Drink

by Iain Gately

  At the same time as declaring war on temperance, America’s brewers industrialized their businesses. European innovations such as steam engines and microscopes were introduced, and the ever-growing railway network was used to extend distribution. Contemporary advances in cooling technology and ice storage enabled them to produce lager all year round, and their consistent, refreshing product made many converts to the German way of brewing. Once they had stimulated demand, the brewers sought to control it. They became apostles of vertical integration, buying saloons in imitation of the tied pub system of their British counterparts. These profited at the expense of independent competitors by a combination of lower prices and clever marketing strategies, which latter included washing the sidewalk in front of the saloon with beer so that its compelling aroma, mingled with the scent of alcohol evaporating in the sunlight, would lure drinkers in through the doors.

  Saloons superseded the colonial tavern as the archetypal American drinking place. Unlike taverns, the average saloon was not expected to serve as a multipurpose institution—a place in which to lodge strangers, judge witches, plot independence, and serve travelers the odd pint of strong waters or cider. The ideal shifted from Elizabethan inn to gin palace. Instead of a warren of rooms, the action was concentrated in a single large space serviced by a long bar. The counter itself was often decorated in an ornate style, with carved facings, a brass footrail, and spittoons of the same material tastefully disposed about its base. An alluring display of bottles and, from 1879 onward, a cash register, backed by a wall of mirrors, drew the eye of the drinker toward the obliging bar-staff.

  In metropolitan saloons, the free lunch pioneered by the City Exchange in New Orleans became an institution. Working hours were changing. Gone were the fourteen-hour days of the first flush of the Industrial Revolution, when there had seemed to be no limit to the capacity of the laborer for labor. Employers let their workers rest at noon and set them free in the evenings, thus creating two fixed periods when they might relax and refresh themselves. The opportunity to eat for free for the price of a few beers drew hungry men to drink at lunchtime for the sake of food, and they rewarded such largesse with their loyalty in the evenings.

  Saloons, more so than taverns, relied on men for their clientele. Throughout the nineteenth century, American women had been drifting away from public drinking places, and the new model was developed with their absence in mind. It transpired, however, that America’s brewers had neglected its women at their peril. In 1873 they rose en masse and attacked the manufacturers and retailers of alcohol with an unprecedented fury. As the Brewers Association had prophesized, the dormant heresy of temperance was revived, and its flame of intolerance rekindled, albeit by unexpected hands. The Woman’s Temperance Crusade of 1873-74, during which “hundreds of thousands of women, in a paroxysm of activity and prayer, closed thirty thousand saloons and initiated a generation of female leadership in the temperance movement” was as unwelcome a development as it had been unforeseen.

  The crusade was the brainchild of Dr. Dioclesian Lewis, a Boston minister who had learned his temperance at the hands of a drunken father. Lewis made a living as a traveling lecturer, and his favorite themes were the education of women and the social evils caused by alcohol. His eloquence persuaded a band of women in Hillsboro, Ohio, to march into a saloon to reclaim their menfolk, and once the crusade had been set in motion, it snowballed into a national campaign. Across the United States, groups of women invaded saloons. Once inside, their preferred tactics were to sing hymns or fall on their knees in prayer. If prevented from entering, they would occupy the sidewalk outside and raise the doxology. On the occasions that their piety persuaded the saloon keeper that he was an inadvertent ally of Satan, redeemers and redeemed would roll out the barrels and bottles of liquid perdition and empty their contents on the road.

  The women of America had taken to the front line of the war on alcohol because they considered themselves to be its voiceless victims. They were beaten and impoverished by drunken husbands, with little opportunity for legal protection or redress. Divorce was rare, and alcoholism did not yet constitute proper grounds for separation. Women could not vote, and hence they were as helpless to prevent the supply of drink as they were to escape its consequences. And so they seized on temperance as a cause to rally around. With temperance they could test their collective power to influence the behavior of American men, by persuading them to deny themselves their saloons. If we could vote, they declared, we would vote for temperance. Indeed, the female quest for an alcohol-free America was seen by many of its participants as the first step in the quest for female suffrage.

  In retrospect, the brewers should have anticipated the danger. A fair number of women’s temperance societies had flourished prior to the Civil War. While organizations such as the Daughters of Temperance acted as dutiful sisters to their fraternal orders, others were protest groups, established by women who had been excluded from making a common cause with teetotal men, such as the Woman’s New York State Temperance Society. The WNYSTS was the creation of Susan B. Anthony and Mary C. Vaughn, both former Daughters of Temperance, who had been banned “from speaking at a Sons of Temperance convention in Albany (in 1852) because of their sex.” The new society had progressive views on divorce, which it advocated should be permitted to a woman married to an alcoholic. It also passed opinions on matters other than temperance, including slavery and, by extension, universal suffrage. It was, however, ahead of its time, and its members were not consistent in their opinions. Susan B. Anthony, for instance, limited the intended beneficiaries of her demand for votes to black men and white women.

  Despite their noble aims and impressive membership rolls, women’s temperance societies had been passive creatures prior to the Civil War. The Woman’s Temperance Crusade of 1873-74 taught them the use of their teeth, and the newly established Women’s Christian TemperanceUnion (WCTU) gave them a tongue. The WCTU quickly established supremacy among women’s temperance bodies and within a decade was a power in national politics. Its rise to influence and fame was managed by Frances E. Willard, who acted as its national president between 1879 and 1898, and whose motto was “Do Everything!” No measure was spared in the effort to drive out alcohol. Towns were encouraged to build drinking-water fountains; temperance restaurants, a combination of words that would have been oxymoronic to a gourmand, were established; and the free lunch offered by saloons was attacked as a wicked ruse whose hidden costs included the risks of drunkenness and damnation. Moreover, abstinence was idolized and drinking demonized in the promotional material that the WCTU prepared for and taught in American schools. Young girls were trained to withhold their kisses from any with alcohol on their breath via the slogan “Lips that touch liquor shall never touch mine!” Finally the WCTU borrowed some of its opponents’ tactics—like the brewers, it scrutinized the stance on abstinence of every candidate for election and stigmatized any whom it judged to be insufficiently dry.

  Temperance was once again a hot topic in national as well as local politics. A Prohibition Party was established in 1869 as a breakaway from the Republicans, who were not prepared to adopt state-enforced abstinence as official policy. Many within its ranks, however, practiced temperance, and in 1876 Americans elected their second dry Republican president, Rutherford B. Hayes, who, unlike Lincoln, enforced his own self-denial on the White House and entertained domestic luminaries and visiting dignitaries alike with alcohol-free fruit punches and sodas. His wife, Lucy, also teetotal, passed around the jugs. In recognition of her unbending commitment to abstinence, she was given the nickname of Lemonade Lucy by a grateful WCTU.

  However, while the temperance movement was advancing on several fronts, it was forced to give ground to the beer lobby in other places. It had been the fervent hope of the drys that the American Centennial Exhibition, staged in Philadelphia in 1876, would be an alcohol-free event, and they lobbied to have brewers excluded from its agricultural displays. However, they were outflanked b
y their opponents, who petitioned for, and were awarded, a separate edifice of their own—the Brewers Hall, a magnificent structure of wrought iron and glass. It was graced with a monumental portico, reminiscent of Napoléon’s Arc de Triomphe, which sheltered an immense statue of Gambrinus, the medieval king and legendary beer drinker of Bohemia, represented in a posture of victory. The Brewers Hall was one of the most popular attractions of the Centennial Exhibition, in particular its icehouse, which featured chilled beers from around the world. In addition to refreshing their visitors, the brewers supplied them with propaganda, which explained that the duties they paid were by far the largest source of internal revenue in the United States: That “a brewer is just as necessary to the commonweal as a butcher, a baker, a tailor, a builder, or any other economic industry, is proven by the present position of the trade in the United States.”

  24 IMPERIAL PREFERENCE

  Here with a loaf of bread beneath the Bough,

  A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse, and Thou

  Beside me singing in the Wilderness

  And Wilderness is Paradise enow.

  —Edward FitzGerald

  Whereas the British and American temperance movements had marched hand in hand during the first half of the nineteenth century, exchanging ideas, sharing tracts, and lending each other their orators, by the 1870s, when American women were invading saloons and American men were electing a dry president, their paths had diverged and the British temperance movement was in retreat. Although on paper its armies were intact, it had lost the fight for the hearts and minds of Britons to the nation’s brewers. Its defeat may be attributed in part to its reliance upon child soldiers, whom it had deployed in so-called Bands of Hope. The first Band of Hope, a temperance society dedicated to recruiting minors to the cause, was founded in Leeds in 1847 and within two years had “pledged 4,000 children between the ages of 6 & 16.” It was imitated the length and breadth of the land, and by 1860 there were 120 Bands of Hope in London alone, and several hundred thousand British children had committed themselves, or had been pledged by their parents, to a lifetime of total abstinence. Their faith in temperance was sustained throughout infancy and adolescence with propaganda and group outings. They were taught temperance songs and read temperate fairy tales, which had been revised to admit a bestiary of drunks and inebriated ogres. George Cruikshank, who illustrated many of the works of his friend Charles Dickens, was among the revisionists. 52 He had taken to abstinence with the fanaticism of a convert and expressed his new convictions through his art. Cruikshank dedicated two years of his life to a single giant allegorical painting, the Triumph of Bacchus. This shocking canvas, containing several hundred figures, has a monumental statue of the Greek deity of the title as its focus, raising a goblet of liquid perdition atop a pyramid of wine casks, from which issue fountains of the same fluid, which are distributed to the crowds at its base and thence throughout the rest of the canvas, to the general ruin of society. Fearful, perhaps, that he had not made the message clear, Cruikshank followed up with a series of engravings entitled The Bottle, which depicted the step-by-step ruin of a respectable family through the drunkenness of its breadwinner.

  Despite mobilizing the children of the nation and issuing lurid propaganda, the British temperance movement failed to convert its aspirations into laws. Its lack of success was not for want of trying. Enthused by the triumph of their American cousins in Maine, the plethora of British temperance and abstinence societies had paused in their turf wars to throw their support behind the United Kingdom Alliance (UKA), which was founded in 1853 “to outlaw all trading in intoxicating drinks” and to create thereby “a progressive civilization” in Britain. The UKA spent the first four years of its life perfecting its publicity; then, in 1857, it turned to action. A bill was presented by a tame MP to the House of Commons that sought to limit the sale of alcohol via a so-called Permissive Act. Despite the promise of its name, the proposed act was anything but liberal. Its aim was creeping Prohibition—if enacted, a two-thirds majority of voters in an area would be empowered to ban drink shops within their locality. Critics outside the temperance movement pointed out that since the franchise was limited to adult males who owned property, a Permissive Act would enable 2/15ths of the population to “dictate to the remaining 13/15ths.” It also received fire from its own side. Teetotalers thought it did not go nearly far enough and resented the fact that it had been drafted by a brewer. In the event it got nowhere, and no farther when it was reintroduced in 1858, and every subsequent year until 1872, by which time its presentation had become a curious annual exercise in futility.

  Cruikshank’s The Bottle

  While the UKA was engrossed with its Permissive Act, and its constituents were busy recruiting hordes of children, British wine merchants were prospering with the encouragement of queen and country. In 1860, after fortifying himself with “a great stock of egg and wine,” Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone delivered his budget speech, in which he announced a cut in duty on French wines. Britons responded favorably to this largesse and, by 1866, had doubled their consumption and revived the economy of Bordeaux, which was going through a rough patch, at the same time. The 1860s and ’70s were also a golden age for brewing. British beer had never been better or more popular. Production raced to keep pace with demand. Between 1859 and 1876 annual per capita consumption rose from 23.9 to 34.4 gallons—about three times as much as was drunk by the average American. The statistics for spirit drinking were similarly encouraging. While they lagged their eighteenth-century ancestors and contemporary Americans by some distance, by 1875 the average Briton had rebuilt his or her average intake to 1.3 gallons of liquor per annum.

  In retrospect, data showing that consumption of alcohol and membership in temperance societies were both trending in the same direction should have awakened the suspicions of each side, for they either implied that fewer people were drinking more or that many people who had pledged themselves to abstinence still drank. The truth was put to the test in 1872, when, in addition to the ritual submission of a Permissive Bill to Parliament, a Licensing Act intended to reform both the drinking laws and drinking habits of Great Britain was also introduced.

  It was an emotive area of legislation, which demanded the modification of some of the oldest statutes in English law still in use, which, since their earliest forms, had protected the rights of access of the common man to good ale at a reasonable price and his freedom to consume it at his leisure. The nonvoting majority of the British public were notoriously sensitive to political tinkering with the licensing laws, and rioted if they thought that their rights to drink were likely to be abridged. Their point of view was shared even by temperance advocates such as Bishop Magee, who expressed his unease with the concept that Queen Victoria’s government should dictate the drinking habits of her subjects: “If I must take my choice . . . whether England should be free or sober, I declare—strange as such a declaration may sound, coming from one of my profession—that I should say it would be better that England should be free rather than that England should be compulsorily sober. I would distinctly prefer freedom to sobriety, because with freedom we might in the end attain sobriety; but in the other alternative we should eventually lose both freedom and sobriety.”

  The debate over the merits of the 1872 Licensing Bill was extended by the beer, wine, and spirits interests, who accused its sponsors of being inspired by French radicalism. Liberal commentators further muddied the waters by suggesting that the bill was a Tory Trojan horse with capitalism hidden in its belly. Seduced by the alleged social benefits of temperance, Parliament might overlook the social problems caused by long hours, poor working conditions, wretched accommodation, and the absence of any fulfilling leisure activities other than drinking, and so mistake a symptom for the disease. Abstinent capitalists were the real enemies of British society, not the alcohol that the oppressed multitudes drank for solace.

  Finally, nonconformists became entangled in the debate. Joseph Li
vesey, the original malt lecturer, accused evangelicals of hijacking his movement, claiming that teetotalism had become “a useful expedient only, for the furtherance of denominational religion.” Radical Protestant theologians, meanwhile, locked horns in a side quarrel as to the literal truth of the Bible, and indeed its relevance to the age of steam. Instead of trying to prove that the Old and New Testaments meant grape juice when they said wine, some extremists acknowledged their potency and held it out as evidence that the Good Book was nonsense on stilts and that its failure “to censure Noah for his drunkenness” was “only one of the numerous instances” of its “imperfect and perverted morality.”

  The net result of so many conflicting interests was paralysis. The difficulty of trying to accommodate them all was summed up later by Lord George Cavendish: “If an angel from heaven were to come down and bring in a Licensing Bill, he would find it too much for him.” A Licensing Act of sorts was passed in 1872, which took, among others, the important steps of prohibiting the sale of ardent spirits to children under the age of sixteen53 and clarifying statutory opening times for public houses. The act was roundly criticized by all parties and anathematized by temperance organizations. Keeping fifteen-year-olds away from gin was no great legislative leap forward toward a dry Britain. A single statistic explains best why their hopes were doomed to slaughter, with or without angelic assistance: In 1870, exactly a third of all British national tax revenues derived from the manufacture and sale of alcoholic drinks. Abstinence would bankrupt the nation. British brewers, distillers, and wine merchants made this important fact very clear to voters when they treated them in pubs during the 1874 election season. Gladstone, who lost, attributed his defeat to the power of the British drink industry and complained, “We have been borne down on a torrent of gin and beer.”