Drink (55 page)

The ASL set out to exploit each party’s anxieties over the temperance vote, and by the end of the nineteenth century it had become a power broker at both state and federal levels. It owed its eminence to two men: Wayne Wheeler and Richmond Pearson Hobson. Wheeler could make or break candidates for office, Hobson could swing thousands of voters with a single speech. Wheeler had achieved his leverage by creating a network of ASL supporters among Protestant churches in rural areas, whose collective congregations were sufficiently numerous to influence both local and national elections. The same churches provided meeting places where the ASL might tell its followers how to vote and were also a source of the donations with which the ASL underwrote its activities. By 1912 the ASL was supported by nearly sixty thousand congregations, who among them gave two million dollars per annum to its coffers and as many votes when it came to polling time.

This was power that the liquor lobby might only dream of, and it was exploited with Machiavellian skill by Wayne Wheeler. According to his biographer, over a twenty-year career spent in the persecution of alcohol he “controlled six Congresses, dictated to two Presidents of the United States, directed legislation for the most important elective state and federal offices, held the balance of power in both Republican and Democratic parties, distributed more patronage than any other dozen men, supervised a federal bureau from the outside without official authority, and was recognized by friend and foe alike as the most masterful and powerful single individual in the United States.”

Not only was the ASL powerful, it was also wealthy by the standards of a political organization of the age. The donations it gathered from its supporters were spent on propaganda, and its publishing arm spewed out over 250 million pages of temperance writing each month. This blizzard of print was directed at white Protestant men and women in the old western and northeastern states. These people were believed to resent the changes that were occurring in America and to be ready to accept that drunkenness might be behind such phenomena as industrialization, the rise of megacities, and their population with hordes of Roman Catholic immigrants. In consequence, ASL periodicals, pamphlets, and its touring speakers made eugenics a central theme in their case against drink. The speakers peppered their discourses with racism and images of the decline of the breed. According, for example, to Richmond Pearson Hobson, the ASL’s star orator, “In America we are making the last stand of the great white race, and substantially of the human race. If [alcohol] cannot be conquered in Young America, it cannot in any of the old and more degenerate nations. If America fails, the world will be undone and the human race will be doomed to go down from degeneracy to degeneracy till the Almighty in wrath wipes the accursed thing out.”

In addition to providing an apocalyptic vision of the threat posed by alcohol to future generations, Hobson stimulated his audiences by linking drinking with the great taboo topic of the age—venereal disease. Both syphilis and gonorrhea were rampant in the United States, with infection rates ten times those of the present day, and both, then, were almost incurable. According to Hobson, “Probably, certainly, more than fifty percent of adult males are tainted with some form of terrible vice disease, the whelp of liquor.” The baneful influence of alcohol over sexual behavior was likewise highlighted in ASL publicity. Posters were distributed warning that it could override the will, with potentially dreadful consequences:

By 1913, the ASL felt the time was ripe to disclose its true objective. At its twentieth annual conference in Columbus, Ohio, delegates made the unanimous resolution to seek the prohibition of the sale of alcohol throughout the United States by constitutional amendment. An appropriate amendment was drafted and delivered to the steps of the Capitol in December of the same year, accompanied by a troop of schoolgirls dressed in white and a regiment each of ASL and WCTU supporters. It was received by Senator Morris Sheppard, of Texas, and Richmond Pearson Hobson, in his capacity as congressman for Alabama.

Once the draft was in safe hands, the ASL mobilized its supporters, who were instructed to bombard the government with letters, telegrams, and petitions in its favor. In the words of Wayne Wheeler, “From that December day in 1913, when we wired back to our people in every State in the Union, ‘Open fire on the enemy’ . . . the country kept up a drumfire upon Washington.” This furious assault caught the liquor lobby off guard. They were so confident of the significance of the contribution made by taxes on beer and spirits to the federal budget, which, between 1870 and 1915 provided more than half of the internal revenue of the United States, that they dismissed the proposed amendment as a publicity stunt. They politely drew the attention of legislators to their contributions and launched a counterattack against the ASL. Instead, however, of copying the modern campaigning methodsof their opponents, they resorted to the old-fashioned techniques of bribing journalists and poll rigging, which backfired.

There was a growing desire for probity in American politics at the time, and the ASL took pleasure in disclosing the clumsy attempts of brewers and distillers to influence editors and buy voters with money and free booze. Whether they drank or not, Americans were tired of corruption and suspicious of big business. In various industries ranging from oil to tobacco, monopolies, in the form of trusts, had been established that set prices, forced down wages, and created a dependent underclass of worker/consumers who were slaves in all but name. Moreover, there was a certain fin de siècle weariness in America after all the excitement of the nineteenth century. The western quest had ended, the Indians had been confined to reservations, and the continent been tamed. Drunkenness seemed to belong to the pioneers and frontiersmen of the past, not to the present ordered nation with its network of great cities and small towns.

The mood of the age is apparent in
John Barleycorn, or Alcoholic Memoirs
(1913), by Jack London, the best-selling literary author of the day. The book reviews all the contemporary arguments against alcohol and illustrates them with anecdotes from the author’s life, beginning with the first time that he got drunk, at the age of five. Although, by his own confession, London did not start drinking heavily until he was fifteen, he quickly made up for lost time. Thereafter he enjoyed a love/hate relationship with alcohol, alternating between long wet and dry stretches. He felt his drinking habits were typical of his age and that they were the result of the ubiquity of booze, and the central role of saloons in male society. He had little time for the predestination theories of the temperance movement, which considered everyone to be a drunk in waiting: In London’s view “comparatively few alcoholics are born in a generation. And by alcoholic I mean a man whose chemistry craves alcohol and drives him recklessly to it. The great majority of habitual drinkers are born not only without desire for alcohol but with actual repugnance toward it.” This innate repugnance was overcome by repeated exposure to drink and to drinkers, commencing in childhood. London’s father used to take him into saloons, and he found them magical places—beacons of hospitality, quite unlike other public institutions such as shops or libraries, which never “let me warm by their fires or permitted me to eat the food of the gods from narrow shelves against the wall.” The special status of saloons was reinforced as London progressed into his teens, when he perceived them as symbolic of the adult world to which he wanted to belong. He yearned to be among the men he saw in bars who “talked with great voices, laughed great laughs.” Indeed, even “the sots, stupefied, sprawling across the tables or in the sawdust, were objects of mystery and wonder.”

The fascination that saloons held for young men, and their ubiquity, were, in London’s opinion, the prime cause of the sort of destructive drunkenness that he hoped to see eradicated in America. Moreover, he believed that only Prohibition would achieve this aim: “All the no-saying and no-preaching in the world will fail to keep men, and youths growing into manhood, away from John Barleycorn when John Barleycorn is everywhere accessible, and where John Barleycorn is everywhere the connotation of manliness, and daring, and great spiritedness.”

When he wrote
John Barleycorn,
Jack London had less than four years to live. He managed to fit in a stint as a war correspondent in Mexico, to write six further books, to sail around Cape Horn, and to spend a year cruising the Pacific in his own yacht, before his kidneys packed up—possibly from too much alcohol,
⁶¹
possibly from one or a combination of the tropical diseases he’d caught when traveling, and the arsenic- and mercury-based medicines he had taken to cure them.
John Barleycorn
was intended not for his generation but for people of the future, for whom it had a plain message: “The only rational thing for the twentieth century folk to do is to cover up the well; to make the twentieth century in truth the twentieth century, and to relegate to the nineteenth century and all the preceding centuries the things of those centuries, the witch-burnings, the intolerances, the fetiches, and, not least among such barbarisms, John Barleycorn.”

27 IN THE CHALK TRENCHES OF CHAMPAGNE

The twentieth century was quick to differentiate itself from those that had preceded it, albeit not in the manner in which Jack London had hoped. The year after
John Barleycorn
was published, he was approached by
Collier’s
magazine to act as their war correspondent in Europe, where a conflict of unprecedented magnitude had erupted. His ill health prevented his acceptance and spared him the horror of bearing witness to slaughter on an industrial scale. The First World War claimed thirteen million victims in the four years between 1914 and 1918, a quarter of them in a small patch of France and Belgium, where the British and French and their German opponents settled into a static war of attrition.

In order to maintain this standoff, and to supply their millions of troops with weapons, sustenance, and replacements, the resources of the combatant nations were organized for battle. Among the consequences of putting entire economies on a war footing were restrictions on the use of alcohol for recreational purposes. The production of food was accorded a greater priority than brewing, and distilled alcohol was diverted to be used for making fuel and explosives. The little left for drinking was rationed, and directed toward where it was needed most. Interestingly, there was a near unanimity among the parties to the conflict that the best place for whatever alcohol could be spared for booze was the front line. At the point of impact between armies, where soldiers died in their hundreds of thousands—gassed, bombed, bayoneted, machine-gunned—and where many millions more were mutilated, blinded, or condemned to spend the remainder of their lives in wheelchairs, drink was distributed alongside such other necessaries as food and ammunition.

In Britain, the Royal Navy continued its centuries-old tradition of a daily rum ration. The nation’s soldiers also received a regular supply of rum. The army quota consisted of one gallon per day for each company of sixty-four men—the equivalent of two ounces per head. It was delivered in stoneware jugs marked with the initials S.R.D., which stood for Services Rum (Diluted), or, according to the soldiers for whom it was intended, Seldom Reaches Destination. The rum was West Indian, although whisky and cognac were sometimes provided as substitutes. Teetotalers were under no obligation to drink their daily allowances—according to an official memorandum, “the individual man is in all cases free to refuse the issue of rum if he so desires”—but most of them gave in: “This option is only exercised in a few instances.”

Extra shots of spirits were issued prior to and directly after combat. Liquor was considered to be good for modern soldiers: “The comfort, efficiency, and fighting value of the troops are greatly increased by the issue of fortified alcohol.” The troops themselves seconded the opinion of their officers. Even those who had been temperate drinkers before the war, whatever their rank, confessed to the worth of the water of life in the front line. The British poet Siegfried Sassoon, for example, writing of one of his first combat experiences—a night raid on the German trenches—reflected on the respect he had developed since for spirits: “It surprises me when I remember that I set off without having had a drink, but . . . in those days the helpfulness of alcohol in human affairs was a fact which had not yet been brought home to me. The raiders had been given only a small quantity, but it was enough to hearten them as they sploshed up the communication trench.” The value of strong drink to the men in the trenches was reiterated in numerous testimonials. According, for example, to a Canadian fighting at Passchendaele: “Under the spell of this all-powerful stuff . . . one almost felt that he could eat a German, dead or alive, steel helmet and all.”

Spirits, in addition to serving as stimulants, were also used to bring comfort to the wounded and the dying and to proof the senses of the burying details who covered over the mutilated and rotting remains of their comrades. Even after they had become hardened to the task, these working parties were given rum afterward, in order, as one of them expressed it, “to take the taste of dead men out of my mouth.” Rum was also issued as an emetic to some of the victims of gas attacks. While chemical weapons killed relatively few combatants, they maimed in the most horrible and painful manner and created terror in the ranks whenever they were deployed. The following account, by the victim of a gas attack, highlights the use of rum as a remedy: “The gas was phosgene, and we were all sick, choking, when the QM arrived with rum. We swallowed some and the fumes of the rum and gas made us horribly sick and we vomited most of the gas out. After a couple of hours we only had a bad headache and didn’t go out of action.”