by Iain Gately
The idyllic countryside outside San Francisco, and the wines produced there, also attracted the praise of visitors. In 1880, Robert Louis Stevenson spent several months in the upper Napa Valley with his new American spouse. He dedicated part of The Silverado Squatters, his account of his stay, to the winemakers around him, whom he conceived of as prospectors searching the valley and its surrounding slopes for the ideal terroir, which might impart unique flavors to their vintages: “Bit by bit, they grope about for their Clos de Vougeot and Lafitte, those lodes and pockets of earth, more precious than the precious ores, that yield inimitable fragrance and soft fire; those virtuous Bonanzas, where the soil has sublimated under sun and stars to something finer, and the wine is bottled poetry.” Stevenson was certain of their eventual success: “The smack of Californian earth shall linger on the palate of your grandson.” This was a prayer as much as a prophecy. He hoped Napa wines might one day replace the great French clarets and burgundies whose vineyards were then being wiped out, forever as it seemed at the time, by phylloxera. The vineyards of California did not escape the dreaded pest, but it arrived in the state after the discovery that foreign vines grafted onto native American rootstock were immune, and the devastation France had suffered was avoided.
The science of winemaking in California had come a long way since the days of Agoston Haraszthy. A research facility dedicated to oenology had been established at the state university, whose studies made an immediate contribution to the fecundity of local vineyards and the quality of their wine. By 1887, California production was fifteen million gallons per annum, four years later it had risen to twenty million, and in 1897-a freak year—it touched thirty-four million gallons, which resulted in a price crash. Between 1858 and 1890, some of the state’s most famous producers commenced operation, including Charles Krug, Karl Wente, and Jacob Beringer.
California brewing grew at similar pace to Californian winemaking. Its specialty was steam beer, so named because of its ultrahigh level of carbonation: When a barrel of the stuff was tapped there was an explosion of foam, like steam from a ruptured boiler. The carbonation was natural and resulted from the addition of a quantity of green wort to each barrel (a German technique, known as krausening ), which caused a second bout of fermentation. Steam beer was a relic from the gold rush era. The first brewers in San Francisco, faced with a burgeoning thirst and a shortage of both raw materials and of ice for cooling, had been forced to adopt the practice of krausening, which enabled them to manufacture a lager style of beer at high speed, in hot conditions, that was ready for drinking within twelve days, i.e., less than half the time of traditional lagers. Its distinctive properties and low price won it a place in the hearts of Californians, so that by the time that ice was plentiful, and California was bulging with capital for new breweries, steam beer, an invention born of necessity, continued to be manufactured in preference to alternatives of better quality.
The new states to the east of California also experienced a brewing boom. The mining towns that sprang up around productive veins were invariably adorned with saloons and breweries. Perfect brewing conditions in and around Denver encouraged German immigrants to put aside their picks and washboards and turn their hands to making lager. One such, Adolph Coors, who set up in Golden, Colorado, in partnership with another German, turned out a brew of such exceptional quality that within a year, according to the Colorado Transcript, “Messrs. Schuler and Coors have leaped to the front rank of brewers . . . and their beer is regularly sold in Denver and the mountain and valley towns.” Arizona and Washington enjoyed similar surges in production. In Phoenix, the Arcade Brewery, once again run by Germans, was considered one of the wonders of the territory and a tribute to the thirst of its few citizens. So great was their love of beer that they paved the sidewalk of First Street with empty bottles, packed neck down into the dirt. According to eyewitness accounts, this produced a durable, if irregular, surface: “The walk was so uneven a person felt as if afflicted with the blind staggers when walking over it.”
The output of local breweries in former wildernesses was supplemented by imports delivered by the spreading railroads. From the 1880s onward national brewers emerged in America, whose brands of beer were available from coast to coast. While there was a degree of consolidation within the industry, most brewers expanded their production and reach through organic growth. The nation seemed to be possessed with an insatiable thirst for beer. Between 1880 and 1910, U.S. official production increased at more than twice the rate of the country’s population: from 13 million barrels per annum to 59.5 million. The numbers were enough to attract syndicates of investors from the London Stock Exchange, who among them spent a fortune in the early 1890s acquiring American brewers. The foreign interlopers did not, however, succeed in capturing any of the national champions,who responded to the new competition by streamlining their distribution and perfecting their brands. Pabst of Milwaukee, distinguished by the blue ribbon on its label, was the first brewer to manufacture a million barrels of beer in one year (1893), followed by Anheuser-Busch, with its signature “A and Eagle” and the trademark Budweiser, and by Schlitz, the beer with the globe on its bottles, emblematic of the confidence and ambitions of the American brewing industry.
While such confidence was scarcely misplaced in the West, whose population drank with a rare vigor, in the midwestern and eastern states opposition to King Alcohol was rising. The temperance movement had grown into a serious political force. It had focused its efforts on the so-called local option, i.e., the prohibition of the retail of alcohol at the state, city, and county level. Following up on their initial success in Maine, temperance organizations had succeeded in persuading voters and state assemblies in Kansas, Iowa, Maine, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts to incorporate prohibition within their constitutions. Although such bans were often no better than legal fictions—it was easy to find public drinking places open in territories that, officially, were alcohol free—they were important precedents: If Americans could vote to live in a nominally dry state, then they might, one day, vote to live in a dry country.
In addition to plugging away at the local option, the temperance movement stepped up its efforts in the field of indoctrination. The women of the WCTU had decided that education was the key to victory in the fight for an alcohol-free America. To this end, they established a Department of Scientific Temperance Instruction in Schools and Colleges within their organization, under the command of Mrs. Mary Hannah Hunt. Her mission was to instill a prejudice against alcohol into American children through compulsory propaganda. Mrs. Hunt envisaged a future when “from the schoolhouses all over the land will come trained haters of alcohol to pour a whole Niagara of ballots upon the saloon.” She succeeded in embedding temperance in the school curriculum in every state except Arizona. It was taught to children disguised as personal hygiene or physiology. If they started drinking, they were told, they would grow up stunted, foul-breathed, and mad; they would beat their spouses, if they were lucky enough to marry; and would harm themselves and those around them until claimed prematurely by the grave. Such fictions were presented as scientific facts, which were proven with theatrical demonstrations of the deadly powers of alcohol. Many young Americans were treated to a show in which a slice of raw calf brain was immersed in a jar of spirits. It turned gray and blotchy at once, and the students were advised that the same would happen to their brains the instant they took a sip of liquor. Alcohol, they were taught, scorched the skin of the drinker’s throat, hence the burning sensation. It also turned the blood into water, and the heart into fat: “Such a heart cannot be so strong as if it were all muscle. It is sometimes so soft that a finger could easily be pushed through its walls.” Scientific temperance was augmented by mathematical temperance, of a similarly wretched standard of probity, as the following example, from the “Think a Minute” series for first-grade students, illustrates:
Daddy was disgusted with neighbor Jones. “Swigs beer like a sponge! Drank ten glasses, one a
fter another—made a fool of himself—and had to be carried home dead drunk!”
Billy asked, “Daddy, how much did you drink?”
“Only one glass,” said Daddy virtuously.
Billy has been studying fractions. “One glass is ten percent of ten glasses,” he calculated. “Mr. Jones was a fool to drink ten glasses. Were you ten percent of a fool, Daddy?”
The good work of the Department of Scientific Temperance Instruction was supplemented by informal material, similar to that prepared for the British Bands of Hope. There were temperance nursery rhymes, temperance camp songs, temperance wall charts, temperance spelling books, and temperance medals. Newly born infants had the white ribbon of the WCTU tied to their swaddling clothes, a prayer read over them, and their name entered on the Cradle Roll. As soon as they could walk and sing they were deployed against drinkers, especially during elections. They were assembled around polling booths, dressed in their Sunday school best, issued with little American flags, and, when a known sot arrived to vote, would surround him and break into song. The effect could be sinister, as is apparent in Tobias Wolff’s depiction of the junior wing of the WCTU at work: “Swirling round the marked man in a wild elves’ dance, they sang with piping empty violence:
We are some fond mother’s treasure
Men and Women of tomorrow,
For a moment’s empty pleasure
Would you give us lifelong sorrow?
Think of sisters, wives, and mothers,
Of helpless babes in some low slum,
Think not of yourself, but of others,
Vote against the Demon Rum.
An entire generation of American children was conditioned to fear alcohol and to feel guilty when they drank it. Many, however, of the Men and Women of Tomorrow got over their indoctrination. According to federal statistics, per capita consumption of alcohol was creeping back up in the 1880s and ’90s to pre-Civil War levels, notwithstanding the fact that several states were officially dry. This worrying trend was blamed by temperance advocates on the pernicious influence of saloons and their illegal counterparts in those places where they were banned. The saloon became, to the abstinent-minded, a symbol for all that was evil about booze.
The case against these establishments was not without foundation. The American saloon of the 1890s was an equivocal place. While some served similar community roles to colonial-era taverns, functioning as social centers, labor exchanges, and offering a space where people could gather to celebrate christenings and weddings, they were outnumbered by squalid corner bars that dealt plainly and simply in intoxication. Although the principal clientele of this latter category was male, they also sold beer to local women and children, who bought it by the bucketful out the back door. Rushing the growler, as the practice was known, was particularly common in New York. While their counterparts in Ohio were wearing white ribbons and watching their teachers pickle calves’ brains in grain spirit, children in the tenements of the Bronx were drinking deep. Even the poorest families could afford a daily binge: A saloon keeper of the time observed that rushing the growler was “an inexpensive mode of becoming intoxicated. On thirty cents a whole family of topers can become drunk.”
Many of the less-salubrious kind of saloon harbored brothels and, if they could not accommodate prostitutes in-house, operated sister businesses where they might send their drunks. They also served as recruiting grounds on polling days, for the practice of buying votes with drinks was still common in urban America. Finally, they were often stinking eyesores surrounded by crawling drunks. A really nasty saloon was a tableau vivant of temperance noir. Their existence anywhere in America, and persistence in states where they had been outlawed, pricked the consciences of many drys, especially those of a religious bent, who perceived them to be the terrestrial colonies of hell. From the insulted ranks of temperate Americans, a heroine emerged to take the fight to the saloons, who gave their movement the excitement that hitherto it had lacked.
Sensation, in the imposing shape of Mrs. Carry A. Nation, helped drinking to become the first American political issue of the twentieth century. Born Carrie Amelia Moore to a Kentucky slave owner, this future scourge of saloons had good reason to hate alcohol. After a peripatetic childhood, during which she suffered from a mysterious and debilitating bowel ailment, and an unhappy adolescence, which she spent caring for her insane mother who suffered from the delusion that she was Queen Victoria of England, Carry made an unhappy marriage to an alcoholic doctor, who died of the delirium tremens shortly after the birth of their first and only child. The child, a daughter, suffered from a disfiguring abscess, which caused her right cheek to fall off, and which prevented her from opening her jaws for eight years. Carry attributed the affliction to the drunkenness of her husband: “The curse of heredity is one of the most heartbreaking results of the saloon. Poor little children are brought into the world with the curse of drink and disease entailed upon them.”
Carry remarried to a preacher and attorney named David Nation and moved to Kansas, where she absorbed the propaganda of the WCTU. This she combined with her individual version of radical Christianity to create a personal doctrine of direct action against alcohol. She was physically well-equipped to put it into effect—six feet tall, approximately 180 pounds, strong of arm, with a piercing voice, false teeth, and a face whose jowls resembled those of a bulldog. Moreover, Medicine Lodge, the nominally dry town where she lived, was full of provocation—its prison, which she visited in an evangelical role, was packed with drunkards; and its flamboyant, if illegal, saloons did a roaring trade, even on the Sabbath day.
Carry flowered into violence in late 1899, when she attacked Mart Strong’s saloon in her hometown one Sunday afternoon. Accompanied by fellow female advocates of temperance, who supplied background music on a melodeon, and singing what was to become her battle song,59 she advanced into the bar and chased out all its customers. Encouraged by her success, she marched on all the remaining saloons in Medicine Lodge in subsequent weeks, and on the local drugstore, where she smashed a keg of medicinal whiskey with a sledgehammer and set its contents on fire. Once she had cleared Medicine Lodge of alcohol, Carry meditated on action against other hotbeds of sin nearby.
The next place to feel the strength of her arm was Kiowa, a neighboring hamlet in Barber County. She set off in a buggy loaded with stones and other missiles and, in the course of a single morning, smashed up the fixtures, fittings, and windows of no fewer than three saloons. After Kiowa, she moved on Wichita, the state capital, whose illegal drinking joints operated within walking distance of the legislature that had outlawed them, and which were renowned for their ostentatious architecture and interiors. First stop was the Carey Hotel, which featured a magnificent oil painting by John Noble, entitled Cleopatra at the Bath or The Temptress of the Nile, behind its bar. Such prurient canvases were common in the saloons of the period and drew Mrs. Nation’s particular ire. “It is very significant,” she wrote, “that pictures of naked women are in saloons. . . . The motive for doing this is to suggest vice, animating the animal in man and degrading the respect he should have for the sex to which he owes his being; yes, his Savior also!” She treated Cleopatra to a volley of stones, then raged through the saloon with an iron bar, shattering bottles, decanters, and tumblers, while shrieking, “Glory to God! Peace on earth, goodwill to all men!” at the top of her voice. She was arrested while in the process of battering the cherrywood bar counter with a brass spittoon.
Once they had her in custody, Wichita officials were confronted by a legal conundrum: Strictly speaking, joints were banned in Kansas, and to prosecute someone for damaging one would be to admit to their not-so-clandestine existence. The police chief offered to pay her fare home, but she refused to go, and so she was sent to Sedgwick County Jail while they worked out what to do with her. She caused similar headaches among policemen, sheriffs, and county attorneys throughout and beyond the state after she was bailed, not least of all because the press detected greatness
in Carry Nation and encouraged her into newsworthy behavior. The exciting reports they published of her exploits caused mobs to form wherever she appeared. She adopted the hatchet as her signature weapon and sold little replicas made of pewter to help finance the battle against jointists and “hellions.” Moreover, she was fearless: In the course of her crusade she was arrested twenty-five times, had her nose broken by the wife of a saloon keeper, her head cracked open by the wife of a cigar-store owner,60 her wrist shattered by a bartender in Ohio, had been horsewhipped in Kansas, pistol-whipped in Texas, had a chair broken over her head in Kentucky and her false teeth knocked down her throat in Trinidad, Colorado.
Had she been a man, it is probable that Mrs. Nation’s career would have been ended with a bullet or two in the first saloon that she attacked. However, protected by her sex, she spent several years assaulting bars, drinkers, smokers, and tobacconists in the United States and abroad, during which time she became an international celebrity, albeit a figure of ridicule as much as praise. The WCTU and other temperance organizations, while acknowledging the publicity she generated for their cause, distanced themselves from its source: Carry Nation did not personify the dry ideal.
Indeed, the liquor barons were more effusive in their praise of the woman who described herself as “a bulldog running along at the feet of Jesus, barking at what He doesn’t like.” She was offered considerable sums to represent various brands of beer, and several whiskey manufacturers sent her kegs of their product in the hope that she would destroy them in front of the drinking public. Whenever she smashed a bar the debris was collected and sold as relics; many saloons were named after her, and the Big 803 in Topeka, Kansas, displayed a hatchet, captured from her in 1901, in pride of place behind its counter.