressed 383 different audiences and the next year achieved national prominence when he drew twenty thousand potential converts to a single event on Boston Common to bear witness to his zeal.

  The year after that, Gough took part in another grand American tradition when he backslid so spectacularly it became a minor national scandal. He was found in a brothel near Broadway and Canal streets in lower Manhattan, in relative repose following a six-day bender. Gough later claimed he had been drugged, that the drugging had led him to a round of drinking, and that at one point “I saw a woman dressed in black [and] I either accosted her, or she accosted me.” By all accounts he remained totally abstinent thereafter, and by the time he stopped lecturing thirty-four years later Gough had delivered more than ten thousand speeches to audiences estimated at more than nine million people. Among his listeners was a San Francisco surveyor who named one of the city’s main thoroughfares in his honor—out of either a sense of gratitude or, possibly, irony.

  RECALLING THE NASCENT temperance movement in the 1840s, one of its most devoted adherents would salute the work of the Washingtonians. They had changed many lives, he said, through “their mission of peace and love.” But, he added, “we also saw that large numbers who were saved by these means, fell back again to a lower position than ever, because the tempter was permitted to live and throw out his seductive toils. Our watchword now was, Prohibition!”

  The exclamation point was entirely characteristic of Phineas Taylor Barnum; the taut, one-word epithet that preceded it, bearing its declaratory capital P, represented something new. Prohibition—the legislated imposition of teetotalism on the unwilling—was an idea that had been lurking beneath the earnest pieties of the temperance movement and was transformed in the late 1840s into a rallying cry. Barnum may have been the nation’s best-known convert to the cause, a relentless proselytizer who used his protean promotional skills to persuade men to take the same pledge he had. At his American Museum in New York City, Barnum drew in crowds eager to gawk at his collection of “gipsies, albinoes, fat boys, giants, dwarfs [and] caricatures of phrenology,” but that was only the beginning of the show: he also did all he could to direct them to the museum’s theater, for presentations of “moral plays in a moral manner.” One of these, The Drunkard; or, The Fallen Saved, was an overripe melodrama that drew as many as three thousand people to a single performance.* The lead character’s extravagant case of the DTs in the fourth act was an especially popular scene.

  Barnum was among hundreds of thousands of Americans who turned toward prohibitionism because, he wrote, “Neal Dow (may God bless him!) had opened our eyes.” A prosperous businessman from Portland, Maine, Dow had first made his mark on the public life of his hometown in 1827 when, at the age of twenty-four, he somehow persuaded the volunteer fire department to ban alcohol at its musters. Perhaps the firemen had become chagrined at their “most disgraceful exhibitions of drunkenness” at these “burlesque occasions” (even as they enjoyed them enormously). Just as likely, they were moved (or intimidated, or flabbergasted) by the cauterizing fire of Neal Dow’s passion.

  Dow came by his reformist ardor naturally and lived by it wholly. His father was a prominent abolitionist; his great-grandfather on his mother’s side was a man “of great physical and mental vigor” memorably (and prophetically) named Hate-Evil Hall. In his thirties, by now head of his family’s successful tannery, Dow led a group of Portland employers who chose to deny their workers their daily “eleveners”—grog time. Elected mayor in 1851, he immediately persuaded the Maine legislature to enact the nation’s first statewide prohibitory law, mandating fines for those convicted of selling liquor and imprisonment for those engaged in its manufacture.

  The Maine Law, as it came to be known, enabled the antiliquor forces who had been stirred by the Washingtonians to use this template to pass similar laws in a dozen other states. Just as his cause became a national movement, so Dow became a national celebrity, admired not just by Barnum but by many other prominent men. Some embraced him with almost unseemly fervor. The education reformer Horace Mann called Dow “the moral Columbus” and apparently did not blush when he equated the significance of the Maine Law with “the invention of printing.” This was no longer a movement; it had become a fever.

  Which meant, of course, that it could not last. Republican politicians, fearing that prohibitionism was divisive and might weaken the unity that had formed in the young party around the slavery issue, began to tiptoe around it. In Portland, unrest broke out in 1855 among Irish immigrants who despised Dow and his law; after an angry crowd of three thousand had gathered on the night of June 2, one
man was killed and seven wounded by militiamen who had been ordered to quell the riot. By the end of the decade states that had enacted versions of the Maine Law had repealed them—Maine included.

  THE OPPOSITION OF Portland’s Irish community could have been seen as an augury. For the next three-quarters of a century, immigrant hostility to the temperance movement and prohibitory laws was unabating and unbounded by nationality. The patterns of European immigration were represented in the ranks of those most vehemently opposed to legal strictures on alcohol: first the Irish, then the Germans, and, closer to the end of the century, the Italians, the Greeks, the southern European Slavs, and the eastern European Jews. But the word “ranks” suggests a level of organization that did not exist among the immigrant populations in whose lives wine or beer were so thoroughly embedded. Only the German-American brewers showed an interest in concentrated action, when they united in response to the imposition of a beer tax during the Civil War.

  But even a group as powerful, wealthy, and self-interested as the United States Brewers’ Association met its match in the foe who would engage it for nearly half a century: women. Specifically, women of Protestant, Anglo-Saxon stock, most of them living in the small cities and towns of the Northeast and Midwest. They were led into battle by a middle-aged housewife whose first assault took place in her hometown of Hillsboro, Ohio, in 1873, inspired by a man famous for his advocacy of abstinence, chastity, gymnastics, health food, loose clothing, and the rights of women.

  When Dr. Dioclesian Lewis showed up in town, he could usually count on drawing an audience. Dio, as he was called (except when he was called “beautiful bran-eating Dio”), was no doctor—his MD was an honorary one granted by a college of homeopathy—but he was many other things: educator, physical culturist, health food advocate, bestselling author, and one of the more compelling platform speakers of the day, a large, robust man “profoundly confident in the omnipotence of his own ideas and the uselessness of all others.” He was also the inventor of the beanbag.

  On December 22, 1873, Lewis’s lecture caravan stopped in Hillsboro, a town of five thousand about fifty miles east of Cincinnati. That evening he spoke about “Our Girls” (the title of one of his recent books); the next, he gave a free lecture on the subject of alcohol. In it he urged the women of Hillsboro to use the power of prayer to rid the town of its saloons—not by calling down the wrath of God, but by praying for the liquor sellers, and if possible praying with them.

  The next morning seventy-five Hillsboro women emerged in an orderly two-by-two column from a meeting at the Presbyterian church, taller ones in the rear, shorter in front, and at their head Eliza Jane Trimble Thompson. She was the daughter of an Ohio governor, the wife of a well-known judge, a mother of eight. She had never spoken in public before, much less led a demonstration of any kind. Inside the church, chosen by the others as their leader, she had been so strangled by nerves that she had been unable to speak until the men, temperance advocates though they were, had left the room. She was fifty-seven, a devout Methodist. As she left the sanctuary of the church and emerged into the bitter, windy cold, she led the women in singing the sixteenth-century German hymn “Give to the Wind Thy Fears,” translated by John Wesley himself.

  On that Christmas Eve and for ten days after, Thompson led her band to Hillsboro’s saloons, its hotels, and its drugstores (many of which sold liquor by the glass). At each one they would fall to their knees and pray for the soul of the owner. The women worked in six-hour shifts, running relays from their homes to the next establishment on the list, praying, singing, reading from the Bible, and generally creating the largest stir in the town, said a Cincinnati newspaper, since news of the attack on Fort Sumter twelve years before. If they were allowed inside, they would kneel on a sawdust floor that had been befouled by years of spilled drinks and the expectorations of men who had missed, or never tried for, the spittoon; if not, they would remain outside, hunched for hours against the winter cold. At William Smith’s drugstore, the proprietor joined them in prayer and vowed never to sell liquor again. Outside another saloon, they knelt in reproachful humility while the customers leaned against the building, hands in their pockets, unmoved by the devout spectacle before them.

  The events in Hillsboro launched the Crusade, a squall that would sweep across the Midwest, into New York State, and on to New England with the force of a tropical storm. In eleven days Thompson and her sisters persuaded the proprietors of nine of the town’s thirteen drinking places to close their doors. Down the road in Washington Court House, the gutters ran with liquor decanted by repentant saloonkeepers. As the Crusade spread from Ohio into Indiana in January and February 1874, federal liquor tax collections were off by more than $300,000 in just two revenue districts. In more than 110 cities and towns, every establishment selling liquor yielded to the hurricane set loose by Eliza Thompson.

  But hurricanes don’t last, and within a few months this one was spent. Some saloons remained closed; many did not. This is not to say that the sacred ardor of the women had been spent in vain. If nothing else, in many towns the saloon operator was ever after marked as an outcast, a pariah. Andrew Sinclair, in Era of Excess, cites the playwright Sherwood Anderson recalling how the saloonkeeper in the northern Ohio town where Anderson was raised “walked silently with bent head. His wife and children were seldom seen. They lived an isolated life.”

  ELIZA THOMPSON WAS blessed with devoted successors who, flushed with reverence, would always refer to her as Mother Thompson. But she herself had been fortunate in her predecessors—a group of women in upstate New York who had begun to agitate against alcohol at about the time of the Washingtonians and would provide a direct link to the women who eventually carried Thompson’s crusade forward. One of these women was a schoolteacher named Susan B. Anthony. Another, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, was a journalist’s wife. Within a very few years they were joined by Lucy Stone and Amelia Bloomer, two more women whose names, like Anthony’s and Stanton’s, still resonate today for reasons seemingly far removed from the purported evils of booze.

  In fact the rise of the suffrage movement was a direct consequence of the widespread Prohibition sentiment. Before she began to campaign for women’s rights, Amelia Bloomer found her voice as an agitator in a temperance publication called The Water Bucket. Lucy Stone began publishing The Lily, which would become an early and important outlet for suffragists, because, she wrote, “Intemperance is the great foe to [woman’s] peace and happiness. . . . Surely she has a right to wield the pen for its suppression.” And Susan B. Anthony, who as a teenager feared for the future of the Republic because its leader, Martin Van Buren, had a taste for “all-debasing wine,” was virtually shoved into the suffrage movement by men who believed the temperance battle was theirs to lead.

  Anthony had given her first public speech in 1849, to a group called the Daughters of Temperance. The Sons were less accommodating. In 1852 she was not allowed to address an Albany meeting of the Sons of Temperance specifically because she was a woman. “The sisters,” said the group’s chairman, were there not to speak but “to listen and learn.” The same year, at a New York State Temperance Society meeting in Syracuse, the same result. In 1853 it happened again, at a World Temperance Society convention in New York City (where Amelia Bloomer was given the boot as well). Finally Anthony cast her lot with Stanton (who had declared alcohol “The Unclean Thing”) and proceeded to give half a century’s labors to the cause of suffrage.

  One could make the argument that without the “liquor evil,” as it was commonly known to those who most despised it, the suffrage movement would not have drawn the talents and energies of these gifted women. “Had there been a Prohibition amendment in America in 1800,” wrote the critic Gilbert Seldes in 1928, when the actual Prohibition amendment was very much on the national mind, “the suffragists might have remained for another century a scattered group of intellectual cranks.” Seldes arrived at this provocative conclusion because he believed that the most urgent re
asons for women to want to vote in the mid-1800s were alcohol related: They wanted the saloons closed down, or at least regulated. They wanted the right to own property, and to shield their families’ financial security from the profligacy of drunken husbands. They wanted the right to divorce those men, and to have them arrested for wife beating, and to protect their children from being terrorized by them. To do all these things they needed to change the laws that consigned married women to the status of chattel. And to change the laws, they needed the vote.

  But the changed laws, and the universal vote, were decades away. Not even the efforts of the women who banded together in the 1840s to threaten sexual abstinence if their husbands could not achieve alcohol abstinence could keep liquor from continuing to permeate the national fabric. More and more, roadside taverns that had provided the traveler with dining table and bedroom as well as the companionship (and the cruelty) of the bottle found their clientele in nearby towns and farms. These were men seeking release from the drudgery of their lives, but in too many instances they found as well a means of escape, even if temporary, from the responsibilities of home and family. The quantity of liquor served in these places was as great as the quality was not, unless the quality you sought was the one that put you on the shortest route to oblivion.

  A drunken husband and father was sufficient cause for pain, but many rural and small-town women also had to endure the associated ravages born of the early saloon: the wallet emptied into a bottle; the job lost or the farmwork left undone; and, most pitilessly, a scourge that would later in the century be identified by physicians as “syphilis of the innocent”—venereal disease contracted by the wives of drink-sodden husbands who had found something more than liquor lurking in saloons. Saloons were dark and nasty places, and to the wives of the men inside, they were satanic.