Prohibition Page 2
As whiskey consumption rose after the American Revolution, it attracted attention. Medical doctors were among the first to notice the increase. More patients were having the shakes from involuntary withdrawal from alcohol, delirium tremens nightmares and psychoses were on the rise, and solo drinking of massive quantities in binges that ended with the drinker passing out became a new drinking pattern. Doctors such as Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and onetime chief physician of the Continental Army, who had first warned against the overuse of whiskey and other distilled spirits during the Revolution, became alarmed. Experts recognized that over time, drinkers needed to increase their use of alcohol to gain the same sense of euphoric satisfaction from drinking. Down that road was chronic drunkenness or what would later be called alcoholism. Medical schools included warnings to students, but most physicians in the early 1800s believed that alcohol was an important medicine. Physicians especially favored laudanum, which was opium dissolved in alcohol. Laudanum calmed the nerves and miraculously ended the craving for alcohol. Children’s nurses used laudanum to quiet babies.
To Rush, the issue was not just about health. He published many newspaper articles and pamphlets hostile to distilled spirits. His best-known work, An Inquiry into the Effects of Spirituous Liquors (1784), went through at least twenty-one editions and had sold 170,000 copies by 1850. The Philadelphia doctor argued that democracy would be perverted and ultimately destroyed if voters were drunken sots. Public safety in a republic required an electorate capable of wise judgment about political matters. Drunkenness made for bad voters. Rush and others also worried about how distilled spirits damaged society in terms of crime, poverty, and family violence. Many serious crimes, including murder, were committed under the influence of alcohol. The unemployed or unemployable drunkard abandoned his family so that the wife and children sometimes faced starvation while the husband and father debauched himself. Liquor use was often associated with gambling and prostitution, which brought financial ruin and sexually transmitted diseases. Drunkenness also led to wife beating and child abuse. To many Americans, it appeared that the United States could not be a successful republic unless alcoholic passions were curbed.
The generation born during the Revolution that came of age around 1800 was particularly drawn to whiskey. Consumption skyrocketed due to low price and widespread availability. After Americans settled in Kentucky and Ohio, fertile corn-growing areas, a corn surplus developed. Western farmers had no practical way to ship this local glut to market as corn, but they could and did distill spirits and export it to the East. The price of whiskey dropped to 25 cents per gallon. The federal government had stopped taxing whiskey with the repeal of the whiskey tax in 1802, but imported molasses and rum continued to be taxed. Not surprisingly, in 1810, the third most important industry in the United States was making distilled spirits, which accounted for 10 percent of the nation’s manufacturing sector. Low price and ready availability stimulated whiskey consumption. Cities and counties required retailers to buy licenses, but licenses were mainly a source of revenue rather than a way to limit sales, and most governments issued as many licenses as there were applicants. No state governments licensed, taxed, or otherwise controlled alcohol.
According to Dr. Benjamin Rush’s popular temperance thermometer, abstinence brought happiness, health, and life, while distilled spirits led to misery, illness, and death. Thomas’s Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Newhampshire & Vermont Almanac, by Isaiah Thomas, 1791, National Library of Medicine, 2574036R
Problems associated with heavy drinking produced a public reaction. Reformers then created the temperance movement. In 1812 a group of Congregational clergy associated with Andover Seminary, prominent business leaders from Boston, and a handful of physicians founded the Massachusetts Society for the Suppression of Intemperance. For the next twenty years these elite reformers met once a year and issued an annual pamphlet lamenting the increase of whiskey consumption and abuse in the United States. The organization did not oppose all alcohol and in fact served wine at its meetings. The group had little impact on public opinion, as suggested by the awkward name, but the concerned New England clergy, who read the pamphlets, noticed the growth of alcohol problems inside their own congregations, and they began to preach against overuse of distilled spirits. These ministers did not object to beer, cider, or wine, which was rarely used in America, and they even accepted whiskey either as a medication or as a beverage, if the liquor was sufficiently watered down when it was consumed. They called their campaign to reduce consumption of distilled spirits and eliminate public drunkenness the temperance movement.
Other Protestant preachers took up the cause. These included Quakers and Methodists, two denominations that had turned against alcohol before the American Revolution, as well as growing numbers of southern Baptists and western frontier evangelicals of many new denominations. An upsurge in evangelical Protestant religion began around 1800 on the frontier in Kentucky, Tennessee, and North Carolina and quickly spread north into Indiana and Illinois. Over two decades, these Christian revivals, which later were called the Second Great Awakening, eventually flowed back into the Southeast, upstate New York, and New England. By the 1820s, evangelical Protestantism surged throughout the country. The South witnessed the rise of Methodists and Baptists, Methodism became the most popular denomination in most states, and within another decade or so many new groups, such as the Church of Christ, Disciples of Christ, Seventh-day Adventists, and Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, were established.
The religious revivals and the emerging temperance movement were strongly connected. This tie had started with the earliest gatherings in Kentucky. Although the revivals attracted entire families and both whites and blacks, preachers noticed that women were in the majority. Often, women insisted on attending, and husbands drove their wives to the meeting in wagons and then left for the woods to drink while women and children sang hymns and listened to sermons. These men often got drunk and occasionally stumbled into the revival meetings to raise hell. The preachers were not amused. Peter Cartwright, a Methodist in Illinois, picked up a burning log from the campfire and hurled it at several drunkards. As the fiery object fell, Cartwright shouted that hellfire was descending upon the wicked. Ministers denounced the Demon Rum. “The devil,” declared the Reverend Huntington Lyman, “had an efficient hand in establishing, perfecting, and sustaining the present system of making drunkards.”3
Large numbers of evangelical churches required their members to abstain from hard liquor. “We may set it down as a probable sign of a false conversion,” advised one preacher, “if he allows himself to taste a single drop.”4 Giving up whiskey enabled the convert to prove sincerity and make a life-altering change that would carry over into family and religious life. The revivals that peaked during the 1820s marked the first great effort to control alcohol use in America. During the 1830s, many evangelicals redefined temperance. The word no longer meant abstinence from hard liquor. Now churches required members to take the teetotal pledge, that is, to abstain from all alcoholic beverages. This shift had both philosophical and practical roots. It was hard to justify calling for abstinence only from hard liquor. Could not all forms of alcohol be pernicious? Then, too, the promise to drink only beer, cider, or wine clashed with the temptation to drink whiskey in a society where whiskey was pervasive. John Tappan wrote, “Daily experience convinces us that we must include all intoxicating drinks in our pledge, or the excepted drinks will perpetuate drunkenness thro’ all coming generations.”5
Before 1830, anti-liquor forces had not opposed consumption of wine because it was so expensive and rare that only a few wealthy people drank it, and they did so in the privacy of the home. Wine had no association with public drunkenness or alcoholism. Then, too, Saint Paul had advised, “Use a little wine for thy stomach’s sake,” and the Bible called for wine in the communion sacrament. During the 1830s, evangelicals reinterpreted the Bible and persuaded thems
elves (if not Episcopalians, Catholics, and Jews) that the wine in the Bible was the unfermented juice of the grape, that is, grape juice. New bottling techniques eventually appeared that made year-round grape juice possible for religious purposes.
Temperance advocates also argued that the rich had to sacrifice wine, which was harmless, to get the poor to give up whiskey, which was harmful. A similar plea was made concerning hard apple cider. Widely used only in rural America, this drink caused little trouble, but farmers were told to abandon cider so that Americans addicted to whiskey would stop consumption. Before the Revolution, housewives had brewed a mild beer that spoiled in two or three days; after 1800, cheap whiskey that did not spoil had replaced this rural beer. In the 1820s, when the country was overwhelmingly rural, there were few beer drinkers, but they were also expected to quit their beverage of choice in order to rid the nation of whiskey.
Dry propaganda flooded the country. Lyman Beecher, a prominent evangelical Protestant minister and the father of Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, issued Six Sermons on Intemperance (1826). That same year the American Temperance Society began to publish anti-liquor tracts, as did the successor American Temperance Union in 1836. Edward Delavan, a former wine merchant converted to teetotalism, ran a major anti-liquor press in Albany, New York. He once mailed a broadside to every household in New York State, and in the 1840s, he supplied every schoolroom in New York with a colored drawing illustrating the diseased state of a drunkard’s stomach. In 1851, the American Tract Society reported that it had circulated nearly five million temperance pamphlets. Dry advocates, or those who promoted consuming no alcohol of any kind, produced lectures, poetry, songs, novels, and plays. John B. Gough, a self-styled reformed drunkard, made a fortune on the lecture circuit telling anti-liquor stories in which he acted out the part of a drunkard. Timothy S. Arthur’s best-selling novel, Ten Nights in a Bar-Room (1854), was quickly turned into a hit stage production.
Temperance forces organized local societies throughout the country, although most were concentrated in smaller cities in the Northeast that were experiencing rapid economic growth brought by early industrialization. In 1831, the American Temperance Society reported 2,700 local groups with 170,000 members; three years later, there were 7,000 groups with 1,250,000 members, which was close to 10 percent of the total population. Women made up 35 to 60 percent of the members of the local societies, and they were usually among the most enthusiastic supporters. Societies enabled members to meet other abstainers, employers, employees, or customers. In boom towns along the Erie Canal such as Rochester, New York, employers often hired new employees through evangelical church or temperance society connections, and social events included dry picnics, concerts, and public lectures. Because taverns had often been the only large venues in a small community, temperance groups built meeting halls to house events where alcohol would not be served. Reform organizations and political parties used these halls. Women participated as equals in these activities.
Anti-liquor forces lobbied elected officials, many of whom were heavy drinkers, for restrictions against alcohol sales or better enforcement of existing laws. Washington, DC, was awash in saloons and soggy boarding houses, but drys were particularly appalled that alcohol was sold in the basement cafe of the US Capitol, where members drank, told stories, and swapped votes. Lewis Cass, a Michigan Democrat who ran for president in 1848, converted to the dry cause. In 1832, as secretary of war, he had abolished the Army spirits ration, and a year later he became the founding president of the Congressional Temperance Society. There was a need. Writing privately to a friend, Senator Henry Wise of Virginia noted that frequently among his legislative colleagues “members [were] too drunk for the decency of a tavern bar-room.”6 The society’s meetings drew many members, who eagerly joined to placate their dry constituents. Even the frequently drunk Daniel Webster, who claimed that his best speeches were all given while he was well oiled, astonished colleagues by attending one temperance meeting. In 1837, Congress bowed to dry pressure and banned liquor sales in the basement cafe, but the reform did not last, and the Congressional Temperance Society faded into insignificance during the mid-1840s.
Between 1825 and 1850, the amount of alcohol consumed per person in the United States dropped by half. This was a remarkable shift in a short period of time. The evangelical revivals and the temperance movement had much to do with this change. It was not so much that Americans drank half as much alcohol. Rather, a large number, approaching 50 percent in many small towns where the evangelical movement had been especially strong, had simply stopped drinking at all. The use of alcohol became socially unacceptable, particularly in middle-class circles in small towns. Middle-class employers refused to employ anyone who drank. To advance in business or society, a person found it necessary to abstain. Advice books and novels, which were beginning to circulate among the middle class, told young women not to marry any man who drank. In New York State in 1839, a reliable estimate held that a majority of the physicians and 85 percent of the Protestant clergy had ceased to use any alcohol.
For a variety of reasons, the vast majority of residents of America’s large cities never embraced the temperance movement. Cities were by definition diverse. Seaports, in particular, had hard-drinking residents and visitors, including sailors, from all parts of the world. Nor had the revivals that had started on the frontier ever caught on in the great cities. Evangelical Protestants denounced restaurants, theaters, and musical performances as ungodly frivolities, but many city residents enjoyed these urban delights. Almost all public places in cities sold alcohol.
Although massive Irish Catholic immigration did not begin until the 1840s, a number of Irish Catholics had already migrated to the largest cities, such as New York. Episcopalians, Catholics, and Jews approved of the use of alcohol. The Catholic Church, however, opposed public drunkenness, and the Irish priest Father Theobald Mathew visited America’s great cities to urge Catholics to abstain voluntarily from alcohol as a personal commitment to reduce public drunkenness. In any case, New York City remained wet, and when drys in the state legislature in 1846 required every town in New York State to vote on local option liquor licenses, the city was exempted from the vote, since it was understood that the city would vote overwhelmingly wet. Of 856 townships and cities that held elections, 728 voted dry.7
The early Industrial Revolution played a role in the temperance movement as well. To middle-class Americans who lived in small towns, getting ahead financially and socially was a real possibility in the emerging market economy of the mid-1800s. To do so, a person needed education, a good reputation, and access to credit. When the evangelical reformer Lewis Tappan set up his credit rating agency, the forerunner of Dun and Bradstreet, in 1841, the firm evaluated business prospects as to their creditworthiness partly on the basis of the owners’ drinking habits. Teetotalers, mostly evangelicals, were rated the highest, and anyone with an interest in the liquor industry was all but eliminated as a borrower. By the 1830s, colleges no longer served alcohol on campus, and students, faculty, or staff who drank were dismissed. Temperance forces established dry steamboat lines, dry hotels, and dry restaurants. The same reformers who opposed liquor often backed the abolition of slavery and women’s rights. All these reforms were rooted in the belief in the dignity of the individual soul. White southerners became suspicious of the ties between temperance and abolition, and before 1860 the temperance movement was weaker in the South than in the North, although some southern churches demanded that members take the pledge.
Alternative beverages also changed drinking habits. Amid flourishing trade, the United States began to import significant quantities of coffee, which largely replaced whiskey. The old-fashioned whiskey break became the coffee break. Coffee was safer to drink around machinery, which began to appear in the emerging industrial age. To a lesser extent, tea and cocoa imports also increased, although those items were rarely consumed by anyone outside the urban middle class. Governments, s
trongly supported by dry forces, built public water supply systems in major cities. Philadelphia constructed the Fairmont Works, and in 1842, New York City opened the Croton Aqueduct, which piped in pure water from upstate. The city had long suffered from brackish wells that were easily susceptible to contamination from nearby outhouses. Croton water was free to every resident who hooked up, and the city installed numerous public water fountains.
During the 1820s and early 1830s, evangelicals were convinced that their temperance crusade would dry out the United States in a short time as drinkers saw the light and renounced the Demon Rum. Children signed the teetotal pledge, and dry forces sponsored parades and cold water picnics. Abolitionists at the same time hoped that southern slaveholders would voluntarily relinquish their slaves. Neither anti-liquor nor anti-slavery forces succeeded, and by the late 1830s, both groups were disillusioned. At the time, reformers saw alcohol as the greater problem: Drinking took place throughout the country, while slavery was relegated to the South. Some evangelicals also believed that alcohol sent drinkers to hell. In contrast, slavery merely harmed the body temporarily. Reformers could also see that curbing liquor, at least in northern states where evangelicals were strong, appeared to be easier politically than ending slavery. To force drinkers to give up alcohol, drys shifted from voluntary abstinence to using state coercive power.