Thanks for having me over, Agitators. This is my second stint as a guest blogger for Radley. The first time, I think I got up about two posts. Bloggin’, it turns out, ain’t easy. I learned that I have many fewer ideas than I thought had.

So I’m going to try something a little different here. I’m writing a book about how American culture, politics and basic economics intersect to drive drug trends — and how those drug trends then feedback and impact our culture and politics. My book is set to come out in the spring — 4/20/09; mark your calendar! — and I’m working on finishing it now. I’ll post excerpts here and any feedback you have will be incorporated — or not — into the final work. Tell me what I’m missing, where I go wrong and/or where I go too far. If you want to get me directly, I’m at ryangrim-at-gmail-dot-com.

And, of course, while Radley’s gone, also check out the blog I write for at Politico, The Crypt. 

So if this works for you guys, I’ll post another excerpt later. For now, here’s some of the historical section… 

On a Sunday in December 1873, around 70 women marched out of a Presbyterian church in Hillsboro, Ohio, led by the daughter of a former governor. “Walking two by two, the smaller ones in the front and the taller coming after, they sang more or less confidently, ‘Give to the Winds Thy Fears,’ that heartening reassurance of Divine protection now known…as the Crusade Hymn. Every day they visited the saloons and the drug stores where liquor was sold. They prayed on sawdust floors or, being denied entrance, knelt on snowy pavements before the doorways, until almost all the sellers capitulated,” writes Helen E. Tyler in Where Prayer and Purpose Meet: The WCTU Story, 1874–1949. Born out of these marches, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union became one of the most successful lobbying organizations in American history.

Over the next four decades, the group became a media sensation, grew its ranks by more than tenfold, and spearheaded the effort to transform the personal pledge of its members “to abstain from all distilled, fermented and malt liquors” into a Constitutional mandate. By 1920, per-capita consumption in the United States was only about an eighth of what it was a century before, and only about a quarter of what it is today.

The WCTU’s slogan—”For God and Home and Native Land”—perfectly encapsulates the forces that propelled it: religion, family values, and nationalism. In the 19th-century United States, all three were in ascendance. The Second Great Awakening fostered the growth of missionary societies, preaching tours, and dayslong revival meetings. New periodicals such as Godey’s Lady’s Book, Ladies Home Journal, and Good Housekeeping described women’s duties to their nuclear families as near-religious imperatives. The War of 1812—especially Andrew Jackson’s drubbing of the British at the Battle of New Orleans—gave Americans a sense of themselves as players equal to any on the world stage and unleashed a wave of patriotic fervor. If the latter ebbed a little during the Civil War, it rose again mightily with the 1876 centennial, marked in Philadelphia with an exposition of homegrown wonders that included Charles E. Hires’ root beer, H.J. Heinz’s ketchup, and Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone.

In other words, if you had a taste for Bible-thumping, homemaking, flag-waving, and teetotaling, it was an exciting time for America. Ditto if you had a taste for cocaine or opiates.

What we think of as today’s major drugs almost all entered American culture in the mid-19th century, and all became hugely popular by the end of it. Key to their success was the demonization of beer, wine, and liquor by the WCTU, the Anti-Saloon League, and their various fellow travelers and predecessors, none of which realized something fundamental about America: that it relates to alcohol and drugs much like an addict does—with spasms of morality and sobriety followed by relapse.

Again and again in American history, use of one substance diminishes while use of another rises, due to a combination of social, political, and economic factors. A movement against a drug might spring up organically, but it’s nurtured by whatever interests it serves. The drug goes from socially acceptable to socially condemned. It often becomes illegal. Then something else takes its place.

This process was on full display in the 19th century, as the first significant surge of the temperance movement accidentally created a drug lover’s utopia.

The first European settlers of America drank, on average, three times as much alcohol as we do now, despite the reputations of our Puritan ancestors. (Colonists also smoked an enormous amount of tobacco, often a variety that contained around 15 percent nicotine—enough to cause hallucinations and a high far superior to the buzz that now comes from a Marlboro.) Unlike the WCTU, early American temperance advocates opposed, rather than drinking, drunkenness. In 1619, the Colony of Virginia banned “playing dice, cards, drunkenness, idleness, and excess in apparel.” Massachusetts Bay Colony began requiring a governor’s permit in order to sell liquor in 1633, observing that many of its people were “distempering themselves with drinke.” One unfortunate lush, a fellow named Robert Cole, was made to wear a red “D” around his neck for a year.

But the American temperance movement didn’t really get going until 1785, when Dr. Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and social reformer, wrote the first major anti-liquor treatise in U.S. history. In his Inquiry Into the Effects of Ardent Spirits Upon the Human Body and Mind, With an Account on the Means of Preventing, and of the Remedies for Curing Them, Rush pioneers the conception of alcoholism as a disease, and he still suggests Christianity, guilt, and shame as great inducements to sobriety. But he also writes of the effectiveness of cures including vegetarianism, ankle blisters, a “violent attack of an acute disease,” “an oath, taken before a magistrate, to drink no more spirits,” and “suddenly, and entirely” abstaining from liquor—perhaps with the aid of a touch of laudanum.

Unlike the teetotalers he inspired, Rush restricted his finger-wagging to the consumption of liquor. Drinks such as beer and wine, he writes, are “generally innocent, and often have a friendly influence upon health and life.” Indeed, when America’s most prominent physician was recommended by Thomas Jefferson to help prepare Meriwether Lewis and William Clark for their journey West, Rush suggested outfitting them with, among other things including 8 ounces of Turkish opium and 600 mercury-laden laxatives of his own concoction, 30 gallons of “medicinal wine”—although the doctor did admonish, “The less spirit you use the better.”

Rush suggests that the overuse of spirits leads to everything from “a puking of bile,” “a husky cough,” and “frequent and disgusting belchings” to “falsehood…fraud, theft, uncleanliness, and murder.” Liquor tears apart families, ruins fortunes, and corrupts children. “The social and imitative nature of man,” he warns, “often disposes him to adopt the most odious and destructive practices from his companions,” meaning that a drunkard begets other drunkards, until so many are about that the very nation is at risk. “Should the customs of civilized life preserve our nation from extinction…they cannot prevent our country being governed by men, chosen by intemperate and corrupted voters. From such legislators, the republic would soon be in danger.”

Likeminded men such as Jefferson and John Adams similarly wanted the nation to be built on “virtue”—a democratic society, they reasoned, requires the selfless and civilized participation of upright citizens. Shortly after the Constitution was ratified, Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton pushed through Congress a tax on liquor that he said was meant “more as a measure of social discipline than as a source of revenue.” (Though Hamilton also conceded that he “wanted the tax imposed to advance and secure the power of the new federal government.”) Americans, it turned out, had as much love for taxes on whiskey as they had for taxes on tea, and the levy was met on the frontier with fierce resistance. Protesters launched the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794, which had to be beaten back by George Washington.

The movement against insobriety has risen and fallen at different points in the history of this nation founded on high idealism. But whenever the American campaign against drunkenness has gathered strength, whether in the 1830s, the 1870s, or the 1980s, the call for temperance has evolved into a demand for full abstinence—zero tolerance, in today’s terms. Abraham Lincoln told a temperance organization in 1842 that Americans used to assume that problems with alcohol come from “abuse of a very good thing,” but then came to realize that the culprit is “use of a bad thing.” The WCTU still proudly displays a line from ancient Greek philosopher Xenophon on its Web site: “Temperance may be defined as: moderation in all things healthful; total abstinence from all things harmful.”

Members of various waves of the American temperance movement have distributed copies of Rush’s Inquiry, but once total abstinence became the goal, they left his kudos to beer and wine on the editing-room floor. Other positive portrayals of drinking were edited out of American history, too. An 1848 engraving of George Washington making a toast to his officers shows him holding a glass with a bottle of liquor or wine on the table. When the image was reprinted for the centennial, as the temperance movement rose, the glass was removed and the bottle was replaced with a hat.

– Ryan Grim

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 13th, 2008 at 12:09 pm by Ryan Grim and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.