Prohibition: Thirteen Years That Changed America (5 page)

But the core of Edwards’s argument was that liquor never had been, and never could be, part of the kingdom of God, for “The ingredient [vinous fermentation] is not the product of creation, nor the result of any living process in nature. It does not exist among the living works of God.” On the contrary,

... it is as really different from what existed before in the fruits and the grains as the poisonous miasma is different from the decomposition and decay of the vegetables from which it springs. It is as different as poison is from food, sickness from health, drunkenness from sobriety. . . they are as really different in their natures as life is from death.

He was on tricky ground here. How could God, creator of all things, not be held responsible for this “poisonous miasma”? After all, as even his most devoted parishioners must have observed, fruit and vegetables rotted with age, in a natural fermentation process.

In his zeal to deny liquor any organic authenticity whatever, his metaphors became increasingly mixed, his arguments more extreme:

To conclude that because one is good as an article of diet, and therefore the other must be good, is as really unphilosophical and false as it would be to conclude that because potatoes are good as an article of food, that therefore the soil out of which they grow is good for the same purpose.

Without a single redeeming quality, liquor

. . . has been among the more constant and fruitful sources of all our woes. Yet such has been its power to deceive men that while evil after evil has rolled in upon them, like waves of the sea, they have continued till within a few years knowingly and voluntarily to increase the cause. . . . Ministers preached against drunkenness and drank the drunkard’s poison.

Conventional wisdom, in short, was that “to take a little now and then does a man good.” But, Edwards continued, between 1820 and 1826 “it was realized that if drunkenness was to be done away with, men must abstain not only from abuse but from the use of what intoxicates — that is one of the first principles of moral duty.” The result would be immediately forthcoming: “They will enjoy better health;
they can perform more labor;
⁴
they will live longer.”

Alcohol was a drug that altered perceptions. Sometimes, he admitted, “men take alcohol to drown present sorrow.” Thus,

A man lost his wife, the mother of his children, and he was in great distress. He took alcohol, and under its influence grew cheerful, and seemed full of mirth. He seized the dead body of his wife, and with high glee dragged her across the room by the hair of her head, and threw her into the coffin.

Likewise, “auctioneers, merchants and others have often furnished it to their customers, gratis, to make them feel more rich, and thus induce them to purchase more goods and at higher prices, and thus cheat them. “ It was, of course, the Reverend Justin Edwards’s intention to strike the fear of God into his listeners, and his diatribe ends with a horrific description of the impact of alcohol on the human body.

Why does alcohol cause death? Were the human body transparent, every man might answer this question. Alcohol inflames the sinews of the stomach. The surface becomes inflamed and begins to grow black. The coats become thickened. Ulcers begin to form and spread out till . . . the whole inner coat of that fundamental organ puts on an appearance of mortification, and becomes in color like the back of the chimney. Not infrequently cancers are formed and the whole surface becomes one common sore. The man cannot digest his food. The system is not nourished. Other organs become diseased, till the body itself is literally little else than a mass of putrefaction.

The “spontaneous combustion” theory was a fact.

Take the blood of a drunkard, from his head, or his liver, and distil it. You have alcohol. It has actually been taken from the brain, strong enough, on application of fire, to burn. Dr. Kirk of Scotland dissected a man who died in a fit of intoxication. From the lateral ventricles of his brain he took a fluid distinctly sensible to the smell as whiskey. When he applied a candle to it, it instantly took fire and burnt blue.

However absurd, such tales were of considerable symbolic importance to a devout Christian audience. The point was made that the drunkard was not only destroyed by fire in his own lifetime: his hideous fate reminded them of the eternal hell-fire that awaited him in the thereafter.

This, and other apocalyptic vignettes designed to strike fear in the hearts of all its readers, was the theme of an 1850s best-seller. Timothy
Shay Arthur’s
Ten Nights in a Bar Room and What I Saw There
— an immensely popular, mawkish tearjerker — described the appalling fate, the “road to hell,” of all those who succumbed to the temptation of ardent spirits. Interestingly, though such potboilers were dutifully written by profit-seeking hacks, no truly great American literature used the ravages of alcohol as a pretext to examine current social issues on a broader canvas.

But there was no nineteenth-century American writer comparable to Emile Zola (Jack London is his nearest equivalent, at any rate in terms of subject matter), whose favorite theme was the destruction of human lives through alcohol — the only drug that enabled the dispossessed to endure the monstrously cruel social system exploiting them. In America, alcohol was a religious rather than political or social problem. The Puritans’ view of habitual drunkards was singularly uncharitable: they were perceived as weak, self-indulgent, profoundly flawed individuals, not, as in Zola, as victims of an unjust society, alcohol merely accelerating their doom.

In early nineteenth-century American literature there is almost no hint that excessive drinking may have been the only solace of desperate men and women for whom there was no other release — that for underprivileged males (women were not admitted) the saloon was at once refuge, club, library, employment agency, and sole source of local news. Jack London is an exception, but his descriptions of America’s saloon culture show a mixed attitude. Although he was fascinated by the working-class companionship and sense of belonging that only the saloon could provide, he nevertheless regarded liquor as an intrinsic evil, never bothering to ask why working-class people became drunkards in the first place.

The thrust of the new, hard-line Temperance preachers was very different, and the impact of men such as the Reverend Justin Edwards was enormous because the message they imparted was far more ominous: they were convinced that the liquor industry was nothing less than a vast, godless conspiracy intended to undermine society. Their message struck an immediate chord, for any conspiracy theory — whether it has to do with witchcraft, communism, satanic child abuse, or even more recently the United Nations — has always found a ready, credulous American audience.

As the Reverend Justin Edwards constantly reminded his listeners,
Judge Jaggett says: “Over every grog shop ought to be written in great capitals:
THE ROAD TO HELL, LEADING DOWN TO THE CHAMBERS OF DEATH
. You sell to the healthy, and you poison them. So by the time the father is dead, the son is ready to take his place.” So with men who sell poisonous drink. If they sold it to none but drunkards, they would soon kill them and the evil would cease. But the difference is: they sell to sober men. No sooner have they killed one generation than they have prepared another to be killed in the same way. That is abominable, and ought to receive universal execration.

He conceded that not
all
those involved were necessarily conscious conspirators. Some (relatively innocent) saloon keepers might plead: “But in that case I must change my business?” To which he replied, with the earnestness of the truly saved: “So must the thief, the highway robber, the murderer.”

The American Temperance Society, though silent on Christian dogma, was even more intransigent. One of its booklets,
“Medico-legal Considerations upon alcoholism, and the moral and criminal responsibility of inebriates,” by
Paluel de Marmon, M.D. (reproduced in 1872 in the
Medical World)
, asserted that liquor

. . . modifies, perverts or abolishes the functions of the nerve centers. In the first stage, the drunkard is jolly good-natured, witty. His natural timidity has been changed to boldness. He is kind, generous, friendly. . . he is social and obliging. The words flow out of his mouth like a stream.

This was followed by gradual loss of physical control, ending in “brutishness and somnolence.” In a tougher vein, M. W. Baker, M.D., in the
Journal of Inebriety
(April of 1887) advocated establishing

. . . special asylums for the inebriates on a par with criminal lunatic asylums. They should resemble those provided for the insane in being under medical care; and in possessing equal powers of detention and control, and will differ from insane asylums in their stricter discipline and in the constant employment of their patients.

He recommended a mandatory one-year term for those found drunk, and a two-year term for a second offense. The magazine claimed
that “300 physicians have subscribed $6300 to the U.S. inebriate asylum plan.”

Ironically, as Temperance movements of all types gathered strength throughout America, the actual
consumption
of liquor decreased considerably. Data show that in 1850, per capita yearly consumption was little more than two gallons — proof that the “spiritual” health of the nation was by now a far more important consideration than the physical health originally advocated by Dr. Rush.

The growing power of church movements, especially on the East Coast, spawned a generation of new lay activists. The 1830s and 1840s saw the rise of the first great tub-thumping prohibitionist advocates — not just clergymen but men such as General James Ap-pleton of Massachusetts, who first advocated total Prohibition in the
Salem Gazette
in 1832 and entered politics solely to further its cause, becoming a member of the Massachusetts state legislature in 1836.

There were politicians who never achieved national status but nonetheless became immensely influential in their own states: Neal Dow, a prominent Quaker, and a tanner and timber speculator from Portland (Maine), alternately cajoled and bullied his fellow citizens, lecturing them relentlessly on the evils of drink, until in 1840 this small town became America’s first “dry” city (though illegal, unlicensed grog shops abounded).

In 1847, an important Maine Supreme Court ruling restricted drinking hours throughout the state, setting the scene for future legislation. This gave Dow a new importance: he had lobbied for it for years. Saloon keepers and liquor retailers argued that such measures were illegal, threatened individual liberty, and were in restraint of trade. They lost their case.

The ambitions of Neal Dow, this “pretty dapper little man,” as his political opponents described him, did not stop there. Although nominally a Republican, he was no party hack, and was convinced he was if not presidential material at least qualified to be vice president of the United States, regardless of the winning party. (He partially fulfilled this goal, in 1880 becoming the tiny Prohibition party’s presidential candidate.)

A brilliant lobbyist, drawing on his own considerable funds, and unfazed by repeated defeats in the Maine legislature, he constantly
urged that “traffic in intoxicating drink be held and adjudged as an infamous crime.”

By 1851 his persistence was rewarded, and he scored a famous victory: on June 2 that year, the Maine State Legislature finally passed the bill he had proposed so many times, making the sale of liquor illegal throughout the state. It was a law with teeth. Its provisions contained fines, prison for repeat offenders, searches, seizures, and raids on liquor stocks. Almost the entire paraphernalia of the later (1920) Eighteenth Amendment was to be found in this early Maine law.

Dow reveled in his new fame. He was now the independent mayor of Portland, welcoming Republican
and
Democratic supporters provided they held pro-Temperance views and initiating a policy that would prove so useful to the later Anti-Saloon League. He began staging much-publicized raids in his hometown, watching with evident glee as thousands of gallons of illegal liquor were poured down the gutters in front of the local town hall.

The climate of blind hate between Temperance advocates and their opponents extended to other matters. The “wets” were, by and large, dyed-in-the-wool conservatives: backed by the brewers, the distillers, and the saloon keepers, they not only opposed any form of legislation restricting drinking but were in favor of maintaining slavery. They regarded Temperance activists and abolitionists as fanatics, tarred with the same brush. This explains the violence of the attack made on Dow by his principal opponent, Democratic Senator Shepherd Cary, on the eve of the Civil War.

“I train in a different company,” said Cary,

and I do not expect to have any influence in the party until the reign of niggerism and fanaticism is over. A few years ago the jackdaw Mayor of Pordand, this man with the fancy vest, was at the head of the nigger movement in that city. . . . Even Abolitionism was not strong enough for his diseased palate, and he has added temperance to his former stock of humbugs. Is this Federal-abolition wringneck to be allowed to dictate to a Democratic legislation what enactments it shall pass?