Prohibition: Thirteen Years That Changed America (6 page)

For all his “liberal” antislavery convictions, Dow was also, by current standards at least, a notorious racist: he had a visceral hatred for
Irish Catholics. Their growing presence was “a permanent threat to destroy law-abiding America.” After a riot in front of his town hall, in which one man was killed by the police, his first question was: “Was he an Irishman?” This atypical Quaker, who fought with his fists and flaunted his wealth, was capable of the most un-Christian callousness, happily touring the most wretched street slums of his beloved Portland with his friends, gesturing to children in rags and broken-down shacks. “Rum did that,” he would say, with evident relish. Blinded by his obsession, he believed his role as mayor was to wage war not on slums but on liquor. The maniacal zeal with which his minions carried out raids on illegal liquor stocks made him so unpopular with tradespeople that he was repeatedly mugged, his windows smashed, his family threatened.

Although it banned saloons, “Dow’s law” did not ban drinking: liquor could still be freely imported and consumed at home. It could also be home-brewed. The new law also proved how easily proscription could be circumvented. In Maine, as in other states with early Prohibition laws, shopkeepers started charging five cents for a soda cracker — the accompanying glass of rum was free. The early code phrase used was “Do you want to see the blind pig?” That is, do you want a glass of rum? “Blind pigs” would later become one of the slang terms for the speakeasies of the Prohibition era.

Prohibitionist fervor was not confined to Maine. In one form or another, Oregon, Minnesota, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Vermont, and Michigan voted in
their laws
by 1852. Michigan followed in 1853, Connecticut in 1854, and Indiana, Delaware, Nebraska (a territory, not yet a state), Pennsylvania, New York, and New Hampshire in 1855.

These years coincided with the apogee of the Washingtonian Revival, a movement actually established not in Washington but in nearby Baltimore. In that town, six well-known drunkards, all of them artisans or shopkeepers, became the disciples of the Reverend Matthew Hale Smith, a noted Temperance orator. In 1840, they decided to take the pledge and campaign for abstinence, which they did with the same devotion they had previously shown for drinking.

Their movement spread, thousands of former heavy drinkers signed up, and Timothy Shay Arthur, the same potboiling author who had penned
Ten Nights in a Bar Room and What I Saw There
, praised the reformed Baltimore drunkards with his
Six Nights with the
Washingtonians
. (Another best-seller was the Reverend John Marsh’s
Hannah Hawkins, or, The Reformed Drunkard’s Daughter, a tear-jerker telling the story of the conversion of Hannah’s father after listening to her tearful plea “Papa, please don’t send me for whiskey today!”)

The Washingtonian Revival spawned a host of rival societies, such as the Independent Order of Good Templars, which increased its membership from 50,000 in 1859 to 400,000 in 1869. Some of them, somewhat condescendingly, sought out black members for the first time — segregating them in separate groups, of course. The black affiliate of the Friends of Temperance was called the Sons of the Soil.

Then, dramatically, Temperance movements all over America lost their momentum, and in time, one by one, except for Maine, state Prohibition laws were repealed. The reason was simple: for the first time since the overthrow of British rule, more pressing issues were attracting American attention.

As the abolitionist movement, leading to the Civil War, gathered momentum, priorities shifted, and for the next 25 years, all prohibitionist progress halted. The cause was also jolted by a prominent Massachusetts politician, John A. Andrew, who later became its wartime governor. Shordy before the Civil War began, he headed a legislative committee whose report totally refuted the Prohibitionists’ claims. Liquor was not “sinful or hurtful in every case.” More important, it was “the right of every citizen to determine for himself what he will eat or drink.”

A law prohibiting him from drinking every kind of alcoholic liquors, universally used in all countries and ages as a beverage, is an arbitrary and unreasonable interference with his rights, and is not justified by the consideration that some men may abuse their rights, and may, therefore, need the counsel and example of good men to lead them to reform.

It was an argument that “wets” would later claim to be so self-evident that they assumed, wrongly, that it must ultimately prevail. Even as the Civil War began, Maine became famous for its “temperance regiments.” Neal Dow himself raised and commanded the Thirteenth Maine (Temperance) Regiment. Hundreds of families begged him to take their sons, so that they would not have to mix with volunteers of
Scottish or Irish descent, known for their hard drinking and immoral ways.

The Civil War put a stop to the onward march of the Temperance movement — it was a time of excessive alcoholic indulgence. Abraham Lincoln himself, though a temperance advocate and lifelong teetotaler, turned a blind eye to Ulysses S. Grant’s excessive drinking. When called upon to remove him from his command, Lincoln replied, with his usual irony: “Can you tell me where General Grant gets his liquor? If you could, I would direct the Chief Quartermaster to lay in a large stock of the same kind of liquor, and would also direct him to furnish a supply to some of my other generals who have never yet won a victory.”

But Prohibition activists would later claim that had he lived Lincoln would have proved a formidable Prohibition ally. On the very last day of his life, they recalled, it was claimed he had agreed that “after reconstruction the next great question will be the overthrow and suppression of the legalized liquor traffic.”

Although Lincoln had in early life acquired a store in New Salem, Illinois, that sold liquor, he had some sympathy for the Washingtonian movement, and in his famous (1842) Temperance address, eloquentiy supported the Temperance cause: “We found intoxicating liquor used by everybody, repudiated by nobody. It commonly entered into the first draught of an infant, and the last thought of the dying man.”

On public occasions, he noted, it was “positively insufferable” to be without it. Liquor, “the devastator, came forth in society like the Egyptian angel of death, commissioned to slay if not the first, the fairest born of every family. . . . Social and personal disasters brought by liquor come not from the abuse of a very good thing but from the use of a very bad thing.”

The drys, and especially the Anti-Saloon League (ASL), would later exploit Lincoln’s views with considerable effect. As the struggle for Prohibition became increasingly fierce, the ASL appropriated carefully selected Lincoln quotes. Millions of small metal buttons showed an effigy of Lincoln, circled by his words: “The legalized liquor traffic is the tragedy of civilization.” A hugely popular youth movement, devised and administered by the ASL, was the Lincoln Legion for the young. Each enrolled member (and though no accurate statistics exist, they probably numbered in the millions eventually ) signed a pledge and
received an elaborately printed certificate. Headed “Love-Sacrifice-Service,” it read:

LINCOLN LEGION

I hereby enrol in the Lincoln Legion and promise, with God’s help, to keep the following pledge, written, signed and advocated by Abraham Lincoln. “Whereas the use of intoxicating liquors as a beverage is productive of pauperism, degradation and crime; and believing it is our duty to discourage that which produces more evil than good, we therefore pledge ourselves to abstain from the use of intoxicating liquors as a beverage.”

What Prohibition activists conveniently ignored was that Lincoln’s innate tolerance, humor, sense of irony, and, above all, concern for individual freedom would never have allowed him to support, much less impose, Prohibition legislation. In 1840, he had made his position clear when he said: “Prohibition will work great injury to the cause of temperance. It is a species of intemperance within itself, for it goes beyond the bounds of reason by legislation and makes a crime out of things that are not crime. A prohibition law strikes at the very principle upon which our Government is founded.”

Even in his 1842 Temperance address he stigmatized the dogmatists’ “thundering tone of anathema and denunciation.” Liquor taxes were essential to pay for the huge costs of the Civil War. Reluctantly, Lincoln imposed what some regarded as crippling levies on breweries, distilleries, and saloons: a manufacturing tax of $1 per barrel of beer, 20 cents a gallon on distilled liquor, and an annual $20 tax on retail liquor oudets. To outraged Prohibitionists, Lincoln was simply perpetuating the liquor traffic.

T
he next step in the long march toward Prohibition was very different. American women spearheaded what briefly turned into a nationwide movement, discovering their formidable power for the first time.

The Women’s War against liquor was the first women’s mass movement in American history. It was also the modern world’s first large-scale, nonviolent protest movement. Long before Mahatma Gandhi invented the passive but effective form of protest known as Satyagraha, those waging the Women’s War used their “gentle sex” and their only other weapons — passivity and Christian forbearance — to gain their ends, kindling imaginations all over America and making for compelling media coverage at a time when newspapers were assuming an increasingly influential role. Like Gandhi’s followers, its “crusaders” courted arrest, welcoming blows and insults, with the deliberate intention of shaming their adversaries and turning them into guilt-ridden converts — and they succeeded, for a time, beyond their wildest dreams.

But if women were the shock troops at the forefront of this new crusade, deliberately excluding men from the actual battle, their
behind-the-scenes mentors were men, and the logistics of the war were furnished by the male-dominated Protestant churches.

The Prohibition portrait gallery includes many notorious eccentrics, but few are as odd as the man who inspired the Women’s War. Dr. Dioclesian Lewis was a preacher, social reformer, feminist, and health faddist whose targets included not only liquor but corsets and male chauvinism. In an age when women were still regarded as chattels, he campaigned for their freedom, not only in regard to the vote but to their physical selves. Heavy, constraining garments, he preached, were among the greatest dangers to health. In considerable advance of his time, he insisted that light clothing and short skirts were a prerequisite for better health and that “A clean tooth never decays.” He advised women to walk, daily, with 20-pound sandbags perched on their heads to improve their posture.

This physical giant of a man, impervious to ridicule or threats, was a forceful personality with a distinct oratorical gift. He was also a prolific writer on hygiene and women’s health problems, and was regarded by many as a charlatan because, though he used the title Doctor, he had in fact earned only a degree in “homeopathic studies” at Harvard. Although no Prohibitionist (he was too much of a libertarian for that), he was a firm believer in the evils of drink, his own father having been a notorious drunkard. It was Lewis who in the 1860s initiated the practice of walking into saloons at the head of his followers (mostly women) to pray for the souls of saloon keepers and bartenders, later lecturing in church halls on the effect of these “visitation bands,” claiming that the results had been spectacular.

His message reached Elizabeth Thompson, in Hillsboro, Ohio, in 1873. Braving the sarcasm of her husband, this sixty-year-old housewife, encouraged by one of her sons, who had attended one of Dr. Lewis’s meetings, summoned a group of townswomen — like her, respectable middle-class wives and mothers. After a warm-up meeting in a church hall, the women, in procession, made for Hillsboro’s best-known liquor dealer, Dr. William Smith’s Drug Store. After watching them picketing and praying outside his store, a contrite William Smith went up to “Mother Thompson,” as she later became known, and publicly pledged to stop liquor sales, even agreeing to pour his liquor reserves into the gutter.

It was a “sign.” A few days later, in the snow, Mother Thompson
marshaled her troops again. This time the target was a saloon. Here too, though the wait was longer, and the praying more intense, the saloon keeper gave in to the women, and pledged to close his establishment. A beer garden run by a German, Charley Beck, was a tougher proposition. Picketing lasted two weeks, but by now the movement was in full swing, and many more volunteers were available to swell Mother Thompson’s ranks and maintain a 24-hour hymn-singing marathon. “Ach, vimmins, shut up vimmins, I quits,” he finally told the group.

The crusade, gathering strength all over the state, now staged more ambitious incursions further afield. In Clinton City, Ohio, the villainous John Calvin van Pelt, owner of the Dead Fall saloon, famous for its disreputable clientele, at first mobilized some of his patrons to get rid of the women by force. They remained where they were until forced to flee under a hail of stones and brickbats. Many suffered cuts and bruises, and, as a result, Pelt was jailed for a week. There he underwent a dramatic conversion, for on his release, before an audience of praying, hymn-singing crusaders, he smashed his liquor casks himself, announcing he was doing so “to sacrifice that which I fear has ruined many souls.”

For several months, the “Women’s Crusade” became an itinerant wonder, attracting crowds similar to those that flock to self-proclaimed saints claiming miraculous powers. On Dr. Lewis’s advice, Mother Thompson restricted her activities to villages and small towns. Other, related “women crusaders” attempted, without success, to emulate her in New England (Dr. Lewis noted that this part of America was “not adapted to this new method of warfare”) and in larger towns, such as Cincinnati, a liquor stronghold. Invariably in these big cities the crusade was a total failure. But though its greatest impact was on the Midwest, there were instances of successful women’s crusades picketing as far away as California. Mrs. Annie Wittenmayer, a later president of the National Women’s Christian Temperance Union, who was to chronicle the crusaders’ movement, wrote of further “miracles.” In Cleveland, a saloon keeper’s wife loosed three fierce dogs on a kneeling “crusader,” Mrs. Charles Wheeler, who never stopped praying but simply extended her hands to pat the animals on the head: they curled up at her feet. In Ohio, another saloon keeper’s wife hurled a torrent of vile abuse at the kneeling, praying women. Their leader cried out: “Lord,
silence this woman,” and “immediately, the woman’s mouth was shut like a steel trap, and she never spoke another word as long as she lived.”