Prohibition: Thirteen Years That Changed America (4 page)

The symptoms of “this odious disease” included “certain immodest actions” and other “extravagant acts: singing, hallooing, roaring, imitating the noises of brute animals, jumping, tearing off clothes, dancing naked, breaking glasses and china.” The specific diseases caused by liquor were listed as follows:

1. Decay of appetite, sickness at stomach, puking of bile and discharging of frothy and viscous phlegm.

2. Obstruction of the liver.

3. Jaundice and dropping of belly and limbs, and finally every cavity of the body.

4. Hoarseness and a husky cough, leading to consumption.

5. Diabetes, i.e., a frequent and weakening discharge of pale or sweetish urine.

6. Redness and eruptions in different parts of the body, rumbuds, a form of leprosy.

7. A fetid breath.

8. Frequent and disgusting belchings.

9. Epilepsy.

10. Gout.

11. Madness — one third of patients confined owed their condition to ardent spirits.
Most of the diseases are of a mortal nature
.

Rush’s renown and the apocalyptic imagery of his prose had an enormous effect on ordinary people, and on physicians and clergymen around the country, as well as on congressmen in Washington — though President James Madison continued to drink a pint of whiskey before breakfast. Rush himself was no Prohibitionist: on
the contrary, the core of his argument was that consumers should be made to switch from hard liquor to wine and beer. To wean addicts, he even suggested mixing wine with opium to calm them down until they were cured — for opium then was no controlled substance but an innocuous, effective drug, almost as widespread as aspirin today.

Rush saw hard liquor as a “temporary aberration.” The moderate consumption of wine and beer, ensuring health and lasting happiness, would ensure a radiant future for generations to come. Some cynics, such as Boston’s Fisher Ames, who had defeated Samuel Adams for Congress in 1788, were more cynical, and realistic: “If any man supposes that a mere law can turn the taste of a people from ardent spirits to malt liquors, he has a most romantic notion of legislative power.” This was a warning later Prohibition advocates would dismiss or ignore.

There was one issue that united both laissez-faire advocates and hands-on Temperance interventionists: all those in authority, in Indian territories and reservations, banned the sale of liquor to the “native American” survivors, or at least issued orders that liquor was not to be used as a medium of exchange. Earlier traders bartered cheap rum for valuable otter furs, and witnessed the consequences: Indian tribes became so addicted that their interest in trapping animals waned.

But such orders were systematically ignored. Liquor was introduced in the Northwest by John Jacob Astor’s Pacific Fur Company in 180% at first with disappointing results — to the traders. A company employee, Gabriel Franchere, noted that the “mild and inoffensive” Pacific Northwest Indians did not know how to make liquor, and despised those who drank. “These savages,” he wrote, “are not addicted to intemperance, regard liquor as poison and consider drunkenness disgraceful.”
⁶
Strong drink, noted another Northwest company trader, Ross Cox, was anathema to them: “All the Indians on the Columbia River entertain a strong aversion to ardent spirits.” Liquor, they believed, was only fit for slaves.

Sir George Simpson, head of the Hudson’s Bay Company in London, and a highly moral man, was aware of this and issued instructions that on no account should liquor be used as barter. But by 1824, the battle had been lost: rival traders, including Russians from across the Siberian border, had no such qualms, and although the Indian chiefs at first sent them packing, younger members of the Pacific Northwest tribes eventually challenged the elders’ authority. The traders were
cunning, devious — and patient. Some provided the Indian hunters with slaves, bought from other tribes, to sweeten their deals. The Hudson’s Bay Company directives were still observed, at least in principle: strong drink was not used as a medium of exchange. It
was
, however, used to celebrate a deal. First the traders and the Indians drank together, to seal their contract. Then liquor became a bonus package, along with money, that accompanied every transaction. Soon afterward, this fiction went by the board, and liquor replaced money. Ten otter pelts could be had for a bottle of whiskey. Russian traders used vodka.

The result was a holocaust: liquor addiction went hand in hand with mortal disease. The Columbia River Indians died en masse, and some, such as the Chinooks, were virtually wiped out. The tragedy was recorded in extraordinarily lyrical poems, passed down from generation to generation by survivors. Here is the piteous cry of an Indian chief as he simultaneously chronicles his decay and finds solace in the whiskey that enables him to forget his plight:

I am afraid to drink but still I like to drink.

I don’t like to drink, but I have to drink whiskey.

Here I am singing a love song, drinking.

I didn’t know that whiskey was no good.

And still I am drinking it.

I found out that whiskey is no good.

Come, come closer to me, my slaves,

And I’ll give you a drink of whiskey.

Here we are drinking now.

Have some more, have some more of my whiskey.

Have a good time with it.

Come closer to me, come closer to me, my slaves,
We are drinking now, we feel pretty good.

Now you feel just like me.
⁷

Once the drinking habit started, Edwin Lemert,
⁸
a native-American specialist, noted the Indians drank until they dropped. Massacres, blood feuds, and killings all became endemic after 1820. And though the Hudson’s Bay Company reiterated its instructions in 1831, unregulated competition proved too strong: the whiskey-for-skins barter continued, with fearful consequences.

Most Temperance activists, of course, were unaware of the Indians’ tragic predicament. But whether as a result of Dr. Rush’s writings,
or because of the growing spectacle of “immoderate” drinking among increasing numbers of manual workers, Temperance societies mushroomed throughout America at the turn of the century. Active at first on the East Coast, and stimulated by campaigns conducted by puritan theologians such as the Reverend Lyman Beecher and his more famous daughter, Harriet Beecher Stowe, they formed, split, and amalgamated, but invariably thrived.
The Philanthropist
, the first Temperance newspaper, began publication in Boston in 1826. By 1829, there were a thousand Temperance societies throughout America, and
The Philanthropist
chronicled their spectacular successes: liquor dealers pledging to stop selling hard liquor and drunkards pledging no longer to drink the stuff. In 1831, Lewis Cass, a prominent Temperance advocate appointed secretary of War, put an end to the army’s liquor ration, also banning the sale of “ardent spirits” in all military installations. By 1836, a web of Temperance societies — some affiliated, others single-mindedly autonomous — blanketed inhabited America. No preacher — whether Methodist, Presbyterian, or Catholic — could ignore them, and many clergymen became totally committed to these movements, providing venues, and in some cases actively using the pulpit to raise funds. They were not yet politically important, at least not in the sense that “wet” or “dry” advocacy might determine election outcomes. But they were becoming bolder, more extreme — and more intolerant. By 1836, Rush’s vision of a healthy community enjoying moderate quantities of beer and wine was largely forgotten: the new Temperance leaders were on the warpath against wine, beer, and cider drinkers as well. For the first time, from the 1830s on — in pulpits, pamphlets, and medical journals — total Prohibition was being openly advocated.

A
new generation of puritanical Temperance advocates, from the early nineteenth century on, discovered — and richly mined — a new theme, both simple and compelling, designed to put an end to yet another avenue of pleasure: drinking, they decided, was a mortal sin. A leading Boston preacher, the Reverend Justin Edwards, was among the first to spread this doctrine. Others quickly took it up. The evils of drink were no longer to be found, exclusively, in physical and mental deterioration: what was at stake, from the 1830s onward, was the human soul itself.

The puritan ethic has always required a “sign,” an incontrovertible,
visible proof of
salvation, among its elect. In earlier days, material prosperity — as Tawney showed in
Religion and the Rise of Capitalism
— had been proof enough. But in the 1830s, it became fashionable to invoke another “sign,” another kind of proof: preachers all over America began equating drunkenness with damnation, abstinence with salvation. And salvation, according to an editorial in the
Temperance Recorder
, one of a spate of new prohibitionist journals, would
bring about “unprecedented peace, happiness, prosperity.” Lyman Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s father, repeatedly relayed the terrifying message: “Drunkards, no more than murderers, shall inherit the Kingdom of God.”
¹
The message became increasingly vituperative, increasingly extreme. Here, for instance, is the Reverend Mark Matthews, moderator of Seattle’s First Presbyterian Church: “The saloon is the most fiendish, corrupt, hell-soaked institution that ever crawled out of the slime of the eternal pit. ... It takes your sweet innocent daughter, robs her of her virtue, and transforms her into a brazen, wanton harlot. ... It is the open sore of this land.” It was a tone that would retain its power right up to the imposition of Prohibition in 1920.

With the new religious fervor, even Rush acknowledged that his scientific evidence had taken second place. Given that the huge majority of Americans still indulged in liquor with evident enjoyment, and little care for their health, “I am disposed to believe,” he wrote, “that the business must be affected finally by religion alone.”

Not that medical evidence was neglected. As so often happens, Rush’s learned treatise spawned a rash of pseudoscientific, alarmist nonsense. A Dr. Thomas Sewell of Columbian College, Washington, alleged that liquor was responsible for most human afflictions: “Dyspepsia, jaundice, emaciation, corpulence, rheumatism, gout, palpitation, lethargy, palsy, apoplexy, melancholy, madness, delirium tremens, premature old age. ...”

These were but a “small part of the endless catalogue of diseases produced by alcohol drinking.” Physicians also began propagating as scientific fact a myth that became accepted, for decades, as verifiable truth: that excessive drinking could lead to the body’s spontaneous combustion. Case after case, recorded not only in American but in French and British nineteenth-century medical journals, involved individuals bursting into flames from close contact with a candle, suddenly and inexplicably exploding, or even “... quietly simmering, while smoke poured from the apertures of the body. . . . Vivid accounts of the terrible sufferings of drunkards whose insides had been transformed into roaring furnaces were published in most of the leading temperance papers. . . . and temperance lecturers were quick to point out that such an unusual experience was but a mild foretaste of what awaited the drunkard in hell.”
²
Dr. Eliphalet Nott, President of Union College,
Schenectady, New York, was an expert on this form of “spontaneous combustion,” and firmly believed that

. . . these causes of death of drunkards by internal fires, kindled often spontaneously in the fumes of alcohol, that escape through the pores of the skin, have become so numerous and so incontrovertible that I presume no person of information will now be found to call the reality of their existence into question.

No one delivered these grim messages more eloquently than the Reverend Justin Edwards, a prolific writer and speaker, whose fulminating, alliterative style made him the most sought-after preacher of his day, and the Prohibitionists’ chief attraction. His “Temperance Manual,” originally devised as a sermon, widely distributed throughout America,
³
began with the grim premise that any human activity that did not directly involve religious worship was a misappropriation of the brief time on earth allotted to human beings, for “Ever since man turned away from God as a source of enjoyment, and from his service as a means of obtaining it, he has been prone to seek it in some improper bodily or mental gratification.”

It was necessary, first of all, to demolish the theory that liquor was “the good stuff of life.” Edwards ridiculed Holinshed’s sixteenth-century chronicles, which claimed that

It sloweth age; it strengthened! youth; it helpeth digestion; it cutteth flegm; it abandoneth melancholia; it relisheth the heart; it highlighteth the mind; it quickeneth the spirits; it cureth the hydropsie; it expelleth the gravel; it puffeth away ventosity; it keepeth and preserveth the head from whirling, the eyes from dazzling, the tongue from lisping, the teeth from chattering, the hands from shivering, the sinews from shrinking, the veins from crumbling, the bones from aching, the marrow from soaking. . . .