Drugs, Alcohol and Addiction in the Long Nineteenth Century

Volume III

Daniel Malleck

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781138350137
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429789892
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

This collection captures key themes and issues in the broad history of addiction and vice in the Anglo-American world. Focusing on the long nineteenth-century, the volumes consider how scientific, social, and cultural experiences with drugs, alcohol, addiction, gambling, and prostitution varied around the world. What might be considered vice, or addiction could be interpreted in various ways, through various lenses, and such activities were interpreted differently depending upon the observer: the medical practitioner; the evangelical missionary; the thrill seeking bon-vivant, and the concerned government commissioner, to name but a few. For example, opium addiction in middle class households resulting from medical treatment was judged much differently than Chinese opium smoking by those in poverty or poor living conditions in North American work camps on the west coast, or on the streets of Soho.

This collection will assemble key documents representing both the official and general view of these various activities, providing readers with a cross section of interpretations and a solid grounding in the material that shaped policy change, cultural interpretation, and social action.

Volume III
EFFORTS TO CONTROL, RESTRICT, AND PROHIBIT: ALCOHOL

INTRODUCTION TO VOLUME III

Everyone’s wrestling with John Barleycorn

The “Alcohol Problem” was one of the most intractable social concerns in the nineteenth century, spurring large, international social movements; new political parties; fractious community division; new crimes; and a challenge to the idea of liberty. Alcoholic beverages were deeply embedded in many cultures, and most certainly in many English-speaking communities alcoholic beverages were nearly ubiquitous. Harry Levine argued that concerns about alcoholic excess as a physical and social problem were rooted in ideas of efficiency in the emerging industrial workplace and how drinking, being drunk, or being hung-over could negatively affect workplace efficiency. Other historians have challenged the primacy of industrialism, noting that debates about the problem of drunkenness long predated the American Revolution. Nevertheless, concerns about liquor in the workplace did persist, with workers seeing drink as detrimental to their financial wellbeing. Indeed, working-class organizations such as the Knights of Labor, active from the 1870s to the turn of the century, encouraged its members to be temperate, if not abstinent. At the same time, the rituals and social cohesion built through drinking, and the important community centre of the drinking space, made controls on excess, and repression of public drinking, an intractable problem.

Leading the push against drink were a variety of social reformers. Preston, UK’s Joseph Livesey was a weaver turned middle-class liberal reformer who saw alcohol as detrimental to the success of working families. Livesey reportedly tried spirits only once, and pledged abstinence based solely upon his fears about how disoriented that experience had left him, encouraging fellow reform-minded colleagues to do the same, or at least to renounce spirits which were considered the major problems for drinkers.¹ Many other early temperance organizations grew out of a similar drive for self-help, the reformed drinker taking the pledge then encouraging his drunken friends to do the same. Groups like the American Washingtonian Society was founded on this principle, with the first group, the Washington Temperance Society of Baltimore forming in 1840.² Nevertheless, while the Washingtonians faded by the 1860s, evangelical temperance organizations, united with the common bond of church membership and evangelical zeal for social improvement, carried the temperance banner in many countries.³ The importance of evangelicalism may be seen in the speech by Lyman Gilbert and the report of the American Temperance Society, whose arguments were rooted in a need to help root out the “evil of intemperance,” using, often, very intemperate language to condemn drink and its proponents.

One of the first temperance victories in the Anglo-American world was the Maine Law. The law, which prohibited the sale of alcoholic beverages within the state, was the innovation of Neil Dow, a passionate temperance reformer who, when mayor of Portland, Maine, lobbied the state legislature to institute state-wide prohibition. Despite concerted opposition which resulted in Dow losing the election for governor in 1852 owing partly to the fact that prohibition divided his Whig party and thereby diminished Dow’s support, the Maine Law became shorthand for state-wide prohibition elsewhere. Intense opposition including a riot in 1855 contributed to the decline of support for the law and its repeal in 1856. Nevertheless, support for state-wide prohibition did not die, and in 1885 prohibition was written into the state constitution.⁴ The effectiveness of the Maine Law was debated for decades, with critics and defenders of prohibition only agreeing that prohibition’s success hinged on popular support of the principle.

Among its meetings, speeches, marches and political activism, the temperance movement generated a tremendous amount of literature. Pamphlets, texts of political speeches, and reprinted sermons flooded the countryside. A massive temperance fiction industry blossomed. Stories often featured maudlin heart-string-plucking tales of the terrible destruction wrought by King Alcohol, or John Barleycorn. T. S. Arthur’s classic Ten Nights in A Barroom and What I Found There was emblematic of the genre. The narrator observes over the course of several years (the ten nights were not consecutive) the destruction drink caused to a tavern keeper, his family, and the neighbourhood in the otherwise idealized middle-America town. For the semi-literate, images such as the “Drunkard’s Progress” might be more effective, showing a downward progress of a promising young middle-class man being introduced to social drinking by co-workers. Over a series of images, this promising young man begins to overindulge, becomes violent, neglects his family, wastes his money, and ends up unemployed, destitute, and ultimately dead by his own hand. The story was reproduced in various formats, and the idea of drink leading to family destruction had salience in communities in which the individualistic ethos meant that you lived or died by your own abilities. As Elaine Parsons explains, this “drunkard narrative” gained popularity in the 1830s “and became the central pillar of the temperance movement.”⁵ The powerful and persistent image of the death of the American dream might have special meaning for residents of the young republic, but was reproduced around the world. The testimony of Father Chiniquy to a select committee investigating intemperance in the province of Canada in 1849 includes some of the same images of death, family disaster, and social deterioration through drink.

Such narratives in their variety of forms are included in several documents. T. S. Arthur’s collection Six Nights with the Washingtonians attempted to chronicle the hazards of drinking from the perspectives of people who appeared at a Washing-tonian meeting he claimed to have attended. Frances Harper’s “John Anderson’s Saloon” begins with a conversation between a saloon keeper who is intentionally trying to turn a child into a habitual drunkard in order to create a life-long customer and his patrons who voice varying levels of concern. It ends with the story of a patron of the saloon being found guilty of murder while drunk. Harper was an African American born free in New England, and her work was part of a broad genre of African American literature, by free Blacks or freed slaves, linking drunkenness and sobriety to slavery and liberty. Charles Lenox Remond’s speech on temperance and slavery, delivered to the American Temperance Society, also connects slavery and drink, not only through the analogy of drink as slavery, but in the very real economic connection between liquor and the slave trade.

The drunkard narrative was powerful due to the threat it represented, and the values it contradicted. Joseph Gusfield interprets these sorts of messages of the temperance movement as “status anxieties,” the fears of failure and loss of status presented by drink.⁶ Others have pointed to the religious nature of the temperance movement, the evangelical drive to improve self and others through the constraint of physical pleasure. Norman Clark explained temperance and prohibitionism as the effect of “a new configuration of morality, at the centre of which were values such as domesticity and conjugality” focusing upon the nuclear family.⁷ So whether the temperance movement saw a fear of their own failure, and the danger to their own status, or a fear of the decline of society by a debasing of the health and morality of the family unit, such a discourse of family-based morality lay at the heart of temperance literature.

Given the central place of the family in the temperance discourse, perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that women played an increasingly important role in pressing the temperance agenda. The rise of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) was not the first instance of active women in the temperance movement, but the WCTU was different in that it was driven by women. The impetus for the creation of the WCTU was a spontaneous uprising of women across the US Midwest, who marched on taverns, sat in or around them, chanting hymns and imploring the tavern keepers to shut up shop. It was a public expression of the private sphere, and many have argued that it moved women well beyond the home, while still placing the home and its protection at the heart of the movement. In this context votes for women, advocated by many WCTU members by the end of the century, was simply an extension of women’s role as nurturing the home, but it radically affected gendered public power relations. So narratives by women such as the internationally renowned Frances E Willard, and the Canadian temperance leader Letitia Youmans, illustrate some of the challenges women faced, and also how they framed their work as properly within their social sphere, while simultaneously expanding that sphere to encompass the entire world.⁸

By the last part of the century, the temperance movement had become a broad political activity that reached across classes and political parties. Although more conservative viewpoints might be that there was no need for such radical social transformation, favouring business and economics and encouraging limited government interference in the economy, many others viewed the liquor traffic as deeply problematic. This included socialists, whose role in framing the “drink question” in the United Kingdom was a powerful parallel to church-based temperance reformers. As noted earlier, labour groups in the United States, most notably the Knights of Labor, advocated temperance as a way of elevating their comrades by eliminating the negative influence of drink on their bodies and their purses.⁹ Likewise, British labour leaders saw drink as undermining the strength, vitality, and economy of workers. Both MP John Burns, who describes himself as a skilled labourer and life-long abstainer, and MP Philip Snowden, an avowed socialist, railed against drink. Both perspectives reiterate the ideas of drink causing physical, moral, and economic ruin, with the added indictment of the traffic as a capitalist method of further exploiting and degrading workers. Snowdon argues that socialists must be concerned about the drink question just as they are concerned with “landlordism, capitalism, competitions, housing, [and] education.”¹⁰

Temperance was not without its detractors. Sometimes pitched battles could take place in communities in which various dry laws were being contemplated or enforced, but more important were the arguments to contradict the persistent challenges to the right of the industry to exist. There may have been some concerted effort to fight against temperance earlier in the century, but by the last quarter of the century various associations of liquor interests were beginning to present more concerted resistance to what could have become a temperance hegemony. Some of these arguments came from manufacturers, including brewers and distillers associations (which were sometimes at odds with each other), some came through representatives of vendors, such as the UK Licensed Victuallers Defense League or the Licensed Victuallers Association in various Canadian provinces.¹¹ The items in this volume that represent a pushback by the industry include Gallus Thomann’s argument, translated and published by the US Brewers’ Association, that prohibition did not work, that high license (the practice of increasing the cost of a liquor license so that only the more elite, and presumably most respectable, places would sell liquor) was a failure, and that the Gothenburg system is only useful in places where extreme drunkenness is a problem. Thomann argues that such was not the case in the United States. Dr Joseph Warren’s article on the “misstatements” of the physiological action of alcohol systematically dismantles temperance arguments that alcohol has no value and does only damage. He does not deny that over-drinking was a problem, but expresses his wish that the temperance movement would cease “the dissemination of falsehood about what alcohol is and does,” and rather focus on “the control of its rational use and … prevention of all abuse.”¹² Warren’s medical criticism can be compared against the writing of T.C. Down, who attacked “these loud mouthed fanatics” of teetotalism for their attacks on the liberty of British people by pushing prohibition. It is a system that, Down argues, creates more evils than good:

chicanery, deceit, and fraud, and widespread contempt for the law are among the least of the evils engendered by a system of repression, but if you make a freeman into a slave by robbing him of his individual liberty … you must not be surprised if … you develop in him the vices of slavery.¹³

By the turn of the century in the United States, attempts at more objective investigations of the drink question resulted in the formation of the Committee of Fifty. Founded in 1889 as a committee of fifteen, the group grew to include prominent US businessmen and researchers who funded research into the drink issue, ostensibly to present objective evidence in contradistinction to the self-interested evidence of the liquor industry and the histrionics of temperance.¹⁴

Between the wets and the drys stood the moderates, usually individuals who had no connection to the industry itself but were unwilling to consider prohibition to be an effective or realistic option. Moderates were philosophically resistant to legislative action banning drink. Many drew their arguments from a number of sources, most notably from the work of philosopher John Stuart Mill, whose On Liberty included a clear revocation of the idea of prohibition purely from the standpoint of its interference with individual liberty.¹⁵ Ideas like those of Mill are replete in the articles opposing prohibition, and even some supporting it, and we can see the rhetorical excesses in titles such as Down’s Teetotal Tyrant in contrast to Lees’ argument that prohibition “is perfectly compatible with rational liberty” in this volume. More reasoned and administratively dry, appeals to moderation appeared in arguments against various forms of prohibition found in different government commissions, letters in newspapers, and stump speeches by politicians.

Many governments, torn between liquor interests and drys, found a middle ground in licensing.¹⁶ Licensing allowed the implementation of any number of controls over liquor sales, while maintaining the principle of individual liberty. The simple process of granting a license to sell liquor could be rendered incredibly complex by placing more restrictions, requirements, and constraints on liquor sales. Moreover, in any specific jurisdiction, the licensing authorities could reduce the number of licenses in order to constrain access to booze. Licenses could also be granted or rescinded for certain types of retail sale. As Szymanski notes, the Anti-Saloon League included many moderates who, opposed to complete prohibition simply wanted to close the saloons, drinking spaces in which many people saw tremendous problems.¹⁷ In the province of Ontario, the government separated liquor sales from other grocery sales in the 1880s, and required all public drinking spaces to have meal and sleeping accommodation by the end of the 1890s.¹⁸ A similar attempt to constrain drinking through licensing was found in New York State in 1896 when the Raines Law limited the sale of liquor on Sundays to properly constituted hotels. Attempting to skirt the law, many saloons created shabby bedrooms to conform with the lodging requirement and offered substandard food to fulfil the meal requirement. These places, called Raines Law Hotels, were a cultural oddity, but in the history of liquor licensing, they were just one more innovative attempt to make money from booze by gaming the sy...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• VOLUME III Efforts to control, restrict, and prohibit: alcohol