Prohibition Page 4
Willard gradually grew disenchanted with the Republican Party’s unwillingness to embrace prohibition. In 1869, dry extremists irritated with Republicans and Democrats founded the Prohibition Party, and in 1884 they nominated John St. John, former Republican governor of Kansas, for president. He won Willard’s backing, but the WCTU declined to follow. St. John won only 1.5 percent of the vote. The Prohibition Party’s presidential vote peaked in 1892 with 2.25 percent.4 As critics noted at the time, Willard’s Do Everything policy and her political gyrations weakened the ability of the WCTU either to enact prohibition or to influence the two major parties that were key to political success.
Although southern temperance forces were a minority during the 1870s, they were growing and had ties to leading Baptist and Methodist clergy. Because the southern states were poor and needed schools and roads, dry leaders and elected officials backed high license fees for saloons and grocers who sold alcohol. High fees were supposed to eliminate disreputable sellers. During the 1880s, however, temperance support for high license fees faded, and in 1887 the Tennessee Conference of the Southern Methodist Church declared, “The license system is an evil.” Ten years later the Georgia Baptist Convention stated, “The license system is in league with hell and the devil, and must die.”5
Dry fervor produced an increasing demand in the South for communities to be able to impose local prohibition. Every southern state adopted local option by 1890. Even if the votes were lacking to prohibit alcohol statewide, there might be enough votes to support a ban in a county, in a portion of a county, or in a town. Legislation usually called for voters to decide the issue of licensing in local elections, which brought the liquor question into politics, where the alcohol industry exerted pressure to allow sales. Under local option, evangelicals dried up large geographical areas in the South during the 1890s. Another strategy was to ban alcohol sales near churches, schools, or colleges. In Tennessee, for example, alcohol was banned within four miles of any rural church or school, which more or less made rural Tennessee dry.
One alternative to using local option to ban sales was the Gothenburg System, invented in Sweden, whereby government-run dispensaries sold distilled spirits for home consumption. Profits went to the government instead of the liquor dealer, and personal consumption could be monitored or limited, as the dispensaries kept individual sales records. Although many reformers supported this system, evangelicals who hated the Demon Rum disliked the idea. A few jurisdictions adopted the plan, including Athens, Georgia, in 1891. Two years later Governor Benjamin “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman (D-SC) forced a statewide dispensary system through the legislature to derail prohibition. In addition to considerable revenue, dispensaries created numerous patronage jobs, which Tillman quickly filled with supporters. North Carolina, Alabama, and Virginia allowed local dispensaries, but only South Carolina adopted this plan statewide. The law proved problematic. Local political factions resisted state control, and liquor leaked through employee theft. The system did not satisfy prohibitionists, and South Carolina abolished its dispensaries in 1907.
Anti-liquor radicals wanted state and national prohibition. They were frustrated by the rise of local option in the 1880s and 1890s. “When there is a vigorous public sentiment on any question of morals,” a WCTU writer stated, “it is because somebody has taken an advanced position.”6 The trouble with advanced positions is that they cannot, in a democracy, produce political success. In the 1880s, drys forced reluctant legislators to put statewide prohibition on the ballot in sixteen states. Anti-liquor crusaders won only four of these elections, and all four bans were subsequently repealed. When frustrated drys backed the anemic Prohibition Party in 1884, 1888, and 1892, they mostly revealed their own insignificance.
Because the North was richer, government officials in that region had less interest in revenue from high license fees, and because evangelicals were a minority in much of the North, especially places heavily settled by Irish and German immigrants, local option became more important in the North than in the South from the 1870s through the 1890s. By 1900, America had many dry towns and counties, but most of the country remained wet. The only dry states were rural—Kansas, North Dakota, Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire.
In the 1870s and 1880s, Irish Catholic immigrants and their descendants in certain cities created a significant temperance movement. Upwardly striving middle-class Irish were embarrassed by saloons, drunkenness, and vice. In St. Paul, Minnesota, a heavily Catholic and militantly wet locale, Bishop John Ireland led the Catholic Total Abstinence Union. In the late 1870s, a thousand Irish activists cooperated with the Sons of Temperance and the Good Templars in pledging voluntary abstinence. Ireland and his followers wanted to remake the “drunken Paddy” stereotype. In 1876, 9 percent of St. Paul’s Irish Catholics belonged to temperance societies. To Ireland’s regret, German Catholics showed no interest in temperance. Germans brewed almost all the city’s beer, and in 1887 Germans operated 45 percent of St. Paul’s saloons; the Irish had only 9 percent. Local Catholics universally opposed prohibition.
Employers often opposed alcohol in the late 1800s. Paternalistic founders of large corporations took a personal interest in the welfare of their workers, even as their companies exploited labor. George Pullman built his eponymous sleeping cars in the Chicago suburbs in order to establish a factory surrounded by a model dry town. Absenteeism from drunkenness declined. Thomas Edison located his engineering works and lightbulb factory in Menlo Park, New Jersey. The inventor effectively kept saloons away from the site. Later, the fanatically dry Henry Ford moved his auto company from Detroit to suburban Dearborn. Ford workers were not allowed to drink either on or off the job, and company spies checked garbage cans at workers’ homes for liquor bottles.
No dry employer opposed the use of alcohol more vigorously than John D. Rockefeller, whose Standard Oil Company monopolized the petroleum industry. Realizing that oil was the key commodity in the machine age, he had cornered the market to become America’s first billionaire. Although Rockefeller had practical reasons to oppose alcohol in a refinery, his fanaticism was rooted in his Baptist faith. He really did believe in the Demon Rum. This stupendously wealthy man and his son, John D. Rockefeller Jr., contributed $350,000 to the Anti-Saloon League from 1900 to 1919.
The dry crusade also appealed to some native-born labor leaders, and the railroad brotherhoods required abstinence. Terence Powderly of the Knights of Labor, for instance, favored prohibition. In 1895 he declared, “No workingman ever drank a glass of rum who did not rob his wife and children of the price of it.”7 The Knights excluded liquor dealers from membership, and the heavily German brewery workers union bolted to the new American Federation of Labor over Powderly’s anti-liquor stance. Under Samuel Gompers, the AFL avoided controversial social issues.
To evade employer spies, many union locals met in saloons. Workers were allowed to use a back room if they purchased beer. Another source of anxiety about saloons, especially in New York and Chicago in the 1880s and 1890s, came from drinking houses that harbored political radicals, particularly anarchists who had migrated from Germany. Anarchists drank beer, held discussions, and planned strikes or protests, including bombings. These establishments displayed prints of Karl Marx on the wall and stocked radical newspapers such as Freiheit. As anarchists, they defied the law to stay open on Sundays.
A lot of the rising hostility to saloons came from growing opposition to illegal gambling and prostitution. Moral purity crusades were strong where large numbers of single young men congregated, which was often the case in immigrant communities. “Alien illiterates rule our cities today,” declared Frances Willard. “The saloon is their palace; the toddy stick their scepter.”8 Rough urban working-class male culture enraged middle-class women devoted to family, education, moral improvement, and social uplift. Saloons displayed pictures of female nudes, stank of urine and stale beer, had tobacco spittle on the floor, and sold cigars as well as alcohol. In addition to promoting easy sex, sal
oons were often the sites of drunken brawls. Their powerful role in politics angered feminists, who knew that saloonkeepers opposed women’s suffrage.
While the WCTU tried to civilize the country by closing saloons, drinking houses flourished in the West. Mining towns from Virginia City, Nevada, to Leadville, Colorado, and Bisbee, Arizona, were rife with boisterous miners, rowdy saloons, faro games, and prostitutes. “The entire fabric of the Territory was constructed on liquor,” an Arizona pioneer recalled.9 In 1876, Wild Bill Hickok, a legendary frontier sheriff, was shot while playing poker in a saloon with his back turned unwisely to the door in Deadwood, Dakota Territory. The raunchiness, violence, and romance of the hard-drinking western saloon as an essential element of American life lasted well into the twentieth century. The German composer Kurt Weill and librettist Bertolt Brecht took up the theme in the opera The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (1930), and for two decades Marshal Matt Dillon and Doc Adams hung out at Miss Kitty’s saloon in Dodge City on the long-running hit television series Gunsmoke (1955–1975).
If cowboys indulged in drunken sprees at the end of the Chisholm Trail, so did the native inhabitants of the Great Plains. Alcohol played a role in buffalo hunts and ghost dances. So liquor on the frontier in the nineteenth century also meant lucrative trade with Native Americans, who were sometimes plied with spirits until they handed over valuable furs, horses, or land. Trade in the white man’s firewater dated to colonial times. Indian violence under the influence of liquor led the federal government in 1834 to curb private vending to native peoples on reservations. The statute, however, did not apply off reservations. In 1862 and 1874, Congress enacted new restrictions, but these measures proved ineffective. In 1892, Congress imposed a more robust form of prohibition on Native Americans over whom the federal government exercised guardianship. Reservations became officially dry, although Indians continued to drink. In 1953, Indian prohibition was repealed; today, some tribes continue to ban alcohol sales on their land.10
The all-male clientele of this saloon in the mining town of Central City, Colorado, was typical of frontier watering holes in the 1870s. Denver Public Library, Western History Collection, X-2947
While the temperance forces concentrated on drying out the United States with new legislation, the problem of drunkenness remained. Moral exhortations against drinking had a limited effect on the nation’s numerous alcoholics. In 1866, Dr. Leslie Keeley, a Union army surgeon, settled in Dwight, Illinois, about seventy miles south of Chicago. Many of his patients had serious drinking problems, and in 1879 he announced, “Drunkenness is a disease and I can cure it.”11 A year later, the Keeley Institute opened in Dwight to provide four-week treatments at one of the world’s first detoxification centers. Bed rest, excellent meals, and refined conversation were part of the therapy, but so were oral infusions or injections of Keeley’s double chloride of gold cure. In the 1880s and 1890s, hundreds of patients arrived at the Keeley Institute each week to begin treatment. By 1896, Keeley had made a fortune by franchising 126 treatment centers in nine countries.
Around 1900, alcohol policy in the United States was contradictory and ambiguous. While most of the country was legally wet, there were many dry localities, although some were only nominally dry. In other words, it was easy to find a drink. A certain amount of naivete prevailed inside the WCTU. Though respectable women neither drank alcohol nor visited saloons, they used tonics, such as Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound. Herbal alcohol-infused potions were especially favored for coping with menstrual cycles or menopause. In 1904, the Massachusetts Board of Health tested Pinkham’s elixir and found it was 20.6 percent alcohol. Frances Willard herself for a time drank a “medicinal” glass of beer with her daily dinner.
For decades, the main organized opposition to prohibition came from the alcohol industry. As was the case in many other industries after the Civil War, large-scale manufacturers became dominant. In the three decades after 1865, cheap abundant corn and proximity to the Midwest market led distilling to be concentrated in Illinois and Kentucky under the monopoly control of the Distilling Company of America, which was commonly called the Whiskey Trust. German immigrants established nationally important breweries, especially in Milwaukee (Pabst, Schlitz, and Blatz), Cincinnati (Moerlein), and St. Louis (Anheuser-Busch and Lemp). German-style lager beer could not be brewed in hot weather, and Milwaukee’s short summer gave it an edge. Its beer was shipped to Chicago and beyond. Busch captured much of the important Texas beer market by becoming the first brewer to use refrigerated railroad cars.
Industrial capitalism in the late 1800s favored the producer over the retailer. Major breweries established tied-house saloons, that is, the brewers owned or financially controlled the saloons, and each saloonkeeper agreed to sell only one brand of beer. The brewer provided the building, furniture, fixtures, and inventory in return for monthly rent. High wholesale prices, which included big producer profits, kept profit margins for the retailer low. Producers franchised far too many outlets in order to deny a market to competitors. A national brewer might locate four or six saloons on a single block to capture foot traffic and keep out rivals. In 1909, brewers owned or controlled 70 percent of the nation’s saloons. In New York City and Chicago, 80 percent of saloons were tied houses. These numbers do not count the outlets that the distillers controlled. While this system benefited the producer, it did not help the retailer, who was forced to sell beer at the same low price as the competitors. Some saloonkeepers used musical entertainment or games to attract customers, but the more lucrative way was to offer illegal gambling or prostitution. In one working-class neighborhood in Chicago, prostitutes were found in 34 percent of saloons.
Saloonkeepers found other ways to turn a profit. Bartenders encouraged treating, which was the custom by which a patron bought a round for everyone in the saloon. Reformers attacked treating, but it was popular with regulars because it promoted male bonding. Some saloons watered spirits or refreshed stale beer with chemicals. Others sold cheap alcohol from bottles that had once contained expensive liquor. Drunkards and children were served. One Ohio seller explained, “We must create the appetite for liquor in the growing boys. Men who drink . . . will die.”12 Criminal syndicates fenced stolen goods in disreputable drinking houses. At Mickey Finn’s Lone Star Saloon in Chicago, customers were invited to try the Mickey Finn Special. After the victim passed out from the drugged drink, he was robbed, beaten, and often stripped. Finn was put out of business in 1903.
A common way to lure customers was the free lunch, which was offered from a buffet table with the purchase of a five-cent glass of beer. To the worker who earned one dollar a day, the free lunch was not a bargain, especially if the salty ham, sardines, potato salad, pickles, and pretzels made him thirsty and led him to buy a second glass of beer, as the seller hoped. A hearty free lunch might draw a large crowd, if the place was close to a factory. Although respectable women did not enter saloons, some working-class bars made an exception. Female factory workers took the free lunch along with a beer in a back room, which they entered through a special side entrance. The idea appalled temperance reformers. The Reverend Mark Matthews of Seattle denounced the saloon: “The most fiendish, corrupt and hell-soaked institution that ever crawled out of the slime of the eternal pit.”13
Some saloonkeepers gained political power. A voting precinct might be located in the saloon, and the seller became a precinct captain. If voting took place in the back room, chits for free drinks might be given to men who cast ballots, which were not necessarily secret. The proprietor might then advance to elected office. In 1890, eleven of New York City’s twenty-four aldermen were saloonkeepers. “It is the degenerate vote that has in the past overwhelmed the liberties of free people,” warned Representative Richmond Hobson (D-AL). “And it is the degenerate vote in our big cities that is a menace to our institutions.”14 Muckraking magazines gradually exposed urban corruption practiced by political machines whose power was rooted in saloons. New York’s De
mocratic Party based in Tammany Hall closely resembled the Republican machine that ran Philadelphia. Party bosses were usually Irish Catholic immigrants and their sons or grandsons, and most had ties to saloons. City thievery, payoffs, and prostitution were commonplace. “If we wish to purify politics,” said the Anti-Saloon League, “the saloon must be destroyed.”15
Carry Nation heard the call. Even legally dry Kansas was far from dry. This troubled woman with a stormy family history lived in Kiowa, Kansas, in 1900. Furious at the brazenness of the town’s liquor dealers, she took matters into her own hands, literally, and destroyed the fixtures and bottles in the interior of a saloon with a hatchet in the first of her many “smashings.”16 Local officials declined to arrest her. Nation’s attack drew national attention, and in 1901 she set off for Topeka, where she used hatchets to smash saloons. When arrested, she resorted to prayer and fasting. Usually an admirer quietly posted bail. Her Topeka campaign drew more publicity, and she took her hatchetations to the East, where the wet press ridiculed her. She continued to attack saloons, but she was careful never to smash a legally licensed place. Nation also organized sell-out performances on Broadway, where she re-created her saloon destructions for the thrill of the curious. A celebrity, Nation continued as an eccentric dry crusader until her death in 1911. Serious dry reformers were embarrassed by her theatrics.
The most powerful and effective anti-liquor organization in the history of the United States was the Anti-Saloon League (ASL), which was founded by evangelical ministers and lawyers in Berea, Ohio, in 1893.17 The ASL had strong ties to Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians. Although many Americans opposed public drunkenness and conceded that alcohol impoverished families and led to terrible crimes, including wife abuse, these same people often found a ban on alcohol to be extreme. Weddings and holiday parties were frequently celebrated with liquor, and many people saw no harm in a glass of wine or beer at home with dinner. Chronic drunkenness in a seedy saloon was different, and immigrant-owned drinking houses lacked respectability. The ASL played on these mixed feelings by stressing opposition to the saloon as an institution. Although the ASL’s ultimate goal was national prohibition, the organization placed the saloon front and center with the slogan “The saloon must go!”