Prohibition Page 3
Massachusetts passed the first coercive law in 1838. To prevent saloons from selling liquor by the drink, the law provided that distilled spirits could be sold only in a minimum of fifteen gallons, the size of a small barrel. To gain passage of the law, legislators excluded beer, cider, or wine. In theory, respectable middle-class or farm families could store hard liquor for medicinal or household purposes, but the tavern or saloon that sold single glasses to the urban working class would disappear. The statute failed to work the way that its advocates intended. One tavern keeper owned a blind pig, and for a small sum, customers could see it. A free drink awaited in the room beyond the pig. This is the origin of the expression “blind pig” to describe an illegal drinking establishment. The ineffective law was repealed in 1842.
The anti-liquor movement took a new turn in 1840, when six working-class drunkards met in the back of a Baltimore tavern and resolved to stop drinking. To do so, they formed the Washingtonian Society, a self-help group. Members met two or three times a week to share personal experiences. Naming the group in honor of George Washington, they said that, like Washington, they were first—in their case, the first drunkards to reform. The idea spread rapidly, and by 1847 there were 600,000 members. At first, middle-class evangelicals were skeptical about the Washingtonians, but they were welcomed as allies in the late 1840s. In 1842, the Sons of Temperance emerged as another self-help group. They claimed 220,000 members nationally by 1849. Unlike the Washingtonians, the mostly middle-class Sons accepted members who were not self-confessed drunkards. Both groups had women’s auxiliaries. In 1851, the Independent Order of Good Templars (IOGT) was founded at Utica, New York. A dry lodge, the IOGT was, unlike the Freemasons, pledged to personal abstinence and prohibition. Women and men were accepted as equals. After the Civil War, the IOGT grew to seven million members.
The Reverend Heman Humphrey, president of Amherst College, linked the anti-liquor and anti-slavery causes in this 1828 tract. Many northern reformers favored both movements. Boston Public Library, Special Collections, 4265.59 no.4
In the 1840s, many dry Americans no longer wished to live in communities where liquor attracted derelicts and criminals, and where drunkards beat or starved their wives and children. To create dry islands within the wet sea, temperance supporters turned to local option licensing. For the first time, anti-liquor forces began to use government power to stop alcohol consumption by imposing prohibition. Under this system, once the state passed a proper enabling statute, voters in a city, county, or other local area could ban all liquor sales, and local officials would then refuse to grant any liquor licenses. Going back to medieval England and continuing into colonial America, licenses had always been required to sell alcohol. Partly, the license system raised revenue, but it also guaranteed that officials monitored who was selling liquor. Alcohol was connected to gambling and prostitution, which were far less acceptable to the public than alcohol.
Local option licensing, however, brought problems. Unless a city had a strong tax base, it often needed the license fees. Also, liquor sales might continue on an unlicensed basis if licenses were not available. Under those conditions, city officials not only lost revenue but also lacked the leverage to force saloons to act responsibly or lose their licenses. Finally, many residents lived close to a wet jurisdiction. As soon as a locality voted itself dry, a saloon or store that sold alcohol might pop up just across the border. The dry town lost license fees but suffered from liquor imported from outside the town limits.
Mayor Neal Dow of Portland, Maine, found a solution. Dow, a businessman and teetotaler of Quaker background, loathed alcohol. In 1851, he persuaded the legislature to pass the nation’s first statewide prohibition law, which became known as the Maine Law. Dry jurisdictions would be safe from neighboring wet areas, except in a narrow strip along the state border. Dow then campaigned for similar laws in other states. Evangelicals lobbied for statewide prohibition laws in the 1850s. From 1851 to 1855, eleven states passed such laws. The six states of New England headed the list, joined by New York, Michigan, Indiana, Iowa, and Delaware. All contained large numbers of evangelicals, and all were in the North, except Delaware, which did, however, contain a lot of dry Methodists.
None of these laws, including Maine’s, lasted, and most were gone by 1865. In Delaware, Indiana, Massachusetts, New York, and Rhode Island, state supreme courts invalidated anti-liquor laws, sometimes finding legal technicalities, sometimes disapproving of popular votes to enact legislation, or sometimes citing personal liberty, an argument embraced by wet Democrats. Legally valid statutes sometimes replaced the flawed ones. In Connecticut, New York, and Wisconsin, governors vetoed prohibition statutes; in Connecticut and New York, new governors signed follow-up laws. But German lovers of lager beer blocked voter approval of a prohibition law in Pennsylvania in 1854.
The alcohol issue was entangled in rising immigration. More than two million Irish and German migrants flooded into the United States during the 1840s and 1850s. Both countries of origin had heavy drinking cultures. The Irish favored whiskey, which they claimed to have invented; indeed, the word whiskey was corrupted from an Irish word, usquebaugh. Germans were identified with lager beer, a type of lightly colored and mildly alcoholic German beer that had to be aged (or lagered) before it was ready to drink. By 1860, Irish and German immigrants were almost 10 percent of the American population. Their influence, however, was much greater because they settled heavily in America’s economically booming cities. In some cities, immigrants and their American-born children were a majority. The Irish, rarely having the money to move inland, favored the eastern seaports of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, while the Germans were concentrated in the Midwest in Cincinnati, Chicago, St. Louis, and especially Milwaukee. In 1860, a majority of the residents of Milwaukee were of German ancestry. Germans also acquired farms in Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa, and Missouri. Few Irish or German immigrants settled in the South because they did not want to compete for jobs with low-cost slave labor.
Much of Irish immigrant culture revolved around the saloon where men drank, talked politics, and conducted business deals. The saloonkeepers, mostly Irish immigrants, arranged jobs, lent money, passed along messages, and advised about voting. The saloon was often the voting place, and city political machines frequently provided chits that voters could cash for a free drink after they had cast their ballots. Many saloonkeepers became city aldermen. The Germans enjoyed saloons, too, but they also had beer gardens, often located on the edge of town, where entire families gathered, especially on Sundays, to sing songs, to play sports, to eat bratwurst and other German foods, and to drink lager beer. While almost all the Irish immigrants were Roman Catholics, a tiny group in the United States before 1840, the Germans were split between Catholics and Lutherans. Unlike America’s evangelical Protestants, neither religious group regarded abstinence from alcohol as a sign of holiness. Evangelicals disliked Catholicism, abhorred Irish saloonkeepers involved in politics, and despised Germans who celebrated Sundays with drinking festivities that included children.
Both the local option and statewide prohibition laws of the 1850s were attempts by evangelicals to impose on society their own practices, including the quiet family Sabbath when all businesses were shuttered. Evangelicals stopped Sunday mail delivery, tried to prohibit commercial travel on Sunday, and frequently passed local ordinances that banned the sale of alcohol on the Sabbath. These ideas clashed with the practices of many immigrants, who were expected to conform to the will of the majority. The evangelical position was ironic, because forty years earlier American drinking habits would have resembled those of the new arrivals. To the immigrants, the demand was absurd. They had no intention of giving up traditions that enabled them to keep in touch with each other and that served as reminders of their own culture. On Sunday, the front door of the saloon might be locked and the blinds drawn, but those who knocked at a side door would be admitted. Some immigrants served alcohol in private homes and denied
that these were saloons, although they were in fact substituting for saloons. Beer gardens sometimes compromised by delaying the opening until Sunday afternoon, or they paid off government officials to look the other way.
In the 1850s, a bitter political fight took place in Ohio, which had many evangelicals, especially in the northeast part of the state where settlers from New England predominated. Cincinnati, on the other hand, became a great German immigrant city where beer flowed freely. The Whig Party, heavily composed of evangelicals, fell apart over the demand to curtail alcohol sales in Cincinnati and especially to close beer gardens on Sunday. The Know-Nothings in Cincinnati rose to prominence in the mid-1850s to express this anti-liquor backlash, but professional politicians, who could count votes, steered clear, because any party that attacked immigrant drinking could not win statewide elections. Smart politicians ignored the liquor question to create the Republican Party as a coalition of evangelicals and German immigrants from Cincinnati who all abhorred slavery.
The statewide laws in the 1850s suffered from the inability of the drafters to create any viable system of enforcement. Some drys naively believed that if the law were passed, it would be honored, but this proved to be untrue in large cities, mining districts, seaports, or logging areas with large numbers of single young men. Other drys were more cynical. They knew the state laws would not be enforced; however, their main concern was not to stop individual drinkers but the alcohol industry. By making the industry illegal, everyone connected to it could be made odious. This would force respectable people out of the liquor business. Given the lack of police forces and the general understanding that police power was limited in the 1850s, these laws simply could not be enforced. There was neither the political will nor the governmental resources to back the law. By 1860, attention had swung from alcohol to slavery, and most statewide dry laws had been abandoned or were no longer enforced.
During the Civil War, the federal government badly needed new revenue. A wartime income tax proved difficult to collect and easy to evade, and Congress repealed it as soon as the war ended, but high alcohol taxes imposed in 1862 were retained. Recognizing the need for wartime revenue, temperance forces supported these taxes on the grounds that higher prices would discourage consumption. Abraham Lincoln had been active in the temperance movement early in life; he persuaded Congress to impose a far higher tax on whiskey than on beer. No longer would a glass of whiskey cost the same or even less than a glass of beer. Little wine was drunk at this time, but its rate of taxation was between the taxes levied on beer and whiskey. The distillers resisted the tax, and after the war they were caught bribing government inspectors to allow untaxed liquor to be withdrawn from storage. Their greed, dishonesty, and lack of wartime patriotism ruined the distillers’ reputations. The brewers, mostly German immigrants, cheerfully paid the beer tax. The major brewers created the United States Brewers’ Association to lobby for a tax law that did not unduly burden the industry; they were also astute enough to know that if the government permanently taxed beer, it would never be outlawed.
The Civil War affected alcohol consumption in one other way: German immigrants in the Union army introduced other soldiers to lager beer. Officers preferred that soldiers drink mildly alcoholic beer rather than whiskey, which seemed to lead to arguments and fights. Whiskey, however, was used medicinally to treat war wounds. One-quarter of Union army soldiers were immigrants, mostly from Ireland and Germany, and much anti-immigrant sentiment disappeared in the aftermath of this military service. The veterans’ association, the Grand Army of the Republic, was a cross-class and multiethnic organization that offered social, economic, and political advancement to all veterans regardless of place of birth. After the war, many veterans continued to drink, and drinking may have increased in response to painful wounds that did not heal properly, psychological problems, and unemployment. In the United States as a whole, consumption shifted gradually from whiskey to beer. The low cost of beer, continuing German immigration, and urbanization all played a role in this change.
Chapter 2
The Dry Crusade
Dio Lewis, a homeopathic physician and itinerant lecturer, made his living by speaking in small towns. In December 1873 he gave a series of talks in Hillsboro, Ohio, denouncing the Demon Rum. The effect on the evangelical Protestant women who attended his presentations was electrifying. Looking around Hillsboro, they saw the town’s many raunchy saloons through new eyes, and they decided to act. Led by the wives and daughters of leading citizens, dozens of women descended upon one saloon, entered this all-male sanctuary, and proceeded to pray on their knees and sing hymns. They said they would leave as soon as the seller agreed to close the business. Several saloonkeepers quickly capitulated, which put more pressure on the others to conform. Within a short time, Hillsboro went dry.
News of the Hillsboro campaign spread in the newspapers, including the temperance press, and evangelical women in other small towns in Ohio and western upstate New York also took direct action. Thus was born the Women’s Crusade of 1873–1874.1 Middle-class women dried up dozens of small towns, but when anti-liquor reformers in larger towns led similar movements, they met defiance and resistance. In big cities the reaction was fierce. In Cincinnati, praying women were locked out of the saloons, which admitted only regular customers, and a few saloonkeepers’ wives located in upstairs apartments dumped the contents of chamber pots upon the heads of the protesters. Sometimes they were drenched with stale beer. Although the demonstrations were mostly peaceful, rocks occasionally broke barroom windows, and sellers learned to shutter their windows before the crusaders arrived. This anti-liquor crusade accompanied the economic crash of 1873, which produced a depression that lasted until the end of the decade.
Well-dressed protesters gathered at the rear of a saloon in Mount Vernon, Ohio, during the 1873–1874 Women’s Crusade. Courtesy Ohio Historical Society, AL00060
In November 1874, dozens of middle-class women, many of them veterans of the Women’s Crusade, met in Cleveland, Ohio, to found the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). They elected Annie Wittenmyer of Philadelphia the first president. The new organization chartered local groups that planned their own dry campaigns according to what locals considered to be most beneficial in their own communities. The national organization provided speakers, issued a publication, later called the Union Signal, advised how to set up a society, and acted as a clearinghouse for information. The group used woman instead of women in its title to indicate that it promoted a feminine or feminist sensibility and was not just an organization composed of women. The WCTU was ecumenical among Christians, although it had little appeal beyond evangelicals, and ties to the Methodist Church were strong. The WCTU enabled women to participate in their communities at a time when women could not vote.
Frances Willard was elected the corresponding secretary at the first national meeting. She had already shown remarkable leadership in incorporating a women’s college into Northwestern University. Named the school’s first woman dean, she was a tireless fundraiser. In 1879, Willard became the president of the WCTU, a position that she held until her death in 1898.2 She steered the organization in new directions. Under the brilliant and insightful slogan “Home Protection,” Willard pushed to ban not only alcohol but also gambling, tobacco, opium, pornography, and prostitution. Critical of urban poverty and juvenile delinquency, the WCTU favored free kindergartens and prison reform. To the public, Willard and the WCTU represented the women’s sphere, a theory of separate female development popular in the United States in the late 1800s. Willard had a broader vision: When women lobbied legislators, wrote letters, held meetings, and organized petitions, they were preparing for voting and citizenship.
In another initiative, the WCTU introduced the program of Scientific Temperance into the public school curriculum. Mary Hunt headed a WCTU bureau that supplied lecturers, provided school materials, trained teachers to instruct students against using liquor, and made certain that textbooks oppos
ed alcohol. Materials presented alcohol as a poison and showed students gruesome photographs and charts about alcoholic deaths. In 1891, thirty-five states required temperance education in public schools. WCTU members interviewed candidates for teaching positions, and school boards were pressured to hire only abstainers. Children educated in the late 1800s were thus inculcated with hostile attitudes against alcohol. That fact helped spur the Progressive Era surge toward prohibition.
Using the motto “Do Everything,” WCTU members specialized in whatever reform was closest to their hearts. A committed feminist, Willard pushed women’s suffrage, which attracted many women. Under Willard, the WCTU grew to become the largest women’s organization in the United States with 200,000 members in 1890. She also traveled to Europe and in 1891 established the World’s WCTU with herself as president. The first global women’s organization, the WWCTU coordinated with women’s anti-liquor groups in Australia, India, the United Kingdom, Scandinavia, and Germany.3
In 1881 and 1883, when Willard toured the South to establish the WCTU there, she found that her own close ties to the Republican Party proved a handicap. Whereas educated, elite women, who were most often local WCTU leaders, were usually Republicans in the North, they were almost always Democrats in the South. Willard accepted that the WCTU in the South supported Democrats, but she was forced to create separate local affiliates for southern African Americans to placate southern whites. The national WCTU always seated black delegates at annual meetings.