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By bob k.
Our main object is not to reform inebriates, but to induce all temperate to continue temperate by practicing total abstinence . . . The drunkards, if not reformed, will die, and the land will be free.
Reverend Justin Edwards, 1820 speech
There’s a lot of drinking in 21st Century America. Booze seems to be almost everywhere. Whereas we used to drink covertly in drive-in theaters, we now can down overpriced adult beverages in VIP cineplexes. There’s no need to wait for post-round cocktails at the golf course, just flag down the cart girl and her mobile bar. All manner of events are celebrated with liquor. Other than the fast food outlets, almost every restaurant sells alcohol. Servers push drinks as alcoholic beverages drive up the tab and the gratuity. Much to the chagrin of the MADD people, fans drink before, during, and after sporting events.
Ours is a boozy culture.
As hard as it might be to imagine, there were times when Americans drank more – much more. The Pilgrims and Puritans arrived in ships that were loaded with wine and beer. A shortage of potable water in colonial America saw men, women, and children downing daily rations of cider and ale. The author Susan Cheever tells us that the prominent citizens we read of in our history books were impaired a good portion of the time. Per capita consumption of alcohol was double what is seen in the current age.
Following the Revolutionary War, taxation of products containing alcohol led to a temporary decline in their use, but America went on a binge in the early 19th Century as farmers found out their corn could be distilled. Corn liquor was easier to ship and in no danger of spoiling along the way. Despite the fact that corn liquor was incredibly cheap, the farmers netted more revenue. By the 1820s, per person consumption figures rose to triple the amounts seen today.
Wherever there is drinking, there are drinking problems and problem drinkers. With a higher degree of imbibing, those troubles increase.
The promiscuous boozing, now with hard liquor, brought counter-measures organized primarily by the religious. Some local groups, formed mainly by affluent churchmen, began lobbying for moderation in drinking. The lower classes were in need of reform. Alcohol abuse among wealthier and more prominent citizens was viewed quite differently. Carruthers is going through a hard time since his wife died. Smith has always been a bit eccentric.
Years earlier, Dr. Benjamin Rush had railed against hard liquor while seeing wine, beer, and cider as reasonable substitutes. Initially, the temperance organizations pushed for less imbibing rather than no imbibing. In 1826, Lyman Beecher (1775-1863) and Justin Edwards (1787-1853) formed the American Temperance Society (ATS). The group fairly quickly shifted to the target of total abstinence that Edwards had been in favor of from the start. That change lost them the support of some of their wealthier supporters who were unwilling to give up their ports and fine sherries. After all, it was the working classes who abused alcohol and misbehaved in a variety of ways.
Not representing the best of Christian charity and compassion, Reverend Edwards offered the statement in the essay’s header. That drunkards were the agents of their own destruction was virtually the universal view. If they wanted to drink less, they would.
The pair of Protestant ministers drew from the plentiful coffers of Protestant churches to finance paid missionaries travelling the country to spread their message. The American Temperance Society expanded rapidly. By 1831 there were 2,200 auxiliaries and by 1838, there were 1,200,000 members in 8,000 branches. Alcohol consumption was substantially lower by the time of the Civil War (1861-1865).
When Bill W. was dreaming big dreams of expansion for his newly organized group of sober alcoholics, the Rockefeller aide. Frank Amos would have confirmed the wisdom of paid agents. He was well-acquainted with temperance history.
The Woman’s Crusade
Following a period of dormancy that began with the lead-up to the Civil War, the conflict itself, and the reconstruction that followed, the Temperance Movement was refired in Hillsboro, Ohio. Shortly before Christmas of 1873, Diocetian Lewis (1823-1888) delivered a lecture, The Duty of Christian Women in the Cause of Temperance. Eliza Jane Trimble Thompson (1816-1905) led a group of 75 women on William Smith’s drug store where they persuaded the proprietor to stop selling alcohol without a prescription. At two of the town’s three other pharmacies, other pledges were obtained. After Christmas, the women marched on bars and got one owner to pray with them outside. Word of these successes spread and similar activism was undertaken elsewhere in Ohio and in neighboring states. Bottles were smashed and beer kegs were shattered with axes.
Leaving the sanctuary of their homes, they carried with them an aura of moral responsibility and upright character as they entered bars filled with smoking and imbibing men and prayed on the streets in front of drinking establishments for weeks on end.
Many men were incredulous that the respectable women of Southern Ohio were capable of organizing daily prayer sessions and well-orchestrated marches into male domains.
Courts and Temperance Ladies, Richard Chusad, Yale Journal of Law and Feminism, p. 21
Within a short period, most of the closed bars re-opened. The Woman’s Crusade was not terribly effective but it did refire the Temperance Movement and also paved the way for the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU).
The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union
“At the end of the 19th century, Americans were spending over a billion dollars on alcoholic beverages each year, compared to $900 million on meat, and less than $200 million on public education.” (wctu.org)
In 1874, the WCTU held a national convention where Annie Wittenmyer was elected to the presidency. WCTU members were proponents of “gospel temperance.” To save drunkards and reform liquor sellers, mass meetings, prayer, and publicity were employed. The group pressed for temperance instruction for children and had remarkable success at getting educational programs describing the dangers of drinking into schools. Strong lobbying resulted in new textbooks being printed that warned of the danger posed by even small amounts of alcohol. The indoctrination of children with the anti-alcohol message was important as the target of a national prohibition became increasingly realistic.
Eventually, “schools taught that alcohol itself, not merely the abuse of it, was harmful. One by one, states passed prohibition laws of their own. The first to do so was Maine in 1851, and by the time national Prohibition went into effect in 1920, thirty-three states, covering 63% of the U.S. population were dry.” (Prohibition – Perspectives on Modern World History, Sylvia Engdahl, editor, p. 4)
Frances Willard (1839-1898) won the presidency in 1879. Her ‘’Do Everything’’ policy included women’s rights and a variety of other social measures. Campaigners such as Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906) and Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902) sought support for their agendas from within the ranks of the Temperance Movement in general and the WCTU in particular. After Willard’s death in 1899, the WCTU’s focus turned to Prohibition. Only the Anti-Saloon League played a larger role in bringing that about..
The Anti-Saloon League
Groups of Protestant clergymen soon joined the dynamic grassroots female reformers in their war on the saloon. Steeped in the traditions of teetotaling preachers who identified alcohol imbibing with sin, they organized the Anti-Saloon League in 1893. Backed by the vast resources of the nation’s Protestant churches . . . the Anti-Saloon League blossomed into a highly organized and well-heeled ‘’pressure group.’’
The War On Alcohol, Lisa McGirr, p. 10
The Anti-Saloon League began in Oberlin, Ohio but quickly became national. Rev. Howard Hyde Russell (1856-1945) was chosen as the group’s first president. “This organization’s members thought that American society was in moral decline. As people moved from rural areas to urbanized ones, many Americans believed that they were losing touch with their religious values. One way that people were violating God’s desires was by consuming alcohol. The Ohio Anti-Saloon League hoped to reduce alcohol consumption, if not outright prohibit it, by enforcing existing laws and by implementing new ones. This organization also sought to eliminate bars, taverns, and saloons, believing that these businesses promoted the consumption of alcohol.” (ohiohistorycentral.org)
Local churches, especially the Methodist ones, recruited their followers to lobby members of both political parties to support the banning of the sale and manufacture of alcohol. The League was strongest in the South and the rural North. The movement’s leaders were drawn mainly from the ranks of the ministry, but they also hired lawyers. “The rise of the ASL was directly tied to its claim to act as the agent of organized Christianity in its battle against saloon lawlessness and immorality.” (Battling Demon Rum, Thomas Pegram, p. 114)
The Anti-Saloon League of America made no pretense of feigning any sort of respect for the principle of the separation of church and state.
Wayne Wheeler (1869-1927) was a lawyer who became the ASL’s main political strategist. Wheeler’s anti-alcohol sentiments were rabid and dated back to a childhood incident where an extremely inebriated man stabbed the boy’s leg with a pitchfork.
Wheeler “led the organization to national prominence. He did this by adopting a strategy of helping prohibition candidates to win at city and county levels. The local political bosses could then be used to launch bigger campaigns in state and federal elections.” (Prohibition, John M. Dunn, p. 62) His pressure politics, relying heavily on mass media and mass communications, was referred to as “Wheelerism.” Strenuous efforts were made to persuade politicians that the public wanted or demanded a particular action. The strategies commonly included intimidation, threats, and covert action. Known as “the dry boss,” Wheeler created loose alliances with groups who shared a common anti-alcohol sentiment, if oftentimes nothing else. He supported women’s suffrage very simply because most women favored the idea of prohibition.
As was the case with the WCTU, nativism and racism played roles in the tactics of the moralists. Saloons were patronized, to a great degree, by German and Irish immigrants. Frances Willard referred to these people as ‘’the scum of the Old World.’’ Willard also liberally tossed around the idea that drinking inflamed the passions of black men thus endangering white womanhood. She alleged that most lynchings were of black rapists—an entirely unsupportable claim.
The United States’ entry into WWI provided a new opportunity to stir up the old race-based arguments against taverns. “The Anti-Saloon League whipped up patriotic hysteria by claiming the German beer industry was sapping America’s will to fight. Congress passed the required resolution to amend the Constitution in 1917, and sent it along to the states for ratification . . . The Eighteenth Amendment would take effect in early 1920, and America was about to learn a lesson in the futility of trying to legislate moral behavior.” (Rockefeller Connection, Jay Moore, p. 85)
The Anti-Saloon League had played a key role in bringing national Prohibition to the United States of America. The results were nothing like what had been expected. When Prohibition was repealed in 1933, there was an opening for a new strategy in dealing with America’s alcohol problem—a mutual aid group with a plan for America’s worst drinkers to help themselves by helping others.
bob k. is the author of Key Players in AA History and The Secret Diaries of Bill W., both published by AA Agnostica. Research into the pre-AA world of alcoholism and attempted solutions came up with this fascinating piece of American history. For more about drinkers and drinking prior to 1935, watch for Almost Hopeless : Pre-AA Efforts to Reform America’s Alcoholics coming soon to an Amazon near you.
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