Drink (40 page)

In addition to drinking iced cocktails after dinner, Dickens also refreshed himself with imported wines throughout his sojourn, especially champagne. Champagne was very popular in America at the time. According to another British author to have toured the country, “The quantity of champagne drunk is enormous, and would absorb all the vintage of France.” That it did not is tribute to the counterfeiting skills of local manufacturers, who produced most of the fizz sold in the United States within its borders: “The small state of New Jersey has the credit of supplying the American champagne, which is said to be concocted out of turnip juice, mixed with brandy and honey. It is a pleasant and harmless drink, a very good imitation.”

The domestic wine industry did more than create faux champagne. In the same year that Dickens visited Cincinnati, Nicholas Longworth, its richest resident,
³⁶
had made a breakthrough in the quest to produce an all-American wine, whose taste was not so vile that it needed to be masked with brandy. Longworth had similar hopes to Thomas Jefferson’s as to the place that American wine might occupy in American society—both as a healthy alternative to whiskey and as an emblem of civilization. He had begun experimenting with various native and imported vines in 1813 and had had his first qualified success in the 1820s when he planted the
Catawba
grape along the banks of the Ohio. The Catawba had been discovered growing outside a North Carolina tavern by Major Adlum, the same man who had brought the soon-forgotten and unlamented scuppernong grape to the attention of North America. Adlum had experimented with his new contender in Maryland and had sent some of the wine it produced to Thomas Jefferson just before his death, who had pronounced his blessing over it.

Longworth’s first few seasons with the Catawba in Cincinnati were disappointing. Its wine proved to be as foxy as the scuppernong. In the 1830s, suspecting the nasty aftertaste came from the skins of its grapes, Longworth removed them from the must prior to fermentation, with encouraging results: He created a pale, still wine that tasted like artificial strawberries, which found favor with the German immigrants who were settling in the environs of Cincinnati—and no one else. Before, however, Longworth’s grand experiment to make a wine his fellow citizens would drink in preference to imports and whiskey failed, fate intervened—a neglected batch of the “strange strawberryish liquor” underwent secondary fermentation, resulting in a clear, effervescent wine, reminiscent of foxy champagne. Longworth sent for winemakers from the Champagne district of France to improve his product and, despite high wastage in the form of exploding bottles (the Catawba sparkled with a true Yankee vigor), succeeded in creating a wine that won not just domestic but international acclaim. By 1850 it was a commercial success and, shortly afterward, an aesthetic triumph. Henry Longfellow, the first great American poet, composed an ode in its favor:

While Dickens passed through Cincinnati, which he loved (and where he probably met Longworth among its “intelligent, courteous, and agreeable” society), rather than praising its wine in his
American Notes,
he remembered the city with a description of a temperance rally. Although associated through his writing with the same cause in Britain, Dickens chose to emphasize the comical aspects of the marchers and their “banners out of number.” His favorite was one portraying “a temperate man with ‘considerable of a hatchet’ (as the standard-bearer would probably have said), aiming a deadly blow at a serpent which was apparently about to spring upon him from the top of a barrel of spirits.” He was also captivated by the appearance of “a huge allegorical device, borne among the ship-carpenters, on one side whereof the steamboat
Alcohol
was represented bursting her boiler and exploding with a great crash, while upon the other, the good ship
Temperance
sailed away with a fair wind, to the heart’s content of the captain, crew, and passengers.”

Dickens had little time for the American antialcohol movement. Although he spent much of his tour visiting orphanages, lunatic asylums, and other benevolent institutions, he did not honor any of the thriving temperance societies with his company. In retrospect, this neglect was surprising, for temperance was fast becoming the most popular issue in the United States. Its principal activist organization, the American Temperance Society (ATS), claimed one and a half million members by the time of Dickens’s visit. The ATS promoted temperance in the sense of abstinence. In 1836 it had published research conducted by the chemist William Brande that proved, as Livesey had demonstrated with his
Malt Lecture,
that weak drinks, in this case wine, contained the same intoxicating substance as whiskey: “The man who drinks wine, drinks alcohol, as really as the man who drinks distilled liquor; and if he drinks his wine clear, and his distilled liquor mixed with water, he may drink quite as much alcohol in one case as in the other.”

The news that wine was an ardent spirit in disguise caused consternation in the ranks of temperate Americans, most of whom had been recruited to the cause through their churches. Surely Jesus had not intended his disciples to celebrate his divinity with hard liquor? Many answered this question in the negative and supported their decision by questioning traditional interpretations of the use, and abuse, of wine in the Scriptures. They found themselves on shaky ground. From the days of Noah, the place of wine in Judeo-Christian societies had been a magnificent one, buttressed by divine associations. To rid Christianity of alcohol was a daunting challenge in revisionism. What, for example, about the Eucharist? While most of the sects in America had Protestant roots, and did not believe in the actual transubstantiation of communion wine, it was still served in numerous chapels throughout the country, mocking, as it were, the supposed compatibility of teetotalism and Christianity. Moreover, the Good Book was full of positive thoughts about wine. Of 212 mentions in the Old Testament, the vast majority speak well of “the gift of God.” The fact, however, that wine occasionally received a prophet’s curse gave hope to the temperance lobby. The Bible was reexamined by Moses Stuart in 1840, and he discovered that
wine
always meant the “liquid fruit of the vine,” i.e., unfermented grape juice, on the occasions when it was referred to as a blessing from heaven; whereas when it appeared as Satan’s potion and rendered kings or patriarchs unconscious, it meant alcoholic wine.

These imaginative glosses on the Word of the Lord provoked a bitter debate. Dr. John Maclean, professor of ancient languages at the College of New Jersey, took up his pen against revisionism in an 1841 essay, “Bacchus and Anti-Bacchus.” It was not merely bad scholarship, he argued, to pretend that the Jesus had not meant alcoholic wine when he made it “the symbol of his shed blood, in the most sacred rite of his holy religion” and commanded “all his disciples to drink of it in remembrance of him” but also bad theology. Despite such principled and erudite opposition, some of the so-called New School Presbyterians switched to nonalcoholic juice of the fruit of the vine for divine service. Together, they created sufficient demand to constitute a target market for entrepreneurs, who invented and promoted tailor-made products with which they might perform their rites. In 1840, for example,
The Charleston Observer
ran an advertisement from Daniel Pomeroy of New York, who offered unfermented grape syrup, guaranteed to remain free of alcohol, for sale to any New School temperates who wished to stay dry in the house of God.

Interestingly, the debate was most intense in Pennsylvania and Kentucky, where temperance flourished at a rate that would have had the Whiskey Boys of 1794 spinning in their graves. In these former frontier states, in whose creation booze had played so central a role, not only was sacramental wine a controversial issue, but so was whether people who sold or manufactured any sort of alcoholic drink could be acknowledged as Christians at all.
No,
said the synod of Pittsburgh in 1841, and anyone who traded in intoxicating beverages should be excommunicated from its congregation. This scorched-earth approach was opposed by William L. Breckinridge, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Louisville, who pointed out that biblical lands in recorded history had never produced alcohol-free wine. After adding that Jesus Christ had never forbidden or even criticized drinking per se in any version of the Bible yet published, he concluded “either that we live in a
very
enlightened age, or that all this is profane and blasphemous irreverence toward the Son of God.”

While American divines grappled with the theological challenges of abstinence, the nation’s drinkers took up the cudgel against alcohol and beat themselves vigorously. They were inspired by the example of half a dozen Baltimore barflies, who had attended a local temperance meeting to laugh but had left as converts. These proceeded to found the
Washington Temperance Society,
named in honor of America’s first president, who had led the country to independence from a monarch, and whose spirit they wished to imitate by freeing the United States from the rule of
King Alcohol
. The
Washingtonians,
as they styled themselves, carried the parallel further in a manifesto published in 1841, which parodied the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident;—that all men are created temperate; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain natural and innocent desires; that among these are appetites for COLD WATER and the pursuit of happiness!”

Alongside issuing revolutionary propaganda, the Washingtonians staged confessional meetings like those of the northern British teetotalers, at which reformed drinkers would trumpet their prior degradation and present salvation, and which were a novelty in America. While some commentators found their antics disgusting and labeled them as a “scurrilous army of ditch-delivered reformed drunkards (whose glory was in their shame),” their melodramatic assemblies were immensely popular. Within a year, their membership numbered one hundred thousand, and by 1843 there were half a million Washingtonians,
³⁷
whose leaders were pan-American celebrities. Principal among these was John Bartholomew Gough, a former actor and drunkard, who was renowned for delivering gruesome speeches about inebriates ruining themselves and hurting others. One of his favorite topics was the withdrawal symptoms suffered by alcoholics, which he would demonstrate as he described them: “Did you ever see a man in delirium tremens, biting his tongue until his mouth was filled with blood, the foam on his lips, the big drops on his brow? Did you ever hear him burst out in blasphemy which curdled your blood, and see him beat his face in wild fury?”

Despite its immense popularity, the Washingtonian movement proved short-lived. Away from the excitement and fervor of its meetings, many converts to abstinence relapsed, including Gough, who was discovered dead drunk in a brothel in New York after a weeklong binge. Although Gough tried to paint himself as a victim, claiming that his cherry soda had been spiked with drugs, his authority was diminished and the torch of abstinence passed back to the ATS. The latter was joined in its fight against alcohol by a number of new organizations, including the American Temperance Union (ATU) and the Sons of Temperance.
³⁸
While these eschewed theatrical or confessional meetings, they nonetheless encouraged melodrama in temperance writing. The ATU resolved to use works of fiction in the battle against alcohol in 1836, and within a decade temperance had become a stand-alone literary genre. The works published in the field fell into two categories: propaganda, such as the
Good Boys’ and Girls’ Alphabet
(Philadelphia, 1841), whose readers were taught to hate inebriates via “
D
is for Drunkard”; and books with genuine commercial appeal. It was the age of penny dreadful newspapers, which focused on true stories of violent crime, and accounts of the sordid activities of drunkards could tap into the same market, provided that they were sufficiently gruesome in their details.
The Glass; or The Trials of Helen More. A Thrilling Temperance Tale,
by Maria Lamas (1849), is an exemplar of the commercial variety of temperance writing. It features (a rarity) a female alcoholic who shuts her son in a closet while she goes out on a spree and returns to find that he has eaten himself alive: “I unlocked the clothes room door, and there—oh! there bathed in his blood, lay the mangled corpse of my child—murdered by his mother. There he lay, poor slaughtered innocent! starved! starved! starved! His left arm gnawed to the bone—gnawed till the artery had been severed, and he had bled to death.”

When temperance societies found they could promote their version of moral ascendancy and make money at the same time, they commissioned both established and up-and-coming authors to create for them. The Washingtonians, for example, in their glory years, paid Walt Whitman to write
Franklin Evans or, the Inebriate
—whose motto was: “Within that cup there lurks a curse.” The result was a convoluted tale of drunkenness, Indian wars, and miscegenation, whose orphan hero was redeemed by its sponsors. It had, however, hints of De Quincey, including incitements to voyeurism and flaunting of wounds, in its confessional style of narrative, perhaps because (so Whitman claimed) it had been completed “in three days for money under the influence of alcohol.”

The flood of temperance writing resulted in a trickle of new ideas in literature. The psychopathic inebriate became a stock-in-trade character, especially for writers in the gothic style. This creature was an altogether more complex type than the bumbling and parasitical individual depicted by Dickens in his groundbreaking “The Drunkard’s Death.” Active rather than passive, prone to spectacular hallucinations when not drinking, the improved stereotype had wonderful potential. He could kill, go mad, rape his infant daughter(s), repent, suffer the anguish of guilt, digress and forget himself, relapse, and die, shaking, in a maelstrom of nightmares, all in the same book. The promise of such a fictional individual was realized by Edgar Allan Poe in “The Black Cat,” whose narrator, addressing the reader from the shade of the gallows, describes the sequence of events that will terminate with his imminent execution. While the plot is ridiculous, the characterization is spectacular: The narrator is a psychopath as well as a drunkard, who murders his pets and feeds his rage with liquor.