ON AND OFF THE WAGON, by Donald Barr Chidsey
Copyright © 1969 by Donald Barr Chidsey.
Published by Wildside Press LLC
www.wildsidepress.com
Acknowledgments
Any editorial opinion expressed in On and Off the Wagon is the author’s own. Accounts of recent events, especially since repeal, are generally from the files of the New York Times. A list of the books consulted is appended. The author wishes to thank the dedicated reference librarians of the Olin Library, Wesleyan University; the Palmer Library, Connecticut College for Women; the Yale University Library; the Library of the United States Coast Guard Academy; and the Phoebe Griffin Noyes Library of Old Lyme, Connecticut; also, Mrs. Fred J. Tooze of the National Woman’s Christian Temperance Union; Thomas J. Donovan of the Licensed Beverage Industries, Inc.; Mrs. Alexander P. Guyol of the League of Women Voters; Roger C. Storms of the Prohibition National Committee; and Niles N. Peebles and Robert E. Hitchins of Alcoholics Anonymous.
D. B. C.
CHAPTER ONE
Hiss the Villain
The corner saloon is the villain of this story. There are many in America who remember it, and many who wince when they do. It was a mysterious, maleficent, awesome institution, almost flamboyantly wicked. Children were taught never to loiter near it and under no circumstances, even when passing, to peer under the swinging doors. They did both, just to get a glimpse of the dim interior, flyblown mirrors, men’s feet on a brass rail, the sawdust, the spittoons. Now and again a man would lurch through those doors, coming or going, and then the children would scatter, scampering away, afraid of the kind of men who patronized the corner saloon. But the children always came back, for the place was endlessly fascinating.
Women walked blocks out of their way to avoid passing a saloon. In the cities a lady might have to pass half a dozen such dives on her way downtown to do her shopping. She would walk fast, turning her head a little aside, for the language that emerged from the corner saloon was never intended for a female audience. Men were not allowed to talk that way on the sidewalk.
There were men who did not pause in passing the saloon or hasten their step, but who shook a sad head and clucked their tongues, wondering how the American people could continue to tolerate such places. These men were not long-nosed, skinny- necked galoots who carried tightly folded umbrellas, such as Rollin Kirby depicted in his New York World cartoons, men who gazed upon their neighbors with a jaundiced eye and whose mouths seemed filled with lemon juice. Most were decent, sensible people who deplored the saloon because it was a deplorable place and who were determined to do whatever they could to abolish it.
The most notable thing about the saloon was its stink. It was a fusty, musty odor, damp and clammy, an odor compounded of sawdust, tobacco juice, malt, metal polish, and whiskey. Though the word “saloon” was abhorrent to all right-thinking people, it had not always been so. The inns and ordinaries of American colonial days were called taverns and taprooms, but these shops had the reputation of being loafing grounds, the meeting places of idlers and drunkards, so that when “saloon” drifted into the language, from France by way of England, it was seized upon by the purveyors of spirits and malt drinks as an excellent and elegant substitute. “Saloon” was high-toned. Nothing dreadful could ever happen in a “saloon.”
Toward the end of what was dubbed the Dry Decade—though it lasted almost fourteen years, from 1920 to 1933—when repeal was faintly visible on the horizon and men’s hearts beat faster in the hope of obtaining unpoisoned booze, even the most stalwart of the wets—men like A1 Smith of New York and Governor Albert C. Ritchie of Maryland—protested that, no matter what might happen to the Eighteenth Amendment, the old-fashioned saloon would never come back. Nor has it—by that name. Many saloons today call themselves bars and cocktail lounges; but others, in a calculated attempt to achieve an air of respectability and nostalgia, are called taverns or taprooms.
So we have come full circle. It might be interesting to examine this phenomenon. The stench has gone, admittedly, but could it be that the spirit of the old corner saloon still lingers on?
CHAPTER TWO
Place Where We All Got Drunk
Colonial days—Prohibition
in Georgia—Indians
There is no agreement on where or when the temperance movement in America began. There may have been unrecorded antiliquor societies that soon fell apart, since the earliest ones almost certainly were made up of farmers seeking a way to convince their hired men that rum was not essential to vigor in the fields.
But neither beer nor “ardent spirits” were frowned upon by the first English colonists in America. Beer was their water, their table drink, and they fed it to their children, for they distrusted natural water, fearing it would make them sick. In view of the primitive sanitary conditions back in crowded England, the fear had some basis. On long voyages beer was known to keep scurvy at a distance, something that fresh fruit would have done as well if only the fruit could have been preserved. At Jamestown, because of mismanagement, and at Plymouth, because the “Mayflower” sailors would not let them unload any, wanting it all themselves for the return trip, the colonists were woefully short of beer. Sheer thirst at last forced them to taste the water, which to their amazement and delight they discovered was not polluted at all, and almost as good as beer itself. But they much preferred beer, when they could get it.
As for spirits—chiefly rum, though there was brandy for the rich—these were held in high esteem. They were called “the good creature” or “the good creature of God.” They were looked upon as a boon, a gift to mankind. Physicians and laborers agreed that spirits kept up bodily strength. Part of a man’s wages might be paid in spirits, and a worker did not go out into the fields unless he had a jug with him or was sure that one would soon be brought. When the community was together at affairs like bees and raisings, the liquor was placed where everyone had a chance to help himself as often as he wished. At weddings and funerals, rum or wine was considered indispensable. At the funeral in 1678 of Mrs. Mary Norton, widow of the minister of the First Church of Boston, fifty-one gallons of wine were consumed. It was Malaga.
The colonists did not tolerate drunkenness, however. Rum might be a gift from God, but anybody who misused that gift to the extent of making a disgrace of himself in public probably experienced his hangover in the stocks. After a second offense he might be condemned to wear a large red letter “D” around his neck for a year, just as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s heroine had to wear an “A.”
Many of the early settlers were indentured, that is, they were obliged to work at a particular job, at no wages, for a specified length of time. Such people, whether they were children or adults, belonged body and soul to their masters. A servant’s time was never his own, and if he wasted it in a rum shop drinking on credit against the money he would be given when he was released from servitude—why, that was sinful and, in most cases, unlawful. Early legislation pertaining to rum usually stressed this time factor. Innkeepers were admonished never to permit servants to linger on their premises.
Georgia, the last of the thirteen original colonies, did have a ban on spirits for a while. Georgia’s patron, General James Oglethorpe, feared that his colonists, who were nearly all debtors, had picked up the habit of heavy drinking in the English jails from which they had been rescued. The colonists in Georgia were not consulted. They were told only that they could not have rum.
Soon men who functioned much in the manner of bootleggers began to swarm down the rivers and coves that spread between tidal Carolina and tidal Georgia, providing the colonists with the spirits they wanted. The sellers, acquainted with every foot of the aquatic maze, would disappear like so many fireflies if they were surprised by the authorities. It was easy enough to apprehend the purchasers, but hard to fix upon a means of punishing them without taking them away from their work, which was the reason they had been brought across the sea in the first place. Besides, every man jack of them, as a British subject, could claim his right to a jury trial, and that would have tied up all business