Drink (54 page)

The good work of the Department of Scientific Temperance Instruction was supplemented by informal material, similar to that prepared for the British Bands of Hope. There were temperance nursery rhymes, temperance camp songs, temperance wall charts, temperance spelling books, and temperance medals. Newly born infants had the white ribbon of the WCTU tied to their swaddling clothes, a prayer read over them, and their name entered on the Cradle Roll. As soon as they could walk and sing they were deployed against drinkers, especially during elections. They were assembled around polling booths, dressed in their Sunday school best, issued with little American flags, and, when a known sot arrived to vote, would surround him and break into song. The effect could be sinister, as is apparent in Tobias Wolff’s depiction of the junior wing of the WCTU at work: “Swirling round the marked man in a wild elves’ dance, they sang with piping empty violence:

An entire generation of American children was conditioned to fear alcohol and to feel guilty when they drank it. Many, however, of the
Men and Women of Tomorrow
got over their indoctrination. According to federal statistics, per capita consumption of alcohol was creeping back up in the 1880s and ’90s to pre-Civil War levels, notwithstanding the fact that several states were officially dry. This worrying trend was blamed by temperance advocates on the pernicious influence of saloons and their illegal counterparts in those places where they were banned. The saloon became, to the abstinent-minded, a symbol for all that was evil about booze.

The case against these establishments was not without foundation. The American saloon of the 1890s was an equivocal place. While some served similar community roles to colonial-era taverns, functioning as social centers, labor exchanges, and offering a space where people could gather to celebrate christenings and weddings, they were outnumbered by squalid corner bars that dealt plainly and simply in intoxication. Although the principal clientele of this latter category was male, they also sold beer to local women and children, who bought it by the bucketful out the back door.
Rushing the growler,
as the practice was known, was particularly common in New York. While their counterparts in Ohio were wearing white ribbons and watching their teachers pickle calves’ brains in grain spirit, children in the tenements of the Bronx were drinking deep. Even the poorest families could afford a daily binge: A saloon keeper of the time observed that rushing the growler was “an inexpensive mode of becoming intoxicated. On thirty cents a whole family of topers can become drunk.”

Many of the less-salubrious kind of saloon harbored brothels and, if they could not accommodate prostitutes in-house, operated sister businesses where they might send their drunks. They also served as recruiting grounds on polling days, for the practice of buying votes with drinks was still common in urban America. Finally, they were often stinking eyesores surrounded by crawling drunks. A really nasty saloon was a tableau vivant of temperance noir. Their existence anywhere in America, and persistence in states where they had been outlawed, pricked the consciences of many drys, especially those of a religious bent, who perceived them to be the terrestrial colonies of hell. From the insulted ranks of temperate Americans, a heroine emerged to take the fight to the saloons, who gave their movement the excitement that hitherto it had lacked.

Sensation, in the imposing shape of Mrs. Carry A. Nation, helped drinking to become the first American political issue of the twentieth century. Born Carrie Amelia Moore to a Kentucky slave owner, this future scourge of saloons had good reason to hate alcohol. After a peripatetic childhood, during which she suffered from a mysterious and debilitating bowel ailment, and an unhappy adolescence, which she spent caring for her insane mother who suffered from the delusion that she was Queen Victoria of England, Carry made an unhappy marriage to an alcoholic doctor, who died of the delirium tremens shortly after the birth of their first and only child. The child, a daughter, suffered from a disfiguring abscess, which caused her right cheek to fall off, and which prevented her from opening her jaws for eight years. Carry attributed the affliction to the drunkenness of her husband: “The curse of heredity is one of the most heartbreaking results of the saloon. Poor little children are brought into the world with the curse of drink and disease entailed upon them.”

Carry remarried to a preacher and attorney named David Nation and moved to Kansas, where she absorbed the propaganda of the WCTU. This she combined with her individual version of radical Christianity to create a personal doctrine of direct action against alcohol. She was physically well-equipped to put it into effect—six feet tall, approximately 180 pounds, strong of arm, with a piercing voice, false teeth, and a face whose jowls resembled those of a bulldog. Moreover, Medicine Lodge, the nominally dry town where she lived, was full of provocation—its prison, which she visited in an evangelical role, was packed with drunkards; and its flamboyant, if illegal, saloons did a roaring trade, even on the Sabbath day.

Carry flowered into violence in late 1899, when she attacked Mart Strong’s saloon in her hometown one Sunday afternoon. Accompanied by fellow female advocates of temperance, who supplied background music on a melodeon, and singing what was to become her battle song,
⁵⁹
she advanced into the bar and chased out all its customers. Encouraged by her success, she marched on all the remaining saloons in Medicine Lodge in subsequent weeks, and on the local drugstore, where she smashed a keg of medicinal whiskey with a sledgehammer and set its contents on fire. Once she had cleared Medicine Lodge of alcohol, Carry meditated on action against other hotbeds of sin nearby.

The next place to feel the strength of her arm was Kiowa, a neighboring hamlet in Barber County. She set off in a buggy loaded with stones and other missiles and, in the course of a single morning, smashed up the fixtures, fittings, and windows of no fewer than three saloons. After Kiowa, she moved on Wichita, the state capital, whose illegal drinking joints operated within walking distance of the legislature that had outlawed them, and which were renowned for their ostentatious architecture and interiors. First stop was the Carey Hotel, which featured a magnificent oil painting by John Noble, entitled
Cleopatra at the Bath
or
The Temptress of the Nile,
behind its bar. Such prurient canvases were common in the saloons of the period and drew Mrs. Nation’s particular ire. “It is very significant,” she wrote, “that pictures of naked women are in saloons. . . . The motive for doing this is to suggest vice, animating the animal in man and degrading the respect he should have for the sex to which he owes his being; yes, his Savior also!” She treated Cleopatra to a volley of stones, then raged through the saloon with an iron bar, shattering bottles, decanters, and tumblers, while shrieking, “Glory to God! Peace on earth, goodwill to all men!” at the top of her voice. She was arrested while in the process of battering the cherrywood bar counter with a brass spittoon.

Once they had her in custody, Wichita officials were confronted by a legal conundrum: Strictly speaking, joints were banned in Kansas, and to prosecute someone for damaging one would be to admit to their not-so-clandestine existence. The police chief offered to pay her fare home, but she refused to go, and so she was sent to Sedgwick County Jail while they worked out what to do with her. She caused similar headaches among policemen, sheriffs, and county attorneys throughout and beyond the state after she was bailed, not least of all because the press detected greatness in Carry Nation and encouraged her into newsworthy behavior. The exciting reports they published of her exploits caused mobs to form wherever she appeared. She adopted the hatchet as her signature weapon and sold little replicas made of pewter to help finance the battle against jointists and “hellions.” Moreover, she was fearless: In the course of her crusade she was arrested twenty-five times, had her nose broken by the wife of a saloon keeper, her head cracked open by the wife of a cigar-store owner,
⁶⁰
her wrist shattered by a bartender in Ohio, had been horsewhipped in Kansas, pistol-whipped in Texas, had a chair broken over her head in Kentucky and her false teeth knocked down her throat in Trinidad, Colorado.

Had she been a man, it is probable that Mrs. Nation’s career would have been ended with a bullet or two in the first saloon that she attacked. However, protected by her sex, she spent several years assaulting bars, drinkers, smokers, and tobacconists in the United States and abroad, during which time she became an international celebrity, albeit a figure of ridicule as much as praise. The WCTU and other temperance organizations, while acknowledging the publicity she generated for their cause, distanced themselves from its source: Carry Nation did not personify the dry ideal.

Indeed, the liquor barons were more effusive in their praise of the woman who described herself as “a bulldog running along at the feet of Jesus, barking at what He doesn’t like.” She was offered considerable sums to represent various brands of beer, and several whiskey manufacturers sent her kegs of their product in the hope that she would destroy them in front of the drinking public. Whenever she smashed a bar the debris was collected and sold as relics; many saloons were named after her, and the Big 803 in Topeka, Kansas, displayed a hatchet, captured from her in 1901, in pride of place behind its counter.

Despite the indifference of the WCTU, and the unwanted admiration of the liquor interests, Carry had a real impact on the illegal saloon trade, in particular during the first year of her crusade, when she and imitators wrecked nearly fifty bars, causing hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage, and cleared over thirty counties of drinking places. She was a champion to many dry eyes, and her admirers broadcast her virtues in print. The
Topeka State Journal,
for example, lavished hyperbole on her efforts:

However, in states where saloons were legal, Carry was treated as a figure of fun. When she found her preferred style of direct action barred, she took to the stage and became a popular vaudeville attraction. She justified her cooperation with the forces of darkness on the grounds that that the American theater-going public constituted “the largest missionary field in the world. No one ever got a call or was allowed to go there with a Bible but Carry Nation. The door was never opened to anyone but me. The hatchet opened it.” Her most popular role was as Mrs. Hammond in the stage version of
Ten Nights in a Bar-Room,
whose plot had been altered to include a saloon-smashing scene, which Carry performed with practiced grace. Offstage, she continued to preach wherever anyone would listen. She was the victim of numerous hoaxes, in particular at the hands of students. She was invited to Yale, for instance, by a letter that complained that the students were being forced to consume alcohol in their food. Menus featuring dishes such as roast ham with champagne sauce were included in the letter. She duly traveled to New Haven and was chaperoned around campus by the members of the Jolly Eight drinking club. When she tried to give a speech she was drowned out by drinking songs. She posed for a formal photograph, and just before the shutter clicked, the students assembled behind her pulled out concealed mugs and bottles. She left convinced that Yale was “a school of vice to a great extent.”

Carry even took her message to Great Britain in 1908. She set out full of hope and got off to a good start by smashing the bar mirror in the steamship
Columbia,
which carried her over the Atlantic. She was arrested several times during the course of her visit, and while she received a positive welcome from British temperance organizations, she was treated to a barrage of eggs and vegetables by London theater-goers when she appeared onstage at various music halls. When asked her opinion of the British upon her return to the United States, she characterized them as tea fiends and claimed that their addiction made them nervous and affected.

Carry died the following year of a stroke, possibly complicated by congenital syphilis. Her final written assessment of the temperance issue was prophetic: “I now feel that this great wave of prohibition which is sweeping over the whole land, propelled by a mighty power of public sentiment, will go on and on until national prohibition will be the ultimate outcome.”

Although the art of hatchetation perished with its founder, the temperance movement kept her spirit alive by concentrating its forces on saloons. These open sores on America’s fair face were visible proof of the damage wreaked by alcohol. The Anti-Saloon League (ASL), a relatively young association of drys, was in the van of the attack. The ASL had been founded in Oberlin, Ohio, a hotbed of sobriety, in 1893. It was conceived of as a political weapon, forged for a single purpose— to end drinking in the United States. It perceived, correctly, that temperance had become a pivotal issue in federal politics. The short-lived National Prohibition Party, while it had attracted few votes, was believed to have influenced the outcome of the presidential elections of 1884 and 1888, in the first case giving a narrow victory to the Democrat Grover Cleveland, and, in the second, to the Republican Benjamin Harrison. The Prohibition Party itself was supplanted as a third force in American politics by the rise of the Progressives, but both Democrats and Republicans had learned to pay at least lip service to Prohibition.