On and Off the Wagon: A Sober Analysis of the Temperance Movement from the Pilgrims through Prohibition

C.

CHAPTER ONE

Hiss the Villain

The corner saloon is the villain of this story. There are many in America who remember it, and many who wince when they do. It was a mysterious, maleficent, awesome institution, almost flamboyantly wicked. Children were taught never to loiter near it and under no circumstances, even when passing, to peer under the swinging doors. They did both, just to get a glimpse of the dim interior, flyblown mirrors, men’s feet on a brass rail, the sawdust, the spittoons. Now and again a man would lurch through those doors, coming or going, and then the children would scatter, scampering away, afraid of the kind of men who patronized the corner saloon. But the children always came back, for the place was endlessly fascinating.

Women walked blocks out of their way to avoid passing a saloon. In the cities a lady might have to pass half a dozen such dives on her way downtown to do her shopping. She would walk fast, turning her head a little aside, for the language that emerged from the corner saloon was never intended for a female audience. Men were not allowed to talk that way on the sidewalk.

There were men who did not pause in passing the saloon or hasten their step, but who shook a sad head and clucked their tongues, wondering how the American people could continue to tolerate such places. These men were not long-nosed, skinny- necked galoots who carried tightly folded umbrellas, such as Rollin Kirby depicted in his New York World cartoons, men who gazed upon their neighbors with a jaundiced eye and whose mouths seemed filled with lemon juice. Most were decent, sensible people who deplored the saloon because it was a deplorable place and who were determined to do whatever they could to abolish it.

The most notable thing about the saloon was its stink. It was a fusty, musty odor, damp and clammy, an odor compounded of sawdust, tobacco juice, malt, metal polish, and whiskey. Though the word saloon was abhorrent to all right-thinking people, it had not always been so. The inns and ordinaries of American colonial days were called taverns and taprooms, but these shops had the reputation of being loafing grounds, the meeting places of idlers and drunkards, so that when saloon drifted into the language, from France by way of England, it was seized upon by the purveyors of spirits and malt drinks as an excellent and elegant substitute. Saloon was high-toned. Nothing dreadful could ever happen in a saloon.

Toward the end of what was dubbed the Dry Decade—though it lasted almost fourteen years, from 1920 to 1933—when repeal was faintly visible on the horizon and men’s hearts beat faster in the hope of obtaining unpoisoned booze, even the most stalwart of the wets—men like A1 Smith of New York and Governor Albert C. Ritchie of Maryland—protested that, no matter what might happen to the Eighteenth Amendment, the old-fashioned saloon would never come back. Nor has it—by that name. Many saloons today call themselves bars and cocktail lounges; but others, in a calculated attempt to achieve an air of respectability and nostalgia, are called taverns or taprooms.

So we have come full circle. It might be interesting to examine this phenomenon. The stench has gone, admittedly, but could it be that the spirit of the old corner saloon still lingers on?

CHAPTER TWO

Place Where We All Got Drunk

Colonial days—Prohibition

in Georgia—Indians

There is no agreement on where or when the temperance movement in America began. There may have been unrecorded antiliquor societies that soon fell apart, since the earliest ones almost certainly were made up of farmers seeking a way to convince their hired men that rum was not essential to vigor in the fields.

But neither beer nor ardent spirits were frowned upon by the first English colonists in America. Beer was their water, their table drink, and they fed it to their children, for they distrusted natural water, fearing it would make them sick. In view of the primitive sanitary conditions back in crowded England, the fear had some basis. On long voyages beer was known to keep scurvy at a distance, something that fresh fruit would have done as well if only the fruit could have been preserved. At Jamestown, because of mismanagement, and at Plymouth, because the Mayflower sailors would not let them unload any, wanting it all themselves for the return trip, the colonists were woefully short of beer. Sheer thirst at last forced them to taste the water, which to their amazement and delight they discovered was not polluted at all, and almost as good as beer itself. But they much preferred beer, when they could get it.

As for spirits—chiefly rum, though there was brandy for the rich—these were held in high esteem. They were called the good creature or the good creature of God. They were looked upon as a boon, a gift to mankind. Physicians and laborers agreed that spirits kept up bodily strength. Part of a man’s wages might be paid in spirits, and a worker did not go out into the fields unless he had a jug with him or was sure that one would soon be brought. When the community was together at affairs like bees and raisings, the liquor was placed where everyone had a chance to help himself as often as he wished. At weddings and funerals, rum or wine was considered indispensable. At the funeral in 1678 of Mrs. Mary Norton, widow of the minister of the First Church of Boston, fifty-one gallons of wine were consumed. It was Malaga.

The colonists did not tolerate drunkenness, however. Rum might be a gift from God, but anybody who misused that gift to the extent of making a disgrace of himself in public probably experienced his hangover in the stocks. After a second offense he might be condemned to wear a large red letter D around his neck for a year, just as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s heroine had to wear an A.

Many of the early settlers were indentured, that is, they were obliged to work at a particular job, at no wages, for a specified length of time. Such people, whether they were children or adults, belonged body and soul to their masters. A servant’s time was never his own, and if he wasted it in a rum shop drinking on credit against the money he would be given when he was released from servitude—why, that was sinful and, in most cases, unlawful. Early legislation pertaining to rum usually stressed this time factor. Innkeepers were admonished never to permit servants to linger on their premises.

Georgia, the last of the thirteen original colonies, did have a ban on spirits for a while. Georgia’s patron, General James Oglethorpe, feared that his colonists, who were nearly all debtors, had picked up the habit of heavy drinking in the English jails from which they had been rescued. The colonists in Georgia were not consulted. They were told only that they could not have rum.

Soon men who functioned much in the manner of bootleggers began to swarm down the rivers and coves that spread between tidal Carolina and tidal Georgia, providing the colonists with the spirits they wanted. The sellers, acquainted with every foot of the aquatic maze, would disappear like so many fireflies if they were surprised by the authorities. It was easy enough to apprehend the purchasers, but hard to fix upon a means of punishing them without taking them away from their work, which was the reason they had been brought across the sea in the first place. Besides, every man jack of them, as a British subject, could claim his right to a jury trial, and that would have tied up all business indefinitely. Accordingly, after a few years the proprietors, rather than be made to look silly, lifted the ban.

This was the first prohibition experiment in America, and it was an unmitigated failure.

When the American west was opened up, and flatboats and keelboats and then steamboats began to appear upon its great rivers—the Ohio, the Mississippi, and the Missouri—there was free whiskey for the men who worked the boats. An open barrel, to the rim of which a tin ladle was tied, was placed in easy reach of all the crew, and any poler, fireman, or deckhand could refresh himself whenever he pleased. He had to keep his strength up, didn’t he? The stuff was usually Monogahela, from western Pennsylvania, although after a while some individuals began to insist on bourbon.

Then there was the problem of the Indian.

When Henry Hudson sailed the Half Moon into a New World bay at the mouth of a magnificent clean river that he hoped might prove to be the Northwest Passage to Cathay, he espied to starboard a large, flat, and heavily wooded island at the edge of which some red savages were fishing. He went ashore to make friends with these savages and to see whether he could learn, by sign language, anything about the source of the river. Of course he took with him a cask of Hollands gin. Every business discussion between familiar or alien parties started with a round of drinks. Anything else would have been discourteous.

The Indians liked the gin. They had never before tasted alcohol, and they asked for more. In fact, they had quite a party, roughly on the present site of Battery Park. Afterward the Indians decided to give the deserted island a name, something they had not previously thought about doing. They called it Manahachta-nienk, which meant place where we all got drunk. This was subsequently shortened to Manhattan.

The first explorers and settlers along the North Atlantic coast encountered red men who were nothing like the fierce, proud warriors their descendants were to meet farther inland. They were a sheepish, sickly lot, but when they partook of firewater they became savages indeed. Indians and liquor, the colonists soon learned, were an explosive mixture.

All the colonies had laws forbidding the sale of spirits to Indians. But the average man was willing to take great risks to obtain a bundle of pelts, especially if the transaction took place in the wilderness, where there would be no record of what actually occurred. It is safe to assume that all the laws at one time or another were broken.

CHAPTER THREE

The Vicious Triangle

Rum, molasses, and slaves—

Dr. Benjamin Rush—

The Whiskey Rebellion

The economy of New England and New York rested largely on rum and on an ingenious three-way trade that developed as soon as the colonies got away from England’s stifling commercial grip. Merchants, in particular those of Massachusetts and Rhode Island, sent ships to the Guinea coast of Africa and purchased slaves from the native kings. The slaves were then taken to the West Indies, where there was always a demand for them but where, because of harsh home-country restrictions imposed by France, England, and Spain, there was very little money. But there was plenty of molasses, especially in the French colonies of Martinique and Guadeloupe, because the brandy interests in Paris had seen to it that rum imports were forbidden in France. So the slaves were exchanged for molasses, which was taken to New England, where it was distilled into rum. Rum was everywhere.

By the early nineteenth century there were forty distilleries in Boston, twenty-one in Hartford, and eight in Newport, all making rum. Some of the rum was sold in the colonies, some was transported to Europe, and a generous quantity was drunk at home. The rest of the rum was shipped to the Guinea coast to pay for more slaves, who were then taken to the West Indies and traded for molasses, which was taken to New England and made into rum, which was sent to the Guinea coast to purchase slaves. ... So it went for many years. It was a vicious, but lucrative, triangle. Some of the stuffiest New England families owe their current affluence to this trade.

The man who inaugurated the Guinea coast slave trade, that stout old Elizabethan sea dog Sir John Hawkins of Plymouth, was granted in honor of his achievement a coat of arms featuring a Moor, as all Negroes were called then, in chains. Many a present-day Brahmin of Boston might well display a similar escutcheon, perhaps supplemented by a cask of rum.

It was largely because of this cunning commercial arrangement that rum came to be a generic word in the United States for all hard liquor, as in phrases like demon rum, rum- pot, rum row. It is not so used anywhere else in the world.

Dr. Benjamin Rush, the surgeon general of the Continental middle army during the Revolutionary War, was by all odds the best-known, most outspoken physician practicing in the colonies and later in the new United States. He had studied in London and Edinburgh. He was a friend of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine, a member of the Second Continental Congress, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. When such a personage came forth with a formal statement on the health of the soldiers under his care during the war, remarking that the regular rum ration was not essential to the well-being of the troops, and in the long run might even be detrimental, it caused a shock. Few were convinced, but many were