H. L. Mencken famously defined Puritanism as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy,” and its adherents have yet to shake their reputation as prudish, booze-hating killjoys. But Puritans did not, to be fair, abstain from alcohol entirely (one Book of Lawes entry involved price controls for beer; “two pence for a Winchester pint”), and they enjoyed unashamedly robust sex lives, so long as the sex was between married couples. They spurned the Calvinist notion that celibacy was purer than sexual union, and divorce was allowed if a spouse refused to fulfill his or her bedroom duties. Court proceedings from 1669 captured this emasculating grievance uttered by Middlesex County resident Hannah Hutchinson about her husband, Samuel: “Though he had a pen, he had no ink.”
For Puritans, work was the primary indulgence, idleness their unforgivable sin. They outlawed theatergoing, gambling, dancing, and even Christmas celebrations. Attending church on Christmas was acceptable, but taking a day off to feast and relax in what smacked more of pagan reveling than religious worship was out of the question. (Long after the ban on Christmas was lifted in 1681, the Puritans’ humbug attitude endured, and December 25 didn’t become an official federal holiday until 1870.)
From this austere and pious New England stock sprang Neal S. Dow, born in Portland, Maine, on March 20, 1804. Though physically small, from childhood Dow manifested a headstrong, self-confident personality. In his otherwise staid autobiography, The Reminiscences of Neal Dow, he relates a surreal account describing his scuffle at about the age of seven with a local monkey penned up next to Portland’s barbershop. “For what seemed to me a long time the monkey had most of the fun and I most of the pain,” Dow recalled, “but at length the brute got tired and knew enough to give up.” That tenacity only grew more emboldened once Dow found a larger cause to fight.
While employed by his father, a successful tanner, Dow interacted with numerous laborers and was shocked “not only by the prevalence of drunkenness among them, which indeed was more or less apparent in all classes of society, but by the evident inability of workmen to provide for the pressing necessities of their families when spending so much as was their habit for intoxicants.” He went on to lament: “My indignation at the men who brought so much suffering upon their families for the gratification, as it then seemed to me, of a mere taste for liquor, softened into pity and sympathy when I found them apparently helpless victims of a controlling appetite that was dragging them to ruin.”
· · ·
“You have to understand what Portland was like in the early 1800s,” Rob Quatrano tells me as we walk around the house Neal Dow built and inhabited until his death in 1897. Rob, now in his late forties, has been the live-in caretaker here for the past twenty years. “There were three hundred taverns in this small town, and some literally served drinks out of a trough. Every workday a bell would ring at eleven A.M. and four P.M., and that was rum time. Workers would stop and have a few drinks before going back to their jobs.”
I confess to Rob that ever since childhood I’ve dreaded visiting colonial-era house museums like this one. Something about the stuffy atmosphere and mundane lectures on antique furniture always made me drowsy, and to this day I find them soporific. But Rob’s enthusiasm is invigorating, and he’s a font of stories unlike any I heard during my grade school field trips.
“Even firefighters got drunk on a regular basis back in the 1800s,” Rob says. “And if your house was burning down, you could pay them with liquor. ‘Water for the fire, rum for the fireman’ was the saying.” Rob goes on to explain that it wasn’t uncommon for two engine companies to arrive, inebriated, at the same alarm and start brawling with each other.
“What drew me to Portland was the Rum Riot in Monument Square,” I say to Rob, “but the more I learn about Dow, the more I’m interested in him and any unmarked places connected to his life.”
Rob immediately thinks of two.
“If you look across the road where the Rite Aid is, that’s Dow’s birthplace, 778 Congress,” he informs me as we peer out the living room window.
Rob then tells me that Dow’s “rebirth” occurred in front of what was once the H. H. Hay drugstore, a few blocks from here, just off Congress.
“Dow was walking down the street,” Rob says, “and right by the store he saw a child about nine or ten, drunk, stumbling around. The boy grabbed Dow’s pant leg and begged for money. It was at that point, Dow later said, that he was transformed. That’s what put him over the edge.”
As a member of Portland’s volunteer Deluge Engine Company, Dow successfully persuaded his fellow firemen not to serve spirits at their anniversary bash. But after the incident at Hay’s, he was convinced that encouraging people to abstain was no longer enough, and he sought to outlaw alcohol entirely. He helped establish the Maine Temperance Society and lobbied throughout the 1830s and ’40s to enact statewide prohibition.
In 1851, Dow was elected Portland’s mayor, and with his newfound political power he drafted a bill that, on June 2, 1851, made Maine the first state in America to ban the sale of alcohol, with strict punishments for noncompliance.
Dow’s triumph garnered him national acclaim as “the Napoleon of Temperance,” due to both his diminutive stature and his domineering personality. Between 1852 and 1855, about a dozen other states adopted what became known as the Maine Law. Dow’s popularity began to falter back in Portland, however, and even he conceded in his Reminiscences that prohibition wasn’t exactly “accepted in a spasm of excitement.” Distillers, saloon keepers, liquor retailers, and other merchants financially devastated by Dow’s crusade joined forces to defeat him, and Dow lost reelection in 1852. But over the next few years he made enough new allies to eke out a forty-six-vote win in April 1855.
Two months later, rumors started circulating that barrels of rum were being stashed under city hall, and on June 2 a horde of screaming, apoplectic townspeople surrounded the building. What most enraged the crowd was the rank hypocrisy of the man they believed to be stockpiling the rum: Mayor Neal Dow.
“How many visitors do you get here each year?” I ask Rob.
“On average about twelve,” Rob says.
“A year? That’s … not a lot.”
“Even people who live in Portland don’t realize how important Dow was.”
Right on cue, the doorbell rings. Three women and a man, all of whom look to be in their sixties, are interested in taking a tour, and Rob is happy to oblige.
I ask what brought them here, and one woman says she heard Rob speak at a community AARP event. “He was very good, very dynamic. Afterward I told my husband, my sister, and her friend that we should stop by.” (We all nod hello.) “We’re from the area and go by this house all the time,” she continues, “but we’ve never come inside before.”
I’ve already heard a good portion of Rob’s presentation, but I lag behind to eavesdrop. Before Rob can launch into his talk, one of the women walks over to a lamp and asks if it belonged to Dow.
“It did,” Rob tells her. “Almost everything you see is original.”
“Oh, look at this,” the other woman says, tapping her finger on the expertly carved piecrust edging around a wooden table.
My hand instinctively goes to my mouth, stifling a Pavlovian yawn.
Pointing to an oil portrait of Dow over the fireplace, the first woman says, “Is that him? He looks like such a nice man.”
“He was! People assume he was this elitist aristocrat,” Rob says, taking a few steps and mimicking the stiff-spined walk of a pompous nobleman. “But he was a very compassionate and generous man. He was also active in the abolition and suffrage movements. And he was a tiny guy like me.” (Dow was just over five feet tall, and Rob’s not nearly that short.)
“What type of shutters are these?” someone asks, and I’m suddenly feeling woozy again.
“Those are Indian-massacre shutters,” Rob says.
“Indian-massacre shutters?” I ask, reviving.
“If there were Indian raids
on the town, these would be closed up for protection.”
Just as I’m feeling reenergized, the women start inquiring about the dinnerware, and before I pass out on the carpet, I whisper to Rob that I’m going to meet up with Representative Herb Adams, who’s been waiting for me to call. “But I’ll stop back in before leaving,” I say.
Herb is a lifelong Mainer and local legend, having served as a state representative off and on since 1989, and we’d arranged for him to take me to Monument Square.
It’s surprisingly warm out, but Herb arrives at Dow’s house wrapped up in a blue windbreaker underneath a thick, long scarf. He reminds me of Dr. Dennis Jenkins from my Paisley trip; there’s a distinguished air about him coupled with a stout ruggedness.
Herb’s knowledge of Maine is encyclopedic, and during our short stroll down Congress Street he’s constantly alerting me to historic buildings and other points of interest.
“That, as you can see, is Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,” he says, identifying a statue of the Portland-born poet.
“It looks restored.”
“Yes, a few years ago. Workers cleaned it using high-power hoses that sprayed a blast of finely crushed walnuts. Water wasn’t strong enough and sand was too abrasive, so crushed walnuts did the trick. The whole area was overrun with squirrels crazed out of their minds with joy.”
Every twenty feet or so we’re interrupted by a friendly “Hey, Herb!,” and when one resident comes up to buttonhole him, I slip away for a moment to photograph 594 Congress Street, where the H. H. Hay & Co. drugstore used to be. Now it’s a Starbucks.
Herb rejoins me and we walk a few blocks down to a massive square plaza with a giant monument in the middle. “This must be Monument Square,” I observe astutely.
“Yes, but it was Market Square in Dow’s day.”
“Didn’t the old city hall used to be in the middle?”
“That’s right.”
“And it was in the basement that Dow was storing the rum?”
“Right again.”
For almost twenty years, Dow had antagonized no end of anti-prohibition businessmen, legislators, and residents who were rather fond of their spirits, so when word leaked that Dow himself had hidden below city hall an estimated $1,600 worth of alcohol, a hefty bar tab even today, it was retribution time. To rile up anti-Dow sentiment, his adversaries disseminated the following circular:
While the city authorities are busy searching private houses for demijohns and jugs of liquor, it is, perhaps, not strange that they should overlook wholesale importations into the city of what are probably impure liquors intended for sale.… Where are our vigilant police, who are knowing to the above facts, and who think it their duty to move about in search of the poor man’s cider, and often push their search into private houses, contrary to every principle of just law? … The old maxim reads: “Fiat justitia ruat coelum,” which means, “Let the lash which Neal Dow has prepared for other backs be applied to his own when he deserves it.”
Hoisted by his own petard, as it were.
By the afternoon of June 2, 1855, more than one thousand men and women had amassed around city hall. A local judge issued a warrant for the alcohol’s seizure, and the expectant crowd—many of whom hoped to intercept the bounty—started growing impatient. They were also growing in numbers, and the municipal police force was overwhelmed. Dow called in the militia, which only heightened tensions. When the mob threatened to rush city hall, both the local sheriff and Neal Dow read them the Riot Act and ordered everyone to disperse. They responded by hurling rocks, and that’s when Dow instructed the militia to open fire. People ran screaming as bullets flew in every direction. Minutes later the square was deserted, save for a lone dead body on the ground. Twenty-two-year-old John Robbins was killed in the mêlée. Seven other men were shot but survived.
Dow was hauled before a grand jury, accused of manslaughter. A lengthy investigation exonerated Dow of any responsibility for Robbins’s death and further cleared him of wrongdoing for stockpiling the rum. The Maine Law explicitly allowed the sale of liquor for medicinal and industrial uses, and an authorized municipal committee had approved the alcohol’s importation and storage specifically for these reasons. Once tempers cooled, nobody really believed that Dow, the lifelong teetotaler, sought to create a bootlegging empire. Self-righteous, uncompromising, and meddling, perhaps. But a greedy, rum-dealing crook, no.
Dow’s reputation nevertheless took a dive, and with it down went the Maine Law, which was abolished in 1856. That same year Dow wisely decided against running for mayor, and in 1857 he sailed overseas for six months to rally his abstemious counterparts in Great Britain. Dow rebounded in 1858 when he was elected to Maine’s legislature, but in 1860 he had to weather another political firestorm when a close associate he’d campaigned for turned out to have been embezzling state funds.
Redemption came again in April 1861; at fifty-six years of age, Dow volunteered to fight for the Union during the Civil War. He was appointed a colonel, and his Thirteenth Maine (Temperance) Regiment served under General Benjamin Butler and helped capture New Orleans. Dow was promoted to brigadier general in April 1862 and sustained multiple wounds on May 27 during the battle for Port Hudson. Five weeks later, the still-recuperating Dow was nabbed by Confederate soldiers and held for well over a year in a prisoner-of-war camp. On February 25, 1864, he was exchanged for one of the Union Army’s most prized POWs—General William Henry Fitzhugh Lee, son of General Robert E. Lee.
“In mid-April 1861,” Herb tells me, “a theater group was in town performing Shakespeare’s Hamlet. One evening, people were gathered in this square, buzzing about the attack on Fort Sumter, when the official announcement was made that the Union had declared war on the South. Everyone burst into cheers—except a lone southern actor who was conspicuous by his silence. And he was right here in Market Square on that momentous night.”
“Wow,” I say. “That’s incredible.”
Herb and I stand there for a minute savoring the story.
Something occurs to me. I turn to Herb and ask, “We are talking about John Wilkes Booth, right?”
“Yes,” he says.
“Just checking.”
While Herb goes off to speak with another constituent, I wander Monument Square taking pictures and thinking about Maine’s tumultuous five years banning spirits and how aptly they foreshadowed the capital-P Prohibition movement to come more than six decades later. Far from casting alcohol and its associated evils out of society, Dow’s crusade made otherwise respectable folks feel like common criminals forced to sneak into secret “grog-taverns” and similar establishments. People feared being tattled on by their neighbors or having policemen barge into their homes in search of stockpiled liquor, fostering suspicion between citizens and resentment toward government and its agents. And violence ensued. Nothing like the street-fought tommy-gun battles that erupted during the 1920s and ’30s, but enough to convince Maine voters in 1856 to repeal their law. (At least for a while; Mainers amended their state constitution twenty-seven years later to outlaw booze once again.)
Obstinate to the end, Dow ran for president in 1880 on the Prohibition Party ticket. He lost spectacularly but relished the opportunity to barnstorm the country preaching the gospel of sobriety and rallying apostles eager to wage holy war against Demon Rum.
Victory for the prohibitionists came in January 1920 with the enactment of the Eighteenth Amendment, followed one month later by the Volstead Act, which made it illegal to “manufacture, sell, barter, transport, import, export, deliver, furnish or possess any intoxicating liquor” in the United States. Neal Dow had died twenty-two years earlier, on October 2, 1897, having outlived his wife and five of their nine children. Venerated in his own day as the Napoleon of Temperance, Dow was all but forgotten when Prohibition became the law of the land. Better known to most Americans were Wayne Wheeler, de facto leader of the Anti-Saloon League; Carrie Amelia Nation, the hatchet-wielding barroom smasher who altered her n
ame to Carry A. Nation; and federal agents Eliot Ness and Richard “Two Gun” Hart.
Genuinely good intentions drove many Americans to lobby for a dry USA, free of booze-related crimes. But this idyllic, sober paradise was not to be. In its wake, Prohibition left thousands dead, either burned alive in home-still explosions or poisoned by denatured alcohol. Drug use soared. Political corruption grew rampant, exacerbated by an increasingly formidable Mafia syndicate that was once little more than a loose affiliation of street thugs. And billions of dollars in potential tax revenues were lost. On the plus side, jazz flourished in speakeasies across the nation, and NASCAR was born on Appalachia’s back-country roads after bootleggers learned how to outrun Johnny Law in souped-up automobiles, and then later raced one another for kicks.
America’s “Noble Experiment” ended in December 1933 with the Twenty-First Amendment, the only constitutional amendment passed to fully repeal a previous one.
Another of Prohibition’s most enduring legal legacies—a watershed change in how law enforcement conducts investigations—is its most overlooked. A hint of this transformation is evident in the anti-Dow circular that grumbled about city authorities on a mission to hunt down “the poor man’s cider, and [who] often push their search into private houses.” This isn’t how the system originally worked.
Up until the 1850s, police officers rarely initiated searches of a suspect’s property or person. The victim did. (With murders, coroners often requested the investigation.) Authorities didn’t start poking about until after the aggrieved party appealed to a judge or magistrate for a search warrant. Many American communities didn’t even have a full-time police force, which, to a citizenry wary of centralized power, reeked of a standing army. And since selling or owning unlicensed alcohol was considered by most to be a victimless crime, constables didn’t run around aggressively raiding establishments or individual homes.
Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History Page 20
