by Wayne Curtis
Liquor-fueled troubles swelled in small towns and large cities alike, from drunken street clashes to heads of households abandoning wives and children. Drinking invaded hallowed churches; one New England magazine was compelled to note in 1812 that “the selling of spirituous liquors at a place of worship should be discouraged and that a man who indulges in the use of ardent spirits is in a poor situation to either hear or preach the gospel.”
The unseemly and unproductive behavior of drunkards was increasingly at odds with a new generation of can-do Americans, who saw their nation as full of promise and plenty. Drink was a tax on the sober, stuck with the tab for the wreckage left by drinkers in their wake. Upright citizens began organizing to reform the morals of their neighbors. Amid a besotted society, a backlash started to brew.
And while rum now served as second fiddle to whiskey in all aspects of American life, from economic to cultural, in one sphere rum remained supreme: the temperance movement.
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In 1785, the great patriot named Benjamin Rush published a small book on the perils of drink. Rush was a Philadelphia doctor, as learned as he was restless. A signer of the Declaration of Independence, he had served as the first surgeon general of the Continental Army, opposed the ownership of slaves, and advocated the development of a large-scale maple sugar industry to create “a source of sugar that would be free from the taint of slavery.” He distributed watermelons to Philadelphia prisoners in summer. But most notably, Rush was the first physician to challenge the medicinal benefits of alcohol—no small feat given distillation’s long alliance with alchemists and apothecaries, and the persistent belief that alcohol was the cure for nearly every disease. While Rush allowed that beer and wine consumed moderately were good for one’s health, his observations of his countrymen led him to wonder about the merits of consuming “ardent spirits.” Indeed, Rush was among the first to identify alcoholism as a disease, one in which drinkers became victim to a “craving” or “appetite” that lured them to the edge of a cliff and then pushed them over. Rush was nothing if not a careful observer. In his Inquiry into the Effect of Ardent Spirits, Rush outlined the eight stages of drunkenness with unsettling accuracy: First, “unusual garrulity.” Second, “unusual silence.” Third, “a disposition to quarrel.” Fourth, “uncommon good humor and an insipid simpering, or laugh.” Fifth, “profane swearing and cursing.” Sixth, “a disclosure of his or other people’s secrets.” Seventh, “a rude disposition to tell those persons in company whom they know, their faults.” And eighth, “certain immodest actions.” Rush called for Americans to resist the siren song of liquor as they built their new nation.
At first, the sentiments in Rush’s tract found only a small audience. But with alcohol consumption at historic highs in the early nineteenth century, the scattered brigade of concerned Americans began to coalesce. Individual protests against drink in isolated communities grew into small but organized units, which, in turn, became broader campaigns. The Union Temperance Society of Moreau and Northumberland, founded in Saratoga, New York, in 1808, prohibited members from drinking “rum, gin, whiskey, wine, or any distilled spirits” except when sick or at public dinners. The following year the Total Abstinence Society was founded in nearby Greenfield, New York. The Massachusetts Society for the Suppression of Intemperance, which would become one of the most influential groups nationally, was founded in 1813. Dozens of other societies would follow, among them the powerful Washington Temperance Society, the American Temperance Society, the Congressional Total Abstinence Society, the Sons of Temperance, the United Order of the Golden Cross and Sons of Jonadab, the Marblehead Union Moral Society, the Order of the Templars of Honor and Temperance, the National Temperance Society and Publication House, and Catholic Total Abstinence. By 1833, a million Americans had signed pledges for temperance through six thousand temperance associations around the nation.
The attack on intoxicating liquors was more than a crusade in name—it had the trappings of a full-out war. Books like Charles Jewett’s Forty Years’ Fight with the Drink Demon (1877), and J. A. Dacus’s Battling with the Demon (1872) urged followers to take up arms against an insidious foe. Rev. W. W. Hicks said of drink, “It has no regard for honor. It knows no truce. It hears no cry of remonstrance—no appeal for quarter.” A letter to the New York Tribune following the Civil War noted that “the people in this part of Ohio honestly think the next war in this country will be between women and whiskey; and though there may not be much blood shed, you may rest assured rum will flow freely in the gutter.”
The most powerful weapon in the temperance arsenal, at least in its crude firepower, were the temperance tracts—the booklets and pamphlets that decried drink and urged the reader to follow the more righteous path of sobriety. Crusaders embraced the doctrine of overwhelming force, as if the weight of the printed word could overcome the evils of alcohol. Between 1829 and 1834, temperance societies in New York—the most active state in the nation in the war on drink—churned out 5.5 million tracts; by 1839, fifteen temperance journals were published in the United States; in 1851, the American Tract Society alone had distributed another 5 million tracts nationwide. Other temperance groups published their own screeds, or ordered them in bulk from National Temperance Society, which had dozens of titles available at wholesale for between $4 and $8 per thousand.
The tracts informed readers exactly what would happen to those who succumbed to drink. The best they could hope for was impeded digestion or clogged brains. At worst, they could expect cheerless haggardness, physical collapse, and, in the final stages, the horrors of the delirium tremens. In libraries and reading rooms, visitors could peruse Sewall’s Stomach Plates, a set of eight lithographs nearly two-by-three-feet each, which showed the deterioration of the stomach of a drunk. “Not the production of mere fancy,” the promotions claimed, but “the result of actual scientific research and investigation.” One 1877 tract noted that “scientific men agree…that all diseases arising from intoxicating drinks are liable to become hereditary to the third generation, increasing, if the cause be continued, till the family becomes extinct.” The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, founded in 1874, oversaw its own Department of Scientific Temperance Instruction, which produced schoolbooks detailing the effect of alcohol on the body, such as the thinning of the walls of blood vessels, which could result in abrupt bursting. (The WCTU didn’t limit its antipathy to drink; they also had a Department of Suppression of Social Evil that promoted blue laws, a department to end bigamy among Mormons, and a department that advocated the eating of bland foods, since spicy foods were believed to provoke a thirst for strong drink.)
Violent deaths were a natural by-product of drink in the temperance tracts, an early variant of the “scared-straight” approach to dissuasion. Children were left destitute by swilling fathers, and young men once brimming with promise died early. M. L. Weems, best known for inventing the legend of George Washington and the cherry tree, wrote in The Drunkard’s Looking Glass (1812) of a young Dred Drake, who, in his cups, agreed to a horseback race through a piney wood. He scarcely made it a hundred yards before falling from his horse and dashing out his brains. “There was not a sign of a nose remaining on his face,” Weems wrote, “the violence of the blow had crushed it flat, miserably battering his mouth and teeth, and completely scalping the right side of his face and head—the flesh, skin, and ear torn off to the back of his skull. One of his eyes, meeting a snag on the trunk of a tree, was clearly knocked out of its socket; and held only by a string of skin, there lay naked on his bloody cheek.”
If the trees didn’t get you, the literal fires of damnation would. Temperance tracts reported that the blood or perspiration of a drunk would flare up when he or she got near an open flame. Even if no flame were present, there was the distinct possibility of spontaneous combustion. The first reports of boozers coming to an abrupt and fiery end surfaced in Europe and found a keen audi
ence among Americans, who already had a large appetite for spectacle. Vanishing in a puff of smoke crossed from rumor into popular culture in 1853 when Charles Dickens, in Bleak House, depicted a character reeking of gin abruptly dematerializing into “a smouldering suffocating vapor in the room, and a dark and greasy coating on the walls and ceiling.” In a subsequent edition, Dickens defended the veracity of the scene in a preface that cited nearly three dozen cases of spontaneous combustion among heavy drinkers.
If the prospect of a fiery end didn’t frighten one off drink, there was always the relatively mundane fear of poisoning. Temperance leaders averred that distillers weren’t content merely to poison their customers with alcohol alone; they added toxic ingredients to encourage addiction and slowly kill off the drinker. (No explanation was offered as to why a liquor vendor would want to kill off his client base.) “The adulteration and manufacture of villainous and maddening decoctions have become common,” wrote one temperance sympathizer. Another fretted that the “addition of some actively poisonous substances to alcohol, in order to produce a new luxury, is the evil most disastrous.” The new liquors “do not satisfy as the genuine liquors of the past were wont to do,” wrote an oddly nostalgic third, “but instead to incite further indulgence.”
Some of these reports of poisonings took root in the thin soil of a partial truth—the less scrupulous rum sellers were long known to stretch a supply of Jamaican rum by wiles and deceit, cutting it with harsh domestic rum and more. An 1829 work entitled Wine and Spirit Adulteration Unmasked included several recipes for making “old Jamaican rum” with nontraditional ingredients including birch-oil tincture, oak bark, “new-scraped leather,” tar, and oil of clove. A later account noted even less appetizing ingredients to give fresh-made alcohol the sophistication of mature liquor: logwood, brazilwood, green vitriol, opium, tobacco, aloes, bitter orange, henbane, nux vomica, sugar of lead, oil of bitter almonds, poison hemlock, bark of tartar. Spirit sellers, increasingly under attack, defended the wholesomeness of their products by advertising that their wines and liquors were, in the words of one Philadelphia tavern keeper, “warranted pure and unadulterated.”
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The temperance crusade was more of a guerrilla uprising than a traditional battle with a well-defined front. Scattered, far-flung groups went after the local and state liquor trade in isolated skirmishes; group leaders came together at conclaves and conventions to exchange ideas and beat the drums to maintain the fervor. The enemy was always out there, in kegs and bottles and tankards. Crusaders often railed against “intoxicating liquors” when among themselves, but that terminology was ungainly and lacked punch on pennants and posters and in podium-pounding speeches. “Ardent Spirits,” another favorite, seemed too genteel, and “King Alcohol” lacked absoluteness—alcohol, after all, was useful in industry and for medical reasons. The Drys needed a villain, one that had resonance, was memorable, and could command the attention of distracted crowds.
And so was born Demon Rum. The omnipresent liquor of the colonial era was now back, a symbol of everything odious that plagued the new republic, the windmill at which temperance crusaders would tilt.
By what curious process did rum come to exemplify the worst elements of liquor? In the 1830s, whiskey was by far the dominant drink. Why didn’t temperance leaders put whiskey squarely in their crosshairs? (To be fair, some tracts did go after whiskey, like the 1878 National Temperance Almanac, which asked, “What key will unlock the door to hell? Whis-key.”)
Whiskey was inconvenient in small ways, not the least that it was hard to rhyme. Yet anyone could find a rhyme for rum. In the 1900 presidential campaign, Republican supporters of William McKinley were given to chanting, “McKinley drinks soda water, Bryan drinks rum; McKinley is a gentleman, Bryan is a bum.” Rum was also pliable and could append itself nicely to other words. The mid-nineteenth century was the glory days for rum words: Rummy surfaced in 1834, rum-hole in 1836, rum-mill in 1849, and rum-dealer in 1860. Orators assailed the “rum interests” and made references to the “rum tax.”
Samuel Smith, a temperance poet, put this informal use of rum into more formal terms:
Hail, mighty rum! and by this general name
I call each species—whiskey, gin or brandy:
(The kinds are various—but th’ effect’s the same,
And so I choose a name that’s short and handy;
For reader, know it takes a deal of time
To make a crooked word lie smooth in rhyme…
This sturdy, three-letter word—the very epitome of Anglo-Saxon vigor—packed a vast amount of power, lore, and tradition into its small frame. As historian J. C. Furnas noted, rum made for a “fine, short disreputable-sounding syllable, admirable for rhetorical uses.” Yet rum could also sound a charge. Its sound was to temperance troops like the sound of a bagpipe to a Scot or a bugle to a western infantryman. It evoked memories of pioneers like Benjamin Rush, or early crusaders in the Republic of Rum. Never mind that few now drank rum—it was a name infused with the sacrifice of early heroes.
To fight Demon Rum was to fight the fiercest and most formidable dragon terrorizing the countryside. Some posters featured Demon Rum personified, with horns and a rictus grin, its evil tail wrapped around bodies of the dead and dying drinkers. One tract offered helpful hints on child raising: “If you must some times scare them in the room of telling them that bears will catch them, that hobgoblins or ghosts will catch them, tell them that Rum will catch them.”
Demon Rum helped pull together a decentralized movement that was often at cross-purposes. Goals varied: some called for complete abstention from drink, others just for moderation. Some wanted all forms of alcohol, including beer and wine, driven from the country; others focused their wrath on ardent spirits. But they all could share a vivid loathing for the great demon itself. Rum was a uniter, not a divider.
And it had come full circle: In colonial times, rum was a symbol of freedom and independence—not only from the mother country, but also freedom from the dour Puritan elites. Now rum stood in the way of true freedom and so became the focus of one of the most persistent campaigns in American history.
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Such techniques as public browbeating and extraction of signed sobriety pledges were remarkably successful—for a while. Personal consumption of alcohol dropped, in one estimate, by three-quarters, the boozy 1830s becoming the relatively dry 1840s. But the ocean of temperance pamphlets, plays, and poems failed to have a more enduring effect. A signature on a temperance pledge was hardly binding, and backsliding was endemic. And for every person who signed the pledge, hundreds refused. An influx of European immigrants from Ireland, Germany, and Scandinavia brought with them entrenched tippling habits and changed the demographics. By the late 1840s, drinking was again on the upswing. A new approach was needed.
So the temperance crusade turned its attention away from the rum drinker and toward the rum seller. The campaign to shut down the Rum Traffic started small, embracing the “local option” that allowed localities to ban liquor sales. In Massachusetts, for instance, whole counties went dry. Emboldened, the movement went for larger quarry and sought to ban sales at the state level. Success was spotty at first. In 1838, Massachusetts effectively banned the retail sale of liquor with the “fifteen-gallon law,” which permitted sales of liquor only in amounts of fifteen gallons or more—effectively shutting down taverns and dramshops. Creative interpretations of the law cropped up, among them the famous “striped pig.” A liquor dealer painted up a pig with colorful stripes and announced that for a mere six cents a citizen could marvel at this freak of nature—and enjoy a complimentary glass of whiskey while doing so. The fifteen-gallon law, riddled with loopholes, was soon repealed.
In 1851, Maine was the first to pass a state prohibition, thanks to a short, tenacious businessman turned politician named Neal
Dow. With its population of fishermen, farmers, and lumbermen, Maine had long been home to serious drinkers, whose habits offended the abstemious and hardworking Dow. His conversion from passive disgust to open activism occurred in the 1840s, when he sought to aid a destitute relative who drank to excess. Dow went into the shop where the besotted relative bought his liquor and asked the rum seller to refuse the poor, broken man. The rum seller curtly brushed off Dow’s suggestion by noting that he was licensed by the city and he could sell to whomsoever he pleased. Dow took this as a challenge.
With increasing fanaticism, Dow pursued his vision of a liquor-free society. He agitated successfully for a citywide law banning liquor sales in his hometown of Portland. Drinking slowed but didn’t stop. Frustrated by the flow of liquor from adjoining towns, Dow badgered the state legislature into considering a statewide liquor ban. His arguments and sheer personal force proved irresistible, and what came to be known as the “Maine law” carried the legislature. Dow brought the document to the governor for his signature and then set about enforcing its provisions. Just months after the law’s passage, Dow himself oversaw the destruction of $2,000 worth of liquor in Portland, and boasted that “in Portland there were between three and four hundred rum-shops, and immediately after the enactment of the law not one.” Dow portrayed alcohol as a quarry that needed to be hunted and slain: Liquor “stands in the same category with wild beasts and noxious reptiles,” he said, “which no one can claim as property and which every one may destroy, and in so doing any one is a public benefactor.”
The success of the 1851 law came as a revelation to temperance movements nationwide. Dow traveled widely to promote Maine’s triumphs and assisted other states in passing similar laws. Within four years, thirteen states had banned liquor sales, and the trade was passing into its first miniature ice age.
