Drink (49 page)

Throughout the conflict Southern officers had better access to alcohol than their men and did not experience the same vicissitudes in supply. Not all of them followed the example of Bragg; indeed, some abused the privilege. This was resented in the ranks, whose scorn for inebriated superiors is apparent in the diary entry of an anonymous Louisiana soldier for October 25, 1863, apropos of his new brigadier: “From what I can tell [he] is better able to command a bottle of whiskey than anything else.” Confederate physicians also had privileged access to alcohol. It was employed as a panacea against ailments ranging from camp itch to malaria, and when supplies of anesthetics dried up, it served as an analgesic during surgery. The Civil War created nearly half a million cripples. Fear of wounds turning gangrenous made amputation the operation of choice, and accounts from both sides describe the horror of seeing cartloads of freshly severed human limbs stacked up outside operating tents. More often than not the only sedative a wounded Confederate received before his arm or leg was sawn off was a mouthful of spirits. Like the officers, the physicians were suspected of exploiting their advantages. Indeed, some confessed to drinking a fair proportion of their own medicine under the strain of work.

While the South burned, the cocktails still flowed in Washington. Nathaniel Hawthorne advised visitors to Willard’s Hotel, which served as an informal center of operations in the capital, to “adopt the universal habit of the place, and call for a mint julep, a whiskey skin, a gin cock-tail, a brandy smash, or a glass of pure Old Rye, for the conviviality of Washington sets in at an early hour, and, so far as I had an opportunity of observing, never terminates at any hour.” Moreover, as victory for the North became inevitable, there was no equivalent religious revival in the Federal camps and no attendant blip in temperance. Indeed, the movement received a serious setback when a tax was imposed on beer and distilled spirits in the Union states, thereby conniving at their manufacture and sale.

American drinking habits shifted in the aftermath of the Civil War. Lager beer replaced whiskey as the national beverage of the working-man. The change was caused by a number of factors. The excise tax introduced by the Union to help pay for its armies had pushed up the price of spirits, so that they were no longer much cheaper than sodas. The price of beer, meanwhile, was traveling in the opposite direction. Although it had likewise been subjected to a tax (of one dollar per barrel) the net effect of the imposition over the following decade was to focus brewers on making the production, distribution, and sale of their merchandise vastly more efficient. Attendant benefits in both quality and availability resulted in a surge in consumption. Whereas in 1860 there had been 1,269 breweries in the United States, with a total output of one million barrels, by 1867 output had risen to six million barrels, and by 1873, 4,131 brewers produced nine million barrels of beer among them. Most of this growth was accounted for by lager beer, in the pilsner style, and much of it came from towns in the old West such as Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, and Chicago.

The switch to lager from colonial favorites such as ale, porter, and stout resulted partly from demographics, and partly from changing tastes among consumers. The flood of German immigrants in the mid-nineteenth century had created a naturalized American market for lager. Over the next two decades Teutonic entrepreneurs established large breweries dedicated to their native brews in towns where fellow Germans had settled in numbers. Some of their enterprises remain household names: In 1855 Frederick Miller took over the Menomonee Valley Brewery in Milwaukee, and lent the enterprise his name, the following year Joseph Schlitz started brewing in the same town, and in 1857 Eberhard Anheuser acquired a small brewery in St. Louis, which, with the assistance of his son-in-law Adolphus Busch, he converted to the production of Anheuser-Busch pilsner. In addition to introducing German beer to America, immigrants also established Bavarian-style beer gardens where they might gather in their leisure hours. The Bowery district of New York was graced with a number of these institutions, which won the approval of the press of the city for the orderly conduct of their patrons. They were “immense buildings, fitted up in imitation of a garden,” which could accommodate “from four hundred to twelve hundred guests. Germans carry their families there to spend a day or an evening.” These drinking places usually provided music to entertain their clients, which was judged to be “exquisite in some places, especially in the Atlantic Garden.” However, they also attracted criticism for being foreign to the American way. They were child-friendly, did their best business on Sundays, and were notoriously peaceful places where, despite the quantity of alcohol consumed, good humor and decency prevailed. Such qualities provoked both the ire of the temperance movement, who reviled the clientele of beer gardens for Sabbath breaking and for drinking in front of their wives and children, and the prejudice of non-German Americans, who held up the different customs of the minority for ridicule.

After lager and beer gardens, German immigrants introduced a third innovation to American drinking: organization. When the Civil War tax on beer was introduced in 1862, thirty-seven New York lager brewers had arranged a national convention to consider the matter, which was attended by brewers from other Union states. The convention was repeated the following year, and the next, by which time it had acquired a title—the United States Brewers Association (USBA)— and a mission, which was to influence America’s elected politicians in favor of beer. From the start, the members of the USBA had been diligent in paying their taxes and asking that they might be reduced. They were also conscientious in documenting their financial contribution to the war, and to postwar reconciliation, and this record formed the bedrock on which the beer lobby was raised. In addition to singing the praises of liquid bread, the USBA launched a preemptive strike on temperance, whose resurgence it feared. According to its secretary, speaking at the 1866 convention, “Just now a note of war is heard coming against us by fanatics who, in pretending to support Sunday and temperance laws, are in fact trying to annihilate the self-respect and independence of mankind, and liberty of conscious, and of trade.” Its response, made formal in Chicago in 1867, was the resolution: “That we will use all means to stay the progress of this fanatical party, and to secure our individual rights as citizens, and that we will sustain no candidate, of whatever party, in any election, who is any way disposed towards the total abstinence cause.”

At the same time as declaring war on temperance, America’s brewers industrialized their businesses. European innovations such as steam engines and microscopes were introduced, and the ever-growing railway network was used to extend distribution. Contemporary advances in cooling technology and ice storage enabled them to produce lager all year round, and their consistent, refreshing product made many converts to the German way of brewing. Once they had stimulated demand, the brewers sought to control it. They became apostles of vertical integration, buying saloons in imitation of the tied pub system of their British counterparts. These profited at the expense of independent competitors by a combination of lower prices and clever marketing strategies, which latter included washing the sidewalk in front of the saloon with beer so that its compelling aroma, mingled with the scent of alcohol evaporating in the sunlight, would lure drinkers in through the doors.

Saloons superseded the colonial tavern as the archetypal American drinking place. Unlike taverns, the average saloon was not expected to serve as a multipurpose institution—a place in which to lodge strangers, judge witches, plot independence, and serve travelers the odd pint of strong waters or cider. The ideal shifted from Elizabethan inn to gin palace. Instead of a warren of rooms, the action was concentrated in a single large space serviced by a long bar. The counter itself was often decorated in an ornate style, with carved facings, a brass footrail, and spittoons of the same material tastefully disposed about its base. An alluring display of bottles and, from 1879 onward, a cash register, backed by a wall of mirrors, drew the eye of the drinker toward the obliging bar-staff.

In metropolitan saloons, the free lunch pioneered by the City Exchange in New Orleans became an institution. Working hours were changing. Gone were the fourteen-hour days of the first flush of the Industrial Revolution, when there had seemed to be no limit to the capacity of the laborer for labor. Employers let their workers rest at noon and set them free in the evenings, thus creating two fixed periods when they might relax and refresh themselves. The opportunity to eat for free for the price of a few beers drew hungry men to drink at lunchtime for the sake of food, and they rewarded such largesse with their loyalty in the evenings.

Saloons, more so than taverns, relied on men for their clientele. Throughout the nineteenth century, American women had been drifting away from public drinking places, and the new model was developed with their absence in mind. It transpired, however, that America’s brewers had neglected its women at their peril. In 1873 they rose en masse and attacked the manufacturers and retailers of alcohol with an unprecedented fury. As the Brewers Association had prophesized, the dormant heresy of temperance was revived, and its flame of intolerance rekindled, albeit by unexpected hands. The Woman’s Temperance Crusade of 1873-74, during which “hundreds of thousands of women, in a paroxysm of activity and prayer, closed thirty thousand saloons and initiated a generation of female leadership in the temperance movement” was as unwelcome a development as it had been unforeseen.

The crusade was the brainchild of Dr. Dioclesian Lewis, a Boston minister who had learned his temperance at the hands of a drunken father. Lewis made a living as a traveling lecturer, and his favorite themes were the education of women and the social evils caused by alcohol. His eloquence persuaded a band of women in Hillsboro, Ohio, to march into a saloon to reclaim their menfolk, and once the crusade had been set in motion, it snowballed into a national campaign. Across the United States, groups of women invaded saloons. Once inside, their preferred tactics were to sing hymns or fall on their knees in prayer. If prevented from entering, they would occupy the sidewalk outside and raise the doxology. On the occasions that their piety persuaded the saloon keeper that he was an inadvertent ally of Satan, redeemers and redeemed would roll out the barrels and bottles of liquid perdition and empty their contents on the road.

The women of America had taken to the front line of the war on alcohol because they considered themselves to be its voiceless victims. They were beaten and impoverished by drunken husbands, with little opportunity for legal protection or redress. Divorce was rare, and alcoholism did not yet constitute proper grounds for separation. Women could not vote, and hence they were as helpless to prevent the supply of drink as they were to escape its consequences. And so they seized on temperance as a cause to rally around. With temperance they could test their collective power to influence the behavior of American men, by persuading them to deny themselves their saloons. If we could vote, they declared, we would vote for temperance. Indeed, the female quest for an alcohol-free America was seen by many of its participants as the first step in the quest for female suffrage.

In retrospect, the brewers should have anticipated the danger. A fair number of women’s temperance societies had flourished prior to the Civil War. While organizations such as the Daughters of Temperance acted as dutiful sisters to their fraternal orders, others were protest groups, established by women who had been excluded from making a common cause with teetotal men, such as the Woman’s New York State Temperance Society. The WNYSTS was the creation of Susan B. Anthony and Mary C. Vaughn, both former Daughters of Temperance, who had been banned “from speaking at a Sons of Temperance convention in Albany (in 1852) because of their sex.” The new society had progressive views on divorce, which it advocated should be permitted to a woman married to an alcoholic. It also passed opinions on matters other than temperance, including slavery and, by extension, universal suffrage. It was, however, ahead of its time, and its members were not consistent in their opinions. Susan B. Anthony, for instance, limited the intended beneficiaries of her demand for votes to black men and white women.

Despite their noble aims and impressive membership rolls, women’s temperance societies had been passive creatures prior to the Civil War. The Woman’s Temperance Crusade of 1873-74 taught them the use of their teeth, and the newly established Women’s Christian TemperanceUnion (WCTU) gave them a tongue. The WCTU quickly established supremacy among women’s temperance bodies and within a decade was a power in national politics. Its rise to influence and fame was managed by Frances E. Willard, who acted as its national president between 1879 and 1898, and whose motto was “Do Everything!” No measure was spared in the effort to drive out alcohol. Towns were encouraged to build drinking-water fountains;
temperance restaurants,
a combination of words that would have been oxymoronic to a gourmand, were established; and the free lunch offered by saloons was attacked as a wicked ruse whose hidden costs included the risks of drunkenness and damnation. Moreover, abstinence was idolized and drinking demonized in the promotional material that the WCTU prepared for and taught in American schools. Young girls were trained to withhold their kisses from any with alcohol on their breath via the slogan “Lips that touch liquor shall never touch mine!” Finally the WCTU borrowed some of its opponents’ tactics—like the brewers, it scrutinized the stance on abstinence of every candidate for election and stigmatized any whom it judged to be insufficiently dry.

Temperance was once again a hot topic in national as well as local politics. A Prohibition Party was established in 1869 as a breakaway from the Republicans, who were not prepared to adopt state-enforced abstinence as official policy. Many within its ranks, however, practiced temperance, and in 1876 Americans elected their second dry Republican president, Rutherford B. Hayes, who, unlike Lincoln, enforced his own self-denial on the White House and entertained domestic luminaries and visiting dignitaries alike with alcohol-free fruit punches and sodas. His wife, Lucy, also teetotal, passed around the jugs. In recognition of her unbending commitment to abstinence, she was given the nickname of
Lemonade Lucy
by a grateful WCTU.